Long Futile Searches Through Chesterton

I’ve made several confessions of mental ineptitude recently. I’ve talked about my inability to stop boring my wife by rehearsing every detail of a history book I’m reading. I’ve admitted my susceptibility to distraction by emotions and by flies. And I’ve exposed my hitherto almost total ignorance on the number of existing sequels to one of my favorite novels.

Today I have to continue the streak by admitting a mistaken notion about one of my favorite authors that has deluded me for years. (The notion deluded me, not the author.) The story starts in 1982 at Baylor University. As a new master’s student, I eagerly checked out the library soon after my arrival in Waco. What led me to G. K. Chesterton, I don’t know. I had heard of him and had possibly read The Everlasting Man at that point. Whatever the reason may have been, in addition to books on music (I fell in love with the works of Donald Tovey at that library), I also checked out a book by GKC called Tremendous Trifles, a collection of weekly essays written for the newspaper.

I was instantly transported! These were the first British essays I had ever read, so I have to say first that I was enthralled by the form of these pieces. No direct context-setting introduction here. No outlining of three main points to be detailed in later paragraphs. Here was the classic British elliptical entrance, and I loved it. But I loved everything else about these essays as well: their clear prose, their logical twists (never actual paradoxes!), their respect for authors I treasured, and their forthright denouncement of modern vacuities that I previously had thought only started causing trouble in the 1960s. (Uggh. I only had learned what the Middle Ages were the winter before I started at Baylor, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t know anything about the history of modernism in thought.)

I read other sets of essays from the Baylor library including Alarms and Discursions. I enjoyed them so much, I actually drew a tick mark in the tables of contents next to the titles of my favorite essays. I’ve passed Waco on I-35 many times since then, and afterwards, I’ve always wished I had stopped, visited the library, and checked to see if my marks were still there. I’ve forgotten most of them and would probably have a lot of fun seeing what I thought especially noteworthy in 1982. Among the gems I do remember very well were “The Glory of Grey,” in which Chesterton praises the variety in the look of overcast days, and “On Cheese,” which began “If all the seas were bread and cheese there would be quite a lot of deforestation in my neighborhood.”

Some ten years later, I discovered that Ignatius Press was publishing the complete works of Chesterton in several volumes and that one could subscribe to the project. The subscription service never worked well, but I ended up with about twenty of the project’s thirty-odd volumes, including all of the essays from The Illustrated London News. I read sporadically in this bookshelfful of prose, but somewhere in the second Ten-Year plan, I started reading one year of essays from the ILN every year. By the end of that reading plan, though, I still hadn’t read any essays that pulled up dusty memories. For the Third Decade, I started reading two years’ worth of the newspaper columns every year (Chesterton wrote for the paper for a very, very long time!) with the vision of finally discovering and rereading “The Glory of Grey” and “On Cheese” and finishing all the essays by the end of the decade.

But this year, I looked through the table of contents of the assigned years and still saw no titles that sounded familiar. I picked up the remaining volumes of ILN pieces and searched their ToC’s. I went through all the ones I had already read to see if I had previously found “The Glory of Grey” and “On Cheese” and just forgot. But these titles were nowhere to be found. So I did some internet searching and found two disconcerting and embarrassing facts. (1) The collections I had read at Baylor were taken from the Daily News, a paper to which Chesterton contributed before he joined The Illustrated London News. (2) Ignatius Press had no plans ever to republish these earlier essays. So that’s several years, three feet of bookshelf, a lot of dollars, and a lot of reading time spent on an impossible quest. *sigh* The collections I read forty years ago are on Gutenberg, and I’ve changed my Plan to alternate between the familiar chestnuts and the remaining ILN volumes on my shelf. I’m sure I’ll have something to say in these posts about cloudy days and cheese sometime in the next few years.

While I’m confessing, I have to say it isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, and coincidentally, the other incident also involved G. K. Chesterton. A girl I knew in high school (and just after) told me that I would like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. (I think this is where I first heard of Chesterton. So for that, at least, I’m grateful to this girl.) She told me as an example that one involved a man who escaped from a prison using a rat that he trained to carry messages through the sewer opening in his cell. Several years later I finally got around to reading Father Brown. Again, I read a few stories each year for a while and then finally made a big push to the end, enjoying the stories greatly, but wondering when I would at last reach the story about the rat. But that rat never showed his head. It turns out “The Problem of Cell 13” was written by Jacques Futrelle, so naturally it had very little chance of showing up in a collection of stories by Chesterton. Alas, the misleading lead was not the only mistruth that girl told me. And that’s a story you will not see me blogging about in the next few years. Or ever.

