A Reflection Between Christ the King Sunday and Advent, in Poetry and Prose

Tags

Advent, Christ, Evangelical, God, Interpersonal relationship, Jesu, Job, John Donne, Liturgical year, personal relationship, Poetry, Second Coming of Christ

One of the things I appreciate most about the liturgical calendar is the richness and depth of its conception of our relationship with God. I grow generally frustrated when modern Evangelicals want to talk about their “personal relationship with Christ.” Not because such a relationship is contrary to orthodoxy – for two thousand years we have believed that our relationship with God is an interaction of persons and not a mere submission to an impersonal force. What annoys me though is that, in most conversations I hear, people forget to define “personal.” And when they do this, they usually assume that synonyms for “personal” might consist in words like “warm, fuzzy, and emotive”; non-words like “relatable”; or words denoting individual ownership – we have our own personal Jesus to go with our personal computers and our personal pan pizzas. While I will not deny that there are possibly some aspects of this set of words that has something to do with what “personal” means, I feel that the word has lost its full force and depth – to have a personal relationship is to relate as persons, and while this can include aspects of the aforementioned words, it can also include things like the dark night of the soul, Job’s confrontation by God in the whirlwind, and experiences like that which Donne describes in “Batter my heart, Three-Personed God.” In the liturgical calendar – between our consideration of Christ’s kingship and our practice of waiting for his return during Advent – we are given ample space and time to reflect on the various ways we relate to God, as members of his body, the Church. As someone who “gets” the God in the Jobean whirlwind far better than I “get” the vagaries of warm fuzzy relatableness, I submit the following poetic meditation on the season:

Meet God? Ah, yes;

Maybe shake his hand,

Exchange pleasantries,

Share a cup of coffee

In cozy homes.

We forget Christ coming

Like a thief by night,

Coming unbid

When we least expect;

You speak in pastel tones

Of letting Christ enter your heart;

Better to speak of letting a lion

Enter a chicken coop.

For, oh, we are haunted

Through highways and hedges

To the depths of hell,

Hunted like dogs

Protecting our mange

So fiercely we deny our depth of hunger.

But see, we see when He is not looking,

He has left scraps under table;

“Scraps are nothing, He will not notice,”

We say.

He does, who cares for nothing even.

We shy away cursing Him for it,

The rich meat He lets us taste

Leaving us satisfied with nothing less,

But wondering if dogs dare dream; and is it shame we feel?

Better a quick brown dog

Than killed lion’s carcass ooz sting-jacket honey

No sweeter for death.

They say Christopher was a dog once; he bore Christ.

Perhaps just maybe, the power of the dog can be chrismed

And Christ come to us in odd ways by odd means;

Our hungry thirst for blood and flesh not broken,

But blessed with difference.

An Apology for My Post on the U of R English Department: Thinking About Christian Things With Anglo-Saxons, Christian Humanists, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

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academia, Academics, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Saxon Christianity, Beowulf, Christian, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Creation, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Liberal Arts, Old English literature, U of R, University of Regina, Viking

As someone who often wishes that the Exeter book compilers had left a note explaining the connections between the works they compiled, I feel that it is only fair not to leave anyone reading this blog in the dark about the puzzlement of my last post: “What does the University of Regina Arts department have to do with the stated purpose of this blog? How is that in any way a “Christian thing”? I would like to respond by talking about three instances of literature that, for me, embody the way Christians should interact with the liberal arts. In all three instances I see the attempt to protect the Liberal Arts, and by extension what is good, true and beautiful (or all three together) in creation.

It is I think first worth noting that all three of these approaches are grounded in a strong sense of the goodness of creation. Imaginary art is, it seems to me, a subsidiary creation dependent on the primary creation, and if this creation is not good (as declared by God in Genesis) and not redeemable (as declared in Christ’s resurrection), then what is secondary to it is also not good. Though I think Plato himself was more sophisticated about it than he often gets credit for, his expulsion of the poets from the Republic is the natural outworking of a philosophy or theology that is trying to escape creation, and after Plato it appears in much less sensible forms in gnostic theology. All this to say that the poets I am about to discuss, working within a long tradition of Christian theology, presupposed the goodness of creation, and so understood matters like the liberal arts as the task of working with the things of creation. One did not of course even need to know about Christianity to discover this goodness – it is of course as accessible as creation itself, so that even pagan and secular observations of this goodness were readily adopted by Christians where they in fact reflect goodness, truth, or beauty – though with the caveat that such natural philosophy only goes so far.

What I see in the three examples I am about to discuss is the strong belief that protecting creation and its aesthetic subsidiaries is one of the most important tasks of the Christian. It is so because both creation and the arts are easily lost, whether in fact physically marred or rhetorically appropriated for unjust or selfish purposes. The Christian call to Charity encompasses a deep love of creation and the things humans have found in it and formed from it, insofar as these things are in fact the product of the deep God-given capacity for imagination woven into our hearts and not the shallow parody instigated by sin (the “vain imaginations” so often lamented in the Bible). The love of the Arts is thus in fact an extension of our love for our neighbour.

