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On Philip Larkin’s High Windows by Anthony Esolen

April 5, 2012

Philip Arthur Larkin, (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), but he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered together in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), book cover above, and he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). He was the recipient of many honors, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of poet laureate in 1984, following the death of John Betjeman.

Kudos to Esolen for his reading of Philip Larkin. If you wish to read more of his essays, more under the category listing on the right. I’ve adapted the following for readability and emphasis. From Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good to view the article in original form. Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Ironies of Faith. He has translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

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The sexual revolution puts forth a vision of paradise in which we rig up some nifty devices to guarantee infertility, consider neither holiness nor virtue, and believe in the blessings of no one and nowhere and nothing.

The recent controversy over whether a church, or indeed a single individual, may be compelled to purchase health insurance that provides free coverage for contraception, abortifacient drugs, and sterilization suggests that Americans may yet reconsider the wisdom of what has made the controversy possible in the first place. That is the sexual revolution.

I find it instructive here to glance backward before that revolution, to a poem that celebrates its arrival, and that in fact presents to us several of the crucial elements or motifs of the current controversy: contraception, the Church, a certain vision of freedom, and a supposed maturation beyond the need for the strictures of the past. The poem is “High Windows,” by Philip Larkin. It is, technically and rhetorically, a brilliant work. It is also fundamentally dishonest and self-contradictory, from beginning to end. Here it is in full:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives –
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Paradise — a perfect garden of delights, with young people rutting and hallooing down the slide to happiness without end. And yet this vision of carefree nature rests upon a strange submission to technology, and a depersonalization of human love.

Consider that opening sentence. The “couple of kids” are evidently not free, no matter what Larkin may say, and no matter the casual obscenity that surprises us out of careful thought. For the girl in question must ingest the artificial estrogen, or must insert a blocking device into her body. Why must she do so? Precisely because neither she nor he intends the natural result of their engaging in a reproductive act. But in what way is this an expression of being free of care? They must take great care beforehand, so that they may pretend that they need not care while engaging in intercourse. They are not ready for a child, but they do what makes for children, and hope that none will come.

Thus they are not naked to one another, as an innocent Adam and Eve in Eden. They disrobe, but they hide. They push to the side all “bonds” and “gestures,” conveniently vague. That is, they refuse to be free with themselves, each one giving wholly to the other. The bond of marriage that sets a couple truly free, that gives a man and a woman the confidence to devote themselves forever to their mutual good and that of their children, is simply dispensed with. It is relegated to irrelevance, like “an outdated combine harvester.”

But that analogy, startling and effective though it may be, is downright strange. Larkin uses it to suggest something ungainly and absurd, but his ironical contempt seems to have prevented him from noticing a contradiction. For there is nothing inherently silly about a combine harvester. It is a tool for reaping the goods of the earth. It does its work quite well, and only becomes “outdated” when a new combine harvester is invented that will do that same work better. The work of a harvester depends upon fertility. The work performed by the “bonds and gestures” of marriage is also oriented toward fertility, like the free and glorious fertility of a beautiful garden — a paradise.

But in this poem the whole idea of reaping a good harvest is replaced by reliance upon pills and a diaphragm. It is therefore an artificial and sterile paradise, dependent upon tools that bring to pass a willed infertility. What’s the use of a harvester, when there is no life?

But that state of affairs will be “the life,” as Larkin imagines a wishful hedonist saying to himself forty years back. That life is defined largely in negative terms. There will be no God; meaning that there will be no felt presence of God, no pangs of conscience as regards sex, no virtue to aspire to, no duties to fulfill, and no sins to confess and to expiate.

One might also add that there will be no sense of holiness; no sacred promise to devote one’s life to one’s spouse; no victory over the importunacy of the flesh; no shielding the sexes from abusing one another. This will be like going “down the long slide.” There will, apparently, be no broken hearts, no one cajoled into saying with the body what is not held in the mind, no children living without a father, no visits to the abortuary, nothing but living “like free bloody birds.”

