Wendell Berry's Vindication of the Flesh

Abstract

All this dread ORDER break--for whom? For thee? Vile worm!--oh, madness, pride, impiety! --Pope, Essay Man (I.257-58) It takes man of tonsorial, not academic, practices to observe glaring contradiction in Port William: Jayber Crow, town barber sees people who love crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs sitting through world-condemning sermons; he hears the wickedness of flesh ... preached from pulpit while young husbands and wives and courting couples sit thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy; he puzzles over religion that scorns the beauty and goodness of this (Berry, Jayber Crow 161). He asks whether Jesus put our flesh so that we might despise (JC 50). In doing so, he raises both personal and an authorial question answer to which is as complex and perhaps as important as anything Wendell Berry has proffered. There is of course simple answer to question: No. It is also correct one, and most of us would readily give it no matter where in despoiled creation our neglected flesh finds itself. But 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 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 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. In recent interview Berry, now in his seventies, says, I was never satisfied by Protestantism that inherited, think because of dualism of 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 virtue. From very early that kind of piety was distasteful to me (Rendering 33). Likewise, Berry spoke in early 1990s against a dualism that manifests itself in several ways: as cleavage, 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 dualism of body and soul from which follows dominant religious view ... that body is kind of scrip issued by Great Company Store in Sky, which can be cashed in to redeem but is otherwise useless (SEFC 107). He wondered what we could expect [w]hen we hate and abuse 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 capable of eternal bliss? (SEFC 108). And three years before that, defending his tiny dissent from all tail-wagging over personal computers that he rightly foresaw would enslave us, he said [i]mplicit in technological revolution from beginning has been 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 problem was no less impressive in early 1970s: [s]ome varieties of Christianity have held that one should despise 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 world, and their own posterity, to exploiters and ruiners. …