The Sad Waste of Time

C. S. Lewis popularized, among other things, both the term and the concept of "chronological snobbery," which is a pervasive modern prejudice that anything contemporary is better than anything from the past, whether technological, theological, philosophical, artistic, or social. Much of his work is based on the underlying, pervasive assumption that the past has something to tell us and that the modern world is not automatically superior just because it is modern. One does not need to be a Lewis aficionado to appreciate the implications of this attitude. 

Is there anything sadder than having been trapped within a fad that now looks ridiculous? This is easy enough to see in such things as '70's synthetic leisure suits or mullet haircuts, but the same thing applies to ideas. Being embarrassed by photos of oneself (or one's parents) in older photos is one thing. But when ideas, art forms, education practices, or theological hobby horses fall away as historical detritus, these things can leave behind some hurt lives and some damaged culture. 

Think of the 1960's "Death of God" movement for example. This putative updating of theological ideas in a civilization supposed coming of age now looks as ridiculous as the zoot suits of earlier years. 

Cab Calloway looks good in a zoot suit. You don't.

Reading this sort of thing used to make you look good. Now it doesn't.

Psychoanalysis reigned through a good portion of the 20th Century, and millions of people--many of them highly influential--idolized the Freudian mythology that erroneously taught a therapeutic technique that turned out to have as much real scientific basis as astrology. Yet the image of a person on a couch, telling of childhood memories and dreams to an analyst, has sunk so deeply into modern secular life that the scenario still has some cultural purchase. You can still see this now dead form of analysis in movies, television shows, and commercials, sometimes without any irony even though real psychoanalysis is dead in the actual profession. 

Medieval Science.

On a lesser level, transactional analysis burned brightly for a while, influencing pastors among others, as THE answer to the guilts and anxieties afflicting modern humans. Transactional analysis is also now more of an historical curiosity than the cutting edge of the mental healing arts. 

One final example: the literary critic Paul de Man helped usher in the movement labeled "deconstruction" which overwhelmed English departments in America in the 1980's and '90's. This movement was so pervasive that one could even attend regional Conferences on Christianity and Literature and hear professors apply De Man's ideas--just as the whole deconstruction movement was actually on the wane. Additionally, recent evidence indicates the de Mann was a liar, a plagiarist, a Nazi sympathizer, and a deadbeat husband, abandoning his family in Europe in order to reconstruct his life in America as an academic superstar. Imagine the embarrassment today of "scholars" who in the 1990's gleefully embraced the literary practices of de Man as the way of building a scholarly career.  

Literary icon and Nazi lover.

Which is worse--looking at a photo from the 1980's in which you sport really tall hair or a curriculum vitae in which you have several papers and articles based on the writings of a fascist who abandoned his wife in order to become an academic superstar? 

One purpose of the Institute is to help us learn to avoid fads, and thus avoid looking like idiots.

Instant Rhetoric

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the rhetorical tradition in the history of Western civilization. Beginning with Homer's epics, and moving through the classical age of Greece and then through the Roman Republic and its subsequent history, the rhetorical tradition was embedded into the deepest, earliest strata of the life of the West. Via Augustine and other Church Fathers, through the Medieval period, then into the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical, the nineteenth century, and into the early part of the twentieth century, classical rhetoric adapted to differing cultural situations without any trouble and without too much distortion. That is, classical rhetoric remained remarkably the same throughout this long history, although at different points there were different emphases, such as stressing style over invention, or valuing highly figurative language over plain speech. 

One obvious demonstration of rhetoric's simultaneous staying power and usability is the writings of America's founding fathers and others since then. Jefferson and Franklin were immersed in classical rhetoric. And Lincoln's utilization of rhetorical techniques for deeply moving purposes shows the similarities and differences between different eras regarding the implementation of rhetoric. This applies to such diverse communicators as Augustine, Martin Luther, and C. S. Lewis. They differ in style, tone, and purposes, yet they all learned their lessons from classical rhetoric. 

But how do you get this now? Some composition classes in college and some speech or communication courses may dip into this major tradition, but usually such academic environments downplay or disregard classical rhetoric in favor of more contemporary "critical theory" approaches, such as "Queer Rhetoric" which " seeks to uncover the symbolic and performative strategies whereby queer identities have been and continue to be constructed in different times and places" (this is from the 6th annual LGBT Conference at Hofstra University. In case you wanted to know.). So if this is the case today with secular education, how do you get into classical rhetoric without resorting to muddling through on your own overprice and antagonistic textbooks? 

Leland Ryken can help you. Ryken has been for years applying traditional rhetorical and literary techniques to the Bible, and his works can help you get into the habit of reading rhetorically, teaching you how rhetoric works. 

