All part of a plan

On "The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse":

What runs through Wodehouse’s books like a seam of gold is the idea that everything will come right in the end. His stories are defined by an inexhaustible optimism that is not only comforting, but intelligent and thoughtful. Beneath the japes, scrapes, pig-stealing, and aunt-dodging, there’s a genuine attention to the texture of human existence.

The Jeeves stories, for instance, contemplate serious philosophical questions around human agency, fate, and the existence of free will. The joy of these stories is their predictability, and this is deliberate. No matter how difficult a fix Bertie gets into, the reader knows that the hidden hand of Jeeves will always be there, quietly directing events towards a satisfactory conclusion.

Bertie meanwhile remains oblivious, labouring under the delusion that he is free to decide the course of his life. This inevitably backfires. It’s often only at the end of each story that Bertie understands that his attempts at independent action have actually been part of a far grander plan envisioned by Jeeves. In this sense, the Jeeves stories are an allegory for real life: we go along believing we are masters of our own fate, but we do so unaware of the hidden forces directing our path. ....

It’d be obtuse to argue that P.G. Wodehouse should be remembered as a philosopher. He’d have no doubt thought that preposterous. But his reputation as a master of the English comic novel – though apt – obscures the brilliance of his writing. It should be remembered that although his books were comical, they were far from frivolous. They contain a resilient optimism that will comfort, cheer and entertain readers for generations. .... (more)

William Fear, "The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse," Engelsberg Ideas, July 22, 2024.

"Attercop! Attercop! Down you drop..."

I just finished an application of Miss Muffet's Revenge, a very effective spider killer/repellent that lasts for three or four months. I usually spray every surface a spider might cross getting onto my balcony. But this year I decided to wait for my replacement awning to be installed. That hasn't yet happened. So, after walking through a cobweb as I went outside, I decided to at least spray around windows and doors.

I readily admit that spiders are generally beneficial, consuming insects and themselves providing food for birds. But I prefer they don't occupy the same living space I do.

Beneath the shadow of the British oak

A favorite Burke quotation from his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

.... Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour. ....

Old-fashioned truths

In September 1947, the cover of Time, perhaps then the most important American weekly magazine, portrayed C.S. Lewis. The cover article, uncredited, but in fact by Whittaker Chambers, former Communist spy, now a Christian witness against that ideology, described Lewis to Time's readers. (Lewis didn't much like this portrayal):

The lecturer, a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice, was coming to the end of his talk. Gathering up his notes and books, he tucked his horn rimmed spectacles into the pocket of his tweed jacket and picked up his mortarboard. Still talking—to the accompaniment of occasional appreciative laughs and squeals from his audience—he leaned over to return the watch he had borrowed from a student in the front row. As he ended his final sentence, he stepped off the platform.

The maneuver gained him a head start on the rush of students down the center aisle. Once in the street, he strode rapidly —his black gown billowing behind his grey flannel trousers—to the nearest pub for a pint of ale.

Clive Staples Lewis was engaged in his full-time and favorite job—the job of being an Oxford don in the Honour School of English Language & Literature, a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College and the most popular lecturer in the University. To watch him downing his pint at the Eastgate (his favorite pub), or striding, pipe in mouth, across the deer park, a stranger would not be likely to guess that C.S. Lewis is also a best-selling author and one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.

Since 1941, when Lewis published a witty collection of infernal correspondence called The Screwtape Letters, this middle-aged (49) bachelor professor who lives a mildly humdrum life (“I like monotony”) has sold something over a million copies of his 15 books. He has made 29 radio broadcasts on religious subjects, each to an average of 600,000 listeners. Any fully ordained minister or priest might envy this Christian layman his audience.

That audience is the result of Lewis’ special gift for dramatizing Christian dogma. He would be the last to claim that what he says is new; but, like another eloquent and witty popularizer of Christianity, the late G.K. Chesterton, he has a talent for putting old-fashioned truths into a modern idiom. .... (more)

Whittaker Chambers, "Don v. Devil," Time, September 8, 1947.

"The bullet is in me now"

I taught US History for many years, so no surprise that a 1912 event described by a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article came to mind:

It was 99 years ago Oct. 14 that former president Theodore Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt near what is now the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee at W. Kilbourn Ave. and N. 4th St. He was campaigning in Milwaukee as the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party presidential nominee. His shirt bloodied by a bullet still lodged in his chest, T.R. insisted on delivering an hour-and-a-half long speech anyway at the Milwaukee Auditorium, notable for this declaration:

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through — and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”

The assassin was John Schrank, an opponent of Presidential third terms who had followed TR for thousands of miles, finally finding his opportunity in Milwaukee. Shrank wrote that the ghost of William McKinley had advised him in a dream to avenge his [McKinley's] death by killing Roosevelt.

A description of the event:

.... He [TR] stopped for the afternoon at the Hotel Gilpatrick, and after dining with local dignitaries, readied to leave for the Milwaukee Auditorium (now the Milwaukee Theatre) to give a campaign speech.

As he was getting into his vehicle, Roosevelt paused on the floorboards to turn and wave goodbye to well-wishers. Unfortunately, this moment cleared the way for would-be assassin, John Schrank, to take the shot he had been plotting for more than three weeks as he followed Roosevelt's campaign across eight states. Schrank fired his .38 revolver from close range, hitting Roosevelt in the chest.

In the ensuing melee, in which Schrank was immediately caught, Roosevelt's car left, but it was supposedly several moments before Roosevelt fully comprehended that he had been hit. The tenacious Roosevelt insisted, however, on continuing on to his speech anyway. (It could be that he felt he owed the speech its day — it was the speech's thick manuscript, folded in his breast pocket along with a metal glasses case, that absorbed most of the bullet's force.)

