1.
One of the striking aspects of Calvin and Hobbes is how directly the strip confronts the issue of death. It's an odd thing for a comic strip to do. Peanuts was a strip that dealt with death. But Peanuts tended to come at the issue indirectly. For example, I have discussed in The Theology of Peanuts how Charles Schulz used snowmen as a metaphor for death and mortality.
By contrast, Calvin and Hobbes deals with directly. Often asking very direct questions about death.
For instance:
2.
In his book The Secular Age Charles Taylor discusses the "malaise of modernity." That is, with the collapse of the transcendent, spiritual dimension secular persons face various challenges that our forbears did not face in bygone "enchanted" eras. Taylor notes that in the secular age, due to the flatness of the Immanent Frame, where no meaning is to be found outside of human strivings, we find meaning fragile. That is, if there is nothing deeper or above us, spiritually speaking, we struggle to find our projects of lasting value, meaning, and significance. We live and die and are forgotten. This realization continually threatens our psychological equilibrium in the secular age. Existential crises are common and ubiquitous. In the Immanent Frame we are constantly asking, "What's the point?" Work, work, work to get the gold watch? Is that the goal of human life? If there is nothing transcendent and lasting beyond me and beyond death then why not collect toys and distract myself with entertainments? These nagging questions are symptoms of the malaise of modernity. Meaning is hard to secure and protect in the secular age.
3.
The most extended meditation on death in Calvin and Hobbes appeared in March of 1987. Calvin and Hobbes find a baby raccoon close to death. Calvin and his family try to save the baby raccoon but the raccoon dies. Across a two week period, nine strips in all, Watterson poignantly meditates on death, loss, and grief:
4.
Taylor notes that the existential crises in the secular age are particularly acute when we confront death. In earlier enchanted eras we had psychological and spiritual structures that allowed us to understand and approach death. Death, in many of these formulations, was often seen as a welcome end, a friend. This aspect of death was powerfully captured in George MacDonald's fantasy tale At the Back of the North Wind. In that story a sickly boy named Diamond is befriended by the North Wind. Diamond and the North Wind have many adventures together. At the end of the tale Diamond dies and we discover that the North Wind is Death. This friendly companion was Death. And the safe haven is to be found at the back of the North Wind. In dying Diamond must pass through the North Wind to emerge safely on the other side.
Such a notion is unavailable in the secular age. Death can no longer be seen as friendly. Death is a hole. A cul-de-sac with no exit. An abyss.
In short, in the Immanent Frame death stumps us.
This confounding in the face of death is continually echoed in Calvin and Hobbes. In one of his riskier Sunday strips Watterson tackled this experience directly. The strip, at the start, shows us the picture of a dead bird. Which prompts the existential ruminations of Calvin, ultimately ending in that feeling of incomprehension:
5.
Death confounds us in the Immanent Frame. In the secular age we are called upon to reconcile ourselves to our immanent projects. This life must be “good enough” for us. To want “more” is no longer possible.
But we wonder, with Calvin, if the Immanent Frame has prematurely foreclosed on the subject of death. Questions linger. True, we can’t figure out this death stuff.
But something inside keeps trying.
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Richard Beck
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).
The Theology of Faƫrie
The Little Way of St. ThĆ©rĆØse of Lisieux
The William Stringfellow Project (Ongoing)
Autobiographical Posts
- On Discoveries in Used Bookstores
- Two Brothers and Texas Rangers
- Visiting and Evolving in Monkey Town
- Roller Derby Girls
- A Life With Bibles
- Wearing a Crucifix
- Morning Prayer at San Buenaventura Mission
- The Halo of Overalls
- Less
- The Farmer's Market
- Subversion and Shame: I Like the Color Pink
- The Bureaucrat
- Uncle Richard, Vampire Hunter
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- On Maps and Marital Spats
- Get on a Bike...and Go Slow
- Buying a Bible
- Memento Mori
- We Weren't as Good as the Muppets
- Uncle Richard and the Shark
- Growing Up Catholic
- Ghostbusting (Part 1)
- Ghostbusting (Part 2)
- My Eschatological Dog
- Tex Mex and Depression Era Cuisine
- Aliens at Roswell
On the Principalities and Powers
- Christ and the Powers
- Why I Talk about the Devil So Much
- The Preferential Option for the Poor
- The Political Theology of Les MisƩrables
- Good Enough
- On Anarchism and A**holes
- Christian Anarchism
- A Restless Patriotism
- Wink on Exorcism
- Images of God Against Empire
- A Boredom Revolution
- The Medal of St. Benedict
- Exorcisms are about Economics
- "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?"
