Wendell Berry Conversation on the Absence of Christ in the Modern World

A Conversation with
Wendell Berry
Lorenzo Albacete, Eric Perl, V. Bradley
Lewis, and John Berkman
Lorenzo Albacete
Mr.Berry, according to Charles Peguy, this modern era is the first
time since the coming of Christ that Christ has been absent from
the world. Not that God has been absent, not that religion has
been absent, but that Jesus Christ has been absent, that the
incarnate God has been absent. In the modern time, according to
this view, God has been, so to speak, dis-incarnated. Jesus Christ
has been dis-incarnated; he is no longer an unavoidable presence
in the world. He is no longer a constitutive factor, a
"founder"- as you use yourself the word- of a worldly way of
life that is unthinkable without him. He has been, in your own
words, cut off from nature and culture.
This is not a moral problem. It is not that there are more
sinners in modern times than before. God knows, if anything,
Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete is professor of theology at St. Joseph's Seminary
in Dunwoodie, NY.
Eric Perl is assistant professor in the School of Philosophy of the Catholic
University of America.
V. Bradley Lewis is assistant professor in the School of Philosophy of the
Catholic University of America.
John Berkman is assistant professor of moral theology in the School of
Religious Studies of the Catholic University of America.
Communio 27 (Spring 2000). © 2000 by Communio: In ternational Catllolic Review

A Conversation with Wendell Berry 59
people may be better today than before- as Walker Percy shows
in The Thanatos Syndrome, saying that this in fact is the main
problem: the presence of too many good people. For Peguy, saints
and sinners are on the same side of the fence. Jesus Christ is
present for both, incarnate in their world. The problem is not at
the level of piety or devotion; it is not that people love Jesus less.
The problem is at the level of knowledge, of the ability to grasp
what is real.
Flannery O'Connor said that today we govern by tender-
ness, because we can feel more. Today we feel more, as she says,
but see less. The problem is this seeing less. For O'Connor, the
reason for this is that this feeling, this tenderness, has been
detached from the source of tenderness, which is the person of
Christ. Reality has been detached from Christ, with the result that
we see less. I thought of these things reading your essay "Chris-
tianity and the Survival of Creation."1
One asks, how could this
have happened? how did it happen? Peguy says this cannot have
been brought about purely by historic;al, meta-historical, theoreti-
cal, political, social, economical, or sociological changes. He writes,
"all of these together would mean nothing." The cause, Peguy
argues, is what he calls a "mystical disaster," a disaster at the level
of the relation between eternity and time, between spirit and flesh,
between divinity and humanity, between heaven and earth.
What happened was to reverse the direction of the
Incarnation, so to speak. The purpose of the Incarnation came to
be seen not to save the world, not to transform it, but to escape it,
to resist it, to war against it. He says, "those in charge of the
eternal, the legitimate protagonists of the eternal, have not
known, have falsified, have forgotten, have forgotten the tempo-
ral. . . . Jesus did not in fact come to dominate the world. He came
to save the world. This is quite a different purpose, quite another
operation. And, he did not come to separate himself from the
world, to withdraw from the world. He came to save the world.
This is quite another method. You understand, my friend, if he
had wanted to withdraw, to be removed from the world, all he
had to do was not to come. . .. It is possible to say that no one had
ever been more in the world than Jesus." Somehow, I think this is
what you say, Mr. Berry, in your essay on "Christianity and the
Survival of Creation."
1
Wendell Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation," chap. 7 of
Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York and San Francisco:
Pantheon Books, 1992- 1993), 93- 116.

60 Albacete, Perl, Lewis, and Berkman
Now, inasmuch as God is the creator of reality, to fail to
grasp the true relation between God and reality- and that
relation is Jesus Christ- is to be unable to appreciate the divine
and to be unable to grasp the real. This latter result is what concerns
me. I see this everywhere: a radical skepticism about our ability
to grasp the real, and so a diminishment in our interest in the real,
in the truth. Having rejected the Incarnation, we are afraid to
expect too much from the world.With our mind, we construct for
ourselves another world. This is ideology.
Now, I want to apply this to the poor. My question is this:
how <lees the modern economic ideology of the unguided free
market originate in that mystical disaster of which Peguy wrote,
and which you have also described in your article on creation and
Christians? That is, the presence of Christ in the world generated
a cultural situation in which the poor became visible, in which the
poor mattered, in which they were cared for, not leaving it to the
private charity of saints, but as a social responsibility, as a
requirement of an "economy" (in the sense that you use the word,
the overall sense of the word, the way of ordering and budgeting
the world and its resources). The poor had a claim on this; they
were recognized to have a claim on this. It is what today the
Church calls the "preferential option for the poor," as the measure
of a truly human economy, one based on reality not on ideology.
After the mystical disaster, the poor became an ideological
category, as in ideological socialism, class struggle, etc.; their
reality was not grasped.Those ideologies are basically, at least for
the moment, gone. How is the vision of the poor also unreal in the
present dominant ideology, the ideology of the free market
without control? How does this ideology falsify the reality of the
poor? That is my question.
Wendell Berry
The passage in the Bible that really stops me every time I
think of it and that has moved and troubled and enticed me more
than maybe any other one is the passage in which Elijah says to
Job that if God withholds his spirit and his breath, all flesh will
perish together. And then he goes on to say that mankind will turn
to dust again. But, where I tend to stop is when he says all flesh.
What so interests me about this verse is that it's an exactly opposite
version ofreality from our present economic version of reality.The
term reality has been sort of co-opted, as we used to say, to mean
a certain kind of reality. I mean realism has to do with a rather

