Tomorrow, I start the sixth year of my ten-year reading plan. A few days later, Nancy and I leave for Arezzo, Italy, where I will teach for a semester. Before I know it, I’ll be reading the Aeneid in Tuscany, close to the site of Virgil’s Italian battles. I know it sounds weird, but I love my reading schedule. Every New Year, I look at the list and get excited about what’s coming up. There’s always a good dose of my favorite authors: Plato, Aristotle, Dickens, Trollope, Shakespeare, Aquinas, Plutarch, Durant, Augustine, Lewis, Chesterton, Boswell, James, and O’Brian. Year 6 also has me eager to read Byron, Sun Tzu, Chrysostom, Dionysius, Jonathan Edwards, and Alvin Plantinga, all of whom are basically new to me (except for a couple of poems by Byron and one sermon by Chrysostom), as well as a biography of Rutherford B. Hayes and a history of Black regiments in the Civil War. I get to read more in Boccaccio, Euclid, and Orlando Furioso, and I get to reread a novel by Charles Williams and Goldsmith’s hilarious Vicar of Wakefield. Yes, I love my reading plan.
Five or six years ago at this magical season between semesters, when time is suspended and the air is hushed, I had a dream. In my dream, I stood on a footbridge over a river, facing west-by-northwest. The sky was dark, but the details of the scene were made visible by the glow of scores of tiny blue lights floating in the air above the river and all around me. And from these lights issued the indistinct whispers of human voices. I saw no human figure other than myself, but on the western bank stood a large, imposing building complex made of dull stone. It looked a bit like a castle with several stern keeps behind a high, windowless wall that zigzagged irregularly around the inner towers like a strip of perforated postcards laid on its side. I don’t know what I thought the castle was or what lay behind me, but I remember I was headed toward the west and didn’t want to move any farther toward the castle, so I just lingered on the bridge. As much as I opposed the idea of moving forward, though, I didn’t feel fear or disgust or any negative emotion about the castle; I simply noted its undesirability cognitively. All I felt at the moment was the most joyful peace I ever remember, a peace that seemed sustained by soft, wordless voices emanating from the blue lights.
I puzzled over this dream for a long time and asked several friends for their help in understanding it. I recognized some of the features of the tableau: the bridge probably came from my memories of the footbridge leading to the music building at the University of Iowa, and the floating lights vaguely reminded me of the icicle lights that hang across the front window in our house each December, and hang there now casting their numinous glow on the room. But the peace surpassed all adult memory; it seemed to me it could only come from childhood or directly from Heaven. Ironically, this dream of utter peace agitated me for weeks as I sought an explanation. What was I headed toward? What fearsome future awaited me? What were the lights, and whose were the voices? The memory of the peace remained sweet to me, but it seemed I could feel it only indirectly as long as these answers eluded me.
A huge part of the unmediated enjoyment returned when I remembered that the windowless wall had no doors, either, and that the path from the bridge turned right on the shore and led past the castle. Whatever the buildings represented, they now seemed both more severe, since they would not allow me entrance, and less ominous, since I had discovered that the worst the castle could do to me was to cast its shadow on my way for a while.
With that discovery, a lot of things clicked. The path represented the journey of my life; I had no thought of turning around and heading east because I could no more reverse the direction of my walk than I can reverse the course of time. The lights floating around the bridge reminded me of Christmas lights because the bridge stood for the days before and after Christmas. What imposing institution lay in wait for me, ready to darken my path after the Christmas break but unwilling to fully accept me into its community? Too easy.
But how did the voices in the lights fit into this scenario? They clearly meant something more than a Christmas decoration; Christmas lights don’t talk. These lights had personalities, they had comforting messages. Surely they include my family and my best friends. But because there were so many and because their words were indistinct, I believe they also include the authors on my reading list. Maybe their words are indistinct because they were the Spirits of Reading Yet to Come.
Yes, it sounds strange even to me, but I love my reading plan. Thanks for sharing part of the journey with me. At this point, some of the lights represent you and your encouragement. What are your lights? May they lead you across your bridge and through the shadows on your path.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Book Awards -- 2011
Halfway through! I finished the fifth year of The Plan just a couple of weeks ago with Dickens’s Pictures of Italy. This weekend I start year 6, and the weekend after that I take the Kindle to Italy. In the meantime, I’m happy to announce my book awards for the year. I blogged earlier in the year about the recipients of all awards except the last.
Still Too Good to Compare with Anyone Else
Charles Dickens. This year I read the Great Man’s masterpiece among masterpieces, the book about the boy Dickens called his favorite of all the children that lived in his mind. Much of David Copperfield, in fact, is about people that live in the mind: both fictional people and the imperfect shadows we create of people we know. I always wondered before why David begins his first-person account with local women prophesying at his birth that he would grow up to see ghosts. Now I understand that the prediction came true.
Best New Read: Fiction
George Orwell, Animal Farm. Partway through the book I realized that trying to figure out the allegory was a pointless distraction. Stalin’s Soviet Union provides just one example of the contemptible but all too common human dynamic demonstrated in this fairy tale. The leaders’ insistence that the common folk use particular language, the changing rules, and the loose interpretation of the rules by those who are more equal than others all sound very familiar. I once received an email stating that in my publications and correspondence I must always refer to the University of Oklahoma with a capital T in the word “the.”
Best New Read: History
Durant, The Age of Faith, chaps. 27-36. Last year I read the section on the political history of the Middle Ages in Europe. This year I read Durant’s account of the Church and the arts. My spirit soared with the Gothic cathedrals and was humbled with Dominic and Francis. And Durant got the part dealing with music right, including all the technical descriptions – a rare accomplishment for a nonexpert!
Best New Read: Religion
My first inclination says to go with the Church History of Eusebius, especially on this feast day of the Holy Innocents in commemoration of Herod’s slaughter of Jewish babies, but instead I’ll take the opportunity to celebrate George Morrison’s Christ in Shakespeare. According to Morrison, the Bard testified to Christ not so much by putting sermons in the mouths of the Christian characters as by faithfully depicting the physical, spiritual, and moral world that Christ created. I’ll never read Shakespeare the same way again.
Most Confusing Philosophy
As much as I want to say Hegel, especially after reading William James call him a lunatic, I have to give the award to Oswald Spengler, who expected others to judge ideas, people, and institutions by the colors they invoked in Spengler’s mind.
Most Encouraging Philosophy
Aquinas, Part I-II, QQ. 59-63. I’ll attempt a summary of this section on virtues – gulp! The moral virtues arise in us first as aptitudes and are developed usually by habitual action but sometimes by miraculous gift. They don’t eliminate the passions, as the Stoics incorrectly taught. The ends of moral actions must be in accord with reason, and reason orders and directs the passions; therefore, some moral actions are strengthened by rationally ordered passion. God surpasses human reason, so He gives us the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) to direct us to Himself. My summary of the summary: God works in us to will and to do his good pleasure.
Biggest Disappointment on the List
Since Spengler already got an award, I’ll give this one to Richard Blackmore’s Lorna Doone. The “hero” gets a lot of guns so he can kill all his enemies and get the pretty girl. Seriously?
Most Disappointing Sequel
Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book. I liked the wildly inventive first book in the Thursday Next series (which got a positive award from me last year), and this one provided lots of new clever ideas, like the secret library of all possible plots, but the story brought in too many elements and meandered. I couldn’t help wondering if the sidetracks were there to give a second meaning to the title, as if Fforde were saying that the plot of his book suffered from the literary espionage that he writes about in his fantasy world. But I never could fully buy into that theory, especially when this supposed celebration of books dethroned classic after classic by calling them all boring.
Best Reread
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. As much as Jasper Fforde seems to hate the classics, Lewis loves them. His story of the way God used good friends and good books to reveal Himself inspires me on every page, and I was pleasantly amazed at the number of Lewis’s favorites I had read in the twenty years since I last enjoyed Surprised by Joy.
Best Recommended Offroading
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games. I could be picky and ask who Katniss is talking to in her first-person, present-tense narrative. Sometimes it seems like I’ve been given access to her stream of consciousness, but at other times she explains details of her culture as if talking to an outsider. But in spite of this problem (which may be resolved by one of the later volumes, for all I know), this book had me enthralled beginning to end. It clearly belongs to the era of reality television and cameras in the sky, yet it shows Aristotelian unity in its almost relentless pursuit of a single story.
Well, there’s my last retrospective on 2011. Next time, a preview of 2012.
Still Too Good to Compare with Anyone Else
Charles Dickens. This year I read the Great Man’s masterpiece among masterpieces, the book about the boy Dickens called his favorite of all the children that lived in his mind. Much of David Copperfield, in fact, is about people that live in the mind: both fictional people and the imperfect shadows we create of people we know. I always wondered before why David begins his first-person account with local women prophesying at his birth that he would grow up to see ghosts. Now I understand that the prediction came true.
Best New Read: Fiction
George Orwell, Animal Farm. Partway through the book I realized that trying to figure out the allegory was a pointless distraction. Stalin’s Soviet Union provides just one example of the contemptible but all too common human dynamic demonstrated in this fairy tale. The leaders’ insistence that the common folk use particular language, the changing rules, and the loose interpretation of the rules by those who are more equal than others all sound very familiar. I once received an email stating that in my publications and correspondence I must always refer to the University of Oklahoma with a capital T in the word “the.”
Best New Read: History
Durant, The Age of Faith, chaps. 27-36. Last year I read the section on the political history of the Middle Ages in Europe. This year I read Durant’s account of the Church and the arts. My spirit soared with the Gothic cathedrals and was humbled with Dominic and Francis. And Durant got the part dealing with music right, including all the technical descriptions – a rare accomplishment for a nonexpert!
Best New Read: Religion
My first inclination says to go with the Church History of Eusebius, especially on this feast day of the Holy Innocents in commemoration of Herod’s slaughter of Jewish babies, but instead I’ll take the opportunity to celebrate George Morrison’s Christ in Shakespeare. According to Morrison, the Bard testified to Christ not so much by putting sermons in the mouths of the Christian characters as by faithfully depicting the physical, spiritual, and moral world that Christ created. I’ll never read Shakespeare the same way again.
Most Confusing Philosophy
As much as I want to say Hegel, especially after reading William James call him a lunatic, I have to give the award to Oswald Spengler, who expected others to judge ideas, people, and institutions by the colors they invoked in Spengler’s mind.
Most Encouraging Philosophy
Aquinas, Part I-II, QQ. 59-63. I’ll attempt a summary of this section on virtues – gulp! The moral virtues arise in us first as aptitudes and are developed usually by habitual action but sometimes by miraculous gift. They don’t eliminate the passions, as the Stoics incorrectly taught. The ends of moral actions must be in accord with reason, and reason orders and directs the passions; therefore, some moral actions are strengthened by rationally ordered passion. God surpasses human reason, so He gives us the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) to direct us to Himself. My summary of the summary: God works in us to will and to do his good pleasure.
Biggest Disappointment on the List
Since Spengler already got an award, I’ll give this one to Richard Blackmore’s Lorna Doone. The “hero” gets a lot of guns so he can kill all his enemies and get the pretty girl. Seriously?
Most Disappointing Sequel
Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book. I liked the wildly inventive first book in the Thursday Next series (which got a positive award from me last year), and this one provided lots of new clever ideas, like the secret library of all possible plots, but the story brought in too many elements and meandered. I couldn’t help wondering if the sidetracks were there to give a second meaning to the title, as if Fforde were saying that the plot of his book suffered from the literary espionage that he writes about in his fantasy world. But I never could fully buy into that theory, especially when this supposed celebration of books dethroned classic after classic by calling them all boring.
Best Reread
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. As much as Jasper Fforde seems to hate the classics, Lewis loves them. His story of the way God used good friends and good books to reveal Himself inspires me on every page, and I was pleasantly amazed at the number of Lewis’s favorites I had read in the twenty years since I last enjoyed Surprised by Joy.
Best Recommended Offroading
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games. I could be picky and ask who Katniss is talking to in her first-person, present-tense narrative. Sometimes it seems like I’ve been given access to her stream of consciousness, but at other times she explains details of her culture as if talking to an outsider. But in spite of this problem (which may be resolved by one of the later volumes, for all I know), this book had me enthralled beginning to end. It clearly belongs to the era of reality television and cameras in the sky, yet it shows Aristotelian unity in its almost relentless pursuit of a single story.
Well, there’s my last retrospective on 2011. Next time, a preview of 2012.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Imagining Christmas Morning
In year 3 of this reading plan, Calvin gave me new perspective by explaining that Christ’s entire earthly life was a redemptive act. From humbling Himself at the Conception, through birth in a feeding trough and life as a carpenter, all the way to his crucifixion – every aspect of his incarnate life was an act of human obedience that set, proved, and satisfied the standard for our race. His death, Calvin explains, was the central act of redemption, not the only act.
The Book of Common Prayer’s Litany, which I pray about once a month, confirms this idea in a section that read this way:
This morning, I am imagining myself in a dirty cave. The strong but not-so-offensive smell of barnyard waste hits my nose. The animals keep up a sporadic drone of scraping hooves, swishing tails, and calm bleating and lowing. My mouth feels the dryness of the morning, and I drink some metallic tasting water from a skin pouch. I see a little family with a newborn, wrapped tightly in a worn cloth marked with a couple of dull purple stripes. I don’t see halos. I remember seeing some shepherds come in a couple of hours ago, telling of strange visions. I run outside to look at the indigo sky but see no signs of angels or heavenly armies. As I come back in, I hear the sucking sound of a baby drinking. The father has both satisfaction and sleepiness on his face; the young mother’s face shows exhaustion and a quizzical amazement. After the meal I reach out a finger and touch the baby’s palm. He closes his fingers around my finger and holds it. I feel the hard stones pressing on my bended knees and the beginnings of tears forming in my eyes.
The Book of Common Prayer’s Litany, which I pray about once a month, confirms this idea in a section that read this way:
By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity and Circumcision; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation,This idea came up yet another time in year 3 when I also read – and put into practice – Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. In one section, Loyola leads the reader through a series of meditations on events in the life of Jesus: the discussion with the teachers when He was twelve, his baptism, his temptation, his arrest, and so on. In each case, Loyola calls the reader to engage the imagination of all five senses: What do I see? What do I hear? What do I feel? What do I smell? What do I taste?
Good Lord, deliver us.
By thine Agony and Bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion;
by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection
and Ascension; and by the Coming of the Holy Ghost,
Good Lord, deliver us.
This morning, I am imagining myself in a dirty cave. The strong but not-so-offensive smell of barnyard waste hits my nose. The animals keep up a sporadic drone of scraping hooves, swishing tails, and calm bleating and lowing. My mouth feels the dryness of the morning, and I drink some metallic tasting water from a skin pouch. I see a little family with a newborn, wrapped tightly in a worn cloth marked with a couple of dull purple stripes. I don’t see halos. I remember seeing some shepherds come in a couple of hours ago, telling of strange visions. I run outside to look at the indigo sky but see no signs of angels or heavenly armies. As I come back in, I hear the sucking sound of a baby drinking. The father has both satisfaction and sleepiness on his face; the young mother’s face shows exhaustion and a quizzical amazement. After the meal I reach out a finger and touch the baby’s palm. He closes his fingers around my finger and holds it. I feel the hard stones pressing on my bended knees and the beginnings of tears forming in my eyes.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol – 2011
Just about a year ago, I blogged about two of my favorite Christmas carols: “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “It Came Upon The Midnight Clear.” This Advent season, I’ve been reading and pondering carols again, and two more have sprung to fore of my attention: “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Silent Night.”
I’m thinking about grammar today, so I have to start with a lesson of a grammatical point, as best I understand it. In English, each noun must perform one of a short list of possible roles: it acts as either a subject, an object, the object of a preposition, a subject or object complement, an appositive, an adjective (unfortunately, the English grammar that allows “water glass” results in dissertations with ugly phrases such as “music understanding index survey instrument”), an exclamation (“Heavens!”), or a vocative. The vocative is a direct address, a calling upon or naming of the person spoken to, like “Our Father” in the Lord’s Prayer. Latin has a special form for the vocative: a Roman addressing Quintus would call him “Quinte.” That function in English used to be signaled by the single-letter word “O.” These days, most people, even some hymnal editors, don’t know the difference between “O” and Oh” and sometimes assume that the shorter form is just the old-fashioned spelling of the more familiar word. But used correctly, as in “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” it indicates that the noun or noun phrase names the person (or thing!) spoken to. In this case, it shows that when we sing the first verse of this song, we sing to the town. What a pretty device! Bethlehem, did you know what monumental event was taking place in your dark streets that night?
