Philip Rieff is what we might call an obscure famous man. Among intellectuals of
a certain kind and generation he is the master who in 1965 published The Triumph
of The Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith After Freud, a pioneering work that charted
the rise of the therapeutic ethos in Western culture (and whose basic thesis was
borrowed some years later by the late Christopher Lasch for The Culture of
Narcissism). He is also famous to University of Pennsylvania denizens of a certain
period, for he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology there for many years
until his retirement in 1992. And for those who like to follow more personal
matters, he is famous for having married Susan Sontag and fathered the journalist
David Rieff.

Rieff published his last major book, Fellow Teachers, in 1973, and given that he is
84 years of age, one could be forgiven for being surprised by the appearance of a
new book—and astonished at being told that My Life Among the Deathworks is
the first of a planned trilogy called Sacred Order/Social Order. It is with such an
act of determination and faith that Rieff breaks his long silence. This first volume
seems to be the ground-clearing polemic. Rieff doesn’t make it easy for his
readers, although a fine introduction by James Davison Hunter helps. Especially
off-putting at the beginning are little tropes like “via“, which turns out to be an
acronym for “vertical in authority”, meaning, well, that authority has to come
down and be looked up to. Then there is Rieff’s cutesy use of “third world culture”
to mean first world culture—of which more in a moment. Once past that sort of
thing, though, the argument gets clearer. And then it gets repetitive.

Rieff divides the history of the West into three cultural types that roughly
correspond to eras. First world culture is, roughly, paganism; second world culture
is the “sacred orders” of Judaism and Christianity (Islam counts but is,
unfortunately, scarcely mentioned); and the third world culture is modernity. We
live in the late transition from the second to third. Third culture, however, lives
parasitically, by destroying the sacred orders of the second and by recycling as
self-conscious “myths” the sacred stories of the first. The commanding heights of
third culture are thus those great artistic “deathworks”, like Joyce’s Finnegan’s
Wake, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Duchamp’s notorious urinal or Picasso’s
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, whose real purpose is to mock and make incredible
the sacred orders of the second world. So in Rieff’s beginning stands Joyce’s
negation of the beginning of Genesis: “Let there be fight? And there was.”” What
we get in return from third world culture is heroic myths recycled for nihilistic
thrills.

If this seems like what we usually think of as postmodernism, Rieff tells us it’s
been hard at work since the beginning of the 20^th century, but goes back even to
the Renaissance. In Mozart and Beethoven, even in Holbein and Michelangelo,
Rieff can detect the odor of decay. He adopts an old Eastern Orthodox criticism in
deploring the two painters for excessively emphasizing Christ’s humanity,
respectively, in death and in love. Rieff is not being prim here. As he sees it, the
products of the mocking and devaluing third world culture are barbarism,
dehumanization and, in a much repeated word, Auschwitz.

Put this baldly, Rieff seems another voice in the chorus of anti-modern
traditionalism. Resemblances do come to mind. Thus Rieff on the blasphemous
character of Duchamp’s Etant donnéés echoes C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength,
where the protagonist is tempted to damnation by apparently meaningless
surrealist paintings. Similarly, Rieff discussing Auschwitz recalls the warning of
Walker Percy’s mad priest in The Thanatos Syndrome, that those who start with
humane euthanasia will end up by killing Jews. But, fortunately, Rieff is doing
more than just providing us with yet another learned account of how it has all been
going to the dogs since the death of Innocent III.

First, Rieff makes his case concretely and effectively through the analysis of texts
and artworks. Particularly with paintings, his descriptions clarify and validate the
subterranean and half-repressed feelings one has always had but could never
articulate, about, say, the ugliness and menace of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He
shows us that there is nothing inadvertent about that menace and exactly what and
how important its target is. His analysis of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, itself a
gloss on Walter Benjamin’s appraisal in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, is
an especially fine example of how he links the particular details of a work of art
with the general condition of soul for which it becomes an emblem. Rieff is an
effective reader of literature, as well. He picks telling examples, like Joyce’s “In
the buginning is the woid”, and tellingly explains them (in this case as the emblem
of how the third world offers “a new beginning which is a pun on the old
creation”).

Second, his extreme, sometimes inquisitorial, severity has real virtues. He says
clearly and ruthlessly what some of us half know to be true, but which we tend to
hide from ourselves and hence others. I was once disappointed, for example, when
I asked my students what movies had provided heroic models for them, to be given
the example of Goodfellas; but I didn’t reply, even in my own mind, with Rieff’s
judgment of it as “a pathological picture” where “transgression and ‘no problem’
violence are released in the storm of dispossession.” And his use of a horrifyingly
chipper and banal account in Harper’s by a woman of her abortion is similarly
devastating; we see afresh the amoral shallowness we take for granted, and with
which we thus become complicit.

Third, Rieff is psychologically acute, as in his account of the inner purpose of drug
culture. With its “closing of distances” between desire and its object, the culture
aims for the return to “primordiality” or a bogus “re-enchantment of the world”; it
is a program of “mastery that no longer needs the rational.” Repeatedly he shows
us in concrete and fresh terms what is really at stake in “the present world fight.”