Which brings us to another contradiction. When we think of birds leaving the earth behind and soaring where they will, we naturally think of freedom. But birds in flight are doing what they do by nature. So too, when mating season comes they join to beget and raise offspring. Even if Larkin meant the word “birds” only as a colloquialism for “lucky stiffs,” or something of the sort, his hidden contempt for nature has gotten the better of him.

The couple of kids he sees are not at all free in the sense of being unrestrained (for they must engage in complicated evasions), or in the sense of being generous (for they withhold their fertility from one another). Nor are they at all like the birds. Instead they desire exactly the opposite of what the birds in mating season desire. They do not want chicks. They want nothing.

So we arrive at the end of the poem, when Larkin presents us with the “religious” experience of someone whose pocket of prophylactics protects him from needing the priest. He has removed human love from the chapel of marriage. But now he wishes to place it back in a chapel of his own. He wants to bless it with the clarity and the “sun-comprehending” of “high windows,” like those of a great church. What is here? There are no stories to behold in the windows; they are colorless. There is nothing beyond the windows either, nothing but “the deep blue air,” the endless nowhere of the sky.

We will all enter paradise, then, when we scoff at nature, rig up some nifty devices to guarantee infertility, consider neither holiness nor virtue, and believe in the blessings of no one and nowhere and nothing. To quote Milton’s Belial, that must end us, that must be our cure.

Where is that promised paradise of no one and nowhere and nothing, Mr. Larkin? Visit a prison, and ask the men in the cell blocks to recount their sexual histories, and those of their mothers and fathers. Visit a hospital, and see the faces of women who have determined to violate their inmost natures as the givers of life. Visit a neighborhood — if you can find one; for your paradise has placed transience and infidelity at the heart of the most intimate of human relations. You with your quaint erudite use of obscenity! The streets of your nation and the sullen youth who roam them make you look like a monocled Edwardian with a taste for French novels.

And this is the world we must protect, even at the cost of our Constitution and our civil liberties?

Posted in Anthony Esolen, Poetry | Tagged High Windows, Philip Larkin, transience and infidelity | 2 Comments »

Poem: Hurrahing in Harvest by Gerard Manley Hopkins

July 30, 2010

Gerard Manley Hopkins asserted with great ardor that man could approach his Lord by the inconsiderable trifles of the world, a love for irises and moths and falcons. His notebooks are crammed with the canniest descriptions, born of love, of what he called the “inscapes” of the things he saw, the peculiar inner fingerprint of a thing that made it itself and no other:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;
Crying What I do is me: for that I came
(“As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” 5-8)

His term inscape is well chosen. It suggests a creation that delves deep within a thing, to its essence. The term is derived from the German schoepfen (to create) and -schaft (knowledge, as of a craft), and from the Anglo-Saxon scieppan (to shape or fashion) and scop (a shaper of verses, that is, poet) Hopkins says the finding of inscapes is precisely what the world is for, all things are for man’s beholding, that he may learn of his Maker and sing his praises.

Hence the typical irony of Hopkins’s poetry. Knowledge is everywhere to be gleaned, but only by those who love. The fault line severs those who can read the signs, often in the most unexpected places, from those who cannot, because their love does not beat warmly enough. The double identity of the world — as heaven penetrates this smallish portion of the world that we misconstrue as the whole — comes across quite nicely in the following notebook entry, describing the first time Hopkins saw the northern lights:

Mv eye was caught by beams of light and dark very like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I s aw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the earthline.

Then I saw soft pulses of light one after another rise and pass upwards arched in shape but waveringly and with the arch broken They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do but free though concentrical with it.

This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.
(Sept. 24, 1870)

Note that Hopkins senses a time-within-time, independent of the clicking minutes whereby we calculate our days in the countinghouse. But it is also a time above that time, steering it, leading it from the nothingness whence it came to the eternity whither it is going. He experiences the fearful sense of the provisionality of time, of its being embedded in God’s time — against which our minutes seem to clash.