I love the sinuous melody of this lovely carol, with its unusually high number of leaps and unusually frequent changes of direction. (Try it! Sing “Jingle Bells” or “Yankee Doodle,” and note how often the melody switches directions. Then compare your results with “O Little Town.”) And I love the turn to minor in the third line and the disappearance of harmony for three beats (“ev-er-last”). These stark features seem especially suitable to the “dark streets” and “fears” of verse 1 and to the “world of sin” in verse 3, and they contrast wonderfully with the sweet, tender outer portions of the score. The combination makes the hymn both uplifting and stern, both beautiful and sublime, and fits perfectly one of the best lyrics in any carol: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”
Several years ago, I was trying to explain to one church’s worship band the problem of lyrics that just list Biblical sounding things without saying anything about them. One popular praise song, for instance, mentions “the greatness of his mercy and love,” but it doesn’t say anything about that greatness. It’s a noun phrase that serves no grammatical function. It isn’t a subject or object. It isn’t a vocative. It isn't part of a sentence. It’s just a phrase that sounds suitable. The band didn’t understand my concern, and my frustration only grew. Ever since that time, I’ve been looking out for nouns in search of a sentence.
I blame a poor educational strategy and sloppy postmodern thinking for the lazy acceptance of these faulty lyrics, but the problem might trace partly to what is perhaps the most beloved of all Christmas carols: “Silent Night.” It certainly starts with two disconnected noun phrases: Silent night, holy night.” I take these to be exclamations or perhaps even vocatives. But it’s all sentences from there on, despite the punctuational choices of hymnal editors. In fact, after checking the punctuation in hymnals and other songbooks, I’m convinced that I’m the only person in America that understands the grammar of this song.
I know. That took a lot of nerve to say and might not sound like it’s said in the Christmas spirit. But anything good and beautiful must share in the spirit of the Child born in the manger. Good grammar has done me good through the years, and I say God Bless It! Check the closest hymnal. Does it place a comma between “virgin” and “mother”? If so, that comma makes “mother and child” a disconnected phrase. "Virgin" and "mother" go together in one phrase: Mary is the virgin mother, and all is bright around her and her child. Does it have a period after mild? If so, it leaves the Holy Infant dangling. “Holy Infant so tender and mild" is the vocative introduction to the sentence. At this point we sing a lullaby to baby Jesus and encourage Him to sleep in heavenly peace. Now honestly, until a few years ago I didn’t know that last line was an imperative addressed to the Christ Child. I just sang it as a suggestion vaguely offered to the world at large. But that reading left “Holy Infant so tender and mild” out of any sentence.
The second verse causes even more problems. The source I’m looking at now puts a semicolon after “light,” leaving “Son of God” and “love’s pure light” homeless. With that semicolon, all we have is a list, not a sentence: a silent night, the Son of God, and the light of love. The third line might as well read “These are a few of my favorite things.” But this verse of the song is not just a list of Christmas things; it’s a sentence. The biggest problem, I believe, comes down to the word “beams.” For most of my life, I thought that word was a noun, just one more thing in this list of happily floating Christmas objects. But after I became aware of the problem of dangling nouns, I became convinced that this classic song wouldn’t make the postmodern mistake. So where is the verb? “Beams” is the only candidate! So here’s my parsing: “Son of God” is a vocative: we address Jesus directly with this sentence. “Love’s pure light” is the subject. “Radiant” causes another small problem. I used to think it described the beams, but my current theory says that “beams” is a verb, so “radiant” must modify some other noun. I think it refers retroactively to the light with a little poetic inversion of word order. So it’s “love’s pure, radiant light” said out of order. Now we get the verb: the light beams – or shines, or radiates – from Jesus’ holy face to signal the dawn of redeeming grace. I’m still pondering the last line, "Jesus, Lord at Thy birth." Is it still part of the sentence? Can one sentence have more than one vocative? The modified version shown here doesn’t fit the rhythm of the melody, but it represents what goes through my mind when I sing the verse:
I’m thinking about grammar today, so I have to start with a lesson of a grammatical point, as best I understand it. In English, each noun must perform one of a short list of possible roles: it acts as either a subject, an object, the object of a preposition, a subject or object complement, an appositive, an adjective (unfortunately, the English grammar that allows “water glass” results in dissertations with ugly phrases such as “music understanding index survey instrument”), an exclamation (“Heavens!”), or a vocative. The vocative is a direct address, a calling upon or naming of the person spoken to, like “Our Father” in the Lord’s Prayer. Latin has a special form for the vocative: a Roman addressing Quintus would call him “Quinte.” That function in English used to be signaled by the single-letter word “O.” These days, most people, even some hymnal editors, don’t know the difference between “O” and Oh” and sometimes assume that the shorter form is just the old-fashioned spelling of the more familiar word. But used correctly, as in “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” it indicates that the noun or noun phrase names the person (or thing!) spoken to. In this case, it shows that when we sing the first verse of this song, we sing to the town. What a pretty device! Bethlehem, did you know what monumental event was taking place in your dark streets that night?
I love the sinuous melody of this lovely carol, with its unusually high number of leaps and unusually frequent changes of direction. (Try it! Sing “Jingle Bells” or “Yankee Doodle,” and note how often the melody switches directions. Then compare your results with “O Little Town.”) And I love the turn to minor in the third line and the disappearance of harmony for three beats (“ev-er-last”). These stark features seem especially suitable to the “dark streets” and “fears” of verse 1 and to the “world of sin” in verse 3, and they contrast wonderfully with the sweet, tender outer portions of the score. The combination makes the hymn both uplifting and stern, both beautiful and sublime, and fits perfectly one of the best lyrics in any carol: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”
Several years ago, I was trying to explain to one church’s worship band the problem of lyrics that just list Biblical sounding things without saying anything about them. One popular praise song, for instance, mentions “the greatness of his mercy and love,” but it doesn’t say anything about that greatness. It’s a noun phrase that serves no grammatical function. It isn’t a subject or object. It isn’t a vocative. It isn't part of a sentence. It’s just a phrase that sounds suitable. The band didn’t understand my concern, and my frustration only grew. Ever since that time, I’ve been looking out for nouns in search of a sentence.
I blame a poor educational strategy and sloppy postmodern thinking for the lazy acceptance of these faulty lyrics, but the problem might trace partly to what is perhaps the most beloved of all Christmas carols: “Silent Night.” It certainly starts with two disconnected noun phrases: Silent night, holy night.” I take these to be exclamations or perhaps even vocatives. But it’s all sentences from there on, despite the punctuational choices of hymnal editors. In fact, after checking the punctuation in hymnals and other songbooks, I’m convinced that I’m the only person in America that understands the grammar of this song.
I know. That took a lot of nerve to say and might not sound like it’s said in the Christmas spirit. But anything good and beautiful must share in the spirit of the Child born in the manger. Good grammar has done me good through the years, and I say God Bless It! Check the closest hymnal. Does it place a comma between “virgin” and “mother”? If so, that comma makes “mother and child” a disconnected phrase. "Virgin" and "mother" go together in one phrase: Mary is the virgin mother, and all is bright around her and her child. Does it have a period after mild? If so, it leaves the Holy Infant dangling. “Holy Infant so tender and mild" is the vocative introduction to the sentence. At this point we sing a lullaby to baby Jesus and encourage Him to sleep in heavenly peace. Now honestly, until a few years ago I didn’t know that last line was an imperative addressed to the Christ Child. I just sang it as a suggestion vaguely offered to the world at large. But that reading left “Holy Infant so tender and mild” out of any sentence.
The second verse causes even more problems. The source I’m looking at now puts a semicolon after “light,” leaving “Son of God” and “love’s pure light” homeless. With that semicolon, all we have is a list, not a sentence: a silent night, the Son of God, and the light of love. The third line might as well read “These are a few of my favorite things.” But this verse of the song is not just a list of Christmas things; it’s a sentence. The biggest problem, I believe, comes down to the word “beams.” For most of my life, I thought that word was a noun, just one more thing in this list of happily floating Christmas objects. But after I became aware of the problem of dangling nouns, I became convinced that this classic song wouldn’t make the postmodern mistake. So where is the verb? “Beams” is the only candidate! So here’s my parsing: “Son of God” is a vocative: we address Jesus directly with this sentence. “Love’s pure light” is the subject. “Radiant” causes another small problem. I used to think it described the beams, but my current theory says that “beams” is a verb, so “radiant” must modify some other noun. I think it refers retroactively to the light with a little poetic inversion of word order. So it’s “love’s pure, radiant light” said out of order. Now we get the verb: the light beams – or shines, or radiates – from Jesus’ holy face to signal the dawn of redeeming grace. I’m still pondering the last line, "Jesus, Lord at Thy birth." Is it still part of the sentence? Can one sentence have more than one vocative? The modified version shown here doesn’t fit the rhythm of the melody, but it represents what goes through my mind when I sing the verse:
Such a silent night! Such a holy night!The kind of close analysis I’m doing probably won’t make any sense to most twenty-first century Americans, and some might think I’m really missing the point of this simple, peaceful song. But I’ll attempt a short defense of my tactics by saying that only since looking at the carol in this way have I meditated also on the dawn of grace and on the mystery of Jesus being Lord at his birth. Looking at the lyrics with such scrutiny helps me see both the hopes and fears of all the years. May they meet in us all tonight!
O Son of God, love’s pure, radiant light
Shines from Thy holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
O Jesus, Lord at Thy birth,
O Jesus, Lord at Thy birth.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
How Aquinas Sees God
Since I started this blog partway through year 4 of a ten-year plan, I’ve tried to go back from time to time to comment on some of my reading from the first three-and-a-half years. Today I’ll look back a bit at Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.
The first time I tried reading Thomas, he made no sense to me at all. I don’t know which hindered me more: my illness at the time or my inexperience with Aristotle. The second time I tried reading the Summa, it seemed surprisingly clear. I had a few more years of living, a bit more knowledge of history and philosophy and logic, and some beginning experience with Aristotle. But I also had Mortimer Adler’s ten-year-plan, which assigned in the first year a small section of the Summa appropriate for beginners, and I had a commentary by Peter Kreeft. Now I just read and learn every year.
In my present plan, I spend five or six weeks each year with Thomas, and I still won’t get through the book in ten years. But I started at the beginning, and I still refer back to my notes on those first pages every year to help make sense of all the rest. The theme of the entire Summa is human knowledge of God, the goal of our lives, so the Doctor begins with several pages on the need for theology for two good reasons: to introduce his subject and to justify his method. Thomas says clearly in this introductory “question” (each chapter, we might say, discusses a single topic and is called a question) that man is directed to God as an “end beyond the grasp of human reason,” but that man can nevertheless arrive at some knowledge of God through reason based on premises revealed in Scripture. Natural reason alone, he says, can only tell us that God is, not what He is.
After a question presenting five ways natural reason can show us the existence of God, Thomas goes on to several questions on the attributes of God that revealed knowledge and reason together give us. The first is the simplicity of God. God has various qualities in a manner of speaking, but these are not separable add-ons. You can take away the white from the horse, because a horse may be different colors; in this way, a horse is a composition. But God is simple in that all the things we can say of God are inseparably unified. For instance, God is his own essence. For a human to be his own essence, that individual human would have to be the same thing as humanity. Well, I am not the same as humanity, but God is the same as deity: there is no separate essence or self-existing definition of God that God merely exemplifies.
Next comes the perfection of God, not that He is complete, as if there could be anything missing from God, but in that He is completely actual with no potentiality. Knowledge, for instance, can be potential instead of actual. I normally know the square of 15 only potentially. I wasn’t thinking of it until I wrote that sentence, but now I’m thinking of it, because I always have the potential to think of it. All of God’s knowledge, on the other hand, is always actual.
Some ancient Greek philosophers pondered abstracts such as Unity and Being, and tried to decide which was logically first: what is it on which every other existing thing depends? It seems that Being is the first thing since everything else that exists has Being. But Being is one thing, so maybe Unity is the first existence. But then how can Unity have existence without Being? Thomas cuts through this Gordian knot by showing that all these abstractions are qualities of the simple God: they are all equally first, because they are all inseparable from God, who is inseparable from his essence. After the question on perfection, Thomas adds Goodness to this list. Goodness is the same as Being. Evil is only a lack of Being. God’s Goodness is inseparable from his Being, and all things that are, are good insofar as they exist.
After then discussing the infinity, immutability, and eternity of God, Aquinas turns to the question of how God can be known by us. We can be sure, he says, that the created intellect can know God in his essence because Paul’s inspired words tell us that we shall one day see Him as He is. But seeing God can come only by grace, which grants the spiritual light that makes God visible. We cannot see God, i.e. know Him in his essence, in this lifetime, but through grace God gives us some knowledge of Himself through Scripture, inner understanding, and in some cases visions.
Now all this doctrine about the need for grace and the limited usefulness of reason differs significantly from what a devotee of a certain Protestant sect once told me about Aquinas’s views. I don’t know if Aquinas sounds either particularly Protestant or particularly Catholic in this section. But he sounds Biblical to me, and he sounds wise with a wisdom that has come through grace.
The first time I tried reading Thomas, he made no sense to me at all. I don’t know which hindered me more: my illness at the time or my inexperience with Aristotle. The second time I tried reading the Summa, it seemed surprisingly clear. I had a few more years of living, a bit more knowledge of history and philosophy and logic, and some beginning experience with Aristotle. But I also had Mortimer Adler’s ten-year-plan, which assigned in the first year a small section of the Summa appropriate for beginners, and I had a commentary by Peter Kreeft. Now I just read and learn every year.
In my present plan, I spend five or six weeks each year with Thomas, and I still won’t get through the book in ten years. But I started at the beginning, and I still refer back to my notes on those first pages every year to help make sense of all the rest. The theme of the entire Summa is human knowledge of God, the goal of our lives, so the Doctor begins with several pages on the need for theology for two good reasons: to introduce his subject and to justify his method. Thomas says clearly in this introductory “question” (each chapter, we might say, discusses a single topic and is called a question) that man is directed to God as an “end beyond the grasp of human reason,” but that man can nevertheless arrive at some knowledge of God through reason based on premises revealed in Scripture. Natural reason alone, he says, can only tell us that God is, not what He is.
After a question presenting five ways natural reason can show us the existence of God, Thomas goes on to several questions on the attributes of God that revealed knowledge and reason together give us. The first is the simplicity of God. God has various qualities in a manner of speaking, but these are not separable add-ons. You can take away the white from the horse, because a horse may be different colors; in this way, a horse is a composition. But God is simple in that all the things we can say of God are inseparably unified. For instance, God is his own essence. For a human to be his own essence, that individual human would have to be the same thing as humanity. Well, I am not the same as humanity, but God is the same as deity: there is no separate essence or self-existing definition of God that God merely exemplifies.
Next comes the perfection of God, not that He is complete, as if there could be anything missing from God, but in that He is completely actual with no potentiality. Knowledge, for instance, can be potential instead of actual. I normally know the square of 15 only potentially. I wasn’t thinking of it until I wrote that sentence, but now I’m thinking of it, because I always have the potential to think of it. All of God’s knowledge, on the other hand, is always actual.
Some ancient Greek philosophers pondered abstracts such as Unity and Being, and tried to decide which was logically first: what is it on which every other existing thing depends? It seems that Being is the first thing since everything else that exists has Being. But Being is one thing, so maybe Unity is the first existence. But then how can Unity have existence without Being? Thomas cuts through this Gordian knot by showing that all these abstractions are qualities of the simple God: they are all equally first, because they are all inseparable from God, who is inseparable from his essence. After the question on perfection, Thomas adds Goodness to this list. Goodness is the same as Being. Evil is only a lack of Being. God’s Goodness is inseparable from his Being, and all things that are, are good insofar as they exist.
After then discussing the infinity, immutability, and eternity of God, Aquinas turns to the question of how God can be known by us. We can be sure, he says, that the created intellect can know God in his essence because Paul’s inspired words tell us that we shall one day see Him as He is. But seeing God can come only by grace, which grants the spiritual light that makes God visible. We cannot see God, i.e. know Him in his essence, in this lifetime, but through grace God gives us some knowledge of Himself through Scripture, inner understanding, and in some cases visions.
