"What is the value in fairy tales..."

In Touchstone, "The Fairy Tale Wars: Lewis, Chesterton, et al. Against the Frauds, Experts & Revisionists":

.... "The individual is foolish, but the species is wise," wrote Edmund Burke. And with this deft hyperbole, he threw a monkey wrench into our modern individualism, which pits the self against tradition. Modern projects to revamp, reinvent, or otherwise rewrite the great stories are, more often than not, arbitrary exercises, prompted by the fleeting opinions of individuals who have a limited grasp of the original storyteller's literary sophistication. Today's fairy tale "experts" embrace a virtually obligatory suspicion of tradition, judging it to be inherently aligned with injurious prejudices, which, they say, we have outgrown and must shed.

These experts, whether Marxist, Feminist, Freudian, Jungian, or Comparativist, tightly wrap their story specimens in a favored methodology, and suck the very life out of them in order to single out and expose class prejudices, sexual stereotypes and gender constructs, archetypes, literary allusions, or universal themes that they claim to find in the stories. Yet in this selective process, they almost always lose grip of the narrative. The truth of a story is not scattered along the way, like the pebbles Hansel dropped in order that he and Gretel might find their way back home. The truth of a story takes form through the whole of the narrative. ....

In an essay titled "Children and Literature," the renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles has written: "The truth is that many of us (certainly in my field of child psychology) don't give enough credit to the natural, normal everyday development of narrative interest, narrative sense, narrative response, narrative competence in boys and girls." Children are always seeking out new experiences, and they find them in stories when adults do not spoil these stories by superimposing concepts or rules over the narrative.

C.S. Lewis writes in "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Best Say What's to Be Said," that fairy tales "give us experiences we have never had, and thus, instead of 'commenting on life', can add to it." Children from roughly ages three through nine exercise their imaginations so powerfully that they quite consciously and quite deliberately leave the ordinary present entirely behind and enter into new worlds of make-believe. They will often object to adult interventions in their play because they know how, in the adult world, reason rules and imagination becomes a casualty. Children live near fairyland and enter into it through play with an ease of which adults are incapable.

More to the point, children instinctively resist abstraction. They cling to the narrative, hunt it down, one might say, to the lessons that can be learned through the dramatic action. Any parent or teacher who has read to children has experienced the intensity, even ferocity, with which children insist that when we try to explain a story, we must reference, retell, even "relive" the dramatic action. In other words, they insist on exercising their imagination, which, unlike reason or the intellect, moves not to abstraction or conceptualization, but seeks out the concrete in a story, the details, and analogizes from them to find meaning. ....

In his own essay on "Fairy Tales" from 1908, G.K. Chesterton maintains that a single idea "runs from one end of [fairy tales] to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition." This truth is the bedrock of morality. It is not only "the core of nursery-tales," but "the core of ethics." The failure to do from the start what is right or what is needed is the most ancient of humanity's memories. In biblical memory, this is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. The serpent appeals not first to the reason, but to the imagination. "Imagine," it says to the first couple, "you can be gods if you eat the fruit of that tree." The idolatrous imagination triumphs in the garden, and it has been a source of much human tragedy ever since.

"The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread," Chesterton observes, the need for something to be done rightly or completely. "The king may invite fairies to the christening, but he must invite all the fairies or frightful results will follow." Then again, sometimes "all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on one negative." The failure to make the refusal may bring about immense misfortune. Edmund, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, fails to turn down the refreshments the White Witch offers to him, even though his better instincts tell him that she must not be trusted. And this jeopardizes the entire economy of salvation upon which the hopes of all faithful Narnians rest. .... (more)

"The Fairy Tale Wars: Lewis, Chesterton, et al. Against the Frauds, Experts & Revisionists"

October 31 and November 1

Re-posted:

Today is Reformation Day and tomorrow is All Saints' Day.

Reformation Day is the anniversary of the day Martin Luther issued his challenge to debate his 95 theses – not the beginning of the Reformation but an important point in it. Halloween is actually All Hallows Eve, the evening before All Saints’ Day. Days were thought of as evening to evening so the eve was the beginning of the next day – think New Year’s Eve or Christmas Eve. Although today most approach it as a secular holiday that wasn’t its origin and for us Protestants all believers are “saints” – and All Saints’ Day is when we acknowledge “the great cloud of witnesses” who have passed on. So today and tomorrow we recognize first the Protestant Reformation and then all those believers who have gone before.

