Over Easter ham dinners when I was growing up, my father liked to read John Updike’s early poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” which begins like this:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules,
Reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
The rest is in the same vein, elegantly decked out with technical jargon that fixes the empty tomb and the folded grave-clothes in the realm of laboratory science. On the basis of this poem, I held in my teens a vague idea of Updike as an obscure religious poet possessed of a passionate and un-Enlightened faith and a fiercely countercultural devotion to the Church.
This turned out not to be exactly right, since Updike was some way from orthodoxy for almost all his life, but his lavishly lustful novels do reflect an essential understanding that we human beings are not wandering spirits but unities of body and soul, appetite and intellection. That conviction alone was apparently enough to make him a great Easter poet for one day in 1960.
The view of the resurrection expressed in Updike’s “Seven Stanzas” was the standard one for seventeen centuries of Church history. The earliest Christians whose writings we possess evidently believed it was important that Christ had been raised materially and not metaphorically; that a particular large rock on a particular spot outside Jerusalem had been shifted six feet to the side by divine power, and that Christianity’s metaphysical and ethical teachings had their warrant in the mysterious movements of physical bodies. In 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul declares that “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain … If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in the midst of your sins.” John begins his first epistle by calling the Gospel account
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard …
This passage returns rhythmically again and again to materiality and sense-perception: Christ had a body; the Gospel begins with bodies. And Jesus himself makes the same point when he offers to let Thomas put his hand in the wounds in his wrists and side, giving him tactile certainty of a material resurrection—touch being the most intimate of senses, a proof that satisfies when sight and hearing are too ambiguous to be trusted.
But there is a basic tension in Christianity: on the one side, the materiality of the shifted stone, the pierced side, the bleeding wrists and ankles; on the other, the Christian turn away from outward ritual and toward the primacy of inward belief. When Jesus offers his wrists to Thomas, the disciple cries out in wonder, but he does not actually touch the wounds. Seeing the risen Christ is evidently enough for him. In Jesus’s words: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
The movement in this passage from touch to sight to sheer inward belief foreshadows what might be called the immaterial strand in Christianity—its tendency to displace religious life and work from the world of bodies into the world of spirit. Compared to the highly ritual and material forms of paganism it supplanted in the ancient Mediterranean and later across Europe, Christianity is indeed a very ethereal faith. The Homeric gods, for example, are subject to bodily desires, pleasures, and afflictions: they lap up smoke from burnt offerings, lust after human beings and one another, and suffer wounds from human heroes.
The movement toward the immaterial begins with Judaism: the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible, surrounded by believers in material gods, seem to have alternated between mocking their polytheist neighbors and imitating them. One of Israel’s great besetting sins, in the eyes of the writers of the Hebrew scriptures, was setting up physical images to worship, defying a god who had commanded them not to worship graven images. To the writers, Yahweh’s immateriality was clearly a source of superiority over the embodied pagan gods, even if it made his worship more difficult for ordinary people. In 1 Kings, after the wicked Ahab has led Israel into polytheism, the prophet Elijah offers a vivid demonstration of the contrast. When the Baal worshiped by Ahab’s priests fails to set his own altar on fire, Elijah ridicules him for his materiality: “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.”
Though the religion of the Hebrews did involve physical acts of sacrifice, one of God’s recurring complaints against his people is that they perform the material rituals perfectly while neglecting inward devotion. “For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it,” prays the author of Psalm 51; “you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
Contrast the sentiment of that passage with Glaucon and Adeimantus’s fear, in Republic II, that the unjust man’s wealth will allow him to excel in sacrifices and so become a friend to the gods. This passage suggests that to conventionally pious Greeks, service to the gods consisted largely in ritual observances—so much so that a bad man’s wealth could quite literally purchase their friendship. And in light of Homer’s depictions of the gods reveling in the smoke of burnt offerings, this attitude made sense. The Hebrew prophets labored to make it clear that the true god was different.