Now all this doctrine about the need for grace and the limited usefulness of reason differs significantly from what a devotee of a certain Protestant sect once told me about Aquinas’s views. I don’t know if Aquinas sounds either particularly Protestant or particularly Catholic in this section. But he sounds Biblical to me, and he sounds wise with a wisdom that has come through grace.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Funny Things Are Everywhere
In the last two weeks, I’ve been rereading a lot of books that I’ve read many, many times – some probably fifty or even a hundred times. The grandkids are in the house, and I’m talking about classics by Dr. Seuss. My favorite book of his is One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. The two anonymous kids from The Cat in the Hat return for this one. In their first book, the Cat teaches them how to have fun, while in the second, he teaches them how to clean up after all that fun. The first tells a lesson some kids need to hear, and the second teaches a lesson all parents wish their kids would learn sooner. But One Fish, Two Fish teaches a lesson that many kids, I fear, never learn: how to stop and enjoy the wonderful world around us. “From There to Here, From Here to There, Funny things are Everywhere.”
The book sticks with fish at first: fish of different colors, and fish of different sizes. “This one has a little star. This one has a little car.” And then the message begins. “Say! What a lot of fish there are!” I love that word “Say!” Besides having an old-fashioned ring to it that reminds me of something my dad would say, it expresses all the wonder and delight of serendipitous discovery.
After some more fish, this time experiencing a variety of emotions, the kids start telling the reader about the fantastic creatures that live in their house: the Ying who likes to sing, and the Yink who links to drink pink ink, the Gack, the Zans, and the Zeep. My favorite part, though, has nothing to do with either fish or special pets. He’s an independent, unnamed creature who shifts the narrative voice to describe himself in first person:
But I also love the rhythm of the poem. I have always laughed at the third couplet and instinctively slow down when I read it. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why it sounded so humorous to me, but I think I do now. The first four lines all end in voiced blends: a sustaining, liquid consonant (l or r) followed by the voiced d. By comparison, the fifth line dispenses with the liquids and ends with the breathy double f. That sudden, unvoiced fricative just makes me want to stop and laugh at the matter-of-fact way this guy turns what should be a momentary situation into a feature of his character. He only tickles my funny bone more by following it up with a line expressing cheerful acceptance of the discomfort in his foot. Why doesn’t he just put his shoe on and warm up that foot? Because his shoe is off. That’s not a descriptive “is,” it’s an essential “is.” The shoe is off not out of choice; it’s off because it is a shoe whose identity is one of being off. It’s as if he had said, “My head is bald” or even “My knee is a joint.” That’s just the way it is, and this guy celebrates it, decades ahead of the era of self-expression.
Thanks, Dr. Seuss. I may not have a Zans for cans, but you helped me enjoy the mysterious world around me. Funny things are everywhere!
The book sticks with fish at first: fish of different colors, and fish of different sizes. “This one has a little star. This one has a little car.” And then the message begins. “Say! What a lot of fish there are!” I love that word “Say!” Besides having an old-fashioned ring to it that reminds me of something my dad would say, it expresses all the wonder and delight of serendipitous discovery.
After some more fish, this time experiencing a variety of emotions, the kids start telling the reader about the fantastic creatures that live in their house: the Ying who likes to sing, and the Yink who links to drink pink ink, the Gack, the Zans, and the Zeep. My favorite part, though, has nothing to do with either fish or special pets. He’s an independent, unnamed creature who shifts the narrative voice to describe himself in first person:
My hat is old,I love the way the description lines up with the guy’s picture, describing him from head to foot as the lines run down the page. I love the way the fellow stands on one hand to describe himself in reverse order on the next page. I love the mysterious bird who appears perfectly content to be held. I love the way his beard comes not from his chin, but from a melding of two long sideburns. I love wondering why he has an old hat if he can afford gold fillings. I love the way he calls his description a story when it isn’t a story.
My teeth are gold.
I have a bird
I like to hold.
My shoe is off,
My foot is cold.
My shoe is off,
My foot is cold.
I have a bird
I like to hold.
My hat is old,
My teeth are gold.
And now my story
Is all told.
But I also love the rhythm of the poem. I have always laughed at the third couplet and instinctively slow down when I read it. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why it sounded so humorous to me, but I think I do now. The first four lines all end in voiced blends: a sustaining, liquid consonant (l or r) followed by the voiced d. By comparison, the fifth line dispenses with the liquids and ends with the breathy double f. That sudden, unvoiced fricative just makes me want to stop and laugh at the matter-of-fact way this guy turns what should be a momentary situation into a feature of his character. He only tickles my funny bone more by following it up with a line expressing cheerful acceptance of the discomfort in his foot. Why doesn’t he just put his shoe on and warm up that foot? Because his shoe is off. That’s not a descriptive “is,” it’s an essential “is.” The shoe is off not out of choice; it’s off because it is a shoe whose identity is one of being off. It’s as if he had said, “My head is bald” or even “My knee is a joint.” That’s just the way it is, and this guy celebrates it, decades ahead of the era of self-expression.
Thanks, Dr. Seuss. I may not have a Zans for cans, but you helped me enjoy the mysterious world around me. Funny things are everywhere!
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Reading Revelation for Advent
The Book of Common Prayer – at least the 1928 edition of the BCP; I go old school on this, as on a lot of things – schedules the reading of Revelation for the evening services during Advent. At first, it may seem that the images of horned beasts and pale horses and lakes of fire don’t fit well with the anticipation of a poor baby born in a feeding trough. But John’s vision tells of events that precede the final coming of the Lord, and reading it at this time makes the season one of preparation for Jesus, whenever and wherever He chooses to come.
The book of Revelation confuses many good Christians. I’ve even heard some say they are afraid to read it. But those who do read it often ask, “What does it mean?” I know I’m just a theory professor with no formal seminary training, but I think I know the right strategy for reading and interpreting Revelation. My hermeneutic? Read it literally. Will everything happen literally as recorded there? Absolutely not. All human speech incorporates figures, so I don’t have any reason to think that all of John’s language is literal. But I don’t know what the figures mean, and I don’t think we can know now.
My strategy comes from thinking about the prophecies of the first Coming. Jesus linked his two Comings and their prophecies when he explained Malachi’s prophecy about Elijah. When asked about Malachi’s words, He said, “Elijah is coming, and he is to restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not know him.” In another place, Jesus says that “if we can accept it,” John the Baptist played the part of Elijah at least once. So according to Jesus, Elijah came once in the normal way and once in a figurative way, and he will come again in some way at some time after the discussion, presumably at Jesus’ second Coming.
Now if the prophecies of the two Comings are connected, how did the prophecies work the first time? Herod’s advisors had to search for an answer when asked where the Messiah would be born. How could the industrious Rabbis not already have a clear answer on such an important question? Because the prophecies were confusing and seemingly contradictory. The prophet Hosea reports God saying, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” But Isaiah says the light of the Messiah will come to the land of Galilee. And Micah says the ruler “from ancient days” will come from the little town of Bethlehem, in Judah. These prophecies weren’t clear, couldn’t have been clear, until a baby was born in Bethlehem to parents who lived on the Sea of Galilee and fled to Egypt for a time. No one could have predicted how those conflicting stories would reconcile. The prophecies didn’t exist so that people could work out a solution ahead of time; they existed to give hope in advance of the event and to provide a measure of proof after the event.
So, I reason, we should treat Revelation the same way: read it, know its stories and its images, take hope from them, and be ready to understand them when the time comes. Over the years I’ve heard several explanations of the ten-horned, seven-headed beast from chapter 13, for instance, but none has worked out. I heard once that the EU would attack Israel when it gathered ten members, but that time came and passed quickly. The EU now has twenty-seven members, way too many even for horns and heads put together. I have no idea what the heads and horns correspond to, but when the time comes, the faithful will understand everything they need to know – the faithful, that is, who know the prophecy. If we were intended to have easier, more straightforward access to what it “really” means now, that information would have been provided.
I think that the people who ask “What does this beast mean?” virtually before they read about it miss the point. Our culture has lost its poetry. The beast means a beast. It is magnificent. It is monstrous. It is asymmetrical. And it is memorable. Picture it in your mind. Put one horn on each of four heads and two horns on each of the rest. Or put the seven heads on top of some of the horns. Or think of seventeen necks and put a horn on some and a head on the others. Imagine it however you want, but picture it, and then picture a dragon giving it authority, and then picture people worshiping it. Maybe a picture like the one in your mind shows exactly how the scene will look, and maybe it is only a representation of something else. Either way, it is a poetic image with its own power. Know that image. Think about how that image makes you feel. Think about what you would do if you were in the scene. This is the story the Bible tells. Don’t worry about what it “means.” Know this story. And be prepared.
The book of Revelation confuses many good Christians. I’ve even heard some say they are afraid to read it. But those who do read it often ask, “What does it mean?” I know I’m just a theory professor with no formal seminary training, but I think I know the right strategy for reading and interpreting Revelation. My hermeneutic? Read it literally. Will everything happen literally as recorded there? Absolutely not. All human speech incorporates figures, so I don’t have any reason to think that all of John’s language is literal. But I don’t know what the figures mean, and I don’t think we can know now.
My strategy comes from thinking about the prophecies of the first Coming. Jesus linked his two Comings and their prophecies when he explained Malachi’s prophecy about Elijah. When asked about Malachi’s words, He said, “Elijah is coming, and he is to restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not know him.” In another place, Jesus says that “if we can accept it,” John the Baptist played the part of Elijah at least once. So according to Jesus, Elijah came once in the normal way and once in a figurative way, and he will come again in some way at some time after the discussion, presumably at Jesus’ second Coming.
Now if the prophecies of the two Comings are connected, how did the prophecies work the first time? Herod’s advisors had to search for an answer when asked where the Messiah would be born. How could the industrious Rabbis not already have a clear answer on such an important question? Because the prophecies were confusing and seemingly contradictory. The prophet Hosea reports God saying, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” But Isaiah says the light of the Messiah will come to the land of Galilee. And Micah says the ruler “from ancient days” will come from the little town of Bethlehem, in Judah. These prophecies weren’t clear, couldn’t have been clear, until a baby was born in Bethlehem to parents who lived on the Sea of Galilee and fled to Egypt for a time. No one could have predicted how those conflicting stories would reconcile. The prophecies didn’t exist so that people could work out a solution ahead of time; they existed to give hope in advance of the event and to provide a measure of proof after the event.
So, I reason, we should treat Revelation the same way: read it, know its stories and its images, take hope from them, and be ready to understand them when the time comes. Over the years I’ve heard several explanations of the ten-horned, seven-headed beast from chapter 13, for instance, but none has worked out. I heard once that the EU would attack Israel when it gathered ten members, but that time came and passed quickly. The EU now has twenty-seven members, way too many even for horns and heads put together. I have no idea what the heads and horns correspond to, but when the time comes, the faithful will understand everything they need to know – the faithful, that is, who know the prophecy. If we were intended to have easier, more straightforward access to what it “really” means now, that information would have been provided.
I think that the people who ask “What does this beast mean?” virtually before they read about it miss the point. Our culture has lost its poetry. The beast means a beast. It is magnificent. It is monstrous. It is asymmetrical. And it is memorable. Picture it in your mind. Put one horn on each of four heads and two horns on each of the rest. Or put the seven heads on top of some of the horns. Or think of seventeen necks and put a horn on some and a head on the others. Imagine it however you want, but picture it, and then picture a dragon giving it authority, and then picture people worshiping it. Maybe a picture like the one in your mind shows exactly how the scene will look, and maybe it is only a representation of something else. Either way, it is a poetic image with its own power. Know that image. Think about how that image makes you feel. Think about what you would do if you were in the scene. This is the story the Bible tells. Don’t worry about what it “means.” Know this story. And be prepared.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
The Mysteries of Robertson Davies
With its eloquent characters brimming with conflicting spiritual ideas and its constant hinting that mundane objects and events have significance also in an ethereal realm, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels persistently brought to my mind the novels of Charles Williams, so much so that as I read, I constantly expected the world of mystery to break through the veil and manifest itself on any given page. In fact, something supernatural may take place about halfway through the book: Maria’s Gypsy mother gives two characters Tarot readings that seem to come true. Davies doesn’t specify whether the cards truly serve as a conduit of insight from another world or whether Maria’s mother simply played a psychological trick, but that ambiguity itself contributes to the mysterious aura of the novel.
Several of the characters have personal mysteries, as well. What does Maria Magdalena Theotoky draw from the rich Christian heritage residing in her names? Does she bear seven devils, or as a bearer of God, have the devils been driven out of her? Or is a name just a name? Why does Arthur Cornish insist on an orthodox Christian wedding? What spiritual benefit does he think he will draw from having the words of the 1706 edition of the Prayer Book spoken at the service, complete with its stern public warnings against fornication?
The most mysterious character is Parlabane. His name suggests that his words carry death, and one character describes him as an outright evil person. He belches, lies, sponges off his acquaintances, and sings bawdy songs – loudly – at public restaurants. He claims to be a complete skeptic about every proposition dealing with anything in the natural world. But he believes that the glory of God lies beyond skepticism, and he argues with Maria about the inadequacy of codes of honour as ethical systems. A code of honour is, he says, “no bigger than the man – or woman, if you are going to be pernickety – who possesses it. And the honour of a fool, or a pygmy-in-spirit, or a redneck, or a High Tory, or a convinced democrat are all wholly different things and any one of them, under the right circumstances, could send you to the stake, or stop your wages, or just push you out into the cold. Honour is a matter of personal limitation. God is not.” That little speech implies unskeptical belief in several propositions. At the end of the book, Parlabane asks for a special Christian ceremony for himself. So does he believe? I can fault Davies for the inconsistency only as long as I ignore the fact that every Christian believer I know (including myself) sometimes contradicts his confessional words by his committed actions.
Mystery religions show up in the book in the form of Gnostic gospels and kabbala and other heterodox traditions. The title of the book refers to a story of two angels who, without casting in their lot with Satan, come to earth to share God’s knowledge with humanity. I’m not sure how that agenda separates them from Satan since the sharing of divine knowledge seems to have been the chief rebel angel’s first ploy against mankind. In any case, the claim that their gift not only influenced Hermes Trismegistus and Paracelsus but also led to the institution of universities has me thinking about the possible motivations for intellectual research.
Having read all of Charles Williams’s novels and having enjoyed all but one of them, I was fully prepared to take the Tarot and the Gnostic gospels as literary devices that convey the mystery of the supernatural with a blunt force that scriptural quotations don’t always have for Christians inured with Biblical language. But near the end of the book, I started to suspect that Davies was trying to claim orthodox Christianity insufficient even outside the world of his novel. Arthur Cornish may want an orthodox wedding at the climax of the story, but Darcourt, the presiding clergyman and one of the two first-person narrators, questions the wisdom of living within strict orthodoxy. I’m also happy with a book that leaves spiritual questions open, but details kept goading me into thinking that Davies was closing the question with an answer I’m not so happy with. So right now, the biggest mystery for me is Davies himself. I started my adventure with Robertson Davies with one Google search, and I finished my reading of The Rebel Angels with another. Just after finishing the novel, I read online that the author once characterized himself as “not a card-carrying Christian.” Suitable, since mysteries can only be defined, not by what they are, but by what they are not.
Several of the characters have personal mysteries, as well. What does Maria Magdalena Theotoky draw from the rich Christian heritage residing in her names? Does she bear seven devils, or as a bearer of God, have the devils been driven out of her? Or is a name just a name? Why does Arthur Cornish insist on an orthodox Christian wedding? What spiritual benefit does he think he will draw from having the words of the 1706 edition of the Prayer Book spoken at the service, complete with its stern public warnings against fornication?
The most mysterious character is Parlabane. His name suggests that his words carry death, and one character describes him as an outright evil person. He belches, lies, sponges off his acquaintances, and sings bawdy songs – loudly – at public restaurants. He claims to be a complete skeptic about every proposition dealing with anything in the natural world. But he believes that the glory of God lies beyond skepticism, and he argues with Maria about the inadequacy of codes of honour as ethical systems. A code of honour is, he says, “no bigger than the man – or woman, if you are going to be pernickety – who possesses it. And the honour of a fool, or a pygmy-in-spirit, or a redneck, or a High Tory, or a convinced democrat are all wholly different things and any one of them, under the right circumstances, could send you to the stake, or stop your wages, or just push you out into the cold. Honour is a matter of personal limitation. God is not.” That little speech implies unskeptical belief in several propositions. At the end of the book, Parlabane asks for a special Christian ceremony for himself. So does he believe? I can fault Davies for the inconsistency only as long as I ignore the fact that every Christian believer I know (including myself) sometimes contradicts his confessional words by his committed actions.
