In the first post I suggested that we might not be grasping what Jesus was up to in the gospels, especially concerning his welcoming of sinners. 

So, what was Jesus doing?

Crucial to understanding Jesus' mission are Old Testament prophecies that the Lord would act to regather his scattered people. For example:

Deuteronomy 30.1-3
And when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God has driven you, and return to the Lord your God, you and your children, and obey his voice in all that I command you today, with all your heart and with all your soul, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have mercy on you, and he will gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you.

The prophets described how God would come as a shepherd to seek out his lost sheep:

Ezekiel 34.11-16
For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land. And I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the ravines, and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice.

This text from Ezekiel reads as Jesus' mission statement in the gospels. Jesus describes himself as "the good shepherd," whose voice the sheep hear and follow (John 10). Jesus has compassion on the crowds because they were "like sheep without a shepherd" (Matthew 9.36, Mark 6.34), and he describes his ministry as like that of a shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to go looking for the one lost sheep (Matthew 18, Luke 15). 

Even more, in Ezekiel 34, before God is described as a shepherd, the prophet levels an indictment at the leaders of Israel for being poor and ineffectual shepherds:  

Ezekiel 34.7-10
“Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As I live, declares the Lord God, surely because my sheep have become a prey, and my sheep have become food for all the wild beasts, since there was no shepherd, and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves, and have not fed my sheep, therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: Thus says the Lord God, Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will require my sheep at their hand and put a stop to their feeding the sheep. No longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, that they may not be food for them.

Much of Jesus' conflict with the religious leaders in the gospels flows right out of this text. If you gathered up all these texts in the gospels--from Jesus' conflicts with leaders deemed to be poor shepherds to Jesus seeking the lost sheep and caring for the weak and injured sheep--you'll have almost the entirety of the gospels before you.

Tightening this connection are Jesus' overt statements about his mission. In his encounter with the Canaanite women in Matthew 15, Jesus flatly says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” We also see the priority of Israel in Jesus' sending of the Twelve in Matthew 10. Jesus sends them out with these marching orders: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." 

Though Israel has priority, we do see Jesus include the Gentiles in his mission. He heals in the woman's daughter in Matthew 15. And in the gospel of John the gathering of the lost sheep is expanded to include the Gentiles: “And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”

Summarizing, Jesus saw his mission as the (re)gathering of Israel. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus describes his mission plainly: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” This mission--seeking and saving the lost sheep--needs to be the framework through which we approach Jesus' welcoming of sinners. The notes of "lostness," "seeking," and "saving" alter how both conservatives and progressives tend to read these stories. Progressives like the seeking part of Jesus' mission, his movement toward the margins. Conservatives like the saving the lost aspects of Jesus' mission, which highlight themes of evangelism and conversion. 

These cross-currents will continue when we turn to look at the provocative way Jesus went about seeking and gathering the lost sheep of Israel.

I think one of the hardest things to understand about Jesus was his practice of table-fellowship with tax collectors, sinners, and sex workers. That might come as a surprise, as Jesus' actions seem straightforward enough. Jesus was extending love and mercy to stigmatized outcasts and marginalized persons. What's confusing about that? Jesus, in this view, is exemplifying a universalizing vision of welcome, inclusion, and tolerance. And we should follow his example by welcoming all those "on the margins."

But if we look a little closer, this view has some cracks in it. 

One of those cracks concerns the moral aspect of Jesus' welcome. A classic example is the woman caught in the act of adultery. Progressives love it when Jesus says, "Neither do I condemn you." But conservatives love it when he says, "Go and sin no more." Something in the story is cutting across each of these simplistic readings. 

Consider also the story of Zacchaeus:

All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

On the surface, it's a story of "welcome" and "inclusion." Jesus has "gone to be the guest of a sinner." But the story goes on to recount an act of conversion and repentance. And it's at that point, after Zacchaeus repents, that Jesus declares: "Today salvation has come to this house." Jesus hasn't merely "welcomed" Zacchaeus. Jesus has saved him. In fact, that's how Jesus describes his mission: To seek and save the lost. "Saving the lost" pulls in a moral dimension that is typically ignored in progressive readings of Jesus. 

A similar dynamic is seen in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. We tend to focus upon the unconditional love of the father, as we should. But the story is also one of conversion and repentance. After a season in the "far country" the son returns home and says to his father: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son." Upon that return a celebration breaks out. As the father says: "This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found." Notice the themes of deadness and lostness in contrast to being alive and found. The joy is triggered by a transformation.

My goal in raising these points isn't to suggest that there wasn't something unprecedented and shocking about Jesus welcoming of sinners. As we know and will discuss, Jesus' actions gave great offense. Today I just want to unsettle some settled opinions by highlighting details in the gospels that don't easily fit into progressive or conservative readings of Jesus. There are details in these stories, details we tend to ignore or skip over, that suggest Jesus was doing something different from what we typically assume. Do we really know what Jesus was up to? Exploring that question is the goal of this series. 