Upon entrance to the Milwaukee Auditorium, Roosevelt announced to the stunned audience that he had been shot, proclaiming: "It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!" He then proceeded to speak for 80 minutes before reluctantly going to a Milwaukee hospital for treatment.

Only after the speech did Roosevelt permit himself to be taken to the hospital  The bullet was not removed and remained in his body for the rest of his life. A transcript of the eighty-minute (!) speech is here.

Schrank was arrested at the scene and Milwaukee officers had to protect him from the crowd. On November 12, 1912 Schrank pled guilty to assault with intent to commit murder. He was found insane by the court and sent to Northern Hospital for the Insane located in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Shrank died not long after FDR was elected to his third term as President.

TR's bloody shirt - JSOnline

The most absurd, offensive blather

A wise reminder from Peter Savodnik, "Don’t Fall for the Partisan Trap":

An hour and a half after Donald Trump was nearly killed at a rural Pennsylvania campaign rally, Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic strategist in northern Virginia who advises Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman, emailed journalists, suggesting the shooting might have been “staged.” ....

By this late date, there’s nothing especially surprising about a partisan, on either side, floating nutty conspiracy theories. Recall that two years ago, Republican influencers like Donald Trump Jr. and Dinesh D’Souza pushed the totally uncorroborated theory that the intruder who attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was his gay lover.

We have come to expect those engaged in electoral battles to say and tweet and post the most absurd, offensive blather. Their job is not to seek out the truth, but to fight relentlessly—blindly.

The problem, of course, is that they forget that the rest of us—the vast majority of us—are not partisans, that we are capable of something more generous and ecumenical. That we are able to disagree passionately with our fellow Americans about the border or the climate or TikTok or whatever and still, somehow, not fall for the most insidious lies about them. That we can make basic moral distinctions. For example, Trump is not Vladimir Putin. Nor is he Adolf Hitler. He’s just the presumptive Republican nominee. ....

There are, to be sure, millions of Americans who fear that President Trump, given a second term, won’t defend and uphold the Constitution. That he endangers our democracy. There are also millions of Americans who believe that President Biden has been a disaster—and that he’s the one endangering democracy with his lies about his mental acuity.

So be it. But we need not succumb to the partisan trap. The partisan stupidity. Because that is exactly what this is. A myopia and mindlessness so blinding that it conjures up scenarios that go beyond the fiercest partisanship into the realm of insanity. That’s what happens when one views one’s political foe not as a human being with human failings, but as Satan himself. Donald Trump, his innumerable foibles notwithstanding, is not Satan. .... (more)

Peter Savodnik, "Don’t Fall for the Partisan Trap," The Free Press, July 15, 2024.

Enlightened critics and the unwashed masses

I continue to be a big fan of The Free Press because it is invariably interesting, tolerant of diverse political and cultural opinion, and intolerant of intolerance. Inevitably I sometimes disagree, but only sometimes. Kat Rosenfield has joined them as a regular "columnist on all things culture." Her first column in that capacity, "How Culture Got Stupid," published today:

Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But...a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction. ....

The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:

• All art was political, and always had been;
• Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;
• And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.

The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. ....

It was inevitable that a rift would emerge between the enlightened critics and the unwashed masses who, as it turned out, would rather not undergo mandatory DEI training every time they turn on the television. The one-two punches of #MeToo followed by BLM only widened it.

Today, there’s often a hilarious mismatch between how normie audiences receive a film versus how it’s reviewed by critics, one most clearly visible on the site Rotten Tomatoes. ....

...[T]he media’s offense-takers enjoy outsize influence—so Hollywood, always a liberal bastion, has increasingly come to see itself as a moral authority. The result is observable, as the complex and provocative stories of the peak TV era have given way to something far more pious, dutiful, dull, and shrill. ....

But don’t we want more? To laugh, to cry, to be thrilled, to be moved? To lose ourselves in a story we haven’t heard before, and to decide for ourselves what it means? .... Despite the strange takeover of my chosen field by tasteless scolds, I still believe there’s nothing better than a story that grabs you and won’t let go. So from now on, you’ll find me writing about all things culture regularly here at The Free Press. ....

Kat Rosenfield, "How Culture Got Stupid," The Free Press, July 13, 2024.

"I will not fail thee nor forsake thee"

In a post at Commentary, Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik quotes from a speech President Reagan delivered at Arlington National Cemetery on on Veterans Day in 1985:

The living have a responsibility to remember the conditions that led to the wars in which our heroes died. Perhaps we can start by remembering this: that all of those who died for us and our country were, in one way or another, victims of a peace process that failed; victims of a decision to forget certain things; to forget, for instance, that the surest way to keep a peace going is to stay strong. Weakness, after all, is a temptation—it tempts the pugnacious to assert themselves—but strength is a declaration that cannot be misunderstood. Strength is a condition that declares actions have consequences. Strength is a prudent warning to the belligerent that aggression need not go unanswered. ....

Peace also fails when we forget to bring to the bargaining table God’s first gift to man: common sense. Common sense gives us a realistic knowledge of human beings and how they think, how they live in the world, what motivates them. Common sense tells us that man has magic in him, but also clay. Common sense can tell the difference between right and wrong. Common sense forgives error, but it always recognizes it to be error first. ....

Peace fails when we forget to pray to the source of all peace and life and happiness. I think sometimes of General Matthew Ridgeway, who, the night before D-day, tossed sleepless on his cot and talked to the Lord and listened for the promise that God made to Joshua: “I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”… Let us make a compact today with the dead, a promise in the words for which General Ridgeway listened, “I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”

Meir Y. Soloveichik, "I Will Not Fail Thee Nor Forsake Thee," Commentary, July/August, 2024.

