Wasting Time with Books

On the one hand, Charles Spurgeon said this about reading:

Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.

On the other hand, Spurgeon had a thing against reading fiction--idle hands, devil’s workshop sort of thing:

How many young people there are whose hearts are just a road along which thoughts of levity and desires for amusement are continually going! How many precious hours are wasted over the novels of the day! I think that one of the worst enemies of the Gospel of Christ, at the present time, is to be found in the fiction of the day. People get these worthless books and sit, and sit—forgetful of the duties of this world and of all that relates to the world to come—just losing themselves in the story of the hero or heroine. I have seen them shedding tears over things that never happened, as if there were not enough real sorrows in the world for us to grieve over! So these feet of fictitious personages, these feet of foolish frivolities, these feet of mere nonsense, or worse, keep traversing the hearts of men and making them hard so that the Gospel cannot enter.

There is an acceptable way of reading this. Spurgeon the Baptist preacher was not entirely wrong in that much of the popular fiction of his Victorian day was trash and probably did fill the minds of readers with nonsense, just like most fiction today. A cinematic American example based that era: remember the writer in the excellent Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven? He wrote penny-dreadful novels of gunslingers and derring-do, silly novels meant to stoke simplistic daydreams of fallen masculine power. Clergy in 19th century America and  England were opposed to such salacious trash of the day, just as we today are rightly worried about our kids watching trash like the Saw movies or the Fast and Furious franchise nonsense. We cannot fault Spurgeon (and other clergy) for advising his flock to keep from wasting time or money on infantile fantasies that lie about the way life really is.

Jesse James, Superhero

But there is something more here, something not quite right in Spurgeon’s distaste for fiction. Spurgeon and his American counterparts sometimes forbade reading any fiction of any kind, including such classics as Don Quixote. The great American novelist Stephen Crane, for instance (1871--1900), had a Methodist clergyman father who dissed reading novels as an un-Christian waste of time. No wonder a talented child would forsake his faith the way Crane did if it was for him the only way to live out his vocation. By identifying one form of creative art in all its dimensions, whether trash or excellent, with ungodliness, Crane’s father constructed a terrible gap between talent and calling, leaving his son no alternative but to walk away from a constrictive evangelicalism. The Christian tradition at its best has found that the vocation of fiction writer finds a rightful place among all the ways of tending the Garden, which is the primary covenant God made with earth-man (Adam, related to adamah, Hebrew for earth).

I am not sure how widespread this attitude is today, but it still survives, more often now it seems in a utilitarian form. Reading fiction takes up too much time, this attitude says. One should be reading the Bible, or cleaning out the garage, or watching sports, or doing something.  Reading fiction (for some, reading anything) is a monumental bore and/or waste of time. There is no justification for it. Even Christians fall into this-- reading the sports page is infinitely preferable to reading a short story because you gain useful information from the first, since sports is much more important, whereas the second . . . wastes time. And it’s harder to read, anyway. Any reading, including fiction if one must have it, ought to be edifying, upbuilding, educational, improving, and so on. Or at least the reading ought to be simple, entertaining-- vacation, summer-by-the-pool, easily digestible and disposable books. One complaint against serious literature--it’s too hard. Or it’s too downbeat. Or it’s too long.  How many Christians today are aliterate?

But the shape of the lives of human beings is narrative. All the world’s a stage, Jacques says in As You Like It, and we all come on the stage, say our lines, and then exit. Individually we yearn for meaningful lives, we anxiously read our own lives to see if there is a pattern, a plot,  that we are not randomly living random accidental lives that simply stop randomly. Even the most pugnacious atheist wants to believe that his life is not literally a chaotic play of energy in the meaningless space of the cosmos (“I get a job, I do well, I am recognized, my friends like my insights, I go on to accomplish things for the Cause, and then I die-- having completed a worthwhile life that means something, doggone it”).

On a larger stage, the narrative of Scripture is the ultimate template of all plot--beginning, complications, resolution, end. The Bible tells us by its very nature that there is a narrative quality to existence. There is the cosmic sized story of creation, redemption, fall, and restoration, and within that meta-plot, there are subplots. The Bible is full of narrative (not fiction, understand). Compare that to the Koran, which is mostly compiled of legalistic statements and highly truncated and edited stories from the Hebrew scriptures, scattered higglety-pigglety throughout the book.

Give yourself unto reading, indeed. Read some good theology, like Spurgeon says, but also read some good fiction like Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” It isn’t a sin. Besides, reading good novels is good for your brain. The science is in.