BUT IF OUR HEARTS are open, we will see. Then it will be as if the veil of creation had been torn in two. We will not see beyond creation, leaving it behind in disdain, but into creation… We will see even unto the dangerous and loving Creator who awaits within and beside and beyond. God is no mere object of love, but the Lover who will tear through cloud and sky to grip the heart of man That explains the ironic reversals in one of Hopkins’s loveliest hymns to natural beauty:

Hurrahing in Harvest
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world wielding shoulder
Majestic as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet

The first line of the poem leads, or misleads, the reader to believe that he is about to hear of the “barbarous” beauty of late summer. Hopkins echoes Shakespeare’s famous line describing the sheaves brought in for the harvest, “Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard” (Sonnets 12 8 ) The “stooks” or ricks of baled corn are bearded and bristly — in that sense barbarous, punning on the Latin barbatus (bearded) — and of a rough and rustic thrusting into the sky

But that is the last sight of an autumn harvest we have in the poem. For Hopkins casts his eye upward. Dante had called the world “this little winnowing floor” (Paradise, 22 151), alluding to Jesus’ warning that it the Last Judgment the wheat would be winnowed from the chaff. Hopkins instead looks to the physical heavens — there is the harvesting, unbeknownst to the men who shock the grain on earth. The skies are “wind-walks” where the horses of the air march round (and there, not simply round and round but in the wildest streams) to power the fan to blow the straw free; the clouds are silky sacks grain a-bursting; they spill the meal, flowing away in sudden runnels and siftings and scatterings.

It is no mere physical description. A real gleaning is going on, with the poet as gleaner, walking through the rows of grain: and his instruments are his heart and eyes. He is gleaning the Savior. That image is meant to evoke a theology of love. In most of the New Testament passages that refer to the harvest; Jesus is comparing the grain to the souls of the blessed (e.g., Luke 8:4-15). In at least one place the souls’ enjoyment of the kingdom of God is compared to a bumper crop at the harvest, “good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over” (Luke 6:38). And why not? Since the life of Christ is the feast: he is the manna from heaven, the food that brings eternal life.

This is the paradox of Hopkins’ poetics of love. God loves a world whose beauty should stir man to fall in love with it and with Him. The more truly I love the meal-drifting clouds, the more truly I love God, because unless I see God in them, I do not fully see what they are. In the same way, Christ gives himself the Eucharist that we may be gleaned by our gleaning our taking Him in is His own taking us up to Himself, so that Aquinas properly says of the sacrament that it is not heaven that descends to us, but we who are raised to heaven.

No earthly love can match the fullness, even the violence, of God’s love for man, when man lifts up his heart to God. Christ’s is a “real” and a “round” reply, a halloo more reverberating than any man’s shout of joy, a kiss more real and warm than the most passionate lover’s embrace. Worship is not for the faint of heart. The hills above are the world-wielding shoulder of this hero — this God and man who is as “stalwart” (and as self-willed!) as a “stallion,” yet mysteriously as sweet as “very-violet.” Very God and very man, says The Book of Common Prayer; but Hopkins combines both natures in those superb images of royalty and approachable beauty.

Just as the northern lights seem to keep a time fixed upon eternity — a real time, a rounder time than what we know — so too the beauty of the harvest is and has always been ready for our seeing. Not the harvest of an Irish countryside, but in that harvest the harvest of oneself, in harvesting Christ. What is wanting? Only our attention: “the beholder.” But we are here to behold it. Then it is our love that is wanting. But if that heart should once move in love, it will find ravishment, swept away by and from the beauty of the earth to the beauty of Christ. For ‘they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:31).

Posted in Aesthetics, Anthony Esolen, Poetry | Tagged Gerard Manley Hopkins, gleaning the Savior, Hurrahing in Harvest | Leave a Comment »

The Son Bore the Wood

July 29, 2010

The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio 1590-1610

Anthony Esolen contrasts the irony Virgil shows us in The Aeneid with the more robust conception we find in the biblical story of the binding of Isaac. There you will find the ironies that will build into the Christian vision of the world and the endless richness of the divine providence of God the Father.