Mystery religions show up in the book in the form of Gnostic gospels and kabbala and other heterodox traditions. The title of the book refers to a story of two angels who, without casting in their lot with Satan, come to earth to share God’s knowledge with humanity. I’m not sure how that agenda separates them from Satan since the sharing of divine knowledge seems to have been the chief rebel angel’s first ploy against mankind. In any case, the claim that their gift not only influenced Hermes Trismegistus and Paracelsus but also led to the institution of universities has me thinking about the possible motivations for intellectual research.
Having read all of Charles Williams’s novels and having enjoyed all but one of them, I was fully prepared to take the Tarot and the Gnostic gospels as literary devices that convey the mystery of the supernatural with a blunt force that scriptural quotations don’t always have for Christians inured with Biblical language. But near the end of the book, I started to suspect that Davies was trying to claim orthodox Christianity insufficient even outside the world of his novel. Arthur Cornish may want an orthodox wedding at the climax of the story, but Darcourt, the presiding clergyman and one of the two first-person narrators, questions the wisdom of living within strict orthodoxy. I’m also happy with a book that leaves spiritual questions open, but details kept goading me into thinking that Davies was closing the question with an answer I’m not so happy with. So right now, the biggest mystery for me is Davies himself. I started my adventure with Robertson Davies with one Google search, and I finished my reading of The Rebel Angels with another. Just after finishing the novel, I read online that the author once characterized himself as “not a card-carrying Christian.” Suitable, since mysteries can only be defined, not by what they are, but by what they are not.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
The Coincidences of Robertson Davies
A couple of days ago, I was reading in The Los Angeles Times a news story about the Angels of Anaheim – a story I can’t bring myself to talk about. But at the bottom of that sad story, I saw a link to another sad story: “God Found in DNA.” Curious, I clicked the link and was taken to an Op-Ed piece by an author who was glad to report that scientists had finally found the causes of religion in human DNA. Imagine John Lennon’s dream coming true, he suggested. At last humanity can be free from the crippling, dangerous idea of God and admit that there is no Hell below us, above us only sky. Human DNA offers our race a unique passion for explanation, the story said, a unique tendency to assume personal agency when causes are unknown, and a unique desire to congregate with others based on shared ideas rather than just shared physical needs. Now that we see that these traits come through our genes and survived natural evolutionary processes, we can see them for the illusions they are. It has now been proven, the author declared, that man created God.
I don’t see the discoveries as proof of any such thing. Christianity has made a lot of sense to me for a long time, and I’m not about to change my view based on a report in a newspaper by a man who wants to see some pop lyrics come true. For one thing, the details were far too sketchy to overturn the wisdom of billions of people who think and have thought that God is more than a racial illusion. For another, I can’t figure out if the author thinks these genetic traits are good or bad: at one point he says they lead to religiously motivated violence and human death, but in another, he says they provide humans with a survival advantage. To give a third reason, the laboratory of history shows us that violence and bloodshed don’t disappear when belief in God is abandoned: revolutionary France and Soviet Russia were hardly peaceful, tolerant cultures.
But more than not seeing this news as proof that God is a construct, I actually see it as evidence that the Bible is true. Many times throughout the Bible we read that God has made humans in a special way that makes them capable and desirous of connecting with the supernatural. David says in the Psalms that humans are fearfully and wonderfully made. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes that eternity is in our hearts. Isaiah reports that God invites us to reason with him, and the Psalms again teach that animals don’t have the necessary reason. So scientists have at long last found the physical markers of this special aspect of our created nature. One might think that these scientists have shown the value of scientific method as an advanced intellectual tool. But another person could say that the superior path to knowledge is the one that made the discovery three-thousand years ahead of the other.
In a curious coincidence, I found an almost identical train of thought later in the day when reading more of The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies. In a conversation between scientist Ozy Froats and Renaissance scholar Maria Theotoky, Prof. Froats praises a scientist named Sheldon for developing a metric to codify different types of healthy human bodies. Maria responds that the writings of Paracelsus are full of such ideas. Oh, but you couldn’t call it scientific, retorts Froats. “You have to prove things like that experimentally.”
Maria: “Did Sheldon prove what Paracelsus said experimentally?”
Ozy: “He certainly did!”
Maria: “That just proves Paracelsus was the greater man; he didn’t have to fag away in a lab to get the right answer.”
Later that day, in an astonishing coincidence of coincidences, I was looking in the library catalog for a book I needed for class on the history of the university and found that my author had also written a book on, of all people, Paracelsus. I think I need to read it.
I don’t see the discoveries as proof of any such thing. Christianity has made a lot of sense to me for a long time, and I’m not about to change my view based on a report in a newspaper by a man who wants to see some pop lyrics come true. For one thing, the details were far too sketchy to overturn the wisdom of billions of people who think and have thought that God is more than a racial illusion. For another, I can’t figure out if the author thinks these genetic traits are good or bad: at one point he says they lead to religiously motivated violence and human death, but in another, he says they provide humans with a survival advantage. To give a third reason, the laboratory of history shows us that violence and bloodshed don’t disappear when belief in God is abandoned: revolutionary France and Soviet Russia were hardly peaceful, tolerant cultures.
But more than not seeing this news as proof that God is a construct, I actually see it as evidence that the Bible is true. Many times throughout the Bible we read that God has made humans in a special way that makes them capable and desirous of connecting with the supernatural. David says in the Psalms that humans are fearfully and wonderfully made. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes that eternity is in our hearts. Isaiah reports that God invites us to reason with him, and the Psalms again teach that animals don’t have the necessary reason. So scientists have at long last found the physical markers of this special aspect of our created nature. One might think that these scientists have shown the value of scientific method as an advanced intellectual tool. But another person could say that the superior path to knowledge is the one that made the discovery three-thousand years ahead of the other.
In a curious coincidence, I found an almost identical train of thought later in the day when reading more of The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies. In a conversation between scientist Ozy Froats and Renaissance scholar Maria Theotoky, Prof. Froats praises a scientist named Sheldon for developing a metric to codify different types of healthy human bodies. Maria responds that the writings of Paracelsus are full of such ideas. Oh, but you couldn’t call it scientific, retorts Froats. “You have to prove things like that experimentally.”
Maria: “Did Sheldon prove what Paracelsus said experimentally?”
Ozy: “He certainly did!”
Maria: “That just proves Paracelsus was the greater man; he didn’t have to fag away in a lab to get the right answer.”
Later that day, in an astonishing coincidence of coincidences, I was looking in the library catalog for a book I needed for class on the history of the university and found that my author had also written a book on, of all people, Paracelsus. I think I need to read it.
Friday, December 9, 2011
The Hidden Things of Robertson Davies
Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, which was itself hidden from my eyes until a couple of months ago, has a lot to say about hidden things. Ancestry, for instance, plays a big part in Maria’s story: her Gypsy ancestry isn’t apparent to everyone she meets, partly because she doesn’t make it apparent. And ancestry only provides one part of the mysterious, hard-to-define heritage that shapes each character: heritage also includes cultural and institutional traditions, wisdom in the literature one has read, and spiritual forces. In one of the recurring motifs of the novel, this hidden heritage is compared to the root system of a tree: what we know of each other is only the crown of the tree, but the roots that feed the crown define each of us and constitute our identity.
Several characters in the book search for hidden treasures. All the academics study either objects or documents as part of their research programs. But other treasure troves come into play. Three of the main characters, for instance, search through the uncatalogued possessions of a deceased collector, hoping to find rare manuscripts or early works by famous artists.
The subject of despised things provides a related theme in the book. A Gypsy woman poignantly explains that since the Nazis exterminated “only” a half-million Gypsies, one-twelfth the number of Jews, the world ignores the tragedy: her people don’t get the dignity of public outrage over their own Holocaust. The improbably named Prof. Ozy Froats studies human waste, and naturally his Congressman makes his work the emblematic object of his attack on what he sees as worthless research.
Linking these two themes is the constant discovery of treasures in even the humblest of places. Maria finds strength and depth in her Gypsy ancestry, and the fecal discoveries of Prof. Froats put him in the running for a Nobel prize. These two events play rather prominent parts in the story. But dropped in seemingly casually in the middle of a conversation, the Anglican priest Darcourt refers to what I consider the Source and Type of all examples of hidden treasures when he quotes Psalm 118: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner.”
Several characters in the book search for hidden treasures. All the academics study either objects or documents as part of their research programs. But other treasure troves come into play. Three of the main characters, for instance, search through the uncatalogued possessions of a deceased collector, hoping to find rare manuscripts or early works by famous artists.
The subject of despised things provides a related theme in the book. A Gypsy woman poignantly explains that since the Nazis exterminated “only” a half-million Gypsies, one-twelfth the number of Jews, the world ignores the tragedy: her people don’t get the dignity of public outrage over their own Holocaust. The improbably named Prof. Ozy Froats studies human waste, and naturally his Congressman makes his work the emblematic object of his attack on what he sees as worthless research.
Linking these two themes is the constant discovery of treasures in even the humblest of places. Maria finds strength and depth in her Gypsy ancestry, and the fecal discoveries of Prof. Froats put him in the running for a Nobel prize. These two events play rather prominent parts in the story. But dropped in seemingly casually in the middle of a conversation, the Anglican priest Darcourt refers to what I consider the Source and Type of all examples of hidden treasures when he quotes Psalm 118: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner.”
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Thanks, Google!
Google really is a pretty amazing thing. Every time I read Dostoevsky or MacDonald or Chesterton or Lewis or Williams or Waugh, I get frustrated wondering what happened to this tradition of Christian novelists, a tradition whose quality the secular world recognizes. (Of course, several of these writers wrote much more than novels, but I haven’t puzzled so much trying to find, for instance, Christian essays from more recent times.) So I did what young people do: I Googled it. Of the handful of names that came up, the one that seemed the most promising based on user reviews (and that’s where the internet breaks down as a helpful source) was Robertson Davies.
For mostly random reasons, I decided to start Davies with The Rebel Angels, book 1 of his Cornish Trilogy. I’m about halfway through, and it has not disappointed in the least; based on my tiny sample, I can even compare it favorably with the previous authors I had in mind. Like Dostoevsky, for instance, Davies avoids predictably pious characters and just presents people of many stripes and lets them talk. Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (about whom I know only the information contained in this sentence) compares Dostoevsky’s books to musical counterpoint: the characters and their various viewpoints simply speak to each other, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in support, and the author just trusts that the Truth will come out in the composite texture. I know his books work that way for me. As George Morrison says of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky reports the world faithfully and, without overtly pursing an agenda, makes his point because the world makes its point as day to day pours forth speech and night to night declares knowledge. The Rebel Angels offers a sex-crazed epicurean, an ex-monk who declares himself a skeptic about everything except the existence of God, several academics whose religion seems to consist of devotion to research, and an Anglican priest who has become resigned to imperfections in the world, in his acquaintances, and in himself.
Like Williams and others on my list, Davies writes dense books. The Rebel Angels examines university professors, gypsies, violin making, wills, art collectors, Rabelais, bodily functions, luck, Paracelsus, clothing, dinner etiquette, literature in translation, romanticism, philosophy of science, humility, codes of honor, opulence, novel writing, bodily functions, evolutionary theories of love, and much more. Every page has something to think about. Two examples: (1) One professor states that the renaissance university got its energy from the conflict of humanism and theology, while the modern university draws its energy from the marriage of science and government. (2) In a dinner conversation about the nature of personhood, one character says that anyone who thinks declaring a person to be a spirit makes one spiritual misses a giant spiritual truth: the body’s structures and routine operations are persistent miracles.
Thanks, Google! I think I found what I was looking for.
For mostly random reasons, I decided to start Davies with The Rebel Angels, book 1 of his Cornish Trilogy. I’m about halfway through, and it has not disappointed in the least; based on my tiny sample, I can even compare it favorably with the previous authors I had in mind. Like Dostoevsky, for instance, Davies avoids predictably pious characters and just presents people of many stripes and lets them talk. Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (about whom I know only the information contained in this sentence) compares Dostoevsky’s books to musical counterpoint: the characters and their various viewpoints simply speak to each other, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in support, and the author just trusts that the Truth will come out in the composite texture. I know his books work that way for me. As George Morrison says of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky reports the world faithfully and, without overtly pursing an agenda, makes his point because the world makes its point as day to day pours forth speech and night to night declares knowledge. The Rebel Angels offers a sex-crazed epicurean, an ex-monk who declares himself a skeptic about everything except the existence of God, several academics whose religion seems to consist of devotion to research, and an Anglican priest who has become resigned to imperfections in the world, in his acquaintances, and in himself.
Like Williams and others on my list, Davies writes dense books. The Rebel Angels examines university professors, gypsies, violin making, wills, art collectors, Rabelais, bodily functions, luck, Paracelsus, clothing, dinner etiquette, literature in translation, romanticism, philosophy of science, humility, codes of honor, opulence, novel writing, bodily functions, evolutionary theories of love, and much more. Every page has something to think about. Two examples: (1) One professor states that the renaissance university got its energy from the conflict of humanism and theology, while the modern university draws its energy from the marriage of science and government. (2) In a dinner conversation about the nature of personhood, one character says that anyone who thinks declaring a person to be a spirit makes one spiritual misses a giant spiritual truth: the body’s structures and routine operations are persistent miracles.
Thanks, Google! I think I found what I was looking for.
Friday, December 2, 2011
We're Going for the Cheese
Chesterton writes in one essay – or possible two essays that my memory has confused – about the best way to travel in foreign lands. People generally go to see the famous buildings: the cathedrals, the museums, the memorials, the state buildings, the homes of famous personages from the past. But seeing Paris, for instance, doesn't mean visiting the Louvre and climbing the Eiffel Tower, because Paris consists of Parisians, and the Parisians themselves don't make the visits of typical tourists. They enjoy the Louvre and the Tower, but, Chesterton points out, not as destinations; the Parisians enjoy these structures as the environment through which they walk to work, to dine, to shop, and to meet people. The famous buildings provide, not the focus of the city, but rather its atmosphere. Far better, he says, to travel in foreign lands for the purpose of enjoying each area's distinct cuisine – above all, its cheese.
In 2005, our family traveled to Europe fortified with this healthy attitude. In Paris, we visited the Louvre briefly and looked at Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, of course. But one of our favorite memories of the trip concerns a lovely lunch we enjoyed at a sidewalk cafe, Notre Dame visible to our left and the Eiffel Tower visible to our right.
Dickens, whom Chesterton so greatly admired, seems to have had the same outlook on foreign travel. Near the beginning of his Pictures from Italy, Dickens says that, so much having been written already about famous artworks, he will say nothing of them. Instead, Dickens focuses on people, dress, food, and manners. This week, I’ve read about men playing “bowls” in a field, footpaths through trellises bedecked with grapevines, narrow streets too exiguous for the passage of a single carriage, rusty gates, gardens overcome with weeds, tanned and barefoot proselytisers for the Catholic Church, red neckerchiefs, number-guessing games, and peeling plaster. In his account of Genoa, Dickens tells about both the regional pronunciation and the town’s penchant for naming boys Giovanni Battista, the combination of which causes the streets to be filled with sneezing sounds as people greet the innumerable “Batcheetchas.”
In a passage about paintings – not great masterpieces, but the decorations at his hotel – Dickens drops some tantalizing clues about an unfamiliar English custom. Apparently, the pictures were dirty, and Dickens says that they would have pleased professional picture cleaners from London. I didn’t know about this profession before. It seems that the shops of these nineteenth-century picture cleaners were marked by a signboard that attempted to demonstrate the benefits of the service offered: a picture of death and the lady, one half dirty and the other half . . . well, less dirty. I’m fascinated and want to know which side was more covered with street grime: death or lady?
