The Psalms and Poetry

Here is one version of Psalm 150:

Praise ye the Lord.
Praise him in his sanctuary; praise him in the firmament of his power.
Praise him for his mighty acts; praise him according to his excellent greatness.
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet; praise him with psaltry and harp.
Praise him with timbresl and dance; praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
Praise him upon loud cymbals; praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.
Praise ye the Lord.

That's the King James version, or the KJV, or the Authorized Version, or the Version Grandpa Used.

Here is the Coverdale version, which is the basis of the Book of Common Prayer:

Praise God in his sacntuary: praise him in the firmament of his power.
Praise him in his noble acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.
Praise him in the sound of the trumpet; praise him upon the lute and harp.
Praise him in the timbrels and dances: praise him upon the strings and pipe.
Praise him upon the well-tuned cymbals: praise him upon the loud cymbals.
Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.

More people probably know the Authorized Version of this Psalm in America, though in England, for centuries, many (most?) people would have been more familiar with the Church of England use of Coverdale's translation. The difference between the two is negligible, I suppose, though a person learning one version through years of repetition would naturally prefer the one embedded in the deepest strata of memory, the one that sounds just right because of its imprint. Either version is melifluous and easily memorized due to the rhythm and the language (the rhythm in part because of the strong caesura of the lines, the pause created for antiphonal reading in worship services).

Donald Davie, in his book The Psalms in English, offers sample translations of Psalms, from this early strata of KJV and Coverdale, through various poetic renditions over centuries. John Milton took a crack at translating Psalms into poetic forms, as did other Greats such as Edmund Spenser. Authors we now label as hymn writers also produced rhymed paraphrases of Psalms, such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. Davies' argument is that the quality of this Psalmic poetry varies, but the hymn writers could produce poetry as good, if not better in some cases, than "official" poets. Here is Wesley, for instance:

Praise the Lord who reigns above
  And keeps his court below;
Praise the holy God of love,
  And all his greatness show;
Praise him for his noble deeds,
Praise him for his matchless power;
Him from whom all good proceeds
  Let heaven and earth adore.

And that is just the first stanza!

Davie also points to more recent poets who have taken a shot at making the Psalms sing for a new age. The British poet Gordon Jackson published his version of 150 in 1993:

Halleluja!
O praise God: in the holy chancel of his love
                     in the mighty nave of his creation.
O praise God: for all his intricate artefacts,
                     for all his grandeur of design.
O praise God: sound his name with brass,
                      pick it out on harpstrings.
O praise God: write in with dancing in the dust
                      sign it with flutenotes on wind.
O praise God: on cymbals wake the dead with it;
                      transmit it through all outer space;
every drawn breath speaks his honour.
Hallelujah!

I think what Davie shows us is interesting for several reasons.

For one thing, seeing the Psalms in different forms like this can help peel away some of the resistance contemporary people have against poetry as such. In our present cultural malaise, "artsy fartsy" forms of art like poetry (and art, and dance, and theater) are increasingly identified as an activity suitable only for certain effete, liberal, secular types--hence, the statement that x (fill in the blank, such as "museums") are so "gay." By connecting the Psalms with poetry in this conitinuous historical way, we can come to see that poetry is a form of language use that is blessed and can be a blessing. We can rescue poetry from being an elitist entertainment and make it central to our perception of the world.

For another thing, this all works in reverse: poetry can help us read the Bible better. By seeing that the Psalms are a form of poetry, we can read poetry with fresh vigor, and by gaining skill in negotiating this kind of language use, we can go back to the Bible and read it, well, in an invigorated way.

One final upshot of Davie's helpful book is that we can gain a sense of the continuity of the Western tradition. The Psalms generate their own vital tradition: in the early church as chant, in the Reformation church as hymn, in the modern world as poetry. We learn to take the long view, to see something of personal importance in a formative tradition. We don't master the Western tradition to show we are so smart, but because it is a resource for spiritual well being in the sense that we learn to place ourselves as one small part of an ongoing life that extends through generations, through centuries.

Another modern version of the poetic Bible

Nicholas Carr has become rather famous--or infamous--for his book The Shallows. A quick way into his argument in from his equally well known article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" from which the book was developed. In some ways, Carr is updating the argument that Neil Postman consistently made over the course of his career in such books as Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. Postman came back again and again to the idea that new technology causes "ecological" changes instead of additive ones. He meant that, for instance, the printing press didn't just add books to an already existing pre-print culture. Printing changed everything in a cascading way that resulted in new behaviors and ideas regarding religion, education, wealth, new knowedge vs. old, and so on. In the same way, television didn't just supplant radio; television fundamentally altered everything in modern culture, from dating, to ideas of masculinity, to pop music.

Carr argues that the internet, with its hyperlinks, embedded ads, pixelated screens, and so forth, retrains the way the brain thinks about things. People now have a harder time reading lengthy texts for extended amounts of time. Even hard core readers--such as Carr himself--now find it problematic to read more than twenty minutes without fidgeting and wanting to check e-mail or follow a link to another page without finishing an article. People are finding it more and more difficult to read lengthy texts (like a Tolstoy or Conrad novel) and to argue in assertion-evidence-conclusion format.

This is depressing stuff, but it seems unavoidably true. However, there is hope, at least for people like those involved in the Institute. The human brain is amazingly malleable, and even in this emotive, therapeutic, hyperlinked environment, people can still train themselves in the old way--the way of Western habits of thought rooted in disciplines like rhetoric and theology and music. It is not impossible to train up children as little Greco-Renaissance-Christian types, and neither is it impossible for adults, though it's harder.

So get out your Erasmus, and Aeschylus, and Calvin, and Faulkner, and get busy reshaping your brain for the Lord and for your neighbor's sake.

