In August 2010, David Bentley Hart published a short essay entitled “The Perfect Game: The Metaphysical Meaning of Baseball.”Footnote 1 Already well known for weighty tomes such as The Beauty of the Infinite (2003) and Atheist Delusions (2010), Hart seemed an unlikely candidate to analyze a sport often referred to as a “pastime.” And yet, in retrospect, “The Perfect Game” bears many of Hart's trademarks, combining cultural criticism and an affinity for Greek antiquity with characteristic literary magniloquence. But what is most memorable about the essay is Hart's claim that baseball is “the very Platonic ideal of organized sport,” indeed, that it is “‘the moving image of eternity’ in athleticis.”Footnote 2 For that reason, Hart adds, baseball will one day be remembered as America's greatest contribution to human civilization—an “invention” and, indeed, a “discovery” of the “traces of eternity's radiance in fugitive splendors”Footnote 3 on Earth.
Already one might be tempted to quibble that, as will be mentioned below, baseball was not actually invented in America—a point that Hart discounts, viewing baseball's ancestors “as inchoately remote from the real thing as a child's first steps are from ballet.”Footnote 4 Nevertheless, Hart's reflections on baseball are insightful and provocative. He argues that, insofar as sports such as American football and soccer feature “limited and martial tactics” to conquer territory, they “appeal more to the beast within us than to the angel.”Footnote 5 In contrast, baseball unites possibility with necessity in surprising ways, taking a meticulously conceived field of grass plus a collection of physical and mental aptitudes and subjecting them to countless probabilities.Footnote 6 The upshot is gut-wrenching theater: baseball is not war but “Attic tragedy.”Footnote 7 Because the game is divided into innings rather than discrete units of time, it unfolds as a metaphor of the human condition. Thrown into a world of ceaseless flux (Hart cites the Latin proverb omnia mutantur et nos mutamur in illis), human beings nevertheless strive in and before the eternal. That is why Hart ultimately concludes that “baseball's philosophical grammar truly is Platonist,” “an attempt to figure forth the ‘heavenly dance’ within the realm of mutability,” though he is less confident that the game has “any discernible religious meaning.”Footnote 8
Unsurprisingly, Hart's argument has elicited responses. Joseph F. Flipper, for example, has come to the defense of soccer. He argues that, although soccer is indeed a “thoroughly horizontal” game, Hart fails to consider how beauty and grace can break into and overflow the “terrestrial realm.”Footnote 9 Thus soccer has a “charismatic spirit” that, according to Flipper, “is shared with strip-mall Pentecostal churches and Sufi mystics.”Footnote 10 Meanwhile, in Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game (2013), John Sexton has called Hart's analysis “over-the-top,” viewing it as an ostentatious if noteworthy footnote to Mircea Eliade's notion of “hierophany.”Footnote 11 By way of distinction, this essay would like to take Hart's reflections on baseball a step further. That is to say that it aims to expand upon his analysis, showing that baseball's time-honored emphases on physical and spiritual discipline follow from its metaphysical imaginary. Moreover, it will show that, in both cases, Christian life and thought are capable of illuminating baseball—and vice versa.
The argument will proceed as follows: First, both Christianity and baseball frame their worlds in terms of emanation (exitus) and return (reditus): “players” leave home and aim to return home;Footnote 12 second, though players belong to a team (ecclesia), the task of returning home is ultimately a solitary one; it has to be done by the individual player, even if the team, too, benefits from the individual's undertaking; and third, the spiritual or attitudinal development of the individual is thus crucial: players have to attend to how they approach the game, particularly in terms of their internal comportment. This last point will receive special attention: it will be reasoned that Søren Kierkegaard's spiritual writings, tendered for the existential “upbuilding” (Opbyggelse) of “the single individual” (den Enkelte), might likewise offer upbuilding insights for the individuals who play baseball—a sport that John Updike once called “an essentially lonely game.”Footnote 13
The Exitus-Reditus Structure of Christianity and Baseball
One of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is that God has brought about and maintains existence in all living things. This teaching is attested in the Old Testament: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Gen 1:1-3).Footnote 14 It is also attested in the New Testament: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1-3). The corollary to this doctrine is that everything that is not God exists only by virtue of God. Such things are known as “creatures” because they have been created by God and thus are derived from, but not identical with, the divine substance.
But what, exactly, is the purpose and status of these creatures? This question permits an ethico-praxical response—namely, that creation exists to glorify God and that human beings, in particular, exist to love God and neighbor (Mark 12:29-31)—but it also presupposes a prior metaphysical assumption. The love (agape) recommended by the New Testament indicates something about the divine nature. In agape, human beings reflect that which unites them with God, both as their origin and end. As creatures, they are distinct from God, but, in and through love, they retain the essence of the divine life and, with it, the path by which they might come to share in it fully again. They have come forth from God (exitus) and are capable of a return (reditus) to God.