- "A Home for Demons...and the Merchants Weep"
- Tales of the Demonic
- The Ethic of Death: The Policies and Procedures Manual
- "All That Are Here Are Humans"
- Ears of Stone
- The War Prayer
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Experimental Theology
- Eucharistic Identity
- Tzimtzum, Cruciformity and Theodicy
- Holiness Among Depraved Christians: Paul's New Form of Moral Flourishing
- Empathic Open Theism
- The Victim Needs No Conversion
- The Hormonal God
- Covenantal Substitutionary Atonement
- The Satanic Church
- Mousetrap
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Gospel According to Lady Gaga
- Your God is Too Big
From the Prison Bible Study
- The Philosopher
- God's Unconditional Love
- There is a Balm in Gilead
- In Prison With Ann Voskamp
- To Make the Love of God Credible
- Piss Christ in Prison
- Advent: A Prison Story
- Faithful in Little Things
- The Prayer of Jabez
- The Prayer of Willy Brown
- Those Old Time Gospel Songs
- I'll Fly Away
- Singing and Resistence
- Where the Gospel Matters
- Monday Night Bible Study (A Poem)
- Living in Babylon: Reading Revelation in Prison
- Reading the Beatitudes in Prision
- John 13: A Story from the Prision Study
- The Word
Series/Essays Based on my Research
The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes
The Theology of Peanuts
The Snake Handling Churches of Appalachia
Eccentric Christianity
- Part 1: A Peculiar People
- Part 2: The Eccentric God, Transcendence and the Prophetic Imagination
- Part 3: Welcoming God in the Stranger
- Part 4: Enchantment, the Porous Self and the Spirit
- Part 5: Doubt, Gratitude and an Eccentric Faith
- Part 6: The Eccentric Economy of Love
- Part 7: The Eccentric Kingdom
The Fuller Integration Lectures
Blogging about the Bible
- Unicorns in the Bible
- "Let My People Go!": On Worship, Work and Laziness
- The True Troubler
- Stumbling At Just One Point
- The Faith of Demons
- The Lord Saw That She Was Not Loved
- The Subversion of the Creator God
- Hell On Earth: The Church as the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit
- The Things That Make for Peace
- The Lord of the Flies
- On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
- Commitment and Violence: A Reading of the Akedah
- Gain Versus Gift in Ecclesiastes
- Redemption and the Goel
- The Psalms as Liberation Theology
- Control Your Vessel
- Circumcised Ears
- Forgive Us Our Trespasses
- Doing Beautiful Things
- The Most Remarkable Sequence in the Bible
- Targeting the Dove Sellers
- Christus Victor in Galatians
- Devoted to Destruction: Reading Cherem Non-Violently
- The Triumph of the Cross
- The Threshing Floor of Araunah
- Hold Others Above Yourself
- Blessed are the Tricksters
- Adam's First Wife
- I Am a Worm
- Christus Victor in the Lord's Prayer
- Let Them Both Grow Together
- Repent
- Here I Am
- Becoming the Jubilee
- Sermon on the Mount: Study Guide
- Treat Them as a Pagan or Tax Collector
- Going Outside the Camp
- Welcoming Children
- The Song of Lamech and the Song of the Lamb
- The Nephilim
- Shaming Jesus
- Pseudepigrapha and the Christian Witness
- The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs
- The Second Moses
- The New Manna
- Salvation in the First Sermons of the Church
- "A Bloody Husband"
- Song of the Vineyard
Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prision
Civil Rights History and Race Relations
- The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (Six Part Series)
- Bus Ride to Justice: Toward Racial Reconciliation in the Churches of Christ
- Black Heroism and White Sympathy: A Reflection on the Charleston Shooting
- Selma 50th Anniversary
- More Than Three Minutes
- The Passion of White America
- Remembering James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
- Will Campbell
- Sitting in the Pews of Ebeneser Baptist Church
- MLK Bedtime Prayer
- Freedom Rider
- Mountiantop
- Freedom Summer
- Civil Rights Family Trip 1: Memphis
- Civil Rights Family Trip 2: Atlanta
- Civil Rights Family Trip 3: Birmingham
- Civil Rights Family Trip 4: Selma
- Civil Rights Family Trip 5: Montgomery
Hip Christianity
The Charism of the Charismatics
Would Jesus Break a Window?: The Hermeneutics of the Temple Action
Being Church
- Instead of a Coffee Shop How About a Laundromat?
