Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part One

The most unfortunate (but also necessary) cut that Peter Jackson’s team made to the cinematic version of The Lord of the Rings is, without a doubt, the scouring of the Shire.  In Jackson’s version of the LOTR ending, Frodo and his companions return to the Shire one year after their journey began, all clad in the refinement of the outside world.  They are met at first with odd glances but seem to assimilate easily back into daily life (with the exception of Frodo).  In Tolkien’s novel, the hobbits return only to find that Saruman and his henchmen have made an industrial wasteland of the Shire, leaving Frodo and his companions to lead a rebellion to save the Shire.  The whole tale, on could say, was to prepare the halflings for this final, home-front battle.

That was, after all, what the hobbits had left the Shire for in the first place.  And while the length in space and time of their journey grew, their hearts were never far from home.  That’s why Sam tries to remind Frodo of so many good, small things as they attempt to climb Mount Doom . . . and why it is tragic that Frodo has lost such memories because they have been displaced by Sauron’s Eye.  And while Jackson tried to make nods to the scouring (as with the mirror of Galadriel scene), it was just too much for the end of an already-long movie.  So some things that should not be forgotten can be lost, depending on the medium and how you understand what is important in life. To have saved the world and lost the Shire would have been too much for our heroes.  Those were always the stakes; the novel just reminds us how very real those stakes were.

That thread from The Lord of the Rings is what comes to mind as I think about the first half of Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods.  It is a book about knowing what you are fighting for, especially when there are competing scopes of importance.  Radner suggests that the important things are the “mortal goods” of life, and that they are the things that proper politics should be about.  Over these next couple of weeks of “ordinary time,” the plan is to write through some of Radner’s points from the book’s first half, which is all about “the good life.”

Radner’s book begins with age, illness, and Covid, which had become something of a great equalizer for most of us.  He found himself wanting to write a letter to his children that would communicate “a sense of what makes life valuable.”  He calls these things “goods that are part and parcel of mortal life, the life God has given us and that, in a sense, must be who we are if we are not to be God.”  These things, Radner asserts, demand our tending, even if we don’t quite know how.  Radner acknowledges that for many people throughout history, the arena of politics has been a way of caring for such things, at least until recently, when the aim of politics seems to have changed greatly.  The book’s argument seems simple:

If “politics,” in a general way, refers to the deliberate judgments and decisions ordering our corporate existence, then our Christian calling is to limit our politics to the boundaries of our actual created lives and to the goods that stake out these limits: our births, our parents, our siblings, our families, our growing, our brief persistence in life, our raising of children, our relations, our decline, our deaths.  These mark the goods of our lives along with the acts that sustain these good, like toil and joy, suffering, prayer, and giving thanks.  Christian politics is aimed at no more and no less than the tending of these “mortal goods.”

It’s worth noting that Radner sees two kinds of “big picture” politics.  The first is normal politics, which he defines as “playing one’s role in whatever system of governance one finds oneself living within, according to the rules of the system.”  This sounds to me like “peace-time politics.” The second is abnormal politics, when there is a threat that stands opposed to a system of “mortal goods.”  Such politics “is almost always engaged in the midst of and through the means of catastrophic realities.”  One could argue that we live in an era of abnormal politics, where catastrophe is experienced all the time by everyone, which is why it feels like everything is always up for grabs (and therefore we remain in panic mode).

As I mentioned earlier, the first half of Mortal Goods focuses on the context and scope of “the God-given good life.”  And while Radner deals regularly with New Testament texts and contexts, much of his overall argument is rooted in an interesting reading of the Old Testament, particularly with the Israelites between Egypt and the Promised Land.  While I don’t agree with everything Radner asserts, I do believe he has something important to say, if only to remind us, like Bilbo reminds Gandalf in the cinematic version of the story: “it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.”