reading proverb

How This Neoconservative Found the Catholic Church

From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith, Sohrab Ahmari, Ignatius Press, 240 pages

There is a famous Persian proverb, Sokuni be-dast ar ey by sabât, ke bar sang-e ġaltân na-ruyad nabât, which translates to something close to “a rolling stone gathers no moss.” As a conservative and traditionalist Catholic, I find that sentiment quite appealing and true to life. Yet there are exceptions, among them the Iranian-American Sohrab Ahmari. The popular writer at Commentary and former editorialist at The Wall Street Journal has rolled quite quickly in his relatively short life, from Shia Islam to Nietzschean nihilism, from Marxism to neoconservativism. Now, in his spiritual biography, From Fire by Water, Ahmari charts his intellectual travels into Catholicism, to which he converted in 2016. For the reading list alone, Ahmari’s apologia is a valuable resource for understanding the intellectual evolution of the West and how traditional religious belief still offers the best answers to man’s quest for truth.

Ahmari was born into a middle-class family in Tehran several years after the 1979 revolution. Many members of his family, including his father and mother, were more aesthetes than pious Muslims. All the same, much of his upbringing—especially that which occurred in the country’s public school system—was set in the larger context of the aggressive Shiism of post-revolution Iran. Yet Ahmari developed a cynicism towards Islam reminiscent of his bohemian father, who drank alcohol and watched Western movies behind closed doors. Of Iran, Ahmari writes, “when it wasn’t burning with ideological rage, it mainly offered mournful nostalgia. Those were its default modes, rage and nostalgia. I desired something more.”

As he grew older, Ahmari’s concerns with Islam increasingly focused on its antagonism towards free will and reason. He explains: “My turn away from God had something to do as well with the nature of the Islam of Khomeini and his followers, a religion that never proposes but only imposes, and that by the sword or the suicide bomber…. In broad swaths of the Islamic world, the religion of Muhammad is synonymous with law and political dominion without love or mercy…. There is little room for the individual conscience and free will, for the human heart, for reason and intellect.”

Indeed, as I’ve noted in two recent articles on Islam, the dominant streams of the religion have always had difficulty reconciling their beliefs—and certainly the nature and development of the Quran—with public rational discourse or academic scholarship. If one considers a map of the world where apostasy laws are in effect, it largely matches where Islam is the dominant religion. Radical Islamism as a distortion of a peaceable, rational Islam, Ahmari writes, is “little more than a polite myth.”

After Ahmari’s parents divorced, he and his mother immigrated to Utah when he was 13 years old. It was quite the culture shock—in part because he found many Americans far less intellectually curious and far more conformist than he had imagined, but also because it involved shifting from the Persian bourgeoisie to living in a trailer park. As an Iranian in a part of the country that was predominantly white, it was always going to be an uphill battle to be socially accepted. But Ahmari’s fervent intellectualism added to this isolation. Though this was also perhaps a blessing in disguise, as he began devouring the kinds of books most Americans know they should read but never do. “Reading the great books in one’s late teens is intoxicating,” he observes.

First on his list was Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he consumed in a few days, barely stopping to eat or groom himself. Ahmari identified with the ubermensch, or “superman,” who exemplifies the evolutionary peak of the human person, defined by self-mastery, radical creativity, and an intense cynicism towards absolute morality. Though it would take a few years, Ahmari eventually came to see the errors of the German philosopher. “Today I consider most of Nietzsche’s ideas to be not merely wrong but positively sinister,” he says. All the same, as I’ve argued elsewhere at TAC, Nietzsche’s philosophy is at play across American culture, education, and politics. References to “empowerment,” to redefining morality according to man’s own needs (or whims), and to accomplishing our goals through force of will are all to varying degrees tinged with Nietzsche’s influence. It’s important that we be exposed to him and his ideas, even if he is deadly wrong.