- A Million Boring Little Things
- A Prayer for ISIS
- "The People At Our Church Die A Lot"
- The Angel of Freedom
- Washing Dishes at Freedom Fellowship
- Where David Plays the Tambourine
- On Interruptibility
- Mattering
- This Ritual of Hallowing
- Faith as Honoring
- The Beautiful
- The Sensory Boundary
- The Missional and Apostolic Nature of Holiness
- Open Commuion: Warning!
- The Impurity of Love
- A Community Called Forgiveness
- Love is the Allocation of Our Dying
- Freedom Fellowship
- Wednesday Night Church
- The Hands of Christ
- Barbara, Stanley and Andrea: Thoughts on Love, Training and Social Psychology
- Gerald's Gift
- Wiping the Blood Away
- This Morning Jesus Put On Dark Sunglasses
- The Only Way I Know How to Save the World
- Renunciation
- The Reason We Gather
- Anointing With Oil
- Incarnations of God's Mercy
Exploring Preterism
Scripture and Discernment
- Owning Your Protestantism: We Follow Our Conscience, Not the Bible
- Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura
- Songbooks vs. the Psalms
- Biblical as Sociological Stress Test
- Cookie Cutting the Bible: A Case Study
- Pawn to King 4
- Allowing God to Rage
- Poetry of a Murderer
- On Christian Communion: Killing vs. Sexuality
- Heretics and Disagreement
- Atonement: A Primer
- "The Bible says..."
- The "Yes, but..." Church
- Human Experience and the Bible
- Discernment, Part 1
- Discernment, Part 2
- Rabbinic Hedges
- Fuzzy Logic
Interacting with Good Books
- Christian Political Witness
- The Road
- Powers and Submissions
- City of God
- Playing God
- Torture and Eucharist
- How Much is Enough?
- From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart
- The Catonsville Nine
- Daring Greatly
- On Job (GutiƩrrez)
- The Selfless Way of Christ
- World Upside Down
- Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?