The contrast is even more pronounced in the Christian Gospels, where Christ teaches about a kingdom not of this world and a perfect God who summons human beings to internal perfection. The service this God demands begins with the conversion of the heart. Jesus carries forward the immaterial tendency of the prophets by rejecting religious authorities’ attempts to enforce ritual laws that would prevent him from performing acts of mercy. He makes the distinction between the inner and the outer explicit:
Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also? But give as alms the things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you.
Admittedly, both Yahweh and Jesus replace ritual action not only with internal conversion but with a new kind of work in the external, material world: showing mercy to the poor and doing justice to the wronged. But as Jesus’s inside/outside language shows, these new assignments differ categorically from older religions’ emphasis on winning the gods’ favor through actions specifically designed to please them. The Christian God calls his followers to change their hearts in the expectation that good works will follow as natural consequences. Jesus finds a metaphor for this process in another recurring image: the tree and its fruit. A good tree will produce good fruit, the external sign of its internal soundness; a bad tree’s fruit is fit only to be burned.
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The modern denial of supernatural agency in the world is an extremely unusual view. That it prevails in our culture is arguably an unintended consequence of this ethereal strand in Christianity. Most medieval Christians seem to have regarded the divinity as governing both the spiritual and the material spheres. By the time of the European Enlightenment, however, a combination of changing scientific frameworks, flowering philosophical humanism, and the inward turn of the Reformation made belief in direct material supernatural action increasingly unfashionable. The deist Western intelligentsia took Jesus’s inwardness discourse to new lengths: their God asks for nothing from human beings other than a simple and rational morality, and he never intervenes in the material world he has made. Kant takes this position in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, declaring, amazingly, that “whatever [the] historical standing” of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, it should not be talked about except in metaphorical terms, since it implies that rational personality (for Kant the site of all goodness) is material rather than spiritual. If miracles do happen, they should be hushed up.
Kant’s view has basically persisted, even as Kantian rationalism went out of fashion in its turn; his deism was the faith of most of the American founders, and today it appears to be the dominant opinion about God in both opinion polling and the public square. A plurality of Americans between 2003 and 2013 said they believe God “observes but does not control what happens on Earth.”
Updike’s “Seven Stanzas,” with its ecstatic insistence on the reality of the resurrection, thus reflects a doctrine that is no longer self-evident to American Christians, if it ever was. Many self-identified Christians see miracles and the supernatural as superstitious distractions from the moral and internal revolution that Jesus proclaimed. To them, as to Kant and the great 20th-century theologians of the American mainline, the dissolution of flesh-and-blood resurrections into the vapor of metaphor is the logical consequence of Christianity’s original departure from pagan blood sacrifice and ritual purification. The true Christian, in this view, rejects the Christian account of the miraculous.
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Here at the end of history, then, a Christian who reads cannot avoid the question: does it matter to me whether or not the Gospel accounts of Jesus Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension are materially true? Most evangelicals trying to make a life among the American intelligentsia learn early on to reinterpret the Genesis account of creation as a beautiful (we always make sure to specify that it’s beautiful) metaphor intended to communicate a cosmological doctrine concerning God’s relation to nature that in no way conflicts with Darwin’s teaching on the origin and progress of life, or with modern geology’s proofs that the Earth is substantially more than six thousand years old.
If we can so easily dispense with sacred scripture’s account of the beginnings of things—even as our less couth coreligionists expend huge amounts of time, intelligence, and money to explain away modern science’s challenges to a literal interpretation of Genesis—then why are we still hung up on the equally strange, if less easily falsifiable, claims of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Jesus himself, liberal theology claims, has shown us the way by turning away from the old blood-and-guts morality and toward an ethic of neighbor-love and inward holiness. Christians (and probably monotheists in general) can sidestep the blows of modern natural science in a way that pagans never could. In fact, a fully ethereal, interior Christianity is immune to any disproof whatsoever by means of science or the senses. It can only be disputed on remote philosophical grounds, and those debates, as everyone knows, are never really settled. Such a Christianity seems well positioned to conquer the world: armed with a compelling moral teaching, preaching love, grace, and kindness, universal in outlook, and materially unfalsifiable, since it makes no material claims.