I do not know the names of those involved in my first example, which is Old English poetry. The names of those who originally thought of these poems, passed them down orally, and then finally wrote them down remain anonymous. But what has been passed down – and what we know about the context in which it was passed down – makes for a riddle that testifies to a Christian love of variegated literatures. It is almost undoubtedly certain that, in their final forms, the Old English poetry we have was preserved by clerics in monastic scriptoria. This of course leaves us with the puzzle of what monks were doing with Beowulf or the double entendre riddles, though the latter is hardly a new puzzle as the Biblical canon itself contains the Song of Solomon. Of course, it is impossible to know beyond a doubt what these monks were doing with these texts, and some criticism inflected through a particularly modern kind of lens sees this as evidence that Anglo-Saxon Christianity was not in fact as Christian as all that – the monks of course had to be monks because of the institutional oppression etc., but below all this their libidinous id longed for these more bawdy earthy things, so they are testimonies to a heroic proto-secularism practiced under the very thumb of the church. The alternative, however, and the explanation I would suggest, is that what we are encountering here is not poor oppressed monks just trying to have some fun, but a sophisticated theology that loves things, even the things of one’s enemies, and so considers them worth preserving – perhaps one can find something in them (and if this sounds far-fetched, consider that Beowulf itself is a story telling the heroic past of the Vikings responsible for attacking the Anglo-Saxons). I don’t of course want to pretend that these monks were sophisticated 21st Century liberals, but, considering the alternative – the Viking raids that, at least in Anglo-Saxon accounts, were no respecters of persons, things, ideas, or books – they did pretty well. Between the constant threat of Viking raids and the great expense of books, the preservation of things – not only Biblical Commentaries and theological works, but poems – was a great and risky sacrifice worth making because the things preserved were made from the stuff of creation, and the stuff of creation is good.

My second examples are the Christian humanists of the Renaissance. My own primary engagement with Christian humanism has been through Donne and Milton, so I will speak what I know from these poets and see whether it accords with More and Erasmus etc. once I have read them. Sidney would fit well here, too, though his work is not fresh enough in my mind to comment. Where the monastics were more involved in the physical preservation of things to do with the arts, the Christian humanists, I would argue, were interested in saving them from the power plays of church and state. We are in our own age very well aware, thanks to Foucault, of the ways the arts can become instruments of power. What we are not very well aware of is that in order to usurp the mantle of beauty, goodness, and truth, a tyrant must as far as possible eliminate the real things – the first casualty of hypocrisy is reality, and I think most of the people of my generation have swallowed whole the idea that all there is is hypocrisy and power plays. What the Christian humanists saw was that, among other things, one of the primary ways of protesting such tyranny and hypocrisy was to preserve goodness, beauty, and truth; it was in any case much better than simply deposing the tyrant, for without such goods another would rise in his place. Loving and protecting the weak and vulnerable reality preserved in the best instances of the arts was the first line of defense against the Leviathan of the nation state. And again, in the best instances of the arts, one could hear the stones – that is, the stuff of earth and nature – cry out at moments when the church herself remained silent.

Perhaps you are wondering where exactly in the Christian humanists I see this protection of goodness, beauty, and truth from abusive power. I think probably the best example, of the people I have read, is Donne. We can see this in all his work – his refusal in sermons to cater to a populist mentality; his scansion of the universe in the Devotions informed by personal digestion of large amounts of philosophy, theology, and poetry; and of course his poetry. Indeed, I would suggest that metaphysical conceits are one of his most prominent means of doing this – through these he forces us to consider, and consider carefully, things that we are used to instrumentalizing and objectifying. By forcing us to step back and look at the reality he helps us observe, he causes us to realize that the things we take for granted are in fact so many sites of choice – things could in fact be imagined other than the way we see them, and things could in fact be done differently.

The other place I see this protest against power is in Milton. One of the more contemporary reads on a Leibnizean theodicy is that, in the form it appears during the Enlightenment, it is not so much a philosophical answer to a philosophical problem, as it is a way of justifying the  cruel negligence of early capitalisms – if free will is a justification for God to wind up the world and let it go, evil and all, it is surely a justification for those with power and money in capitalism to do the same. Make an economy that works, and the invisible hand will take care of the rest – no need for the kind of intervention demanded by ethics or the Christian idea of incarnation.

Milton is of course pre-Leibniz, but I feel as if he anticipates this sophistic use of theodicy and fights hard against it. Part of the way he does this is by writing poetry rather than philosophy; by writing poetry, he acknowledges the felt needs and desires other than bare reason that must be acknowledged when discussing theology. And though some think the many stammering caveats, safeguards, and loopholes that he works into Paradise Lost make for a confusing system that can be dismissed as a Puritan neo-Scholasticism, his reason for doing this is because (if you will pardon a pun) he wants to make sure nothing gets lost. He does not want an easy theodicy, or an easy defense, or an easy dramatic flair that will win his audience over should reason fail. The task he undertakes is gargantuan and in those places where he fails his failure is because it is impossible to fit the better and more complex answer to theodicy – hundreds of years of Scriptural/Christian tradition – into a single poem written by a single person. But behind all the stories of the crabby, misogynistic Milton strutting about like a know-it-all is someone who sees the complexities of a world God made, and sees these complexities in danger of being pared down into the simplistic instruments that would write the history of modernity in blood. And for all his crabbiness, Paradise Lost is his response.

Perhaps the best way of imagining this Christian humanist impulse is the figure of Thomas More. Undoubtedly, someone so vastly intelligent and well-educated could  have easily have achieved promotion rather than execution if he had been willing to bend his knowledge and rhetorical skills to answer the will of Henry the VIII. He refused, however, and it cost him his life. He refused to deploy the arts as a handmaid to deception, trickery, and untruth, and so preserved his own and their integrity.

The third person I want to talk about is Gerard Manley Hopkins. The power that Hopkins resists is that of a weary imminence, the sort of thing that came about imaginatively after the shock of the this-worldly Romanticism had worn off and been institutionalized by Victorian society. This had the effect of making it very difficult to talk about the wild otherness of God in polite society; matters of faith were confined to certain forms of discursive piety in which they could readily be contained, and they were not to mix with the more important matters of business, finance, and politics. The world predicted in Pope’s Essays on man – where “the proper study of mankind is man” – had come to be, and its absorption of faith in the broader societal milieux was a far better means of controlling it than active suppression or persecution.

