Episode 22 Transcript
Ryan:
My guest today is Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, an ecumenical journal of religion and public life. He is the editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on Scripture series and the author of several books, most recently Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism and the Future of the West. For twenty years Reno taught theology at Creighton University. He is an accomplished rock climber, and our interview touches on his escapades in Yosemite in the early 80s. Now Roman Catholic, Reno was formerly Episcopalian, and I began our conversation asking him about his conversion.
You wrote In the Ruins of the Church when you were still an Anglican. Episcopalian, maybe?
Rusty:
Yeah, Americans call Anglicans Episcopalian.
Ryan:
So shortly after the publication, or at least as I recall, it seemed fairly quick, you crossed the Tiber. And I remember hearing from a number of Anglicans that your conversion invalidated the argument of that book, which was essentially that faithful Christians are called to remain in a ruined church as witnesses and lamentors, like the prophet remained in apostate, exiled Israel. So it seemed to some Anglicans at the time that you were reneging on that vocation, jumping ship to the doctrinal and moral security of Rome.
Rusty:
[Laughs]
Ryan:
Now there are many voices…
Rusty:
I was teaching at a Jesuit university. I had no illusions about the moral certainties with the Catholic Church.
Ryan:
That's what I suspected. And of course now there are many voices in the Roman Catholic Church who see their own communion in ruins, whether because of demographics in the US and Europe or because of a perceived progressive trend among powerful elites.
So how did you see the situation when you converted and how does that compare to what you see now in both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic communities?
Rusty:
Yeah, I would say I don't think—I didn't change my mind about the argument in In the Ruins of the Church. I didn't leave the Episcopal Church because of its infidelities and so on. All of which were known to me for two decades before. I started my graduate studies in theology in 1984. I entered the Church in 2004. And already in school I was well aware of the problems that afflict the Episcopal Church USA. It was more just a personal failing. You know, I was involved in this national committee. I think it was, I can't remember, maybe it was the, I can't remember the name of the committee, but it had to do with some, you know, it had to do with the sex matters, which is, seems to be what everybody's preoccupied with throughout my lifetime. And, you know, I just, I just became so bitter. And my own church that I went to in Nebraska was actually quite reasonable and sound, but just the sort of spiritual bitterness that I was feeling, and it became a kind of intolerable basis for religious life. You can't—anger really is not, is not a healthy basis, not a sound basis for religious life. And so I kind of collapsed into the Catholic Church more than chose it.
I think the argument I was making in In the Ruins of the Church—I’m very much influenced by Ephraim Radner, an Anglican theologian who teaches at Wycliffe College. And so I had, as I said, I had no illusions about Catholicism. I think I’d also written about how Catholicism is implicated in the same, it's implicated in the same theological atmosphere that's brought all these trials and tribulations to mainline Protestantism. So, you know, becoming Catholic was just descending to the prime substance of Christianity in the West. And so I don't think it falsifies the argument. Because I don’t I think I converted—I didn't examine Catholicism and say, “Oh, now I've come to see that Protestantism is doctrinally erroneous and the Catholic church possesses the true doctrines.” It was a much more, as I say, a kind of much more primitive thought pattern on my part. It was, you know, it was more, when you feel that you've been abandoned, or that you're lost, where's home base?
And I think my Protestant friends would agree that the Church of Rome is the prime substance of Christianity in the West. And so you go back to the source.
Ryan:
Now, though, there are circles, maybe, you know, that are not as fringe as they used to be within the Catholic Church, who talk about the possibility of a coming schism in order to remain faithful. Do you think there's a kind of, is there a sequel to that book, or a kind of Catholic rebranding that's how that might be in the future?
Rusty:
That's a great question. It is similar. I wrote an article called “Theology in the Ruins of the Church,” and in that article, I argued—it was based on research I had done in ecclesiology and the debate about the one, true Church that emerges after reformation. And I came to be more and more convinced that the theological superstructure of both Protestantism and Catholicism is organized around a kind of polemical relation between the two strands, so to speak, and that the 20th century ecumenical movement had in the loss of confidence that Catholics or Protestants have in the old, really hard-core exclusive times, was going to undermine the plausibility structures for both Catholicism and Protestantism. And that the effect of that would be to make the religious life of Christians in the West, the language I use would be more primitive, and it forces us back. It makes our theology plausible, less stable, and forces us down to the fundamental language of scripture.
And again, I'm influenced by Ephraim Radner, who sees the end of the church (using scare quotes for “end of the church”) as a blessing and not a curse, or as a kind of severe grace that God gives to Christianity and the late modern West to drive us back to the real foundation of the apostolic faith.