No further left

Joseph Epstein, reviewing Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism:

By the end of the 1920s, the various organizations had coalesced into the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). What would entice one to join this American communist party? Idealism expressing itself as a yearning for the best of all good societies. A hatred of capitalism, viewed as a brutally exploitative economic system. Or, perhaps, an incident in the wider culture, such as the 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, which roused many to the defense of the two Italian-immigrant political anarchists charged with killing a factory guard and a paymaster during the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory. Then there is the general challenge, first noted by George Orwell, that those on the political left often feel from people to the left of them: that they are too timid in their views, are not really on the bus, are themselves part of the problem. Communism provided the comfort that one couldn’t go any further left.

For that slender minority of Americans who did go over to Communism (the membership of the CPUSA peaked at around 75,000 in 1947), it was a rocky ride. .... “If the history of American Communism is a narrative of conversion and faith,” he writes, “it is also one of disenchantment and apostasy.” People wandered in and out of the party, others hovered just outside—so-called fellow travelers—but never actually joined. “Communism was an adopted and embattled faith,” the author observes, “and, as such, often precariously held.” ....

The Communist Party of America was never more than a branch office of Soviet Communism, and rather a minor branch office at that. (Both the French and Italian Communist parties were more potent than the American party in the sense of affecting their countries’ mainstream politics.) The chief problem that Soviet communism presented to American communists was the requirement to toe the line—and a most jagged, not to say crooked, line it often turned out to be.

There was the Soviet Union’s break with, and eventual assassination of, Leon Trotsky, a figure much admired by many American Communists. There was the Nazi-Soviet pact on the eve of World War II, through which Stalin promised nonaggression while Hitler invaded his European neighbors and the two dictators fatefully (and secretly) agreed to divvy up Poland. There were the Moscow Trials, during which once-revered old-line Russian Communists were put on trial by Stalin’s secret police, found guilty and executed for treason. There was Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech,” during which Stalin’s successor as Soviet leader seemed to do an about-face, describing and acknowledging the monstrous crimes of the recently deceased Stalin. Then there was the brutal Soviet suppression of a rebellion in Hungary later that year, and (12 years later) a similar attack against restive Czechoslovakians. Through all this and more, members of the American Communist Party had to adjust to sudden ideological shifts if they were to remain in the party. ....

More interesting than the party’s leaders are those peripheral figures, some party members, others fellow travelers—Paul Robeson, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Whittaker Chambers, I.F. Stone, Clancy Sigal, Angela Davis and many others—extollers and victims of communism alike. ....

Joseph Epstein, "‘Reds’ Review: Communism in the U.S.A.," Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2024.

Independence Day

 

A solemn and perilous circumstance

On Independence Day in 1862 Frederick Douglass delivered an address in Himrod, New York. This is only a small selection of passages from that rather long speech:

FELLOW CITIZENS: Eighty-six years ago the fourth of July was consecrated and distinguished among all the days of the year as the birthday, of American liberty and Independence. The fathers of the Republic recommended that this day be celebrated with joy and gladness by the whole American people, to their latest posterity. Probably not one of those fathers ever dreamed that this hallowed day could possibly be made to witness the strange and portentous Events now transpiring before our eyes, and which even now cast a cloud of more than midnight blackness over the face of the whole country. We are the observers of strange and fearful transactions. ....

Never was this national anniversary celebrated in circumstances more trying, more momentous, more solemn and perilous, than those by which this nation is now so strongly environed. We present to the world at this moment, the painful spectacle of a great nation, undergoing all the bitter pangs of a gigantic and bloody revolution. We are torn and rent asunder, we are desolated by large and powerful armies of our own kith and kin, converted into desperate and infuriated rebels and traitors, more savage, more fierce and brutal in their modes of warfare, than any recognized barbarians making no pretensions to civilization. ....

Men have strange notions now[a]days as to the manner of showing their respect for the heroes of the past. They everywhere prefer the form to the substance, the seeming to the real. .... Nevertheless, I would not even in words do violence to the grand events, and thrilling associations, that gloriously cluster around the birth of our national Independence. There is no need of any such violence. The thought of today and the work of today, are alike linked, and interlinked with the thought and work of the past. The conflict between liberty and slavery, between civilization and barbarism, between enlightened progress and stolid indifference and inactivity is the same in all countries, in all ages, and among all peoples. Your fathers drew the sword for free and independent Government, Republican in its form, Democratic in its spirit, to be administered by officers duly elected by the free and unbought suffrages of the people; and the war of today on the part of the loyal north, the east and the west, is waged for the same grand and all commanding objects. We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers, and my fathers began eighty-six years ago. ....

FELLOW CITIZENS: let me say in conclusion. This slavery begotten and slavery sustained, and slavery animated war. has now cost this nation more than a hundred thousand lives, and more than five hundred millions of treasure. It has weighed down the national heart with sorrow and heaviness, such as no speech can portray. It has cast a doubt upon the possibility of liberty and self Government which it will require a century to remove. .... I have told you of great national Opportunities in the past; a greater [one] than any in the past is the opportunity of the present. If now we omit the duty it imposes, steel our hearts against its teachings, or shrink in cowardice from the work of today, your fathers will have fought and bled in vain to establish free Institutions, and American Republicanism will become a hissing and a by-word to a mocking earth. (the entire address)

Frederick Douglass, "The Slaveholders’ Rebellion: An Address Delivered in Himrod’s, New York, on July 4, 1862"

A favorite mystery

A post at the Facebook group "Golden Age Detection" (a private group, you would have to join to read) enthuses about one of my favorite mysteries:

...[I]gnore the movie read the book.