Two passages of Pictures from Italy especially capture the spirit of adventure found in this style of traveling that avoids sight-seeing. The first summarizes Genoa:
In 2005, our family traveled to Europe fortified with this healthy attitude. In Paris, we visited the Louvre briefly and looked at Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, of course. But one of our favorite memories of the trip concerns a lovely lunch we enjoyed at a sidewalk cafe, Notre Dame visible to our left and the Eiffel Tower visible to our right.
Dickens, whom Chesterton so greatly admired, seems to have had the same outlook on foreign travel. Near the beginning of his Pictures from Italy, Dickens says that, so much having been written already about famous artworks, he will say nothing of them. Instead, Dickens focuses on people, dress, food, and manners. This week, I’ve read about men playing “bowls” in a field, footpaths through trellises bedecked with grapevines, narrow streets too exiguous for the passage of a single carriage, rusty gates, gardens overcome with weeds, tanned and barefoot proselytisers for the Catholic Church, red neckerchiefs, number-guessing games, and peeling plaster. In his account of Genoa, Dickens tells about both the regional pronunciation and the town’s penchant for naming boys Giovanni Battista, the combination of which causes the streets to be filled with sneezing sounds as people greet the innumerable “Batcheetchas.”
In a passage about paintings – not great masterpieces, but the decorations at his hotel – Dickens drops some tantalizing clues about an unfamiliar English custom. Apparently, the pictures were dirty, and Dickens says that they would have pleased professional picture cleaners from London. I didn’t know about this profession before. It seems that the shops of these nineteenth-century picture cleaners were marked by a signboard that attempted to demonstrate the benefits of the service offered: a picture of death and the lady, one half dirty and the other half . . . well, less dirty. I’m fascinated and want to know which side was more covered with street grime: death or lady?
Two passages of Pictures from Italy especially capture the spirit of adventure found in this style of traveling that avoids sight-seeing. The first summarizes Genoa:
There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.To the traveler who goes to see what a place is truly like, all these adjectives are equally welcome. The second passage even more explicitly favors the humble over the magnificent:
ARIOSTO’S house, TASSO’S prison, a rare old Gothic cathedral, and more churches of course, are the sights of Ferrara. But the long silent streets, and the dismantled palaces, where ivy waves in lieu of banners, and where rank weeds are slowly creeping up the long-untrodden stairs, are the best sights of all.In January, Nancy and I get to travel to Italy for five months. We have a few sights we'd like to see: the ruins of Pompeii, the Senate House in the Roman Forum, David in Florence. But mostly, we're going for the cheese.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The Black Spot
Sometimes things work out this way. My university is sending me to Italy in January to teach for a semester. And five years ago, as I first pieced together my reading plan for the decade, I decided to read in December of 2011 – just now, as we start to concentrate on getting ready for this trip – Charles Dickens's Pictures from Italy. But as I started the short travelogue yesterday, I was reminded not only of my coming adventure, but also of a favorite documentary film, a favorite adventure novel, and a favorite history book.
In Ken Burns's Baseball film, commentator Daniel Okrent calls Ty Cobb the Black Spot on baseball's history. To me, the phrase "Black Spot" calls up memories of Treasure Island and the mysterious omen of a pirate death sentence, and those overtones of lawlessness, evil, and fate certainly seem appropriate for the bitter man so filled with misanthropy he once left the playing field to stomp a hectoring fan repeatedly with his spiked shoes.
I thought of both works again a couple of months ago as I was reading Durant's account of the medieval Inquisition; he called the Inquisition the black spot on humanity's history, and his description of the horrors convinced me that the Inquisitors outdid either Ty Cobb or Long John Silver in their viciousness. I avoided blogging about it, partly because I didn't really care to concentrate on the cruel subject long enough, and partly because I'm sure I wouldn't have found the right words to express my disgust, shame, fear, and bewilderment. But this whole disturbing, frustrating nexus of thoughts came up again yesterday and finally found its expression in Dickens's masterly phrasing. Visiting the torture rooms in Avignon (on his way to Italy), Dickens pronounced his judgment on the Inquisition in a poetic passage full of vivid onomatopoeia and devastating irony:
In Ken Burns's Baseball film, commentator Daniel Okrent calls Ty Cobb the Black Spot on baseball's history. To me, the phrase "Black Spot" calls up memories of Treasure Island and the mysterious omen of a pirate death sentence, and those overtones of lawlessness, evil, and fate certainly seem appropriate for the bitter man so filled with misanthropy he once left the playing field to stomp a hectoring fan repeatedly with his spiked shoes.
I thought of both works again a couple of months ago as I was reading Durant's account of the medieval Inquisition; he called the Inquisition the black spot on humanity's history, and his description of the horrors convinced me that the Inquisitors outdid either Ty Cobb or Long John Silver in their viciousness. I avoided blogging about it, partly because I didn't really care to concentrate on the cruel subject long enough, and partly because I'm sure I wouldn't have found the right words to express my disgust, shame, fear, and bewilderment. But this whole disturbing, frustrating nexus of thoughts came up again yesterday and finally found its expression in Dickens's masterly phrasing. Visiting the torture rooms in Avignon (on his way to Italy), Dickens pronounced his judgment on the Inquisition in a poetic passage full of vivid onomatopoeia and devastating irony:
Mash, mash, mash! An endless routine of heavy hammers. Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer's limbs. See the stone trough . . . for the water torture! Gurgle, swill, bloat, burst, for the Redeemer's honour! Suck the bloody rag, deep down into your unbelieving body, Heretic, at every breath you draw! And when the executioner plucks it out, reeking with the smaller mysteries of God's own Image, know us for His chosen servants, true believers in the Sermon on the Mount, elect disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal, [and] who never struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness, dumbness, madness, any one affliction of mankind.I could nitpick on the accuracy of the statement about miracles, but I can neither add to nor detract from the spirit of these words.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
More Latin from 2011
A few months ago, I wrote a post about all the Latin phrases I had encountered in Thackeray's Henry Esmond. Ever since then, with my mind on the possibility of blogging about Latin, the number of phrases I've seen from the Romans' tongue has amazed me. I knew and understood some of the phrases, knew but didn't completely understand others, and understood but didn't recognize yet others. And of course, there were the phrases I had never seen and had to look up.
Williams's War in Heaven offered several phrases. Locum tenens was familiar to me: one holding (tenens) or taking the place (locum) of another, i.e. a placeholder. But I'm glad I looked it up, because I found out that the word "lieutenant" comes from this phrase. Anybody with more military understanding than I have is welcome to help me out from there. I think a lieutenant isn't in charge of a group of soldiers himself but acts as a subordinate mouthpiece for the captian. True? Another phrase in Williams that I recognized but didn't fully understand comes from Tertullian: certum quia impossibile. Tertullian's reference is to the doctrine of the resurrection: it is certain, he said, because it is impossible. In other words, widespread first-hand testimony to a miracle can be convincing where testimony to the mundane can easily be a lie; "I saw Jesus walking after being buried" is much more convincing than "Jesus slept here."
Stoker included several Latin phrases in Dracula, including the old Roman proverb festina lente: make haste slowly. In other words, the steady, careful strategy of the tortoise will beat the reckless abandon of the hare. Essential to Kant as he sets out to prove the possibility of synthetic judgments is the idea of the tertium quid: a third something. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts in most cases. A marriage, for instance, is something more than just the concatenation of the man and the woman: there's also a third something, a relationship and a unity. The pitches C and G played together produce a tertium quid: harmony. The tertium quid came up again in William James later in the year; I believe that his description of the tertium quid in mathematical propositions essentially agrees with Kant, but he expressed it in terms so much clearer than Kant's, I really can't be completely sure.
In Waugh's Men at Arms, I encountered Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris: Remember, O Man, that you are dust, and to dust you will return. Looking up a reference in Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall, I found Aquinas's tenet, De Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quod non sit: We cannot know of God what He is, but what He is not. (Recalling that sentence now reminds me of a phrase I read in Ephesians just this morning: that the love of Christ surpasses knowledge.)
Many common phrases peppered my reading from the year: imago dei, tabula rasa, prima facie, memento mori, vice versa, non sequitur, requiescat in pace, and others (or in Latin, et cetera). But I'll close with a phrase I read in Boswell that, as far as I could determine, Dr. Johnson came up with himself: Quid tentasse nocebit? What harm does it do to have tried?
Williams's War in Heaven offered several phrases. Locum tenens was familiar to me: one holding (tenens) or taking the place (locum) of another, i.e. a placeholder. But I'm glad I looked it up, because I found out that the word "lieutenant" comes from this phrase. Anybody with more military understanding than I have is welcome to help me out from there. I think a lieutenant isn't in charge of a group of soldiers himself but acts as a subordinate mouthpiece for the captian. True? Another phrase in Williams that I recognized but didn't fully understand comes from Tertullian: certum quia impossibile. Tertullian's reference is to the doctrine of the resurrection: it is certain, he said, because it is impossible. In other words, widespread first-hand testimony to a miracle can be convincing where testimony to the mundane can easily be a lie; "I saw Jesus walking after being buried" is much more convincing than "Jesus slept here."
Stoker included several Latin phrases in Dracula, including the old Roman proverb festina lente: make haste slowly. In other words, the steady, careful strategy of the tortoise will beat the reckless abandon of the hare. Essential to Kant as he sets out to prove the possibility of synthetic judgments is the idea of the tertium quid: a third something. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts in most cases. A marriage, for instance, is something more than just the concatenation of the man and the woman: there's also a third something, a relationship and a unity. The pitches C and G played together produce a tertium quid: harmony. The tertium quid came up again in William James later in the year; I believe that his description of the tertium quid in mathematical propositions essentially agrees with Kant, but he expressed it in terms so much clearer than Kant's, I really can't be completely sure.
In Waugh's Men at Arms, I encountered Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris: Remember, O Man, that you are dust, and to dust you will return. Looking up a reference in Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall, I found Aquinas's tenet, De Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quod non sit: We cannot know of God what He is, but what He is not. (Recalling that sentence now reminds me of a phrase I read in Ephesians just this morning: that the love of Christ surpasses knowledge.)
Many common phrases peppered my reading from the year: imago dei, tabula rasa, prima facie, memento mori, vice versa, non sequitur, requiescat in pace, and others (or in Latin, et cetera). But I'll close with a phrase I read in Boswell that, as far as I could determine, Dr. Johnson came up with himself: Quid tentasse nocebit? What harm does it do to have tried?
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Off the Beaten Path
While driving off the beaten path yesterday, my thoughts wandered astray, as well. Nancy and I, traveling to St. Louis for the holiday, took a detour off the interstate to see Springfield, Missouri, and as we were driving through town, I saw a psychic's shop. The sight got me thinking about what kinds of people might bring their custom to the establishment. Of course believers in a generic "spirituality" would come, as would the skeptics, pranksters, and thrill-seekers. But in this Bible-belt town, I would also expect many Christians to confer with the psychic; while some of their neighbors no doubt think the Tarot deck sinful, I'm sure others approach with trusting heart, open mind, and a sincere faith in a Lord Who works in mysterious ways.
Wandering from tangent to tangent, my thoughts went next to various sects I had encountered in my reading this year. The first that came to mind were the Sethians, who show up in Patrick O'Brian's Letter of Marque. Sethianism has some relation to gnosticism, although the exact nature of this mystery religion certainly remains mysterious to me. Apparently they believe that Seth was a divine emanation, or an avatar of Christ, or something like that. According to O'Brian, they survived into nineteenth-century England, where they believed that painting the name of Seth in large letters on their homes (or ships) would ensure protection, and that erasing the name (so as, perhaps, to sail the Atlantic without revealing any unusual identifying marks to every enemy ship that passes) would bring destruction.
In Durant this year, I read about the Waldensians and Albigensians of medieval southern France. The Waldensians, in Durant's telling anyway, primarily attacked the practices of the Church and not tenets of Christology: they translated the Bible into their current language and rejected the authority of the worldly priesthood. The Albigensians, again according to Durant's clear-cut categories, shared these traits but also denied the deity of Christ. Although I have much less sympathy for the second group than for the first, I relate to both far more than I can relate to the Church hierarchy that started killing them. On this Thanksgiving morning, I thank God once again for Dominic, who, sharing the sects' disdain for riches, preached Christ to them in a simple robe and with gentle words, and cleared many towns of heretics by conversion rather than by immolation.
This past month, I left the path of my planned list to read Edward Rutherford's Russka. There I encountered Russian Orthodox believers who, like my imagined Springfieldians, mix their Christianity, some with belief in the firebird and water spirits and some with socialism. And of course I read in Williams, Trollope, and the Father Brown stories about many types of Christians, heretical or otherwise. I also read some books by fringe Christians: Wordsworth, for instance, who left and returned to the Anglican Church but didn't believe in the divinity of Christ, and Hegel, who styled himself a Christian but seemed to have viewed God as an entity whose mind evolved along with the universe. And then there's Dickens, who kept his faith mostly hidden, perhaps even from himself, but who once famously claimed to have written every book for the purpose of proclaiming the Lord "who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see" (to quote Tiny Tim).
It's very easy for me to judge the practitioners of these various sects. To my human eyes, some seem completely reasonable, and others sound utterly hopeless. But I can't shake the image of Dominic, who tried not to view the world with human eyes and who humbly spoke the truth to people whose beliefs lay off the beaten path. And I have to remember that only God can judge whether a person's life lies off the crucified Way.
Wandering from tangent to tangent, my thoughts went next to various sects I had encountered in my reading this year. The first that came to mind were the Sethians, who show up in Patrick O'Brian's Letter of Marque. Sethianism has some relation to gnosticism, although the exact nature of this mystery religion certainly remains mysterious to me. Apparently they believe that Seth was a divine emanation, or an avatar of Christ, or something like that. According to O'Brian, they survived into nineteenth-century England, where they believed that painting the name of Seth in large letters on their homes (or ships) would ensure protection, and that erasing the name (so as, perhaps, to sail the Atlantic without revealing any unusual identifying marks to every enemy ship that passes) would bring destruction.
In Durant this year, I read about the Waldensians and Albigensians of medieval southern France. The Waldensians, in Durant's telling anyway, primarily attacked the practices of the Church and not tenets of Christology: they translated the Bible into their current language and rejected the authority of the worldly priesthood. The Albigensians, again according to Durant's clear-cut categories, shared these traits but also denied the deity of Christ. Although I have much less sympathy for the second group than for the first, I relate to both far more than I can relate to the Church hierarchy that started killing them. On this Thanksgiving morning, I thank God once again for Dominic, who, sharing the sects' disdain for riches, preached Christ to them in a simple robe and with gentle words, and cleared many towns of heretics by conversion rather than by immolation.
This past month, I left the path of my planned list to read Edward Rutherford's Russka. There I encountered Russian Orthodox believers who, like my imagined Springfieldians, mix their Christianity, some with belief in the firebird and water spirits and some with socialism. And of course I read in Williams, Trollope, and the Father Brown stories about many types of Christians, heretical or otherwise. I also read some books by fringe Christians: Wordsworth, for instance, who left and returned to the Anglican Church but didn't believe in the divinity of Christ, and Hegel, who styled himself a Christian but seemed to have viewed God as an entity whose mind evolved along with the universe. And then there's Dickens, who kept his faith mostly hidden, perhaps even from himself, but who once famously claimed to have written every book for the purpose of proclaiming the Lord "who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see" (to quote Tiny Tim).
It's very easy for me to judge the practitioners of these various sects. To my human eyes, some seem completely reasonable, and others sound utterly hopeless. But I can't shake the image of Dominic, who tried not to view the world with human eyes and who humbly spoke the truth to people whose beliefs lay off the beaten path. And I have to remember that only God can judge whether a person's life lies off the crucified Way.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Kindle Goes to Italy
I posted my reading plan for next year here on the blog under the tab "2012 Calendar." I have a typical annual plan that I try to fit each year's books into. For instance, I usually devote the winter and spring to (1) works that are harder to read for one reason or another, (2) books I take extensive notes on, (3) and some dessert reading as reward for the tough work. Shakespeare goes in the summer just because that's the way I've been doing it. And so on.
But I didn't follow my usual routine in setting up the schedule for 2012, because I had a special consideration to keep in mind: my university is sending me to Arezzo, Italy, for the spring semester, January to May. A trip to Italy and an extensive, particular reading plan don't necessarily go together easily, and I thought about it for several months before hitting on the solution to the problem.
I first thought of just delaying my reading for half a year or even a whole year. But I realized I couldn't go five months without reading, and I might as well read books on my plan as something else. So then I thought about taking only the longest, densest books to get the most reading time out of the least suitcase space. The Great Books volumes would work well in this way, but I started balking at the thought of checking all that weight.