Of course, Hopkins is by no means the only one to protest this; others attempting to re-sacralize this Victorian world include members of the Oxford movement, George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, and presumably a good number more that only a Victorian specialist would recognize. But I will speak of Hopkins because I have studied him. Accompanying the this worldly turn of most poetry in Hopkins time was that curious idolatry of art known as doing “art for art’s sake.” Hopkins had no idea what that might mean and to be quite honest neither to I, but it conjures the image of a narcissistic asceticism lusting after its own image in a mirror. The opening lines of one of the only poems actually published during Hopkins’ lifetime – The Wreck of the Deutscheland -is a direct challenge to this autoerotic poetry: “Thou mastering me, God…” In a world far more interested in a faith kept neatly separate from (or contained within) the matters of the nation-state, Hopkins cry was from the exilic Ecclesial ship being martyred on the reefs and rocks of a smug modernity. What sets Hopkins apart for me as a particularly inspiring example is how this cry and challenge came not in spite of religion with its institutions and liturgies, but in fact through it. Hopkins is not a Blake for whom religion becomes a language wherewith to express his emotions. He is tied to the strictness and rigor of the Jesuit order, and his matter is mined with effort from the depths of Catholic tradition. He needed Scotus – more of a rebel and less of a systematician than Aquinas – to challenge his society, and it is perhaps fitting that his challenge came out of a Catholicism once banned in England. He refused the shallow categories and languages of his time that permitted theology only to speak when spoken to – God was not for Hopkins the distant psychological vaguery of Tennyson, but was rather, like His mother, as close and palpable as the air we breath. Hopkins refused to stop speaking well of God when doing so in anything other than benevolent platitudes was growing less and less fashionable. In a sense, he covertly discovered what both the Christian humanists and the Anglo-Saxon monks took for granted, that when one seeks first the kingdom and God’s righteousness one finds the arts added to one’s bounty as well. Conversely, poetry that neglects God eats itself from the inside.

I realize that, in the above examples, I have said a number of things that very few English scholars would agree with wholeheartedly, and in part I understand very well why. I have seen concepts like truth, beauty, God, and the common good twisted and manipulated for use by selfish and cruel people, and one becomes reluctant to speak of them after a few experiences with such people. But I would like to hope that what I encountered in these experiences were not the real things, but parodies, and it is not these parodies I mean when I speak of these qualities. I also realize that, in a summary as general as this, I am at some points not careful enough in my assertions; I fear particularly regarding my statements on the Victorian period. I am not a Victorianist, though I know a number of them, and it would would be a dreadful thing to wake up one day and find myself being pursued by a gang of Victorianists. To be more serious, though, I am happy to take correction from any quarter provided it can be substantiated, but I do think that more than ever in a world that leaves such general overviews to the image-factories of shallow politicking, it is probably right to provide an alternative, even if an overview such as this is only a starting point rather than an end point.

This, finally, is the reason that I do in fact consider it a “Christian thing” to defend the University of Regina English department. The department itself is not of course Christian or any other religion for that matter, nor should it be. It is comprised of varying people from varying perspectives, some of faith, and some not. But having taken classes in this department, I do see happening many of the same things that people like the Anglo-Saxon monks, the Christian-humanists, and Gerard Manley Hopkins were trying to protect. And it would be a shame if these were lost to powers more interested in image than truth.

Hercule Poirot and our itching ears

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Agatha Christie, antichrist, Christian, cult, false prophet, Flock of Geryon, Flock of the Shepherd, Hercule Poirot, itching ears, Labours of Hercules

“The time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Timothy 4:3).

That passage was running through my mind recently while reading Agatha Christie‘s short story “The Flock of Geryon.” In this tale, the great detective Hercule Poirot is approached by Amy Carnaby (a companion from a previous episode in the Labours of Hercules series) who is worried that her friend—a Mrs. Emmeline Clegg—is in mortal danger. Clegg has, we learn, been taken in by a cult. Carnaby fears that the group has designs on Clegg’s fortune—and her life. Carnaby explains to Poirot that a number of wealthy older women who recently joined “The Flock of the Shepherd” (for so the religious group was called) had died. They all died of common enough causes, it was believed, but not before changing their wills to leave everything they owned to the Flock.

From Luca Signorelli’s “Deeds of Antichrist”

The sweet-talking Master offers his followers enthusiastic (in the religious sense) experiences, visions, a sense of community, empowerment, and the comfort of his own stirring presence. [“The whole sect centers round the head of the movement,” Carnaby informs us, “the Great Shepherd, he is called. A Dr. Andersen. A very handsome-looking man, I believe with a presence.” “Which is attractive to the women, yes?” Poirot asks. Carnaby responds in the affirmative: “I am afraid so.”] His followers soon desire nothing more than the peace of his pasture. But his peace is a sham. Together Poirot and Carnaby undertake to flush out the wolf hiding in sheep’s clothing.

The story illustrates a problem all too common in our time. Instead of seeking the God in whom our restless hearts find rest (à la Augustine), we accept the restless desires of our hearts and fashion gods as restless as we. We want peace, but we do not want peace as Christ gives it—a peace that passes our understanding and which divides father from son, mother from daughter. And so we elect leaders to preach an easy peace—peace where there is no true peace. We want reward, the promise of family, land, and possessions, but we do not want it “with persecutions,” as Christ offers it. We want rather the assurance that moth and flame will not destroy earthly treasure; and the prosperity preachers answer our call. We want joy and spiritual fervor, ecstasy and radical emotion; we do not want pain and suffering and dying to the self. We want miracles of power; we do not want water or bread and wine. We want glory; we do not want the cross.