So I think some kind of sequel could be written. Yes. Yeah. And as I said, when I interrupted you when you asked the question, that teaching at Creighton university, a Jesuit school, I taught there from 1990 to 2010, and I had no, I had no illusions about the Catholic Church, and also the clerical abuse crisis predated my entry into the church. And that crisis also was not a shock to me, given what I knew about what went on in clerical circles. Yes. It's a treasure in very earthen vessels.
Ryan:
Also around the time of your conversion, you co-wrote an excellent book. It was kind of in the vanguard of renewal of pre-modern or pre-critical spiritual interpretation of the Bible. It's called Sanctified Vision: An introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible. That book was actually, it played a critical role for me. I read it in, I think actually a few weeks before I began my PhD program in literature. And it was one of the major factors that nudged me in the direction of focusing on spiritual exegesis in my dissertation, which became my first book. And now you're the editor of the Brazos Theological Commentaries on Scripture series. So comparing the present day to, say, your PhD years at Yale: how would you compare the place of biblical studies in modern theology and the status of theological exegesis in biblical studies?
Rusty:
When I was preparing for, to watch the Brazos series, I went back and read some of the books that influenced me in grad school, William Temple on the Gospel of John, Austin Farrer's interpretation of Saint Matthew and Saint Mark, and Brevard Childs [inaudible]. It doesn't really come to my mind. And I was really struck by the way Childs preserved the kind of high modern, you know, working out the philological complexities. [Inaudible] And then he would have a final section on theological interpretation, set apart. And you know, my work on the church fathers, with my colleague John O’Keefe, had made me really aware of how alien this kind of segmentation of the theological moment was from classical, pre-modern interpretation of the Bible. I mean, it's alien to contemporary preaching. Nothing is more deadly than a sermon that kind of lays out the several critical issues and then pivots to theological meaning.
The idea behind the series was to get theological writers to write about the Bible and not biblical scholars to talk about theology. The impulse there or the objective there was both to get fresh eyes—they could break out of it. I mean, Charles, his commentary was very early. I think it was in the early seventies and was, I think, groundbreaking to even consider that material for a high eminent scholar like him. And he really was a great figure. He was a grad professor when I was in grad school. The kind of person very much encouraging further development of theological voice in the interpretation of scripture. But it was just to get non-biblical scholars, because, you know, the socialization in graduate study of the Bible is extremely strong and very hard to break out of that. But also it was to force theologians to actually read the Bible and take responsibility for commentary, which has always been a key element of theological vocation until the modern era.
So we theologians, post-liberal theologians, as we called ourselves at Yale in the eighties when I was doing my graduate study, we were all full of our criticisms of modern historical criticism. We had an our critiques of liberal theology, but we wouldn't step up to the plate and actually do the work. We would theorize why it was necessary, but we wouldn’t actually do it. And I hope that one fruit of the Brazos would be a renewed competence among theologians as commentators. I think we've succeeded in that regard. A lot of my friends who have written commentaries, and I could report on my own. I wrote the commentary on Genesis. As Ethan Radner said, the Bible humiliates you, because there's always more to say and you're not up to it. And I found that I learned a tremendous amount, and I don't mean facts. It was the theological education, and many concepts and theological moves that I was well versed in from my own training came alive in a way that it became alive as instruments of interpretation in a way that was quite enriching.
Ryan:
So maybe that's a hint at my next question, which is what's the connection, if there is one, between your engagement with biblical hermeneutics and your other abiding consideration of the tensions between the individual and the community?
Rusty:
You know, Bruce Marshall likes to tease me about how I'm a kind of a handyman academic, a utility infielder, you know, I shortstopped for awhile, a little bit out there in left field. It's not really clear how I wrote a book on the atonement, a kind of quirky, weird book on the doctrine of the atonement that, I mean, I could give you probably some strained effort, some strained account at how that's connected to my interest in biblical exegesis. Probably the most the linkages are actually latent in David Dawson's book on figural interpretation of the Bible, the fashioning of Christian identity.
But you know, because I have a bit of a restless personality, I don't tarry in it long enough to make the connections myself. So I would describe myself as a—Bruce Marshall, like I said, he teases me and says, you're not really a scholar. Because a scholar would put in the time to sort of tie these things together. And I'm too restless to do that. I'm probably cut out to write a column magazine more than monographs for the library.
Ryan:
Classic fox, right? Fox versus hedgehog.
Rusty:
Yeah. To go back to that. The atonement book, there's a lot of, if you read Kant, religion within the limits of reasonable law, and the Kantian tradition in general, the problem with heteronomy is the driving problem in Kant's philosophy. And I think it describes what is the existential anxiety of modernity. And it's the anxiety that we’re under the thumb of something that's fundamentally alien to us, and we serve a master that doesn't have our interests at heart, whether it is the monarch with his absolute authority or whether it's morality that's ultimately going to make our lives artificial.