Achieving the Grail

Everyone knows King Arthur had something to do with the Quest for the Holy Grail. Any one reading this blog probably knows that Galahad succeeded in the Quest. But what exactly did Galahad do with regard to the Grail in order to succeed? What was the goal of the Quest? To discover it in some forgotten dungeon? To bring it to Camelot? To save it from destruction? To pick it out from among a tableful of grails so Sean Connery can drink from it?

Having just finished Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur for the second time in five years, you’d think I would know the goal of the Quest. But this point isn’t really very clear to me. Malory often uses the phrase “achieving the Quest of the Holy Grail” or simply “achieving the Grail,” but he doesn’t ever explain what the phrase actually means. Part of the problem is that Malory tried to collate all the French stories on Arthur that he could find, even where they contradicted each other. For instance, at one point he reports that King Pelles is the Maimed King. And yet, when Galahad gets to Castle Corbenic, Pelles brings out another king altogether and asks Galahad to heal the grievous wounds in his thighs. So having placed odd mistakes like this one in the crucial story, it isn’t surprising that Malory didn’t give us a crystal clear picture of what the goal of the Quest for the Holy Grail actually was. Maybe the sources just couldn’t be reconciled on the issue.

One interpretation is that the goal of the knights on this Quest was simply to see the Grail. Certainly when Lancelot gets close to the Grail in Corbenic, his only desire is to lay his eyes on the sacred vessel. He pays no heed to the warnings that a sinful man should come no closer, though, and falls down in a stupor that lasts twenty-four days, one day for each year of his sinfulness. When Galahad, righteous enough to get closer than his father, reaches the Grail, he sees a vision of the Crucifixion coming out of it and hears a voice from Heaven telling him that he is witnessing some of the secrets of Jesus. So again, it seems that simply seeing the Grail (or the visions inside it) is the point of the Quest. This theory poses two problems, though. First, the Quest is begun when the Grail appears to the knights of the Round Table in Camelot. So they’ve already seen it. How is seeing it a second time more special than seeing it a first time? Second, even though it eventually takes Galahad a couple of years to find the Grail, it’s in a castle all the time that many knights are familiar with, and it’s seen every day by King Pelles and his daughter Elaine, people whom Lancelot has known for quite some time (in the case of Elaine, known in the biblical sense).

Alternatively, maybe the Quest is simply a matter of following the Grail to the home of the Maimed King (whoever he might be) so that Galahad, the only knight pure enough to perform the miracle, can heal his dolorous wounds with the blood of Christ still lingering on the spear of Longinus, the soldier who pierced his side on the cross, and end the curse on the Waste Land. But then if healing the Maimed King is the true goal, why, when the Grail appears at Arthur’s feast, do all the knights depart on the quest when they all know that Galahad is the only one worthy of handling the holy blade?

The thing is, the tale of the Holy Grail is that rare story actually made better by its plot holes. How do the knights know that the appearance of the Grail is a call to go on a Quest? They just do, and our lack of understanding only speaks to the power of the Grail and the holiness of the Quest. Why do they all leave when they know Galahad is the only one who can achieve the Quest and when they know that the mass departure means the end of the Fellowship of the Round Table? They just do, and the lack of explanation only tells us that had we been there we, too, would simply have understood that a futile search for the mysteries of Christ was worth the loss of everything that was good about Camelot. Why does Galahad take two years to find a castle the location of which is known? He just does, and the geographical mystery makes the reader feel the sacred nature of the Quest since no noble act should be done lightly and quickly.