Anthony Gethryn, MacDonald's sleuth is typical and old school but still fascinates. He is English in the way that I like to think of the English of that era. He suits my imagination. I love how he thinks, how he reacts, how he adores his wife, how he is always the smartest person in the room, and how he's filthy rich enough to indulge whatever whim he has but doesn't overdo it. I also love that he can be brave and ruthless. He has no fault. My kind of guy. ....

(Gethryn shows up in my second favorite mystery thriller too, by the way. MacDonald's The Nursemaid Who Disappeared aka Warrant For X.)

Don't know how else to say it: the plot of The List of Adrian Messenger (and has there ever been a better title for a thriller? Well, besides The 39 Steps, that is.) is brilliant. ....

Behind the scenes mass murder on the grandest of scales. A pitiless killer who almost gets away with a cunningly contrived plan if not for a small list of names handed over to a friend by a researching writer who never realizes his own danger — I think he regards the thing as an intellectual exercise. The dreadful audacity of the killer is dazzling if not mind-numbing.

The ending is as ruthlessly efficient as it has to be. ....

My enthusiasm for Philip MacDonald knows no boundaries. Give his work a look, and see what you think. ....

I agree. I also agree that Warrant for X is almost as good. The illustration is of my copy.

A very good, recent, World War II film

Greyhound (2020) is a film only recently available here on DVD although subscribers to Apple TV+ have had access to it. I have replaced the possibly pirated DVD I had already purchased, frustrated by the film's unavailability. The movie is based on C.S. Forester's book, The Good Shepherd (1955). Forester, of course, wrote the Hornblower novels about naval warfare in the Napoleonic era. The film script was written by Tom Hanks who also stars. It isn't long—only 80 minutes—but very intense. This review, from The Hollywood Reporter, describes it well:

As screenwriter, Hanks strips down the story to its essence, largely dispensing with both preamble and post-ordeal exhalation, focusing almost entirely on the nail-biting experience of the hellish voyage. The movie fully immerses the audience in battle, owing something to the intensity of both the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan and the combat sequences in Dunkirk. ....

Krause is captain of the Fletcher-class destroyer code-named Greyhound, leader of three other light warships assigned to protect a convoy of 37 merchant vessels carrying troops and crucial supplies across the North Atlantic to England. The action is concentrated on the middle stretch of the journey known as the “Black Pit,” where surveillance aircraft from both sides are out of range, putting the zig-zagging boats at the mercy of German submarines that lurk in a wolf-pack blockade.

The movie charts that treacherous crossing over three days, broken down according to watch hours, at a time when the stealthy U-boats were more sophisticated than the Navy sonar equipment used to detect them. The elimination of almost all the standard scenes of reprieve or personal backstories — aside from Krause’s brief memory flashes of his last encounter with Evelyn — makes for an exciting open-sea combat experience. ....

To Hanks’ credit, his screenplay mostly downplays the heroics while fully acknowledging the bravery and sacrifice of the men who fought in the Battle of the Atlantic, a WWII campaign relatively underrepresented in movies. (The Oscar-nominated 1981 feature that put director Wolfgang Petersen on the map, Das Boot, viewed the conflict from the German side.) With thorough verisimilitude, Greyhound depicts just one crossing among countless over a six-year period in which 3,500 ships carrying millions of tons of cargo were sunk and 72,200 souls were lost. .... (more)

David Rooney, "‘Greyhound’: Film Review," The Holywood Reporter, July 6, 2020.

The everyday acts of ordinary people

Re-posted because I agree even more strongly today than I did then. From Alan Jacobs on "A Long Defeat, A Final Victory":

.... The phrase “long defeat” comes from J.R.R. Tolkien, who in The Lord of the Rings puts it in the mouth of Galadriel, and in a letter uses it himself: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” ....

.... Perhaps the chief problem with the “culture wars” paradigm that governs so much Christian action and reflection, in the North American context anyway, is that it encourages us to think in terms of trophies rather than testimonies. It tempts us to think too much about whether we’re winning or losing, and too little about the only thing we ultimately control, which is the firmness of our own resolve. ....

It seems to me that the most important political acts I can perform do not involve siding with one of the existing parties, or even necessarily to vote at all, but to try to bear witness through word and action to this double vision of the earthly city: a long defeat followed by a longer joy.

We are too prone, I believe, to think that voting is the definitive political act. That would be true only if politics simply belongs to the government. There is a far vaster sphere of politics — the life of the polis — that belongs to everyday acts of ordinary people. In this maybe Gandalf is a pretty good guide: “Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

A Long Defeat, A Final Victory – Snakes and Ladders

Let Truth and Falsehood grapple

The Dispatch has added another newsletter. "Dispatch Faith" will be emailed on Sundays.

Dispatch Faith will not be a newsletter version of those “Coexist” bumper stickers you sometimes see on the road. We don’t intend to flatten out the real and substantive differences between religions. This newsletter also won’t cater to only one branch of one faith or seek to drive away those who profess no religious faith.

No, we want Dispatch Faith to help readers of all sorts better understand both religion in general and the nuances of particular faith traditions. Often, these essays will touch on religion’s influence on politics, policy, and culture writ large.

The first of these newsletters contains an essay by Karen Swallow Prior: "Christian Nationalism Is a Failure of Imagination." From a part of that essay that draws from the work of John Milton:

In 1644, John Milton, most famous for the Christian epic poem, Paradise Lost, published a treatise directed at his own political and religious faction, the Puritan-led Parliament, appealing to it not to resort to the licensing restrictions of the printing press that had been the approach of his faction’s enemy, the monarchy. Areopagitica (whose title is linked to the same Areopagus, or Mars Hill, made famous by the Apostle Paul in Acts 17) makes some of the most compelling arguments in modern literature for religious liberty. The work became a cornerstone for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Milton’s arguments are thoroughly rooted, not only in robust Christian doctrine, but in firsthand knowledge of just how corruptible a marriage between religion and government is.