grim view of life, for instance. And so a lot depends on how you
construe the term reality and how much dimension you're willing
to give it. So that verse from Job, and there are verses elsewhere
that do the same thing substantially, gives to what we call reality
a dimension that we don't imply by our usual understanding of the
term. Elijah means that what we call reality is suffused with the
spirit of God and that it exists only because it is.
It's possible to find in the modern world people who have
pretty much seen it that way. Morris Graves painted a picture of
a young pine tree, and he called it "Joyous Young Pine." Morris
Graves is a Buddhist, but it's the same idea it seems to me. And
you could take that joyous young pine as a sufficient comment on
the verse from Job: if you are suffused with the spirit of God and
your identity is not really distinguishable from that informing
spirit, if you live by the gift of his breath, then living and rejoicing
become synonymous. If you don't see reality in that way, then I
think you get what we've got, namely, an economic view of
reality: we're beginning to live, it seems to me, in a kind of total
economy in which joyous young pine trees are perceived only as
potential board feet. And, it only follows from that that the poor
are perceived as a labor pool- or depending on how profitably
they can be used, either as a potential source of labor or as a
potential source of headaches for the people who have exploited
the poor to such an extent that they have to worry about them.
*
* *
Eric Perl
Because I agree so thoroughly with so much of what
you've said and what you've written, my question largely takes
the form of a "devil's advocacy." I want to present a problem that
I am wrestling with as a result of thinking along very similar lines
to your own and ask if you can help me with thinking about and
addressing this problem. Here's the problem: the success of the
modern project- in economics, technology, and in other ways- is
in some sense undeniable. I will take two very obvious examples,
things that are mentioned in your works: agricultural technology
and medical technology- and, of course, with that goes all the
economic, social, scientific, educational, and all the transporta-
tion, all the other structures that are bound up with these. The

fact is that in what's generally called the "developed" world, we
have achieved an abundant and secure food supply and, along
with that, a far longer and healthier life that sets us utterly apart
from the experience of the rest of mankind today and from the
whole of mankind until very recently. Granted, as you say, our
food is uprooted, anonymous, obscene, poisoned- but it's here.
And I don't mean just frivolities like asparagus year round or even
the standard of living measured in terms of consumption, but
something much more fundamental: we in this part of the world
live free from the constant shadow of famine, and the fairly
frequent actuality of famine, that was common to the entire human
race until just the last century or two.
This past summer, for example, there was a terrible
drought here in Maryland. It caused some severe problems for
that statistically negligible group, farmers; but, as far as I know,
no one starved to death- as would have been the case under the
same circumstances in the past. Likewise with industrial medi-
cine: yes, it's dehumanized, it's dehumanizing- but it works!
Again, if you compare our society with most of the human race
through most of history, it's too obvious to need elaboration, in
terms of how common death in infancy used to be, death in
childbirth, plague, endemic disease, and so on; I don't really need
to elaborate on that. Now, of course all of this has been achieved,
as you point out, at the cost of massive disruption and destruction
to the earth, to our cultures, to our communities, to our selves.
And to me that raises the question: if we wish to live in the way
that you advocate (or perhaps I should say celebrate)- in local
cultures, in true communities, and therefore also as members of
the cosmos, the holy creation, the "great economy"- rather than
to live reductionistically or, to use Descartes' famous phrase, as
the "masters and possessors of nature," do we have to give up
these successes?
It seems to me that you suggest, at least mildly, that we
do. For example, you say that "we are going to have to draw the
line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to
give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all)
to 'need."'1
Now, it could be argued, and in fact I myself would
argue, that these successes are predicated on our being "masters
and possessors of nature." In other words, all of these successes
1
Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," in What Are People
For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 196.

and achievements depend upon precisely the reductionistic view
of reality that you, and of course I would agree, are criticizing.
I want to read a very famous passage from Descartes,
which I think sums up the entire project:
by knowing the force and the actions of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and
all the other bodies that surround us, ... we could .. . use these objects for all
the purposes for which they are appropriate, and thus make ourselves, as it
were, masters and possessors of nature. This is desirable not only for the
invention of an infinity of devices"- there's the technology- "that would
enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one
finds in it, but also principally for the maintenance ofhealth. .. . (Ajnd ... we
might rid ourselves of an infinity of maladies ... and even perhaps also the
enfeeblement brought on by old age.. . .2
He seems to be even envisaging a technological overcoming of
death.
Berry: William Safire is doing that too.
Perl: A lot of people are. Now, if these "achievements" really do
go along with and depend upon this reductionistic view of the
world and that way of living in the world, then in order to return
to a sane, human, affectionate, reverential way of life, we would
also have to return to the old conditions of living close to death,
as people used to live (famine, plague, endemic disease, being
subject to natural disasters, and so on). And it could be argued
that, therefore, what we need to do is not to reject reductionism
but simply learn to "use" the world more carefully and more
effectively, find better technological solutions to our problems;
because, after all, the fact is that agrarian, pre-industrial, pre-
capitalist, pre-modern life was not only shorter but much harder
and, at least in these obvious senses, more unpleasant than ours.
And many people-remember I'm speaking not for myself but as
a devil's advocate here- many people would, I think, accuse you
of romanticizing pre-modern life by ignoring all of that.
Berry: They have.
Perl: So, the question is: can we have the good things that you
celebrate (community, craft, local agriculture, culture, affection,
reverence, the unity of body and soul, the unity of human life and
2
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1980), 33.

the earth, of man and the rest of creation); can we have that
without the bad things (disease, famine, and so on)? Now, I'm
inclined to think that we cannot; as I have suggested, the over-
coming of these bad things is dependent on the reductionist view
of the world. And, therefore, are the proponents of technology,
globalism, capitalism, and so on so easily answered? They may
very well say: "So what if we destroy 'local culture,' community,
the earth even, if it gives people food, security, health, and other
such benefits?" And if we cannot have the good without the bad,
then do we want it at that price? I don't mean this really as an
argument against you. I would agree that such a life as described
by Descartes- however long, comfortable, easy, and healthy it
might be- would be inhuman, meaningless, and valueless; but
the alternative, it would seem, is to go back to the old way of life
that I've briefly tried to describe.
In short, "What is a man profited if he gain the whole
world and lose his soul?" Now, that's precisely the Faustian
bargain that we have made; and, as the devil's advocate, it's my
duty to point out that the devil keeps his side of the bargain. He
gives us the world- we are well on the way toward becoming
masters and possessors of nature- and all he demands in return
is our souls- by which, like you, I mean not a separated "spiritual
substance," a ghost, but rather our selves, our lives in so far as
they have any meaning and value. As you say, the ultimate goal
seems to be "to replace ourselves."3
But the implied alternative to
that bargain, then, would seem to be that in order to save our
souls- you yourself say, "my wish is simply to live my life as
fully as I can"4
(that's what I mean by "saving our souls" in a
way)- we must be willing at least to lose the world in the sense
that I've described, to lose the mastery and possession of nature.
And so, agreeing with so much of what you say, I have to ask (as
people often ask me because I say many of the same things): Are
we really willing to do that? Is that the real alternative? Is there
any other way? That's my question.
Wendell Berry
Well, Eric, you're a very good devil's advocate, and you
ought to be careful. If the devil makes the mistake of admitting
3
Berry, "Feminism," 190.
4
1bid.

