Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009

Father Richard John Neuhaus died this morning at the age of 72, following a long battle with complications from cancer.

Neuhaus was the founder, editor, and publisher of First Things, the flagship journal for Catholic neo-conservatism, and the only right-of-center magazine to which I have ever regularly subscribed. Neuhaus, a former Lutheran pastor who converted to Rome and was ordained as a priest, was an extraordinary writer. It was the quality of his prose that drew me to him many years ago, when my friend Steve gave me a copy of the wonderful Death on a Friday Afternoon. Steve was — and is — a strong evangelical conservative with latent Catholic tendencies, and he hoped to bring me “over to the dark side” by playing on my fondness for first-rate writing. “Death on a Friday Afternoon” is a book I have returned to again and again in recent Lents, and though I am too progressive in my politics to have much taste for most atonement theories, Neuhaus’ case for the efficaciousness of Christ’s suffering on the cross is as good as any I’ve read. (And I’ve read a lot on atonement theory, having worked on the subject for a year or two in graduate school.)

Neuhaus was a vigorous defender of the idea that faith was vital to how we participated in the struggle for the common good, a point he made in his earlier and very influential The Naked Public Square. His greatest wrath was reserved for those who tried to excise religious motivations from political discussions. He ridiculed the idea that any serious believer (be he or she Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or what-have-you) could so compartmentalize his or her life so that politics and faith had no influence upon each other. Our faith, Neuhaus reminded his readers again and again, shapes our world view — and we participate in public life based upon that world view. Respect and tolerance had their place (and Neuhaus proved it by having friends across the ideological and theological spectrum, including, famously, the radical Methodist Stanley Hauerwas), but respect and tolerance did not preclude the obligation to bring one’s own most deeply held convictions into the political sphere. Father Neuhaus was an influence on many important conservative Catholic voices, and was, without question, the priest closest to the upper echelons of the Bush Administration. George W. Bush called him simply “Father Richard”.

Neuhaus, partnering with Chuck Colson of Watergate fame, was a linchpin of the movement known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. A former Protestant, Neuhaus retained deep and abiding affection and respect for those churches not in communion with Rome. A keen culture warrior, Neuhaus was eager to overcome decades of distrust and hostility between conservative Catholics and right-wing Protestants. Some of his motive was political: American conservatism needed unity rather than division in the struggle against liberalism. Some of his motive was theological: like most serious Christians, the divisions in the body of Christ wounded and saddened him. ECT, as it is known, has been an important project, and has brought in moderates and progressives as well as traditionalists. In recent years, Neuhaus took an interest in Catholic-Mormon dialogue, and published several pieces in First Things sympathetic to the LDS movement.

I’ve pointed out before that influential conservatives seem to be dying off at a faster rate than influential liberals. Perhaps Father Neuhaus was not interested in living under an Obama Administration in which his intellectual heft will be far less significant than it has been in the past eight years. But his influence will be there; Obama’s comfort with religious rhetoric is greater than that of any Democratic president in memory (including the Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter). Some of that comfort may lie in the undeniable reality that we are more comfortable here, in the early 21st century, with public professions of faith than we were three decades ago. And some of the credit or the blame for that goes to Father Neuhaus, whose enormously influential magazine and books made the case, sometimes winsomely and sometimes harshly, that a public square without religion is incomplete, and naked.

When it came to politics, I agreed with Richard John Neuhaus at most about 10% of the time, but was and am an unceasing admirer of his prose. And though Auden later rejected the sentiment he expressed in his famous tribute to Yeats, I’ve always thought it right and accurate:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

And time will presumably pardon Richard Neuhaus, if pardon is indeed what he needs.

If one who has never read Neuhaus wanted to start, I’d recommend his short and lovely essay Born Towards Dying. It’s a story about his first battle, in the early 1990s, with cancer. But it’s also a meditation on dying, and how we ought to think about dying in a world so reluctant to contemplate the greatest physical certainty of all. Here’s an excerpt:

All philosophy begins in wonder, said the ancients. With exceptions, contemporary philosophy stops at wonder. We are told: don’t ask, don’t wonder, about what you cannot know for sure. But the most important things of everyday life we cannot know for sure. We cannot know them beyond all possibility of their turning out to be false. We order our loves and loyalties, we invest our years with meaning and our death with hope, not knowing for sure, beyond all reasonable doubt, whether we might not have gotten it wrong. What we need is a philosophy that enables us to speak truly, if not clearly, a wisdom that does not eliminate but comprehends our doubt.

Bold mine. RJ Neuhaus ordered his loves and his loyalties in hope, at peace with the prospect that he might well have gotten it wrong. I don’t know if he is in heaven, or if, as he and I both hoped, all souls eventually do find their home in union with the God who made them. But I’m grateful for the provocative, often infuriating, beauty of his prose and for this reminder that we live and die less in certainty than in wonder.