Virtue, Milton argues, differs from innocence, which does no wrong because wrong is not an option. Virtue must be chosen in order to be virtue:

He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised & unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

Liberty, not the coercion of the law, is the friend of truth, Milton writes. Licensing and prohibiting are its enemies:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter. Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.

Living and writing during the height of the English civil wars, wars fought between factions whose religious and political identities were indistinguishable, Milton fought for the right to be wrong (and free to be wrong), even on matters of utmost political, spiritual, and eternal importance:

Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his Pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresy.

A flourishing Christian faith, along with a flourishing nation, depends on minds free and well-formed enough to recognize truth amid falsehood. The primary question Christian nationalism claims to ask—namely, what does it look like for people of faith (Christian or otherwise) to advocate in the public square for the public policies they believe will do the most public good?—cannot be answered with tropes, types, and cliches. Such are the makings of a flattened imagination that can deal only with ideas, not the real world. .... (more)

Karen Swallow Prior, "Christian Nationalism Is a Failure of Imagination," Dispatch Faith, June 23, 2024.

Enjoying Shakespeare

Most of my knowledge of Shakespeare comes, not from studying the plays in English classes, but from attending annual student productions at the college where my parents taught and I eventually attended. Milton College had a tradition of annual Shakespeare plays dating back to the 19^th century. I've seen yearbook pictures of WWI casts that were entirely female since most of the guys were serving in the military. My brother and I from a very young age were taken to whatever was being performed that year. In preparation, Dad would read us a summary of the plot from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. I was reminded of that today:

First published in 1807, it contains retellings of 20 of Shakespeare’s best-known plays. The Lamb siblings weren’t trying to dumb down the language or stories, they were simply hoping to give newcomers a more understandable introduction to these plays. Often, it’s easy to get stuck on the unfamiliar language and trip on the allusions, and these mishaps can make us lose the whole thread of the plot. Many characters, some major and many minor, zip on and off stage, adding to the confusion. Tales from Shakespeare, however, aims to fix some of that by giving the plots in as straightforward a manner as possible and including enough of the Bard’s language to give a thrilling glimpse to eager readers. ....

Whether you’re a long-time lover of Shakespeare’s works or you couldn’t name a single one of his plays; whether you’re a Stratfordian or an Oxfordian; and if you never could figure out whether Hamlet was crazy or not, Tales from Shakespeare is a wonderful addition to any library. Read it aloud to your children or dip in and out for your own pleasure — this delightful introduction to some of the greatest stories, prose, and poetry in the English language is a treat.

Sarah Schutte, "Shakespeare for the Young," National Review, June 23, 2024.

An outrageous zeal

Quoted at Anecdotal Evidence today, Samuel Johnson describes an attitude not confined to his time:

He certainly retained an unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called and thought liberty; a zeal which sometimes disguises from the world, and not rarely from the mind which it possesses, an envious desire of plundering wealth or degrading greatness; and of which the immediate tendency is innovation and anarchy, an impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established.

Patrick Kurp, "An Impetuous Eagerness to Subvert," Anecdotal Evidence, June 23, 2024.

"Hope that breaks the witch’s spell"

Making an argument that G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien have also made:

.... Fairy tales are beloved by children partly because they are tales of action. Rather than revolving around the inner thoughts and motivations of nuanced characters, they are concerned with what happens next, what the characters (often archetypes) do. They are more than mere fables with a snappy moral (think Aesop) because their meaning transcends clearcut lessons. Instead, they are full of mystery. There is room inside these tales for the child to explore fairyland: a strange and dangerous world in which she can practice overcoming her fears by journeying alongside the hero. And at the end of the tale, everything is set right. ....

The fairy tale acknowledges that parents do not always love and care for their children as they ought, that loved ones die and leave us alone and grieving, that evil is real and often powerful, and that violence and sin are present in our world. All these truths make grownups uncomfortable; we are eager to smooth over a child’s fears with comforting falsehoods. “Don’t worry, nothing is going to happen to me,” a mother might say when her child is distraught at the thought of her mortality. But the child knows that sometimes mothers die and his mother is no different. Children are wise enough to be afraid of death, loss, and danger – after all, these are frightening things. The question is whether we allow them to wrestle well with these fears or not. British writer G. K. Chesterton famously wrote, “The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a Saint George to kill the dragon.” If we spend our efforts trying to convince a child that the dragons of life can’t hurt him, we not only fail to tell the truth, we fail to show him that dragons do not have the last word. And the child longs to be equipped to face the monsters he fears, whether dragons or death. ....

Every human being understands the world and his place in it through narratives. God wires us to be formed by story; Jesus himself tells parables to teach his disciples. It is of the highest importance that we consider what stories we are telling our young people. What character do they think they are in the story of their lives? And what kind of world is their story set in? Is it a world in which greed and power will be ultimately triumphant? Is it a world in which love and goodness hold any sway? Could the dread that seems to plague our young people be not merely a reaction to the brokenness of our world but our failure to communicate that the universe will ultimately be set right as both fairy tales and the gospel promise? ....

To combat both the anxiety that comes to children robbed of the space to confront evil and the despair that holds that the last chapter of humanity’s tale is final defeat, we have to offer truer stories. Early in life, children need to be steeped in fairy tales that don’t gloss over the dark and ugly parts of the world. Children are wise; they reject the false advertising of cheap positive thinking for the real prize of hard-won hope. For a message of hope to be received, it must be hope that shines in darkness, hope that breaks the witch’s spell. .... (more)

Haley Stewart, "The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales," Plough, June 17, 2024.