Finally, toward the end Rieff does have something sensible, perhaps even
practical, to say about the American interest. He is highly dubious about the
increasingly secular understanding of the American regime. He is with John
Patrick Diggins on the importance of the religious side of Lincoln (here as a
“sacred messenger”), and he blames Benjamin Franklin for softening Jefferson’s
“sacred truths” in the Declaration of Independence into merely “self-evident” (and
therefore not necessarily self-evident) truths. He also gets as much as he can (and
maybe more) out of Tocqueville’s concern for American religiosity. This isn’t
new, but it is said alertly.

Rieff’s straightforward defense of “sacred order” as the source of any decent
society is at the heart of his project, and it is hard not to approve the intent and
much of the execution. But I have some problems with it, the first being a question
of timeliness and practice.

As it happens, we decadent third world types are currently faced with a powerful
and ruthless enemy who speaks to us in the purest tones of “sacred order.”
However modern the jihadist perversion of Islam may be, it nonetheless gives us
an object lesson in why we are generally thankful not to be living under such a
grim dispensation. The confrontation with Islamism reminds us of all the reasons
to cherish the Enlightenment. We see anew the bloody, dogmatic, intransigent,
power-grabbing stupidity of sacred orders on the rampage. These rightly bring out
in us the latent spirit of outraged decency and common sense, a contempt and
indignation for fanaticism that is a sign of our health. Here, where Rieff and the
sacred orders condemn (and the playful postmoderns praise) “transgression”, I
wouldn’t mind hearing some old-fashioned praise for “reason.” In other words, this
might be a time for strengthening the self-confidence of the Enlightenment by
reminding ourselves of its naive origins, rather than taking on the role of Grand
Inquisitor, or Brother Jorge from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose—as Rieff
comes close to doing, for instance, in his polemic against laughter, and his
magisterial assertion that “there is no laughter in the Bible, and not a single joke
that I have ever been able to find.” (As the Danish cartoon case has suggested,
laughter may no longer just be the chatter of nihilist hyenas; the right to laugh may
again need the most heroic and serious defense.)

My second problem is this: As Rieff well understands, there is something dubious
about a defense of “sacred order” as such, as opposed to defense of a particular
revelation. It is one thing if C.S. Lewis or T.S. Eliot tells us that we need to
become good Christians; we are free to accept or reject the case on its merits. But
what does it mean to be told to believe in “sacred order” without any particular
sacred order being specified? Is this not unnervingly like Jacques Derrida’s
“messianism without a messiah?” Or is it an attempt to use revelation—any one
will do—ultimately for secular purposes for the sake of social order?

Whenever it is made explicit, the concept of “sacred order” is itself secular,
unguided by revelation and sociological, which is to say, ultimately philosophic.
Yet Rieff has very little good to say of philosophy. Indeed, one could see
philosophy as his real, if largely tacit, target. As such, its history is scarcely visible
in My Life Among the Deathworks. Plato is seen somewhat ambiguously as linked
to the first, pagan world. Philosophy then reappears as a third world instrument of
destruction aimed at the second world. Reason’s true position, Rieff tells us, is to
be guided by sacred order. It is “feeling intellect”—the title of his short,
fragmented 1990 book of essays—that can be trusted, not decontextualizing
rationality off on its own destructive toot.

Of course, it all depends on what Rieff means by “feeling intellect.” He may mean
no more than a reason that recognizes in the world something like a nature, maybe
merely something like the existence of kinds, or species. If so, both ancient and
contemporary forms of Socratic thought might pass muster. But the crucial fact is
that Rieff does not allow reason to fight out, say, the existence of kinds for itself; it
must yield to the rule of sacred order. This suggests strongly that Rieff believes
that reason pursued independently does lead, as Nietzsche thought, to nihilism. If
so, the dilemma of a philosophic condemnation of philosophy remains the same for
him as for Nietzsche. But where Nietzsche pointed toward intensifying nihilism as
a way to transcend it, Rieff points back to acceptance of some “sacred order.” But
that acceptance is called “faith” and, in its absence, it is hard to make much of the
general advice to have it, coming from a philosopher despite himself.

At book’s end, Rieff grapples with this problem. There he cautiously indicates that,
in its effort to radicalize Judaism, Christianity (particularly Paul) actually set the
second world rolling gradually downhill toward the nihilistic third. So the real
question for Rieff would be: Why not Orthodox Judaism? We don’t get so much
an answer as a painful personal clue: One of his grandfathers left young Philip his
Hebrew commentaries and tefilin (phylacteries) as an inheritance, but his mother,
thinking them unenlightened nonsense, threw them out. So if, for whatever reason,
he cannot return to faith, what then?