This series has focused upon how positive psychology cannot give a full and comprehensive account of human flourishing because of its commitment to the fact/value split. I make this point in The Shape of Joy. Our case study has been how positive psychology attempts to co-opt the ancient virtue traditions but fails to do so because it cannot speak to the telos of human life. The ancient virtue traditions were metaphysical. Positive psychology, by contrast, is empirical. 

Let me share one more post to illustrate the broader point. You see positive psychology's failure to account for value in many places, not just with the virtues.

Take, for example, subjective well-being. When positive psychologists talk about a science of "flourishing" or "eudaimonia" they don't really mean that. What they really mean is "subjective well-being" or "satisfaction with life." 

By far, the most common dependent variable in positive psychology research is the construct known as "satisfaction with life." The most common assessment instrument used to assess satisfaction with life is the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) developed by Ed Diener and colleagues. Rated on a 1-7 likert scale, the SWLS has five items:

1. In most ways, my life is close to my ideal.


2. The conditions of my life are excellent.


3. I am satisfied with my life.


4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.


5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

This is what positive psychologists mean when they say "flourishing." To be sure, satisfaction with life is vital. No denying that it is important. But satisfaction with life is, at best, only a proxy for flourishing. Being satisfied with your life isn't the same as living a good life.

Here's why. Not to get too judgmental, but take someone like Elon Musk. What would his score be on the SWLS? Pretty high, I'm guessing, given that he is the richest man in the world. What about TikTok wellness influencers? They seem really satisfied with their lives, and tell you so all the time so you can emulate them. What about Vladimir Putin? The Kardashians? Wall Street sharks? Drug lords? Rapacious Christians pastors lording over their spiritual empires? 

Of course I don't know if any of these people really are, deep down, satisfied with their lives. But I raise these examples to illustrate the point that we can think of people who are extraordinarily satisfied with their lives who don't capture what we mean by "flourishing." Seriously, do we want someone like Elon Musk serving as the epitome of "the good life"? Elon Musk as the telos of human flourishing? 

And yet, positive psychology admits this outcome because, if Elon Musk is highly satisfied with his life, he's a specimen of human flourishing. He's living the good life.

Stepping back, just like we saw with the virtues, because positive psychology cannot speak to values it cannot study "the good." And if that's true, how can you study eudaimonia--the good life--when you cannot define or operationalize that life? Devoid of any vision of the good, positive psychology can only assess "satisfaction" with life.  

And satisfaction isn't the same as good. 

"He is holy"

Psalm 99 is described as an enthronement psalm, a song of praise exulting the kingship of God. What strikes me about the psalm is the repeated refrain, "He is holy."

Holiness has moral, cultic, and ontological implications. I'd like to focus on the ontological. Specifically, the holiness of God, God's "set apartness," speaks to God's Otherness, God's qualitative difference from creation.  Nicholas of Cusa described God as non aliud, God as "not-other." That is, God cannot be "other" than us as a "different sort of thing." Which is why God is often called "Wholly Other," with a capital "O." God is so different that the word "different" doesn't apply. God is so other that the word "other" fails. 

Appreciating all this about God was a long time in coming for me. My mind was long poisoned by that literalness frequently found among atheists. But once the insight arrived beaome a touchstone in both my devotional life and theological thinking.

A breakthrough moment for me came in reading The Divine Names by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Writing in the 5th or 6th centuries, Pseudo-Dionysius creates in The Divine Names, along with his other works, a fusion between Neoplatonic philosophy and Christianity. In doing so, Pseudo-Dionysius becomes one of the great theologians of the apophatic and mystical tradition, what some call the Via Negativa of theology.

In regards to God's ontological difference, in The Divine Names Pseudo-Dionysius describes God as "the Nameless One." God cannot be named because God "transcends all things." God is "at total remove" from the "totality of existence." 

And yet, while God cannot be praised as "word or power or mind or life or being," God is "the cause of everything" and "at the center of everything." 

Pseudo-Dionysius goes on to pile up names and descriptions for God. God is the Source of every source.  God is the Being of beings. God is the Life of the living. God is the Sacred Stability upon which we stand. God is the Center around which all things revolve. God is the Destiny of everything. God is the Longing of every creature.

It goes on, these mystical descriptions, our achingly feeble attempts to catch a glimpse the Uncreated Light. 

But it all comes back to: "He is holy."

In the first post I made the claim that positive psychology cannot give a full and comprehensive description of human flourishing because of its commitment to the fact/value split. To illustrate that claim I pointed out how positive psychology attempts to appeal to "virtues" and "character strengths," borrowing these from the ancient virtue traditions. I described these virtues as "zombie virtues," lifeless and directionless shells of their former selves. To defend that claim, we closely examined the history of the fact/value split and the teleological context of the virtue tradition. Having separated itself from a teleological understanding of human flourishing, positive psychology has attempted to reclaim virtue after virtue, to borrow a phrase from Alasdair MacIntyre. This attempt of positive psychology to promote virtue after virtue flounders.