And then I remembered the Kindle and all the internet sources for classic literature, and my plan started to coalesce. After typing out the complete list of works to read next year and looking online at manybooks.net, gutenberg.org, etc. to see what I could find, I ended up downloading and installing on the Kindle 34 files, all absolutely free. Well, OK, the Kindle, the computer, the electric power, and the internet service are far from free, but the files themselves cost nothing. Then it was just a matter of arranging the list so the Kindle works all came in the first half of the year.
The Greek classics stay in their usual place at the beginning of the year: plays by Euripides and Sophocles, Platonic dialogs, and various books by Aristotle. The translations available online are as old-fashioned as they are free, but then so are the translations in the Britannica set. For Virgil, I downloaded two translations, one verse and one prose, so I'll have a choice. Dickens stays in the winter as the perfect palette cleanser to some of the tough reading, but I moved Trollope up from his usual place in November. I also moved up some Christian theological works since they were available online. I usually like to spread out Aquinas, the Church Fathers, early modern Christian authors, and Augustine over the year so I'm always within sight of reading theology at any time in the schedule, but Dionysius and Edwards reside now in the public-domain etherworld, so they ended up on my Kindle and on my schedule for February and May.
I will take a small number of physical books with me. I write a lot of notes in the pages of the Summa Theologica as well as on my large computer file (well over 200 pages now), so one volume of Aquinas will take the trip with me. I also want to take the Oxford edition of Bleak House: besides the excellent editorial notes, each volume in the Oxford series of Dickens's works includes the transcription of the author's working notes for the book and reproductions of all the glorious original illustrations that did so much to give the reading world its collective idea of how Dickens's characters look. And I'm thinking of taking one other large book just to help occupy fourteen hours of airports and flights on the way home.
But for the most part, I'll read on my Kindle for five months. It's small and light, holds 1500 books, and casts a clear image without much glare, even under the Tuscan sun.
But I didn't follow my usual routine in setting up the schedule for 2012, because I had a special consideration to keep in mind: my university is sending me to Arezzo, Italy, for the spring semester, January to May. A trip to Italy and an extensive, particular reading plan don't necessarily go together easily, and I thought about it for several months before hitting on the solution to the problem.
I first thought of just delaying my reading for half a year or even a whole year. But I realized I couldn't go five months without reading, and I might as well read books on my plan as something else. So then I thought about taking only the longest, densest books to get the most reading time out of the least suitcase space. The Great Books volumes would work well in this way, but I started balking at the thought of checking all that weight.
And then I remembered the Kindle and all the internet sources for classic literature, and my plan started to coalesce. After typing out the complete list of works to read next year and looking online at manybooks.net, gutenberg.org, etc. to see what I could find, I ended up downloading and installing on the Kindle 34 files, all absolutely free. Well, OK, the Kindle, the computer, the electric power, and the internet service are far from free, but the files themselves cost nothing. Then it was just a matter of arranging the list so the Kindle works all came in the first half of the year.
The Greek classics stay in their usual place at the beginning of the year: plays by Euripides and Sophocles, Platonic dialogs, and various books by Aristotle. The translations available online are as old-fashioned as they are free, but then so are the translations in the Britannica set. For Virgil, I downloaded two translations, one verse and one prose, so I'll have a choice. Dickens stays in the winter as the perfect palette cleanser to some of the tough reading, but I moved Trollope up from his usual place in November. I also moved up some Christian theological works since they were available online. I usually like to spread out Aquinas, the Church Fathers, early modern Christian authors, and Augustine over the year so I'm always within sight of reading theology at any time in the schedule, but Dionysius and Edwards reside now in the public-domain etherworld, so they ended up on my Kindle and on my schedule for February and May.
I will take a small number of physical books with me. I write a lot of notes in the pages of the Summa Theologica as well as on my large computer file (well over 200 pages now), so one volume of Aquinas will take the trip with me. I also want to take the Oxford edition of Bleak House: besides the excellent editorial notes, each volume in the Oxford series of Dickens's works includes the transcription of the author's working notes for the book and reproductions of all the glorious original illustrations that did so much to give the reading world its collective idea of how Dickens's characters look. And I'm thinking of taking one other large book just to help occupy fourteen hours of airports and flights on the way home.
But for the most part, I'll read on my Kindle for five months. It's small and light, holds 1500 books, and casts a clear image without much glare, even under the Tuscan sun.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Dickens's Second-Best Historical Novel
Three years ago, after an interim of about twenty years, I reread Charles Dickens's second-best historical novel, Barnaby Rudge. OK, so he only wrote two pieces of historical fiction, and A Tale of Two Cities is exquisitely beautiful, so calling BR the second best doesn't really say much. But half of it is really, really good.
Like A Tale of Two Cities, the book tells the story of an interconnected group of characters who get caught up in mob riots in the 1780s in a major European capital, only this time it's London instead of Paris, and it's the Gordon Anti-Catholic Riots as opposed to the Jacobin Anti-Catholic (and Anti-Other Things) Riots. Also, like its more famous counterpart, Barnaby Rudge spends about half its pages establishing the domestic setting of the main characters before getting into the major historical events, and this first half is as joyful and funny as anything Dickens ever wrote. Sadly, the historical part gets dreary and probably is to blame for the novel's general neglect.
It amazes me how much power a simple list can wield. The master of the rhetorical list is surely Rabelais; his lists in Gargantua and Pantagruel go brazenly on and on until you have to laugh, and then get sick of laughing, and then start laughing all over again in spite of yourself. He lists, for instance, about two hundred games played by Gargantua. A few chapters later, some village cake-makers call visiting shepherds forty-three insulting names including “prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, . . . blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, . . .woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, . . . and other suchlike defamatory epithets.” Dickens’s lists may not be as long (no one’s are), but where Rabelais’s lists satirize human pretensions and convey pure silliness, Dickens has a much greater range of expression that he accomplishes. Consider the joy in this description of the offerings of a happy village inn:
But everything wonderful about this first part of the novel disappears when the riots start. John Willet and his funny friends disappear for several chapters, and the originally hilarious popinjay Sim Tappertit becomes a pale, ineffectual puppet leader of the masses once the protests begin. Where A Tale of Two Cities has the fascinating deFarges and their knitting companion, The Vengeance, to carry our interest through the Revolution, Barnaby has only the sad, predictable Lord George Gordon.
The first time I read the book, I thought Barnaby himself, described as “simple,” suffered mental retardation. But this last time he seemed more mad or addled. I don’t know what real-life model Dickens had in mind; he may just have had a romantic notion that developmentally disabled people can nevertheless be eloquent and even poetic (like, for instance, Smike from Nicholas Nickleby). But thinking of Barnaby as mad helped me understand why Dickens named the book after a character that has so little impact on the plot. The novel constantly explores issues of control: Can John Willet control his own peaceful environment? Can Sim Tappertit control his chapter of protesters? Can the mob control the laws of England? Can Gordon control the mob? The answer seems always to be “no.” In this context, Barnaby’s pitiable inability to control his own thoughts becomes symbolic of the theme. Maybe Dickens found that he himself lost control of his beautiful domestic comedy to the rioters that wreck a huge part of the second half of the book almost as badly as they do the Maypole.
Like A Tale of Two Cities, the book tells the story of an interconnected group of characters who get caught up in mob riots in the 1780s in a major European capital, only this time it's London instead of Paris, and it's the Gordon Anti-Catholic Riots as opposed to the Jacobin Anti-Catholic (and Anti-Other Things) Riots. Also, like its more famous counterpart, Barnaby Rudge spends about half its pages establishing the domestic setting of the main characters before getting into the major historical events, and this first half is as joyful and funny as anything Dickens ever wrote. Sadly, the historical part gets dreary and probably is to blame for the novel's general neglect.
It amazes me how much power a simple list can wield. The master of the rhetorical list is surely Rabelais; his lists in Gargantua and Pantagruel go brazenly on and on until you have to laugh, and then get sick of laughing, and then start laughing all over again in spite of yourself. He lists, for instance, about two hundred games played by Gargantua. A few chapters later, some village cake-makers call visiting shepherds forty-three insulting names including “prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, . . . blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, . . .woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, . . . and other suchlike defamatory epithets.” Dickens’s lists may not be as long (no one’s are), but where Rabelais’s lists satirize human pretensions and convey pure silliness, Dickens has a much greater range of expression that he accomplishes. Consider the joy in this description of the offerings of a happy village inn:
All bars are snug places, but the Maypole's was the very snuggest, cosiest, and completest bar, that ever the wit of man devised. Such amazing bottles in old oaken pigeon-holes; such gleaming tankards dangling from pegs at about the same inclination as thirsty men would hold them to their lips; such sturdy little Dutch kegs ranged in rows on shelves; so many lemons hanging in separate nets, and forming the fragrant grove already mentioned in this chronicle, suggestive, with goodly loaves of snowy sugar stowed away hard by, of punch, idealised beyond all mortal knowledge; such closets, such presses, such drawers full of pipes, such places for putting things away in hollow window-seats, all crammed to the throat with eatables, drinkables, or savoury condiments; lastly, and to crown all, as typical of the immense resources of the establishment, and its defiances to all visitors to cut and come again, such a stupendous cheese!Who wouldn’t want to visit such a richly appointed establishment? The Maypole’s owner, John Willet, is one of Dickens’s most unjustly unfamiliar comic masterpieces. Poor John only wants a little peace and comfort and is never happier than when smoking a pipe with a group of compatriots from the town of Chigwell. He constantly amazes his neighbors (and readers) with how much he seems to say without speaking a word – sometimes even while sleeping!
But everything wonderful about this first part of the novel disappears when the riots start. John Willet and his funny friends disappear for several chapters, and the originally hilarious popinjay Sim Tappertit becomes a pale, ineffectual puppet leader of the masses once the protests begin. Where A Tale of Two Cities has the fascinating deFarges and their knitting companion, The Vengeance, to carry our interest through the Revolution, Barnaby has only the sad, predictable Lord George Gordon.
The first time I read the book, I thought Barnaby himself, described as “simple,” suffered mental retardation. But this last time he seemed more mad or addled. I don’t know what real-life model Dickens had in mind; he may just have had a romantic notion that developmentally disabled people can nevertheless be eloquent and even poetic (like, for instance, Smike from Nicholas Nickleby). But thinking of Barnaby as mad helped me understand why Dickens named the book after a character that has so little impact on the plot. The novel constantly explores issues of control: Can John Willet control his own peaceful environment? Can Sim Tappertit control his chapter of protesters? Can the mob control the laws of England? Can Gordon control the mob? The answer seems always to be “no.” In this context, Barnaby’s pitiable inability to control his own thoughts becomes symbolic of the theme. Maybe Dickens found that he himself lost control of his beautiful domestic comedy to the rioters that wreck a huge part of the second half of the book almost as badly as they do the Maypole.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Wordless Summary Glimpses
I enjoy two different writers named William James. One goes by Bill James and writes on baseball. Inspired by his statistical methods, I've invented a superstat for position players that takes both hitting and fielding into account. I call it simply "value," and according to my calculations, the Stephenson Value Awards for 2011 go to Matt Kemp in the NL and Jacoby Ellsbury in the AL. I invented another stat for pitchers: upon the year's highest in each league, I bestow the Grover Cleveland Alexander Award. The AL winner this year was Justin Verlander, the NL winner, Roy Halladay. None of this has anything to do with the books I've been reading, but I wanted to take advantage of the coincidence in names to mention it.
More pertinent to this blog is American philosopher and psychologist William James. In the previous post, I talked about James's theory of the "fringe" of our consciousness. Just as we can't identify one specific gallon of fluid in a rushing stream of water, most of our stream of consciousness flows in such a way that the parts can't be distinguished from the whole. James's best example of this fringe in operation involves the nagging sense we have of a word or name we can't remember. We seem to feel its shape, but can't describe it. We know whether suggested names are right or wrong; so clearly we have an idea of that illusive word. We can even tell if a wrong suggestion is close or on the right track. This ineffable sense comes, James says, from all the context with which we surround a concept. He sometimes calls this contextual fringe by other names as well: halo, suffusion, wordless summary glimpses, psychic overtone. It seems that the idea of the fringe was itself somewhere in the fringe since James couldn't decide on a name.
James contends that the most important thing about a train of thought – both the undifferentiated stream and the identifiable, concrete objects flowing in the stream – is its end. When trying to remember that name, for instance, obviously only the conclusion satisfies. But all trains of thought work this way, he says. We have an idea and then work to put it in words, satisfied only when the whole compound has been expressed. (Parenthetical aside no. 1: I need to look over my notes on Wittgenstein again; he maintains that only the external expression means anything, not any vague internal intention to speak. Aside no. 2: Writing a blog has exercised my patience in dealing with the innumerable times I've published a post unconvinced that I have expressed my idea.) James provides another couple of everyday examples to test his claim. First, he says, we normally cannot repeat verbatim a sentence of any appreciable length once we have spoken it; we speak with the conclusion in mind, not the means of reaching that end. Second, he says that sometimes after reading a book, we retain only the gist without being able to quote a single sentence. I experience both of these situations routinely. How about you?
Since the topic involves verbal expression of ideas, James refers several times in the chapter to language. The clear objects in our consciousness, the things we have images of and definite names for, we express with concrete nouns and verbs and adjectives. The undifferentiated stream, i.e. all the relationships between these concrete things and actions, we represent by means of prepositions and other such words as well as by grammar and word order and the use of words that conventionally go together. At one point, almost in an aside, James shifts his focus for just one paragraph off of the psychology and onto the implications of his theory for language and provides a handy recipe for good writing. (1) Express the concrete by using the right words. (2) Express the fringe by fulfilling grammatical expectations. (3) Make sure each word has "the psychic 'overtone' of feeling that it brings us nearer to a forefelt conclusion." And (4) "let the conclusion seem worth arriving at." It all seems so simple! Use the right words and the right grammar, lead to a point, and say something worth saying. Students, take note! Bloggers, take note! Self, take note!
Hegel, take note! In the most surprising and delightful passage of the chapter, James explains what's wrong with the philosopher that tried my patience this last spring. He begins his explanation by pointing out that the grammar and the order of a sentence can flow according to expectations without actually saying anything. Some speakers and writers, he says, rave on like "lunatics" with strings of sentences that sound plausible but ultimately communicate nothing. The danger becomes especially likely the more a writer stays on a subjective, abstract level. At this point in the explanation, James lifts my burden and lights my darkened heart by using Hegel as an example. In many passages, he says, the only sense to be found lies solely in their form: the words come from a related vocabulary and the grammar follows familiar patterns. "Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves." My straining last spring often proved unfruitful.
More pertinent to this blog is American philosopher and psychologist William James. In the previous post, I talked about James's theory of the "fringe" of our consciousness. Just as we can't identify one specific gallon of fluid in a rushing stream of water, most of our stream of consciousness flows in such a way that the parts can't be distinguished from the whole. James's best example of this fringe in operation involves the nagging sense we have of a word or name we can't remember. We seem to feel its shape, but can't describe it. We know whether suggested names are right or wrong; so clearly we have an idea of that illusive word. We can even tell if a wrong suggestion is close or on the right track. This ineffable sense comes, James says, from all the context with which we surround a concept. He sometimes calls this contextual fringe by other names as well: halo, suffusion, wordless summary glimpses, psychic overtone. It seems that the idea of the fringe was itself somewhere in the fringe since James couldn't decide on a name.
James contends that the most important thing about a train of thought – both the undifferentiated stream and the identifiable, concrete objects flowing in the stream – is its end. When trying to remember that name, for instance, obviously only the conclusion satisfies. But all trains of thought work this way, he says. We have an idea and then work to put it in words, satisfied only when the whole compound has been expressed. (Parenthetical aside no. 1: I need to look over my notes on Wittgenstein again; he maintains that only the external expression means anything, not any vague internal intention to speak. Aside no. 2: Writing a blog has exercised my patience in dealing with the innumerable times I've published a post unconvinced that I have expressed my idea.) James provides another couple of everyday examples to test his claim. First, he says, we normally cannot repeat verbatim a sentence of any appreciable length once we have spoken it; we speak with the conclusion in mind, not the means of reaching that end. Second, he says that sometimes after reading a book, we retain only the gist without being able to quote a single sentence. I experience both of these situations routinely. How about you?