We want miracles of power; we do not want water or bread and wine. We want glory; we do not want the cross.

The God who meets us in Scripture is not a god we could have predicted. Nor is He the god we would want. He is rather a god we innately hate: a God who tells us our hearts are disfigured. A God who tells us that judgement is necessary. A God who tells us we can never—never—measure up, and that we are best suited for the trash heap.

And yet the glorious mystery remains: this severe Judge is also the fulfilment of Love. He doesn’t abandon us to the trash heap. Instead He transfers all of our disfigurement, all of our foulness away from us and onto Himself. He heals us by disfiguring His Son; He cleanses us by befouling His Only Begotten. He forgives us and condemns to death instead Jesus the Christ.

He heals us by disfiguring His Son; He cleanses us by befouling His Only Begotten.

This is the God of Christianity. A God who humbles Himself and becomes obedient to death—even a criminal’s death by capital punishment. His death saves us from death, and by His wounds we are healed. So let us not run after the desires of our heart; let us instead crucify our wants and desires, so that we who die with Christ may also be raised with Him. Thus raised, we shall find true peace, true treasure, true joy, true love, true God. Not as the world desires, but as He truly is.

Like the Mrs. Clegg in Agatha Christie’s story, we are drawn to leaders who offer us easy reward; itching ears will always find voices to speak what they want to hear. But God has already spoken in the Word made flesh; he who has ears, let him hear.

A Lament For My Alma Mater

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Arts, Education, English Department, English language, English studies, financial cuts, Humanities, Renovation, University of Regina

It starts with a story. There was once a fine restaurant that specialized not only in serving fine cuisine, but in collecting and experimenting with recipes from many different cultures, time periods, and persons. Because of its excellence in this, its fame spread by word of mouth, and more and more people kept coming. The owners were happy about the restaurant’s popularity, but they had one problem. Having started out as a small operation, their building was not very aesthetically pleasing. Their ovens and kitchen tools, though still workable, were not cutting edge. And every night they had to turn people away because the restaurant wasn’t big enough to hold them.

Their profit on the business had increased greatly due to their popularity, and so they began to use this profit to fix these problems. They were able to purchase some kitchen tools and new ovens. But there was not enough left over to renovate and expand the building. That is, until the joint owner of the place, young and wise in the ways of the world, came up with a brilliant idea. “People love this restaurant,” he said, but they are being turned away. And other people who might love it choose not to come because, aesthetically speaking, the place is a dump and not very progressive. So let’s do this. You know those hot dogs they sell at Ikea – the really cheap ones, for fifty cents? Let’s get rid of our old menu and only serve those. They are easy to make, so we can let go our highly trained and expensive chefs, and the ingredients are not nearly as costly. With the left over money we can do our renovations and make the place sexy, and no one will know the difference.”

Another story: Once upon a time there was a university. It was not the richest or sexiest or most glamorous of universities. It did not rank where it wanted to rank in MacLean’s university listings. But what it did do, it did well. Though it was not liable to win any popularity contests, its students were grateful for the humble patience, rigor, and attention they got from their professors – often moreso than students at bigger name factory-like universities that generate more prestige than solid critical thinking.

At some point someone came along and said, “This university isn’t very sexy. Let’s spend a lot of money on advertisement and recruiting to raise the profile of the university. And let’s renovate the university, and make it bigger and more cutting edge.” When asked how he planned to do this, he did not of course say that he meant to get extra money by cutting at the very heart of the university, the scholars without whom the university does not exist. Administrators never say this. Rather he made abstract decisions he refused to discuss, and let things fall as they may, without acknowledging the effects. Things were, as they always were, tight all around, and everyone had better just tighten their belts and prepare for winter; what he didn’t mention is that for some of those “tightening their belts,” this would mean starvation – not an altogether bad thing from a fiscal point of view because one less mouth to feed costs less.

These are parables, and you can take them as you will. What is not a parable is what is currently happening to the University of Regina English department, and it is in many ways similar to both stories above. The English Department, of which I am an Alumnus (both BA and Masters), is experiencing cuts so severe that it has become nearly if not completely impossible to teach both the writing courses that are prerequisite for English and non-English students alike, and the more specialized courses that are the business of the English discipline proper. What’s more, the discussion of this with upper level administrators largely consists in the ruse of pitting faculties and disciplines against each other in such a way that it merely looks like the cuts are unfortunate but necessary cuts serving the needs and demands of the public – if science and computers are more popular and useful than the arts, it’s not the administrators’ jobs to put money elsewhere – they must put it where the people want it put.

And if this were the real problem, I might have some sympathy. After all, some of the Arts, grounded in the humanities, have done a good job of making themselves irrelevant by boldly ushering us into the brave new world of a “post-human” or “post-person” age. If the idea of humanity is an old fashioned construct used as an instrument of oppression, then surely disciplines grounded in the humanities must die with the deconstruction of humanity. Perhaps university administrators are listening more closely to the humanities than we think – after all, in a university after cyborg theory, does it really matter whether there is anything human – or humanities oriented – left?

But though this is a problem, I submit that the real issue at hand is not between departments or faculties, but rather between a university designed for real education, and a sophistic shell that needs to sing its own hollow praises because no on else will. At bottom, it is not really a question of funding more popular and “useful” classes and cutting smaller and “less useful” classes. Because there is another element at play. At the same time that all this business of Arts cuts has come up, the university is spending massive amounts of money to renovate its downtown campus and expand its program for continuing education. It may just be me, but I fail to see how a university can even begin speaking of continuing education when it is failing to fund education, plain and simple. And like most modern universities, it seems that U of R is increasingly caught up in the need to preen its image through advertisement and rhetoric, and to ensure that its technological standards are cutting edge. And if someone protests that the money used for renovation is not the same as that being taken from the Arts, and that it was raised independently in a variety of ways, I would suggest that there needs to be a seismic shift in the rhetorical orientation of the university. When we raise money for buildings and let the primary business of education wither, we are not being a university but something else.