The providence we see in pagan works such as Virgil’s The Aeneid is ambiguous, a flicker of hope perhaps that in the great scheme of history events will work out under some benign plan. But Virgil’s poem does not end with the marriage of Aeneas and Latinus’ daughter Lavinia. It ends with a confused and disappointed man in the grip of wrath. The irony of the Greek victory at Troy is that it seals their own defeat; the irony of the Roman conquest of the Greeks might well have been their consequent abandonment of piety. All paganism seems to end in despair. Even in Virgil we are left with the iron cycles of birth and death, and rise and fall – one state succeeds another and the only design in it all serves to reveal the littleness of man.

Such irony — which shows man, who thinks he knows things, to be a counter in a game played out by fate or impersonal law or design — in a strange fashion presupposes the providence it denies. It is parasitic upon a suppressed belief in One who foresees. For there either is a plan, or there is not. If there is not, then all man’s attempts to divine meaning in his history are vain. One irony of a flat and uninteresting sort pervades all: man thinks he knows, then learns that he knows nothing, if he can even be said to learn that. Yet hidden deep within a belief in a disillusioning fate is a belief that there ought to be a providence: that, despite all we see to the contrary, history ought to be a stage for justice, however dimly perceived and incomplete, and that man is made to know, however straitened that knowledge must he on this side of the grave.

So believers in providence have more, not fewer, opportunities to see irony at play than have the disbelievers. For, granting providence, the artist may illustrate man’s movement from ignorance to knowledge: or from perception of one kind of order to perception of order of a wholly different magnitude, not contradicting but comprehending the former. The artist may attend to knowledge gained in surprising ways that yet are most suitable for the knower, for the thing known, and for the God who grants the knowledge; or he may attend to those who can have no pretensions to knowledge, for instance to children and fools, who yet prove wiser than their betters. And the artist may see these ironies at work not only in the life of one person, but in mankind’s long and meandering history.

Augustine was the first, in his City of God, to outline a Christian theory of history. But the notion that history had a meaning (other than providing object lessons in valor and, more commonly, folly or vice) was implicit in scripture and was a cornerstone of the Jewish tradition at the time of Christ. History was going somewhere: events of old not only prepared the way for events to come hut foreshadowed them, concealing their full meanings until the time for complete revelation should come.

The Jews held, for instance, the mysterious belief that the prophet Elijah would precede the coming of the Messiah — yet the same Jews were deeply divided on the question of the survival of the soul after death. Evidently they expected someone who was not Elijah’s soul reincarnate, but who was Elijah in more than an analogical sense: someone who fulfilled the meaning of Elijah, who was, and had always been meant to be, Elijah come again. Thus the Jews ask Jesus, “Are you Elijah?” they do not mean, “What can you tell us about King Ahab, who lived back in your day?” or “Are you playing the role of Elijah?” but rather “Is Elijah fulfilled in you? Are you Elijah?”

If you do not understand this belief in a history-ordaining God, you cannot understand scripture, Old Testament or New or both together. Nor can you understand the rich ironies of Christian literary works that model their own “history” after the pattern of God’s revelation not only in history but by means of it. Let us return now to the story of father Abraham.

Despite his old age—and his laughter! —Abraham has been granted a son of laughter, Isaac. He has circumcised him by his own hand and has thereby dedicated him to God. Through the loins of Isaac shall come the promise, the descendants as numerous as the stars.

Then one night God delivers a startling command:

And it came to pass alter these things, that God did tempt Abraham: and he said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.

And he said, ‘Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of .
(Genesis 22:1-2)

It is important to remember the darkness surrounding Abraham. He must have been crushed by God’s command — led so soon from unexpected joy to despair. Nor is there a convenient detour. For, with the Lord’s consent, Abraham has allowed his wife Sarah to banish the concubine Hagar and their son Ishmael, a boy whom Abraham loved dearly. God reconciled Abraham to the banishment by promising care for Ishmael (which he does provide, miraculously and tenderly [Genesis 21:14-21]; but for all Abraham knows, their bones are bleaching in the desert).

And God reasserted his covenant, to be fulfilled through Isaac and his sons: “Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah bath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice, for in Isaac shall thy seed he called” (Genesis 21:12).