Here's why the attempt to preach virtue after virtue fails for positive psychology. Let's go back to look at positive psychology's list of virtues and character strengths from the first post: 

1. Wisdom: Creativity, Curiosity, Judgment, Love of Learning, Perspective


2. Courage: Bravery, Perseverance, Honesty, Zest


3. Humanity: Love, Kindness, Social Intelligence


4. Justice: Teamwork, Fairness, Leadership


5. Temperance: Forgiveness, Humility, Prudence, Self-Regulation


6. Transcendence: Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence, Gratitude, Hope, Humor, Spirituality

Notice how, without a teleological framework, a vision of the telos, purpose, and goal of human life, these virtues just hang in the air. Unlike the ancient traditions, these virtues and strengths are going nowhere. No end is in view. The virtues and strengths are presented in an isolated, trait-like way, reducing them to a sort of personality inventory. To say nothing about some real puzzlers in this list.

Regarding the puzzlers, why is sense of humor included in transcendence? Humor can take many forms, many of them dark and aggressive. Why is love of learning associated with wisdom? There are a lot of people with PhDs who aren't very wise. We could go on, but I'll just pause here to point out that, at a superficial glance, I don't think the positive psychology folks knew very much about any of the virtue traditions they were poaching from.

More importantly is the lack of a teleological framework. Where are these virtues and character strengths supposed to be taking us? What vision of human life is supposed to emerge from this list? Consider bravery. Were the Nazi soldiers brave? What about suicide bombers? Yes, those are extreme examples, but I use them to illustrate the point. "Virtues" and "character strengths" can be pointed at many different targets. Think about other virtues that seem to be intrinsically good, like hope and gratitude. Hope for what exactly? Some bad things can be hoped for. Gratitude can also have a dark aspect. Think of Jesus' Parable of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee. The Pharisee starts off his prayer with a troublesome expression of gratitude: "Lord, I thank you that I am not like other people." Examples abound, from misuses of justice and mercy to people using their empathy and social intelligence for Machiavellian purposes.

Here's the point. If you don't specify the overarching telos of human life, all positive psychology provides us with is a random list of adjectives. There is no cohesion or direction to the virtues. No animating life or spirit. Just shuffling zombies. 

And here's the kicker. Positive psychology cannot address this problem because, as an empirical project committed to the fact/value split, positive psychology is silent on questions of value. Positive psychology can't tell you what life is for, or if life is for anything at all. This is what I mean when I say, in The Shape of Joy, that positive psychology cannot give a full account of human flourishing. Positive psychology can point you to the virtues but cannot speak to or advocate for the values that give those virtues direction, unity, and life.

So, if we are living after the fact/value split what used to glue facts together with values?

Much of this story is told in Alasdair MacIntyre's seminal book After Virtue. MacIntyre's work is not without its critics, but it's difficult to overstate just how influential After Virtue has been. For my part, After Virtue is at its most powerful and persuasive in its analysis of the Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue traditions, and how we have lost much of that ancient framework. This is relevant for our conversation about how positive psychology handles the virtues, why I called them "zombie virtues."

As I described in the first post, Aristotle called the goal of life eudaimonia, the "good life." Necessary for achieving eudaimonia is arete, "excellences" and "virtues" in living. Virtues for us have a moral connotation, but for the Greeks virtue was as much aesthetic as moral. Living well was like playing an instrument well. Life involved skill. Life was performance. Life was art. Consequently, to achieve the good life you had to be and become a certain kind of person, an "excellent" and "virtuous" person. 

The metaphor about playing an instrument is apt because it implies a teleological approach toward life, and this teleological framework is what kept values and facts connected. 

Again, as I described in the last post, after the fact/value split we cannot extract value judgments from factual descriptions. But within a teleological framework we can. Specifically, if we know what something is "for"--its telos, purpose, or goal--we can determine through observation if something is "good."

Let's go back to the musical instrument. If I hand you a broken guitar and ask you the question "Is this a good guitar?" your answer would be, "No, it's not. It's broken." Notice how a value judgment--"This is not good"--flows out of an observation about the guitar being broken. A value judgement is flowing from a factual observation. Precisely what I said yesterday could not be done!

So what's the difference? The answer is teleology. If you know what something is for you can determine if something is good. 

The ancient world operated within this teleological framework. Aristotelian science was teleological. Everything in the world moved toward its telos, its final goal and ultimate purpose. The telos of an acorn is to become a tree. The telos of a guitar is to play music. And the telos of human life was eudaimonia. 

With the advent of the Scientific Revolution science pivoted away from Aristotle. Teleology was replaced by causality. Where teleology looked forward in time toward ultimate goals, causality looked backward in time to trace chains of prior cause and effect. When this shift occurred, the fact/value split was introduced. In denying ultimate goals and purposes, in eschewing teleology, science could no longer say what human life was "for." And without teleology factual descriptions could no longer inform value judgments. The fact/value rift was introduced, along with all the consequences I described in the last post. 