As an alumnus, I can say with the utmost honesty that, when I think back to my degrees at U of R, the moments that changed my life did not involve architecture or renovation. Nor did they involve the most up to date experiences of technology. Nor did they involve advertisements so loud in their self-praise that they seem to be compensating for something. No, it was those classes where I met ideas I had not before – more than this, had the opportunity to discuss these with classmates who were likewise new to the subjects as well as professors who had been studying these subjects and ideas all their lives. I know I will be critiqued as an idealist who does not understand the complexities of fiscal systems, but I also know that these systems have no way of gauging the ongoing impact of real professors doing real research and engaging in person with students. I’m sure it looks good on the books and at the fundraisers to have new technology and prettier buildings and a media campaign that makes you look good, but to be quite frank, it is not these things that university students remember throughout their life. No one will look back and say, “Gosh, I’m sure glad I got to work in that smartly renovated building,” or “Gee, I’m glad we got to use touchscreen rather than the old fashioned computers with qwerty keyboards.” No one’s life will be changed by the inflated advertisements telling you how the U of R will help you fulfill your dreams. In fifty years, the architecture will be outdated, the technology will seem archaic, and the ads will seem so backward and cute, “so 2012.” But I guarantee that certain discussions and certain books encountered in university will stick with and influence a student for the rest of his/her life – if nothing else, my own life is a testimony to that. And that would not have happened without fair, knowledgeable professors who knew how to lead me through the right texts, and knew the right questions to ask. So, yes, it may be that the university has to make some cuts in these hard financial times. But making cuts that cripple departments like English is a little like claiming to save someone’s life by removing that person’s heart. Yes, sacrifice will have to be made – but it may have to be made by those who prefer a university that looks good over a university that is good.

Christians and Textual Politics: An Only Half Flippant Response Regarding Donne, Milton, and Blake.

Tags

Blake, Catholic, Christian, Harold Bloom, Imagination, John Donne, john milton, Milton, Paradise Lost

The answer to this seems to me fairly simple, and has to do with reception history. Though I know less of Blake than the other two authors, it does seem clear that Blake’s Milton is much different from the Milton of the modern imagination. For Blake, I think, Milton was all about freedom and a very romantic looking freedom at that; he was the champion of censored books and the “one just man” who stood out from the oppressive crowd. I am not sure how seriously to take his claim that “Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it” – I would have to do more research about what Blake thought of Milton’s God – but even that claim associates Milton with a romantic appropriation of Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost.

Fast forward to the twenty first century. Milton is now a misogynist who made his daughters slavishly read him poetry. He’s kind of full of himself in a way that particularly irks the postmodern imagination. And other people we hate, such as C. S. Lewis, championed him, which means he must be old fashioned and outdated. I think probably many students now who first encounter Milton are put off by what strikes them as all the worst excesses of modernity – a seemingly brash confidence in reason and the human will, and an insistence on natural order and knowledge. Such students in some ways agree with Blake – the devil is the heroic figure – but they treat this as an accident and lump Milton in with his God, both of whom they hate. Oh, yeah, and just so we don’t forget Harold Bloom, we must remember that most of the Western canon is grounded in the subversion of the ominous Miltonic father figure.

But people still like Blake. And it would be a shame to associate someone as brilliantly rebellious as Blake with a crusty old blind Milton. So, if we are to pair him with another poet, it will have to be someone we consider subtle and subversive. Donne is the prime candidate. Where Lewis defended Milton and was not particularly fond of Donne, Donne had as his champion none other than T. S. Eliot. A poetry that can influence the author of “The Wasteland” must be more attuned to the subversion and lament of postmodernity, and therefore onboard with Blake, who was (we know) of the postmodern party without knowing it. And to be fair, there is a difference between the styles of Donne and Milton. Milton writes epic poetry, and if we think of his precedents, we will see that though they involved great things, they were external – not angsty and inward turning in the way we would like. There is a difference between the rage of Achilles and the Ethan Hawke Hamlet. Contra the Psychomachic tradition, battles nowadays are not the way to talk about psychological subtlety. Donne on the other hand is metaphysical, something of a Christian Neoplatonist reaching upward toward the Forms. If Milton is interested in the stuff of hard history in the tradition of Homer and Vergil, Donne, perhaps in the tradition of the Plato who turfed Homeric poetry out of the Republic, is in fact interested in the minute details and sophisticated nuances that will be trampled in a battlefield scene. Donne is our man. And so we must pair him with Blake.