that we're destroying everything that we're using now, he's made
a really bad mistake in the debate, because it's really hard to
argue that keeping on as we're going, which is what you mean
when you say we ought to refine our technology and get better
practical solutions, that's a dangerous argument, that's the
argument that gave us the stockpiles of nuclear waste and in fact
the stockpiles of used tires that we've not gotten technologically
sophisticated enough to know what to do with- and maybe there
isn't much of a promise that we can. So, if you're prospering by
using up the sources of your prosperity, you really don't have
security. That's the simple answer to your question.
A more complex answer is to say that what we have done
in our condition of total economy is reduce the economic issue to
the issue of use alone; that is, if you have food, all you have to do
is eat it; if you have medical help, all you have to do is use it.
And, I think the religious traditions would say, well, wait a
minute, that's only half; you also have to respect it. And, maybe,
if the verse in Job is going to be taken seriously, you have to have
a kind of reverence for it. And so, you're already proposing a
different kind of culture. A culture that acknowledges that the
food it eats is worthy of its respect and calls for the profoundest
kind of gratitude is a different kind of culture from the one we
have. That kind of vision of food is completely desecrated by the
idea of fast food, for instance- eating fast, cooking fast, killing
animals fast, picking vegetables fast. All of this desanctifies and
desecrates the world.
About medicine, I was telling somebody last night about
Dr. Holmes Morton, a doctor who has taken on as his chief
obligation, perhaps, the hereditary diseases among the Amish, the
disease known as Maple Syrup Urine Disease, for instance. These
are hereditary diseases. And, on the one hand, I think that
Holmes Morton is completely dedicated to finding a way to cure
these diseases. I've visited his hospital, his clinic, and he is not
backward in any sense in his technology, and I think he would
consider gene therapy. But there's another side to that story and
that is that, as Holmes Morton knows (I know he knows it,
because I learned it from him), the Amish consider these afflicted
children as special gifts of God because of the love that they call
forth and give. In other words, those children put a kind of love
and a degree of love into the world that otherwise would not be
in it. I don't think there's a way to reconcile those two positions
logically or rationally. I think that we have to be willing to hold
those two positions in mind. And, if we do, if we honor those two

kinds of thinking about healing, then we have a different kind of
medicine and a different kind of patient than we have at present.
So, this finally comes down to a practical question. As a
devil's advocate you were being fiercely practical, and I'm willing
to carry it back around to fierce practicality again. The question
in my mind is, finally, how do you protect the source. In medi-
cine, the source is perhaps a very full sense of humanity, compas-
sion for sufferers and that sort of thing. In the food economy, the
source is the ground, the earth, and the water, and the seeds. And
the question I have is whether or not, in the working of the food
economy, you can protect the source adequately if you look upon
it simply as a technological problem. My own feeling is that you
can't; if you work, if you use these things economically in your
work without respect of a very profound sort, if you're not
willing to live in that way of being indebted for your life to other
lives of immeasurable worth and significance, then you're
probably going to have the sort of disposition in your character
and so on that will make you finally destroy the source. And so,
the upshot is not that we have security and plenty to eat and are
rid of the bad things, but that we are headed straight back toward
them again.
And, then, I suppose I would caution the devil not to be
too condescending toward earlier times. I mean, to think that our
life is peculiarly pleasant because we've desecrated and de-
stroyed so much stuff is really not supposable. I think our time
has its quotient of unpleasantness and badness and that probably
if we had a meter that could measure, we would find that the
quotient of misery is fairly constant, and that the quotient of
pleasure is too, and that it's not bad, for instance, to live close to
death. And what you're really saying is that those people knew
it and we don't, which means that we are continually being
surprised by it.
..
.. ..
V. Bradley Lewis
Actually, my question or comment is somewhat similar to
Eric Perl's and saves me from having to ask part of it. What I
want to do, really, is ask a question about community and, in
particular, about the nature of community and the political

context of it, and also the reasons for our exit from the kind of
community life that you have talked about. So, I want to press on
some of the political implications ofwhat you've written. Perhaps
the most direct approach here is to look for a moment at one of
the central concerns about community.
It's commonly said to be one of the most salient issues of
debate among academic political philosophers in the last twenty
or thirty years, this issue of community, and the debate is
between two camps, usually referred to as liberals and
communitarians. Liberals concentrate on individual freedom and
rights, while communitarians criticize the extent to which the
liberal conception of the person is radically asocial, ahistorical,
and abstract. Now, truth to tell, both sides in this controversy
have been very abstract, a fact that becomes clear when one asks
detailed questions about just what communitarianism and such
is. Is there one communitarian program or even critique? After
all, varieties ofMarxists, feminists, environmentalists, Christians,
and others are often considered communitarians. Among
communitarians are followers of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel,
Marx, and Herbert Marcuse.
A further difficulty in identifying who communitarians
are lies in the fact that many people deny that that's what they
are, even though they're often called that by their opponents.
Moreover, there's even something a bit odd about the very idea
of communitarianism as an alternative to a liberalism that is
perceived as asocial, ahistorical, and abstract. Is not
communitarianism, as an "ism," a kind of abstraction? Would not
the real alternative be actual loyalty to, membership in, and life
as a part of, a real, concrete community with the enjoyment of its
goods? Otherwise, how would one know what community was?
Indeed, communitarianism is probably best understood as a
convenient category for people who are uncomfortable with
crucial aspects of liberalism, and it does not do a lot of intellectual
work otherwise.1
Now, Wendell Berry's criticisms ofliberalism and the kind
of culture it has given us are another story. I would suggest that
Berry's account of community is more coherent and more honest
than that of any academic communitarian thinker that I know of.
1
A complete theoretical inquiry into contemporary communitarianism
would require one to bypass its current spokesmen and return to its deeper
roots in the thought of Rousseau and the later historicist critics of the
Enlightenment.

