From the latest issue of Book Forum:
After these months of going to school on his collected works, I wished I could sit down with Professor Rieff and have a long student-teacher conference, for I had many questions to ask him and some bones to pick. The contradictions in his own position can be puzzling, bordering on infuriating. How could he have spent all those decades in the sociology department when his work is pristinely innocent of actual social observation? Why did he allow several ugly instances of homophobia to mar his work? Was he himself ever psychoanalyzed, and if so, how did that work for him? Why, with only a couple of minor exceptions, does he let Freud off the hook for creating the conditions for the therapeutic culture he despises? How did he reconcile his fierce and eloquent defense of faith as the force that gives human life order and meaning with his own apparent faithlessness and a personal life devoid of religious observance? How could he have been without faith himself and yet have such faith in faith? So nu? I wanted to have a man-to-man talk about this. I once had faith, but my immersion in the modern secular and scientific culture had its usual effect, and now it's as lost as my altar boy's cassock and surplice. The more I found myself convinced by Rieff's polemics on behalf of the sacred order, the more impossible the dilemma of the modern intellectual appeared. I yearned for whatever it was that Flannery O'Connor had: At a dinner party where Mary McCarthy was cooing about the "beautiful symbolism" of the Eucharist, O'Connor famously retorted, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." Where does that conviction come from?
And then, in a most unexpected way, I found myself captured by charisma -- the real, Pentecostal thing. On one Sunday evening, I traveled to the United House of Prayer for All People in Harlem to attend a memorial service for a beloved coworker. A potent combination of revival meeting, jazz funeral, and gospel shout, it offered some of the most heartfelt and moving personal testimony and passionately virtuoso singing I have ever experienced, along with an overwhelming sense of sacred community. Out of range of any possible empirical carping, the Spirit had landed and Jesus was in the house. The shared belief of the congregation and the palpable love for our colleague made it so, and even an unbeliever like me was swept away by this gift of grace. Take that, Richard Dawkins.
I wish I could talk to Philip Rieff about it.
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