So Malory may have left these gaps because, as in the case of the identity of the Maimed King, he tried to fit in too many contradictory sources and just left out everything that caused problems. And he might have left mysteries unsolved because he knew the story would then resonate with more awe. But I can mention a third possibility. He may well have skimped on explanation only as a matter of established tradition. Earlier versions of the Grail story have their own prominent lacuna. In some of the prior forms, King Pelles tests the worthiness of each knight who reaches the castle that houses the Holy Grail by telling the knight that he is allowed to ask one question and that it must be the right question. Only Percival, the knight who achieves the Quest in the earliest manifestations of the story, satisfies the Alex Trebek of medieval romance by coming up with the right question. We learn the questions asked by several of the knights who arrive before Percival: How did the Grail get here? Who stabbed the Maimed King? Is that really Christ’s blood on the spear? What am I supposed to do now? Is Elaine seeing anyone? If Monty Python had been in charge of the story at this early date, these lame attempts would have gotten their respective knights rightfully tossed into the canyon. I may have remembered some of those questions incorrectly. But what I haven’t forgotten is that Percival’s question isn’t revealed to us; we only read that he is told that he has asked the right question and proven himself worthy of bearing the spear and healing the Maimed King. Movie critics made a huge deal out of Bill Murray’s inaudible words to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation, as if such a thing had never been done ever before in the history of storytelling. I’m here to declare that Percival’s unreported line, tantalizingly hidden from readers eight hundred years before Sofia Coppola ever knew how to hold (or withhold) a pen, is exactly twenty-one times more interesting than Bill Murray’s whisper.

Now, when I write my own enduring and beloved version of the Arthurian legends (you can read about another of my ideas for this grand project here), I plan on restoring the test of the question. Galahad will be the one who achieves the Quest in my book; the story of Lancelot stumbling into Corbenic and of Pelles knowing that a son of Lancelot’s named Galahad is destined to heal him so that he must cast a spell on his daughter making Elaine look like Gwenevere and enabling her to entice Lancelot to beget the destined child within her is just too weird and wonderful to pass up. Twenty years and many chapters later, it won’t be enough that Galahad has been mystically led by the Holy Grail to the home he doesn’t remember, that Pelles now sees his grandson for the first time since he was a baby, that Elaine sees her son grown into the greatest knight in the world, or that Merlin has created a magical seat at the Round Table that offers in glowing golden gothic letters the message “This Is The Dude You’ve Been Waiting For” when Galahad places his pure rump in it. Pelles will still have to make sure he has the right guy by instructing Galahad to ask one question. And I will have it happen this way because I know the question Galahad asks!

Three Musketeers. I Mean, Four Musketeers. Wait. Five. Yes, Five Musketeers. Or Is It Three After All?

 OK, so here’s the way the Plan went originally:

(1) In 2017, year 1 of the current ten-year schedule, read the unabridged version of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, the English translation of which was only available in shortened form in the 1970s.

(2) Year 2, 2018: Reread The Three Musketeers, one of my favorite adventure books from teen years.

(3) Year 4, 2020: Read Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, inexplicably unread by me in the forty-three years since I first read TTM. (At least I thought it was the sequel.)

(4) Year 6, 2022: Read The Man in the Iron Mask, the only other Dumas novel whose name I had routinely seen on lists or sets of classic books throughout my life (Classics Illustrated comic books, Barnes & Noble cheap editions, and so on).

In pursuit of that plan, I looked on Amazon several years ago for a Kindle copy of The Three Musketeers. They offered a set called D’Artagnan and the Musketeers: The Complete Collection for free. (Here and there the edition has a few typos from OCR, but overall this free edition works great.) Another edition is entitled The D’Artagnan Romances. Dumas wrote more books about D’Artagnan? Stuff for the Fourth Decade List! Or so I thought.

So I open the book early in 2018 to begin the adventure, flip through the table of contents, and find to my surprise that The Man in the Iron Mask is the last book in the collection. Iron Mask is a D’Artagnan book? At this point in the post, I first wrote the word “Wonderful” with three exclamation points and decided the interjection did not adequately convey my excitement. Anybody reading this blog knows the joy of starting a sequel, of finding a good novel series, of discovering a favorite character in another of the same author’s works. Add to that familiar joy the excellence of D’Artagnan as a character, the love of a teenage boy for adventure stories, and the sentimentalism of a man old enough to get senior discounts at Flapjack’s Pancake House who is reliving his youth, and you get some idea of my elation.

But then, surprise upon surprise, I look at the ToC more closely and discover that The Man in the Iron Mask is not actually a complete novel but only the third of three parts of a longer work called The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Each part of TVoB:TYL is about as long as The Three Musketeers, so that puts the total word count of The Vicomte at about 700,000: 20% longer than War and Peace, about equal to David Copperfield and Anna Karenina combined.