Not Western, But So What?

The roll call of Christian poets is mighty impressive. Most of us are familiar with some of the Big Names of the English language tradition, such as John Milton, George Herbert, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, and so forth, but the tradition is much wider than this, with lesser known writers who deserve reading. This list would include the likes of Thomas Traherne, Christopher Smart, Elizabeth Jennings, and Jack Clemo.

Blind Cornish and Christian poet Jack Clemo

Beyond the English language, you can find Christian poets who have been influential in their own national and theological spheres, such as the Dutchman Jacobus Revius, the French Huguenot Salluste du Bartas, the Danish Lutheran N. F. S. Grundtvig, or the Polish Czeslaw Milosz.

One of the first biggies of Christian poetry was the early church poet Ephrem of Syria. Ephrem lived in the 4th century and was highly prolific (as so many church authors were back then), churning out hundreds of texts of poems, hymns, sermons, and biblical commentary. His writing was popular and translated into surrounding languages, such as Coptic (Egyptian), Armenian, and Georgian (as in near Russia, not near Alabama).  One of the themes of the early church was Christ as victor, as warrior, and Ephrem exemplifies this in some of his work. Notice in this  prose translation of some opening lines how Christ fights Death like a mighty hero:

"Death trampled our Lord underfoot but he in his turn treated death as highroad for his own feet.  He submitted to it, enduring it willingly, because by this means he would be able to destroy death in spite of itself.  Death had its own way when our Lord went out from Jerusalem carrying his cross; but when by a loud cry from that cross he summoned the dead from the underworld, death was powerless to prevent it.

“Death slew him by means of the body which he had assumed; but the same body proved to be the weapon with which he conquered death.  Concealed beneath the cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat; but in slaying our Lord, death itself was slain.  It was able to kill natural human life, but was itself killed by the life that is above the nature of man.

“Death could not devour our Lord unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swallow him up unless he bore our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld.  This chariot was the body which he received from the virgin; in it he invaded death’s fortress, broke open its strong room and scattered all its treasure.”

The emphasis here is on hardcore doctrine (the incarnation, the atonement, our salvation) in highly charged, exciting poetic imagery. When we think of the tradition of Christian poetry, it is good to have some knowledge of the English tradition, as referenced above, but it’s also good to expand beyond that, forming an historical awareness of Christian poetry. This is good for us for several reasons. One, it helps smash the chronological snobbery that we are more and more enveloped by; two, it expands our access to profound spiritual resources that can enhance our own devotional lives.

Christ the Conqueror

I’ve been trying to track down a quotation given on numerous web pages regarding Ephrem, including Wikipedia, but haven’t found it. The quotation is this: Ephrem is, according to one writer, “The greatest poet of the patristic age and, perhaps, the only theologian-poet to rank beside Dante.” — Robert Murray. I have no way of judging the truth of this, but I’m sure one could mount such a defense of Ephrem’s importance.

Wait. There was a huge Christian church in Syria as big as anything in the West?

Well, there was. Syria was once a hotbed of vital Christian culture, with poets and theologians of great learning influencing the early church all over Europe and the Mediterranean. For instance, the now relatively famous Irish monastics were in direct contact with this Syrian Christianity, and a lot of the Celtic interlace on texts like the famous Book of Kells derived some of their inspiration from Syriac (and Egyptian Christian) versions and were not totally indigenous to the Irish.

So what happened to Ephrem and his ilk? What happened to this thriving, influential branch of Christianity, and why didn’t it hang around like the church in the West?

Well, there was this thing in the seventh century called Islam . . . .

To find out what happened to the ancient Syrian church, read this.

Just Listen to Your Heart

It is a temptation to take an important work by C. S. Lewis and call it a tour de force because you will end up calling nearly everything he wrote a tour de force. But in all honesty not everything C. S. Lewis wrote works equally well. And sometimes even Jack nodded. For instance, no one would argue that Lewis was a great poet, even though that’s what he wanted to be when first starting out. And it would be pretty hard to argue that The Pilgrim’s Regress is one of the best things Lewis wrote. Though The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has some fun stuff in it, it can never rank at the top of the Narnia books. And some of the occasional essays are too tied up with contemporary issues and arguments to speak with the same irenic urgency that Lewis’ most important works do (like The Abolition of Man--if anything, this work is even more desperately true regarding 21st century American education than mid- 20th century British education).