I mean, I could go on and on, different instances in the modern era, and I don't know when it happened, but sometime early in my career as a teacher, I became more and more aware that my students were not fearful of being dominated as they were fearful of being kind of lost or dispersed or in some way undone. And so they were cautious rather than—it wasn't like they had had this Emersonian ambition that was ready to burst out, but rather that they were cautious and self protective against something. It wasn't a power from above. It was just, you know, Nietzsche talks about, you know, nihilism as the end point for modernity and nihilism as a thread of a kind of vacuum where you get torn apart by the vacuum, rather than crushed by the Greek power force, the singular power source.
Anyway, I'm kind of babbling on. And so the book on atonement grapples with that. The doctrine of atonement is not just about our dependence upon God's grace to escape from dominion from sin, but also the role of Christ on the cross as the bridge, so to speak, between the old man and the new man. Aristotle once said, no man would accept the world for the sake of being another person, if it cost being another person. And I think that there's a danger we feel in our time, not that I'm being dictated to, but that the moral demands of Christianity stretch us to the point of breaking, and how do we endure any kind of moral, any kind of strong moral demand. How can you actually survive it?
That's very different from the question of, is it really mine? And that's the old heteronomy question. Is it really mine? And this new one, which I think is more of a postmodern question, is, you know, how can I survive? And reading, interpretation is you build a house of interpretation. You know, Origen’s very beautiful; in his descriptions he uses the image of the house of interpretation. Or it's in Descartes’ discourse on [inaudible] house of knowledge.
And so you build it; you are, you're weaving, if you will, garments that you can then put on. And so this kind of interpretive exercise of let me—I think George Lindbeck said it in The Nature of Doctrine—that for classical Christian theology, the text absorbs the world rather than the world absorbing the text. And so the textual identity becomes a constant, so to speak, even as we anguish about our own pilgrimage from sin into sanctity. So I try to make the connection.
Ryan:
So in the conclusion of your dissertation you wrote, “The Christian language of faith caused the believer to challenge the present community with a vision nurtured by the individual's relationship to God.”
Rusty:
Yeah, I think that my dissertation was over determined by the Kantian concern about heteronomy. And so that was, it was, you know, I was, what was I reading? Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, all kinds of stuff in political, moral philosophy that revolve around that classic modern problem. And so I think my dissertation, I remember David Kelsey, who read it, said it was adequate but it ultimately failed. And I said, well, thanks. And he said, the real topic that you're interested in is transcendence. I mean, I do a double take. What, what are you talking about? And I went back and reread it, and said, yes, he's correct.
Transcendence is really about stretching, right? And then that's my point about—the greater the promise of transcendence, the more fearful we are that we're going to snap as we stretch the cord that connects us, past to present to future, old man to new man, We'll break. We'll snap. And that's a very different question than the one of like, who is transcendence. Right? Who's telling me what my goal is. That's the heteronomy question. Whereas the other question is, you know, how can we seek on and not die? That's the, that's kind of Old Testament. It's actually Moses on Mount Sinai. You cannot see God and live, but in the Book of Job, Job's sees God and yet lives. And that reflects this deep, biblical, I think—it's the textual way. It's the Bible's way of conveying to us the grandeur of the promise of redemption, and also it's fearfulness, that it really is more than we can bear. So what I did is I revised this dissertation as my first book, The Ordinary Transformed, in that cap, the title captures what I see as the Christian promise, which is that our final destiny is not natural. It is supernatural, but as Saint Thomas says, grace is not destroyed, but transformed nature.
Ryan:
So yeah, one question I had for you is…
Rusty:
Do you think that this a failed dissertation?
Ryan:
Every dissertation is a failure.
Rusty:
Sometimes you have to write something to figure out what it is that you really think. I was anguishing about this, and my dissertation director said that, you now, the best dissertation is a completed dissertation. Make your first book the thing that you really thought about.
Ryan:
Yeah, exactly. That's good advice.
So why do you think the natured grace debate in the American context happened when it did?
Rusty:
What do you mean?
Ryan:
Well, so the debate over the natural desire to see God.
Rusty:
Sort of mid 20th century, maybe triggered by Henri de Lubac…
Ryan:
Right, but then this resurgence, in the early 2000s, of the argument…
Rusty:
Steve Long was probably leading the charge on that.
Ryan:
Yup. And John Milbank, you know, on one side, and the sort of extreme de Lubacean side.
Rusty:
So if you have de Lubac, and you are being formed in early 20th century Catholicism, as it was, which seemed to have, I mean, it had a tremendous Latin mass, high ritual, a kind of severe French asceticism, that it seemed to have all of the wonderful promise of transcendence. But at the end of the day, kind of disconnected from reality. And so his book, Surnaturel, which argued for the legitimacy of this natural desire for God, is that it has within it a desire for the supernatural and not just, you know, a natural knowledge of God. It was an attempt to restore the promise of the Gospel, which is that we are resurrected in our bodies, that this life, [inaudible] of the creative order, it has a role in final, in God's final act.
