In my upbringing, the main way precocious teenage boys were allowed to do some deep thinking was apologetics. Adults preferred the kind distilled through second- or third-hand accounts of C.S. Lewis’ apologetics. I—having somehow taken to the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, who reveled in weird terms like ‘paradox’ and ‘the absurd’ and ‘faith’—never took to it.
Years have passed, and I’m still hopelessly devoted to Kierkegaard and somewhat suspicious of apologetics. But I hope I’ve mellowed a little. One apologetic argument even compels me now, perhaps as one of the few I think really works. It’s called ‘Lewis’ Trilemma,’ or the ‘Liar, Lunatic, or Lord Argument,’ and every second campus evangelist knows it well. For those who don’t, it goes like this:
1. The man Jesus of Nazareth claimed striking things about himself— “I am the light of the world,” “I am the way, the truth, the life,” “I and the Father are one,” etc.
2. Given these striking claims about himself, Jesus was either
a) right, b) crazy, or c) lying.
3. Here you have a trilemma. Let the reader decide: Jesus of Nazareth was either Liar, Lunatic, or Lord. It seems Jesus was not really a liar or lunatic, because ____ (fill in the things you like about Jesus here). So, he must be who he said he was.
It still rings true to my ears, every time I revisit it. Not an airtight argument, of course. Many have poked several holes in it. But the flow of it just feels right, which is often the main point of apologetics anyway. Indeed, it’s not even meant to be airtight, since Lewis had claimed the main target for this argument was not the convinced atheist (who may well think Jesus crazy or two-faced) but the liberal-minded loafer who admits, yes, Jesus said some good things, but we shouldn’t go so far about all that other mystical stuff. The argument forces you to stop deferring judgment about this Jesus and get square with him. ‘Choose! Lord, Liar, or Lunatic!’ These existential stakes remind me of Kierkegaard.
Even so, the more I think about it, the more I’ve wondered if the argument hides a strange sort of success that goes beyond its intentions. Now, suppose this Jesus fellow really was a deluded madman or a scheming liar. Lewis might reply, “then forget about him! Better, condemn him! And get back to reading Plato.” I confess, I can’t get back to reading Plato.
Let me explain why, in what I’ll call the Meta-Lewis Trilemma.
I try to finish the supposition: I imagine this wandering Hebrew preacher in the first century AD (or whatever year it would have been, had this preacher not mattered so much), lying-raving his way through the towns. His conniving-craziness annoys enough people that, finally, they arrest him, strip him naked, torture him, nail him to boards of wood, raise that contraption in the air, and leave him there to collapse his breathing into his own lungs and suffocate and die.
I am supposed now to condemn this man, or at the very least forget about him and move on with my life unchanged. To complete the thought, I imagine myself sneering and scoffing at this deceiver-fool, glad the world is rid of at least one mistake, wishing it would be rid of a few more—that is, wishing a few more people like him would end up on crosses. Or, I fancy being much more polite, thinking to myself with earnest wisdom, ‘shame he did that to himself, got himself into that trouble, but you know, that’s just the way things are, and maybe that’ll teach some kids to think twice, keep a few more people from ending up on crosses.’
In either case, I’m trying to imagine myself following the morality demanded by the possibilities that Jesus was not who he said he was. I am justifying the whole ordeal. This strange fellow, this liar-lunatic, had it coming. I find myself approving the crucifixion. (Of course, at this point we’re just now reaching the introductory stage of Christian orthodoxy: that we all put this Jesus on the cross somehow—but let’s leave that aside for now.)
And I can’t do it. I stop my imagination right there, because I find the whole thing too unjust and can’t bear to put crazies or conmen to gruesome deaths. I just feel too much pity. I realize that no matter what I’d thought about this Jesus, whether I believed in him or not, I am implicated in the whole affair of his crucifixion. Whoever this Jesus was, even if he was guilty of stirring up trouble, I mourn that he suffered an unjust death on that cross.
That is the success of the Meta-Lewis Trilemma. For if not for that Jesus (let us still briefly suppose he was a liar or a lunatic), I doubt I would have ever cared to feel pity or injustice over the killing of various lowlives. Indeed, if not for Jesus and everything he preached and did and gave birth to in his followers, who then went on to preach and do all those things we all know, all of which finally came down to me, two-thousand years later, and shaped my conscience, I truly don’t think I’d ever feel that tinge of guilt that comes with dismissing Jesus as just another loser of history who had it coming.