Therefore being justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:
By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand,
and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
Romans 5:1-2 (KJV)

No fear!

I've posted this several times in years past as Halloween has approached.

As Halloween approaches it is useful for the more excitable among us to be reminded that the Evil One has already been defeated. From "Concerning Halloween" by James B. Jordan:

.... "Halloween" is simply a contraction for All Hallows’ Eve. The word "hallow" means "saint," in that "hallow" is just an alternative form of the word "holy" ("hallowed be Thy name"). All Saints’ Day is November 1. It is the celebration of the victory of the saints in union with Christ. The observance of various celebrations of All Saints arose in the late 300s, and these were united and fixed on November 1 in the late 700s. The origin of All Saints Day and of All Saints Eve in Mediterranean Christianity had nothing to do with Celtic Druidism or the Church’s fight against Druidism (assuming there ever even was any such thing as Druidism, which is actually a myth concocted in the 19th century by neo-pagans.) ....

The Biblical day begins in the preceding evening, and thus in the Church calendar, the eve of a day is the actual beginning of the festive day. [emphasis added] Christmas Eve is most familiar to us, but there is also the Vigil of Holy Saturday that precedes Easter Morn. Similarly, All Saints’ Eve precedes All Saints’ Day.

The concept, as dramatized in Christian custom, is quite simple: On October 31, the demonic realm tries one last time to achieve victory, but is banished by the joy of the Kingdom.

What is the means by which the demonic realm is vanquished? In a word: mockery. Satan’s great sin (and our great sin) is pride. Thus, to drive Satan from us we ridicule him. This is why the custom arose of portraying Satan in a ridiculous red suit with horns and a tail. Nobody thinks the devil really looks like this; the Bible teaches that he is the fallen Arch-Cherub. Rather, the idea is to ridicule him because he has lost the battle with Jesus and he no longer has power over us. ....

Similarly, on All Hallows’ Eve (Hallow-Even – Hallow-E’en – Halloween), the custom arose of mocking the demonic realm by dressing children in costumes. Because the power of Satan has been broken once and for all, our children can mock him by dressing up like ghosts, goblins, and witches. The fact that we can dress our children this way shows our supreme confidence in the utter defeat of Satan by Jesus Christ – we have NO FEAR! .... (more)

Biblical Horizons » Concerning Halloween

An enjoyable Halloween movie

There is a lot of over-thinking and political nonsense in the second half of this essay — attributing "insights" that never would have occurred to Capra or the author of the play or writers of the screenplay — but before that a good description of a very entertaining comedy. I first saw the play onstage in a Milton College production. About the film:

.... Arsenic and Old Lace is as Rockwell-esque as It’s a Wonderful Life, a gleeful, ghoulish comedy that runs wild in an aesthetic of darling, old-fashioned, almost Victorian-Americana. It is quaint. It is cozy. It is joyous. It is not a film, so much as a carol. A Halloween carol, you might say. ....

Based on the hit 1941 play by Joseph Kesselring and screenwritten by Casablanca dream team Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, Arsenic and Old Lace is the story of Mortimer Brewster, a famous, wealthy, and well-liked theater critic (the first tip-off that this thing is fiction), who discovers one Halloween night that his entire family is criminally, murderously insane. Until he heads home (to the quaint Brooklyn street where he was raised), on that day, Mortimer (Cary Grant, hyper and nuttery) believes that the biggest trouble before him is a nuptial scandal, that he’ll make a mockery of his career by getting married; he’s the author of several bombastic, comical books that decry marriage, entitled things like The Bachelor’s Bible, yet what has he done? Gone and fallen in love with Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), the daughter of the Minister who lives across the road from his two adorable spinster aunts, Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair). Mortimer’s aunts raised him in that house, so Elaine’s really “the girl next door,” of all things—a homey figure that checks the highfalutin city boy persona he has adopted. After they get married in the Manhattan courthouse and duck the paparazzi (again, he’s a theater critic?!), they swing by Brooklyn to say a quick goodbye to their families before heading to Niagara Falls. That’s when Mortimer stumbles upon a dead body stuffed into the window seat of his Aunts’ well-kept parlor. ....

