Wendell Berry's Vindication of the Flesh

All this dread ORDER break--for whom? For thee? Vile worm!--oh, madness, pride, impiety! --Pope, Essay on Man (I.257-58) It takes a man of tonsorial, not academic, practices to observe a glaring contradiction in Port William: Jayber Crow, the town barber sees people who love "good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs" sitting through "world-condemning sermons"; he hears "the wickedness of the flesh ... preached from the pulpit" while "young husbands and wives and courting couples" sit "thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy"; he puzzles over a religion that scorns "the beauty and goodness of this world" (Berry, Jayber Crow 161). He asks whether "Jesus put on our flesh so that we might despise it" (JC 50). In doing so, he raises both a personal and an authorial question the answer to which is as complex and perhaps as important as anything Wendell Berry has proffered. There is of course a simple answer to the question: No. It is also the correct one, and most of us would readily give it no matter where in the despoiled creation our neglected flesh finds itself. But the gulf between how we answer and how we live, between what we profess to believe and what we apparently believe, suggests that such an answer merely speaks an uncomplicated truth in complicated conditions inimical to it. No inaugurates a deep and necessary criticism, to be sure, but it does not explain why, for example, we can be as "materialistic" as we apparently are while living or desiring to live in what Berry calls "the realm of pure mind" (What Are People For? 195), (1) or why, to put it another way, we can be obsessed with the body and yet require so little of it. The burden of this essay is to address these apparent contradictions; doing so requires making plain Berry's signal, indispensable insights into an old dualism. They are insights upon which much depends. I In a recent interview Berry, now in his seventies, says, "I was never satisfied by the Protestantism that I inherited, I think because of the dualism of soul and body, heaven and Earth, Creator and creation--a dualism so fierce at times that it counted hatred of this life and this world as a virtue. From very early that kind of piety was distasteful to me" ("Rendering" 33). Likewise, Berry spoke in the early 1990s against "a dualism that manifests itself in several ways: as a cleavage, a radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature, spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, worship and work, and so on" (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community 105). He called this dualism "the most destructive disease that afflicts us. In its best-known version, it is the dualism of body and soul" from which follows the "dominant religious view ... that the body is a kind of scrip issued by the Great Company Store in the Sky, which can be cashed in to redeem the soul but is otherwise useless" (SEFC 107). He wondered what we could expect "[w]hen we hate and abuse the body and its earthly life and joy for Heaven's sake": "That out of this life that we have presumed to despise and this world that we have presumed to destroy, we should somehow salvage a soul capable of eternal bliss?" (SEFC 108). And three years before that, defending his "tiny dissent" from all the tail-wagging over personal computers that he rightly foresaw would enslave us, he said "[i]mplicit in the technological revolution from the beginning has been a new version of an old dualism, one always destructive, and now more destructive than ever" (WPF? 175, 190). The clarity and vigor with which he approached the problem was no less impressive in the early 1970s: [s]ome varieties of Christianity have held that one should despise the things of this world--which made it all but mandatory that they should be neglected as well. In that way men of conscience--or men who might reasonably have been expected to be men of conscience--have been led to abandon the world, and their own posterity, to the exploiters and ruiners. …