The episode begins with the four main characters discussing why so many eligible women in New York City remain alone and unhappy. Three of the women seem undecided, but one of them—Samantha—offers this solution:

Look, you’re a successful saleswoman in this city. You have two choices: you can bang your head against the wall and try and find a relationship or you can say SCREW ’EM, and just go out and have sex like a man [. . .] I mean without feeling!

Samantha proudly recounts how she slept with a man and “afterwards, I didn’t feel a thing. It was like ‘Hey babe, gotta go, catch ya later’ and I completely forgot about him.” Samantha is a liberated woman. She tells Carrie, “sweetheart, this is the first time in the history of Manhattan that women have had as much money and power as men plus the equal luxury of treating men like sex objects.” Samantha has freed herself from stuffy social conventions, she does what she wants, and she’s happy.

Right?

Freedom is fundamental to human happiness. The founders knew this—they acknowledged “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—William Wilberforce knew this; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. knew this; Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew this. And so the question “what does it mean to be happy?” points to the more primary question of “what does it mean to be free?”  Does freedom mean radical freedom—freedom to do whatever we want, free from all restraint? Will that make us happy?

Carrie, a relationship columnist and the show’s narrator, reflects on Samantha’s proposition:

Was it true? Were women in New York really giving up on love and throttling up on power? (To camera:) What a tempting thought.

Carrie wonders whether engaging in sex that is free from typical societal constraints might bring her happiness. After all, she’d be free to satisfy physical desire without all the messy complications that come with caring about the other person—no commitment, no vulnerability, no potential for heartbreak. She’d be empowered. So she decides to give radical freedom a go.

But in the scene immediately following her decision to act on this new-found freedom, Carrie arranges a liaison with an ex-boyfriend whom she describes as “scum” and “a self-centered withholding creep.” Addressing the audience in no uncertain terms, Carrie identifies her history with this man as a destructive cycle: she tells us he was a mistake she made when she was twenty-six, twenty-nine, and thirty-one, and that she would be a “masochist” to interact with him again. Yet when they meet, Carrie first lies to a friend who wants her to avoid the guy and then appears utterly unable to help herself from engaging with him. This is freedom? Far from empowering her, Carrie’s radical freedom instead draws her back into a destructive cycle.

The whole affair ends badly for Carrie, and the episode ends with another (much more attractive, eligible, and honorable) man telling Carrie (who’s still pretending that her radical freedom approach to sex will make her happy) “I get it, you’ve never been in love.” He drives off, leaving Carrie alone in the dark saying “suddenly I felt the wind knocked out of me. I wanted to crawl under the covers and go right to sleep.”

A solipsistic tendency lurks at the root of radical freedom. Defining freedom as the power to do whatever one wants to satisfy one’s own desires leads a person to subordinate other individuals to those desires. Carrie’s misguided conception of freedom causes her to treat her ex-boyfriend as a means of satisfying her desires and not as an end in himself. She describes him as an object of an experiment — something to be manipulated — and not as another fully human being. In doing this, Carrie also cuts herself off from any possibility of true communion. She’s running the experiment, she’s the puppet master, and so she’s alone. Radical freedom degrades the relationship between human beings: it encourages us to see our neighbors only in terms of their material use and not encounter them as fellow souls whose worth surpasses any ability to quantify. Radical freedom also degrades our own view of ourselves and our purpose in life. Not for this were we fearfully and wonderfully made.

True freedom and happiness flow out of the significant bonds between human beings. These bonds are the opposite of those that radical freedom establishes. The slave to radical freedom tends to see people only insofar as they might serve his selfish ends — an extremely narrow vision. But the person who tries to see his neighbor as an end in himself opens himself to the fullness of the other person’s being, and so opens himself to receive the other person as a gift. This creates the bonds that radical freedom would seek to destroy: mutual respect, concern for the well-being of others, a willingness to sacrifice self-interests, and a genuine desire for surrender and self-giving.

Standing before the wonder of this new creation—with stars singing in the heavens, forests springing up along the hillsides, and all manner of animals being called into being—Uncle Andrew can think only of personal profit and material gain. He exclaims:

The commercial possibilities of this country are unbounded. Bring a few old bits of scrap iron here, bury ‘em, and up they come as brand new railway engines, battleships, anything you please. They’ll cost nothing, and I can sell ‘em at full prices in England. I shall be a millionaire!