Now all has been snatched away. Abraham has left his kin forever; he has banished his son, at the command of this strange God. He has won victory in battle, with this God’s assistance, and has witnessed the destruction of the wicked cities Sodom and Gomorrah, at the hands of this God; and he was allowed to plead for the lives of the few just people living there, namely his nephew Lot and his household. Beyond these things Abraham knows nothing about God, or at least nothing we are told.

So he is crushed, but I think not entirely surprised. He is the victim of a god’s practical joke. That is how gods are. They set you up and knock you down. There is no reason to trust them, except that refusal to trust might end up even worse. Yet on that grim morning, Abraham trusts. It is no myth he follows, but the voice of the living God. He does not know why he trusts; we are granted no revelation regarding his thoughts. If he could reason his way into a proof of Cad’s trustworthiness, that would derogate from his trust, God speaks to him — not a theological proposition, not a mythical father of might, but God in truth — and Abraham responds.

Man and son climb the mountain alone. Abraham has left two young companions at the base, saying, “Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again unto you” (Genesis 22:5). Of course, Abraham is lying, in part. Worship there will be, but as far as he knows, Isaac will never return. Yet we who know the story (and ‘we” includes all the Hebrews, who told and retold with reverence this foundational story of their race) know that Abraham speaks the truth unwittingly. He thinks he has been fooled by God, and does not suspect that he is being fooled by God. He thinks he knows that God is capricious, like all the gods; he will find that God is faithful, like none of those shams.

The innocence of the boy makes the climb all the more terrible. Abraham carries the knife and, carefully, in both hands, a pot of glowing coals for the fire. Isaac bears the wood strapped to his back — for Mount Moriah is bleak and bare, with no decent firewood to be found. Isaac unsuspectingly asks the obvious question: “Behold the fire and the wood: but where is a lamb for the burnt offering?” (Genesis 22:7).

With what hardly controlled agony the father replies! “My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:8). He dissembles; he believes that God has already provided the lamb, the son Isaac born by God’s miraculous intervention. Perhaps Abraham hopes against hope that another lamb will be provided — if so, it is surely a great example of his faith. Yet such a “perhaps” must be gray and flickering. Abraham hears the steps of his young and harmless boy beside him, knows what Isaac does not know, and must imagine the black loneliness of returning down the accursed mountain without him.

Again, however, Abraham has spoken the truth he did not see. For as he raises his knife to slay Isaac, bound upon the same stone altar his own young hands have helped his father build, Abraham is stopped by a herald of the Lord: “Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me” (Genesis 22:12). Such is the language God uses to present truth to the finite mind of man. God has known Abraham all along; it is rather Abraham here who learns. He learns about his own faith, and he learns, should he ever doubt it, that God will not break his word. He is not a god like the other gods.

As for those other gods — fertility gods especially, the Baals of the Canaanites and Moloch (Melkor) of the Phoenicians — they demanded human sacrifice as the filthily ironic price of good harvests and large families. Abraham knew as much, as did the Hebrews who told the story. The gods, in malevolent control of everything, require that you slay your child (which seems, to the ignorant, a counterproductive thing to do), so as to secure more children (as everyone as sophisticated as the Phoenicians knows will happen, for that is the cruel yet necessary bargain). But it is not so.

Or it is so, in a way the surrounding peoples do not understand. Their sacrifices form part of an iron economy, a rigid rule for the universe. They give up, to gain. They kill, but they do not yield; they allow the wailing infant to pass through the fire to Moloch, on condition that Moloch uphold his end of the deal. Abraham must have thought that God was requiring something similar from him. It is remarkable that God has, however, given Abraham no hint of a recompense, and yet Abraham obeys anyway.

The message, then, is that God does not want Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in that way. God is no rewarder of mercenaries, nor does a mercenary really offer a sacrifice. Abraham has slain the choice of his heart, and for making that sacrifice God rewards him with the return of Isaac, and a ram for the offering:

“And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen”
(Genesis 22:13-14).