- Christ and Horrors
- The King Jesus Gospel
- Insurrection
- The Bible Made Impossible
- The Deliverance of God
- To Change the World
- Sexuality and the Christian Body
- I Told Me So
- The Teaching of the Twelve
- Evolving in Monkey Town
- Saved from Sacrifice: A Series
- Darwin's Sacred Cause
- Outliers
- A Secular Age
- The God Who Risks
Moral Psychology
- The Dark Spell the Devil Casts: Refugees and Our Slavery to the Fear of Death
- Philia Over Phobia
- Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture
- On Love and the Yuck Factor
- Ethnocentrism and Politics
- Flies, Attention and Morality
- The Banality of Evil
- The Ovens at Buchenwald
- Violence and Traffic Lights
- Defending Individualism
- Guilt and Atonement
- The Varieties of Love and Hate
- The Wicked
- Moral Foundations
- Primum non nocere
- The Moral Emotions
- The Moral Circle, Part 1
- The Moral Circle, Part 2
- Taboo Psychology
- The Morality of Mentality
- Moral Conviction
- Infrahumanization
- Holiness and Moral Grammars
The Purity Psychology of Progressive Christianity
The Theology of Everyday Life
- Self-Esteem Through Shaming
- Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
- Online Debates and Stages of Change
- The Devil on a Wiffle Ball Field
- Incarnational Theology and Mental Illness
- Social Media as Sacrament
- The Impossibility of Calvinistic Psychotherapy
- Hating Pixels
- Dress, Divinity and Dumbfounding
- The Kingdom of God Will Not Be Tweeted
- Tattoos
- The Ethics of :-)
- On Snobbery
- Jokes
- Hypocrisy
- Everything I learned about life I learned coaching tee-ball
- Gossip, Part 1: The Food of the Brain
- Gossip, Part 2: Evolutionary Stable Strategies
- Gossip, Part 3: The Pay it Forward World
- Human Nature
- Welcome
- On Humility
Jesus, You're Making Me Tired: Scarcity and Spiritual Formation
A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option
George MacDonald
Jesus & the Jolly Roger: The Kingdom of God is Like a Pirate
Alone, Suburban & Sorted
The Theology of Monsters
The Theology of Ugly
Orthodox Iconography
Musings On Faith, Belief, and Doubt
- The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
- Pragmatism and Progressive Christianity
- Doubt and Cognitive Rumination
- A/theism and the Transcendent
- Kingdom A/theism
- The Ontological Argument
- Cheap Praise and Costly Praise
- god
- Wired to Suffer
- A New Apologetics
- Orthodox Alexithymia
- High and Low: The Psalms and Suffering
- The Buddhist Phase
- Skilled Christianity
- The Two Families of God
- The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity
- Theodicy and No Country for Old Men
- Doubt: A Diagnosis
- Faith and Modernity
- Faith after "The Cognitive Turn"
- Salvation
- The Gifts of Doubt
- A Beautiful Life
- Is Santa Claus Real?
- The Feeling of Knowing
- Practicing Christianity
- In Praise of Doubt
- Skepticism and Conviction
- Pragmatic Belief
- N-Order Complaint and Need for Cognition
Holiday Musings
- Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
- Advent: Learning to Wait
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 1
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 2
- It's Still Christmas
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation
- The Liturgical Year for Dummies
- "Watching Their Flocks at Night": An Advent Meditation
- Pentecost and Babel
- Epiphany
- Ambivalence about Lent
- On Easter and Astronomy
- Sex Sandals and Advent
- Freud and Valentine's Day
- Existentialism and Halloween
- Halloween Redux: Talking with the Dead
The Offbeat
- Batman and the Joker
- The Theology of Ugly Dolls
- Jesus Would Be a Hufflepuff
- The Moral Example of Captain Jack Sparrow
- Weddings Real, Imagined and Yet to Come
- Michelangelo and Neuroanatomy
- Believing in Bigfoot
- The Kingdom of God as Improv and Flash Mob
- 2012 and the End of the World
- The Polar Express and the Uncanny Valley
- Why the Anti-Christ Is an Idiot
- On Harry Potter and Vampire Movies
Hi Richard,
I have been enjoying this series immensely.
However, this post makes a claim that I find a little strange. It seems perfectly reasonable that someone could accept that we, as minds or souls, disappear at the end of life, while also accepting that there are transcendent projects, communities, and causes that will survive (and thrive) after us. In fact, I would say that is one of the primary evolutionary advantages to religious beliefs, they transcend a single lifetime and are primarily concerned with community cohesion.
In my opinion, the Immanent Frame is the price that is paid to have objective knowledge. Kant explores this in some basic ways by dividing the "world" into passive sensation and active interpretation. We all interact with the same objective physical space, but we each put our own mental spin, our own narrative upon what is happening and our relationship to it.