The smallness—the pettiness—of Uncle Andrew’s scheme reveals an extreme narrowness of vision. Because he only looks out for himself, Uncle Andrew makes himself blind to everything else; he is one of those “who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear.” Greed and the desire to exploit creation make Uncle Andrew suspicious and fearful of all he encounters (even the talking animals of Narnia!). He may be a mischievous old miser, but Uncle Andrew is also a character to be pitied, for he cannot experience the beauty or delight of this new world.

I thought of Uncle Andrew while watching television recently when this ad came on the air:

The premise of the ad is that Easter shopping trends threaten chocolate bunnies with extinction and that we should do something about it. We should especially pay attention because a group of television celebrities says so. What solution do they propose? “Just buy less chocolate and more toys this Easter,” one celebrity says. The camera then cuts to a cute little girl who breaks it down even further for us: “Just buy toys this Easter.”

As we approach Easter, we approach what Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has called “the day of the new creation.” Like Uncle Andrew in Narnia, we encounter on Easter a new creation which reminds and recalls us to Paradise. In the midst of this mystery, do we, like Uncle Andrew, instead bother ourselves with commercial goods and petty personal gain? Do we, in fact, “just buy toys this Easter?”

The most tragic aspect of Uncle Andrew’s character is that his self-centeredness makes him unable to meet the creator, Aslan. He can only see Aslan—and in fact the whole world—in terms of his own plans for personal gain. This renders creation as something simply to be manipulated and the creator as an obstacle and a hindrance. “Oh Adam’s sons,” Aslan laments, when Uncle Andrew hardens his heart against the Lion’s help, “how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”

At the end of the story, insisting on—but worn out by—his foolish ways, Uncle Andrew finally departs Narnia in a state of semi-consciousness, muttering nonsense about the world and his plans. He himself works no great harm. Nor does this chocolate bunny advertisement. But both approach the profound beauties of a new creation—Narnia for Uncle Andrew, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter for the advertisement—and appear amazingly unmoved. Even if Uncle Andrew’s plan succeeded, he would have returned from the wonder of another world with nothing more to show for it than a piece of machinery to sell. Will we be satisfied if we have a basket full of chocolates or toys at the end of Easter?

In the words of Walker Percy:

That won’t do. A poor show [...] one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

May God have mercy on us, who all suffer from various stages of Uncle Andrew disease, and grant us particular grace this Holy Week to meet our resurrected Lord with open eyes and ears and minds and hearts.

Botticelli’s “The Virgin and Child with Four Angels and Six Saints” (ca 1490); courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Italian Renaissance, an art form emerged known as the sacra conversazione or “sacred conversation.” Sandro Botticelli, Fra Angelico, later Titian and others painted the Madonna and Christ Child talking with saints and sometimes the artist’s own patrons. Recalling Dante’s beatific vision, figures otherwise separated by time and space meet in the planes of these paintings.

Sacra conversazione works illustrate what T.S. Eliot describes as the crucial “historical sense”—“a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together.”  (A phrase that also poetically describes the nativity of our Lord.) Eliot argues that any artist—and every person has some sort of artist in them—must develop this sense if he wants his work and his responses to other works to mean anything.  No artist of any art, Eliot observes, has his complete meaning alone. Consider the tragedy of Genie if you think that creativity can flourish in a person isolated from human companionship.

Eliot explains that this historical sense also makes the artist “most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.” If we only know our own times, then we don’t really know our own times, and we don’t really know ourselves. C.S. Lewis considers this paradox in his allegory Pilgrim’s Regress with an encounter between John, the main character, and a giant called the Spirit of the Age.

Inspired by a vision of transcendent beauty, John sets out from home on a pilgrimage and quickly goes astray. He falls into the company of “artists” who insist that beauty is a lie, “reality has broken down,” and that art “must be brutal” to express their “savage disillusionment.” When he fails to understand their work, John is beaten by the very progressive artists. He escapes and wanders to a mountain pass where he is stopped by guards who tell him that the land belongs to the Spirit of the Age. John says he will go another way—he had not meant to trespass. “You fool,” the captain of the guard jeers at him. “You are in his country now. This pass is the way out of it, not the way into it. He welcomes strangers. His quarrel is with runaways.” At that moment, John realizes that the mountain in whose shadow he stands is the Spirit of the Age—a menacing stone giant.