Over the course of the 20th century, the American mainline churches embraced this post-material Christianity. Major theologians imported historical-critical scriptural interpretation from Germany and used it to dismiss the Gospel’s miraculous accounts. The Jesus of Kant and Jefferson—a great teacher, a simple man, willing to give up his life for his beliefs—became the central figure in elite American Christianity. The result, however, was not a third Great Awakenings. Instead, Americans stopped going to church.
The secularization of the West over the last century is a complicated issue. Attributing it entirely to the shifting theology of the Protestant mainline would be a mistake. But an American Christian who wants to keep up with the times faces a curious paradox: the churches that have accommodated themselves most completely to modern thought have utterly failed to hold Americans’ interest—filling up for encouraging messages on Easter and Christmas, holding skeleton congregations for the rest of the year. The sociologist Elizabeth Drescher, who interviewed hundreds of post-Christian Americans for a book project, told an interviewer in 2013 that many ex-mainliners feel they’ve “graduated from church.” “They got it,” Drescher said. “They get that they’re supposed to be good to people, share what they have, do good in the world.” Evidently the most purely ethereal forms of Christianity tend to go up in smoke.
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Liberal Christianity may not get many people out of bed on Sunday mornings, but it certainly has philosophical appeal. As I worked my way through the familiar adolescent struggle to reconcile thought and belief, I found unexpected guides in a pre-Christian philosopher and one of his post-Christian disciples.
Although Plato is often read—not without justification—as one of the founders of the immaterial turn in Western thought, his ethical teaching is actually grounded in the world of objects. Kant’s ethics require us to delve deeper within ourselves; Plato’s summon us beyond the machinery of human consciousness. Specifically, Plato’s teaching that the good as such is an external object of understanding, rather than an immaterial property of the human will, turns our attention away from ourselves and toward an external world of physical things in which the good is, if not actually present, at least fleetingly imaged. The contemplation of real things, real actions, real people outside our heads becomes a condition for our access to goodness.
In her most famous work, The Sovereignty of Good, the Platonist Iris Murdoch takes Kant as an especially brilliant representative of the characteristic ethical attitude of modernity. Kant situates goodness in the will—the choice to obey reason, which is free, rather than some lesser principle that is ultimately determined by the necessity-bound material world: pleasure, pain, blind faith. This account of the good is founded on a profound truth: under the direction of a bad will, the strongest and most beautiful things can be put to bad ends. Eloquence can sway an audience to good or evil; strength can save or kill. Goodness itself is plainly not located in objects or attributes. So where can we find it? Kant solves the problem by moving it inward, to the will.
Plato moves it outward and upward instead. He locates goodness in the perfections of the objects and actions we encounter every day: what an olive tree or an act of courage is measured up against and striving to become. These perfections he calls the forms; the more perfect the object, the more completely it shares in the attributes of its form. This sharing is what his translators usually call participation—a word that tries to capture the mysterious relation between an imperfect object and its perfection.
The material world, on this account, is a world of shadows; the substance, the true reality, lies beyond the sphere that we know with our senses. Yet the Platonic view also imparts an immense dignity to the material, since the ascent to the forms begins with the contemplation of objects outside ourselves. Murdoch points out that the Republic’s philosopher-kings are after all kings as well as philosophers, compelled to rule in the cave because their contemplation of the good makes them capable of a more perfect attention to particulars than a non-philosopher can manage. And she thinks that ordinary people are called to some version of the same kind of thinking: “The difficulty [in an ethical dilemma] is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy, and despair.” In short, an ethics of attention to the good broadens for Murdoch (and, in her account, Plato) into an ethics of attention to objects outside the self in light of a good that is also outside the self. Socrates, too—a man continually in quest for the forms—spends his time walking around the city, eating and drinking with other people, rather than doing his most important work alone in his armchair like Descartes.