Now, here are four facts whose conjunction I find highly problematic:
(1) I must read The Man in the Iron Mask because I’ve wanted to since I was 10.
(2) I have to read it in 2022 because I like Plans.
(3) I have to read 460,000 words worth of other non-Plan material before I get to Iron Mask.
(4) I read slowly.

All I can do to solve this crisis is to make some time to fit the rest of the work in. I usually have time to read a handful of books outside the regular schedule each year, so I just made sure this year to save up and see how far ahead of schedule I was near the end of the year. As it turned out, I had enough time for one-third of The Vicomte. (I’ve discovered that I have no problem reading part of the way through a long novel, stopping, and picking it up a year later.)

The first part of The Vicomte of Bragelonne is called The Vicomte of Bragelonne. (Maybe I wouldn’t have been so confused about all this if Dumas had been a better titler.) The book starts ten years after the action of Twenty Years After. Dumas introduces D’Artagnan in that way that authors of sequels sometimes do when they write about the hero at first as “a mysterious man sitting in the dark,” as if the reader has any trouble identifying his favorite character. Very soon Dumas reveals that the nameless creature has a Gascon accent. No one who loves The Three Musketeers can have any doubt at this moment that he is in the presence of the fourth musketeer, Monsieur D’Artagnan.

But then a second mystery man appears! Could it be? It is! Our old friend Athos, who is, outside of Dickens, one of my top three favorite characters ever. He and D’Artagnan go separately and unbeknownst to each other on the same errand of international intrigue and almost ruin it for each other. The tears of joy are hot on my face. About 70% of the way through this first third of the giant novel (I am reminded of Monty Python identifying the lower two-thirds of the nape of the neck), dear old Porthos appears! Then Aramis! I am as giddy as Scrooge in his Christmas Past reliving the appearance of Ali Baba! This is not just a D’Artagnan book. It is a second Three Musketeers sequel! And it is enormous!

Have my surprises come to an end? Is my happiness complete? No, they have not, and, no, it is not. In googling all these confusing titles, I discover – how did I miss this before? – that director Richard Lester and the original cast of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers made a film version of Twenty Years After. Clearly Lester learned how to entitle movies from Dumas himself: his films The Three M’s and The Four M’s together tell the story (oh, so faithfully!) of the novel The Three Musketeers, and the story of Twenty Years After is presented under the title The Return of the Musketeers. Michael York as D’Artagnan? Oliver Reed as Athos? Guess what’s on the top of my Christmas list!

A Long-Awaited Completion

After reading a chapter here and a chapter there for over twenty years, I have at last completed all of William James’s Principles of Psychology. I’m sure his work has been superseded in the 130 years since its publication, but still I felt compelled to continue with it a bit each year until I finished reading it all. James teaches me to think about how I think and seems to know me and several of my weird mental habits quite well. In previous posts, I’ve commented on, among other things, James’s explanation for why I need special help with memorization and how many of the mnemonic tricks I’ve developed myself work, why I struggle to move a single muscle in order to get out of bed some mornings, why walking helps my attention-challenged mind to concentrate on a book, how (on the other hand) my habit of wool gathering while reading is a sign of extraordinary intelligence (I choose to read his observations that way, in any case), and most surprisingly why I’ve had trouble recording from old LPs with skips when I’ve tried to drop the needle at just the right moment.

James self-deprecatingly downplayed the value of his work and suggested a scattered and serpentine order of chapters for his readers. So I followed his plan and then wandered around the book over the next several years picking up all the leftover bits, as well as rereading some of the chapters I read first in the early 90s. So, odd as it seems as a plan for finishing a book with twenty-eight chapters, this year I read chapters VIII, XVII, and XXI.

In chapter VIII, “The Relation of Minds to Other Things,” the Psychologist explains, among other things, the ability of exhausted mothers to sleep soundly and yet to be awakened instantly when the baby cries, and the correspondence of the French verbs connaitre and savoir to two distinct psychological states. In the most fascinating passage of the chapter, he claims that many people have multiple consciences, only one of which has access to the mouth. His evidence comes from observations that certain people, while talking animatedly to someone in front, can be made by someone standing behind to follow simple instructions or to grasp something presented to the hand, and yet say that they don’t remember any of this posterior activity. My wife has very little attention for anything else when she’s talking on the phone. I’m going to sneak up behind her someday when she’s talking, tell her to raise her right arm, and see what happens!