The next major influence on the young thinker were existentialist writers (and communist sympathizers) Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. For Ahmari, this was a logical progression from Nietzsche, who “considered man to be his own moral measure, and…licensed an elite to designate new values and overthrow the old.” This was exactly what Marxism offered. “By the age of eighteen, I was quite literally a card-carrying Communist,” he writes. Ahmari fervently embraced the ideas of dialectical materialism, class struggle, and anti-capitalism. But, he acknowledges, “Marxism’s greatest attraction was its religious spirit,” its emphasis on a secular salvation, revolutionary justice that “would wipe away every tear.” Again, like Nietzsche, Americans need not embrace Sartre or Marx to see the need to read and understand them—especially when Marxism is such a dominant force at most U.S. universities. One must understand the best attacks on conservatism and religious belief in order to defend them.

Anyone familiar with the philosophical traditions influencing the American academy can probably guess what came after Marx for the young Ahmari: Jean-Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault, the deconstructionists who tackle topics like “sex and gender, language and the unconscious, colonialism and postcolonialism, media and pop culture.” At this point, Ahmari defines his worldview as the following: “Man’s place in the world is unsettled; he is homeless. Capitalism’s pitiless destruction of older social forms, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious—all these things had made it impossible to cling to any eternal or permanent truth about humanity…. Everything about people turned on historical conditions and social power dynamics.” According to these thinkers, man is repressed by society, which can be reduced to performative “language games.”

Yet Ahmari recognizes now that postmodernism’s analysis means there is “no standard left on which to base these various claims for justice.” It would take a number of life experiences, including two years doing Teach for America (TFA), to help Ahmari see the errors of his ways. While he halfheartedly sought to impress his Marxism and relativism on his students, another teacher imposed strict rules and procedures to guide learning. The latter had far more success. As Ahmari writes, “good teaching [is] at heart about order—order, in the teacher’s mind, about the lesson he was going to impart on a given day; order in the minds of students, who needed routine, regularity, and predictability from adults; and order in the sense that peace reigned in the classroom and those who disturbed it knew what to expect.” The TFA experience also convinced Ahmari of a fatal flaw in leftist ideology—people aren’t reducible to “language, race, class, and collective identities.” Anyone, and everyone, regardless of circumstances, can choose to be virtuous, to cultivate the good in themselves and society.

It was around this time that Ahmari began reading anti-communist literature that helped persuade him that rather than being an oppressor, the kinds of absolute moral laws propagated by the Judeo-Christian tradition were actually “a bulwark against totalitarianism.” He adds: “The God who revealed himself in the moral law, and who condescended to be scourged and crucified by his creation—this God was a liberator.” In time, he came to recognize that the most praiseworthy elements of Western civilization cannot be understood apart from the religious traditions that brought them into being. These traditions view man as having inherent dignity and possessing certain inalienable rights. Thus did Ahmari begin to “make peace with American society,” and develop into a popular neoconservative writer.

Soon he was reading the likes of political theorist Leo Strauss, biblical scholar Robert Altar, popular Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, the Church Father Augustine, great Catholic convert John Henry Newman, and the great scholar/theologian/pope Joseph Ratzinger. Ahmari is not the only one whose reading of Augustine led him into the Church—Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruenig trod a similar path. But perhaps what’s most consistent amid Ahmari’s intellectual journey from Islam through various forms of post-Enlightenment ideology and ultimately into Catholicism is his search not only for truth but freedom. It was the deeper, more authentic vision of freedom in Christianity that spurred Ahmari towards a greater conception of the world and the human person. “True freedom, Benedict [XVI] taught, was something else. It was ‘freedom in the service of the good,’ freedom that allowed ‘itself to be led by the Spirit of God.’”

It is this same search for freedom that underpins the conservative project to which Ahmari now contributes—albeit, to my chagrin, of a more neoconservative variety. Yet any conservatism that perceives man’s flourishing as intimately linked to his creator is one worth lauding.

Casey Chalk is a student at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College. He covers religion and other issues for TAC.

02

Big Mistakes Reading Proverbs

You’ve heard people recite a proverb and know — deep inside — the proverb isn’t true for you. You may well have thought it wasn’t really true for that person either. The one that comes to mind for me most often, the one that I think has been misused more often than any other proverb, is this:

Train children in the right way,and when old, they will not stray (Prov 22:6).