Like John, we often live unawares in the shadow of the spirit of our age. If our vision only extends to our immediate surroundings, our perception becomes myopic. Without what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” we lack perspective. Significantly, John only recognizes the spirit of the age when he tries—rather unintentionally—to escape it. He doesn’t set out to take a philosophical stand against the errors of his time. He simply flees from the felt absurdity and violence of the destructive “artists.” I think many of us follow John’s progression. We only glimpse the awful authority of the spirit of the age when we oppose it on some point that directly affects us and find we are called “fools” for it. At these moments, we discover that this time of supposed relativity and tolerance is not quite so tolerant as we thought.

C.S. Lewis sends a heroine called Reason to rescue John. While reason alone can help us, I think that stories are more primary aides. This is not to suggest a dichotomy between reason and stories. But in our quest for freedom from the tyranny of the spirit of the age, the characters we meet in stories may be more lasting helpers than purely rational or philosophic arguments. Atticus Finch, for example, can teach us about duty in ways that the works of Immanuel Kant simply cannot.

It requires “great labour,” Eliot says, but we can acquire the “historical sense” by going out and reading literature from times and places other than our own. We return the richer for it, like Nathan returning home from his great journey in Nathan the Wise. If you don’t know Nathan, you should get to know him. He’s a wise Jewish father living in 12th century Jerusalem during the time of Saladin the Great. A German playwright named Gotthold Lessing, concerned about religious tolerance, told Nathan’s story in 1779, and a professor at George Mason University named Paul D’Andrea, concerned about religious tolerance, translated and adapted Nathan’s story into a play that debuted in 2001. If Botticelli was alive today, he might paint a sacra conversazione with Lessing and D’Andrea gathered around the Blessed Virgin and baby Jesus. I hope that Botticelli’s observant eye would also notice us, perhaps eavesdropping in a corner, gradually making our way into fuller communion with the other sacra conversazione participants.

Have the processes of intellectual evolution rendered faith impracticable—obsolete? One contemporary writer considers just a few of the difficulties that Christianity poses to the modern mind:

The difficulty begins with the very first page of the Bible. The concept presented there of how the world came to be is in direct contradiction of all that we know today about the origins of the universe . . . And what of paradise? Long before man existed, pain and death were in the world . . .  all the miraculous stories of the Old Testament are . . . the expression of a cosmology that regards the universe as ruled by all manner of spirits . . . [in the New Testament] a single man is supposed to be the center of all history . . . is this not the naïve claim of an age that was simply incapable of penetrating the vastness of the universe, the greatness of history and of the world?

The contemporary writer who raises these questions is Pope Benedict XVI. How would you answer them?

The Catechism affirms that “there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason.” But Pope Benedict also cautions that our thinking “can never completely integrate faith and knowledge, and we must never, from a very understandable impatience, allow ourselves to press on to immature syntheses” that actually compromise the faith. Discussions about, for example, the Biblical account of the seven days of creation can be interesting. But they can also tempt believers to give convoluted explanations—or evasions—that contort faith and reason. The resulting arguments go round and round in circles without moving anyone closer to Christ.

In his book Faith and the Future, Pope Benedict addresses the root assumptions from which questions like those listed above stem. He clarifies that faith is neither “a diluted form of natural science, an ancient or medieval preparatory stage that must vanish when the real thing turns up” nor some “colossal edifice of supernatural facts” teetering beside all our empirical knowledge. “Rather,” he says, faith “is something essentially different.” The shepherd of Rome concludes that “faith is, not a system of knowledge, but trust;” it is an assent to God who gives us hope and confidence.

This assent can be—must be—made without comprehending every last detail of the separate facets of faith. This is not easy. And maybe it is especially hard for us who live in an age that so emphasizes measurable realities and empirical investigation and reproducible experiments. How can we, knowing all we know, ever run like those simple shepherds, at the urging of angels (angels?), to kneel before a man who is also supposed to be our Lord and our God?

One mistake we make, I think, is about the simplicity of those shepherds and about the simple or childlike faith of all who would follow Christ after them. As Dietrich Von Hildebrand has observed, it is not a simple thing to have true simplicity. Spiritual simplicity is not the same thing as primitivity, or platitude, or stupidity, or poverty of meaning.

