Further reflections on A Christmas Carol. 

Something else interesting about Marley’s ghost. Toward the end of the uncanny interview, Scrooge gets a vision of the afterlife – here is just the end of the vision:

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to his ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom he saw below, upon a doorstep. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.

What interests me about this passage is that Scrooge is being shown a picture of reality – of an essential aspect of human nature, of an essential part of the meaning of each person’s life. Scrooge’s life – the closing of his heart, the refusal to respond to reality emotionally and intellectually – represents a conscious denial of reality. He constructs his own reality, his world version, one that allows him to give in to his strategy to conquer his fears of being alone and abandoned. He mistakes his construction for reality itself, and thus cuts himself off from reality – which is to say, from the Good. The vision of people like Scrooge suffering regret and remorse because, having only one mortal life to realize their nature and having failed, they can no longer actualize what they were created to do, exposes his capitalist construction as false to the world. It is a vision of reality, from a negative point of view of having failed it. If we could all only have such a sublime vision of reality itself, of the Good itself! Well, we can, indirectly, through art. Almost all of my favorite works offer such a vision from some point of view.

    This raises another question. The book, a work of fiction, allows us to experience together with Scrooge the “proof” of a higher reality of which our world is only a part. Since within the confines of the work of fiction we know the world is meaningful and good, all doubt is taken from us. But if we are given the correct answer to the nature of reality, then our life becomes an intellectual matter. I took Kili to the dentist yesterday. He had a cavity that needed to be filled. It was a perfectly rational action. Science understands in great detail and perfection why cavities form. It thus serves as a firm basis for action – developing the tools and techniques to deal with a reality nearly completely understood. If we are given a key to all of reality as such, as is Scrooge through the vision and indeed the encounter with all the Christmas spirits, then acting becomes a no-brainer. As though you simply needed to say “4” to the problem of 2 + 2. If God appeared in the sky and compelled us to listen to the full Truth, we would all share one Truth and all act in ways that accord with this Truth.

   But that seems wrong. (It is what many Christian and also existentialist philosophers (e.g. Dreyfus and Kelly in All Things Shining) complain about when they criticize Plato and Aristotle). If evil is nothing but ignorance, then all we need is truth to be good. Our problem in this mortal life is ignorance; it is that we cannot know the Truth in the same way and with this same degree of assurance that dentists can understand cavities and what to do about them. Dickens through Marley almost seems to give us “the correct answer”:

 “Oh! Captive, bound and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know that ages of incessant labor, by immortal creatures, for this earth, must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed! Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness! Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunities misused!”

 There is, however, a vast gulf that separates the one kind of knowledge from the other. Where there is knowledge, there is no need for hope, faith, and love. And yet – at least in the Christian-Catholic world version – hope, faith, and love are the essential relations of the mortal creature to Truth, necessary for realizing the good that lies hidden in each of us. Knowledge can’t bypass these ‘theological virtues.’ All knowledge of the whole of reality must be mediated by hope, faith, and love – or it misses the mark. Hope, faith, and love are what philosophers like to call cognitive when it comes to metaphysical knowledge. It is through the heart and the imagination that Being reveals itself to mortals - not the cold, calculating intellect of a Scrooge. (Had Plato written philosophical treatises rather than dramatic dialogues, he would hardly be read today.) Pascal meant this perhaps when he wrote that "the heart has its reasons." It is not that such knowledge is less certain than the scientific knowledge and practice dentistry relies on, but it is less grounded in the material world. It requires the soul to transcend the everyday working world, the everyday world of the senses and indeed science (except at its outmost limits). Dickens can allow most people to do this better than Aquinas. I'm not knocking Aquinas. Aquinas helped me to understand Dickens and Dickens helped me to understand Aquinas. I need both to understand.

   Does this make the novel incoherent? Does the novel pretend to give us a knowledge of facts, substituting this for a knowledge grounded in hope, faith, and love? I don’t think so. Indeed, it is not certain that for Scrooge the whole story wasn’t a dream – a vision, like Dante’s. It is certainly more real than, say, the dream of the Wizard of Oz. But when Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning, and we with him, we are not positive that the whole thing wasn’t a true dream, a myth. Some faith and hope are required at this point to affirm it. After all, he was quite willing to reduce Marley to a bit of undigested beef earlier in the story; the same strategy lay open to him after he awakes on Christmas morning. And then Dickens explicitly puts the story in fairyland when he begins the narrative with: "once upon a time." And the whole knowledge awakens in the sympathetic reader a love of the world. Through love and love alone can we understand the story, and thus we are in the same position as Scrooge, who can only understand himself and the world through opening his heart to love – and thus joy.