So, if you teach kids what is right they will return to it when they are old. The comfort of many a parent with a wandering son or daughter. So many have questioned the utter truthfulness this one that some are attracted to a well-known reading — train up a child according to their bent in life or according to their age maturation — and it will turn out well. The problem is that many have done both and it’s not worked out.

Learning how to read Proverbs, paying attention to the genre of the proverb, is important, and so we turn again to Glenn Pemberton in his excellent new book, A Life That Is Good.

He discusses with modern examples of proverbs five major challenges in reading Proverbs, beginning with the tendency to absolutize the proverbs.

Challenge #1: Absolute versus Conditional Meaning

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second rat gets the cheese.”

As a rule, proverbs are not one-size-fits-all statements of absolute truth. They are observations about life from limited perspectives and specific circumstances. This is true for the genre of proverbs that are outside and inside the Bible.

“The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the craving of the wicked” (10:3)

“A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich” (10:4)

OK, that’s clear to most readings, but the next one requires some nuance and some familiarity with the ancient world.

Challenge #2: Translation and Culture

[Proverbs in the Bible] come from a culture other than our own … they also come from a particular time in a culture’s development.

Challenge #3: Enigma

[So true…] Proverbs often convey their message in enigmatic ways to capture the hearer’s imagination. Humor or a striking image might stir reflection, or maybe a powerful truth expressed in such a memorable way that the proverb evokes internalization.

This is one of the most insightful statements about reading proverbs, all proverbs: they are a literary and rhetorical creation.

Proverbs are like jokes. Whenever we must stop to explain a joke, it is no longer funny. The moment we must explain a proverb, it loses much of its power or punch.

If the first challenge is big, this one complements it perfectly from a different angle.

Challenge #4: Descriptions or Prescriptions

The fourth challenge in reading Proverbs 10-31 is recognizing when a proverb describes an action or activity observed to be true and when a proverb prescribes an action to take. A descriptive proverb explains the way the world works, what people do and why, without passing judgment. A prescriptive proverb, however, names a situation and/or diagnoses a condition and directs a person toward a wise response.

One for each: a descriptive and a prescriptive. All are of course prescriptive when interpreted aright.

“The poor are disliked even by their neighbors, but the rich have many friends” (14:20)

“Those who are greedy for unjust gain make trouble for their households, but those who hate bribes will live” (15:27)

One is tempted to say: “But these proverbs in Proverbs are from the Bible. They are true!”

Challenge #5: The Bible Factor

Reading the Bible and identifying its different genres is far more complicated than a one-size-fits-all approach. And negotiating the genres of the Bible can be threatening to many believers who have never considered the Bible to be anything other than absolute truth. So the first brave soul to suggest that proverbs express general truths that depend on circumstances risks a church fight that will make Luther look like a conformist-a fight sure to be remembered accurately for years-unless we exercise due caution and much wisdom in helping others recognize the Bible factor. Only then, with respect and patience, do I believe it is possible to help believers not only come to a better understanding of Proverbs, but also a better understanding of the Bible as a whole. But this is only possible if we read with full recognition of the Bible factor.

03

Proverbs, read spiritually

By Dr. Jeff Mirus (bio - articles - email) | Jun 26, 2018

It is time, in this series on the books of the Bible, to take a quick look at Proverbs. I also did this back in early 2016, but the purpose then was simply to pluck some of the proverbs that had particularly struck me during my reading in January of that year (see A few pointed remarks (from God)). The attempt to say something helpful about the Book of Proverbs as a whole is far more difficult.

As the introductory note in the Ignatius Bible (RSV-CE) explains, the book we have today is an inspired collection of several previous sets of proverbs, which played an important role in Jewish culture, an oral culture heavily dependent on memory. All the proverbs were ascribed to Solomon, following standard practice at the time. It is very reasonable to suppose that some core of these sayings can actually be traced back to him.

But the introductory note also points out, “The general subject of the proverbs is the art of right living.” In other words, the Book of Proverbs deals with the full range of life, from the spiritual heights to the pragmatism of daily business. Yet it will earn me no intellectual laurels to pronounce that the Book of Proverbs is about…everything.