However, there seem to be some ambiguities in it that I would
like to explore, most of which refer to two of your essays, "Sex,
Economy, Freedom, and Community" and "Conserving Commu-
nities."2 In the former essay, you distinguish between the public,
the private, and community as three kinds of categories. The
distinction between public and community is a particularly
interesting one and seems also to reflect the distinction between
community life as such and political life. Community life, for
example, is based on trust, public life on a kind of distrust.3
Community life is about friendship, public life about justice and
even litigation.4
Community is local and small in scale;5 public
implies a large population and a plurality ofparticular communi-
ties.6
A community "identifies itself by an understood mutuality
of interests. But it lives and acts by common virtues of trust,
goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgive-
ness" and has the power to enforce decency without litigation and
without coercion.7
Public life evidently involves interaction apart
from the virtues of trust of community and does involve coercion.
The political exists apart from community and indeed facilitates
private interests preying on communities. The distinction here
reminds one of similar oppositions in the history of social thought,
most obviously that between "community" and "society" made
famous by Tonnies,8 and perhaps even more recent distinctions
that are similar to that.9
2
Wendell Berry, "Sex, Economy, and Community," chap. 8 in Sex,
Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 117-73;
"Conserving Communities," in Another Turn ofthe Crank (Washington, D.C.:
Counterpoint, 1995), 8-24.
3
Wendell Berry, "Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community," 161.
4
Ibid., 120, 139.
5
Ibid., 120, 168.
6
Ibid., 168-69.
7
Ibid., 120.
8
Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing, Michigan:
Michigan State Univ. Press, 1957). The German original, Gemeinschaft und
Gesellschaft, was published in 1887.
9
Cf., for example, the more abstract distinction between "lifeworld" and
"system" in Habermas. See, in particular, Habermas, The Theory of
Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique ofFunctionalist
Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 113-97. The
concept of "lifeworld" (lebenswelt), of course, originates in the work of
Husserl and Schutz.

I want to pose two related questions about this.First, must
we think of politics as so distinct from community? And, sec-
ondly, why has public life become so powerful at the expense of
community life, and ought we not think a bit more about the
possible reasons and why more people do not see them to be as
problematic as you do and that most of us, I suppose, do? Now,
my reason for asking the first question is that here your descrip-
tion of community is quite similar to the community that Aris-
totle calls, in his Politics, the "city" (even with the understanding
that a city involves a large amount of rural territory as well).
Moreover, somewhat unlike what you have said, Aristotle sees
the political aspects of the city as very important not just to the
city as such but to the moral development and health of the
individuals that make up the city and their common life together.
Much of Aristotle's account in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics
(and in other works of classical political philosophy, like Plato's
Laws or those works of Xenophon and Cicero) concern what you
call the moral ecology. And this moral ecology is quite closely
related to economic practices, as the first book of the Politics
makes clear. The political aspect of the community involves both
law and coercion- and not just as a last resort. Cities cannot
preserve their moral ecology, Aristotle thinks, without these
things, and he sees law not merely as an instrument of social
control but as pedagogical in nature10
and related inseparably to
another crucial political aspect of community life, that is, the
manner in which the community is governed. This Aristotle refers
to as the city's politeia or its "regime." Most immediately, regime
describes who rules in a given community and to what end, and
the famous classification of the different kinds of regimes which
Aristotle gives follows that. The ends in view are either the
common good of the city or the private good of the rulers. When
one person rules for the common good, the city's regime is called
by Aristotle a monarchy; when one person rules for his own
private advantage, it's called a tyranny. When few rule for the
good, it's an aristocracy; when few rule for their own interest, it's
an oligarchy. When the many rule for the common good, we have
what he calls polity; and when many rule for their own interest,
it's a democracy.11
So, I mean, just that classification shows a
certain problem here, I think.
10
SeeespeciallyNicomachean Ethics 1179a33-1180b29;Politics 1253a29-39; and
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1-2.90, prologue and art. 1; 92.2, ad 4.
11
Politics 1279a17-b10.

My first point here is that your distinction between
community life and politics seems to have been alien from
Aristotle's account, and so I wonder if that's specifically an
account of our modern situation that you're giving or if there's
more to it than that. A second and perhaps more important
problem emerges, however, from the Aristotelean classification
of regimes that I just mentioned, since Aristotle classifies democ-
racy as one of the deviant regimes and is skeptical of the ability
of the many to rule for the sake of the common good. His
skepticism about this is indicated by the fact that the good
counterpoint to democracy- i.e., polity- is itself a compromise
between oligarchy and democracy.12
He seems to think that the
best regime simply would be a kind of aristocracy but that such
a thing is very rare, and the best one can usually hope for is a
regime in which the few wealthy and the many poor share power
towards the end of some tolerable approximation of the common
good. Part of the reason Aristotle was suspicious of the many was
that their need to work for wages or on a small plot of land meant
that they could neither achieve the educational prerequisites for
informed participation in public life nor have the leisure neces-
sary for participation in public deliberation. Now, I take it that
you speak favorably in various places of a kind of Jeffersonian
democracy,13
although I would like to know a little more about
that.But, democracy seems to become a real possibility politically
only under conditions like those we have today: mass societies
with dynamic capitalist economies built on the basis of the
"mastery and possession of nature," to use Descartes' telling
phrase, and that's made possible precisely by the repudiation of
the sorts of views held by Aristotle about politics and also about
nature, human and otherwise.
So my larger question, then, concerns the extent to which
democracy is possible on anything but modern terms. One way
to see this more clearly is simply to ask just why the sorts of
technological developments and economic institutions that you
criticize came into being in the first place. In "Feminism, the
Body, and the Machine," an extraordinarily eloquent essay, you
12
Politics 1293b3-34.
13
See, for example, "Jefferson, Morrill, and the Upper Crust," in The
Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books, 1977), 143-69. Jefferson's views were complex (and perhaps in some
respects, internally contradictory) and this brilliant essay is very nuanced,
but does contain the basic idea I have in mind.