This loss of the teleloogical worldview is why Alasdair MacIntyre describes the modern world as living "after virtue." The ancient virtue traditions--Greek and Christian, along with all the other ancient virtue traditions--presumed teleology. Human life had a telos, and that telos allowed us to determine if we were living well or not. Living excellently, virtuously, skillfully, and artfully was moving toward our telos. Fail to move toward that telos and your life was impoverished, even broken, like a busted guitar. 

Today, without a teleological vision of life, we lack the capacity to ask and answer questions about the quality of our lives. Am I living well? Who can say? If I don't know what life is for how can I make a value judgment? My life might be a guitar or it might be shovel. So if you see me in the backyard trying to dig a hole with my guitar, who are you to tap me on the shoulder to say I'm misusing my life? If you can't say what my life is for you can't make evaluative judgments about how I'm using or misusing my life. We're living after virtue, after the fact/value split, after teleology. 

And this, finally, is why I called the virtues of positive psychology "zombie virtues." As an empirical science positive psychology is committed to the fact/value split. That is to say, positive psychology, as a descriptive project, cannot speak to normative values. Phrased differently, positive psychology is silent when it comes to teleology. Positive psychology cannot tell you what life is for, if anything. And yet, positive psychology presumes to grab ahold of the virtues from the ancient virtue traditions and import them into modern therapeutic contexts. But the virtues, as we have seen, are teleological. Virtues are directed toward a telos. Positive psychology is attempting to transplant teleological plants in non-teleological soil. Positive psychology is preaching virtue in a world living after virtue. 

This is why I've described the virtues of positive psychology as "zombie virtues." Positive psychology has grabbed ahold of the virtues but jettisoned their teleological context, the purposes that animated them and gave them life. Without teleology, the virtues become zombies, lifeless and directionless. 

In the next two posts, I'll describe what some of this looks like close up.

In the last post I described the virtues of positive psychology as "zombie virtues," virtues that have been torn from the metaphysical matrix that animated them and gave them life. This, as I argue in The Shape of Joy, is an example of how positive psychology, due to its commitment to the fact/value split, routinely fails to give a full and comprehensive account of human flourishing. 

Now, some readers might be able to connect all these dots, but if not I'm going to take a few posts to make this story plain.

To start, what do we mean by "the fact/value split"? 

You might not know this, but the fact/value split sits behind so many of our modern debates and troubles, from our post-Christian crisis of meaning to the relationship between faith and science to the role of religion in the public sphere. Let me put it this way: the fact/value split is the undiagnosed infection causing our societal fever. 

In short, if you want to have a clue you need to know about this.

At its most basic, the fact/value split argues that facts and values represent distinct sorts of claims. On the one hand are factual claims, claims governed by scientific observation and empirical methods. On the other hand are value claims, claims about ethical norms, right versus wrong, and transcendental values related to the true, the beautiful, and the good. 

Critical to the fact/value distinction is the grounding of these claims. Factual claims are objective, empirical, and public. Value claims, by contrast, are subjective and private. That is to say, "water boils at 100 degrees" is something that can be adjudicated through shared observation. By contrast, "you should not have sex before marriage," as a value judgment, lacks public consensus. Nor is there an empirical test we can conduct to bring this value into public view. Thus, value judgments can only be grounded in personal opinion and private conviction.

Broadly speaking, the Enlightenment gave birth to the fact/value split. On the political side, it was argued that since the state could not get the public to agree upon issues of religion, due to the religious fracturing of the Protestant Reformation, it was best to regulate religion to the private sphere. Thus the fact/value split gave birth to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, that the state would not establish (or privilege) a religion. Consequently, the fact/value split sits behind all our debates about the place and role of religion in our civic life. And while I am not fond of the Christian nationalists, they do raise a legitimate question, one asked by political philosophers from many different persuasions: Can a country survive and thrive without values? And if not, who supplies those values? And how do you get a diverse electorate to adopt one set of values over another set of values? Especially when there is no objective criterion to adjudicate between those values?  

This goes to another consequence of the fact/value split. An issue I've talked about a lot over the years concerns Hume's Dictum, that you cannot get an ought from an is. That is, you can't get a normative claim from a descriptive claim. Simply put, science can't tell you how to live your life by way of moral obligations and duties. This subjectification of value sits behind many modern problems. For example, the relativization of morality. If there is no objective standard of value, I'm free to decide for myself what is right or wrong. The societal consequences of this relativization is something we regularly worry over and debate.

As one more example, the fact/value split is also implicated in our modern crisis of meaning. As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, a purely factual description of the world bleaches it of value and meaning. The New Atheists reaped the whirlwind on this score. During their heyday the New Atheists pushed a fundamentalist materialism, an ideology sometimes called "scientism." All that existed and was real was the physical, material world. Well, that season of atheistic evangelism didn't age very well. The implications of the fact/value split quickly came into view. Science is devoid of both moral and existential content. Science cannot tell you how to live, or if there is any point or purpose in living. More, science cannot account for the transcendent values, like human dignity, that undergird the morality of liberal humanism, the go-to moral code of the New Atheists. The New Atheists found themselves stuck on the fact side of the fact/value split only to realize that what makes life worth living was the value side. But the worldview the New Atheists preached--scientific materialism--couldn't bridge the fact/value gap, leaving them with a message that was, in the end, ugly and nihilistic. 

