Year-End Round-Up

My blogging hasn’t kept up with my reading this last month, so I’ll need to cover three books in one post. In July, I said I was hopeful that I would have happy things to say about Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, Williams’s Many Dimensions, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love. I did indeed enjoy all five of those books immensely, but I’ve only blogged about three so far. So I’ll say something about the other two and toss in some comments about William James for free.

I’m so glad I finally read Julian of Norwich: the Revelations are so very happy! God is our friend, she learned in her visions, and cannot be angry with those He has redeemed. In a beautifully quaint phrase, she says that God displays towards us “abundant largesse . . . through his marvellous courtesy.” We worry about sin more than God does, she says; He knows it had to happen, and He dealt with it. Repent, move on, and rejoice! “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” If you get an edition like mine, you will see that two versions of the book have survived: a short version and a long version. It’s mildly interesting to think about which might have come first and why Julian (or someone else) thought there should be a second version. But just go ahead and read the “long” version: it’s only about 150 pages long.

The last time I read Charles Williams's Many Dimensions, eleven years ago, I wrote in my personal notes only these thirteen characters: “pp. 118, 128.” I just checked my copy of the book to see what happens on those pages, and I have to say I don’t have any idea why I recommended page 118 to myself. But 128 does get at the heart of the matter. In this marvelous book of, well, um . . . , marvels, the Stone from the crown of Solomon finds its way to England. The Stone, marked with the Tetragrammaton, has some of the properties of God and, in fact, seems to be an inlapition (to coin a term parallel to “incarnation” while using the Latin for “stone” in place of the word for “flesh”) of the Divinity, showing clear manifestations of the powers of teleportation, telepathy, self-multiplication, and healing. Some people don’t believe what they see; others, following the Sanhedrin of Jesus’ time, believe what’s happening but think it can only cause trouble if word gets out; and yet others see the Stone and its powers as mere commodities to be sold or phenomena to be studied for personal enrichment. Alone in all of England, Lord Arglay and Chloe Burnett see the Stone as a divine object expecting fealty and sacrifice, and on p. 128, they decide to “choose to believe.” And by that bit of insightful phraseology, Williams indicates that the type of belief the Stone demands is more than mere acknowledgment of the truth; after all, the demons believe yet tremble. Belief in the Stone requires a personal choice and commitment.

Having enjoyed small pieces of James’s Principles of Psychology over the course of fifteen years or so, I knew I had to read The Varieties of Religious Experience. I didn’t know what I was in for, but I was certain it would be interesting. The first interesting surprise was to find out that the book wasn’t 140 pages long, as my planning notes said, but about 530, so I had to read a bit faster than I thought I would in order to finish before the holidays. I can’t begin to do justice to 530 fascinating pages in a one-paragraph review, but I’ll say a word about one cautionary point. James says to his audience (the book consists of transcripts of lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh) at the outset that studying religious experiences from a psychologist’s point of view can never prove, nor does he wish to suggest, that God is not involved in the experience, just as no amount of textual criticism can ever prove that God didn’t superintend the composition of the Bible. One of his conclusions is that visions, callings, divine assurance, etc. come from the subconscious part of the mind (he prefers other terms such as the “fringe” or the “extraliminal”), but again he assures his audience that he doesn’t mean to say that locating the immediate source of the experiences in one part of the mind precludes a prior, divine source working on the subconscious. Someday I’m going to have to do some experimentation with reading “subconscious” anytime I see the human spirit mentioned in the Bible and thinking “spirit” everywhere I see the subconscious (or “fringe”) mentioned in psychological writing.

That does it for the regular posts this year. I’ll be back in a few days with the yearly awards ceremony, and then it’s on to 2025, when, among other reading adventures, I’ll explore some more Thomas Hardy and the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, finish up The Forsyte Saga, and revisit two novels by the Great Man himself, one near the top in my ranking and one very near the bottom in everybody’s ranking. Stay tuned to find out which two books I mean and what I think about everything else!

I hope your Merry Christmas brings you some new books!