 His major work is Words of Delight: a Literary Introduction to the Bible,   and it is worth investing in. Ryken takes familiar texts and shows how the standard elements of style, organization, figurative language, parallelism, and so on are thickly embedded in all biblical texts (the title of the book makes it sound as if he is dealing only with literary issues, but the line between the literary and the rhetorical is very foggy, so he employs both interpretive strategies, and this makes his book that much more useful). 

Another  Ryken work is his  Dictionary of Biblical Imagery ; Ryken edited this mostly, though some of the entries are his. Again, many of the entries are more about rhetoric than literary techniques--though-- again--many of these overlap. 

You can also find on the internet some PDFs by Ryken. These are abbreviated versions of material from his books, but I would urge you to invest in the books themselves and leisurely wallow in them when you can. You will learn about rhetoric this way while also shaping up your understanding of how the Bible works as a human document. That is to say, whatever your doctrine of the Bible's inspiration, the Holy Spirit did not short circuit individual human personality, making every writer sound exactly the same. That's what the Koran does, interestingly. Indeed the monophonic, depersonalized nature of the Koran is suggestive of its theology . . . . The Bible speaks with multiple voices in multiple ways. Even Paul is different from letter to letter and even within a letter he can change rapidly his rhetoric.  

So, reading the Bible rhetorically with Ryken's help will plug you into the deepest currents of Western civilization, and it will also help you read the Bible with greater acuity, and thus with greater devotion.

Literature is Good for You

Simone Weil is one tough cookie. Her writings are both luminous and infuriating, enlightening and neurotic. But this isn’t about the relative merit of her work. Weil’s influence is assured, regardless of where one comes down on the clarity or helpfulness of her ideas about God, suffering, prayer, and salvation. Her unique vocabulary makes her difficult to understand, and I am not going to comment on the contentious possibilities of her work, though many readers across multiple denominational fences have found her to be inspiring. 

What I am interested in is Weil’s response to literature and what this can tell us about the inherent power of great  literature. What Weil can help us see is that the contemporary academic approach to literature censors some of the best things great literature can do for us. Weil--a mystic, a philosopher, a non-Marxist leftist, a klutz who tried to live out the Gospel--read literature like The Iliad or George Herbert’s poems and was lifted to a higher vision than the secular realm can account for. Literature at its best can have an intrinsic power that is now more or less denied in the secular academy. 

“Literature” is now a subject conditioned by academic speculation, controlled in classroom contexts, and burdened with au courant critical theory. At least that is what it has become for most people who encounter literature in the context of current academic study. Weil’s encounter with the power of literature helps us see that the boundaries between literature and theology is thin and permeable, and this is a good thing. Her reading of Greek classics and British poetry, for instance, flies in the face of most contemporary literature professors, yet Weil has far more academic and even leftist credentials in her little finger than an entire English department faculty will ever have. And she says that literature can show us something of God. 

Take, for example, the metaphysical poet George Herbert. Weil, who suffered from excruciating migraine headaches, learned to recite Herbert’s poem “Love” in order to concentrate and to lessen the pain. The internalizing of Herbert’s God-enraptured poetry helped ease Weil into Christian faith by helping her discover the palpable love of God, and this is a use of literature scorned by or ignored by nearly all modern academia. 

 

Another example. Weil also thought that The Iliad was suffused with a vision of life comporting with the deepest insights of the Christian vision of human boundedness. The epic showed that all human beings are subject to “force,” the violent necessities of passion, genetics, psychology, and culture. We are trapped but we know we want to be free. We hate violence, fear death, and just want to go home, yet when the blood lust of war strikes us, we want to kill and subjugate. Both sides--Greek and Trojan--and all warriors--major, minor, heroic or cowardly--are caught up beyond self-control, and Force rules all, making all turn temporarily into hateful monsters. When Force has run its course, for a while anyway, everyone returns to sanity and hates what he has become, but he will succumb again in short order until something breaks. Weil’s interesting take on the poem might or might not be true, but the point here is that she found Great Literature to be something more than a subject to write essays for in an English class. The Iliad offers one of the profoundest views ever composed in artistic form of human captivity and the hunger for freedom from necessity. Weil claims that literature at its best achieves an almost religious quality of revelation. 

Katherine T. Brueck, in her  The Redemption of Tragedy: the Literary Vision of Simone Weil, uses Weil’s ideas about literature to question recent academic trends that turn away from considering how and why literature can speak to us of pressing human realities. The qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty are laughed at in many (most?) colleges and universities, but Brueck deploys Weil's experiences  to challenge the hegemonic discourse (and grading practices) of institutionalized secular education. This so far is a minority opinion, but that doesn't matter. It is the truth.