Murdoch believes that Plato’s account is truer to moral experience than Kant’s. She recognizes the grandeur of Kant’s vision, but she also thinks that his image of the perfect human being is both unrealistic and perhaps a little silly. The brooding solemnity of the upright man who proudly refuses any heteronomous moral instruction and insists on vanquishing his demons through the force of his own will may have seemed right to the highly disciplined and intellectual Sage of Königsberg, but it also defies thousands of years of common sense, which has always laughed at exaggerated claims of self-sufficiency.
Plato, by contrast, saw that a person who wants to be good does so by contemplating something beyond and above herself, attained and understood through great effort. The moment of moral clarity comes not when we fix our gaze most intently on our own inwardness, but when we turn it away from ourselves and toward the good as such.
Murdoch’s embrace of Plato was self-consciously anachronistic; she referred to him, romantically, as “the philosopher under whose banner I am fighting.” She was right to think about her project in those terms, because her ethical thought cuts against the grand progressive movement toward ethical inwardness. For Kant and his liberal Christian heirs, the movement away from paganism entailed a movement toward what reason could grasp: a comprehensive cosmology, a rational ethics, all situated within the human mind. For Murdoch, ethics summons us into a cloud of unknowing, since the good, while accessible to our contemplation, is beyond our comprehension.
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It was on a Thursday night that Jesus, sitting with his disciples at what he knew would be the last meal before his betrayal and execution, took bread; and, when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you: do this in remembrance of me. Likewise after supper he took the cup; and, when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink this, all of you; for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins: Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.
I found myself trying to wrap up this piece during the three days between Maundy Thursday, when Christians commemorate the strange and brutally material command to eat Christ’s body and drink his blood, and Easter, when we celebrate his resurrection. It’s a time when we’re supposed to fast and meditate on the bodily agonies Jesus suffered during his trial and death: scourged, stripped, nailed wrist and ankle to a wooden frame, raised skyward and left to hang there, arms stretched out of their sockets by his body’s downward weight and likely elongated, according to one account I read, by six or seven inches. The immediate cause of death was probably asphyxiation; the loud cry he gave at the end would have been the last breath he could manage. Thinking about what happened to Jesus reminds us that we, too, have bodies, and that those bodies can be twisted, smashed, and torn in a thousand different ways, and that even if we manage to keep them more or less out of harm’s way for seventy or eighty years, they will eventually oxidize into uselessness and finally collapse into shapeless masses of bloody pulp.
The contemplation of Christ’s broken body and shed blood does draw us in towards ourselves, then, but not in Kantian contemplation of the moral law within. It shows us that even our very inwardness, in this fallen state of ours, is broken, strange, irrational, and liable to die. So many of the intellectual and practical tendencies of modern life militate against this understanding—from transhumanism, which seeks to replace this mortal body with one that we can truly control, to the overprescription of psychotropic drugs, which desperately attempts to subject the irrational and bodily to a universal reason. Seeing Christ gasping for air on the cross, we see God’s own son, the divine logos, laboring in the same fleshly shackles that bind us.
The gospel of inwardness and immateriality offers a simple and elegant solution to the horrifying paradox of the Cross: Christ died on Golgotha, but he lives on in the hearts of his followers, or perhaps their spirits or consciences, because, after all, the truth he came to preach was far too great to be contained in a fleshly body. Christian orthodoxy offers a less sophisticated and frankly more violent solution to the paradox: that instead of outwitting death, vaporizing out of its grasp into the pure intellectual realm of freedom, Christ beats it down by main force, crushes it, mangles it, and reclaims the physical realm of necessity as a realm of freedom by rising bodily from the tomb in defiance of nature’s laws.
