The Culture Beat

If you own a television and you’re not watching “House,” watch it. If you don’t own one, well, you may want to consider buying one so that you can watch “House.” “House” tells the story of Doctor Gregory House — played brilliantly by Hugh Laurie — the head of diagnostic medicine in a fictional hospital in Princeton, New Jersey. House takes Henri Nouwen’s idea of the “wounded healer” to, as the cliche goes, a whole other level: he’s a rude misanthrope who expects little besides the worst from other people. His battle against death and disease isn’t driven by love for his fellow man — it’s part of a battle of wits that he hates to lose. (Mind you, there’s much more feeling behind that nasty exterior than he wants to admit but the audience must take this idea on faith.)

Gregory House is also television’s most visible — perhaps its only — atheist. I don’t mean “atheist” in the way the term is used today: a posture that has more to do with the speaker’s desire to differentiate himself from others than with any careful consideration about the question of God. (This posing is why the expresson “village atheist” was coined.) I mean “atheist” in its classical , i.e., Greco-Roman, sense: one who does not believe in the gods of the city.

House doesn’t believe in the vaguely benign and ill-defined god of American civil religion and, therefore, sees no reason to engage in the ritual pieties associated with that belief: optimism for its own sake, platitudinous talk about death, etc. Like Thomas Hardy, House thinks that if there is a “higher power” it’s, at best, indifferent to our fate and, thus, ritual appeasement is a waste of time.

Because, not despite, of this, “House” is where you will find the most thoughtful discussions of faith and morals on the tube. Instead of sentimental tripe, we see honest and consistent disbelief confronting a fairly portrayed opposite. And, disbelief usually loses. Case in point: the September 20 episode “Autopsy.” The patient was a nine-year-old girl named Andie with terminal cancer. What intrigued House wasn’t only her symptoms — she was hallucinating — but her demeanor: she was brave to an almost supernatural degree.

House suspected that her grace — the word used to describe her — was itself a symptom. That kind of courage and resiliance in the face of a certain and senseless death had to be the result of an organic problem. He was especially sure after the girl told him that she was being brave because she didn’t want her mother to suffer. For a man who has used his handicap (an infarction is his leg left him permanently crippled and in pain) as a cudgel with which to beat others, Andie’s sacrifice literally made no sense.

As you’ve probably guessed, there was no medical/organic reason for Andie’s actions. She was, as House put it, a “self-sacrificing saint,” which left his — forgive my language — worldview in tatters. It wasn’t the first time this has happened. In “Damned if You Do,” House’s bleak outlook was also shaken after an encounter with goodness, that time in the person of nun named Sister Augustine and her Mother Superior.

“Autopsy” reminded me of the 2003 movie “Levity,” starring Billy Bob Thornton as a man whose unbelief makes it impossible for him to imagine ever being forgiven for his crime. In both instances, the writers understand something that has escaped many, if not most, Christians: the world doesn’t need to be convinced of the reality of evil as much as it does the possibility of good.

People who regularly see evil — both “natural” and man-made — as House does have no trouble believing in what C.S. Lewis called the “bent” nature of this world even as they reject Lewis’god. Their problem is in imagining how that “bentness” can be overcome. That people lie, cheat and are selfish is a given: why they tell the truth, even when it costs them, why they are just and why they sacrifice themselves for others is what they can’t get their minds around.

The Christian response is obvious: what God has done in the life, death and resurrection of his Son and the inbreaking of this new order among his people, the Church. Unfortunately, most of what passes as “apologetics,” especially in the cultural arena, is intent on proving what nearly everyone knows: evil exists. (If I were like Gregory House, I would say that the goal is to prove that evil exists so that they will stop having sex, especially with a condom.) To paraphrase St. James, the POMOs know this and they don’t tremble. We think that their problem is that they are behaving in certain ways when the real problem is what they don’t know and we seem oddly disinclined to tell them. Good thing there’s an atheist doctor on the case.