This summary is theological in nature, but a similar exitus-reditus framework has been explored philosophically, especially in pagan antiquity. A key example here is Plotinus, a Neoplatonic thinker whose Enneads stands as one of the “greatest masterpieces of mystical as well as of philosophical literature.”Footnote 15 According to Plotinus, just as all things come from the One, they all return to the One. For the human being, in particular, earthly life is a kind of journey, in which the individual “must … ascend to the Good, which every soul desires.”Footnote 16 But this ascent will not be undertaken by everyone. It requires that persons “divest themselves of the garments they put on when they descended.”Footnote 17 This is a process of self-purification, by and through which one “proceeds in the ascent, passing by all that is alien to the god until one sees by oneself alone that which is itself alone uncorrupted, simple, and pure.”Footnote 18 To reach this goal is a joy: “If someone sees this, what pangs of love will he feel, what longings and … how would he [not] be overcome with pleasure?”Footnote 19 Yet, drawing on Plato's Phaedrus, Plotinus admits that returning to the One is a struggle, which demands both strength and virtue:
And with the Good as the prize, the greatest and “ultimate battle is set before souls,” in which battle our entire effort is directed to not being deprived of the most worthy vision. And the one who attains this is “blessed,” since he is seeing a blessed sight, whereas the one who does not is without luck. It is not the one who does not attain beautiful colors or bodies or power or ruling positions or a kingship who is without luck, but the one who does not attain this and this alone.Footnote 20
Thus, the philosophical life is a kind of spiritual trial, a “battle,” not in the sense that it is physically violent but in that it requires inward intensity—a single-minded focus on returning to the Good. Moreover, Plotinus repeatedly emphasizes “the essentially private and individual nature of his mysticism”; his spiritual warrior is, famously, on a “flight of the alone to the Alone.”Footnote 21
The sheer solitariness of the Plotinian reditus would have to be qualified by later Christian interpreters, who, drawing on the biblical understanding of God and salvation, stressed that the pilgrim's spiritual journey is inseparable from bodily life. Whether in the need for human community or in the incarnate example of Jesus, Christian salvation does not prescind from time but occurs in and through time. Still, the overarching theme of exitus-reditus persists throughout the Christian tradition. Famously, Marie-Dominique Chenu argued that Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is structured according to this very principle: the Summa's first part (Prima Pars) deals with the procession of creatures from God, the second part (Secunda Pars) identifies God as the goal of all things, and the third part (Tertia Pars) concerns the Christian means of returning to God.Footnote 22 The German mystic Meister Eckhart, a Dominican like Aquinas, also developed “a dynamic system whose basic law is the flowing out (exitus, effluxus, ûzvliezen) of all things from God and the corresponding flowing back or return of all to this ineffable source (reditus, refluxus, durchbrechen, îngânc).”Footnote 23 Eckhart understands the divine as a hidden “ground” (grunt) or abyss out of which creatures emanate or bubble up (ebullitio) and to which they return.Footnote 24 Among all created things, moreover, human beings are considered supreme because, qua intelligent beings, they carry a “spark” of the divine intelligence. Consequently, a key aspect of the person's reditus is the cultivation of a spiritual disposition of “willingness and receptivity”Footnote 25 to God's presence within—a pure attachment to what is divine and a detachment from all other objects.
Of course, a more focused investigation into the exitus-reditus model might delve into subtle differences between various figures such as Plotinus and Eckhart or engage scholarly debates about the extent to which a given thinker (e.g., Aquinas) appropriated the model. The aim of the present discussion, however, is not to explore the nuances of Neoplatonism's influence on Christianity. Rather, it is to sketch the basic framework of exitus-reditus, which begins with the procession of creatures from an abyssal primordial ground and ultimately traces their return “home.” In the case of intelligent beings, this reditus comes through a journey of physical and spiritual self-discipline.Footnote 26
With these points established, it is now time to turn to baseball. Yet, before exploring the game as such, a qualification is in order. What is at stake here is not whether baseball was meant to mirror Neoplatonic-cum-Christian metaphysics. As one might expect, the game's origins are far less philosophical, comprising the gradual refinement of various bat-and-ball games (such as rounders) that first developed in Europe. The earliest known manuscript references to baseball date from the mid-eighteenth century. For example, John Newbery's early children's book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) features a rhyme entitled “Base-Ball”: “The Ball once struck off, / Away flies the Boy / To the next destin'd Post, / And then Home with Joy.”Footnote 27 In 1755, a Surrey teenager named William Bray wrote in his diary: “Went to Stoke church this morn. — After dinner, went to Miss Jeale's to play at base ball.… Drank tea and stayed til 8.”Footnote 28 An analogous account is found in Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey. Published posthumously in 1818, but written around the turn of the nineteenth century, Northanger Abbey is a coming-of-age tale centered on Catherine Morland, who, as a youth, is inclined toward “cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country.”Footnote 29 That these and other similar references gesture toward a version of today's game is corroborated by a dictionary entry from 1768, which defines “baseball” as “a rural game in which the person striking the ball must run to his base or goal.”Footnote 30
Thus baseball, at least in its most rudimentary form, was not invented in North America.Footnote 31 But the game continued to develop in the New World, its rules evolving and its popularity increasing. For example, Bill James has noted that “baseball in 1870 resembled fast-pitch softball more than any other, including modern baseball.”Footnote 32 Pitches were “delivered underhand from a distance of 45 feet,” and it was not until 1875 that catchers received pitches from immediately behind the batter—a practice inaugurated by Deacon White of the Boston Red Stockings.Footnote 33 Incremental modifications, often based on trial and error, are thus essential to the sport's development. As a practice rooted in history and honed (or ravaged) by temporal circumstances—just consider the ongoing quarrels about the American League's adoption of the “designated hitter” in 1973—baseball can hardly be seen as a mere translation of metaphysics into the form of a game. It is an activity or, as the saying goes, a “pastime” first and foremost.