And with this, the movie turns from a screwball romantic comedy about a secretly-reformed chauvinist who falls in love with a girl from his own neighborhood, into a high-stakes farce about a man who discovers that his loving family (and the idyllic block where he was raised) are not nearly as charming and innocent as they once seemed. There have been clues to this all along—including Mortimer’s ne’er-do-well brother Jonathan Brewster, whom they haven’t seen in years. Their childhood was spent with Jonathan tormenting Mortimer, and Mortimer seems to have blocked out the darker aspects of this fraternal bullying. But then, of course, this Halloween night, when Mortimer has to negotiate between the new, impatient bride waiting across the street [actually, across the churchyard], a dead body in his family’s living room, and his Aunts’ frank confession of serial murders, Jonathan (Raymond Massey) finally returns home. But Jonathan doesn’t look like himself—a wanted man (guilty of a dozen murders, just like his Aunts), he has commissioned a cowardly, alcoholic surgeon named Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre) to cosmetically reconstruct his face, resulting in a hack job that permanently makes him look like Frankenstein’s monster, scars and all. ....

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) is available right now on Prime Video

Arsenic and Old Lace - Crimereads

"Put not your faith..."

I encountered this today and as an election approaches thought it a good reminder.

Samuel Johnson:

How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,
Our own felicity we make or find.
With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,
Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.

Lines added to Oliver Goldsmith's "The Traveller" (1764)

Tyrants

The Hitler-Stalin Pact, 1939

Reviewing Hitler and Stalin at The Telegraph:

Who was the worst tyrant of the 20th century? While there are many contenders – from Mao to Pol Pot – none has been responsible for more deliberate killings than Adolf Hitler, with Joseph Stalin a close second, argues Lawrence Rees in his impressive parallel study. Comparing the crimes of Hitler and Stalin is not about denying the singularity of the Holocaust, he notes. It is about reminding people of the scale of destruction brought about by these two men, and to make sure that those who suffered from their rule are not forgotten. ....

The book focuses on the war years, which Hitler and Stalin started as allies, before, two years later, Hitler broke their pact and invaded the Soviet Union, turning them into mortal enemies. Stalin’s troops, weakened by years of purges at their leader’s behest, were initially overwhelmed when Hitler unleashed his forces on June 22 1941. ....

For both men, it was the First World War that changed everything, creating the space for the Bolsheviks to come to power in late 1917 and setting Hitler on his journey into politics. Neither of the two was interested in material wealth, but they shared an obsession with political power. Stalin continued to dress in simple workers’ or soldiers’ uniforms at the height of his rule; Hitler cultivated his image as an ordinary German chosen by destiny to lead his people. Both abhorred Christianity and liberal democracy, and firmly believed that a utopian future would emerge from their rule – and were both willing, determined even, to destroy anyone and anything that stood in its way. ....

Neither Hitler nor Stalin ever felt remorse for murdering millions of civilians. In fact, Stalin insisted that even Russia’s bloodthirsty 16^th-century tsar, Ivan the Terrible, whom he otherwise admired, had been too “kind” to his enemies: “He should have killed them all.”

Hitler and Stalin by Laurence Rees review: a tale of two tyrants

Re-reading

It's a little after 1:30 am and I have finished re-reading Treasure Island. It grabbed me much as I remember reading when I was young. There were lots of detail I had forgotten. I think I'll continue. What next? There is a long list of possibilities: Watership Down? The Wind in the Willows? Kidnapped? The Maltese Falcon? The Hobbit? I think perhaps I'll go this time with Buchan, perhaps Castle Gay. I'm enjoying this.

A mess of pottage

Followed a couple of links to this:

.... I was an English major at a small liberal arts school in the early 1990s. Most of my teachers were uninterested in critical theory. They loved literature for its own sake and they believed in and taught the canon. How dismaying when I recently learned that my old English department has now rebranded itself the department of “English and Cultural Studies.” The current department head and other professors (most of my old teachers are retired or dead) mumble woke catchphrases and seem to go about their educational task apologetically. The love is gone. They have surrendered to political propaganda.