Reformation dudes with books

The recent movie On the Road  is a film version of the famous Jack Kerouac novel and it brings back to public attention the beatniks. The novel has been popular ever since it came out in 1957 (interestingly, he completed it in 1951, but couldn't get any publishers interested in taking it on since the story of hard drinking, hard living, and free loving was too much at first for mainstream publishers). But the novel was almost immediately commandeered by rebellious youths, and it has been used ever since as a kind of template for how to be cool by dropping out of middle class dullness. Many readers have embraced the beat mystique, from the time it was written through the 1960's counter-culture and from then on with every decade of hedonistic drug and alcohol-fueled scramble for "freedom." Today's Goths, for instance, (or are they already declasse?) mark out by their clothing, their music, and their attitude that they are way beyond dreary bourgeouise conventionality.

In spite of the in-you-face breaking of taboos and hedonistic romping in the novel, there is actually a serious angle to Kerouac that Christians do well to heed. The middle class can be dull. It can be conformist and oppressively anti-Christian even in the midst of Christianity in the way that it requires fealty to certain codes of behavior and certain idolatries instead of Christ. We need to drop out of it [Middle Class conformity] in some sense. In fact, it is a persistent religious insight across all religions that we need to drop out of the world in some sense. All religions and all religious perceptions (such as those of Plato) recognize that ordinary life is to some degree delusional.

Jack Kerouac

Keep in mind, too, that it was originally a conservative Republican soldier who told Americans to watch out for the military industrial complex (I like Ike!).

 Unfortunately, I think that most of those who read Kerouac's novel will take away from it only the parts that glamorize drunken sex without understanding that by the end of the work, all of the characters are burned out by their irresponsible flight from normality. Their rejection of the bland, secular world with its propaganda to buy your way to happiness is a correct instinct that is at bottom relgious, but rather than turning to religion--of whatever kind--to give shape to their longings, the various characters have nothing but their own needs to propel them, and so they fail in their quest for enlightenment. This is also a truth of the novel, one that will be ignored by this generation of readers and probably by subsequent ones.

Only by dropping out in the sense of giving one's self away to God is the true Christian beatnik road to somewhere.

Rembrandt's beatnik Jesus

Who we are and what we love

Our Mission:  To explore, evaluate, and pass on the Great Conversation of Western Civilization by way of a Christian view of life and the world.

Our faculty, board, students, and supporters are a group of academics, artists, and businessmen (many more than one, and Dan here is all three!) who are concerned that the Christian Faith just doesn’t seem to carry much weight in our culture these days.  Arguments that used to sound reasonable and compelling now seem to fall on deaf ears -- in government, the arts, poplar culture, academia, the business world, even the Church...  How do we regain a hearing for the Faith?  Christians are pretty good at pointing out that everything is falling apart, but what we may need to do is to paint the watching world a picture of the Good again -- to show how beautiful and attractive the Good can be.  Make people want to do it rather than evil because by comparison evil is so clumsy and thread-bare.  For example, it may be that before we can gain a hearing again for the biblical definition of marriage, we first need to find some example of a man leading and a woman following that everyone would agree is beautiful and delightful and worthy of praise.  If it is hard to imagine an example like that, then you see my point.  Have you ever seen two really good waltzers?  They move like one person.  It is far easier to make a biblical case seem plausible when we can show beautiful results of its implementation.

For centuries the Good has been mediated to the next generation through the great literature, art, architecture and music of our ancestors.  So, one of the best ways to keep future generations from taking the Faith seriously is to disconnect young people from their cultural inheritance.  Old Uncle Screwtape would probably advise “just don’t let them see great works -- or if you can’t keep them from seeing, at least keep them from understanding them.”  For a long time now, the universities have been rejecting first, the biblical God, but then 2nd, the Western art, music, and literature that came about partly as a result of faith in that God.  

And it is into this university system that we Christian parents send our young students -- students who have grown up in the Church and been taught in Christian private schools and we are seeing studies now that 50% of these Christian students will lose their faith by the time they finish their undergrad degrees.  

At the Center we draw attention again to our rich and dynamic culture -- in hopes that people will fall in love again with it.  We want students who can stand up against the pressures of this fallen world - not just to say no to partying, but to know how Nietzsche’s take on Dionysus encourages those parties... we want adult students to know not just that Impressionists were painters of pretty pictures, but to know how to read Impressionist paintings, and Greek epics, and Shakespeare’s plays with a Christian mind. These ancestors of ours are, like the descendants of Abraham, a scurvy lot...but they are OUR scurvy lot.  They are OUR parents and grandparents, and we are commanded to honor our parents -- and they have left us an attic and a storage locker FULL of marvelous things they have made and collected - cathedrals, symphonies, novels, paintings, films, statues, poems -- things that Edmund Burke said furnished the wardrobe of our moral imagination.  Those who know these works have larger souls - they have more to enjoy and communicate to their peers and the next generation, and by knowing them, they are more likely to be able to see through the flashy, trashy, superficial, and sentimental that every generation produces, and the present one in spades.  This experience can get us out of ourselves and open our eyes to the full spectrum of the human condition.  CS Lewis said we should read 2 old books for every new one because while every generation makes errors, not every generation makes the SAME errors -- so while we scoff at the blindspots of our ancestors, we no doubt have blindspots of our own that they didn’t have and could teach us about.

At the Center, we don’t see the student as the client who chooses the things he wants to study according to his own interests -- rather we see the wisdom of the ages as the client, and the students as gifted and chosen means by which that client wisdom might be passed down through the ages.  The Center for Western Studies exists to reacquaint this generation and the next with its own culture inheritance.