In chapter XVII, “Sensation,” James brings up a point that he has made earlier and that he goes into later in the book as well (things I know from having read the book so out of order): that all sensations automatically have a spatial element. It’s his version of Kant’s tenet that space is a category or form of the mind. (Don’t ask me for a treatise on how the two authors might agree or disagree on this topic!) In a passage that I approach with delicate skepticism, he says that babies at first only have a notion that the objects they hear and see are “out there.” It takes many months and many sensations in order to learn to coordinate the “out theres” into a mental concept of a spatial framework. I don’t know. Are horses that different from humans? Foals can walk when they’re born, and they don’t, to my knowledge, constantly bump into trees as if they don’t know how close the trees are. But James hooks me again when he talks about where we locate sensations of touch. We feel the desktop under the pencil point, he says, and we sense the tap of a cane to be located on the ground, even thought the sensation is really all in our hand. I think he’s right, and I’m now convinced that all sensations carry a sense of “out there” with them.

Chapter XXI, “The Perception of Reality,” is really about belief. James says so many thought-provoking things touching on religion, patriotism, family or tribal identity, the created worlds of fiction and what others might term the suspension of disbelief, mathematics, scientific forces, and mad delusions, that I can’t do them all justice. So I’ll just highlight one point. Belief, he says, involves an emotional layer in the thought. Try saying, “The sky is blue” and then “The sky is red,” in order to begin to feel the difference. (I think I do.) Well, if belief involves an emotion, then you can come to believe proposition X by having that emotion while thinking proposition X. Thus someone can make you believe proposition X if they can instill the right emotion in you when trying to convince you of proposition X. (It all sounds a little crazy until you think about the early days of a romance and things you believe without having copious amounts of evidence.) And now, finally, the “one” point I’m trying to highlight: an idea involving an extreme call to action is often believed precisely because the call to action raises such strong emotions. In some cases, the more absurd the action called for, the easier it is to believe the associated idea.

We think we’re so rational, and reason seems so clear when we’re calmly looking at a neat syllogism. Yet our human connection to reason is so tenuous! As Pascal noted, we take pride in the nobility of our lofty thoughts, and yet what power a little fly has to paralyze our minds by simply landing on our knee. Chapter XVII of James reassured me that I have a grasp on reality. Chapter XXI told me my reality may be the result of emotional manipulation. I’m glad my temperament told me early in life to be wary of people trying to convince my mind while toying with my heart.

Even Mississippi

My poor wife! She’s had to listen to me talking about Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought every day for weeks. There’s a reason this history of the United States from 1815 to 1848 won the Pulitzer Prize. Howe, of course, documents every detail, he explains rather than just describing, he uses copious illustrative quotations, he covers daily life and art and entertainment and science and technology as well as economics and politics and war, and he does it all with elegant, vibrant prose. But the stories he tells! I’d heard these stories in school and read about them since, but not with all these details.

Let’s take the Mexican War for an example. I knew Polk wanted this war and that he wanted Texas and got a lot more. I knew that two war heroes emerged from the fighting, both of whom received the Whig nomination for President, and one of whom won. But I didn’t know that Polk secretly negotiated with a captured Santa Anna, let him go, and told him to get himself made President again and ask for a treaty. I didn’t know that Polk, a Democrat who wanted more territory for the extension of slavery, wanted to win the war decisively enough to get California out of the deal but not so decisively as to create war heroes who would beat him in the upcoming election. (Clearly, he failed in that last goal.) I didn’t know that he relieved his ambassador, Trist, before the conclusion of the treaty because he decided he wanted to dismantle the country of Mexico and take it all. I didn’t know that Trist told the Mexican government that he had been relieved and that they should take his offer anyway rather than becoming absorbed in toto. And I didn’t know that gold was discovered in Sutter’s mill the very week that these negotiations were going on, when Mexico was agreeing to sell California for a pittance.