I may have a hard time being a Christian in the modern world, as Kierkegaard rightly argued, but I also have a hard time not being one. Because of Christianity, I have a compassion I cannot shirk off, even when I try to believe that the person who started it was a sham.
And I cling to my compassion. There are days when my faith is quite weak, and that compassion—that self-absorbed compassion in which I treat myself as some moral agent—is all I have. Yet it keeps me from dropping Christianity and picking up better books by better authors, like Plato. I admit, it’s most prideful: my pity for Christ, rather than the pity I should feel for my own sinful unbelieving self—the irony. But I cling to pity nonetheless, when I need it. For in it I know that Jesus of Nazareth has so formed me, so pervaded my life, that after all, he really must be who he said he was; that there is no escape from him, even on the days I think he’s crazy or just not right about all this. Jesus is Lord, whether I believe it or not.
I think I’m in good company. Friedrich Nietzsche was the most impressive anti-Christian of them all. If I get queasy about my own thought experiments, as I did just now, I can hardly approach some of his beautiful and bombastic blasphemies. He had little patience for pity, and he found the Jesus that Christianity concocted the most pervasive and pitiful thing of all.
Nietzsche also admired the works of Dostoevsky. In Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov dreams of a wretched old horse that fails to tug a cartload of drunken peasants and gets a savage beating. And Raskolnikov, as a little young lad, runs crying up to the horse to save it, but can’t. Nietzsche likely knew that story well, because on January 3, 1889, in the village of Turin, he ran up sobbing and clutched onto a horse that was taking a beating. There his mind collapsed, and he remained insane until his death ten years later.
During confinement, he sent out largely unintelligible letters, signing some of them, “Dionysus”—others, “The Crucified.”
I want to ask Nietzsche: after all those glorious lucid years, after all that playful jubilation about strength and will and beginning again after an old God’s death and dancing on his grave, why did you feel pity for that horse? At this point a Nietzsche scholar might crash onto the page and pontificate that all his work was much more nuanced than that, and some myth shrouds the horse episode anyway. But I don’t want to ask a scholar, I want to ask Nietzsche. And I feel in my bones as if he might admit that he too knows this pity he couldn’t escape in the end. Then I glimpse the hope that I won’t escape it either. Or, I even hope, shall we.
This is an essay about politics, of course.
I fear that, if anything is true in our post-truth society, it is that we all are losing this essential pity. Today, much is made about empathy, compassion, and pity, little of it good. After years of being surrounded by the insufferable kitsch of advertisements from corporations so determined to sell us the notion that they care, we have all gotten quite tired of what they are selling. (Though America suffers the pathology of consumption, it does have the ambiguous virtue of growing bored rather quickly with what it’s fed.) Pundits and partisans have straightened up, turned high- and hard-nosed, and now suffer less patience with their enemies, having learned that easy platitudes of common ground are not only difficult to practice but rarely make for good ground. And the corporations have caught on and changed their ads accordingly.
Be that as it may, this growing impatience with sentimentalism is often prone to treat the pitiable with contempt. Our disdain for fake pity has not yet matured into the wisdom that can distinguish what seems from what is. That is, we have not yet learned that fake pity, conniving empathy, nanny-state compassion, tweets of thoughts and prayers, woke capitalism, gentle parenting—all these phonies only arise, not because pity itself is a sham, but because the demons work best when looking like what is true.
In a book most often studied during the wrong times, Hannah Arendt wrote,
“The Western world has hitherto, even in its darkest periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be remembered as a self-evident acknowledgment that we are all men (and only men). It is only because Achilles set out for Hector’s funeral… only because the Romans allowed the Christians to write their martyrologies, only because the Church kept its heretics alive in the memory of men, that all was not lost and never could be lost.”
Whatever the theologians make of the ‘seeds’ of the Gospel that opened Greco-Roman culture to Christianity, it was likely not so much Plato or Aristotle but rather that sense of acknowledgment that led the Roman centurion to beat his breast at Jesus’ dying breath.