Maybe it is harder for us in modern times to understand and experience true spiritual simplicity. But as we struggle and pray for the grace and the confidence to run like the shepherds straight to our Lord, perhaps we can also recognize kindred spirits in the Magi and see something familiar about the longer road they took to Christ.

In a beautiful novella titled Helena, author and convert Evelyn Waugh dramatizes the life and conversion of St. Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine and finder of the true cross. Her pilgrimage to the Holy Land coincided with the Feast of Epiphany, and so Waugh imagines Helena reflecting on the Magi’s journey. Through the character of Helena, Waugh offers this humbling prayer for our own times:

“This is my day,” she thought, “and these are my kind.” [. . . ]

“Like me,” she said to them, “you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way. For you the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed and a new defiant light blazed amid the disconcerted stars.

“How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

“You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!

“Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too. You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family than the ox or the ass.

“You are my especial patrons,” said Helena, “and for my poor overloaded son. May he, too, before the end find kneeling-space in the straw. Pray for the great, lest they perish utterly. [. . .]

“For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

Advent begins tomorrow and one way to prepare for Christ’s coming is to meditate on the story of his Nativity. Besides the Gospel accounts, one of my favorite stories to read during this season is Shakespeare’s play the Winter’s Tale. The story Shakespeare tells illuminates aspects of the Nativity story in a way that points me back, with increased wonder, to the Gospels and ultimately to our Lord Himself.

Like the story of the Nativity—which really begins with the story of the fall—the Winter’s Tale begins with a descent: the tragic fall of King Leontes. Leontes and Hermione, king and queen of Sicilia, are hosting King Polixenes of Bohemia, Leontes’ childhood friend. Great love exists between them all, but Leontes becomes suspicious of Hermione and Polixenes and convinces himself that the two are having an affair. The suspicion is unfounded—Hermione and Polixenes are clearly pure in their love and committed to the king’s own good—but none of this matters to Leontes. He accuses his pregnant wife of adultery, tries and condemns her, ignores the protest of his friends, blasphemes against the gods, and indirectly causes the death of his young son who cannot bear the false accusations against his mother.

The whole terrible fall happens suddenly in the beginning of the play with Leontes doubting the intentions of those who truly love him. Acting on this doubt, he makes rash and disastrous choices that cost him nearly everything. Sound familiar?

 [The serpent] said to the woman: Why hath God commanded you, that you should not eat of every tree of paradise?  And the woman answered him, saying: Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat:  But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die.  And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death.  For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3)

Doubt God’s word; doubt his intentions; suspect that one who truly loves you is actually deceiving you and withholding some good from you—this is how the evil one tempts Adam and Eve to their destruction and these are the doubts that undo Leontes.

In a tragic turn, the queen Hermione gives birth to her baby girl while in prison awaiting trial. The king cruelly rejects his daughter as the “bastard” of Polixenes and orders one of his lords to take the child outside his realm and abandon it. The lord, Antigonus, obeys the king and sails off with the newborn whom he names Perdita (Latin for lost one). As soon as Antigonus abandons the baby, a savage bear chases him off stage and kills him. At the same moment, a storm sinks the ship Antigonus sailed in and drowns the crew.

Back in Sicilia, Leontes finally realizes his errors, but it’s too late. His newborn daughter has been abandoned in the wild. His slanderous words have effectively killed his son. When she hears of her son’s death, the queen swoons and also appears to die. Polixenes and Camillo, Leontes’ most trusted servant, flee in fear for their lives. Like an outcast from Eden, Leontes loses almost everything. Yet one seed of hope remains. Leontes receives a pronouncement from the Oracle at Delphi with these words from Apollo (the play is set in pagan times):

Hermione is chaste;
Polixenes blameless; Camillo a true subject; Leontes
a jealous tyrant; his innocent babe truly begotten;
and the king shall live without an heir, if that
which is lost be not found.

Shakespeare structures his story so that the fate of the entire kingdom depends upon one innocent babe, the truly begotten and rightful heir. Where have we heard that before?

Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call his name Jesus.  He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the most High; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father; and he shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever. (Luke 1)

When the Lord God of Hosts came into this world, he came as defenseless babe, born in a stable to a humble virgin married to a carpenter. This union of power and humility—so central to the Catholic faith—appears frequently in Shakespeare’s works, but it is especially clear here in the Winter’s Tale with the nativity of Perdita.

Perdita, the innocent child on whom the fate of the kingdom rests, lies abandoned in the wild. And who should first find and adore the child but a shepherd! The scene is comical, simple, sweet, and very down-to-earth—very like how our Lord’s Nativity must have been. The funny old shepherd appears, looking for some lost sheep of his and grumbling about the impertinence of youth when suddenly:

. . . what have we here! Mercy on ‘s, a barne a very
pretty barne! A boy or a child, I wonder? A
pretty one; a very pretty one: sure, some ‘scape . . .

The shepherd finds the child who will save the kingdom and whose name means the lost one while out looking for lost sheep—a subtle but profound touch which is so typical of Shakespeare and which points back to the mysterious divine artistry that first sent shepherds to adore the newborn Lamb of God.

The shepherd’s son then enters and tells his father he has seen a bear kill Antigonus and a storm sink the ship. The shepherd exclaims: “Heavy matters! heavy matters! but look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn. Here’s a sight for thee,” and he presents the child.

Like the shepherds in Bethlehem, these shepherds of Shakespeare find themselves in the presence of something that fills them with awe. And while the fallen world may be going in one direction—to meet with things dying—these humble shepherds meet with something “newborn”—something life-giving. Although he’s not quite as eloquent, the old shepherd reminds me of Simeon meeting the infant Jesus and it helps me to picture how tenderly that patient old man must have cradled the Christ-child in his arms.

I don’t want to spoil the ending of the Winter’s Tale, so if you want to know what happens to the shepherds and Perdita and Leontes’ kingdom, you’ll just have to read it yourself (and you should, because there’s a surprise ending!). But as a final point, I want to clarify that none of this is to suggest that the Winter’s Tale is really just an allegory for Christ’s Nativity. It’s not about decoding which character in the play stands for which character in the Gospels. Rather, I would suggest that Shakespeare’s works, and especially the late romances, are fruits which grow organically from a very sacramental, Catholic understanding of the world. For this reason, it can be very fruitful to us to read Shakespeare in the light of Catholic scripture and tradition. His stories contain much worth meditating upon and they constantly point back to the Author of all our stories.

By Thomas Hedden, via Wikimedia Commons

“Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?”

This is the question pondered by Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner at a forced-labor camp in the Soviet Gulag system. Shukhov is the imagined narrator of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Though Shukhov may be fictional, his experiences come out of Solzhenitsyn’s own real-life experience. Arrested in 1945 for criticizing (in private letters to a friend) Joseph Stalin’s military decisions, Solzhenitsyn was interrogated, beaten, and sentenced to eight years in various Soviet labor camps.

If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s name is not familiar to you, it should be. Once a loyal Red Army captain, Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in prison and later in exile led him to reject the communism into which he had been indoctrinated. Although it cost him dearly—his works were seized, he was expelled from the state-sanctioned writers’ union, he was categorized as a “non-person,” the KGB attempted to assassinate him—Solzhenitsyn continued to write and call attention to Soviet atrocities. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The honor, it turns out, gave Solzhenitsyn little protection at home: in 1974, the Soviet government arrested him, stripped him of his citizenship, and deported him.

Do Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet communist system he spoke out against concern us today? Before you answer the question, consider this: According to a survey conducted by Newsweek and reported on in 2011, 73% of Americans could not identify communism as the ideology America opposed during the Cold War. Judging by this statistic, I’m not sure that Solzhenitsyn or his experiences concern us very much today at all. But should they? That brings us back to Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s question: Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?

Or to put it another way, as Solzhenitsyn did himself in a speech in New York in 1975:

Is it then possible or impossible to transmit the experience of those who have suffered to those who have yet to suffer? Can one part of humanity learn from the bitter experience of another or can it not? Is it possible or impossible to warn someone of danger?