very plausibly suggest that these developments have intended to
get us two things: "money and ease."14
And that seems to me to
be right. Bacon spoke of the relief of man's estate,15
Locke of
comfortable self-preservation,16
Descartes promised the mastery
and possession of nature that would lead us to "enjoy without
pain the fruits of the earth" and the "maintenance of health . . .
the first good and foundation of all other goods in this life."17
In
fact, there's another statement from Locke which seems to me, in
some ways, to be the most obvious and convincing argument for
our own ways than anybody's ever given; he said a day-laborer
in England is better off than a king among the Americans.18
Now, the goods that come from this are indeed goods;
most people see them as goods-though distinctly lower than the
perfections of character by the virtues that are the aim of Aris-
totle's Ethics and indeed all of the thinkers in the tradition of
classical natural right.19
They are the goods pursued most directly
and quite impressively by capitalist liberal democracies. As you
can see, this is a kind of devil's advocate question as well in some
ways.
Just one more thing to make this a little more concrete.
The central animating pathos of Tocqueville's Democracy in
America is the apparent division of the author's heart between the
aristocracy into which he was born, and which he saw passing,
and the democracy that seemed to be supplanting it and whose
full flowering Tocqueville thought he had observed in the United
States. What he says there, essentially, is that there are all these
tremendous, wonderful virtues and perfections that we see in
aristocracy (things that involve nature as well and not just human
institutions), and they're passing away and there's a great sense
of loss with those things. But then he says there are all kinds of
these other things that are coming into being, a certain compas-
sion, the improvement of material circumstances for a huge
14
Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," in What Are
People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 188.
15
See Francis Bacon, New Organon 1.66, 129.
16
See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2, section 44, though all of
chapter 5 is important on this aspect of Locke's thought.
17
See Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method, part 6.
18
John Locke, The Treatises on Government, 2, section 41.
19
See, for example, Plato, Laws 631b-d, 697b-c, 726a, 896c967d-968a;
Aristotle,Nicomachean Ethics 1098b12-20; Politics l323a14-b36; and cf. Cicero,
On Duties 1.4; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1-2.2.5, 94.2.

number of people whose circumstances would be quite mean
otherwise. He says even though I don't really like this, somehow
I have to think that God does like it- because of his providential
care for things, but also because of the way that it's improved the
lives of so many people who otherwise would live in quite
meaner circumstances. And so, he says, even though I don't like
it, I have to accept it in some sense; it would be somehow unjust
of me not to.20
There are also, of course, all of the things that Eric Perl
mentioned earlier about the improvements in medicine and so
forth, which I won't discuss because they are all on the table.
I don't mean to suggest that these arguments for the goods
that we've gotten from these modern developments are decisive
simply for this argument, for the reasons that we've already talked
about. But there is certainly something to them, and I suspect they
explain why in fact so many people leave their native lands, their
families, risk their lives to come and live here rather than in places
that in some cases have more of what we've lost. This represents
some kind of evidence it seems to me. So, I would just want to
suggest or ask if we can consider in any more detail the relation-
ship between community and politics in two ways: first, in terms
of this issue of democracy and whether or not it's possible other
than on the terms we now have it or if that isn't something else we
have to give up; and secondly, if there's anything else that can be
20
cf. the following texts from Tocqueville:
When I survey this countless multitude of beings, shaped in each other's likeness,
among whom nothing stands out or falls unduly low, the sight of such universal
uniformity saddens and chills me, and I am tempted to regret that.state of society which
has ceased to be.
When the world was full of men of great importance and extreme
insignificance, very wealthy and very poor, very learned and very ignorant, I turned my
attention from the latter to concentrate on the pleasure of contemplating the former. But
I see that this pleasure arose from my weakness. It is because I am unable to see at once
all thatis around me that Iam allowed thus to select and separate the objects ofmy choice
from among so many others which it pleases me to contemplate. It is not so with the
Almightyand Eternal Being, whose gaze of necessity includes the whole ofcreated things
and who surveys distinctly and simultaneously all mankind and each single man.
It is natural to suppose that not the particular prosperity of the few, but the
greater well-being ofall, is most pleasing in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of man.
What seems to me decayis thus in His eyes progress; what pains me is acceptable to Him.
Equality may be less elevated, but it is more just, and in its justice lies its greatness and
beauty. (A. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans.George Lawrence, ed.J.P. Mayer
[Garden City, N.J.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1969], 704)

said about defending the autonomy of community life against the
predation of more powerful political units, like the nation-state,
that go along with all of these developments.
Wendell Berry's Response
Berry: Could you clarify, just a little bit, why you think those
people sacrifice so much to come here.
Lewis: They think they're going to get something good out of it.
Berry: Plumbing?
Lewis: Well, partly, yes. But also medicine.
Berry: Or do they get to live with their relatives who've already
come? There are all kinds of reasons. I think that sometimes it's
obviously been for idealist reasons. They want to be free, want to
be free to worship or whatever. But there is a gamut of reasons.
Well, you're a teacher and I've been a teacher, and we both
know that whatever ideal method we attempt to apply in
teaching is going to fail, right? That's a very big problem you've
set out for me. I never expected to come to a place like this and be
so swarmed about with devil's advocates. I thought you all were
going to turn out to be good people; I felt safe.
Well, I think the political question reduces to this: I think
there's good in people. I don't think that I've ever met anybody,
especially me, who is entirely good or dependably good, but I do
think that people have good in them. And, to me, the political
question comes down to the question of: in what circumstances
does the good in people have the most efficacy? Most of my
experience- and most of the hearsay that I've had that has meant
the most to me, I suppose- has to do with a tiny community in
my own state, my own community in fact. I know the history of
it pretty much by hearsay, and I know how that landscape
divided itself into creek hollow communities and ridge communi-
ties that would have developed if they'd had another hundred
years... .
Goodness did, at times, have a kind of efficacy. I wrote a
story, called "Watch with Me," about some neighbors following
another neighbor through the woods for a day and a night,
because the neighbor was depressed and was carrying a big old
shotgun and they were afraid he would shoot himself. And one