Okay. So, all right, good. Right. Probably needed at the time. Now let's fast forward, Second Vatican Council, strong emphasis on the imminent, strong emphasis on the horizontal, the communion, the social. Strong affirmations in Guadium et Spes on the shared human quest for God. Bleaching out the distinctive, potentially bleaching out the distinctive claims of Christianity. A liturgy that's, that tends to be very flat and demotic and lacks that transcendent push. And so you get people reengaged in the question of nature and grace, moving in exactly the opposite direction, that de Lubac said you don't even need to try to recover the strong, transcendent thrust of Christianity, as well as the pure, the indispensable particularities of Christ as Redeemer. So Dominus Iesus, the Vatican document about pushing back against the interreligious approach that will tend towards the one God, many paths approach, corresponds with this theological, much more technical debate about the natural desire for God and the nature of grace question.
Ryan:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Right. Let's transition to rock climbing. It's not as well known that you are a very accomplished rock climber. And in the mid-eighties, you're one of the people putting up new roots in Yosemite. You were a bum for awhile. Like how do you get from the days of—well, actually, let me do that one at the end. Let me start with this. You took a fairly legendary fall. It's like, I've come across this multiple times on internet forums, where, you know, some of people will just be talking about falls and someone will say, well, Rusty Reno fell 200 feet in 1986, or whatever it was. And so how far did you actually fall?
Rusty:
That was, let's see, what year was that? That was to do a second set of the Jolly Roger, which is a route on El Capitan that the year before had been put up by Charles Cole and Steve Grossman, two friends of mine. And they were very proud of this route, and they thought it was very demanding. You know, A5 copperheading—the two key pitches in the middle were pretty hairball, A5 copperheading in a seam. And I was a very accomplished climber at that point.
And so I teamed up with Alex Lowe to do the Jolly Roger. The second side of the Jolly Roger. And I was very nervous, you know, was I in grad school? No, this was the year before I went to grad school. So it must have been summer, by June of 1984. And I was very anxious about this 5.11 off ledge that was about five or six pitches up. So I arranged with Alex that he would lead the offwidth pitch and he’d swing leads. I made it so that—because he led the offwidth pitch, which turned out to be easier than the 5.11, by the way. And it was vastly and overrated. So then I would lead the next pitch, which is probably about a thousand feet off up at this point, or maybe 750 feet off the ground. I would lead the next pitch, which was Steve Grossman had led, which had a hundred foot runout that culminated in a 5.8 mantle, after which you would clip the first bolt and then move to booking, which then we could ultimately get you to some hairball copperheading scene.
And I, it was a big chickenhead wall, so it was very steep, but very easy, but the chickenheads ran out, and that's when you had to do the mantle. And here I am, a hundred feet above the belay, being belayed by one of the best free climbers in the United States at that point, who should have been in the lead. Because I was coming—I hadn’t done a lot of climbing, so I was not in my best form. And any way, you know, I tried to press out the mantle a couple of times and backed off, and pressed out, back off. And I just said, oh, come on. It's only 5.8. Well, subsequently, evidently, Steve Grossman was a notorious sandbagger. And also a person with, uh, yes, iron testicles. And so I committed to the mantle and I popped it off. Pop, pop, pop. And then, so I fell 200 feet.
Ryan:
200 feet. Wow. Who was there? Was there a swing involved?
Rusty:
Yeah, just pulling at the bottom. I was pretty beat up when all was said and done. I was gonna go back up to the belay. I mean, it knocked the wind out of me. And it turned out that I broke my tailbone when I was hitting things as I was swinging. But I jumared back up to the, after I caught my breath, got my breath back, I jumared back up to the ledge where Alex was. And, I said, “Oh man, you're going to have to lead this one. I think I'm going to be okay.” He looked at me and said—‘cause that summer before he'd been on an Alaskan and taken a huge fall, comparable, at least in distance. And he said, “You're not going to be able to walk in 30 minutes. We got to go down right now.”
I think it was, I barely got to the base for [inaudible]. And it took me like 45 minutes to walk or an hour to walk back to the car, because your body's just saturated with, you know, the adrenaline and you're beat up from hitting all these things on the way down.
Ryan:
What kind of harness were you wearing?
Rusty:
You know, whatever, some regular harness. That wasn't a factor.
Ryan:
And did you fall directly onto Alex’s belay?
Rusty:
Yes.
Ryan:
He caught you directly without any intervening protection?