Solzhenitsyn suggests that the experience of those who have suffered can serve as a warning to those who are not yet suffering. Maybe it seems like we don’t need to be warned about communism—the USSR collapsed in 1991—but the lies about the human person that Soviet communism grew out of preceded the USSR and will probably plague men until the end of history. I often heard it said (and repeated it myself) that “communism is good in theory but it just can’t work in the real world.” This is simply not true. Communism is not “good in theory.” It rejects an objective standard of good and evil; it treats men as objects to be manipulated; it scoffs at God and presumes to redeem the world and usher in a sort of heaven-on-earth through a coercive politics that leaves no room for civil society. In the last century, these ideas manifested themselves in the communism of Marx and Lenin. But the root temptation to reject God’s authority lurks in many other ideologies and movements and indeed in our own hearts.

St. Peter thus exhorts us in his first epistle:

Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world.

Echoing Christ’s call to take up our cross and follow him, St. Peter says that one way in which we resist the father of lies is by sharing in the “experiences of suffering” endured by our “brethren.” This requires that we recognize what G.K. Chesterton calls “the terrible secret” that “men are men—which is another way of saying that they are brothers.” Here is where the importance of stories like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich comes in.

The statistics of suffering may shock us—Solzhenitsyn estimates some 60 million were killed by the Soviet regime—but we cannot empathize with numbers. We empathize with those who suffer by learning their stories. The first time I read Ivan Denisovich, passages like this made me realize that I had never been truly tired or hungry in my life:

Since he’d been in the camps Shukhov had thought many a time of the food they used to eat in the village — whole frying pans full of potatoes, porridge by the caldron, and, in the days before the kolkhoz, great hefty lumps of meat. Milk they used to lap up till their bellies were bursting. But he knew better now that he’d been inside. He’d learned to keep his whole mind on the food he was eating. Like now he was taking tiny little nibbles of bread, softening it with his tongue, and drawing in his cheeks as he sucked it. Dry black bread it was, but like that nothing could be tastier. How much had he eaten in the last eight or nine years? Nothing. And how hard had he worked? Don’t ask.

Though I’ve never experienced anything like this hunger or exhaustion, I found that the more I read, the more I could relate to Shukhov—the more I understood him to be my brother. I think many of us can feel a kinship with Shukhov in passages like this one:

“Thanks be to Thee, O God, another day over!” . . .

Alyoshka heard Shukhov thank God out loud, and looked around.

“There you are, Ivan Denisovich, your soul is asking to be allowed to pray to God. Why not let it have its way, eh?”

Shukhov shot a glance at him: the light in his eyes was like candle flame. Shukhov sighed.

“Because, Alyoshka, prayers are like petitions — either they don’t get through at all, or else it’s ‘complaint rejected.’”

So: can a man who’s warm understand a man who’s freezing? Not completely, and certainly not easily, but the answer can be “yes.” The answer is yes if we make the effort to learn the stories and if we pay attention to the story-tellers who are often prophets. “I have been in the dragon’s belly, in the red burning belly of the dragon,” Solzhenitsyn said. “He wasn’t able to digest me. He threw me up. I have come to you as a witness to what it’s like in there, in the dragon’s belly.”

Can one part of humanity learn from the bitter experience of another? Again, the answer can be yes if we properly meditate on those bitter experiences. After all, that is what we do when we pray the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary. Importantly, we do not meditate on those mysteries in the hopes of avoiding them. Rather, we pray that we may “imitate what they contain.” In this life, to some degree, we will suffer. What we can learn from prophets like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and what we seek to imitate in the Sorrowful Mysteries of our Lord, is how to, in solidarity with our neighbors, offer our sufferings to God.

This coming Wednesday, November 7th, marks the tragic anniversary of the Lenin-led Bolshevik/communist take-over of Russia in 1917. (Russia used the Julian calendar at the time, so this is often referred to as the October Revolution or Red October.) As we just concluded October’s “month of the Holy Rosary,” it’s an especially good time to reflect on the decades of sorrowful mysteries that communism inflicted on the world and on what we can still learn from the suffering of our brethren. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I highly recommend picking up a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It’s a small but powerful portrait of life under (and in spite of) the lies of communism.

But connecting to Twitter has also connected me to endless streams of nasty tweets about the 2012 U.S. presidential campaigns. My feed is filled with 140 character reactions and over-reactions and analyses of why one reaction is warranted but not another and why one candidate’s quip was funny but another’s was actually racist and on and on ad nauseam.