At the same time, however, baseball bears a timeless significance—one that calls to mind the mythos of religion and, more specifically, the exitus-reditus framework of speculativeFootnote 34 Christian theology. Nowhere is this more evident than with the concept of “home.” Drawing on the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard,Footnote 35 Joe Kraus has argued that the concept of “home” in baseball is dialectical. Just as, in daily life, the person who is “home” has a sense of being secure from external threats, so is the meaning of “home” in baseball grasped in relation to the possibility of getting out: “Home doesn't become meaningful until you have experienced the risk that lies in front of it. You can't score until after you have confronted the pitcher and those fielders who are trying to stop you.”Footnote 36 With this in mind, Kraus likens the player's turn at batting (“at-bat”) in baseball to a mythological journey. The batter leaves “his comfortable known world,” undertakes a quest in the face of opposition, and, if successful, returns “home a changed man.”Footnote 37 In this manner, baseball instantiates what Joseph Campbell famously called the “monomyth.”Footnote 38 As Campbell explains, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”Footnote 39 This pattern is common among “hero stories,” ranging from Osiris to Moses to Jesus.
Although it is plausible to read baseball against the backdrop of Campbell's monomyth, it can also be seen in relation to the exitus-reditus model of Christian metaphysics. Indeed, perhaps the latter paradigm is more suitable, given the number of striking parallels. First, there is the “dugout,” which is the team's bench area, located on the outskirts of the playing field. The term gained currency in the first decades of the twentieth century, when professional teams began to situate the team's bench below field level, so as to facilitate a better view for spectators. And yet, the dugout also bears symbolic importance. Just as Eckhart writes of the abyss or grunt out of which creatures emanate, so does the dugout serve as the depth—the hidden and, as any fan will attest, mysterious region—from which the player surfaces in order to participate. In other sports the player “checks into” the game; in baseball, the player seems to emerge onto the playing field from the dugout. His entrance, then, also marks an exitus.
If the dugout recalls the human being's primordial origin, from which she comes and to which she hopes to return, then the player's at-bat bears all the hallmarks of an existential journey—one that again corresponds to the Christian mythos. This can be seen in two ways. First, the batter's task is, quite literally, to take an ascending path around the bases in order to reach home. In other words, each base reached safely—from first to second to third—represents a higher stage on the batter's journey, culminating in a return to the originary (under)ground. In this way, the performance of baseball aligns with its meta-structure. The one who leaves the dugout (exitus) aims to come back safely (reditus), but this process is long and perilous and is approached in stages.
What, then, are the habits and practices by which, in leaving home, one can be confident of a successful journey around the bases and, in turn, a triumphant return to the (under)ground? This question points to the second way that the at-bat and its corresponding journey echo the Christian tradition. For just as mystics such as Eckhart and his Carmelite successor John of the Cross insist that the spiritual life requires physical and spiritual discipline, so does baseball require discipline of its practitioners, likewise involving the integration of the physical and the spiritual. The batter must train his body to cope with the trials before him, from lifting weights to enduring daily batting practice—what George Will calls the “hard, humdrum repetition, the blister-causing tedium that builds up muscle memory.”Footnote 40 Will recounts the practice routine of the late Tony Gwynn, who was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2007:
A matter of minutes after he began in the batting room [Gwynn] was drenched with sweat. By the time he left the room he had taken more than 200 swings, for the fifth time in as many days. Those 1,000 swings were taken before and after full workdays. When he left the room it was 2:45 p.m., 4 hours and 15 minutes before game time. Still ahead was outfield practice. Oh, yes, and batting practice.Footnote 41
But successful hitters do more than practice a corporeal askesis; they also have to master their minds and hearts. According to Ted Williams, another Hall of Famer and arguably the greatest hitter in baseball history, “‘proper thinking’ is 50 per cent [sic] of effective hitting, and it is more than just doing your homework on a pitcher or studying the situation in a game.”Footnote 42 Williams is suggesting that the hitter synthesize, rather than compartmentalize, the mental and the physical: “The key … is for a player to regulate his mental performance as he regulates his physical performance.”Footnote 43 The word “regulate” can be traced back to the Latin verb regulare, which means “to control by rule.” Thus, to regulate is to control, and the baseball player who exhibits control is one who does not let the inevitable vicissitudes of physical performance tempt one to either complacency or despair. “The player who maintains the same, solid approach regardless of adversity or good fortune best controls himself and the situation.… To maintain control. To keep that even keel. He is the ‘steady’ ballplayer.”Footnote 44
In the end, then, baseball's cosmology—the logic of the world it envisages and enacts—implies an attendant ethico-religious structure. It is a game of leaving and returning, but how one leaves and returns is also important. The player who does not prepare for his reditus has failed himself; the player who disciplines himself both physically and mentally is poised to succeed. And yet, one might wonder, to what extent does the player's place on a team influence his self-realization? In other words, what is the relationship between individual and communal accountability, both in baseball and in Christianity? It is to these questions that this essay now turns.