But The Screwtape Letters? Well, that is a TOUR DE FORCE. There are many good things one can say about this book, with its incisive examination of the way we poor mortals constantly fool ourselves into thinking we are pretty decent people. One particular aspect of this great bit of epistolary genius is the way Lewis examines the rightful place of clear thinking in the cosmic scheme of redemption. I mean, we are talking about demons, and salvation, and eternal souls, and God’s love, and sex. And right in the middle of these really really big issues, Lewis keeps returning to the importance of clear thinking--or rather the absence of it in the modern age when it comes to “spirituality.”

Uncle Screwtape tells Wormwood in the very first letter to keep the patient away from argumentation because logic, definition, well stated propositions and so forth no will not in fact clinch a solid atheism:

“But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as a result of a chain of reasoning.”

Lewis indicates that most people in 1942 had already become trained by mass media and modern education to think in terms of impressions and passing subjective states of moods as the defining condition of real life. Don’t believe your lying brain; believe in yourself, your heart, your Oprah-shaped hopes and dreams. Clear thinking (not the “critical thinking” pabulum currently so au courant in academia) helps kill this kind of ego centered stance.

Screwtape also offers this bit of advice: “Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church.”

Don’t define things. Don’t categorize. Don’t seek out cause and effect. Don’t box me in with your reductive petty ideas and logic chopping. Systematic theology is for losers. Didn’t you read the latest book on church growth? That book you have in your hands--yeah, The Imitation of Christ--man, that’s OLD. It can’t have anything to say to me. Here, read this book on prayers from twitter. And stop using those old fashioned theological words. They are such a turnoff.

This continues throughout the letters. The advice tends to center around a few key strategies: keep the patient in the stream of things (especially through mass media), keep him constantly monitoring his state of mind, keep him focused on the momentary as The Real. Above all, avoid things that might lead him to think about ultimate ends, final purposes. At one point about halfway through the letters, Screwtape’s facade of care for his nephew slips when he learns that Wormwood inadvertently let the patient have two real pleasures--a good book and a nice country walk. This practically led the patient to a second, deeper conversion because the patient was taken outside of himself to think about the ultimate end of things--which is the love of God.

The depth Lewis takes us to in this book comes, partly, from showing the linkage of logic and love. Clear thinking-- clarifying  definitions, accurate comparisons, historically shaped perspectives, and so forth--do not sever us from God, from beauty, from deepest, richest emotions. Clear thinking moves out of the way the tiresome ego and its enervating fears about life so that we can finally see Reality in all of its sublime, heartbreaking beauty.

Logic does not cancel out love for the Christian. It brings us to an attentiveness that silences the constant but ephemeral propaganda that each one of us is the center of the cosmos. For me, this is one of the things that makes The Screwtape Letters such a powerful and convicting piece of writing.

Reaching for the Stars

Take a look at the YouTube clip regarding the new movie by Christopher Nolen. Forget about the movie itself for a minute. Pay attention instead to the exalted rhetoric of sublime human exploration and achievement as the ultimate identity marker of what it means to be a fully realized human being.

“We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments, these moments when we dared to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known, to count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we’ve lost all that, and perhaps  we’ve just forgotten that we’re still pioneers, that we’ve barely begun, and that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, that our destiny lies above us.”

This is nonsense, but it is surprising nonsense.

It is nonsense because the “we have defined ourselves” sounds like human beings have defined themselves as technological overachievers from the beginning. But overcoming the impossible in the sense given in this clip is an ideology born in the Enlightenment, or thereabouts. People like Francis Bacon* and his heirs thought that with the right materialist manipulation of nature (and of human beings, eventually), we overcomers would overcome nature and rule like gods. (The answer to this blasphemic hubris is Gulliver’s Travels and Frankenstein.)

Swiftian scientist extracting sunlight from cucumbers

It is surprising nonsense, because we are well into the second decade of the 21st century, and we are nowhere near the Gernsbackian utopia envisaged by atheists who idolize scientism and its promise of endless progress. The world might have some pretty sophisticated technology, but human beings are as a whole still in pretty bad shape. Our greatest accomplishments don’t seem to fix the problems with crime, with civil wars, with collapsing infrastructures, with poor education, with shattered families and the attendant pathologies of crime and drug addiction. It is surprising that anyone could still say with a straight face that our destiny, our ultimate satisfying identity, is in space exploration.

When it comes to technology, we are in a sense superior to previous generations, and our best inventions (maybe) are still ahead of us, though superior ways of delivering pornography doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. Breaking barriers in terms of curing cancer is impressive and humane. Breaking barriers in terms of bigger and bigger houses (on the moon, maybe) with bigger and bigger closets is less so.