Stepping back, I hope you can see that the fact/value split is a really huge deal. The fact/value split is, in many ways, the question of our lifetimes. This crack runs through your life and society as a whole. So many problems trace back to the fact/value split, from politics to the culture wars to our mental health crisis. But this raises a question. If the fact/value split is a split then there must have been a time when facts and values were unified. And if that's true, how were they unified? 

We'll turn to that part of the story in the next post.

For almost thirty years, positive psychology has devoted empirical attention to studying happiness, well-being, and flourishing. Much of this research has made its way into self-help and wellness culture. Calls to practice gratitude and mindfulness, for example, are ubiquitous. And yet, as I point out in The Shape of Joy, positive psychology is handicapped in how it treats transcendence. Consequently, positive psychology struggles to give a full and comprehensive account of human flourishing. 

As I describe in The Shape of Joy, positive psychology has consistently pointed toward transcendence as integral to well-being. Research concerning meaning in life, hope, awe, cosmic gratitude, mattering, and joy are all examples, locations where making contact with a reality larger than yourself enables self-transcendence. But committed as it is to the fact/value split, positive psychology has nothing to say about transcendence, which leaves an integral aspect human flourishing persistently unaccounted for. 

To provide a case study of positive psychology's limitations and failures, in this series we'll take a close look at how the movement has handled and mishandled the virtues. 

Right at the start of the movement, positive psychology's investigations into the sources of well-being led to a recognition and recovery of the ancient virtue traditions. Aristotle spoke of eudaimonia (literally, eu = "good" + daimonia = "spirit") which is variously translated as "the good life," "happiness," "well-being," "flourishing," and "living well." Critical to achieving eudaimonia was arete, the virtues. If eudaimonia was the target, arete provided the arrows. The key to achieving the good life was cultivating virtues. 

Hoping to recover this ancient insight, positive psychology embraced the virtues. One of the first products of the movement was the publication of Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman. Accompanying the book was the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths, which assessed the 24 Character Strengths identified by Peterson and Seligman. These strengths fell under six virtues, cross-culturally culled from Western and Eastern virtue traditions: Wisdom and Knowledge, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence:

From here, positive psychology began to assess and treat the virtues and character strengths in a trait-like and atomistic way. That is, you take a test to identify your signature virtues and strengths. Having identified these signature strengths, you're encouraged to integrate them into daily life. If one of your virtues is Humanity you might invest more in caring for others, like volunteering in your community. If your virtue is Justice you might become more intentional in your workplace in speaking up about inequities. If Wisdom, you might start taking some classes to satisfy your love of learning. And so forth.

Stepping back, this is what virtue looks like hands of positive psychologists, a natural endowment you lean into to cultivate a happier life. This is virtue after the fact/value split. Virtues are tools in a self-help regimen, a means to achieve your best life now.

We are, here, a long, long way from Aristotle and the ancient virtue traditions. In appropriating the virtue traditions positive psychologists have failed to appreciate the worldview that made those traditions coherent. This is, as I describe in The Shape of Joy, a prime example of positive psychology's inability to account for transcendence. The virtue traditions were articulations of a metaphysical worldview that integrated fact and value. By pulling the virtues out of their native metaphysical context, positive psychology has rendered them incoherent. Simply put, the virtues of positive psychology are zombies. Shuffling corpses that have lost touch with the life that once animated them.

Telling the story of how that happened is the object of this series.

I have posted this quote twice before in this space, and I'm doing so again because it's what I'm thinking about on Easter Sunday.

From Frank Sheed and his book Theology and Sanity.

[I]f we see things in existence and do not in the same act see that they are held in existence by God, then equally we are living in a fantastic world, not the real world. Seeing God everywhere and all things upheld by Him is not a matter of sanctity, but of plain sanity, because God is everywhere and all things are upheld by Him. What we do about it may be sanctity; but merely seeing it is sanity. To overlook God's presence is not simply to be irreligious; it is a kind of insanity, like overlooking anything else that is actually there...

God is not only a fact of religion: He is a fact. Not to see Him is to be wrong about everything, which includes being wrong about one's self...

...We live, indeed, in a vast context of things that are, events that have happened, a goal to which all is moving. That we should mentally see this context is a part of mental health. Just knowing that all things are upheld by God is a first step in knowing what we are, so a clear view of the shape of reality is a first step toward knowing where we are. To know where we are and what we are--that would seem to be the very minimum required by our dignity as human beings.

This is what I believe is at stake with the empty tomb. What is the nature of reality? Get this first and most fundamental question wrong and everything downstream will go off track. Your life will never quite "fit" or "attune" with the cosmos. The melody of your existence will be discordant and off-pitch. You'll be singing the wrong song. Your life will never quite "work." Much of this dislocation will be manifested in your mental health, a buzzing in your ears, something jagged in your soul always snagging. You'll try to fit different keys to the lock of your existence only to discover, over and over again, that none of them work.