A Christian funeral

A post from a few years ago:

I've been thinking about Christian funerals recently, and especially the "celebration of the life" of the deceased in a Christian context. Obviously a funeral or memorial service for a Christian will spend some time remembering the life, the character, the faith, and the contributions — the achievements — of that person. But it seems to me that should not be the primary focus. Of course for a dead  non-believer that may be all that can be said. For a believer the emphasis should be on the Hope we have.

The Book of Common Prayer has a section titled "The Order for The Burial of the Dead," and like every section of that book it rests very heavily on Scripture. The prayers are good, too. I chose readings from this section for my mother's funeral and was somewhat surprised afterwards to be complimented for the choices. I thought they would be familiar to anyone who had attended a funeral. They should be.

The service begins with these words:

I AM the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.

I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

More, later in the service:

JESUS said, Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

I HEARD a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead who die in the Lord: even so saith the Spirit; for they rest from their labours.

O LORD Jesus Christ, who by thy death didst take away the sting of death; Grant unto us thy servants so to follow in faith where thou hast led the way, that we may at length fall asleep peacefully in thee, and awake up after thy likeness; through thy mercy, who livest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

I AM the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.

Warts and all

I majored in history and then taught it for over three decades. Late in my career, I taught a 9^th grade TAG elective with two colleagues, one from the Science department, and the other an English teacher. We chose the 19^th century as a time frame because of significant events that occurred in each of our fields, as well as the kinds of subject matter that might interest bright and motivated students in that age group. One of my most helpful discoveries was the work of Gertrude Himmelfarb. Her work as a historian focused on that century. And her work was fascinating. A search for her name on this site will find many references. National Affairs has published an essay on "The Historian's Craft" about Himmelfarb's approach to the discipline:

...Himmelfarb looked to the past and what it had to say about liberal society as someone (to borrow philosopher William James's phrase) "twice-born": someone who appreciated the profound and terrible role contingency played in history; who had no illusions about the purported inevitability of progress; who, as she put it herself, experienced "life as a tragic mystery, acutely aware of the potentiality for evil and of the heroic effort required to overcome it." ....

Himmelfarb had as little use for misty-eyed nostalgia as she did for an unbounded confidence in the moral arc of history. She revered the liberal tradition, particularly the sensible, practical, and virtue-oriented one born out of the British and American enlightenments, and the multi-generational British and American societies that cultivated and transmitted this tradition. Morals and moral sense mattered, in her telling, because they made the pursuit of freedom — of a kind of progress — possible. ....

"I suffer from the professional deformation of the historian," Himmelfarb confessed at the end of The New History and the Old. "Philosophers can see the eternal verities that transcend history. Political scientists can see the abstract processes that underlie history. Historians can only see history itself, the 'epiphenomena' of history, it might be said pejoratively — the messy, unpredictable, contradictory, transitory, yet ineluctable facts of history."

Even if history is only visible through a glass darkly and mired in mess and contradiction, Himmelfarb knew that wrestling with its ineluctable facts was an essential part of recovering a tradition worth preserving. Unfortunately, our capacity to meaningfully reckon with historical facts (moral or otherwise) has been jeopardized by those who treat history as a litany of abuses by the empowered against the disempowered, while others sanitize it beyond recognition by cleaving ideas from their historical context. If we are to return history to its rightful place in our civic discourse, it will depend in part on emulating the example Himmelfarb set by treating history as a beloved spouse — warts and all.

Nicole Penn, "The Historian's Craft," National Affairs, Spring, 2024.

“Go away and think”

Reading an opinion column, I was pleased to find a summation of G.K. Chesterton's views about tradition:

In his spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy (1908), G.K. Chesterton observed that tradition is “democracy extended through time.” It means “giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors,” and resisting “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” People die, but their ideas live on. Particularly in a constitutional republic, we should avail ourselves of the wisdom of the past and heed what Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.”

Later and with no less panache, he demonstrated why. In The Thing (1929), Chesterton introduced the parable of the fence, in which a reformer finds a fence across a roadway and calls for its removal because he doesn’t see the use of it. Chesterton contrasts him with “a more intelligent type of reformer,” to whom ignorance of the past—of why the fence was built in the first place—justified not removing but preserving it, at least until the fence’s reason for being was understood. “Go away and think,” was the second reformer’s wise counsel to the first. ....

Mike Kerrigan, "The Democracy of the Dead," Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2014.

Wide Awake

Has the country ever been so divided? Well, yes, several times, including the 1860 Presidential election. From this review of a recent book, Wide Awake, by Jon Grinspan:

How did Lincoln, then relatively unknown in national politics, win this critical race? Presidential candidates at the time did not ordinarily campaign for themselves. ....

A youth movement known as the Wide Awakes played a huge role in promoting Lincoln’s candidacy. The Wide Awakes are often mentioned in works on Lincoln, but Mr. Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution and the author of two previous books on the history of American democracy, is the first to probe them in depth.

He traces the movement to five textile clerks in Hartford, Conn., who formed a grassroots political organization in February 1860 to support the antislavery Republican Party. From this initial group, known as the Hartford Originals, the movement expanded quickly. Wide Awake clubs appeared throughout the North—as Mr. Grinspan writes, they emerged “in Bangor and Brooklyn, Cambridge and Columbus, St. Paul and San Francisco, and hundreds of cities and towns in between.” Dressed in shiny oilskin capes and carrying torches, the Wide Awakes staged “monster” parades with fireworks and music, marching and thundering forth their distinctive chant: “Hurrah! Huzzah! Hurrah! Huzzah! Hurrah! Huzzah!” ....

