Ralph Lerner is a man of rare learning, biting wit, and deep thought. His virtues are well known to generations of students and colleagues at the University of Chicago, although he is not as prominent in the wider world as he deserves to be. The publication of this book should induce many more readers to experience Lerner’s virtues for themselves.
Naïve Readings‘ subtitle is characteristically Lernerian, for it induces one to ask what a reveille has in common with the work’s close and careful exegeses of eight rhetorical masters: three American statesmen (Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln), three modern authors (Bacon, Gibbon, Tocqueville), and two Jewish thinkers (Halevi, Maimonides). A reveille is a wake-up call—loud, not infrequently discordant, and often unwelcome. Lerner’s studies are subtle, melodic, and most welcome, the work of a gifted and often understated stylist. But they are emphatically wake-up calls for an age that has been taught the gospel of speed. Lerner teaches the virtue of patience: stop, slow down, and (especially) reflect.
The book presents a challenge. It tells you to read naïvely, to abandon presuppositions lest you substitute your fancy and folly for a superior author’s wisdom. So be moderate. Be cautious. Watch your step. It is easy to lose your way. But caution is not to be confused with aversion to risk. To mention but one thing, naïve reading, as Lerner presents it, demands that you open your mind to the possibility that a great writer may have exercised complete authorial command over every aspect of his chosen literary form—and as Lerner makes clear throughout, the form is a choice that has great consequences for both author and reader. So one must be willing to risk seeing things in a new light. To read naïvely is to read slowly. To reread. To question. To mull. To embrace confusion, in the recognition that it may be the residue of design:
Readers who undertake to approach a text naïvely must perforce commit themselves to acting against their normal impulses. . . . They must be willing to retrace their steps, to pause over irregularities, to attend to seemingly trivial repetitions or near-repetitions, to resist skimming over bland and boring passages—in short, to combat those natural inclinations we ordinarily have to move quickly to what we take to be the core of an argument.
It would be impossible, in this limited space, to provide a genuine sense of this book as a whole. Suffice it to say that each of the essays is a subtle and thoughtful discussion of its subject. Let me mention, however, two examples that capture something of the charm of Lerner’s manner of teaching. In his timely essay on Abraham Lincoln—a man he characterizes as “incapable, by temperament, from demonizing and playing the demagogue”—Lerner gives us a portrait of the great statesman endeavoring to weave together the “inspiring principle” of the Declaration of Independence with the overarching demands of political rhetoric and “public sentiment” while out of office. Such weaving meant compromise, but not on essentials. Lincoln needed to open his fellow citizens’ eyes to the evils of the cancer in their midst without running afoul of their prejudices.
So, at times, Lincoln seems resigned to a society in which blacks would be second-class citizens: “There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.” But that bow to the sensibility of resignation is far from the whole story. By Lerner’s account, the majesty of Lincoln’s statesmanship as an “outsider” consisted of his profound recognition of the transformative power of public opinion—a power that may even overcome what otherwise would “probably forever” prevail. According to Lincoln:
In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.
Lerner shows that it was Lincoln’s abiding concern, throughout his years out of office, to force his fellow citizens to reexamine, and thus reform, their own national self-understanding. He properly concludes that “not the least of Lincoln’s extraordinary political achievements was his success in making general an awareness of the problem of public opinion—his nurturing of an opinion about the signal importance of opinion.”
Then there is “Gibbon’s Jewish Problem,” which presents Lerner with a problem: how to deal with a great author who denigrates (in a manner unworthy of himself) a noble people that has too often been the victim of thoughtless scorn. To be sure, Lerner would not tarry with an author who would engage in thoughtless scorn, but what of thoughtful and rhetorically allusive scorn? In a subtle and nuanced reading of the self-styled “philosophic historian,” Lerner reveals how Gibbon, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, employed the Jews as a useful foil indirectly to criticize Christianity, of which he was no admirer and which could not, at that time, be subjected to frontal attack:
Gibbon almost apologizes for concluding that “the primitive fathers were very frequently calumniators” and for leading his readers to conclude that “our present gospels” are polemical works designed to oppose the Gnostics’ favorite tenets. . . . The larger point, however, is not to be missed. When we raise our eyes above the differing views of those early sectarians regarding the divinity or continuing obligation of the Mosaic law, we can see that “they were all equally animated by the same exclusive zeal, and by the same abhorrence for idolatry which had distinguished the Jews from the other nations of the ancient world.” In short, these warring Christians are no better than the Jews in their hateful unsocial zealotry. In some respects, they are even worse.
But what of Lerner’s Gibbon problem? Lerner clearly admires Gibbon, but he struggles to reconcile that admiration with his entirely reasonable disapproval of Gibbon’s embrace of a rhetoric that could (and would) be employed to render “Jews less than fully human.”
Lerner reaches a reconciliation—insofar as he can—in two ways. First, he draws attention to other elements of Gibbon’s writings and actions that point to a more thoroughgoing humanity: “In calling [the Jews] an unfortunate and unhappy people, the ‘philosophic historian’ displays more than a symptom of compassion.” The second way is by pointing beyond Gibbon to a contemporary “who had the vision and fortitude to declare openly an enlarged and liberal policy [beyond toleration] that he commended to the rest of mankind as worthy of imitation.” That would be George Washington.
These summaries don’t do justice to the richness of Lerner’s wonderful essays. But they should be enough to whet a reader’s taste for them, and for the rest of his elegant Readings.
Steven J. Lenzner is a Salvatori research fellow in political philosophy at Claremont McKenna College.