Paul writes that at the end of all things Christ “delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” This is not an intellectual battle, or even a purely spiritual one: it is a material triumph in the material world. If contemplating Jesus’s death forces us to acknowledge that the basic conditions of our life are beyond our control, contemplating his resurrected body transforms the meaning of bodiliness itself, making materiality into a sphere of radical and miraculous possibility. Of course, nothing like this happens in Plato, for whom material things merely point the way out of materiality. Platonism shares Christianity’s ambivalent but hopeful attitude toward the material world as containing the promise of something better; but only Christianity offers the final consummation within materiality itself.
The Christian who lives within the frame of reference given by the Bible must ask: why does a God who desires the conversion of the heart make the salvation of the world depend on the sacrifice and miraculous resurrection of a material human body? Why does a God who blesses us with the terrible gift of free will insist on working out our salvation in the material realm, the realm of necessity? The problem of material truth turns out to be a problem of theodicy. Why doesn’t the master of time and space perform his works of grace in the immaterial sphere of universal reason, where they would be accessible to every rational mind as Kant demanded?
Murdoch’s distinction between inward and outward reason points the way to an answer. If Christ is not raised materially from the dead, the faith that Paul preached and that Christians today profess is indeed in vain, since Christian faith in his teachings is nothing other than the mind’s faith in its own operation—its own capacity to comprehend the workings of the great Newtonian machine of nature and the greater Kantian machine of rational ethics. If he did not live, die, and rise bodily, that luminous unknown outside the self can and must be absorbed and comprehended by the self, by the humming brain of the rational animal.
Christ’s sayings can be absorbed and systematized; like Socrates in the Phaedrus, he compares his teachings to seeds that he sows in the soul of his hearers but that must grow up on their own. But Christ’s risen body cannot be absorbed or systematized. In its materiality it remains irreducibly external to the self; in its miraculous resurrection it shatters the mind’s mastery of the laws of nature.
As Jesus walked around and talked with various inhabitants of first-century Palestine, he left behind him immaterial teachings and doctrines that enter the soul of the believer and free it from the arbitrary and amoral material commands of paganism. But he also left behind miracles, culminating in his own emergence from the tomb where he had been laid, dead as a doornail, thirty-six hours before. These miracles cannot enter the soul of the believer. They remain outside, mystical objects of contemplation, beyond our capacity to systematize or explain.
Plato and Murdoch help us not only to accept this strange teaching but to love it. Plato’s doctrine of the good as an object outside the self, grasped through dialectical contemplation of external objects that participate in it, moderates his own repudiation of the reality of the material world. It is also a rebuke to the Christian who wants to rule out any doctrine that doesn’t fit in his system, and a reminder to Platonist and Christian alike that we ascend to the truth not through ever more concentrated self-analysis but through attention: to our cities, to our neighbors, to the person of Christ in the scriptures.
We live not in a mind-palace of our own construction but in a world of faces—an unsettling world at times, but also one adorned with glories that we could never have discovered in ourselves. Critics of Platonism have scoffed at the longing for an unworldly and inaccessible perfection. But Platonism also bestows an astonishing dignity on the world of things, each of which becomes a promise of a beauty beyond imagination. To look at things as they are and see them straining toward what they might be—to see, as Paul wrote, “the whole creation … groaning together in the pains of childbirth”—is to be freed from the despairing resignation of the inward turn, which seeks perfection in pure thought out of disillusionment with the corruption of the material. And Christ’s bodily resurrection, Paul says, is the beginning of all this, the beginning of the end of the birth of the new life, the redemption of the body. Attending to the reknit molecules and rekindled amino acids of his risen body prepares us to attend to a world that lies just on the verge of bursting into glorious newness.
Simone Weil, Murdoch’s fellow Platonist and a crucial source for her ethics of attention, characterized attention as a kind of self-effacement: “I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.” For Weil as for Murdoch, the attention that draws us toward the truth is not necessarily abstract. “The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real,” she wrote. “It is the same with the act of love. To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.” Immaterial Christianity makes the man Jesus into a symbol, a metaphor for the teaching that lives in every Christian’s heart, and melts his solid flesh into air. Only to the believer in material truth can the hungry and thirsty Christ become an object of attention, of love that lifts us out of selfishness.