Rusty:
Well, there was a pendulum from the belay over the chickenheads. So there was a bolt just off the, off the ledge, from the ledge. And you know, of course he got dragged across the ledge and he was himself kinda cut up, because, you know, “Who's gonna fall 200 feet?” So you don't actually prepare for it as a belayer.
Ryan:
Well, I think, I mean, a lot of people think that that might be the longest fall.
Rusty:
Oh, I don't know. Jim Bridwell told me that when he was doing the Cerro Torre, he was tied in, he didn't realize he wasn’t clipped to the belay, and he ended falling the whole length of the rope. So 150 feet, around 165 feet. I mean, at some point, you reach terminal velocity really, basically, after the first 30 feet. So, whether you fall 30 feet or 200 feet, your impact is pretty much the same. It's, you know, there are things you hit on the way that you need to worry about. But I've taken long falls, not 200 feet, but I've certainly fallen 80, 100 feet.
Ryan:
So climbing has changed. Climbing has changed a lot since then. some climbers lament the transformation of the American Alpine club from an elite association of heroic explorers into just another Access Fund for the support of sport climbing and the diminution of goals and scope from the big walls of Yosemite or the Himalayas down to single pitch routes, to bouldering, to indoor climbing gyms, and finally to the MoonBoard, which reduces global endeavor to a set of about a hundred holds reproduced identically in an app on tens of thousands of phones, you know, in the world.
But it would seem that local chapters of the Access Fund, with their, or even climbing gyms, with their concern for local places, local communities, strong land use borders, it would seem that they're prime examples of solidarity and active vigilance, while alpinism, especially in the fast and light style, valorizes the breaking down of boundaries and limits by the solo individual. These are both—each is an impetus that you seem to value. The former, you know, in the political sphere, and the latter within climbing itself. Which do you find yourself gravitating towards? Or how does that tension sit with you?
Rusty:
I mean the Alpine club, I mean, it evolved out of necessity. When it moved to golden, that was a key move away from that sort of lost, you know, Canadian Rockies, Swiss Alps, sponsored expeditions organization into an organization that was sort of the wider climbing community. And I think it's been successful in that regard. And so it's not, it's not the place… I mean, Jim McCarthy was probably the last cutting-edge climber to be a player in the Alpine Club. And he was one of the great Gunks climbers in the sixties, and he was a Wall Street guy, and so on. And, you know, climbing changed in the sixties, you know, in the seventies, with the young bucks, young kids, it's who actually were [inaudible], and it became a sort of free-spirit activity rather than a clubby activity.
And then the role of the club became to really provide the infrastructure of support so that people can engage in this at all these different levels. I think the Access Fund has been hugely important, actually in the last 30 years, for both preserving areas’ accessibility as well as opening new areas up.
And yeah, the idea that, you know, this sport has just been reduced to climbing gyms is absurd. There are guys doing really extraordinary things all over the world, in the most extreme circumstances, taking, you know, really embarking on incredible adventures. I really admire them. You know, it's beyond my imagination, the sort of things they are doing, and that's part of, it's part of the nature of the sport. I was doing things in the late nineties—I don't think that, you know, Layton Kor, who I climbed with, actually, at one point—he, copperheading, you know, 85 copperheading was just beyond his imagination. So I was doing things in the late seventies that he would have gone, “Wow, that's so cool! But I just can't imagine it.” And now at age 60, I meet young kids that are, you know, doing, you know, freeing roots on El Capitan and things like that, that I just have to shake my head and think, wow.
I did the Dawn Wall in 1982, or 3, or 1? I can't remember when. With my friend Charles Cole. And I have not watched a movie where Tommy Caldwell does the first free ascent, but I mean, I've been there so I don't need to watch the movie. Look, I don't even have to see the movie to be able to just shake my head and go, wow. I clipped the rivet ladders. I climbed the rivet ladders that go across this huge blank part of a wall. And it's just beyond my imagination to think that you could free climb anywhere on that more-than-vertical blank face. So I'm in awe of these guys. I think the notion that the sport has become domesticated is absurd.
Ryan:
So do you also admire the climbing-gym communities as fraternal organizations? I mean, this is, you know, in your more political work, you lament the loss of fraternal organizations, clubs. And now it seems like climbing gyms, and various other kinds of gyms, yoga studios, are generating the kind of community, that kind of social glue that the Elks Club, for example, used to use to produce. What do you think about that?
Rusty:
Yeah, I mean, communities are, I mean, if people are going to, you know, work out on an elliptical machines, I don't see any community there. A sort of good, warm, fellow feeling can develop. I mean, community develops when you're united [inaudible]. And so there are goals, these goal-oriented activities that have traditions, that have shared objectives, shared standards of evaluating people's—they have hierarchies within them. These are genuine communities, and the climbing community is appropriately described as a community, in a way that, I would say, I don't know that, you know, the drug sales rep community is a kind of ersatz community. I mean, I shouldn't be—my impression would be. And so, I think the climbing gyms obviously now function as nodes within the community, where people meet, find people of comparable level of ability and ambition, and then get inspiration and encouragement, role models, teachers, and it perpetuates the community, then it's a key node in the community’s self-perpetuation.