"I say, old chum! Does this thingy show the topless girls from Mardi Gras?"

Here is an odd fact--odd from the perspective of a secularist ideologue who believes in inevitable progress: human nature doesn’t change. What Plato, what Shakespeare, what Edwin Arlington Robinson has to say about being human is still as relevant as it has ever been.

According to the New Testament, the proudest human achievement is to repent. In an unintended way, the Interstellar voice-over gets it right--our destiny lies above us, just as Aeschylus, Milton, Faulkner, and , oh, I don’t know--Isaiah?--have been telling us.

Maybe this movie will be good. Nolen has made some entertaining movies. But it will only be a pleasantly diverting fiction, if the movie is nothing other than a celebration of Promethean Man, who is in fact the little child who says, “I can do it by myself!”

* I am probably being a bit unfair to Francis Bacon, but history is uncanny in its twists and reversals. Bacon wanted empiricism to serve humans, helping them to become noble and religious. Instead, it brought about the horror of things like hyper-efficient Nazi death camps and transhumanism

Christmas Trees (and the beauty of God)

We shall behold him....

"Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." Ps. 29:2b

A standard Hebrew word for "beauty" is "noam," which means "pleasing or delightful to the senses." It is the word David uses in Psalm 27:4 when he said that part of his great desire was to "behold the beauty of the Lord." It is a bold statement, not just in what it's asking but also in what it's implying, i.e., God's beauty is a sensory experience (and not just a mental abstraction). However, David did not use "noam" here in Psalm 29:2. He uses "hadarah" instead, which includes the idea of "noam" but carries it further. "Hadarah" means "ornamentation" or "decoration," and could be associated with one's apparel ("adornment"). It is similar to the Greek word "κοσμος" in that they both mean "order," a specific kind of order: an arranging or arrangement of beauties ("noam") that accentuates and maximizes their overall beauty.

The beauty of holiness.

Think of it like a Christmas tree, which we decorate ("hadarah") with beautiful things ("noam") in order to make an even more beautiful thing, a summation of beautiful parts. I can think of other examples, like jewelry, which is the taking of separate, individual jewels ("noam") and arranging them in a particular sequence ("hadarah") to create an even greater beauty. Another good example, as I mentioned earlier, would be clothing. The "beauty of holiness" is sometimes translated the "attire of holiness," a less poetic but not unfair reading. Individual pieces of clothing may be beautiful ("noam") with their own colors and patterns, but style (and occasionally fashion) comes from arranging ("hadarah") these pieces together into a single, stylish ensemble.

There are more examples I could give: a stained-glass window, the human body, and even the Bible itself are all examples of separate, individual beauties ("noam") brought together to make a beautiful arrangement ("hadarah"). The overall point, however, can be summarized in three startling thoughts: (1) God's beauty is for the senses; (2) beauty belongs to order, and the greater the order the greater the beauty; and (3) holiness is a kind of beauty, a "hadarah" beauty, an arranging of single beauties into a magnificent whole. Perhaps it is the greatest beauty of all, since it is the beauty that belongs to God, a beauty that our sense are capable of beholding and desire to behold.

World War Z, Museums, Evolution: Some Barely Contiguous Thoughts

As the zombie plague worsened at a frightening rate in World War Z, one brief scene takes place on board a U.S. war ship: huge paintings obviously rescued from some museums were being stowed below, along with limited amounts of precious food, fuel, and human beings. The point of the scene is the fast paced movie is obvious: society was collapsing, so humans had to get busy saving the remnants of “civilization.” Other end of world movies provide similar scenes, but rarely with a bit of reflection on why we should save things while we desperately fight off extinction at a basic animal level.

For instance, in the spectacular Deep Impact, not only is a pitifully tiny remnant of humanity chosen to survive a comet strike by hiding deep in some caves in Missouri,  carefully selected items of art from museums and private collections are also carted deep into the artificial cave systems where presumably they too will eventually be rescued to form a rebirth of humanity (though I would hope that American art like like Frederic Remington’s would make it and the Warhols and Koons would be tossed for lack of space).

Save the children! And the Rembrandts!

A variation of this theme: in The Day After Tomorrow, after North America freezes up into a new ice age over night, a group of survivors huddle in the New York Public Library, burning books in an old fireplace to stay alive. In one scene, there is a debate about which books absolutely should not be burned due to their historical or cultural importance. Even as people perish, they recognize that some things are worth saving for the survivors who will eventually crawl out of the frozen buildings.