To see wrong is to be wrong about everything.

This is the question of Easter.

"Let the rivers clap their hands"

Last week, with Psalm 97, I described the pagan vision of the natural world, all of creation animated by spiritual powers and potencies. The poetry of the Psalms echoes this vision with its anthropomorphized descriptions of the natural world. For example, in Psalm 98 the rivers clap and the mountains shout.  

These images could be mere metaphor. The material world, in such a view, is inert and dead. Rivers do not clap and mountains do not shout. Any such descriptions, therefore, are romantic indulgences and poetic pretending. We import a subjectivity where it doesn't exist.

And yet, borrowing from David Bentley Hart's recent book, the pagan vision of creation, where "all things are full of gods," may be more faithful to the Biblical imagination than scientific materialism. And yet, this appreciation and rehabilitation of the pagan worldview will be worrisome to many Christians. As I mentioned last week, viewing the world as full of spiritual powers and potencies raises concerns about idolatry and the demonic. Two very legitimate concerns. But the presence of temptations here doesn't mean the cosmology isn't true. In fact, these worries admit the validity of the pagan perspective. We would't be concerned about such things if none of it was real. 

There is also goodness in this vision of the world as well. As I described last week, the imagery of the Psalms opens up the possibility of a baptized paganism, viewing the powers of nature, visible and invisible, as subject to the lordship of Christ. I described how C.S. Lewis presents a vision of baptized paganism in The Chronicles of Narnia. A lovely illustration of this comes from The Magician's Nephew where the children bear witness to Aslan creating the world:

The Lion opened his mouth, but no sound came from it; he was breathing out, a long, warm breath; it seemed to sway all the beasts as the wind sways a line of trees. Far overhead from beyond the veil of blue sky which hid them the stars sang again; a pure, cold, difficult music. Then there came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters."

It was of course the Lion's voice. The children had long felt sure that he could speak: yet it was a lovely and terrible shock when he did. Out of the trees wild people stepped forth, gods Fauns and Satyrs and Dwarfs. Out of the river rose the river god with his Naiad daughters. And all these and all the beasts and birds in their different voices, low or high or thick or clear, replied:

“Hail, Aslan. We hear and obey. We are awake. We love. We think. We speak. We know.”

Lewis blends nature mysticism with Christianity. Creation is awake. 

As Psalm 98 says, the mountains shout and the rivers clap. 

Last post in this series reflecting on enchantment and disenchantment in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. 

The main thing I want to point out, here in the final post, is how the vampire genre has become increasingly disenchanted. 

The evil in Stoker's novel is very much enchanted, and sacred objects, especially the Host, repel the vampires. The battle is explicitly supernatural, a struggle between Good and Evil. In Dracula the Christian faith is true and provides the means of resistance. 

But as the vampire genre has developed and evolved over time, Stoker's privileging of Christian metaphysics has been displaced. You see this whenever the Christian weapons from Dracula, like the crucifix, are portrayed as impotent and powerless. In many modern vampire stories, the vampire will laugh at you if you hold a crucifix aloft and will chid you for being superstitious. In modern stories, vampirism is often given a biological explanation, like a genetic mutation. The occult has been eclipsed by science. The effects of garlic, silver, and sunlight are described as severe allergic reactions. In much of the modern vampire genre God is dead. The world is wholly disenchanted.

You also find the disenchanting effects of Protestantism in modern vampire stories, a loss of the sacramentalism in Stoker's novel. For example, in Stephen King's Salem's Lot crosses are effective against vampires. But there are two changes. First, these are crosses, not crucifixes. A very Protestant change. Also, there's a scene where Father Callahan holds aloft a crucifix, but because the priest lacks faith the crucifix proves ineffectual. Notice the shift away from the robust sacramentalism of Stoker's Dracula. What matters in Salem's Lot isn't the power of God but the power of faith. The weapons against evil have shifted from the objective to the subjective, from the ontological to the psychological. Recall how the most powerful weapon in Stoker's Dracula is the Host, the Real Presence of Christ. A real, material power. But in Salem's Lot, the power shifts toward the human and the mental, something wholly subjective. As Barlow says to Father Callahan in Salem's Lot, “It is your faith against my faith, Father. Is your faith enough?” The center of power now resides the human heart. Do we have enough faith? Sola fide! Believe! God is in your mind!

All this to share how you can trace the influence of modernity in the disenchantment of the vampire genre since the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula. And this is an easy test anyone can conduct: In the vampire story you're reading or watching, when the crucifix--or cross!--is held aloft does the vampire even care? 

The indifferent reaction of the modern vampire to the cross reveals much about the modern world.

As I mentioned in the last post, Bram Stoker's Dracula is a liminal book, in plot and when it was published. The book sits at the cusp of the Old world and the New, poised between ancient superstitions and scientific progress. The novel dances been skepticism and faith.