The “Lonely Game”
In October 1960, the American hommes de lettres John Updike published “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” in The New Yorker. Updike's essay chronicles Ted Williams’ final game at Fenway Park—the “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark”Footnote 45 in which the Boston Red Sox play their home games. Despite an illustrious career—“The Kid” (as he was known) retired with a .344 batting average, .482 on-base percentage, and 521 home runs, astounding numbers diminished by lengthy stints as a naval aviator in both World War II and the Korean War—Williams’ last contest at Fenway had an unassuming quality. “The day,” Updike recounts, “was overcast, chill, and uninspirational.”Footnote 46 Moreover, the Red Sox were thirty-two games behind the first-place Yankees, and Williams’ status as a baseball icon was secure. The game, for all intents and purposes, was meaningless.
And yet, the Boston leftfielder did not succumb to indifference. John “Fat Jack” Fisher was on the mound for the Baltimore Orioles in the eighth inning when Williams strode to the plate. The Fenway faithful—indeed, fewer than eleven thousand on that sullen afternoon—began to applaud like an “ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand.”Footnote 47 The umpire let the ovation continue for a few moments, while Williams moved about “impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task.”Footnote 48 At last, Fisher delivered his first pitch—a ball. The next pitch was a strike, but Williams “swung mightily and missed.”Footnote 49 Then, on Fisher's third pitch, Williams connected and drove the ball over the center field fence—a home run in what would prove to be the last at-bat of his baseball career. Williams hurried around the bases, as if the crowd's cheers “were a storm of rain to get out of,”Footnote 50 and he soon descended into the dugout without acknowledging the fans. Some might see Williams’ restraint as typical for a player whose “dealings with the fans, [ranged] between rugged charm and uncharted rudeness.”Footnote 51 For Updike, however, it was fitting for a player of his stature: “Immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer letters.”Footnote 52
Updike's language here demands further reflection. He is not merely saying that Williams was a great player, set apart by his unique combination of physical skill and mental acuity. Rather, he is suggesting that Williams is an eternal archetype of how to play the game. “To those of us who saw [Williams] at the plate,” Updike adds, “he seemed the concentrated essence of baseball.”Footnote 53 Indeed, Williams’ refusal to occupy himself with niceties such as pleasing fans and demanding bigger paychecksFootnote 54 meant that the only thing that mattered to him was “the assigned task”Footnote 55 of the hitter—to merit safe passage around the bases and to return home. Thus his intensity, often considered contemptuous, was actually a sign of “focus”: “Williams’ body language declared that he wanted to be the best, that this was more than a game or a livelihood for him.”Footnote 56
Just as the ideal American football player is rough and tenacious (think Jim Brown or Dick Butkus) and the ideal basketball player is tall and agile (think Larry Bird or Michael Jordan), so does Updike want to say that Williams personifies the very nature of baseball. For although baseball certainly values grit and ingenuity, it prizes above all a dedication to craft—a workmanlike attention to detail that refuses to compromise its standards, no matter the external circumstances. The baseball player does not play for the sake of the crowd or even for the sake of his team; he plays for the sake of the game. It was this disposition that Updike saw in Williams:
For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual contests is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained … by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art .… Williams was an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, so assiduously refined his natural skills, so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.Footnote 57
In a recent interview, Ben Bradlee Jr., longtime journalist for The Boston Globe and author of the definitive biography of Ted Williams,Footnote 58 remarks that Updike's essay “elevated Ted's stature,” transforming him from a superb yet surly ballplayer into an icon for the “lions of literature.”Footnote 59
Bradlee is doubtless right on this point. Yet, as far as the present essay is concerned, the influence of “Hub Fans” on Williams’ legacy is unimportant. Rather, and in keeping with the previous section on exitus-reditus, it is Updike's claim about the “essence” of baseball that is salient. Is there something about baseball's structure that makes it “essentially lonely”?