I’ve often chuckled-slash-tilted-my-head when I’ve read or heard the part of Dr. King’s Dream speech in which he says “even the state of Mississippi.” I’m happy to know that Mississippi recently changed its state flag. Perhaps that’s a sign that Dr. King’s dream is coming a bit nearer to reality. But why did he call out that state in particular? Or maybe my question is, why was Mississippi in special need of being called out? Howe went a long way to explaining that. After large tracts of Mississippi were “bought” from the Indians, white settlers came in a rush to establish new cotton fields. Most of them made their black slaves walk to the new land, and most of these workers had to make the trek in winter, since their owners didn’t want to miss out on any of the growing season. So the white people who came to Mississippi were interested in a quick buck; they had no interest in technological investments or building cities as trade centers. As a result, Mississippi ended up a poor area with few large towns. These settlers also represented the type of slave owner that had no sense of “paternalism” toward their chattel, a sense that led some owners elsewhere in the country, say, to care a bit for the health of their possessed humans or to offer them a modicum of comfort or of education. These dynamics tend to pass from generation to generation, and thus we get Mississippi, perennially low in spending on education, perennially low in median wage, and so rife with racial injustice that Dr. King felt a need to give that state a special place in his speech.

(I see that Mississippi is 51st in the country for median wage in 2020, behind all other states and the District of Columbia. The state is now 46th in number of dollars spent per pupil on education. They’ve moved up recently. So, yes, there’s hope, even for Mississippi.)

I could go on and on. The railroads. The canals. The telegraph. The elections. Debates on internal improvements. Debates over paper money and a national bank. Jackson’s appeal as a man of “natural” talent and his supporters’ suspicion of training, education, and expertise. The rise of voluntary associations. The beginnings of abolitionism. On the other hand, Calhoun’s conversion to a states’-rights-er and the rise of the claim that slavery was a “positive good.” The rise of women’s participation in politics. Every story was a bit familiar and yet full of nuance and new detail that made sense not only of that period but of ours as well. Howe may very well soon find himself in possession of an exlibrismagnis book award to go with his Pulitzer!
 

Poetry by Young C. S. Lewis

This year’s literary itinerary included stops at two volumes of poetry by America’s favorite Anglican, C. S. Lewis. The first, Spirits in Bondage, was composed before Lewis became a Christian and includes railings against a God the young man didn’t believe in. The other is a book of poems from Lewis’s Christian years, collected by Walter Hooper, secretary to Lewis late in his life and curator of his literary estate. Having read Lewis’s own accounts of his atheistic years, I expected to enjoy the later poems more, but my expectations were wrong.

Perhaps Spirits in Bondage presents less mature work than the later book. It’s still more advanced than any poetry I might have written. Perhaps it occasionally cries out blasphemous doubts. What Christian hasn’t struggled with doubt and left the battle with the limp of Jacob? I loved these poems because here I found deep questions, stirring emotions, and vivid images expressed by the Lewis I know and love. It’s all here: the scholarship, the dry clip of twentieth-century language moistened with the elegance of earlier eras, the piercing psychological insights, the intelligent arguments, and the humility that suggests the author would gladly sit over a pint with any reader and enjoy a conversation that wouldn’t leave the lesser one embarrassed by the chasm of intellectual ability that separated the two.

The young atheist’s poems, though, also lifted me with passages about desires for and visions of moral standards, about life after death, and about eternal peace. The same collection that contains these lines:

Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.
The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.

also contains these:

When glory I have built in dreams
Along some fiery sunset gleams,
And my dead sin and foolishness
Grow one with Nature’s whole distress, [i.e., when I go the way of all flesh]
To perfect being I shall win,
And where I end will Life begin.

At this point in his life, the future Christian apologist sees God as an inevitable fly in the ointment of the eternal life of “perfect being” he foresees in those lines above. Consider this passage:

For in that house I know a little, silent room
Where Someone’s always waiting, waiting in the gloom
To draw me with an evil eye, and hold me fast –
Yet thither doom will drive me and He will win at last.

That atheist would later in his life bless the Hound of Heaven that drove him to that silent room, and he would explain that among the tools He wielded in order to “win at last” was the special sensation Lewis called “joy,” the phenomenon he first experienced as a child looking at his brother’s toy garden. His description of it in these poems is perhaps even better than his more familiar prose account in Surprised by Joy:

But only the strange power
Of unsought Beauty in some casual hour
Can build a bridge of light or sound or form
To lead you out of all this strife and storm;
When of some beauty we are grown a part
Till from its very glory’s midmost heart
Out leaps a sudden beam of larger light
Into our souls. All things are seen aright
. . . . . . .
The miracle is done
And for one little moment we are one
With the eternal stream of loveliness
That flows so calm, aloft from all distress
Yet leaps and lives around us as a fire
Making us faint with overstrong desire
To sport and swim for ever in its deep.