It makes me angry. Joseph Epstein, who was an English major at the University of Chicago and taught at Northwestern University for thirty years, understands. In his 2008 essay, “A Literary Education: On Being Well-Versed in Literature,” he writes:

“One of the reasons for anger at the theory-ridden English departments of our day is that they sold out the richness of literature for a small number of crude ideas – gender, race, class, and the rest of it – and hence gave up their cultural birthright for a pot of message.”

That was twelve years ago and things are only worse now. ....

I would never recommend any young person become an English major today. Thankfully, my kids have other things in mind for themselves. Apart from a diploma, there’s nothing of value you can gain by studying literature in school that you can’t get on your own as a reader and lover of good books. ....

Literature is for Amateurs - Idlings

Gentlemen of fortune

Having re-read Without Lawful Authority I decided my next re-read to be Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. It's one of the first books I ever read in its entirety—sometime in second or third grade. I recall being asked to read it aloud to my elementary school class in the then Milton Junction Grade School. I also remember making my little brother play the part of Jim Hawkins while I portrayed Blind Pew. There have been many film versions of the story. My favorite is available on Prime Video and stars a young Christian Bale as Hawkins, Christopher Lee as Pew, Oliver Reed as Billy Bones, and Charlton Heston as Long John Silver. But back to the book:

I own a reproduction of the Scribner Classics edition with the N.C. Wyeth illustrations. Wyeth considered them his best and they certainly affected my visualizations of the story. This is part of a famous passage. Silver is recruiting sailors to be mutineers. Most of the pirate captains he refers to are historical. The narrator is Hawkins.

Now, just after sundown, when all my work was over and I was on my way to my berth, it occurred to me that I should like an apple. I ran on deck. The watch was all forward looking out for the island. The man at the helm was watching the luff of the sail and whistling away gently to himself, and that was the only sound excepting the swish of the sea against the bows and around the sides of the ship.

In I got bodily into the apple barrel, and found there was scarce an apple left; but sitting down there in the dark, what with the sound of the waters and the rocking movement of the ship, I had either fallen asleep or was on the point of doing so when a heavy man sat down with rather a clash close by. The barrel shook as he leaned his shoulders against it, and I was just about to jump up when the man began to speak. It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.

"NO, not I," said Silver. "Flint was cap'n; I was quartermaster, along of my timber leg. The same broadside I lost my leg, old Pew lost his deadlights. It was a master surgeon, him that ampytated me—out of college and all—Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog, and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle. That was Roberts' men, that was, and comed of changing names to their ships—ROYAL FORTUNE and so on. Now, what a ship was christened, so let her stay, I says. So it was with the CASSANDRA, as brought us all safe home from Malabar, after England took the viceroy of the Indies; so it was with the old WALRUS, Flint's old ship, as I've seen amuck with the red blood and fit to sink with gold."

"Ah!" cried another voice, that of the youngest hand on board, and evidently full of admiration. "He was the flower of the flock, was Flint!"

"Davis was a man too, by all accounts," said Silver. "I never sailed along of him; first with England, then with Flint, that's my story; and now here on my own account, in a manner of speaking. I laid by nine hundred safe, from England, and two thousand after Flint. That ain't bad for a man before the mast—all safe in bank. 'Tain't earning now, it's saving does it, you may lay to that. Where's all England's men now? I dunno. Where's Flint's? Why, most on 'em aboard here, and glad to get the duff—been begging before that, some on 'em. Old Pew, as had lost his sight, and might have thought shame, spends twelve hundred pound in a year, like a lord in Parliament. Where is he now? Well, he's dead now and under hatches; but for two year before that, shiver my timbers, the man was starving! He begged, and he stole, and he cut throats, and starved at that, by the powers!"

"Well, it ain't much use, after all," said the young seaman.

"'Tain't much use for fools, you may lay to it—that, nor nothing," cried Silver. "But now, you look here: you're young, you are, but you're as smart as paint. I see that when I set my eyes on you, and I'll talk to you like a man."

You may imagine how I felt when I heard this abominable old rogue addressing another in the very same words of flattery as he had used to myself. I think, if I had been able, that I would have killed him through the barrel. Meantime, he ran on, little supposing he was overheard.