of the interesting parts of it is that their attention and care was
utterly without effect. How would they have prevented him from
shooting himself? He had the big old gun and he could have shot
them if they got close enough to disarm him. So, all they're doing
is just being with him. But that is a kind of goodness that has an
efficacy and that gives the community an idea of itself. Now, I
founded that story on two stories that I knew about in which that
very thing had happened. A neighbor just flew off the handle and
went out to the woods, and people felt he was endangered and
some of the other neighbors just got up and went. And the
question, and the conversation I've been having lately, came up:
how does will figure in that? Well, my answer is, will doesn't
figure in it at all. Committed as they were, knowing what they
knew, they had no choice. I mean, they would have felt so bad if
they hadn't gone that they had to go, and so they submitted to
that discomfort.
Well, to me, as unprepossessing and ineffectual as that is,
that seems to me to be a kind of model of community life and
community responsibility. You could even call it public responsi-
bility if you want to, but this obviously is a community, this is
obviously the thing that can happen among people who know each
other. And I know that my little old town accommodates drunks
and half-wits and various kinds of human wreckage that would be
institutionalized if those people tried to live in a middle class
suburban neighborhood. We just tolerate them. If they do things
funny, we laugh; if they do things that are pitiful, we are sorry. But
they can be included in this life, and I think it's upon the principle
simply of mutual knowledge. People know what to expect.
I think the Greek city-states had a kind of scale, for one
thing, that our cities don't have, and they had a kind of latitude,
a physical, practical latitude that our cities don't have. A Greek
city was not just the polis- the bounded, the demarcated, city
limits, and everything within those city limits. The Greek city was
the city, what we call the city plus its tributary landscapes. And,
in fact, those cities were full of granaries and storage places and
probably foals for flocks and so on, holding places. Those are the
two things that our cities seem to me to have lost. New York
City- I know because I lived there in the last days of this- was
once rather informally organized into neighborhoods. There
would be little shopping centers; there would be butcher shops,
bakeries, and so on, and the people in the neighborhood shopped
in the neighborhood shopping place or market center, and they
knew the shop keepers, they saw them everyday, and they saw
each other as they came and went in shopping. This is a different

principle from a city such as all ours have become now, in which
people drive to supermarkets, so that, as the city has become
more and more centralized economically, it has become vaguer
locally, because it loses that local knowledge of the neighborhood.
I don't know what to do about this exactly. My description
is that we've given proxies of all kinds to all manner of people,
and we've given proxies over such a distance, such a remove, that
we can't really police the proxy. We give proxies for health to
doctors and health specialists.We give proxies to food production
not just to farmers but to the whole food industry, just as we've
given proxies for political representation to people we for the
most part don't know. I was really interested to hear on All Things
Considered, the other night, some cranky Yankee from New
Hampshire who said he hadn't made up his mind about Bush
because he hadn't met him yet. Well, if that spirit were even
possible in our country, we would have a different kind of
democracy from the kind we have. If politicians were running a
real risk of meeting in the street and having to account to the
people who had elected them, it would be different. So, I think
that, I don't know whether I've answered all of your question or
not, I think I'm responding to some of it, am I not? The question
would be a practical one: how do you organize neighborhoods in
such a way as to permit people even to take back some of the
proxies they've given or to shorten the distance between them
and the proxy holder? It's possible, for instance, for a doctor to
know his or her patient, and if the doctor knows his or her
patient, that makes for a different kind of medicine from the kind
you'd get with a stranger meeting a strange expert.
Another aspect of this problem is that I don't know that I
would call what we now have democracy, because so many
functions of government are being usurped by corporations. I
think that the economy is really very swiftly moving in on
politics. So, you have an interesting question: if you have become
totally dependent on corporations, who in fact own your
decisions-your significant choices about what you're going to
eat, for instance-if you've come to that, then doesn't your
freedom of speech, say, amount to less? I've been talking, at one
time I thought, right into the face of the food industry. Now I
know that a conversation between us (mere eaters or mere
farmers) and the food industry is not possible. They don't hear us,
because they don't have to. So this is a taking of power; this is
something really new in the world. What difference does it make
if we have a Bill of Rights, if we can't make any significant
economic choices?-So, I don't think that my answer, my response

to your question is not an answer. All I've done is sit here and
compound the problem!
*
* *
John Berkman
I want to begin by making it clear that, as someone who
occasionally tries to be a respectable theologian, you may rest
assured that I will not discuss the devil in this question! It is truly
a great privilege to have the opportunity to ask Wendell Berry a
few questions this morning. I've been reading his work for ten
years now, and Berry is one of the most continually inspiring
writers that I read. I have something quite specific in mind when
I say that Berry is inspiring; that is, whenever I read him, I have
the great urge to change my life. There are not many writers
whom I read who have that effect on me, and I'm not exactly sure
why Berry has this effect on me. Also, I know that I'm not good
at actually changing my life in response to what Berry teaches me.
However, he does allow me to live in hope in a way I would not
otherwise be able to do, and for that alone I am extremely grateful
that Wendell Berry writes his books. In other words, he helps me
to imagine new ways of living in the world that I don't otherwise
see.
Perhaps this effect that Wendell Berry's prose has on me
actually becomes a form of professional jealousy. I am by trade a
moral theologian. Ostensibly, we moral theologians discuss how
Christians live well as disciples who live in response to the gospel
of Jesus Christ. Of course, moral theologians are often scarcely
distinguishable from highbrow busybodies who take great
pleasure in telling others what to do. If only I could figure out the
secret of Berry's influence on me, perhaps I'd make a more
convincing moral theologian!
One of Wendell Berry's many points to us yesterday was
to emphasize what he called the power of the particular, the
inseparability of the moral lessons we learn from the narrative
context of them. So, perhaps long after we have forgotten about
Wilson's "consilience," we will still remember the inseparability
of a particular hilltop in Kentucky with the life of Wendell Berry
and that of his grandfather and his grandson. We will still remem-
ber the spiritual impetus behind Shaker artistry. In my question