It was noted earlier that the exitus-reditus tradition assumes a measure of independence. To take a paradigmatic example, Plotinus speaks of the self-purification needed for a reditus to God. Not everyone will possess the intellectual and physical discipline required to accomplish Plotinus’ “flight of the alone to the Alone,” but the one who does so will attain blessedness. Of course, the matter is more complicated in the Christian tradition, which understands the individual's mission as simultaneously for the other. Still, there is little doubt that Jesus himself possessed a sense of who he was and of what he was called to do, even over against the society of his day. Moreover, this sense of personal identity and responsibility was passed on to Jesus’ disciples (perhaps especially to Paul of Tarsus) and then on to later Christians such as Augustine of Hippo, who fused his classical and Neoplatonic training with a deep sensitivity to Scripture. The self, for Augustine, is fallen, riven from God, and it will not be whole until it rests again in the Creator's love. As Rowan Williams explains, “So much of [Augustine's] Confessions centers upon the image of homecoming. God waits for the soul to come back to its home with him—without that home in God, nothing can have any meaning.”Footnote 60 Yet, for precisely this reason, the Augustinian self is a self in via, undertaking an “interior journey”Footnote 61 on its path back to the One. And this journey awaits all persons who seek the bliss of mystical union: “God, as the One, is origin and end of the self.”Footnote 62
Thus to be a Christian requires individuation, not in the sense of self-invention or self-sufficiency, but in the sense of a “highly personal” yet “highly objective” task—to prepare oneself, with the help of divine grace, for conformity with “the truth of the Creator in his creatures.”Footnote 63 But does that mean that Christianity promotes “loneliness”? The answer depends on how one understands the notion. The word “loneliness” stems from the Old English compound all ana, meaning “alone” or “all by oneself.” The one who is “alone” is indeed “lonely,” but this can mean different things. On the one hand, the person who is alone may be bereft of companions, divorced from communion with God or neighbor. It was from this meaning that, in the nineteenth century, the current term “loneliness” took on psychological connotations of dejection and deprivation. On the other hand, the person who is alone may simply be “on one's own,” whether in terms of physical isolation (“he walked the streets alone”) or personal responsibility (“she alone wrote the essay”). Both can be seen as essential to Christian praxis.
To be sure, the Christian tradition has long urged disciples to spend time alone. Jesus himself seeks solitude on a number of occasions, often to take leave of distraction for the sake of prayer: “There [went] a fame abroad of him: and great multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed by him of their infirmities. And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed” (Luke 5:15-16). A few centuries hence, after Emperor Constantine established the church as a legal organization within the Roman Empire, Christian ascetics began “to seek places of solitude away from social, political, and economic demands.”Footnote 64 Alone, even lonely, they “were free to concentrate most of all on exploring the motives of conduct and thought within themselves so that what was disordered could be brought to light and redeemed by encounter with the forgiveness of God.”Footnote 65 In time, they came to be known as the “desert fathers” because many of them scattered to the badlands of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, where they could undertake “a lifestyle of great simplicity.”Footnote 66 Doubtless they would have agreed with the words of Paul Tillich, a theologian of a much later generation: “It is man's greatness that he is centered within himself,” Tillich once observed, and that is why “God … had to separate [man] and thrust him into aloneness.”Footnote 67
Influenced by the existentialist tradition in philosophy, Tillich had an affinity for the thought of Søren Kierkegaard—the Danish philosopher, social critic, and theologian who is widely known as the “father of existentialism.”Footnote 68 And, indeed, perhaps no modern thinker stressed the “loneliness” or “solitude” of faith more than Kierkegaard.Footnote 69 He did so for two main reasons. First, as with the desert fathers and other Christian mystics, Kierkegaard understood that a life of piety and prayer at times necessitates that one “interrupt the pace of busy activity in order to put on the repose of contemplation in unity with oneself.”Footnote 70 As he explains in “An Occasional Discourse” (En Leiligheds-Tale, 1847), popularly (and more memorably) known as “Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing,” the one who seeks God has to “become united with oneself in stillness.”Footnote 71 This Stilhed can be fostered by an eremitic flight to the wilderness—“the quiet places” (de stille Steder) where “the echo of the forest” or the “gentle ripples” of the sea induce a contemplative mood—but what is essential is that one cultivate “the earnestness of eternity.”Footnote 72 For it is this internal disposition that opens one up to the invisible God. The second reason for Kierkegaard's insistence upon faith's “loneliness” is that it detaches one from the influence of “the crowd” (Mængden) or “public” (Publikum). These terms, in related but slightly different ways, refer to social groups that prioritize partisan conformity over individual responsibility. Yet, as Kierkegaard sees it, an authentic and fruitful community can emerge only when “each individual is attempting to live according to an ethical-religious ideality.”Footnote 73 The loneliness of Christian praxis is, paradoxically, the guarantor of Christian communion.
