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Getting It Helps Cure It: Vanauken and “A Severe Mercy”

Getting It Helps Cure It: Vanauken and “A Severe Mercy”

Last updated on: January 20, 2015 at 7:11 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Getting It Helps Cure It: Vanauken and “A Severe Mercy” 2015-01-19T22:27:59-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Sin is all around and if it doesn’t make the world go round it does make the world go bad. If you are not a Christian, you might be confused about the idea of “sin” and that would mean missing a good bit of reality. Sin is real and dealing with it matters.

At least when portrayed in the media, Christians seem obsessed with sin, though the Christians I have known are much more interested in mercy. Of course, we need mercy because of our sins, so the two are joined: a perfect person doesn’t need anybody’s mercy, let alone a perfect God’s. As part of a reality based community, Christians don’t ignore spiritual reality and part of spiritual reality is knowing everybody falls short of perfection.

So if everybody does it, then no harm? Yes? No. Everybody eventually quits breathing, but it is a pretty big (and sad) deal when it happens to you. The harm my sin causes me and the people around me doesn’t get one bit less harmful because other people also cause harm. So if “sin” means “a bad thing I did,” then sin isn’t very controversial: does anyone, religious or irreligious, think they have done nothing bad? If you don’t like “bad” substitute “wrong” or “hurtful” and you will get the general meaning.

This isn’t deep theology, but it might help clear up some confusion: sin is doing what you ought not to do.

God does not create mistakes, but sadly the world in which we all live is not in original condition. We have inherited a planet, a genome, and a civilization where the goodness has been twisted and broken. The goodness isn’t gone, it is still fundamental, but the broken is even when it ought not to be. As a result, some parts of me desires what I ought not to desire.

My experience says there is little use publicly judging a brokenness I do not share.

I have never been tempted to gamble and so I cannot relate to the hunger to win some of my friends have. They are attracted to broken things that (naturally) repulse me and so I have found it hard to talk to them about their difficulties.

There is one sin, one besetting sin, that I do get, because it always threatens to destroy me: unbound romance. The unbound romantic will commit any evil for the beloved . . . he is attracted, not repulsed, by the speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium that says total oneness of the beloved and the lover is the greatest good. The resulting union may no longer be human, but that does not matter to the romantic.

We admire Lancelot for being willing to destroy Camelot for one kiss from Guinevere.

There are lowbrow versions of this broken desire shown everyday on the Hallmark Channel and a highbrow version in those of us who admire Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and are not horrified when Catherine says that she is Heathcliff. If you shudder in terror and not in desire at this paragraph from Wuthering Heights, you are not tempted to sin as I am tempted to sin:

‘May she wake in torment!’ he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. ‘Why, she’s a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’

To share a soul, would not that be grand? It would not: Plato knew it would not (see Symposium), but that it would be monstrous. Emily Bronte got it and spent Wuthering Heights explaining it, but for the romantic (the diseased romantic) we miss the cure and glory in the illness. Jane Eyre, the work of Charlotte Bronte, is more helpful to us, but as a result our immature selves despise it. Emily “gets it” and Charlotte does not.

Oh, the arrogance of sin!

Why is this romantic extremism evil? It is vile because there is no harm that the two lovers will not inflict on others in the name of their “love.” From a Christian perspective, their love is damnable, not because it is love (love is good), but because it has become wholly selfish. It has imploded on itself, but the very cost levied is justifiable to the romantic.

It is for that reason that a very fine book, A Severe Mercy, helped save my soul.

If the word “lilac” makes you sneer, if Christina Rossetti does not move you, and if Gabriel Rossetti is not a great painter in your mind, then this is not the book for you. It lacks the quality of a “great book” to speak to those with no sympathy for the author’s point of view, but for those who are excessive romantics, this book is a powerful cure.

Like Wuthering Heights, it can be misunderstood. A very clever student asked me about it in this way:

Why was A Severe Mercy the book you took to Hope and the pivotal issue of marriage: Doesn’t it describe the sickness of co-dependency? Or, does CS Lewis’ letters at the end talk about a deeper and very important truth?

Does Vanauken just show you how to not have a marriage? Or, does Lewis say something at the end that is prescriptive for marriage about integrating the concept of immanent death into the nature of marriage and how to approach a wife?*

And so I also misunderstood A Severe Mercy: I admire a marriage turned in on itself, a relationship that wanted only the good of the beloved at the cost of ever other good. I still want it in my worst moments, though less now than thirty years ago.

Vanauken is a romantic of the most excessive sort: in his commitments, in his poetry, in writing. I gloried in it. I loved his sin, but Vanauken did not end his book or his writing in sin. Instead, Vanauken kept writing, kept dealing with his selfishness, kept seeing that his love had more in common with Dante in Purgatory than Dante in Paradise.

Dante believed he loved Beatrice with all his heart, but his love was just another form of lust. Beatrice herself let Dante know his superficiality at the top of Mount Purgatory.

Vanauken is brave enough for love, but also brave enough to admit that he missed love while looking for it. And as a romantic, he was the one person I could hear say that only Jesus could fulfill the romantic longing of my heart. Most people who talk this way, I thought (in my folly) simply did not get it: they did not know the passion, the tears, the sheer longing. They did not understand thinking a single kiss from the beloved might be worth damnation.

And it almost is, but Van tells the hard truth: hell is more hellacious than I thought. No human love survives there. We destroy the beloved, ourselves, the people around us in the name of love and our love is just another lust. It is no better, no more noble, no more intellectually rich, than the lowest Vegas lounge lizard. If you were I, then you could hear Sheldon Vanauken as a witness because he was better at romance than I could ever dream of being.

He knew Oxford, I dreamed of her.

He knew the shining barrier of total commitment, I longed for it.

He understood total union with the beloved and rejected it totally for the teachings of the Christian Church.

I could not dismiss him because he was better at my vice than I was and he was willing to call it vice. He saw his selfishness and called it selfishness and he learned that death could not be defeated by human love. He did learn (and through a series of letters) reminded me that Jesus’ love was greater than the love of a woman.

A man can live without sex and romance, but no man can live without the divine romance found between a man and God.

I could hear it from A Severe Mercy (and his later writings), because his sin was a higher version of my own. And so Van saved my life, my marriage, and my by God’s grace pointed me to the Lover who could save my soul.

I love Jesus, but Jesus gives me back myself. He will not let me dissolve in His Divine nature, but insists I go on being the real me. And he demands I love passionately: country, friends, enemies, neighbor, wife, children. He demands I love well, when I wish to love badly. All my desires were against this Divine Romance, but my own desires were wrong. I was as I ought not to be.

Vanauken taught me to ignore the sanction of the great god Eros and seek something better.

*I have lightly edited this letter to obscure the writer and clarify the point for those lacking his/her expansive intellectual experience.

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