Plantinga calls scientific naturalism a depersonification of the world, which must by contrast mean that theology is the personification of the world. By exploring the impersonal forces that shape and control various actions and reactions, the materialist demystifies reality and thereby becomes mystified by his own reflection. Walker Percy does a much better job of explaining this paradox in "Lost in the Cosmos".
Since also I enjoy insights from pop culture, I will end with a relevant quote from a Stephen King book: "Few if any seemed to grasp the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search."
Scientific rationalism excludes God as a method of investigation, and it works better than anything else in its domain of applicability - the how and what of existence, but not the why of it. The mistake of materialism and rationalism is to substitute that tool for philosophy, or worse, for religion. It is the moral and intellectual equivalent to giving up on God and worshipping a jackhammer. The consequence of it is the "malaise of modernity."
Step 2,
I and Taylor would agree with what you are saying. I think it's an "altitude" issue. In the enchanted era the altitude of transcendence was infinite, Ultimate. In the Immanent Frame we, as you point out, do seek transcendence but we can't get quite so high. For example, I was struck while watching the VP debate how appeals to transcendent ideals (e.g., America, freedom, political party) become places where personal projects get "lifted" by things "bigger" or "higher" than ourselves.
So there is a kind of transcendence here, but it doesn't get quite so high as spiritual, metaphysical, or religious transcendence. For every ideal there are competing ideals, for every nation there are other nations, and for every political party there is another party that thinks your project is idiotic. These conflicts tend to, to mix metaphors, take the wind out of our sails and bring us back down to earth a bit.
On a different note, I think it is this facet of trying to replace faith with low-altitude human projects that is the reason things like patriotism and political party are our new immanent religions.
Scooper,
I agree. I think Taylor's point is that as we've explained nature without needing God as a hypothesis Deism was created and, in one short step from there, secular humanism. Taylor's point isn't that faith is unreasonable or impossible in the secular age, just that faith is now reflective and, hence, problematized. Rather than having faith be a default and tacitly accepted worldview, faith is now something we see as risky and hard to defend at times. Faith "feels" different in the disenchanted age than in the enchanted age. But faith remains. Just changed as an experience.
Dr. Beck- I am glad I'm still naive and believe in the transcendent spiritual. To me, it makes my life so much more wonderful! A great series. I have enjoyed it so much. Thank You!
It would be interesting to hear your opinion on the being called Satan. I have heard it said that the development of Satan in the Hebrew Bible did not occur until after the Hebrews had contact with Persian Zoroastrians under which they lived after the collapse of the Babyloninan empire. Apparantly the Persians were very dualistic in their thinking and this later became incoporated into the Hebrew worldview. I do not know if this is 100% correct. Also, is it possible that the only Evil that exists in the world is not a personified being called Satan, but just the evil that we human beings do to one another. I would be interested in any input, Thanks, MATT
I've never heard *anyone* reference "The Back of the North Wind". I found it a wonderful and terrible, and an attempt at exactly what you describe here. Grace and peace.
Dr. Beck - Thank you so much for this amazing series! (I know, it was 6 years ago - I was 9 when this came out!) I chose to do a project on Calvin and Hobbes for my tenth grade Religion and Popular Culture class, and I used this article as a base. What I argued was that, although Calvin and Hobbes does relate to the Immanent Frame, Watterson is not saying that life has no meaning in the Immanent Frame - instead, he is saying that life is full of meaning despite this lack of spirituality. I think you hit on a relevant point in your third article, when you said that the morality turns from a duty to being true, pure morality when love is introduced. I also think that moments such as Calvin hugging Hobbes on Christmas show that there is meaning in life, not in materialism or riches, but in simple, touching moments of true love. I would say that this love is where we can really find true meaning in our lives.
I would love if you could respond to this, as it would give me great material for my paper, but I understand that you are a busy guy and furthermore, you probably won't see this given that it was posted six years ago.
Thanks again for these great articles!