It is at this point that the nature of Christian life can shed light on baseball. In calling baseball “an essentially lonely game,” Updike was not equating baseball with individual sports such as boxing, nor, in turn, was he denying the fact that baseball is also a team sport. Rather, he was calling attention to the unique way in which baseball players contribute to their team. The baseball player, in general, and the hitter, in particular, is called to excel at the task assigned to her. No one can do it for her or even with her, even though her success (or failure) has an impact on others. In other words, baseball compels and cultivates a distinctive sense of individual accountability: personal excellence is the sine qua non of communal excellence. The best teams are composed of individuals intent on becoming great at what they do, and individuals who achieve greatness do so through a kind of askesis—a word that, quite literally, means “training,” but also has come to take on connotations of self-denial and even of self-sacrifice.
The ascetical side of baseball is, in one sense, obvious even to casual observers of the game. Like all athletes, baseball players have to practice their craft on a daily basis, disciplining their bodies to perform at a high level. What is less apparent, though no less important, is the spiritual discipline required of the baseball player. Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra famously quipped: “Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.”Footnote 74 Indeed, as mentioned previously, hitting is especially recognized for its psychological component. Not only must the batter consider the tactics of the opposing pitcher, but he must be able to control his state of mind, cultivating a kind of inner equilibrium when he is at the plate. But how does one go about achieving this? In the next section, it will be argued that Kierkegaard's spiritual psychology, which he wrote for the sake of religious upbuilding, offers insights for the hitter—a final example of how Christianity and baseball resemble each other and, in turn, can be seen as mutually informative.
Kierkegaard, Spirituality, and Baseball
This essay has made two claims thus far: First, Christianity and baseball envision corresponding “worlds,” each featuring an exitus-reditus structure; and second, Christianity and baseball recommend an analogous way of understanding the relation between individual and community, giving precedence to individual excellence for the sake of communal flourishing. In sum, the individual who is most attentive to the task at hand—in particular, her own reditus home—is poised to make the greatest contribution to the team. Yet, just how to acquire such attentiveness is a vexing question, occupying Christian mystics and spiritual directors on one side and coaches and sports psychologists on the other. While not wanting to muddle these disciplines and roles, this paper has endeavored to demonstrate that they can talk to each other. This point will be further developed with an eye to the thought of Kierkegaard, whose concepts of self and of self-realization can enlighten baseball players, precisely because baseball too requires a kind of spiritual comportment—an internal attunement to the external game.
An interest in the nature and purpose of the self permeates Kierkegaard's extensive oeuvre, though his 1849 treatise The Sickness unto Death (Sygdommen til Døden) develops his theory of the self most carefully. According to Anti-Climacus, the pseudonym to whom Kierkegaard ascribes the text, the human self is a combination of contrasting elements—namely, infinitude and finitude, temporality and eternality, and freedom and necessity.Footnote 75 These contrary components themselves are not the self; rather, the self is the third thing that emerges when this “synthesis” relates itself to itself. It is this free self-reflexivity that at once constitutes the human being's highest call and greatest danger. In the latter case, the self fails to harmonize its contraries, slipping, for example, into the wraithlike disengagement of infinitude or into the bourgeois worldliness of finitude. Anti-Climacus categorizes such states under the name “despair” (Fortvivlelse). On the other hand, when the self brings its contraries into balance and tranquility, it roots out despair and is able to reach its full potential. Crucially, however, this realization can happen only when the self “in relating itself to itself relates to another.”Footnote 76 This “other” is God, from whom the self receives its existence and to whom it hopes to return. In other words, the self's fulfillment finally depends on how it relates to its reason for being. As Anti-Climacus writes, “The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.”Footnote 77
For Anti-Climacus, then, the word “self” bears an active quality. It is something one does. And one can do it well or not so well, depending on how one “relates … to that which established the entire relation.”Footnote 78 Because the self comes from God, it cannot properly harmonize its contrary features without reference to its origin and its end, much like a car cannot be “tuned up” without taking into consideration its maker (a Hyundai is different from a Rolls Royce) or its purpose (moving heavy loads is different from racing).
But it is here that problems arise. For the self, being free, can refuse to acknowledge this primordial relationship; it can refuse a “tune up.” When this refusal happens, the self falls into despair. This is, in a sense, the starting point of The Sickness unto Death, which walks the reader, step by step, through various forms of despair. Thus, it is a journey into the heart of darkness, though with an edifying purpose—to reveal the ways in which the self falls short of fulfillment.
Anti-Climacus analyzes despair in two overarching ways. As noted previously, despair arises out of an imbalance among the self's constituent elements. Here it can become too wrapped up in time-bound, finite interests, or it can drift away, as it were, with the fantasies of the imagination. The second way, however, is more complex and, according to Anti-Climacus, more important. It views despair “within the category of consciousness.”Footnote 79 C. Stephen Evans describes this approach as going “up the scale”Footnote 80—a phrase that underlines the itinerary at the heart of Anti-Climacus’ analysis, though, in this case, ascent signifies distance from God. The higher the despair, the farther from happiness.