I think they're good. You know, I find them dreadfully [inaudible]. I mean, I'm scheduled to go to—mine reopened a couple of days ago. I have to schedule now. So I’m scheduled to go tomorrow morning. I will put my two hours in, because if I go to the climbing gym—I was just out in Washington doing a Climbing Index Town Wall with a friend of mine. And my, you know, like, I was just barely getting from hold to hold, because my fingers were so weak, I don't have any juju in the fingers to do the hard roots.
And say that you got to go to the gym to just work on your basic finger strength, and then it makes the outdoor climbing more enjoyable and more, you have more range as an outdoor climber. Other people though that I climb with at the gym, it's really what they do. I mean, it's their sole arena, and they, for them, it's a kind of gymnastic—they lead in the gym. I never quite understood that. I mean, some friends would want me to go, “Let's do some lead climbing today.” It’s like whatever, I'll do whatever you want. Don't you want to work on your lead climbing? And I said, look, it's not something that I need to work on. I've done that enough. I don't need to practice lead climbing.
So, you know, you do enough of it. I mean, if I'm feeling strong, I can do crux move 20 feet out from the gear. Starting when I was 25 years old, you know, I did a lot of free soloing to train myself to be able to stay cool under stress. You know, in other words, just to maintain your cool and to be able to move deliberately. And so it was probably when I was at 25, 26 in grad school that I kind of made that, I trained myself in that way. And then I became very confident leading, you know, well above my gear. That doesn't go away. I was always the guy that, my friends, I would visit, and they would save up the routes that have the 80-foot runout to the [inaudible]… five-nine, that are 150 feet long with one bolt in the middle. And so it was, okay, Rusty's in town—we can go do those routes! I've always, after that point, I could climb confidently, you know, well above my gear,
Ryan:
So, in Free Solo, the movie that documents…
Rusty:
I have seen that one.
Ryan:
Okay. So he is more freaked out by the freeblast, those lower 5.11 slab pitches then he is, seemingly, by the, you know, the boulder problem up above. Should he have been—is this a generational thing? I mean, you're a slab master.
Rusty:
I've done the free blast a couple of times, but I did the [inaudible] wall as a [inaudible] climb in 1978, to show you how old I am. And then in the eighties, I mean, I think I did it once in the nineties as well. I did the free blast, and those are hard moments. I mean, they are negligible, you know, there's nothing it's, you're not, there's nothing to hold onto. You're doing a kind of classic slab climbing move, and 5.11 slab is tenuous. It's the nature of the beast.
And I would regard, whereas guys like Honnold who are, if, when I would do, in my prime, when I would do climbs with my friend Charles, we would only take one large cam for multi-pitch routes, on the theory that, if we could get our hand into the crack, we didn't need protection. So, you'd have one fist-sized, or hand-sized, cam. So when I did [inaudible], we took one cam that was hand sized, and it's got a 300-foot section of hand crack at the top. And Charles, you know, walked it up for 150 feet, left it, and then did the final 150 feet. And the theory is if you’re as strong as Honnold, if he can get his hands in the crack, he ain't falling. And if he can get his fingers on a hole, he's not falling. Slab climbing—ooh! And he did at night! When he backed off, and he grabbed the bolt. I’m thinking, “aaah!”
So that's my point about how the notion that climbing has been domesticated and the adventure has been drive driven out of it by gyms—that is ridiculous. What an accomplishment that was, that was documented in that film. And I mean, I'm just in awe.
Ryan:
And he was a total gym rat, you know, that's how he got there, originally.
Okay. So, well, let's see, in the interest of time, I'm going to skip a couple of things. Well, so maybe to then back out of this climbing section, how, how did you go from being a, you know, a Yosemite climbing bum to PhD student at Yale? What was the transition?
Rusty:
I was, it’s funny, you know, providence puts the strangest book in our hands at the right moments, you know. And when I went to Yosemite for an indefinite stay at age 18, I had in my backpack copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. And in that novel, Hans Castorp, the main character, he goes for a visit and, you know, kind of like gets sucked into this world away from the world, a kind of vacation from life, really. And you know, after a couple of months, I realize, Rusty–I mean, I spent the better part of a year there, but I was aware that, you know, you have to actually, you can't be on vacation all your life. And that climbing was fantastic recreation, but it's not a vocation. At least it wasn't for me. And so I went back to college, and I fell in love with theology. And then off I went to grad school. I mean, it was a little more rocky-road than that, but you know what I mean. Once I got moving intellectually, that became what I really cared about.