That dance is mainly played out between Dr. John "Jack" Seward and his former professor Abraham Van Helsing. Seward, as a psychiatrist, is a modern man of science. But when he is stumped by Lucy Westenra's symptoms, he calls upon Van Helsing, his former professor. Van Helsing soon begins to suspect that something occult is going on, but he refrains from disclosing his thoughts to Seward. Knowing him to be a modern, scientific man, Van Helsing knows Seward will be skeptical about Van Helsing's diagnosis of the problem. Consequently, as things unfold it's between Van Helsing and Seward where the issues of faith and doubt in the modern world come out in the novel. 

For example, early on, in discussing Seward's perplexity at Lucy's aliment, Van Helsing says to him:

"You are a clever man, friend John. You reason well, and your wit is bold, but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men's eyes, because they know, or think they know, some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain."

Such a great line: "It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain."

Later in this same conversation, Val Helsing asks Seward to open his mind, to set aside his scientific prejudices, so that Val Helsing can disclose what he thinks is happening:

"Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is this, I want you to believe."

"To believe what?"

"To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith, 'that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.' For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of the big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him, but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe."

This passage captures how Van Helsing is a man of two worlds, a man of science and a man of faith. Seward's epistemology, by contrast, is small and asymmetrical. Science, for Seward, has collected a pile of pebbles we call "facts." But he lets those small truths, even a single pebble, derail the entire train. The granular, factual, and small blinds Seward to larger realties. 

Van Helsing also values science. All those facts, those small truths, we keep and value them. But we don't let this handful of facts trick us into thinking we have in our possession all the truth in the universe. 

If you like the work of Iain McGilchrist, Seward is left-hemisphere dominant. Seward can see the granular but he can't see the larger whole, pattern, or Gestalt. Seward's attention is too narrow. He can't see big pictures. Van Helsing, by contrast, is more balanced in his cognitive processes, able to let his right-hemisphere piece together a mosaic from the bits of the factual. 

In short, in the novel Dracula Van Helsing, as the hero of the story, presents us with an epistemological ideal. As a man of science, Van Helsing is firmly planted in the modern world and is at home there. But as a man of faith, Van Helsing is also able to perceive larger and greater realities that his more modern student, Dr. Seward, cannot. Seward can only see illness. Van Helsing can see both illness and evil, and this greater perceptual range makes him the champion of the story. 

Over the Christmas break I went with my son Aidan to see Nosferatu, the modern remake of the 1922 silent film. The original film was a pretty bald ripoff of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. So much so that Stoker's widow sued the German film makers for copyright infringement. 

When I went to see Nosferatu, I had not seen the 1922 original. Nor had I read Stoker's novel. But in watching the movie I was struck by its themes of enchantment and disenchantment. The story is set in a world coming of age. Science, medicine, and technology are advancing. And yet, emerging from the shadows of the Old World there appears a spiritual terror. Something dark and menacing still haunts the modern world.

Stoker published his novel in 1897. And as the author of Hunting Magic Eels, I'm interested in our culture's drift from enchantment to disenchantment. So the liminality of Nosferatu caught my attention. And given that Nosferatu basically borrowed Stoker's novel, I decided to read Dracula for the first time.

Here's what shocked me. Bram Stoker's Dracula is a very Christian novel. I would even say that Dracula is one of the greatest Christian novels of all time. Christianity suffuses the book. Faith is the air the novel breaths. Fans of the novel, of course, are aware of this, but the pious devoutness of the story caught me by surprise. However, if you've not read the novel, here's a selective survey of its Christian content and themes. I've tried to avoid spoilers.

First off, the main characters are Christian. The Harker's, the couple at the center of the drama, are Protestant. Professor Abraham Van Helsing is a devout Catholic. The group trying to defeat Dracula pray together and explicitly view their battle against Dracula as a spiritual conflict. As Van Helsing says at one point (by the way, Van Helsing is Dutch so his English is broken), "Thus are we ministers of God's own wish. That the world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him. He have allowed us to redeem one soul already, and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem more. Like them we shall travel towards the sunrise. And like them, if we fall, we fall in good cause." Before the climatic encounter with Dracula, the group prays with Van Helsing: "We men all knelt down, Mina lying prostrate; and Van Helsing lifted his hands and said:—‘O God, give me light in the darkness!’”

Second, the reality of heaven plays a key role in the drama of the story. The status of Lucy Westenra’s soul is at risk if the group cannot free her from the curse. As Val Helsing explains, "When this now Un-Dead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor lady whom we love shall again be free." When Lucy's soul is freed, Van Helsing declares, "For she is not a grinning devil now, not any more a foul Thing for all eternity. No longer she is the devil's Un-Dead. She is God's true dead, whose soul is with Him!"

Third, and this is something I think almost everyone knows, the weapons used against Dracula are spiritual weapons: Holy water, rosaries, crucifixes and, most importantly, the Consecrated Host. This last bit surprised me. In vampire movies you often see crucifixes held aloft. But the Host, by far, is Van Helsing's weapon of choice. The Host is used to repulse a vampire from attacking. The Host is used to despoil tombs and coffins so they cannot be used by vampires. The Host is used to determine if someone has been tainted by Dracula's blood. And crumbled bits of the Host are used to create protective circles that Dracula cannot enter. Even more than crucifixes and holy water, the Host is the most powerful weapon against evil in the novel. 