"Here it is about gentlemen of fortune. They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it's hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets. Now, the most goes for rum and a good fling, and to sea again in their shirts. But that's not the course I lay. I puts it all away, some here, some there, and none too much anywheres, by reason of suspicion. I'm fifty, mark you; once back from this cruise, I set up gentleman in earnest. Time enough too, says you. Ah, but I've lived easy in the meantime, never denied myself o' nothing heart desires, and slep' soft and ate dainty all my days but when at sea. And how did I begin? Before the mast, like you!" ....

In Lewis's country

From Chapter 1 in Thomas Howard's The Achievement of C.S. Lewis (1980):

I may illustrate this problem by referring to my own experience of teaching prep school and college students. I have sometimes given a class the following list of words: majesty, magnanimity, valor, courtesy, grace, chastity, virginity, nobility, splendor, ceremony, taboo, mystery, purity. The reaction is quite predictible: either a total blank, embarrassed snickers, or incredulity. The entire list of words lands in their laps like a heap of dead basalt meteorites lately arrived from some other realm. They don't know what to do with them. They have never encountered them. The words are entirely foreign to the whole set of assumptions that has been written (or I should say televised) into these students' imaginations for the whole of their lives. Majesty? The man must be mad. Valor? What's that? Courtesy? What a bore. Virginity? Ho-ho—there's one for you! Chuckle, chuckle.

After I have gotten my reaction I point out to them that this awful list of words names an array of qualities that any Jew, any pagan, and any Christian, up until quite recently in history, would have not only understood, but would have extolled as being close to the center of things. Their vision of reality presented them with a picture in which these things appeared as not only natural, but blissful. Lewis understood the daunting improbability of awakening the stultified modern imagination to ancient and eternal blisses and realities. He understood the task, and he undertook it by means of the oldest method there is. He began to tell stories (sometimes you can smuggle something in as fiction that you can't force on people in a debate). ....

In the moral mythology of C.S. Lewis, the way of health lies along the well-trodden path, not in newly blazed trails. I suppose that if Lewis had lived long enough to see the phenomenon of "happenings" he would have started in horror (he was shock-able) at these quite vividly dramatized imaginations of hell. For hell, in Lewis's vision, is the ultimately unstructured place, the place of final fragmentation and randomness and inanity, and this is what was celebrated in the happenings of the 1960's.

The City of God on the other hand (thought Lewis, and St. Augustine, and St. John the Divine, and others) is a city four-square, with adamantine foundations and high walls, whose denizens have learned to experience as bliss the steps of the Dance. They are called saints, and their joyful vision of things is wholly remote from what we find extolled in the imagery of contemporaneity. Lewis's works of imagination adumbrate their vision, for if there is one word that rings like the peal of a thousand bells from Lewis's country, it is the word Joy.

Thomas Howard, "The Peal of a Thousand Bells," The Achievement of C.S. Lewis, 1980.

Books in a time of plague

About books that can help reduce stress:

...[Re]-reading our old favourite books can be comforting when life feels uncertain: “When you’re looking for something easy and digestible, reading a book you have already read can help because you know the scenarios – you don’t have to invest in learning new characters, or situations. This sense of nostalgia makes us feel safe.” While book genres are entirely a matter of personal preference, Chambers says that thrillers and adventure stories are good options to tuck into during the pandemic, because they "take the reader on a journey" outside of the one they are already living through. ....

“Reading lowers our cortisol levels, blood pressure and heart rate, by anchoring us in the present. Some books are so melodic that they trigger the flow state, which is where we are completely engaged in a mindful activity to the point where we start to lose sensation of time,” says Chambers. ....

...[W]hen an adult reads to a child, or (vice versa) there's usually physical contact and cuddling happening: “Biologically, this causes a flooding of oxytocin (the bonding hormone), which makes us feel good, and its presence in the bloodstream has been linked to lower rates of depression, anxiety and stress. In a world where both children and adults are more anxious than ever, this is crucial for mental wellbeing.” ....

One of their recommendations for reducing stress was P.G. Wodehouse. That's a fine suggestion. I might choose Manning Coles or John Buchan for re-reading.