So for me, climbing, it was true in grad school. Climbing—although that was independent. I would say once I started as a professor, rock climbing is wonderful because you can't think about work. I mean, because it, you know, the amount of danger associated with rock climbing, it engages your entire cognitive function. And so you are—you’re not distracted because you're engaged in an activity that you enjoy, but there's this free, thick, and impermeable wall around you, and all of the thoughts about the emails that you haven't answered, the phone calls you need to make, or the article that you need to write cannot get inside through those impermeable laws. So it's a wonderful opportunity to relax. So it's paradoxical. I do most of the leading when I climb, and I tell my partners it’s because when I'm in the lead is when I'm at my most relaxed.
Ryan:
So in a way it seems you've come full circle, or completed maybe a revolution of a spiral, between your dissertation and your most recent book, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism and the Future of the West. Except in Return of the Strong Gods, the emphasis is on the community challenging the individual, rather than vice versa. So how would you, I mean, you already said that you saw that original dissertation as a kind of failed project, but, like, how do you get from point A to point B?
Rusty:
The dissertation, like I said, it was very—I was overly overdetermined by this modern problem of heteronomy. But I've come back to that problem. And what I've come to see is that the danger of heteronomy, or the danger that we've become slaves to, you know, the worldly idols—I give the hearth gods, in the book I wrote on the resurrection of the idea of the Christian society, of health, wealth and pleasure—is that we become enslaved when we don't have a firm place to stand. And so it's vulnerability, not heteronomy, that's the greatest threat to freedom. So how do we, and in the Strong Gods book, it's really the intensity of our loves and the depths of our loyalties that give us, that stiffen our spine and allow us to say no to the worldly powers that want to put us under their heel, want to put their boots on our neck.
So the typical approach for a younger person going to college, even to this very day, but certainly when I was a young student, was, those worldly powers will have a boot on your neck, and you free yourself by critiquing them. And I have come to see that, paradoxically, as the critical thinking or critical discourse has become more widespread and more powerful, and in some respects even more insightful, people are more, not less, beholden to, you know, what I call the sort of captivity to the resume. Or captivity to this carefully scripted step from high school, to college, to internship, to job. And this anxiety, if you ever go off script, you're never going to be able to recover. And that kind of limitation on freedom is not because of a failure to critique worldly powers. It's because people have less and less of a firm place to stand in the world.
And also part of it was teaching over the years, teaching Saint Augustine's City of God, or, I mean, his Confessions, over and over and over again. I probably taught that 15 or 20 times as a professor. And I learned from St. Augustine that false loves can only be cured by true loves, stronger loves. And because, you know, in his Confessions, he recognizes that, he becomes a monotheist. He wants to become a Christian. And there's that great passage where he passes the drunk in the streets, and “He's more free than I am, because I'm enslaved to my career, in effect, as a rhetorician, and my status and my place in the world, where at least this person is free to follow this self-destructive, hedonic desire.” And why can't he move? And he's got all these images, he's in chains, and he's rolling, and he's twisting and turning around and around and around. And it's really only in the garden, when he's smitten by a greater love, that he’s able to actually break the chains that hold him in bondage.
And so you can critique and critique and critique, but you're still going to be in bondage unless you have a more powerful, animating love. And the part of the book is to say that most loves have a civic, cultural dimension, and not just a religious, spiritual dimension. And that there's an order to our loves. And the highest level ought to be God. But we get tutored in this love—we’re provided a kind of thick sense of who we really are, over and against a world that's often hostile and does want to put us under its dominion. That we received that from multiple sources, and they've all been weakened and the 20th century. And that my interpretation of our distempers, political distempers of 2020, which are, as we know, those distempers are very much on view in the streets of many cities, stems from a rebellion against this infinitely liquid world without strong loves.
Ryan:
Liberal economists such as Tyler Cowen are interpreting the COVID-19 pandemic as a major reversal for the open society. The EU has been startled awake from a dream of a borderless union to the reality of borders that are too weak to contain the pandemic. Trump's January 31st travel ban on China was at first decried as xenophobic by the same critics who now say he did too little too late. If we're witnessing a durable turn away from open-society globalization, COVID-19 would seem to vindicate defenders of borders and national interests. So why isn't this a victory for the discontents of the open society?
Rusty:
It could precipitate rethinking, but in itself the pandemic has brought into focus—it's driven by fear, not love. So we fear dying, and rightfully so. I mean, it's not an irrational fear. So we’re sickness and death, and so we mobilized the societies to fend off this threat. That's very different from consolidation ordered around shared loves and affirmations. And I think fear can be very dangerous because it really will—at some point, you know, we talk about defeating the virus. I don't like that language, with respect to nature, although it's understandable. But fear can lead to aggression, whereas I think love, a kind of anti-globalization based on love of one's homeland, love of one's culture and civilization is potentially much more, is much more open, in the good sense, then one based in fear.