But what, you might wonder, is this post doing on a Christian blog? What it is doing is suggesting that, if we are indeed to learn as modern Christians to have a Christian imagination, we will have to learn to pay attention to these debates, as well as the sources of these debates, amidst the Lewises and the Donnes and the Miltons and the Eliots. I was a while back reading a book on the Christian imagination that made a very sad statement. The statement was about the experience of Christians attending university, and as an example, it suggested that a Catholic student might gravitate to Christian literature such as Paradise Lost. Now I know what this person meant, and I am not in the least saying that Catholics shouldn’t and don’t enjoy Milton – I happen to know a number who do, and I personally still appreciate Milton even though I am increasingly attracted to medieval Catholicism, particularly the Ecclesiology that Milton lacks. But what made me sad about the statement is that it missed the details. Anyone who knows even the smallest bit about either Milton or the Catholic church knows that both are complicated and fierce and noble – we can expect metaphysical fireworks if we put them in the same room, some pleasant and some not so pleasant – I expect there might be concordance on free will, and frustration regarding things like the Miltonic hermits blown about between heaven and the moon, or the Catholic propensity to have fun while doing theology (e. g. Chesterton and St. Francis). All this we would get and more – but suddenly we have decided that terms like Catholic and Milton and Paradise Lost can all be tossed in the same basket – and we are liable to throw Thomas Kinkade in there for good measure. I guess what I am getting at is that, if we want a Christian imagination, we will not get it by campaigning churches to do more for artists or try to be more open to imagination etc. No, it will be when the art we talk about is not blandly and generically Christian, but something else – something flourishing and growing and being transformed in sometimes pleasant and sometimes painful ways. This will only happen when artists care more about their subject and their craft than the production of Christian art, and when this care comes directly out of the charity that is the heart of Christian life. We will know the Christian imagination is flourishing when we stop talking about Christian art in abstractio, and begin to go to aesthetic bat, so to speak, for things we love rather than things we think will make us aesthetically relevant.

The connection between John Donne and William Blake (and John Milton for good measure)

Tags

John Donne, john milton, william blake

This post is a bit different than what I usually do. Rather than me sharing some feeble attempt at wisdom, I’m hoping someone out there can instead enlighten me. I became aware of this volume (at right) the other day, and it’s got me wondering: does it make sense to match the complete poetry (and selected prose) of John Donne with the complete poetry of William Blake?

Admittedly, I’m no Blake scholar (I’ve read only his Songs of Innocence and Experience), but I have trouble drawing a solid connection between him and Donne. Am I missing something here? Can someone fill in the blanks for me?

For my part, I would have thought it made better sense to pair Blake with John Milton. After all, the latter apparently took up residence (at least briefly) in Blake’s left foot during his afterlife (we learn this in Blake’s poem “Milton,” which I freely admit I have not read completely). I’ve illustrated below:

Someone please educate me (on the topics addressed above, preferably).

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Democracy

Tags

ballot, death, dust, Poetry, politics, queen of Sheba, resurrection, Solomon, vote

Given how annoyed I have been with all the voting stuff going on – and I am merely loving my neighbor as myself insofar as I am equally annoyed when stuff like that happens in Canada – I thought I should offer a Christian reflection on the occasion. I suppose I can see why people get frustrated when they try to talk to me about politics – the dithering probably gets annoying…

Democracy

Not indubitable debt to reason,

But fear is why we fly, as free,

From belief in the risen dead.

 

We are based in us

Inconvenienced if some corpse claws

Back up to say,

“Before you were,

And all your progress,

All your glory

All your sin –

Before you were,

And your progress –

There were people somewhere somehow living

Somehow somewhere living lacking

Knowledge of self-pity due.”

 

Yes, and to say,

“Progress could quit in a flash

Here today and

Tomorrow the sparkmist

Vain

Snuffed.”

 

Truth from the mouth

Of the Queen of the South:

“You unburied but one part of Solomon’s treasure –

Try and say which.”

 

But oh for a thousand tongues to sing

Exactly what we want them to sing

And then stay silent

In Death;

Dust will not judge –

Or will it?

 

Dread dust (the beginning of wit),

Shaken from Apostolic feet

In tomb-grounded townhouse and hovel high;

“Dust we are

And to dust we return,

And dust will inherit the earth,

And judge,” say saints.

 

Dust is the doomsmark

When death passes over,

Bewhispers a cross

Not sequestered in square

On a ballot.

Fear in a Handful of Dust: Christianity and OCD

Tags

Anxiety, Christian, Christianity, God, Jonah, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Phillip Cary

I have in the past written articles and blog posts about mental illness in general and depression in particular. Though some have thanked me for my courage, I have in these instances very often chosen the easy route, by only talking about depression. For, though depression is often debilitating, misunderstood, and stigmatized, it is in my experience often the “easy” mental illness to talk about. I say “in my experience” because I don’t want to make presumptions about other people’s experiences talking about depression, nor do I want to create the impression that there is something inferior in what they say. I do know, though, that I somehow feel like I can talk fairly openly about depression with people and still feel normal in a way I can’t as much with my OCD.

For those who are not familiar with it, the best way of describing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is that it is like a malfunctioning fire alarm – instead of going off when there is a fire, it goes off in response to all kinds of things – and every time it goes off, the same level of panic and anxiety is caused that non-OCD people would experience upon hearing a real fire alarm. So, in the most stereotypical instance of OCD, the person washing his/her hands over and over is receiving a signal like that of someone who has in fact handled dangerous materials, or who washes his/her hands in preparation for an operation. Of course, there is much more to OCD than this stereotype; often sufferers can get similar messages fearing that they will hurt a loved one, either physically or sexually; often they can develop rituals for dealing with these fears that even they know make no sense even as they find themselves repeating them over and over again.

In any case, this is something I have had since I was a child, and what I would like to begin to do is talk about it from a Christian perspective, since little has been done in this area – though I expect talking about it from a Christian perspective must begin with simply learning to talk about it. In my childhood, I experienced all kinds of obsessions and compulsions, which often changed and migrated as I grew up. I did go through a period of hand washing, but I would like to talk about some of the lesser known symptoms. I would, for instance, have a deep fear of having accidentally glared at someone. You might wonder why this would be a problem. It was a problem because I was a good Christian. You see, I was supposed to be a good witness for Christ. And if I glared at someone, they might not like it and might not become a Christian and then they would go to hell and it would be my fault. Bad theology, yes. Bad logic, yes. And I knew it, at least in part – I wasn’t dumb. But the curse of OCD is that even if you can’t explain the obsession and compulsion reasonably to someone else, it is the other person who doesn’t understand. The OCD person knows in his heart that every inch of the universe is laced with hidden traps set for those who do not take care – and OCD makes you take care, over and over and over again. There can even be fear in a handful of dust.