The science of a good bedtime read – and the books that will help you sleep more soundly

Politics and the local church

Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, a church with many politically active congregants,  on what unifies us and what might divide us as church members:

Here is the broad outline:

1. Things feel tense.
2. We are united.
3. We have differences.
4. We’ll be fine.

He enumerated three levels of unity in the church:

1. Salvific matters: unity around the Gospel (matters of salvation; necessary moral entailments of the gospel—church attendance, adultery, abortion)
2. Church matters: unity around those things needed to have a church (who are the subjects of baptism, when and how will we meet on the Lord’s Day).
3. Disputable matters: areas in which we can both differ and yet be covenanted together in a local church, persevering peacefully and edifyingly even through our differences (meat sacrificed to idols, drinking alcohol, the American Revolution, the ultimate hope for Israel). ....
   

He then helps the congregation think through questions like:

• How important are our differences? Are the political differences we are experiencing today like slavery was? Do they rise to the level of salvation?
• If our differences are not at the level of salvation, are our political differences at the level of those things we must agree on in order to have a church (subjects of baptism, when and how we will meet)?
• Or are they matters about which we can sustain disagreement.
• At which level are various political differences best understood?

Mark Dever on Politics and the Local Church

Presentism

Alan Jacobs today:

We are afflicted by our ignorance of history in multiple ways, and one of my great themes for the past few years has been the damage that our presentism does to our ability to make political and moral judgments. It damages us in at least a couple of ways. One of them, and this is the theme of my book Breaking Bread with the Dead, is that it makes us agitated and angry. When we, day by day and hour by hour, turn a direhose of distortion and misinformation directly into our own faces, we lose the ability to make measured judgments. We lash out against those we perceive to be our enemies and celebrate with an equally unreasonable passion those we deem to be our allies. ....

But there is another and still more simple problem with our presentism: we have no idea whether we or anyone else have been through anything like what we are currently going through. Some years ago I wrote about how comprehensively the great moral panic of the 1980s – the belief held by tens of millions of Americans that the childcare centers of America were run by Satan worshipers who sexually abused their charges – has been flushed down the memory hole. In this case, I think the amnesia has happened because a true reckoning with the situation would tell us so much about ourselves that we don’t want to know. It would teach us how credulous we are, and how when faced with lurid stories we lose our ability to make the most elementary factual and evidentiary discriminations. ....

Even more serious, perhaps, is our ignorance – in this case not so obviously motivated but the product rather of casual neglect — of the violent upheavals that so rocked this nation in the 1960s and 1970s. Politicians and pastors and podcasters and bloggers can confidently assert that we are experiencing unprecedented levels of social mistrust and unrest, having conveniently allowed themselves to remain ignorant of what this country was like fifty years ago. (And let’s leave aside the Civil War altogether since that happened in a prehistoric era.) ....

If Then, Snakes and Ladders

Into each life...

The current issue of National Review includes a review of a new biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Much (all?) of his poetry can be found online. This one seemed appropriate today.

The Rainy Day (1842)

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary; The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, But at every gust the dead leaves fall, And the day is dark and dreary. My life is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary; My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past, But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast, And the days are dark and dreary. Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.

Eucatastrophe

Thomas Howard (1935-2020) died this past week. He is one of the Christian writers who influenced how I think and feel about the faith. On my bookshelves are Christ the Tiger, Splendor in the Ordinary, Chance or the Dance, The Achievement of C.S. Lewis, The Dove Descending, and, most recently, a collection of his essays, The Night is Far Spent. This is from something he wrote for Christianity Today in 1973:

.... Is it not true that again and again in the biblical picture of things, the story has to be allowed to finish? Was it not the case with Lazarus' household at Bethany, and with the two en route to Emmaus? And is it not the case with the Whole Story, actually—that it must be allowed to finish, and that this is precisely what the faithful have been watching for since the beginning of time? In the face of suffering and endurance and loss and waiting and death, what is it that has kept the spirits of the faithful from flagging utterly down through the millennia? Is it not the hope of redemption? Is it not the great Finish to the Story and to all their little stories of wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins as well as to the One Big Story of the whole creation, which is itself groaning and waiting? And is not that Finish called glorious? Does it not entail what amounts to a redoing of all that has gone wrong, and a remaking of all that is ruined, and a finding of all that has been lost in the shuffle, and an unfolding of it all in a blaze of joy and splendor?