The first form of conscious despair is, paradoxically, unconscious despair. This notion is not as strange as it might seem. Anti-Climacus is simply referring to the state in which the self lives without awareness of its nature and purpose. In this scenario, the self's despair is not so much a kind of rebellion as a kind of ignorance: it is so caught up in doing what is pleasant and avoiding what is unpleasant that it neglects “the absolute that a human being can be.”Footnote 81 Anti-Climacus likens this state to a person who “not only prefers to live in the basement—no, he loves it so much that he is indignant if anyone suggests that he move to the superb upper floor that stands vacant and at his disposal.”Footnote 82 This sort of attitude is fundamental to what Anti-Climacus identifies as a “pagan” worldview, which effectively reduces the self to an earthly function, institution, or role. But it has also insinuated itself into the lives of Christians, who, according to Anti-Climacus, have fallen away from what their tradition expects of them. Theirs is “spiritlessness in the strictest sense.”Footnote 83
The next “rung” of despair is, naturally, conscious. That is to say, the self now understands its nature and purpose but also realizes that it has missed the mark. Conscious despair has two main forms. The first, and lower, form is “despair in weakness.” This form has different levels of intensity, but each level shares a common trait: the self desires true happiness yet feels incapable of reaching it. This sort of despair culminates in what Anti-Climacus calls “despair over weakness.” Here the self, “instead of definitely turning away from despair to faith and humbling [itself] under [its] weakness,”Footnote 84 becomes wrapped up in self-pity, sorry that it has failed to extricate itself from despair. But lurking behind this sense of helplessness is something more sinister—an “inclosing reserve,”Footnote 85 in which the self secretly applauds its superiority to those who are “shallow,” even as it laments its failure to attain fulfillment. Anti-Climacus points out that such a person usually does quite well in the world, but this success is little more than a disguise. Deep down, the self of “inclosing reserve” is tormented because its spiritual life is stuck in a vicious circle: the fulfillment for which it yearns will arrive if it will accept its weakness, but it is just this weakness that causes it to despair. It hates what it is; its despair is “not to will to be [itself].”Footnote 86
This is not the case with the other main form of conscious despair, which Anti-Climacus identifies as “defiance.” Whereas the previous self despairs over what it is not, this self errs by embracing what it is—namely, a self in despair. Here the self uses its consciousness against itself. It is aware of its capacity for freedom and for imagination, but uses these faculties to separate it “from any relation to a power that has established it, or … from the idea that there is such a power.”Footnote 87 In this way, the self becomes “its own master, absolutely its own master”Footnote 88 but with a cost: all it has is itself. That is to say, in placing itself at the center of the universe, the self is living a lie. It assumes that its activities bear “infinite interest and significance,”Footnote 89 when, in truth, they are products of a finite, time-bound creature and, therefore, lacking in permanence. What appears to be mastery, then, is closer to fiction: “It is easy to see that this absolute ruler is a king without a country,”Footnote 90 notes Anti-Climacus.
This is just a sketch of The Sickness unto Death, but points of overlap with baseball already have come into view. First, Anti-Climacus’ metaphysics of the self can help the baseball player, and especially the hitter, understand who he is. Emerging from the dugout (the ground),Footnote 91 he steps into the batter's box as a self-reflexive synthesis of dialectical elements. On the one hand, he is a finite being, limited by his physical capabilities (say, he has good power but lacks the bat speed to handle inside fastballs) and the necessary conditions of his environment (say, the April schedule has recently been difficult, with few days of rest and several games in cold weather). On the other hand, he possesses infinitude, the ability to “dream,” to envision success and even a kind of immortality as a great player; he can, in short, self-consciously entertain possibilities that transcend immediate sense experience.
Thus constituted, the baseball player is presented with the second way that The Sickness unto Death can inform her play, namely, by encouraging her to synthesize the dialectical elements of the self. In order to succeed, the hitter needs to set her limitations and possibilities in balance. If she is not aware of the necessary elements of her performance—her own strengths and weakness, the repertoire of the rival pitcher, the umpire's strike zone, the fact that the wind is blowing in from left field—then she will fail more than she otherwise would. On the other hand, if she lacks consciousness of her own possibility, if she resigns herself to failure due to the necessity always already constraining her, then she will not succeed either. The task, then, is to harmonize necessity and possibility, to balance the binding conditions of her performance with the hope that she can and will exceed them. Neither element can be prioritized at the expense of the other. The hitter, as with the self in general, will be able to return home only when the dialectical constituents of the self are taken into account.