In its early phase, Mr. Grinspan demonstrates, the Wide Awake movement opposed slavery but was not progressive on race. But the movement diversified. African-Americans became Wide Awakes, with the Ohio lawyer John Mercer Langston (later a congressman representing Virginia) and the Bostonian Lewis Hayden, a former slave, leading the way. Opponents came to view the Wide Awakes as dangerous radicals involved in a conspiracy to bring about a horrid racial reversal in America. One journalist fumed: “The chief object seems to be to give the negro the supremacy over the white man.” ....

It’s unknown how large the Wide Awake movement was: Mr. Grinspan gives us a rough range of between 100,000 and half a million participants. Regardless of the numbers, the Wide Awakes generated outsize excitement wherever they appeared. Violence sometimes followed, as groups of proslavery Democrats assaulted the Republican Wide Awakes with stones and brickbats, while the Wide Awakes were summoned to the fray with the cry: “Do your duty!”

When the Civil War came, many of these young men traded torches for rifles. Mr. Grinspan tells us that most of the former Wide Awakes participated in the war, including the African-American Wide Awakes of Boston. ....

David S. Reynolds, "‘Wide Awake’ Review: On the March for Lincoln," Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2024.

We believe...

Upon occasion, the congregation in my church would recite the Apostles Creed in the Sabbath morning service. That isn't typical of Baptist worship. Many among us claim to be non-creedal, basing belief only on Scripture. Actually, that means creating a personal creed, since interpretations of Scripture can differ. This summer, the Southern Baptists will consider adding the Nicene Creed to the "Baptist Faith and Message," that denomination's belief statement. A few excerpts from arguments made by advocates of the proposal:

As each generation of Christians since the fourth century has rightly noted, the Nicene Creed’s statements are thoroughly biblical. It covers the full slate of major loci in Christian theology – the Trinity, Christology, salvation, creation, Scripture, the church, and the last things. ....

Affirming the Nicene Creed is not new in Baptist history. The rich confessional tradition among Baptists, both General (Arminian) and Particular (Calvinist) Baptists, has often made use of creedal language. For example, the influential Second London Confession of Faith (adopted in 1689) utilized specifically creedal formulations in its statement on the Trinity and the Incarnation: “one substance”, “begotten”, “proceeding,” “very…God,” and so on. ....

In addition to this general creedal dependence, at least two Baptist confessions included the full text of the three ecumenical creeds. First, the Orthodox Creed, an important seventeenth-century General Baptist confession compiled by the influential Baptist theologian Thomas Monck, affirms and includes the text of all three ecumenical creeds in Article 38. Echoing the language of the Articles of Religion, the confession begins as follows,

The Three Creeds, (viz.) Nicene Creed, Athanasius his Creed, and the Apostles Creed, (as they are commonly called) ought throughly to be received, and believed. For we believe they may be proved by most undoubted Authority of holy Scripture....

So, affirming the Nicene Creed is both biblical and Baptist, but it is also beneficial. Affirming the Creed in our confessional document would have the advantage of endorsing it and commending its use in the context of local church ministry. ....

R. Lucas Stamps & Matthew Y. Emerson, "Why We Support Adding the Nicene Creed to the Baptist Faith and Message," The Center for Baptist Renewal, June 8, 2024.

Working the crowd

I first posted this in 2009. I like the argument. The picture is of the pulpit in the Newport Seventh Day Baptist Church, the first SDB church in North America.

The Wittenberg Door regrets "The Loss of Symbolism," specifically what seems an aversion to the pulpit, which the pastor once ascended to preach the Word. He argues that the pulpit symbolized something very important in Christian — and particularly Reformed — doctrine.

The pulpit comprises a lectern standing upon a raised platform. Being the most important piece of “furniture” in the church, it is positioned in front of the congregation, with all pews facing it. Its symbolic importance can be summarized as follows:

• It’s central—The pulpit’s central placement is important because it is from there that God addresses His people via the preached word. Therefore, it commands the most prominent place in the church.
• It’s raised—The pulpit is elevated because it is upon the lectern that the minister’s bible rests, symbolizing the word of God being over the people.
• It’s solid—The lectern is made of solid wood, symbolizing the sure foundation upon which God’s word stands. Moreover, it’s large enough to obscure most of the minister’s body, thus keeping the focus on the word. For this reason, Reformed ministers stay behind the lectern, so as to stay behind the word of God. ....

Things have changed, though. Pulpits are considered outdated, and even stifling. Like nature, the church abhors a vacuum. In the pulpit’s place sprung the Plexiglas stand, allowing the “minister” to be seen in all of his glory. But this too is seen by some as cumbersome. Why let anything stand in front of the minister, hindering his ability to work the crowd...?

Too harsh? Perhaps. But the transition from the pulpit to more modern elements is symptomatic of a greater problem: a shift from the glory of God to the glory of man; ... a shift from the preached word as a Means of Grace to the advent of a new sacrament—the minister himself. ....

The Wittenberg Door: The Loss of Symbolism

The gift of reading

Robert Louis Stevenson was asked by a magazine editor to contribute an essay about books that influenced him. The essay was originally published in 1887. The portions below interested me more than the rest, especially the last paragraph:

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters. ....

The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps better to be silent. ....

The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment—a free grace, I find I must call it—by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences.

This essay "Books Which Have Influenced Me," collected in Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson (1906), can be found on Project Gutenberg.

"The critically silent and the garrulous anecdotic"

Robert Louis Stevenson is famous for books like Treasure Island and Kidnapped. That is how I first encountered him and I still enjoy re-reading those books. I only discovered his essays in the last few years. This is excerpted from "Talk and Talkers," a section of that essay about the value for the young of attending to the talk of the elderly:

The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in their manner...serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age and add a distinction to gray hairs. But their superiority is founded more deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the march of man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they have battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and harbour. ....