Since the topic involves verbal expression of ideas, James refers several times in the chapter to language. The clear objects in our consciousness, the things we have images of and definite names for, we express with concrete nouns and verbs and adjectives. The undifferentiated stream, i.e. all the relationships between these concrete things and actions, we represent by means of prepositions and other such words as well as by grammar and word order and the use of words that conventionally go together. At one point, almost in an aside, James shifts his focus for just one paragraph off of the psychology and onto the implications of his theory for language and provides a handy recipe for good writing. (1) Express the concrete by using the right words. (2) Express the fringe by fulfilling grammatical expectations. (3) Make sure each word has "the psychic 'overtone' of feeling that it brings us nearer to a forefelt conclusion." And (4) "let the conclusion seem worth arriving at." It all seems so simple! Use the right words and the right grammar, lead to a point, and say something worth saying. Students, take note! Bloggers, take note! Self, take note!
Hegel, take note! In the most surprising and delightful passage of the chapter, James explains what's wrong with the philosopher that tried my patience this last spring. He begins his explanation by pointing out that the grammar and the order of a sentence can flow according to expectations without actually saying anything. Some speakers and writers, he says, rave on like "lunatics" with strings of sentences that sound plausible but ultimately communicate nothing. The danger becomes especially likely the more a writer stays on a subjective, abstract level. At this point in the explanation, James lifts my burden and lights my darkened heart by using Hegel as an example. In many passages, he says, the only sense to be found lies solely in their form: the words come from a related vocabulary and the grammar follows familiar patterns. "Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves." My straining last spring often proved unfruitful.
Monday, November 7, 2011
William James's Fringe
In the last post, I wrote about adventure and our need to make the most of whatever comes our way. Even after planning something as detailed as a ten-year reading list, I still follow it with a sense of adventure: the plan is full of authors and works I've never read before, and I never know how they'll strike me or what I'll have to do to learn from them. Even with familiar authors, I wonder sometimes as I approach a new section whether I'll find a tempest or following winds. I schedule William James's Principles of Psychology in the late months each year because I've enjoyed him so much in the past and need exciting, enjoyable reading during my busiest semester of teaching. But each year, I think, "Surely it won't be as good this year as last." Yet James comes through every time.
I've complained in earlier posts about philosophers who try to explain away the human individual; James never worries me in this way. The chapter I'm reading, for instance (chapter IX, "The Stream of Thought"), begins with a defense of individual personhood, proven by the absolute separation of different streams of thought:
Besides his defense of the personal self, another reason I like James is that he constantly provides everyday thought experiments. In the second section of the chapter, he posits two related statements: (1) that thought is in constant change, and (2) that the "simple ideas" discussed by Locke and others do not exist. I imagine that my thought of a rock is always the same, he says, because the rock always appears to be the same no matter the conditions under which I view it. But these changing conditions are precisely what makes my thought of the rock different every time I encounter it. Everything from the lighting and my relative position with the rock to how sleepy I am and what I've been thinking about in the previous minute colors my thought of the rock. I have no thought without this contextual fringe, he says. So here's experiment 1: pick an object you're likely to encounter more than once today and notice what you think about it each time you come to it. Can you imagine ever having exactly the same state of mind twice? At the very least, the first time you see it, you'll be thinking, "I should pay attention so this experiment will work," and the second time you see it, you'll be thinking, "This is the second time, so I wonder how my frame of mind is different."
The fringe is always there, even though we can't put a finger on it, picture it, or put a name to it. James's brilliant proof again rests on an everyday occurrence: forgetting a word or name. (OK, it's an everyday occurrence for me.) We can sense the name in the distance. If someone suggests a possible name, we know if it's on the right track or not, even though before the suggestion we couldn't begin to express our vague feeling of the fringe. And here's a third reason to love James: he always uses such clear, vivid analogies. Trying to capture the fringe of our thought, he says, is like trying to catch a top to see its motion or trying to flip the lights on quickly to see what the room looks like in the dark.
If James is right (and it appears to me that he is), our stream of consciousness is like the river of Heraclitus: you can never step into the same one twice. That means that my reading list offers adventure at every turn, not just with the new authors and new books. Even an old favorite will appear differently the next time I read it. You can never step into the same book twice.
I've complained in earlier posts about philosophers who try to explain away the human individual; James never worries me in this way. The chapter I'm reading, for instance (chapter IX, "The Stream of Thought"), begins with a defense of individual personhood, proven by the absolute separation of different streams of thought:
Each [mind] keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought ever comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. . . . The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature.Later, James points out that these separate unities preserve their integrities even after the interruptions of sleep or other forms of unconsciousness. If two people sleep and then wake up together, "each one of them mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one of the two streams of thought which were broken by the sleeping hours." Just what this personal entity is that unifies each stream of thought is hard to define. Like Augustine trying to define time, James says, "Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it." Nevertheless, he says, "No psychology . . . can question the existence of personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth." Hmm. That worst is bad enough, actually.
Besides his defense of the personal self, another reason I like James is that he constantly provides everyday thought experiments. In the second section of the chapter, he posits two related statements: (1) that thought is in constant change, and (2) that the "simple ideas" discussed by Locke and others do not exist. I imagine that my thought of a rock is always the same, he says, because the rock always appears to be the same no matter the conditions under which I view it. But these changing conditions are precisely what makes my thought of the rock different every time I encounter it. Everything from the lighting and my relative position with the rock to how sleepy I am and what I've been thinking about in the previous minute colors my thought of the rock. I have no thought without this contextual fringe, he says. So here's experiment 1: pick an object you're likely to encounter more than once today and notice what you think about it each time you come to it. Can you imagine ever having exactly the same state of mind twice? At the very least, the first time you see it, you'll be thinking, "I should pay attention so this experiment will work," and the second time you see it, you'll be thinking, "This is the second time, so I wonder how my frame of mind is different."
The fringe is always there, even though we can't put a finger on it, picture it, or put a name to it. James's brilliant proof again rests on an everyday occurrence: forgetting a word or name. (OK, it's an everyday occurrence for me.) We can sense the name in the distance. If someone suggests a possible name, we know if it's on the right track or not, even though before the suggestion we couldn't begin to express our vague feeling of the fringe. And here's a third reason to love James: he always uses such clear, vivid analogies. Trying to capture the fringe of our thought, he says, is like trying to catch a top to see its motion or trying to flip the lights on quickly to see what the room looks like in the dark.
If James is right (and it appears to me that he is), our stream of consciousness is like the river of Heraclitus: you can never step into the same one twice. That means that my reading list offers adventure at every turn, not just with the new authors and new books. Even an old favorite will appear differently the next time I read it. You can never step into the same book twice.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
It's Not a Job, . . .
In Sidney Lanier's book of Arthurian legend, the first version I ever read, several tales begin with the King and his knights sitting down for the feast of Pentecost, determined not to eat until an adventure has come their way. And sure enough, eventually a dwarf or a girl or a dirty young man comes into the hall asking for a boon. These stories brought together in my mind for the first time the ideas of Christianity and adventure. Later, I would read several times in Chesterton (in Orthodoxy, "On Running after One's Hat," and elsewhere) about the adventure of Christianity. Even later, thinking about many of my favorite books and movies, I would come to the conclusion that most (all?) adventure stories come from the soul's longing for Christ. The prince kissing the girl, the knight storming the castle, Frodo entering Mt. Doom, and Luke shooting a bolt down that airshaft are all types of Christ.
These ideas of adventure have popped into my head a lot again recently while reading my second Patrick O'Brian novel for the year: The Letter of Marque. I have no idea if Patrick O'Brian sees adventure in the sacred light that covers it in my view. His wonderful lead characters, Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, each have somewhat complex relationships with the faith, so I don't know that either of them see the adventures that come their way as God's Pentecostal signs. But I certainly have seen an inspiring view of life's adventure in this latest book.
Luck plays a prominent part in this series of sea yarns. The captain is referred to often as "Lucky" Jack Aubrey. Finding an enemy ship in the wide Atlantic is never a given thing. Bullets and cannonballs flying through a battle scene hit one man and miss another without apparent purpose or plan. Governments change, and stocks rise and fall with the ocean winds. The whole series seems set in a world that bounces around on the unpredictable wheel.
This setting, though, becomes theme in the previous installment, The Reverse of the Medal, which centers around the end of Jack's luck. Happily for Jack and his readers, his luck returns in the twelfth volume. But it seemed to me while reading that the lesson O'Brian offers out of all the reverses of fortune is not acquiescence in the indeterminable but a healthy view of luck as opportunity. In Reverse of the Medal, Jack may fall for a con and lose his post because of it, but Stephen takes the opportunity of an inheritance he just happens to come into, and buys Jack a ship to run as a privat . . . – oops, Aubrey looks down on that term – as an independent ship authorized by a letter of marque.
In Letter of Marque, several opportunities come Jack's way by happenstance. He hears of one French ship expecting to meet up with another that happens to be the same size as his Surprise. He hears of another ship moored in St. Martin's and loaded with valuable quicksilver. And he hears that his father has died, leaving an open seat in the House of Commons. Taking these prizes, both naval and political, will help him reach his only goal: reinstatement in the Royal Navy. But Jack has to strategize to make the most of the opportunities luck has sent his way. He paints and rerigs the Surprise to look like the expected rendevous ship, he plans a diversion for the fort at St. Martin's, and he learns what promises (all respectable) to make to which prominent politicians in order to win the place in Parliament. Success never falls in his lap. Stephen gets a little success poured into his lap when a patient unwittingly weens him from his laudanum addiction by raiding the medical supply cabinet and watering down (actually brandying down) the bottle. But that's the only free gift for Stephen: at the end of the book he has to meet an opportunity with carefully chosen action in order to make up with his Diana, which he does through generosity, humility, humor, and vulnerability.
I've been saying "luck," when of course a strict belief in luck leaves God out of control of his own world. Trying to fathom God's purpose in every roll of the dice, though, leads to endless rabbit trails. Better to say with the writer of Ecclesiastes that "time and chance happeneth to all." But these stories are about both chance and intelligent, courageous responses. In looking for God in the world and in good stories about the world, it's hard to say where the chance comes from, but I have no trouble saying where virtues come from.
These ideas of adventure have popped into my head a lot again recently while reading my second Patrick O'Brian novel for the year: The Letter of Marque. I have no idea if Patrick O'Brian sees adventure in the sacred light that covers it in my view. His wonderful lead characters, Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, each have somewhat complex relationships with the faith, so I don't know that either of them see the adventures that come their way as God's Pentecostal signs. But I certainly have seen an inspiring view of life's adventure in this latest book.
Luck plays a prominent part in this series of sea yarns. The captain is referred to often as "Lucky" Jack Aubrey. Finding an enemy ship in the wide Atlantic is never a given thing. Bullets and cannonballs flying through a battle scene hit one man and miss another without apparent purpose or plan. Governments change, and stocks rise and fall with the ocean winds. The whole series seems set in a world that bounces around on the unpredictable wheel.
This setting, though, becomes theme in the previous installment, The Reverse of the Medal, which centers around the end of Jack's luck. Happily for Jack and his readers, his luck returns in the twelfth volume. But it seemed to me while reading that the lesson O'Brian offers out of all the reverses of fortune is not acquiescence in the indeterminable but a healthy view of luck as opportunity. In Reverse of the Medal, Jack may fall for a con and lose his post because of it, but Stephen takes the opportunity of an inheritance he just happens to come into, and buys Jack a ship to run as a privat . . . – oops, Aubrey looks down on that term – as an independent ship authorized by a letter of marque.
In Letter of Marque, several opportunities come Jack's way by happenstance. He hears of one French ship expecting to meet up with another that happens to be the same size as his Surprise. He hears of another ship moored in St. Martin's and loaded with valuable quicksilver. And he hears that his father has died, leaving an open seat in the House of Commons. Taking these prizes, both naval and political, will help him reach his only goal: reinstatement in the Royal Navy. But Jack has to strategize to make the most of the opportunities luck has sent his way. He paints and rerigs the Surprise to look like the expected rendevous ship, he plans a diversion for the fort at St. Martin's, and he learns what promises (all respectable) to make to which prominent politicians in order to win the place in Parliament. Success never falls in his lap. Stephen gets a little success poured into his lap when a patient unwittingly weens him from his laudanum addiction by raiding the medical supply cabinet and watering down (actually brandying down) the bottle. But that's the only free gift for Stephen: at the end of the book he has to meet an opportunity with carefully chosen action in order to make up with his Diana, which he does through generosity, humility, humor, and vulnerability.
I've been saying "luck," when of course a strict belief in luck leaves God out of control of his own world. Trying to fathom God's purpose in every roll of the dice, though, leads to endless rabbit trails. Better to say with the writer of Ecclesiastes that "time and chance happeneth to all." But these stories are about both chance and intelligent, courageous responses. In looking for God in the world and in good stories about the world, it's hard to say where the chance comes from, but I have no trouble saying where virtues come from.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Almost Prophetic
Philosophy is a powerful possession. In book 2 of the Georgics, Virgil tells us:
Dr. Johnson put it this way: the state of the philosophical wise man is to have no want of anything. Boswell usually portrays Johnson as having reached that enlightened stage (although he isn't above commenting occasionally where he thinks Johnson wrong), and even just the sixty pages that I read this year demonstrate his possession of Newman's list of virtues rather well. Boswell describes "almost the repose of faith" this way:
Johnson frequently reveals his knowledge of the human heart. Twice in this year's assignment, he speaks of the need of melancholy people to find diverting occupations for the mind rather than trying to battle the melancholy thoughts, advice this melancholy man has found helpful. He advises a Dr. Taylor not to fight battles for the reputation of a fellow physician: if his arguments prevail, the listener won't call upon the physician anyway because he will only resent being found wrong.
And he is ready with a reasoned opinion on anything that comes up. In these sixty pages, I have read Johnson speak spontaneously about literature and writing, the business of making and selling books, economics, Scottish geography, the proper way to talk about travels (interpretation based on vivid description), the ranking of musical instruments (organ over violin?!), the British constitution, ancient Gaelic languages, whether The Beggar's Opera injures the public morality (no), the ethics of tombstone epitaphs (they may exaggerate guiltlessly), inheritances for daughters (a needed change), the ethics of lawyers seeking a suit to represent (only if the suit is sure to happen), flogging in schools (effective but perhaps not worth the benefit), severe monastic disciplines, the relative roles of aptitude and learning in mathematics, Quakers, Deists, the morality and legality of libelling the dead (occasionally acceptable in the interest of truth), and the joys of taverns.
Dr. Johnson isn't always right about these things, though. He says that Tristram Shandy is too odd to last, but I've read it, and a film version appeared just six years ago.
Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,That's quite a claim: a good dose of science and wisdom, and you'll be able to ignore fear, laugh at things you cannot change, and despise the call of the death that rushes upon you. But some Christian philosophers have agreed with Rome's golden poet. Aquinas says that the virtue of wisdom knows the proper place and cause of all things and brings peace. In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman goes even farther:
atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum
subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari.
Happy is he who has been able to learn the causes of things
And to tread all fear and inexorable fate
Under his feet along with the roar of greedy Acheron.
That perfection of the Intellect, which is the result of Education, and its beau ideal, to be imparted to individuals in their respective measures, is the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres.Of course, Newman knows to say that the wise mind is almost supernatural in its powerful equanimity because he knows that prophecy, knowledge of the heart, charity, faith, and sight of Heaven can only come by the grace of God. But these are God's ideals for the human mind, so it should come as no surprise that true education pursued humbly but diligently should tend in the same direction.
Dr. Johnson put it this way: the state of the philosophical wise man is to have no want of anything. Boswell usually portrays Johnson as having reached that enlightened stage (although he isn't above commenting occasionally where he thinks Johnson wrong), and even just the sixty pages that I read this year demonstrate his possession of Newman's list of virtues rather well. Boswell describes "almost the repose of faith" this way:
I never knew any man who was less disposed to be querulous than Johnson. Whether the subject was his own situation, or the state of the publick, or the state of human nature in general, though he saw the evils, his mind was turned to resolution, and never to whining or complaint.Johnson's knowledge of history reveals itself on almost every page. Near the beginning of my passage from this year, he rates the previous 125 years of British monarchs, approving Charles II (in spite of his licentiousness), James II (in spite of his desire to turn his subjects into Roman Catholics), and George III (in spite of his troubles with America). Boswell indicates Johnson's "near prophecy" when he says, after Johnson's death, "I am happy to think that he lived to see the Crown at last recover its just influence."
