In a Christmas meditation (NY Times, 12/22/24), David Brooks reflects upon his own faith journey. It is worth reading, touching and inspiring in many ways, as he shows his customary insight, intelligence, fluency, sensitivity and transparency. At the same time, since he is widely received as a moral teacher, moderate-balanced-profound, by moderates who lean left and right, it is worth scrutinizing carefully exactly what he is offering.
He is clearly a seeker, admirable in that dimension, and articulate in his desire for the Good, the True and the Beautiful. He is an aesthetic, attuned to the beautiful, but I will suggest that his grasp upon the true and the good is tenuous and confused in serious ways, from the viewpoint of a Christianity that is either Catholic or Evangelical or both.
The True: Faith, Belief and the Sentimentality of Theological Liberalism
Immediately he is clear: he is a man of faith, not belief. He strongly contrasts the two: his is a mysticism of longing and experience, not a form of knowledge of the real. Implicitly, he diminishes cognitive or conceptual belief as he highly values his own experience of and longing for the transcendent, the luminous, which he implies is ungraspable by human concepts.
He assumes, with all of modernity, a Kantian epistemology that the human mind constructs "models" of knowledge that explain and predict "phenomena" (the appearances) but cannot access the "noumenal" (the actual, the real, the ultimate) which is unavailable to us intellectually, but only mystically or emotionally.) More specifically, he follows Schleiermacher, the father of Protestant theological liberalism, who defined religion as experience, emotion, sentiment...of wonder, awe, transcendence, depth...as subjectivity, void of cognitive access to the real beyond the self. He positively quotes Tillich, the epitome of contemporary Protestant liberalism, He is clearly at home in the Jungian universe in which religion is a dimension of the Sovereign Self, not connection of the little self to the Absolute.
Traditionally, faith is the engagement of the entire self...or more precisely, the grasping, by God, of the entire self: emotions, intellect, will, spirit, memory, intentionality, body, community, culture. Scripturally, faith is acceptance of the truth claims of Jesus: that he is the only Son of the living God, that he came to baptize us in the Holy Spirit, that he died to forgive our sins and bring us to heaven. The Evangelical and the Catholic are both clear on this.
The Catholic goes well beyond this: faith is acceptance of the Revelation, by God of his very self, through the inspiration by the Holy Spirit of the Church, originally the apostles, then of the Scriptures, and historically in the Church, especially the doctors, fathers, saints, martyrs, magisterium and theologians. While God is supernatural and inaccessible to the unaided human intellect, he makes himself manifest to us as he created us with a mysterious capacity to know him, he became incarnate to communicate to us, and continues his concrete presence among us through the Holy Spirit and the entire sacramental, magisterial and mystical life of the Church.
And so, in the Christian world, although not the liberal branch thereof, belief is essential to faith, but one dimension, co-inhering with the mystical, liturgical, moral, and social-cultural. We see than that with regard to the Truth, as revealed in Christianity, Brooks remains an agnostic, a seeker, a journeyer: a charming, insightful, authentic soul, but trapped in the sentimentality of theological liberalism. He is hardly a guide for those seeking to grow in Wisdom from on high.
The Good: Indecision, Ambiguity, Confusion, Capitulation
In the context of PBS and NY Times, Brooks is the conservative. He considers himself a "Burkean" conservative, dismissive of radicalism of the right and left, moderate and balanced with a strong taste for tradition and community. He has described himself as on the conservative side of the liberal Democratic consensus. This is accurate. On the conservative/progressive divide, he falls into the later, despite his sympathies, his piercing critiques of the elites, his openness. On the decisive, apocalyptic issue of the time, he is pro-choice. He has the state support the mother in the killing of her unborn. His heart and intellect and will and soul and blood is blue. He has gushed with enthusiasm for Clinton, Obama, and Biden. He despises Trump. He is a strong intellectual in that he sees the multiple complexities, nuances and contradictions of many social policies. But on core decisions about Good and Evil, he becomes ambivalent, indecisive and finally surrenders to the worldly powers of darkness.
Individualism
To my knowledge, he has not pledged allegiance to any Church or corporate embodiment of faith. He wanders in a no man's land, as an itinerant: part Jewish and part Christian, admiring the best wherever he sees it, but keeping himself distant, uncommitted, autonomous. In this he embodies, however graciously-charmingly-intelligently, the very pathology of modernity he identifies: isolation, loss of community, autonomy, rupture with tradition, and refusal to surrender in humility and obedience. He is not part of something greater than himself. The essence of Christianity in any of its authentic expressions (Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, Pentecostal, etc.) is personal communion with Christ in his Body. Brooks remains, with many other admirable souls (Simone Weil, Jordan Peterson, Albert Camus, Ernest Becker), at the very boundary of faith, as ecclesial communion, but outside of it. He is modern man...therapeutic, moralistic, deistic. He is not a man of faith, in any traditional sense. He is a searcher, exquisitely appreciative of the lovely, the other person, the depth and the transcendent as experienced, the splendor of moral goodness. But he remains the Sovereign Self...with Schleiermacher, Tillich, Jung...unhinged, adrift, lonely, confused. But about the True and the Good, as received by Judaism and Christianity, he is confused, indecisive, and confusing.
I will continue myself to read, with appreciation and profit, the gifted David Brooks. Perhaps, in the light of these reflections I will include a short prayer that, in his search, he be drawn by God's grace decisively into the True and the Good.
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