Ryan:
Isn't Asclepius, the God of public health, a strong God? I mean, it seems surely he is, if he can bring the world economy to a standstill. And while this strong God inspires fear, he also inspires solidarity. In fact, fear can be one of the great enabling passions of solidarity. So how do you distinguish Asclepius from the strong gods of, say, truth and nation, that take a prominent place in your book?
Rusty:
I don't think health is a strong God. I think it's a, it's like, I mean, look, wealth is a strong god too, at some level. I mean, greed is a powerful, powerful emotion that can insight in people extraordinary sacrifices. And health is equally strong in that regard. But I think it's thin, right? You know, what does it demand of our soul? You know, and once the danger passes, we go back to normal. So yes, it can evoke solidarity, insofar as we are concerned for the safety of others, certainly, but it's double edged, which is that in this pandemic, the other is threat. The other is an enemy. It was very hobbesian in here, in New York, in April of this last spring, when the virus was kind of at its hottest, so to speak, and people were very fearful. And so human encounters were fraught with threat of death and danger. And that's an enemy of solidarity.
Even if you can make—just like greed as an enemy of solidarity. Look, you can have very strong partnerships in pursuit of profit, right? I mean, Aristotle recognizes that there are friendships of utility, and those are not false friendships, but they're very easily broken when these interests of utility begin to diverge. And I think this is true for the God of health, right? We're all in this together until the sick person actually comes into my home. Or, you know, and I think—yeah, I mean, it's in contrast to truth, which is enhanced by being shared, so that there's no diminution—my wealth is diminished if I have to share it with others. My net worth is cut in half if I have to share it. But if I have to share with my students truth, that community is actually, enhances my possession of it, true enjoyment of it, my knowledge of it. Teaching is when I first really, actually learned things. I learned things in grad school, but I didn't really know them until I had to teach them. And so the sharing of truth, beauty, goodness, these, the sharing of one's own national heritage, sharing of your family, you share your family heritage with your children—those are all, all of that, that's the kind of solidarity that's not one of utility but rather of love.
Ryan:
Here's a question from a colleague who's a reader of yours. Why is a strong personalist, pluralist, democratic state, not a possibility? This would be a state that prizes individual rights, but also thick institutional, communal, and societal connections. Why must we give into the false choice that the 20th century has given us between individualism and pure Trumpian populism?
Rusty:
Yeah, I mean, let's just keep Trump out of it. Because it seems to me that, of course, isn't that what we want. Isn't that what you want for your children? You want your children to flourish as individuals. And at the same time, you hope that they remain firmly part of an family. And we don't tend to see these at odds with each other. We tend to think that insofar I provide my child with a warm and loving home, it's clear, it has a kind of clear, we are who we are, that that will be the foundation on which they'll actually develop this kind of strength to pursue their muse, to follow their dreams.
And so, similarly, I think this is what we ought to be aiming at in a civic culture is that… It goes back to what I said about freedom: my own view of freedom is that the greatest threat to freedom is fear, not heteronomy. And that, you know, I'm always shocked by young people, talented young people that go to very prestigious universities that feel like they have too many choices. What are you talking about? All the world's at your fingertips, but they're fearful that they'll miss out on the internship. They're fearful that they somehow will be economically vulnerable. You know, people don't get married. Why don’t they get married? It's always, it’s not quite the right time. It’s not a good time to get married in my life. And my lines is always, “There's never a good time to get married.” So you might as well get married now. And plus, there's no risk. I mean, there is a risk, but there is no risk, at some level.
So I think it's a false dichotomy between liberalism as an ethos, the liberal society, the [inaudible] of a liberal society, and the kind of thicker sense of communal identity that I think we all crave. The problem is a that liberalism, as a theory, is wedded to this older, modern notion that heteronomy is the greatest threat. And so it devotes a huge amount of its conceptual energy to minimizing the authority of communal norms and empowering the individual.
I think we live in a post-liquid, postmodern liquid age. Where the greatest threat to freedom is the, just the lack of any from place to stand. So reconsolidation would actually promote a culture of freedom. What it has to do with Trump and populism? I mean, I think that it's important not to over theorize domestic, partisan politics. I think we should, we, as intellectuals, should think about these larger questions. And our domestic politics definitely fits into them, but they are, they fit into these frameworks, but the framework, but the partisan politics itself is so messy, and it’s so deeply characterized by the immediate exigencies of winning elections, that I would say beware of overinterpreting.
Ryan:
Well, Rusty Reno, thank you very much for your time.
Rusty:
Pleasure.