There were of course other things. Fear of committing the unforgivable sin. The need to repeat every word in my head slowly when I read silently – otherwise I would be lying if I told someone I had read the book in its entirety. Intrusive sexual and violent thoughts that conjured up whatever was most abhorrent to me and flashed it across my brain. The inability to look at people directly for fear of looking at them sexually.

The difficult thing of course was that the Christian culture I was in played right into the hands of my OCD. I was praised for having a sensitive conscience, and when people are dealing with children and teens, the least of their concerns are those who behave extra well – why question it when I was clearly (from the outside) a model child, student, and Christian.

And then there were the issues made particularly bad by two aspects of the Evangelical culture I was in. The first was the expectation that God works in unexpected and bizarre – often arbitrary – ways. I was used to testimonies of people who would do something very crazy-sounding and it would somehow end up being a way of sharing the gospel or something like that. Such stories gave infinite license to my OCD – sure my compulsion didn’t sound reasonable, but what if the impulse was from God working in a very mysterious dose of the wisdom of God which is foolishness to the world?

The second issue was the push to “find God’s will for your life.” Phillip Cary has recently addressed the problems with Evangelical treatment of this issue in his recent Good News for Anxious Christians – you can read about it here or at the blog of my good friend Captain Thin. However, Phillip Cary had not written his book when I was growing up and my OCD might have mistrusted it anyway. In any case, there was always the sense that one was supposed to find God’s will for one’s life – not generally in terms of actually living what the Bible and Church say, but something very specific and particular. Of course, for me with my OCD, my fear was always that I would blink and miss God’s will for my life and then find myself accidentally running away from God like Jonah. And when you put this together with the prior problem, you will see that my conception of God was of someone completely unpredictable who would torment me with his will in undertones so puzzling that if I didn’t pay very close attention, I might miss them – and even if I did I might miss them. This was – and is to a certain extent now – my condition. Medication helps, as has counseling, but the OCD still pops up here and there, in the ceaseless editing of papers and the skin-picking that comes from nervousness.

Though I do not here want to propose a full answer (what answer is there short of heaven?), I do want to offer some preliminary thoughts regarding things I have learned as I journey on with God in the midst of OCD. First, it is not God and it is not faith that is the problem. OCD will latch onto whatever it can get its talons into. If a person is religious, the OCD will take that shape, but it can just as easily manifest in things like the fear of germs – here, one of the deepest fears of modernity replaces the religious fears. My point though is that a Christian with OCD should no more blame Christianity or God for his/her illness than someone afraid of germs should blame the scientist who studies them. The person frightened of germs may not be able to interact with germs as the scientist does, even as the Christian may have to learn creative ways of interacting with God – what is a spiritual solace for some can become a tormenting hell for those with OCD.

And these are a few of the things I have learned as I go along, and I impart them in the hope of helping other Christians who have OCD. Christian tradition and the communion of saints are your best friends. You see, when your smoke alarm – your conscience and sensitivity – is broken, you will feel guilty about doing anything other than crawling under a rock and dying, though you’d feel bad about that too because it would be suicide. So you need to look at people whose consciences and spiritual sensitivities are working and learn from them. Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (and this verse incidentally is quoted as a prefatory to the great cloud of witnesses), so where we cannot see with our own hearts – where our own hearts will only tell us tormenting lies – we need to act in faith and model ourselves after Christ’s body as encounter it in the institution of the church. The fleshiness and embodiedness of the church is very important here, because it is less subject to the abstractions favored by OCD. One of the best pieces of advice one of my priests gave me was to pray the prayer book aloud with no repeating regardless of what happens. The church is that scary place where we speak – and speak to God even – without rehearsing; the liturgy is not a staged show we rehearse for, but a participation – no room for edits.

Second, God is not the niggling voice in your head. I learned this after a long time of hearing others talk about God and reading the Bible and reading Christian literature. God is not an arbitrary trickster waiting for you to make the wrong move. Sometimes it feels like that, as it did to Job. But our knowledge of Christ, the self revelation of God, shows Job’s experience to be an encounter with only the fringes of God. At his very heart God is love, and not the merciless voice I hear in my head. God is reasonable. In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, we offer ourselves to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice. By suggesting that God is reasonable we do not mean that he is respectable or not surprising or containable in the little box of human reason. Rather, what we mean is that God is trustworthy in the same way that the created world is trustworthy. If I drop something on the ground and then pick it up, I am generally in the habit of trusting that, were I to drop it again, it would fall to the ground rather than float into the sky. In the same way, I can trust the love of God to be the same yesterday, today, and forever, and can trust that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is also the God I worship. I can learn to trust God in the same way I learn to trust the rules that govern a reasonable world made by him, and I can rely on this trust conveyed by others when my own reason goes haywire. Perhaps this is why I find comfort in documents like Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio, which opens with the bold statement: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

Rachel Held Evans’ “Biblical Womanhood” book

Tags

biblical wisdom, Christianity Today, complementarian, egalitarian, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, feminist theology, Jewish-Christan relations, Kathy Keller, Rachel Held Evans, Talmud, women ordination

As my co-blogger Chinglican mentioned Wednesday, Rachel Held Evans has a new book out entitled A Year of Biblical Womanhood.  Evans is by her own account attempting to demonstrate that “biblical womanhood” is a misnomer and that the Scriptures contradict themselves on the subject of how a woman should live. “I felt as though ‘biblical womanhood’ was just a phrase being used really carelessly,” she explains in an interview with ABC News. I suspect Evans is right that plenty of people simply assume they know what “biblical” womanhood is without thinking critically; but, whether you find yourself in the complementarian or egalitarian camp on such subjects, her book might be better left alone.