This theme pops up in many disaster movies; in 2012 and Contagion we humans are once again busy packing away artworks while the world seems to disintegrate into pre-civilizational chaos due either to floods or to a viral outbreak that moves too fast to contain. And this is not an entirely new theme. In the older (circa 1970’s) film The Omega Man, the apparently last human being is holed up in a fortified apartment building with a collection of music, books, paintings, sculptures, ruffled shirts, and so on, while the mutants outside in the dark want to put out the light of culture as well as put out the lights of the last normal human being.

Renaissance man decked out for post-human life

What is art for? What are museums for? Why do we have concerts? Concert halls? Why do we make poems? Poetry readings? Shouldn’t we choose a Keats poem to save and not a Lady Gaga song if we had limited space and the walls were collapsing all around us? Why do we have libraries? Why build databases that preserve Shakespeare’s plays and Eliot’s poems? Would we save a Johnny Cash LP or a Bob Dylan if we had to choose?

This is not what Christianity and the arts looks like.

Scenes in movies like this signal an interesting confusion about art. Here is a delicious irony--a blockbuster movie, loaded with special effects, entertaining us with cataclysmic scenes of human destruction, the ultimate summer entertainment, also promotes the idea of high art as an aspect of humans that must be salvaged. But it doesn’t promote it too seriously. There is no real reflection on the meaning or value of art or larger issues of civilization in these movies. It is just assumed somehow that “art” must be saved along with a human remnant.

Or even if humans will apparently disappear, then the mute witness of our best efforts at being civilized will remain as a kind of consolation (the novel Children of Men shows this beautifully and it is completely lost in the film version). These scenes say that “art is important” in some way, even central to human identity and flourishing, but they don’t seem to mean it. These scenes invoke a kind of standardized view that humans produce something important called art that should be preserved in the case that humanity closes shop, but they give no sustained attention to why art is important and worth cramming into the caves along with the women and children and scientists. And yet these scenes keep showing up as if we all somehow know that art matters and that blockbuster movies don’t matter as much.

(Interesting thought--in a self-referential bit of irony, we would see in one of these movies a close-up: if a choice has to be made, a dvd of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru will be saved and 2012 will be thrown into the ditch.)

Something is going on here probably at unconscious, repressed depths that the filmmaker does not recognize. There is something about human activity that should not die. We are not just meat machines whose directionless evolution is finished because of cosmic chance, as happened to the dinosaurs. They were successful, highly evolved meat machines, right? They were at the top of the evolutionary scheme for their time, right? So when the accident of their extermination happened, we, i.e., the secular materialist mind, has to  chalk that up to the mindlessness of randomicity, right? But when it comes to us, people, human beings who want to be human, we know with inarticulate intuitive urgency  that we are not in fact merely animals whose day in the sun is over. We know that what we do as human beings--like writing plays-- is not just evolutionarily optimized behavior. Our art, which we want to save, witnesses to our more than mortal craving for ultimate being and worth.

Humans make things like poems and films and books because these things are fun. Opera is fun, there is no doubt about it. So is film. But art also signals that we want to insert ourselves into pure nature to show that we are not purely natural. Disaster movies are fun to watch, and some are better than others, but they also unwitting witness to the truth that humans are possessed by a need to transcend time even if most people don’t know why.

Optimized evolution

Christmas carols

So why, if we don't really believe in Christ anymore, do we still find our culture looking forward to Christmas?  Everyone likes a holiday, no?  Isn't that enough?  Not if you care about how things happen in a culture.  It seems that enough of us have believed for a long enough time that Jesus' birth really should be celebrated that we have aligned our business year with the church calendar.  We have over time adjusted the meanings of the church celebration to make it more palatable to non-believers.  We changed "holy day" to "holiday," we changed "St. Nicholas" to "Santa Claus" but we still desire to gather our family together, exchange presents, hold feasts, and celebrate, even though we no longer have any real belief in the thing being celebrated.  But we still want to sing Christmas carols...

We should look carefully at the second and third and fourth verses of our familiar carols.

No more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground.
He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace, and makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness and wonders of His love.

How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given,
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.

God of God, Light of Light, lo, He abhors not the virgin's womb,
Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing… O come let us adore Him…

Good Christian men, rejoice, with heart and soul and voice!
Now ye need not fear the grave - Jesus Christ is born to save.
Calls you one, and calls you all to gain His everlasting hall.
Christ was born to save...