Given the instant, fairly anonymous nature of Twitter, uncharitable rhetoric is probably inevitable. And the barrage of barbs isn’t anything new to presidential elections. During the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s campaign called then-President John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character.” Adams’ supporters countered with claims that Jefferson would cause the “teaching of murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest.” During the election of 1912, then-President William Howard Taft described Theodore Roosevelt as a “dangerous egotist.” Ol’ Teddy took the high road and called Taft an “infernal skunk in the White House.”

Some of these old insults are rather entertaining. George Weigel has a nice piece on the bygone days of the gentlemanly art of the insult. Shakespeare has shown that insults can be, at times, both appropriate and artistic. But when so much of our general rhetoric is degraded and so many of the insults tossed around are, as Mr. Weigel points out, “invariably scatological or sexual,” I think it’s worth revisiting Dante’s timeless warning about mudslinging.

The setting is the eighth circle of hell, where suffer the falsifiers. (I’ll quote from Mark Musa’s translation of the Inferno, Canto XXX.) Here, Virgil and Dante encounter the shade of Master Adamo, a counterfeiter. Adamo’s soul is so bloated and distorted that he can only move “one inch in every hundred years” on his “useless legs.” Dante notices two other souls floundering in a nearby ditch and asks who they are. Adamo explains that they’ve been in that ditch since he arrived

[. . .] and they haven’t budged since then,
and I doubt they’ll move through all eternity.

One is the false accuser of young Joseph [Potiphar’s wife];
the other is false Sinon, the Greek in Troy [who convinced the Trojans to let in the Trojan horse]:
it’s their burning fever makes them smell so bad.

At this point, Dante recounts, Sinon the Greek

[. . .] perhaps somewhat offended at the kind of introduction he received,
with his fist struck out at the distended belly [of Master Adamo],

which responded like a drum reverberating;
and Master Adam struck him in the face
with an arm as strong as the first he had received.

Adamo taunts Sinon after he hits him, saying that although he can’t move about on his swollen legs, at least his arm is ready for such occasions. Sinon shouts back and the fight really begins:

“But [your hand] was not as free and ready, was it,”
[Sinon] answered, “when you went to the stake?
Of course, when you were coining [counterfeiting] it was readier!”

And he with the dropsy [Adamo]: “Now you tell the truth,
but you were not as full of truth that time
when you were asked to tell the truth at Troy!”

“My words were false—so were the coins you made,”
said Sinon, “and I am here for one false act
but you for more than any fiend in hell!”

“The [Trojan] horse, recall the horse, you falsifier,”
the bloated paunch was quick to answer back,
“may it burn your guts that all the world remembers!”

“May your guts burn with thirst that cracks your tongue,”
the Greek said, “may they burn with rotting humors
that swell your hedge of a paunch to block your eyes!”

And then the money-man: “So there you go,
your evil mouth pours out its filth as usual,
for if I thirst, and humors swell me up,

you burn more, and your head is fit to split,
and it wouldn’t take much coaxing to convince you
to lap the mirror of Narcissus dry!”

Back and forth the damned souls go, getting absolutely nowhere. How many episodes of Hardball does this recall? How many panelists on split screens spewing nonsense? Or, beyond politics: how many Housewives episodes echo this exchange?

But before we sensible ones climb too high on our horses, Dante has words for us viewers, too:

I was listening, all absorbed in this debate,
when the master [Virgil, Dante’s guide] said to me: “Keep right on looking,
a little more, and I shall lose my patience.”

I heard the note of anger in his voice
and turned to him; I was so full of shame
that it still haunts my memory today.

Virgil gets angry at Dante for becoming absorbed in the fight. Dante realizes his mistake and asks Virgil’s forgiveness. Seeing he is sorry, Virgil quickly forgives Dante, but warns him:

If ever again you should meet up with men
engaging in this kind of futile wrangling,
remember I am always at your side;

to have a taste for talk like this is vulgar!

Virgil is angry and Dante is ashamed because this “futile wrangling” not only hurts the participants, but it degrades the viewer. There’s no such thing as an innocent bystander to this type of talk. Souls are precious and impressionable things, and that’s why St. Paul tells the Philippians: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

So don’t tune out of all debates and discussions this election season—get informed and vote!—but keep St. Paul’s exhortation in mind and watch out, like Dante, for the “futile wrangling.”