A finding of all that is lost? All sparrows, and all petitions and tears and vigils and fastings? Yes, all petitions and tears and vigils and fastings.

"But where are they? The thing is over and done with. He is dead. They had no effect."

Hadn't they? How do you know what is piling up in that great treasury kept by the Divine Love to be opened in that Day? How do you know that this death and your prayers and tears and fasts will not together be suddenly and breath-takingly displayed, before all the faithful, and before angels and archangels, and before kings and widows and prophets, as gems in that display? Oh no, don't speak of things being lost. Say rather that they are hidden—received and accepted and taken up into the secrets of the divine mysteries, to be transformed and multiplied, like everything else we offer to him—loaves and fishes, or mites, or bread and wine—and given back to you and to the one for whom you kept vigil, in the presence of the whole host of men and angels, in a hilarity of glory as unimaginable to you in your vigil as golden wings are to the worm in the chrysalis. ....

Thomas Howard, The Night is Far Spent, "On Brazen Heavens," pp. 244-245.

 

(Changed the heading for this post more than once)

Old books

From a review of Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs:

.... We have produced two or three generations disturbingly lacking in historical understanding, not to mention appreciation for the benefits of a civilization they can blithely take for granted. Is it possible to be an educated human being without a modicum of intellectual and imaginative engagement with what came before us? The dilemma is especially pressing now, though, because the task of reclamation often doesn’t begin until young people have emerged from high school with practically no knowledge of their world but with, for many, an immensely generous estimate of their own knowing­ness. Jacobs understands the world today’s students inhabit. Apart from the emo­tional burdens typical of their age, they are assailed on all sides by addictively insidious forms of distraction and manipu­lation, electronic information overload, the cumulatively debilitating effects of thin reading, and an incapacity or disinclination to think rationally, a dire state of affairs darkened even further for some by unearned cynicism and a liberally administered dose of ideological self-righteousness. ....

This path [to tranquility] also involves, in one sense, giving the benefit of the doubt to the past, or at least learning about a period and its people judiciously before passing moral judgment. Jacobs is not uncritical of the people of the past (some of whom are exposed to his magnifying glass) and he doesn’t shy from judgments, but he does believe that those judgments are lent firmer founda­tion when advanced intelli­gently while recognizing the easily over­looked fact that we too inhabit a place along the timeline of history and that our de­scendants may not come to share our high opinion of ourselves. The danger of refusing to cultivate a history-tinted mind is that we come to live “thinly in our instant, and don’t know what we don’t know,” which is precisely our public predicament. If fortunate, after much reading and reflecting, we land with the virtue of humility, without which intelligence is simply a loaded gun in reckless hands. ....

.... “To open yourself to the past,” Jacobs writes, “is to make yourself less vulnerable to the cruelties of descending in tweeted wrath on a young woman whose clothing you disapprove of, or firing an employee because of a tweet you didn’t take time to understand, or responding to climate change either by ignoring it or by indulging in impotent rage. You realize that you need not obey the impulses of the moment — which, it is fair to say, never tend to produce a tranquil mind.” .... (more)

Love the Past: Alan Jacobs in New Book on the Value of Reading the Classics | National Review

The change we are living through

This entire essay is very much worth your time. Here are some excerpts from "Stop Being Shocked" by Bari Weiss in Tablet Magazine:

.... To understand the enormity of the change we are now living through, take a moment to understand America as the overwhelming majority of its Jews believed it was—and perhaps as we always assumed it would be.

It was liberal.

Not liberal in the narrow, partisan sense, but liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of that word: the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group or the tribe. The belief that the rule of law—and equality under that law—is the foundation of a free society. The belief that due process and the presumption of innocence are good and that mob violence is bad. The belief that pluralism is a source of our strength; that tolerance is a reason for pride; and that liberty of thought, faith, and speech are the bedrocks of democracy.

The liberal worldview was one that recognized that there were things—indeed, the most important things—in life that were located outside of the realm of politics: friendships, art, music, family, love. This was a world in which Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be close friends. Because, as Scalia once said, some things are more important than votes.