Johnson frequently reveals his knowledge of the human heart. Twice in this year's assignment, he speaks of the need of melancholy people to find diverting occupations for the mind rather than trying to battle the melancholy thoughts, advice this melancholy man has found helpful. He advises a Dr. Taylor not to fight battles for the reputation of a fellow physician: if his arguments prevail, the listener won't call upon the physician anyway because he will only resent being found wrong.
And he is ready with a reasoned opinion on anything that comes up. In these sixty pages, I have read Johnson speak spontaneously about literature and writing, the business of making and selling books, economics, Scottish geography, the proper way to talk about travels (interpretation based on vivid description), the ranking of musical instruments (organ over violin?!), the British constitution, ancient Gaelic languages, whether The Beggar's Opera injures the public morality (no), the ethics of tombstone epitaphs (they may exaggerate guiltlessly), inheritances for daughters (a needed change), the ethics of lawyers seeking a suit to represent (only if the suit is sure to happen), flogging in schools (effective but perhaps not worth the benefit), severe monastic disciplines, the relative roles of aptitude and learning in mathematics, Quakers, Deists, the morality and legality of libelling the dead (occasionally acceptable in the interest of truth), and the joys of taverns.
Dr. Johnson isn't always right about these things, though. He says that Tristram Shandy is too odd to last, but I've read it, and a film version appeared just six years ago.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Judging a Book's Owner by the Cover
Boswell tells about a visit made by Samuel Johnson and the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds to the home of a new acquaintance. When the two men were taken to a sitting room to wait for their host, Dr. Johnson immediately went to the bookshelf and began perusing the "backs of the books," by which I believe Boswell means what I would call the spines.
I've done this same thing many times at homes and in offices. It seems that checking out the books on the shelf should tell you something about their owner. A lot of books by one author is a very good sign that the owner is a fan. The sight of a lot of paperbacks probably indicates a desire for reading that challenges the bank account. Old editions show an interest in collecting and a respect for tradition. The order or disarray, creases in the spines, protruding bookmarks, "used" stickers, dust jackets or exposed hardback cover -- it's all fascinating and informative. And of course seeing a lot of favorite titles could mean that you've found a new friend.
The books on the shelf might be misleading, though. Books on subjects that might demand belief -- economics, politics, religion, and the like -- might indicate interest without commitment. Some books might have been misguided gifts, never to be enjoyed. I have a few misleading books on my living-room shelves. They're scattered around the shelves in no particular order, and I often wonder what guests think of them, although I know that most guests don't love to look as I do. Mostly they're jammed in tightly on low shelves, a good sign that I have tiny grandkids.
Dr. Johnson didn't claim to look at the books in order to learn more about his host, though. Sir Joshua said that he (Sir Joshua) had an advantage: being immediately drawn to the paintings on the wall, instead, he could see entire artworks at a glance. But he asked Johnson why he only looked at the spines without bothering to look inside. The lexicographer answered that by learning titles, he could at least learn more about where to find certain kinds of information. It occurs to me that I look at the shelves for this reason, too. It's almost impossible for me to look up a book in a library catalog and then go straight to that book on the shelf and grab it without looking at all the other titles around it. And I've learned a lot just glancing through bibliographies. Some titles made it to my ten-year plan for no other reason than that I saw them in a list of books compiled by Mortimer Adler.
The same thing happens when I look through a table of contents. I might have opened the book or journal in order to read one particular article, but I usually end up reading something else that catches my eye, too (or instead). And I've learned a lot of music literature just by going through tables of contents looking for the one short piece I intended to study or practice. I had a very intelligent, very talented blind graduate student once who revealed what I thought was a tragic consequence of his condition. For many great composers, he could name only one piece. His piano teacher had assigned pieces, and he had requested Braille versions of them from the Library of Congress. But he had never had the joy of searching a table of contents slowly.
I've done this same thing many times at homes and in offices. It seems that checking out the books on the shelf should tell you something about their owner. A lot of books by one author is a very good sign that the owner is a fan. The sight of a lot of paperbacks probably indicates a desire for reading that challenges the bank account. Old editions show an interest in collecting and a respect for tradition. The order or disarray, creases in the spines, protruding bookmarks, "used" stickers, dust jackets or exposed hardback cover -- it's all fascinating and informative. And of course seeing a lot of favorite titles could mean that you've found a new friend.
The books on the shelf might be misleading, though. Books on subjects that might demand belief -- economics, politics, religion, and the like -- might indicate interest without commitment. Some books might have been misguided gifts, never to be enjoyed. I have a few misleading books on my living-room shelves. They're scattered around the shelves in no particular order, and I often wonder what guests think of them, although I know that most guests don't love to look as I do. Mostly they're jammed in tightly on low shelves, a good sign that I have tiny grandkids.
Dr. Johnson didn't claim to look at the books in order to learn more about his host, though. Sir Joshua said that he (Sir Joshua) had an advantage: being immediately drawn to the paintings on the wall, instead, he could see entire artworks at a glance. But he asked Johnson why he only looked at the spines without bothering to look inside. The lexicographer answered that by learning titles, he could at least learn more about where to find certain kinds of information. It occurs to me that I look at the shelves for this reason, too. It's almost impossible for me to look up a book in a library catalog and then go straight to that book on the shelf and grab it without looking at all the other titles around it. And I've learned a lot just glancing through bibliographies. Some titles made it to my ten-year plan for no other reason than that I saw them in a list of books compiled by Mortimer Adler.
The same thing happens when I look through a table of contents. I might have opened the book or journal in order to read one particular article, but I usually end up reading something else that catches my eye, too (or instead). And I've learned a lot of music literature just by going through tables of contents looking for the one short piece I intended to study or practice. I had a very intelligent, very talented blind graduate student once who revealed what I thought was a tragic consequence of his condition. For many great composers, he could name only one piece. His piano teacher had assigned pieces, and he had requested Braille versions of them from the Library of Congress. But he had never had the joy of searching a table of contents slowly.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Dining with Dr. Johnson Again
It is half past twelve o'clock as I enter the Literary Club. The sign above the door of the establishment says "Wendy's," but that is only the outward and visible sign. I carry a special book in my hand, and today the place takes the form of the Literary Club. It has been about a year since last I dined with Dr. Samuel Johnson, and I am happy to renew his pleasant and inspiring company. After I order a repast at the bar, I look around and find the table I want. There sit many of the illustrious members of the Club: Mr. Beauclerk, Mr. Langton, Mr. Charles Fox, Mr. Boswell, and of course the honorable man of letters, London's most illustrious citizen, Dr. Johnson.
As I seat myself at the table, several of the interlocutors turn to me somewhat taken aback. "You are dressed strangely, sir," says Beauclerk. "I come from the twenty-first century," I reply, "where these clothes are normal." I fail to mention the fact that academic-shabby with a Cardinals t-shirt might be considered eccentric even for my century. "Well, you are welcome, sir," rejoins Beauclerk. "We are just now discussing the recent turmoil in America."
As Dr. Johnson begins to speak, I am immediately reminded of his peculiar mannerisms. With a squint and a jerk of his torso, he informs the group of his opinion: "They are a race of convicts. The Colonists can with no solidity argue from their not having been taxed while in their infancy, that they should not now be taxed. We do not put a calf into the plow; we wait till he is an ox." Mr. Boswell expresses his surprise at a view he characterizes as "unsuitable to the mildness of a Christian philosopher." "I was sorry to see you appear," he says, "in so unfavourable a light in your recent pamphlet on the subject. I could not perceive in it that ability of argument, or that felicity of expression, for which you are, upon other occasions, so eminent." Dr. Johnson responds with a Latin quotation:
I observe that I have just read a passage in a book by Mr. Anthony Trollope . . . . "Who?" asks Mr. Langton. "He is an author, sir, of novels and lived . . . or will live . . . or lives in the nineteenth century." "He bears an unfortunate surname, does he not?" asks Dr. Johnson. "Yes, sir, but the connotation of the word that I believe you have in mind has fallen almost completely out of usage so that those who hear his name -- a group that is sadly far too small, I'm afraid -- no longer think of it in that tainted light." "Be that as it may," says Dr. Johnson, "you were about to tell us of the future. What does this Mr. Trollope say?" "I had in mind a passage in which a young woman, who has spent several months conversing regularly after services with an unmarried Anglican clergyman, finds that the clergyman has not implied any thoughts of marriage in his attentions to her, as she has previously believed, and that as a consequence she decides to become a Methodist." "Why should a man imply anything?" Dr. Johnson asks with a rather frightening roar. (Again, I cannot attest to the exact accuracy of the wording.) "A man should scrutinize and clarify his thoughts with sound moral judgment and careful reasoning, and then speak what he believes without apology. It is my consistent practice, and I have never been sorry for it." "The nineteenth-century English believe discretion in language necessary for the maintenance of social relationships." "Nonsense! By 'discretion' you mean 'hypocrisy.' Social ties were never strengthened by hypocrisy. I speak what I believe, and I find that these good gentlemen continue to dine with me. Boswell there does not agree with me on the age of Ossian, and he and I have never been more fond of each other." Mr. Boswell blushes.
The conversation turns to the recent journey of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell to Scotland and the former's celebrated published account of that excursion. Mr. Langton points out that Dr. Johnson's statement in the book that he has come away from the North willing to believe in second sight has excited some ridicule among his readership. Mr. Boswell responds: "He is only willing to believe. I do believe. The evidence is enough for me, though not for his great mind. What will not fill a quart bottle will fill a pint bottle. I am filled with belief." I am reminded of my (and Charles Schulz's) favorite Peanuts strip. Then, debating the literary merits of Jonathan Swift, various members of the club name titles that I should add to my plan, perhaps instead of rereading Gulliver's Travels.
Dr. Johnson tells the constellated luminaries (and me) that Sheridan was wrong in granting a medal to the author of Douglas. "If Sheridan was magnificent enough to bestow a gold medal as an honorary reward of dramatick excellence, he should have requested one of the Universities to choose the person on whom it should be conferred." I tell him that in my time, universities confer awards only in the hopes that the honoree might return the honor in the form of money. "What?" he exclaims. "Do not the institutions of learning in the twenty-first century continue to guide the publick in the studied, rational judgment of the arts?" "That practice continued into the twentieth century," I reply. "An exemplary case is Prof. C. S. Lewis, who was, like yourself, a Christian philosopher and who, like yourself, enjoyed an ability of argument and felicity of expression. But it is very difficult for anyone in my time and in my country to judge either artistic works, actions, or human character. Expanding freedoms have made the pronouncement of judgment politically dangerous." "Ah," he says with a jerk, "everyone does what is right in his own eyes. Is that it? Humph!" His face disappears in a storm of spasms. "Race of convicts!"
At half past one o'clock, I must leave the Club and wend my way back to my office, which is located in another building. As I walk across the campus, a conversation I overhear between two undergraduates playing catch with a football returns me with a jolt to my own era:
As I seat myself at the table, several of the interlocutors turn to me somewhat taken aback. "You are dressed strangely, sir," says Beauclerk. "I come from the twenty-first century," I reply, "where these clothes are normal." I fail to mention the fact that academic-shabby with a Cardinals t-shirt might be considered eccentric even for my century. "Well, you are welcome, sir," rejoins Beauclerk. "We are just now discussing the recent turmoil in America."
As Dr. Johnson begins to speak, I am immediately reminded of his peculiar mannerisms. With a squint and a jerk of his torso, he informs the group of his opinion: "They are a race of convicts. The Colonists can with no solidity argue from their not having been taxed while in their infancy, that they should not now be taxed. We do not put a calf into the plow; we wait till he is an ox." Mr. Boswell expresses his surprise at a view he characterizes as "unsuitable to the mildness of a Christian philosopher." "I was sorry to see you appear," he says, "in so unfavourable a light in your recent pamphlet on the subject. I could not perceive in it that ability of argument, or that felicity of expression, for which you are, upon other occasions, so eminent." Dr. Johnson responds with a Latin quotation:
Fallitur egregio quisquis sub Principe creditAfter asking him to repeat the aphorism more slowly, I surprise and delight myself at believing I have understood it: Anyone who thinks himself in servitude because subject to a prince errs egregiously; liberty nowhere extends itself more graciously than under a pious king. I venture to point out that Mr. John Wesley has written a letter to the American Colonists pleading with them to understand that they enjoy more freedom than citizens of any other country, and more so even than he. Dr. Johnson replies to me, but since I have neither his "felicity of expression" nor a facile memory for quotations verbatim, I can only report the sense of his remark, which is that he finds Methodists misguided but not hypocritical, such as are the nonjurors.
Servitium; nunquam libertas gratior extat
Quam sub Rege pio.
I observe that I have just read a passage in a book by Mr. Anthony Trollope . . . . "Who?" asks Mr. Langton. "He is an author, sir, of novels and lived . . . or will live . . . or lives in the nineteenth century." "He bears an unfortunate surname, does he not?" asks Dr. Johnson. "Yes, sir, but the connotation of the word that I believe you have in mind has fallen almost completely out of usage so that those who hear his name -- a group that is sadly far too small, I'm afraid -- no longer think of it in that tainted light." "Be that as it may," says Dr. Johnson, "you were about to tell us of the future. What does this Mr. Trollope say?" "I had in mind a passage in which a young woman, who has spent several months conversing regularly after services with an unmarried Anglican clergyman, finds that the clergyman has not implied any thoughts of marriage in his attentions to her, as she has previously believed, and that as a consequence she decides to become a Methodist." "Why should a man imply anything?" Dr. Johnson asks with a rather frightening roar. (Again, I cannot attest to the exact accuracy of the wording.) "A man should scrutinize and clarify his thoughts with sound moral judgment and careful reasoning, and then speak what he believes without apology. It is my consistent practice, and I have never been sorry for it." "The nineteenth-century English believe discretion in language necessary for the maintenance of social relationships." "Nonsense! By 'discretion' you mean 'hypocrisy.' Social ties were never strengthened by hypocrisy. I speak what I believe, and I find that these good gentlemen continue to dine with me. Boswell there does not agree with me on the age of Ossian, and he and I have never been more fond of each other." Mr. Boswell blushes.
The conversation turns to the recent journey of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell to Scotland and the former's celebrated published account of that excursion. Mr. Langton points out that Dr. Johnson's statement in the book that he has come away from the North willing to believe in second sight has excited some ridicule among his readership. Mr. Boswell responds: "He is only willing to believe. I do believe. The evidence is enough for me, though not for his great mind. What will not fill a quart bottle will fill a pint bottle. I am filled with belief." I am reminded of my (and Charles Schulz's) favorite Peanuts strip. Then, debating the literary merits of Jonathan Swift, various members of the club name titles that I should add to my plan, perhaps instead of rereading Gulliver's Travels.
Dr. Johnson tells the constellated luminaries (and me) that Sheridan was wrong in granting a medal to the author of Douglas. "If Sheridan was magnificent enough to bestow a gold medal as an honorary reward of dramatick excellence, he should have requested one of the Universities to choose the person on whom it should be conferred." I tell him that in my time, universities confer awards only in the hopes that the honoree might return the honor in the form of money. "What?" he exclaims. "Do not the institutions of learning in the twenty-first century continue to guide the publick in the studied, rational judgment of the arts?" "That practice continued into the twentieth century," I reply. "An exemplary case is Prof. C. S. Lewis, who was, like yourself, a Christian philosopher and who, like yourself, enjoyed an ability of argument and felicity of expression. But it is very difficult for anyone in my time and in my country to judge either artistic works, actions, or human character. Expanding freedoms have made the pronouncement of judgment politically dangerous." "Ah," he says with a jerk, "everyone does what is right in his own eyes. Is that it? Humph!" His face disappears in a storm of spasms. "Race of convicts!"
At half past one o'clock, I must leave the Club and wend my way back to my office, which is located in another building. As I walk across the campus, a conversation I overhear between two undergraduates playing catch with a football returns me with a jolt to my own era:
She: When is your birthday?I must return to the Literary Club tomorrow.
He: What?
She: Your birthday. Is it in July?
He: No. August.
She: That's what I said. August.
He: You said July.
She: No, I said August.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)