Of course, the crucial word in the above passage is hitherto. For Arendt had worried that now, beginning here in late-modern Western history, when a nation had begun slaying Jews and burning up their memories in smoke, we are in grave danger of losing this.
We say we remember now (especially the Holocaust), but have we gone back through the threshold Arendt thought we crossed? A quick glance at our everyday speech and written language towards each other should disabuse us of the illusion. Granted, most of our words are confined to social media. But the few that do manage to escape those fetters turn brutal often enough—and in everyday moments, not just in mass shootings, assassination attempts, or riots—to keep us from that excuse. Further, our combat bolts so quickly through cyberspace that we do not remember the insults we hurled yesterday as we fight our fights today. And we wonder why we are all so anxious toward each other, having forgotten the loaded words we exchanged yesterday. Each new day disposes of the previous day. This hyper-speed appears essential to our culture now: the past cannot bear the weight we put on today, so we must beat it down into oblivion. It is curious that in spite of this, we still cannot manage to venture forward, nor can we remain satisfied with what’s here now.
Let today’s partisan imagine giving his target an actual beating, not just a tongue-lashing. Then let him spit on the graves of those from the past whom he has declared his enemies. This is the imagination that made Nietzsche relent, in the end. It is a testament to how much Christianity pervaded even his mind that he ended his sanity by clutching onto a beaten horse.
Are we still Christian enough to be distraught by the contempt we feign at our enemies? Or have we progressed beyond Nietzsche to become the overmen whom he came to despise in his last writings? (If you don’t believe me, read Part IV of Also Sprach Zarathustra.) If we have gotten past even Nietzsche, we have truly changed.
With all due respect to the Apostle James, I fear we are not so double-minded as we think. Eventually, we become doers of our words, not hearers and speakers only. And today we speak without pity, we crucify with our mouths, and we do not remember it. Who among us does not acknowledge, deep down, that this shall catch up to us some day?
America has always been partisan. It is a country built on battle. When we try to retreat from our ugly history into our pristine political ideals, Federalist 10 inconveniently reminds us that this violence is embedded into them as well. A small and eerie wonder that some brilliant men found they could work the axiom Homo Homini Lupus into a functioning republic. Ours is, from the beginning, a democracy of confrontation, a constant war of words, and sometimes more than words. Let no nostalgics deny it— and let no one prone to sentiment like myself deny that it has, indeed, worked thus far.
And yet perhaps these Founding Fathers relied on an unstated assumption that beneath every insult of competing interests, there would lie between fighting Americans the honored given that we are all human beings and no more, and no less, and perhaps that gave us all a certain pathos. It is telling that the lowest points in this country’s history occurred when groups decided other groups were not worthy of that assumption.
And so America continues, plunging ever deeper into its culture war. What does this have to do with the Meta-Lewis-Trilemma? I contend nothing less than that our country has always depended on the pity one feels toward a crucified peripatetic and then extends to all people. Indeed, all politics, “whether thrones or powers or dominions or rulers or authorities,” has always depended on that pity. And before that pity existed, or wherever it does not today or may not tomorrow, there was, is, will be, no politics.
America is secularizing, as is the rest of the West. It is leaving Christianity and its pity behind, strangely enough, to go past it That is, Christianity and its past cannot bear the weight our current demands, themselves encultured by Christianity, are making upon it. So our culture berates the past and tries to move on. As the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics attests, if nothing else, Christianity is now the dead horse to be beaten. But I wonder: as it strains to get over Christ, will the West survive without noticing all the other beaten horses of the world? Or will it one day break its supposed sanity and collapse back into a foregone pity?
Or is my bet on the Meta-Lewis-Trilemma just bad apologetics after all, leaving you, my reader, feeling nothing, having proven I am just one of those saps neither manly nor progressive enough for the coming battles ahead?
If the latter, I beg your forgiveness for wasting your time. And I close with a confession. I didn’t describe in full detail what happened to Nietzsche after he tried to save that horse. His friends then locked him in his apartment as they tried to figure out what to do with him. Two days later, they returned to find him mad, unintelligible, and dancing naked with an erection in the living room.
Perhaps that future awaits us. Some days it looks like the present. Perhaps many people prefer it. As for me, I go on pitying Nietzsche.
Image Credit: The photograph series Der Kranke Nietzsche by Hans Olde, 1889
