Fr. Neuhaus' "While We're At It" column at the back of First Things each month is my favorite blog, even if it's on paper (yes, I know he has an actual blog too now). Curled up with the mag last night I found his post about Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. You may or may not know that some biographers have alleged something very unsavory about Carroll's personal life: based, for all I can tell, on the fact that the protagonist of his most famous novel is a little girl. (Indeed, have you noticed that all authors of children's classics are ipso facto suspect now: Carroll, Lewis, Barrie. . .because what normal person would be interested in children? Indeed I would never write a children's book now, because 20 years later everyone will say disgusting things about you. But that's another post.)
Writing about Dodgson biographer Morton M. Cohen, who emphatically defends Carroll against the spurious suspicions, Fr. N concludes:
I have not and do not intend to read all the books pushing conclusions to the contrary. I think--and in part I think because I prefer to think--that Cohen is right. It is a preference closely related to what used to be known as the virtue of charity.
That struck a chord with me because it seems that even (I'll resist writing "especially") among serious Christians, it seems an essential dimension of the virtue of charity --namely, the habit of mind that thinks the best of others-- has been lost. I'm not speaking of people occasionally falling short of a standard, as happens from time to time even among the best of us. I'm speaking of the loss of the standard itself -- countless times in the past year I've spoken with or read prominent Christians who said the classical Christian habit of thinking well of others was a prescription for willful naiveté and/or a threat to "truth" understood as "the right to know."
Examples abound, but I am thinking especially of a private email exchange I had last year with a prominent Catholic who passed along a particularly vicious rumor in the comment section of a blog --on a topic about which he couldn't possibly have had any personal knowledge. This person was gracious to me in our exchange, but strikingly tone-deaf to the idea that he had an obligation to protect the reputation of people and entities unless he had definitive proof of guilt and a compelling reason to pass true information along.
Well, blog comment boxes are notorious snake-pits, so perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised.. But Zadok has a post up giving a more substantive example relating to theological debate.
Calumny & detraction count as violations against the commandment against false witness, we should recall. And since Christian perfection lies not in the mere avoidance of sin, but in acquiring the habits of mind that were in Christ, the standard for believers with respect to other people's behavior and reputation is still: believe all the good you hear and only the evil that you see. This is not a defense of naiveté, but a defense of Truth.