As noted, however, the synthesizing aspect of self-fulfillment also entails one's consciousness of despair. According to Anti-Climacus, the self cannot achieve the happiness of faith without first taking ownership of how it refuses faith. Here, again, something similar might be said of the hitter. The hitter who is unaware of or inattentive to his shortcomings simply cannot develop in the craft; he “goes through the motions,” neither pushing himself to greatness nor confessing his deficiencies. Next, at a more advanced level, the hitter longs to excel but, to borrow Kierkegaard's language, despairs over his weakness. Such a hitter is sorry for his fate: he knows what greatness is—a Ted Williams or, more recently, a Mike Trout—but he thinks it unattainable for him. “If only I had Williams’ batting eye or Trout's combination of speed and strength,” he might say to himself, “I would be great.” Proudly, he measures himself against a standard of excellence but relates to the ideal in the wrong way. To realize his own potential, he must learn to accept who he is as a player. Finally, at the highest level of despair, the hitter defies all standards and training; he insists on doing it “my way.” For a time, perhaps, he can skate by on ability, but, resistant to coaching and dismissive of fellow players (whether past or present), he has made himself bigger than the game. Shunning the very source and purpose of his talent, he is bound to fail. For the game endures while players, however gifted, pass into and out of existence.
In this way, Kierkegaard's theological anthropology, itself rooted in the exitus-reditus tradition of Christian theology, can inform the hitter's spiritual comportment—her self-conscious experience of playing the game—and aid her ascending journey home. That is not to suggest, of course, that only Christianity (or Christian spirituality) can offer such insights. Gregory Bassham has argued that there is a “Zen of the art of hitting,” arguing that the principles of Zen Buddhism (including patience, relaxation, and self-knowledge) “can be applied to the supremely difficult art of hitting a baseball.”Footnote 92 This claim is doubtless true, though, by the same token, the Buddhist worldview would seem less adept at shedding light on the inner drama of baseball. The Buddhist seeks “emptiness” (Śūnyatā), a way of perception by which the presuppositions and stories that render the world comprehensible are bracketed off, thereby detaching the practitioner from meaning, stress, and suffering. Yet baseball, on the other hand, presupposes narrative: the hitter is on a quest, seeking to return home. This quest, moreover, is fraught with peril and affliction. Statistically speaking, hitters fail far more often than they succeed, and thus failure is indivisible from the game itself. In short, baseball is a game rooted in precisely those features excluded by Buddhist Śūnyatā—personal meaning, stress, and suffering.
Of course, a hitter who practices Buddhist meditation (Dhyāna) might glean benefits all the same. The point, however, is that Kierkegaard's treatment of Christian spirituality is particularly capable of informing the baseball player because Kierkegaard assumes the exitus-reditus structure of the game and develops a corresponding spirituality. Kierkegaard would ask the hitter to lean into, rather than detach from, his suffering: it is a cross to bear. After all, the ascending journey back to the (under)ground will involve many pitfalls, many of which can be explained by the hitter's own internal disequilibrium. The hitter must be ever aware of this possibility, constantly working to integrate the finite and infinite, the necessary and the possible, aspects of her person. To do so will bring about a calm—or, as Kierkegaard prefers, a state of “rest”Footnote 93—that will steady the hitter's performance and, at last, facilitate his return home.
Conclusion
As noted at the outset, the relationship between baseball and religion is not an unprecedented topic. Joseph L. Price, professor emeritus of religious studies at Whittier College and codirector of Whittier's Institute for Baseball Studies, has surveyed a number of points of overlap, from historical tensions between baseball and religion to the game's mythological-cum-superstitious aspects to its almost mystical treatment in modern fiction.Footnote 94 Sexton's Baseball as a Road to God aims to show that baseball “can reveal something about the world and our ways of living in it that goes beyond what we see on the field.”Footnote 95 In this way, baseball can point the way to the religious and spiritual life, “to being in the world in a different way and seeing more in it.”Footnote 96
This exposition has sought to do something similar, albeit with a slightly different point of emphasis: if Sexton's book uses baseball to “awaken us to a dimension of life often missing in our contemporary world of hard facts and hard science,”Footnote 97 this piece has teased out why that is possible. It has shown, in other words, that baseball resembles the exitus-reditus tradition of Christian metaphysics and is, for that reason, a game structured like a religion. The batter's exodus from the primordial ground, his effort to ascend back to his origin, his need to discipline body and mind in order to successfully complete this journey—these elements correspond in both baseball and Christianity. As has been seen, one might object that baseball's focus on individual performance—the game's “loneliness,” to use Updike's language—puts it at odds with the Christian tradition's emphasis on ekklēsía. Yet, by way of Kierkegaard, this difficulty has been eliminated. Indeed, and herein lies the ultimate finding of this essay, it turns out that baseball and Christianity can be seen as mutually informative activities. That is not to conflate the two, nor is it to suppose, in the face of all evidence, that one must be a Christian to play or to appreciate baseball. The point, rather, is more modest but no less remarkable: one can learn about baseball from understanding Christianity, and vice versa.