In promotional materials about why she wrote the book, Evans fleshes that out: “I set out to follow all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year to show that no woman, no matter how devout, is actually practicing biblical womanhood.” The point? To foster “a fresh, honest dialogue… about biblical interpretation.”

And that’s precisely what’s wrong with Evans’ latest book. Its deliberate lack of interpretive method. Evans sets out to “follow all of the Bible’s instructions for women,” she says, but what she includes in the category of “instructions” is rather ludicrous. First off, the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament are back in force (even though they’re explicitly superseded in the New Testament, so no Christian is expected to abide by them). Kathy Keller, in an insightful review, notes wisely that Evans would have done better to “attempt to live by all the commandments the Bible genuinely addresses to Christian women, while discussing the rules of responsible interpretation along the way.” That’s not what Evans does. Rather, Evans seems to take all references to women in the Scriptures as if they were imperative—including (and this boggles my mind) narrative. Even the most basic hermeneutic principle (the description/prescription dichotomy) is simply ignored.

The resulting stick-figure of “biblical womanhood” Evans constructs is unsurprisingly easy for her to beat up on. And it’s hard to have “fresh, honest dialogue” when you’re simply ridiculing the idea that there could even be something like biblical womanhood at all.

Case in point (and this comes from a review by Douglas Wilson):

Proverbs 21:9 says this: “It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house.” The ESV has quarrelsome for brawling, and the NKJV has contentious. One gets the idea. Still, it is a verse with a woman in it, and so one must do something.

What Evans did was this. Whenever she caught herself being verbally inappropriate, she put a penny in a jar, and every penny represented a minute she had to go up and sit on the roof of her house.

This is where I clear my throat tentatively, not sure I could have heard this right. But I did, and there are three obvious things that can be mentioned right off the top. First, the text says that it would be better for the husband to be up on the roof than downstairs with Rachel Held Evans when she is being bad. So what’s she doing up there?

Second, the text says nothing about penny jars, or each penny being worth one minute of penance time on the roof. Her suggested mechanism for biblical applications can be illustrated on this wise. The Bible says to be anxious for nothing (Phil. 4:6), and so what if I arbitrarily penalize myself with a minute of hopping on one foot on my front porch every time I find myself being anxious? How about that? But such hopping on one foot, waving at the traffic, is not making the apostle look silly. So we may conclude from this aspect of it that when Rachel Held Evans set up shop to teach us what the Bible says about womanhood, it took her about ten minutes to start producing Talmudic arcana and extra rules instead of straight Bible. Not only extra rules, but dumb ones.

Ouch. It’s this deliberately silly Talmud that Evans is living out in the book, Wilson suggests, not actual biblical instructions for women. At any rate, he says, “I think we have better things to do than learn about biblical womanhood from someone who is having trouble distinguishing subjects from predicates.” And then the Chestertonian-esque clincher: “This is a caliber of exegesis that thinks that Jesus went to Capernaum might mean that Capernaum went to Jesus. Who can be sure? Scholars differ on this controversial point.” You can read the whole review at Blog and Mablog.

A more serious and comprehensive review comes from Kathy Keller over at The Gospel Coalition (which I quote from briefly above). I won’t quote it all at length (you should really go read it yourself), but I will highlight Keller’s criticism of one particularly dreadful misreading Evans imposes upon the Scriptures:

Polygamy, concubinage, rape, adultery, and a host of other sins, many of them against women, truly happened and are recorded in the biblical record with unblinking faithfulness. Yet [Evans] cite[s] accounts of historical events such as Genesis 16, 30, and 35 and remark, ‘If you were a slave or concubine, you were expected to be sexually available to your master,’ as if the Bible condones this behavior.

Keller continues: “The Bible is not simply a collection of ethical principles by which to live. It is a record of human sin and of God’s intervention in history to save his people. Much of it should be read as news, just as we read the newspaper. Horrible acts are recorded in my copy of The New York Times every morning, but I don’t commit the hermeneutical error of supposing the editors of the Times are approving or endorsing such behavior.”

What’s disappointing is that Rachel Held Evans (recently recognized by Christianity Today as a leading female author/blogger in their “50 Women You Should Know” story) could have used the book to advance discussion between complementarians and egalitarians, making people on both sides think seriously about what Christian womanhood is/ought to be. Instead, she went with ridicule. And ridicule seldom brings about “open, honest dialogue.”

[As an aside: There’s been a bit of an uproar since LifeWay Christian Stores declined to carry Evan’s new book. Evans has implied/stated that’s because she used the word “vagina” in the book, and multiple groups (Slate, Religion Dispatches, Christian Piatt, The Daily Beast) have all picked up on that rather startling claim. A recent Christianity Today article fact-checks Evans’ assertion, and notes multiple books with multiple occurrences of the word “vagina” are carried by LifeWay. The article also notes that Evans has at other times publicly stated she never received a reason for why LifeWay refused to carry the book.]

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Note: It seems unnecessary to have to say this, but readers of blogs being what they are, I’ll be quick to point out that my quoting someone doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with everything they think. Take Wilson for example. I find some of what he’s written incredibly distasteful (and plain wrong), and I recently critiqued a Converge magazine article on masculinity for which he was interviewed. But his (and Keller’s) criticisms of Evans above are insightful and therefore worth considering.