today, I hope to elicit some additional particulars from Wendell
Berry, some additional lessons and inspiration as to what it means
to live in and as Christian community in contemporary America.
So, my questions take up a somewhat different agenda from
the ones that Eric Perl and Brad Lewis have just been raising. In his
discussion yesterday, Berry noted the biggest problem that faces
our society is that we do not live with a Christian economy. Now,
I'm certainly not capable of addressing even a moderately
interesting question on Christian macroeconomic theory, and
furthermore I do not think that is something which ultimately
interests Berry that much. As I read him, Berry's abiding interests
are at the micro level in economics as in most other areas. I take
Eric's and Brad's concerns to have been in large part with the
seemingly myriad contradictions inherent in any thoroughgoing
effort to challenge economic, political, and technological condi-
tions under which we live, move, and have our being. Perhaps
one of the reasons Wendell Berry's work is so puzzling to so
many of us is that he does not direct his attention at macro
questions but at particular micro exemplifications of how to
integrate one's microeconomic practices with the rest of one's life
and that of one's local community.
Berry's writings certainly provide exemplifications of
particular groups of Christians who in various ways display how
their faith directs their economic practices.1
For instance, Berry
reads the Amish rejection of various forms of technology not as
a form of Luddism-though he, I might add, is a defender of the
Luddites-but as a means of maintaining internal control of their
economic destinies.2
Similarly, in his closing story last night,
Berry shows how the principles informing Shaker architecture
and craftsmanship are governed by their understanding of God's
providential care of them.
Now, both of these groups are rural folk, and in experi-
ence and in disposition Berry is inclined to such examples. One
1
0ne central element to Berry's understanding ofthe relationship between
faith and economic practices is his understanding of "good work." See, for
example, "Conservation is Good Work," in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and
Community (New York: Pantheon Press, 1993), especially pp. 33-36; and
"Family Work," in The Gift of Good Land (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1981), 155-60.
2
For Berry's defense ofLuddism, see W. Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and
Community, 130-32; and "Health Is Membership," in Another Turn of the
Crank (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995), 90.

exemplary example Berry provides with regard to the relation-
ship between community and economy is that of David Kline, the
Amish farmer.3
"With the Amish, the economy is not merely a
function of community, but community and the economy are
virtually the same." And Berry also notes that Kline's reply "is a
practical description of a spiritual condition," a spiritual condition
that Berry commends to his readers. Now, as I look around the
room, most of us are in the education business. We teach in
universities and seminaries. Most of us live in cities, and I imagine
that Berry has ideas about ways in which those of us who live and
teach in large cities, as Christians called to such a life, can also seek
to structure our economic lives in ways that reflect our faith as
Christians.4
As Berry notes in the preface of his book Sex, Economics,
Freedom, and Community, his book is about sales resistance. I
assume that Berry would not be unhappy if we were to understand
one of the things that he is calling us to is a stance of economic
resistance more generally.5
In this vein, my general questions are
twofold. First of all, presuming that any kind of sustained eco-
nomic resistance requires particular kinds of communities and,
more specifically, sets of concrete practices which such resisting
communities instantiate, I would love to hear more examples of
some practices for such urban economic resisters and how such
practices might shape the very communities that practice them.
Another way of putting it: what does Wendell Berry see to be some
of the key virtues of this community of economic resisters?
Secondly, Berry approvingly cites David Kline's example of what
constitutes a community as a series of forms of reliance upon one
another, including economic reliance. Also, as he noted, and I've
already mentioned with the example of the Shakers, Christian
practices can and do flow out of their theological convictions. For
groups ofChristians committed to integrating their economic lives
3
See W. Berry, "Does Community Have a Value," in Home Economics (San
Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), 179- 92.
4
For Berry's defense of "local" or "regional" culture and the difficulties of
urban life in that respect, see "Writer and Region" and "The Work of Local
Culture," in What Are People For?, 71- 87 and 153- 69.
5
For a discussion of economic resistance in relation to eating practices, see
"The Pleasures of Eating," in What Are People For?, 145- 52. For a discussion
of economic resistance in relation to sexual practices, see Sex, Economy,
Freedom, and Community, especially pp. 133- 68; and "The Body and the
Earth," in The Unsettling ofAmerica (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977).

into their spiritual lives, what are some economic practices that
might be formative of Christian community and that arise out of
what Berry considers to be a Christian vision of economic life?
My last point- speaking out of my own Catholic
tradition- is that there are a variety of Catholic groups, some of
whom are present here today, who in one way or another seek to
do this kind of integration as a community. For instance, various
Catholic Worker houses have sought to live in kinds of ways-
voluntary poverty, living out the corporal works of mercy,
rejection of usury, just to name a few examples- which structure
their lives economically; and such could also be said of a variety
of other well known intentional Catholic communities, whether
it be the practice of certain religious orders or that of various
more recent lay movements in the Church. Of course, ultimately
we are interested in the kinds of economic practices that will
inform communities known as Catholic parishes! And, what I'm
particularly interest in, I suppose, are your insights as to how we
might develop, renew, and practice forms of microeconomics
integral to the lives of Catholic communities.6
Wendell Berry
Now, it's really scary to have somebodysay that you make
them feel like they want to change their life, but my dodge on that
is to say that you've been told by people before me. You know
that e.e. cummings poem-I wish I could quote it all: Plato told
him, he wouldn't believe it; Jesus told him, he couldn't believe it.
It reminds me of a writer I admire a lot and am very much
indebted to, Ananda Coomaraswamy, who was a great student of
the cultural traditions and the artistic traditions of the settled
world. He was the curator of Oriental art at the Boston Museum,
and his retirement speech is really rather wonderful to read,
because he says that his great practice has been to avoid thinking
for himself because it was useless- somebody had already
thought of it. His great practice was to find out what had been
thought and to find that that was perfectly adequate. As a writer,
there's a certain amount of comfort to me in realizing, which I do
from time to time, that my work isn't necessary.
6
For a discussion of the relationship between microeconomics and what
is truly the Great Economy (i.e., the Kingdom of God), see "Two
Economies," in Home Economics, 54-75.