Last time I escaped by simply highlighting some individual proverbs while acknowledging that these would be unlikely to be the same proverbs that particularly struck other readers, or indeed that would strike me in the same way the next time around. In fact, only two of the proverbs that jumped off the page to me in early 2016 made the cut in 2018. This at least tells us something about how the Holy Spirit speaks to our present needs through God’s word.

This time I should try for something deeper and more valuable for the Book as a whole. I selected proverbs which seem to hint at meanings beyond the literal text. In other words, I want to offer an exercise in reading Proverbs spiritually—always an important approach when reading Scripture, and especially in the Old Testament. Perhaps my examples depend mostly on how alert I was at any given moment, but I found proverbs of the greatest spiritual interest to be concentrated between chapters 17 and 26 (there are 31 chapters in all).

For example, let us read 17:2 through a Christian spiritual lens: “A slave who deals wisely will rule over a son who acts shamefully.” In such a reading, a “son” might be a Christian, who has after all been adopted by God through baptism as a son or daughter, that is, as a brother or sister in Christ. Similarly, a “slave” might be a pagan, who has not received this grace of adoption. In this context, the proverb is chilling in its spiritual warning: A pagan who devotes himself to whatever he knows of the good will enjoy a fuller life in God than a Christian who squanders the greater good he has received.

Now consider 22:4 for another kind of spiritual twist: “The reward for humility and fear of the LORD is riches and honor and life.” Taken to refer to our fortunes in earthly life, this proverb is demonstrably false. Moreover, it will not do to pretend the sacred author did not know this, for there are plenty of Scriptural texts (not least in the Psalms) that show the Jews knew it was false in its historical sense. Conclusion? We see that to profit, we must read the text spiritually—and when we read it spiritually, the text is unfailingly instructive.

Pragmatic Spirituality

The spirituality expressed in the book of Proverbs is often compelling in its intense practicality. We are not often scaling the heights here. For example, in chapter 23, we find two verses which emphasize the importance of raising children properly:

Do not withhold discipline from a child;  if you beat him with a rod, he will not die. If you beat him with the rod  you will save his life from Sheol. [23:13-14]

And then there is our human tendency to “pretend we didn’t know” when some evil is discovered close to home, so to speak—evil about which others might assume we must have known:

If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,”  does not he who weights the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it,  and will he not repay man according to his work? [24:12]

An even earthier pragmatism supplies one reason why we should not rejoice over the downfall of our enemies: “[L]et not your heart be glad when he stumbles; lest the LORD see it, and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him” (24:17-18). Therefore, as we learn some ten verses later: “Do not say [of a neighbor], ‘I will do to him as he has done to me; I will pay the man back for what he has done’” (24:29). Now that is motivation that reads our hearts!

On the Heights

Some proverbs contradict each other. That is true even today, for we say both that haste makes waste and that he who hesitates is lost. The Book of Proverbs has similar oppositions. For example, chapter 26 verse 4 advises, “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself”; whereas the very next verse contradicts this advice: “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.” But an explanation for apparent contradictions is given in verse 7: “Like a lame man’s legs, which hang useless, is a proverb in the mouth of fools.” At the root of the Book of Proverbs is the understanding that it is wisdom (that is, spiritual insight) that enables us to discern the application of the right proverb in the right circumstances and at the right time.

In this light, consider the following four verses from chapter 24:

13My son, eat honey, for it is good,  and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste.14Know that wisdom is such to your soul;  If you find it, there will be a future,  and your hope will not be cut off….19Fret not yourself because of evildoers,  and be not envious of the wicked;20for the evil man has no future;  the lamp of the wicked will be put out.

There is much about wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, and the lasting result of wisdom is eternal life. This is a fitting conclusion, but let me leave the reader with a bit of a mystery:

Consider this proverb: “Prepare your work outside, get everything ready for you in the field; and after that build your house” (24:27). This comes to us from an agrarian society, clearly. But what could it mean? I am betting on a spiritual interpretation, and I challenge everyone to attempt to find a meaning that will apply to our life in Christ. If you let me know your best thoughts, not only will I be grateful, but I will append them here for the benefit of all our readers.

Scripture Series Previous: Redemption and Salvation in the Psalms Next: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity: Ecclesiastes

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

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