Crucially, this liberalism relied on the view that the Enlightenment tools of reason and the scientific method might have been designed by dead white guys, but they belonged to everyone, and they were the best tools for human progress that have ever been devised.

Racism was evil because it contradicted the foundations of this worldview, since it judged people not based on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin. And while America’s founders were guilty of undeniable hypocrisy, their own moral failings did not invalidate their transformational project. The founding documents were not evil to the core but “magnificent,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, because they were “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” In other words: The founders themselves planted the seeds of slavery’s destruction. And our second founding fathers—abolitionists like Frederick Douglass—made it so. America would never be perfect, but we could always strive toward building a more perfect union. ....

The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power. ....

The beating heart of this new ideology is critical race theory. ....

Over the past few decades and with increasing velocity over the last several years, a determined young cohort has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. Rather than the institutions shaping them, they have reshaped the institutions. You don’t need the majority inside an institution to espouse these views. You only need them to remain silent, cowed by a fearless and zealous minority who can smear them as racists if they dare disagree. ....

America is imperfect. The past few years and the problems they have laid bare have rocked my faith like no others before. But the ideas this country is based on truly are exceptional, worthy of our relentless defense and more. They are under siege by Trumpism, but also by those who suggest that the solution to our problems lies in obsessing on race; in suggesting that some Americans are more righteous or more cursed than others by dint of the circumstances of their birth; and in tearing down rather than renewing. .... (more)

Stop Being Shocked - Tablet Magazine

Past watchful dragons

On the 70^th anniversary of the first publication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Russell Moore considers why Lewis has meant so much to so many Christians.

.... For many of us shaped by Mere Christianity, though, the most important thing about the book isn’t the arguments for God—although those are sound and have withstood their critics like an eagle against a child.

For many, Mere Christianity resonates because of the written voice of the author. It’s a tone that, unlike the cynicism of modern religion, isn’t trying to market us a political agenda or a line of products, but is simply, with pipe in hand, bearing witness to something true—or, rather, to Someone who is Truth. In that sense, Lewis’s most important contributions in persuading skeptics or reassuring wavering Christians come not, first, from his training as an Oxford classicist but from his experience guiding children through a spare room, past a lamppost, and on into Cair Paravel and beyond. ....

The strangeness of Narnia—a strangeness bounded by the familiarity of tea and fireplaces and so on—is one of the reasons it remains compelling. Much of Christian apologetics—whether modernist or fundamentalist—has sought, first, to make Christianity familiar and intelligible—either by scholastic rationalism or by civilizational hegemony or by political ideologies of the left, right, or center. That’s not Narnia.

Lewis recognized that a major obstacle to his generation receiving the gospel wasn’t that the gospel was too mysterious to them, but that it was too familiar. The Lion of Judah seemed tame; the biblical narrative was confused with a respectable cultural script. And people can’t hear as good news that which they no longer hear as news at all.

“But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass at Sunday school associations one could make them for the first time in their real potency,” Lewis wrote. “Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” .... (more)

The Chronicles of Narnia Still Grips Our Imagination, 70 Years Later

Crumped

Alan Jacobs:

...I have tried to commend, in various ways, a principled yet generous, conservative yet open, living-out of commitment to evangelical Christianity, Anglicanism, and humane learning. (Not always in that order.) And evangelical Christianity, Anglicanism, and humane learning have all crumped.

Have you come across that word? I hadn’t heard it before Covid. Apparently it refers to a patient’s sharp, steep decline — not a complete and irreversible crash, but a plunge into serious danger. Everything I care about and have written to defend has crumped, is crumping, will crump.

excerpt from my Sent folder: crumped – Snakes and Ladders

An intolerant spirit

This morning Alan Jacobs quotes a passage from The Federalist No. 1, (27 October 1787) believed to have been written by Alexander Hamilton. The political controversy then was whether to ratify the Constitution. The authors of the Federalist essays were advocates of its ratification. Here Hamilton is arguing for moderation in judging political opposition.

.... Candour will oblige us to admit, that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted, that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable, the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears. So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes, which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions, of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation of those, who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right, in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection, that we are not always sure, that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives, not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as upon those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more illjudged than that intolerant spirit, which has, at all times, characterised political parties. For, in politics as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution. ....

The Federalist No. 1, [27 October 1787]