I don’t like the impersonal you in the fourth line of this excerpt. And I think the poem loses power by constantly affirming that the experience is something that happens to “us” rather than just describing what happens to the author. But I love reading this poem, knowing what God eventually made of these astonishing moments in this astonishing life. Lewis called the piece “Dungeon Grates,” showing that he knew that the materialistic world he moved in was only a narrow prison and that the surrounding world of the eternal stream of loveliness was a wide land of freedom. In fact, doesn’t the book’s title, Spirits in Bondage, indicate a belief in the existence of a spiritual liberty? Lewis eventually entered that liberty. May he continue to go further up and further in.

Questions for the Durants

 Will and Ariel Durant spent over forty years of their lives together traveling the world, visiting art museums, reading old books, and writing an eleven-volume history of western civilization (with one volume covering the East) that won a Pulitzer Prize. Sounds perfect to me. Some years my reading in this epic saga has been thrilling and inspiring (the high middle ages, for example). In other years, they’ve left me saddened by humanity’s evil, shown even in the pursuit of the ultimate good (religious wars during the Reformation, for example). This year, when I read the end of The Age of Louis XIV and the beginning of The Age of Voltaire, I just felt instructed. I wonder how much the cool emotional reaction simply has to do with the pandemic situation. For many years, I read Durant at lunch on welcome breaks from work; now reading is just one of several activities I engage in while sitting at home. Whatever the reason, my experience this year is more purely intellectual than usual, and I’m left with some questions for the Durants.

(1) You say that the theme of your multi-volume work is the emancipation of (European) thought, government, and social structures from superstition into a freedom of reason and conscience. Thank you, first of all, for spending so many wonderful pages on the development of religion in the west, and especially of Christianity. For people who celebrate its future humiliation, you certainly lavish elegant and fair praise on the Church of middle ages and show where reason did take its place in theological discourse. Would you be willing to concede that the Renaissance, Reformation, and scientific revolution, more than just freeing Europe from the Church, also freed the Church itself from a superstition or two and brought it to more reasonable stances?

(2) Thank you for including Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the Enlightenment rather than calling them, in typical fashion, British forerunners of a properly French movement. You say that the early eighteenth century, after the influence of these great opponents of superstition and the weakening of the Church, was the most corrupt era in English history but that it also saw the rise of public charities like the foundling hospital and the public workhouses. (And, by the way, thank you for acknowledging the charitable aspect of the workhouses in spite of the unredeemed Scrooge’s famous attitude toward them.) Might you concede that the Church, with all its flaws, must prior to this time have had a positive effect on English society by limiting drunkenness, providing honest, healthy work for unwed women, caring for the poor, and other virtuous programs, and that the charitable societies and institutions begun in this period were primarily the work of Christians? In other words, is it possible that the road from blind faith to reason does not necessarily follow a steady ascent?

(3) When I was about 20, I read Francis Schaeffer say that if I were to study David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature in college, the professor would skip the part called “The Conclusion to this Book.” Several years later, I did indeed study that philosophical work, and the instructor did indeed skip the “Conclusion.” Thank you, Durants, for not only including the Conclusion in your discussion of the book but taking Hume at his word that the name of the section refers not just to its position at the end of the book but to its presentation of the main point of the argument. During the bulk of the Treatise, Hume shows the reader by logical argument that I have no reason to trust my senses and thus no reason to believe in the objective existence of the world around me, of laws or of cause and effect, or even of my own mind. But in the Conclusion, he says that he dines with a friend and plays backgammon and then cannot believe his own reasoning. Therefore, he says, reason cannot lead us to truth. I don’t think the sudden shift was just a weaselly dodge, an insincere blanket of comfort thrown over the cold bed of extreme skepticism so readers wouldn’t hate him, and I’m glad you agree. But, I ask, since Kant (not to mention all those professors Schaeffer and I knew) ignored the Conclusion, wouldn’t you say that Hume’s primary influence on philosophy lay in the bleak skeptical tail and not the sentimental dog?

I think the Durants would concede all my points. I believe that moral humanism described their own conscientious view of the Way the World Is. But I don’t think the emergence of the rational, modern world they so valued really was the theme of their lives’ work. No, as historians they were too honest to shoehorn their subject into their one story. I think their true purpose was simply to tell a sweeping tale of troubled humanity’s attempts to negotiate existence, to weep at and learn from our too frequent, execrable failures, and to celebrate our best achievements.