The micro level is the interesting level because that's the
level where the work is done. And it seems to me that our
exemplar there is Christ. I mean, he was an important person, and
he ought to have had better things to do than wander around and
just heal anybody. But, he applied himself to these particular
cases, simply on the ground that they presented themselves to
him or they were brought to him. And I suppose the message
there is that if you are going to be a really important person,
you've got to get down and scratch pretty much at the bottom
level. Also, I'm born and bred an agrarian, and my first-and
maybe my ultimate- teacher in some respects was my father, who
had a passion for good farming. And I think his insistence would
have been that, if you want to be a good farmer, you've got to ·
know where to set a post, you've got to do it in the right place. I
mean, what he understood (and what he made me understand)
was that to do it in the wrong place could be disastrous. Where
you put your fence is of ultimate importance. It's not the thing of
last importance; it's the thing of first importance. And, if you
have good agrarian principles, you really know how to farm,
you've got the methods and all that, and you go around making
mistakes at the micro level, it's all up. All good workpeople ...
workmen ... persons-I hate to give up the term workman, even
under the pressure of justice, because workmanship carries the
correct implication. That is, workmen all know-you women will
have to forgive me for a minute- women who are workmen all
know, that if you're not good at the micro level, you're never
going to get good at any other level, that's just where it starts.
David Kline said to me once- one of the best things
anybody said- all this stuff about getting converted and finding
yourself falls very strangely on Amish ears; after all, we Amish
are not trying to find ourselves, we'te trying to lose ourselves.
And again, I think with the Amish example you're brought back
to the importance of the micro level. Maybe the smartest thing the
Amish do is stop education, stop formal education, at the eighth
grade. Because one thing is, they know that if you have an eighth
grade education and you've got sense enough, you go ahead and
educate yourself anyway, you learn everything you need to
know. And, the Amish are great readers. But, the other thing is,
if they don't educate their people to operate at the macro level,
what they do is stay home and work at the micro level. And that
means that their little ration of really good minds are employed
in the community, at the same thing the other people are em-
ployed in. And that means that you've got excellent examples all
around, and David Kline happens to be one of them, one who

really knows how to do the micro details that maybe make the
Amish a pretty good macro example.
What do you do to resist economically? I think ifyou want
to be an urban resister, you have to put your mind at the micro
level. You don't have, for instance, to buy shaving cream in an
aerosol can. In fact, as I found out a long time ago from a father
of a girl I went with one time, you don't have to buy shaving
cream anyway-soap will do the job! You've got your whiskers
growing out a little bit, and you rub that soap on and then scrape
off enough and that gives you a very satisfactory lather. So, it's
things like that that make the difference, it seems to me. This idea
that we're better off because of all these consumer goods we've
got is a very questionable idea. And, to raise the question of
which of these necessities you actually have to have is sim-
ply-well not simply-it's one of the ways that you make
economics interesting. It gives your personal economy a kind of
interest and integrity that it wouldn't otherwise have. I mean, if
you become a critic of your own economy and begin to ask
questions about it, then you have begun the necessary first step
of economic resistance. You're saying, well do I really need this?
And if you don't really need it, then what are the privileges that
follow upon doing without it? If you don't have a television set,
for instance, there come times in your day when you'll have to
read. I mean you'll just have to, because you want to be enter-
tained or you want to hear someone smart talking. And if you are
trying to get your money's worth out of your television set and
you really need to hear someone smart talking sometimes you're
going be left high and dry.
But there are things you can do, and I think that the
problem ought to be engaged at the personal level because it
makes life more interesting. But then there comes the question:
what can a neighborhood do about something like childcare? The
fact is that the old neighborhoods were childcare facilities. They
didn't denominate themselves in that way, but we know, don't
we? In real neighborhoods, mothers don't have to watch their
children all the time, they just turn them loose, assuming that if
they need a spanking, somebody else's mother will do it; that
people are watching, in other words; that children don't run in
the road if the whole community's watching. So, is it not possible
for communities, for neighborhoods, people on one block to say,
what do we have here that we can do for each other that we're not
doing? What do we have that we can trade to each other for
services and even goods? Is this not a possibility that we're
overlooking? And, in fact, that is beginning to happen.

One of the most radical organizations, in the good sense,
is the Schumacher Society, up in Great Berrington, Massachusetts.
Bob Swann and Susan Witt- Bob's ill now and very old- but out
of that place came the idea of local currency. I don't think there's
a law against local currency, and it's a great idea. For instance, a
local bank could make it attractive to receive loans in local
currency, which would simply mean that that currency had to be
spent in the neighborhood or in the little town or whatever,
where it originated. This has to be done by neighborhood
agreement. One of Susan's and Bob's stories is about a delicates-
sen owner in Great Berrington, and he had to move because of
some improvement like urban renewal. He had to move his shop,
and he couldn't afford to give up the one that he had and open
another in another place. So, what he did was, in effect, give
himself a loan. He issued "deli dollars" that people could buy at
a discount and then redeem in merchandise after he had gone to
his new location. It worked. They set up what they call the share
program-and you have to have the cooperation of a local bank
to do this- but people would put money in savings accounts and
give the passbooks to the program, which would then use those
savings accounts as collateral for small loans to people who
wanted weaving machines, say, or capital to start a goat cheese
operation. Those things can be done; people just have to think
about them and work out the details and do them. But the idea of
a share program making local money available locally is abso-
lutely contrary to the global economy, and it's a defense weapon
really, it's a defense tool let's say. But such things can be done,
and all you have to do is quit believing that all these proxies that
people have given are serving them in the best way possible.
Once you quit that and suggest to yourself the possibility that
there might be a better way, then these real possibilities make
their appearance. If you don't have a share program, then you
simply consent to the syphon that's now in every community,
that sucks the money away and will suck your raw materials, so-
called, away, and will eventually suck away your children. And
we have to find ways not to consent to that, if we're going to be
free. D

SPRING 2000
I
International Catholic Review
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Conference: "The Unsettling ofAmerica"
Lorenzo Albacete, Eric Perl, V. Bradley Lewis, John Berkman
A Conversation with Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
Life Is a Miracle
Peter Casarella
Solidarity as the Fruit of Communion: Ecclesia in America,
"Post-Liberation Theology," and the Earth
Joseph Capizzi
Solidarity as a Basis for Conversion and Communion:
A Response to Peter Casarella
Lawrence J. Welch
The Spirit: The Light of Hearts. A Response to Peter Casarella
William L. Portier
Americanism and Inculturation: 1899-1999
Michael Baxter
The Unsettling ofAmericanism: A Response to William Portier
58
83
98
124
134
139
161

Wendell Berry Conversation on the Absence of Christ in the Modern World

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