Letter #52: Is Nothing Sacred?

A Three Point Plan

Spong.

Funnily enough, while you were watching Hamlet, Mom and I went to see the new production of Macbeth starring Ralph Fiennes and the excellent Indira Varma, who played the girl who wasn’t naked in Game of Thrones.

I bring this up for a reason. Your reading of Hamlet’s line “conscience does make cowards of us all,” is perfect. Despite the anachronistic setting, I’ve always felt Hamlet was Shakespeare’s subtle commentary on the Reformation. Hamlet’s education in Martin Luther’s Wittenberg signals the subtext. With the moral authority of the church broken, Hamlet is no longer able to know himself or trust his conscience to illuminate the truth.

Macbeth, with his conscience swept away by ambition, detaches himself from the moral order entirely. In doing so, he loses all sense of life’s meaning.

I can’t help but feel this provides us with a clue to the shape of our problem: how to define and defend the human self in the oncoming singularity. The self, it seems, is a three-point thing, a fractal of the trinity. There’s the body; our sense of an original spirit we hope to express through the body; and a moral order with which body and spirit must align themselves before they are aligned with one another.

In both tragedies, it’s the characters’ relationship to the moral order that’s out of joint. Hamlet can’t act on it. Macbeth allows his woman’s passion to convince him to override it.

Without moral authority, we’re in a double bind. We can’t truly know what’s moral until we understand who we are, and we can’t know who we are until we understand what we ought to do.

Of course you’re right: that’s why fools shuffle willingly into the mental prison of wokeness. They are desperate for some authoritative definition of the good. But it’s also why Catholics deem the Pope infallible, and some Protestants declare scripture literal and inerrant. Without a base of moral certainty, who are we? How can we know?

Am I so radical an outlaw for believing there is and can be no certainty but in Christ? We know it’s not in scripture alone, because “the devil can cite scripture for his purpose.” We know it’s not in the Pope because, I mean, just look at him. Only a logos clothed in humanity can show us the way. He tells us we are not just reason, but also sense and sensibility and all the flesh and blood components of agape love.

So Jesus doesn’t bow to religious authorities. He doesn’t allow scripture to make him stone an adulteress or cease healing on the Sabbath. Before Abraham was — before religion was — he is.

And because the logos was expressed as man, I can’t believe what’s best in us can be enhanced by machinery. But maybe — maybe when we see in the black mirror what even the genius of technology can’t accomplish, we’ll turn back to that Christly mirror that reflects what humans are built to do.

Dad