Rieff appeals, it turns out, to art. His method of bringing artistic objects to life
turns out to be identical with his epistemological credo. How do we know what is
really sacred? Through great art, it appears. Here Rieff appeals to Keats’ concept
of “Negative Capability”, which Keats identifies with the state of poetic creation.
Rieff defines it as

a state of the mind and body at rest, so that truths, in their particulars, can be given
to whatever identity has achieved, however briefly in such moments of
illuminative certainty, a reconciliation with commanding truths themselves
observed in whatever context has occurred to the person in that state.

This is neither the Cartesian perception of what is “clear and distinct” nor the
Platonic vision of the eidos. It is a lot closer to a grant of cognitive grace whose
certainty (itself, following Keats, “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts”) is still recognized “as links in a chain that descends from highest
authority.” That seems to mean, I think, that when you get it, you get it. And then
the nasty, free-ranging rationalist questions—”How do you know you really got
it?” and “Are you sure this didn’t come from your cultural conditioning or what
you ate last night?”—don’t have to get asked.

As a description of a state of mind that is perhaps the bedrock of any conviction,
and of which even the Platonic and Cartesian formulations may be thought to be
metaphors, this deserves respect. But, as Martin Luther found out when it came to
Zwingli and the Spiritualists, one man’s bedrock certainty of sacred order is
another man’s spawn of heresy. Faith might be one answer, reason another, but
“Negative Capability” is, I fear, ultimately an outsider’s account of what is going
on. It doesn’t satisfactorily answer the problem of Rieff’s own position, the
theologian without a theology, the philosopher in spite of himself.

Moreover, the attempt to make the artist do the work of the prophet is an old story
in the history of modernity, and it is not a story with a happy ending. I am as
sympathetic as anyone to the project, arising out of Rousseau and the notion of
“aesthetic education”, but it could not be maintained, either by the artists
themselves, whose impish and irritable love of “transgression” was much
heightened by the burden of moral uplift imposed on them by the likes of Schiller,
Arnold and Ruskin, or by independent thought that drove a powerful wedge
(consider Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy) into the trinity of Truth, Goodness
and Beauty.

Yet Rieff doesn’t need to be told any of this. The exoteric is part of his method.
Indeed, there are some odd moves here that are too odd to involve real errors. Take
for instance the grim pronouncement that there is no laughter in the Bible.
Elsewhere, however, he says that his grandfather’s favorite sage was the 16^th–
century mystic Isaac Luria, and that C. P. Snow went so far as partly to base a
character named “Luria” on Rieff himself.¹A Coat of Varnish (Scribner’s, 1979). How could Rieff possibly not know
that in Genesis 17:17 Abraham laughs at the news that he and Sarah will have a
child at the respective ages of a hundred and ninety; that at 18:12 Sarah laughs
when she gets the news; or that the name Isaac comes from the word for
“laughter”? (And yes, there are jokes in the Bible: See Genesis 3:11 and Jonah
4:11 for two very funny ones, indeed.)

If, as I suspect, Rieff conceals his knowledge of Biblical laughter, then he is
adopting the posture of grave piety and pious gravity for a reason other than simple
belief. Here’s my guess: Rieff is persuaded by the account of the world given in
the great “deathworks” of modernity and postmodernity, above all by Nietzsche.
But he has seen that Nietzsche’s hope to create a noble posterity out of nihilism
has failed disastrously, that nothing has hastened the coming of the Last Man like
Nietzsche’s own thought, and that, on top of it, this Last Man is no longer a
bourgeois sheep but a post-bourgeois thrill-seeker and even, at heart, a murderer.
Perhaps he wants to do Nietzsche over again, only for our time. Rieff may think
that Nietzsche, were he alive today, would see that his course of radicalizing the
Enlightenment was a mistake, and that he would now instead preach a return to
“sacred order”—a descent, in Nietzschean terms, down the “ladder of religious
cruelty.” Neither Rieff nor Nietzsche could now preach any of the three revealed
world religions to the West, because none of them would be taken seriously thanks
in part to science and largely to Nietzsche’s own works. But Rieff could begin to
create a taste, a prejudice, in favor of the noble, the serious and the devout, and
become, as Nietzsche saw himself, a forerunner, a John the Baptist, for some
future revelation that would recast the “sacred order” in terms receivable by our
own age.

This guess is meant as a kindly one. I don’t think that even at this level the project
is likely to work, though much depends on the next two volumes, which
presumably will provide a positive teaching on the basis of the polemic we find
here. For one thing, Rieff gives up too readily on the status of independent reason.
For another, despair about reason makes it harder to fight indecency, whether of
the second world Islamist kind or the third world Nazi variety. “Negative
Capability” is a weak reed in a storm and, arguably, we’re in one.
Furthermore, it isn’t just that our times justify the fundamental modern
exasperation with the excesses of sacred orders. Any account in which
Michelangelo and Mozart appear as villains is one to which I cannot simply
ascribe. But after registering such reservations, it is also hard not to wish Rieff
well in seeking to create a renewed respect for the holiness of human life. He
knows us disconcertingly well in that regard.

¹ A Coat of Varnish (Scribner’s, 1979).