The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically silent and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we look for; it is perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman, well on in years, sits handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning experience with reverted eye; and chirping and smiling, communicates the accidents and reads the lesson of his long career. Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still quickens his old honest heart—these are "the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his grey-bearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned. ....

The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather hearers than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and critical attention. To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think we must go to old ladies. Women are better hearers than men, to begin with; they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the tedious and infantile vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a woman than even from the oldest man in the way of biting comment. Biting comment is the chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this business. .... If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the malignity of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. ....

William Lyon Phelps, editor, "Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson" (1906), Project Gutenberg.

A thriller

I am re-reading one of my favorite John Buchan adventures. Huntingtower is the first of three novels about the adventures of Dickson McCunn, my favorite among Buchan's protagonists. It can be found, nicely formatted, and available to be downloaded or read online, at Standard Ebooks. I just discovered that the BBC made a six-episode television video of the story and that it is available on YouTube. I haven't watched it and can't vouch for the quality. But I thoroughly enjoy the book, especially Buchan's descriptions, for instance:

It was such a day as only a Scots April can show. The cobbled streets of Kirkmichael still shone with the night’s rain, but the storm clouds had fled before a mild south wind, and the whole circumference of the sky was a delicate translucent blue. Homely breakfast smells came from the houses and delighted Mr. McCunn’s nostrils; a squalling child was a pleasant reminder of an awakening world, the urban counterpart to the morning song of birds; even the sanitary cart seemed a picturesque vehicle. He bought his ration of buns and ginger biscuits at a baker’s shop whence various ragamuffin boys were preparing to distribute the householders’ bread, and took his way up the Gallows Hill to the Burgh Muir almost with regret at leaving so pleasant a habitation. ....

I will not dwell on his leisurely progress in the bright weather, or on his luncheon in a coppice of young firs, or on his thoughts which had returned to the idyllic. I take up the narrative at about three o’clock in the afternoon, when he is revealed seated on a milestone examining his map. For he had come, all unwitting, to a turning of the ways, and his choice is the cause of this veracious history.

The place was high up on a bare moor, which showed a white lodge among pines, a white cottage in a green nook by a burnside, and no other marks of human dwelling. To his left, which was the east, the heather rose to a low ridge of hill, much scarred with peat-bogs, behind which appeared the blue shoulder of a considerable mountain. Before him the road was lost momentarily in the woods of a shooting-box, but reappeared at a great distance climbing a swell of upland which seemed to be the glacis of a jumble of bold summits. There was a pass there, the map told him, which led into Galloway. It was the road he had meant to follow, but as he sat on the milestone his purpose wavered. For there seemed greater attractions in the country which lay to the westward. Mr. McCunn, be it remembered, was not in search of brown heath and shaggy wood; he wanted greenery and the Spring. ....

C.S. Lewis particularly liked Buchan's ability to describe the safe and homely—if only temporary—havens from danger that his heroes would discover.

A quarter of an hour later the two travelers, having been introduced to two spotless beds in the loft, and having washed luxuriously at the pump in the backyard, were seated in Mrs. Morran’s kitchen before a meal which fulfilled their wildest dreams. She had been baking that morning, so there were white scones and barley scones, and oaten farles, and russet pancakes. There were three boiled eggs for each of them; there was a segment of an immense currant cake (“a present from my guid brither last Hogmanay”); there was skim-milk cheese; there were several kinds of jam, and there was a pot of dark-gold heather honey. “Try hinny and aitcake,” said their hostess. “My man used to say he never fund onything as guid in a’ his days.”

John Buchan, Huntingtower, 1922.

Ascending

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation first appeared in Western languages in 1974, fifty years ago, in three volumes. I bought it and read it as soon as I could. I already had some sense of the inhumanity of  Communism but Solzhenitsyn certainly solidified my anti-Communism. Some regimes need to be destroyed. But Solzhenitsyn, based on his own experience in the GULAG, had also gained spiritual insight. Gary Saul Morson on the most important chapter in the book:

“Here is how it was with many others, not just with me,” Solzhenitsyn explains. One’s first prison experience resembles the sky over Pompeii or the heaven of the Last Judgment “because it was not just anyone who had been arrested, but I—the center of this world.” One thought occurs to everyone: one must vow to survive at any price. And one soon realizes what that means: “at the price of someone else.”

And whoever takes that vow...allows his own misfortune to overshadow both the entire common misfortune and the whole world.

This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right—you lose your life, and if you go the left—you lose your conscience.

Solzhenitsyn concedes that at that fork, “at that greater divider of souls,” most choose survival. ....

Although most prisoners chose survival, many chose conscience, and Solzhenitsyn describes a few he met. They all knew that, according to official Bolshevik atheism, there are no transcendent values. Lenin and his followers scorned such ideas as “human dignity” and the “sanctity of human life.” No, Soviet citizens were taught, only the material result counted, and that meant the only moral standard was the interest of the Communist Party. People who accepted this way of thinking readily concluded that, on the individual level, too, all that matters is what promotes one’s own welfare.

Choosing conscience meant rejecting such thinking. You gradually recognize that “It is not the result that counts...but the spirit! Not what—but how.” You begin to change. Instead of being sharply intolerant, you begin to forgive. “You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others.” In short, “you are ascending.”

“Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering.” For the first time, you examine your life sincerely and “remember everything you did that was bad and shameful.” Solzhenitsyn recalls how, when he was in the hospital, the deeply wise Dr. Kornfeld, a convert to Christianity, explained to him that although you are innocent of the crime for which you were imprisoned, “if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply,” you will be able to find real transgressions worthy of such punishment. As it happened, Dr. Kornfeld was murdered that very night. “And so it happened that Kornfeld’s prophetic words were his last words on earth. And directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance.” .... (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "The masterpiece of our time," The New Criterion, June, 2024.