The power of the Host in Dracula has been of scholarly interest and debate. Bram Stoker's religious views were opaque. We do know he was raised Protestant in the Church of Ireland. Given the Protestant and Catholic debates swirling around the doctrine of the Real Presence during his lifetime, some have wondered if Stoker had a sacramental agenda in writing Dracula. Or even a Catholic agenda. For example, in the novel we see the Protestant protagonists coming to accept and embrace Catholic objects, like the crucifix. Very early in the story, before Jonathan Harker goes to Dracula's castle, a peasant woman, fearing for his safety, gives him a crucifix. Later on, upon finding himself trapped in the castle, Jonathan finds comfort in the crucifix. This comfort causes Jonathan to question his Protestant misgivings about the object:

It [the crucifix] is an odd thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavor and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself [the crucifix], or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try to make up my mind about it.

Beyond Protestant misgivings, Jonathan is standing here, early in the novel, in that liminal space between the old, traditional faith and scientific modernity, poised between enchantment and disenchantment. He wonders if the crucifix possesses spiritual potency--"something in the essence of the thing itself"--or if it's just a comforting memory. As the story progresses, Jonathan's doubt will be dispelled. The crucifix, along with other holy and consecrated objects, do possess spiritual power. Sacramentally speaking, there is, truly and powerfully, "something in the essence of the thing itself." And the Host, as the Real Presence of Christ, is the primary example of this sacramentalism throughout the story.

All that to say, given this sacramentalism in Dracula, scholars debate if Stoker had a theological agenda in mind in writing the novel. Regardless, a sacramental imagination suffuses the book. Which, as I mentioned, surprised me. I picked up what I thought was a horror story and found myself contemplating the Real Presence. 

As I said, Bram Stoker's Dracula ranks as one of the greatest Christian novels.

Last post in this series.

While rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I was struck by how much passages of the book reminded me of Jordan Peterson.

(For new readers, I am both appreciative and critical of Jordan Peterson. Any given post I write about Peterson never captures my whole view. This post is in the appreciative category.)

I had recently read Peterson's latest book We Who Wrestle with God, so his ideas were in my head when I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

One of Peterson's big ideas, a repeated refrain, concerns how facts are insufficient to guide human life. In any given moment we face a blizzard of facts. Which ones should we attend to? Which facts have meaning for us? Can a fact even be a fact without that meaning? And so forth. What we need, according to Peterson, are values which help us rank and sort through the facts we encounter. These values, says Peterson, are ranked hierarchically. Some values are more important than others. Continuing, if you keep walking up this hierarchy of value your reach the highest value, the highest good. This is the Logos, the value that governs all other values and determines which facts have value for us in directing our choices and actions.

These ideas are found throughout Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here's a sampling of passages:

"Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value."

"Reason was no longer to be 'value free.' Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality."

Quality (Value) "is the generator of everything we know."

"The facts are there but you don't see them. You're looking right at them, but they don't have enough value...The facts do not exist until value created them. If your values are rigid you can't really learn new facts."

Here's an extended passage where Pirsig describes how value rigidity blocks our ability to see facts. This is an example that Peterson has used in his own work:

I keep wanting to go back to that analogy of fishing for facts. I can just see somebody asking with great frustration, "Yes, but which facts do you fish for? There's got to be more to it than that."

But the answer is that if you know which facts you're fishing for you're no longer fishing. You've caught them. I'm trying to think of a specific example...

All kinds of examples from cycle maintenance could be given, but the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkey's hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trapped--by nothing more than his own value rigidity. He can't revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it. The villagers are coming to get him and take him away. They're coming closer...closer!...now! What general advice--not specific advice--but what general advice would you give the poor monkey in circumstances like this?

Well, I think you might say exactly what I've been saying about value rigidity, with perhaps a little extra urgency. There is a fact this monkey should know: if he opens his hand he's free. But how is he going to discover this fact? By removing the value rigidity that rates rice above freedom. How is he going to do that? Well, he should somehow try to slow down deliberately and go over ground that he has been over before and see if things he thought were important really were important and, well, stop yanking and just stare at the coconut for a while. Before long he should get a nibble from a little fact wondering if he is interested in it. He should try to understand this fact not so much in terms of his big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as he thinks it is.

A little bit later, Pirsig describes how we avoid value traps like this: "You've got to live right too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts." Living right helps you see the right facts. This is Pirsig's case for virtue ethics and echos Peterson's own interest in "rules for living." We can only come to see the right facts in life if we are "living right," living in accordance to the Dao and the Logos. 

Peterson has listed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as among his influences. You can see that influence in the passages above. Specifically, for both Pirsig and Peterson, value comes before facts and helps us select which facts we shall attend to. More so, value creates facts. Value creates our experience of reality. Consequently, in order to live well be must "live right." We must live in accordance to value. For only in living right can we see aright and find the answers to the problems and challenges of life.