What has providence to do with this episode, beyond fashioning a narrow escape for the heroic Abraham? Consider the ram tangled in the thicket. It is slain in place of Abraham’s first-born son. God has provided is now the name of the fateful spot; Abraham names it, recalling his words to Isaac as they climbed the mountain. The lesson would not be lost on the Hebrews, who owed their survival as a free people to another such sacrificial lamb: the Pasch, the Passover lamb, whose blood besprinkled upon the lintel and the doorposts would cause the Destroying Angel to pass by their homes on that dread night when God smote the first-born of Egypt and of all her bleating gods.

It is pointless for the critic, and blasphemous for the Christian, to say that the similarity is accidental. Pointless., because what matters is how the Christian faith, and that includes Christian habits of reading scripture, helped determine the ironies build into the Christian vision of the world as given color and form in Christian literature. Blasphemous, because it denies the providence of God, implying that the Creator of the universe could never have willed from all eternity the foreshadowing of the Passover in the sacrifice of Mount Moriah.

But the providential wisdom does not end there. Examine the celebrated icon of the Holy Trinity by the fifteenth-century Russian artist, Andrey Rublev (see figure below). The genius of the icon lies in a profound theological insight. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, distinct yet as one, are the three angelic visitors to Abraham, sitting at table, while Sarah prepares the lamb. But the outlines of their robes form, in a kind of absent presence, the negative of a chalice: the cup of wine consecrated to become the blood of Christ, given for all. They are the ones invited to a feast, as Abraham thinks; but the truth is that they are inviting to their feast Abraham and all his descendants in faith. And since they are announcing the conception and birth of Isaac, the artist has implied a long arc of providential meaning, extending from this moment under the terebinth trees of Mamre, to the birth of Isaac, to the “sacrifice,” to the true Passover lamb, the Christ. God gives himself wholly to man, that man may rise to enjoy the life of God.

The ram provided by God to spare the life of Isaac, the firstlings of the Passover feast to spare the lives of the Hebrews in bondage what were they, say the ancient Christians, but shadows of Christ? He it is who gives his body not merely in place of ours, to stuffer death, but to redeem us from sin and the death that is sin’s wages. Isaac lived another day, to sin and die and await his Redeemer. So did the Hebrews who followed Moses across the Red Sea. But the true Lamb that the Lord provides is no substitute simply, but his own Son, his only beloved Son, that is to say his very self, that all who believe may be cleansed of sin and may live forever. They will enjoy the wedding feast of the Lamb, himself, his own life, given as food to those he loves (Revelations 19:9).

A world governed by so playful — I can find no better word — a providence abounds in meaning, a cascade of it, from every least word or action. If God is no miser of his blessings, neither is he a miser of meanings: they burst from every tree and leaf. It follows that we cannot know the full significance of what we say and do, but that God does know and can choose to reveal that significance to others, especially by means of events that reenact the past and reveal it to have been far more, or far other, than what the actors themselves supposed.

A charming instance of this cascade is given unwillingly by the inspired author of the Abraham and Isaac episode. Abraham, he says, carried the knife and the fire-pot. Isaac carried the wood. A deft Anglo-Saxon poetic rendering of the scene, in the so-called Genesis A text, makes the connection swiftly and explicitly: Wudu baer sunu (2887B). “The son bore the wood,” the poet says, calling attention to his line by the rhyme, most unusual in Anglo-Saxon composition. Or, since wudu and sunu possess identical forms in the nominative and the accusative cases, “The wood bore the son.” Without dropping any other hint, the poet recalls to his audience a new field of significance, one unknown to Abraham and Isaac. The lad — from whom we hear not one word of protest against his father — foreshadows Christ, who carried the wood up another hill for a sacrifice, his own. Christ was Isaac, was the ram; Christ bore the wood to the altar, and the wood bore him. God spared the son of Abraham, but did not spare himself, so great was his love for the world.

To believe in a world governed by the all-wise and loving Father, who demands justice but whose very act of creation was a condescension, an act of mercy, is to know that divine providence is endlessly rich, embodied in the exploding galaxy and in the grain of sand on the shore. It is a world brimming with consequence: allusions shooting like weeds, wonderful and lush; paradoxes hidden like thrush’s eggs in the tree-crotched nest; etymological parallels winking one to the other like the glaze of dewdrops on the first day. And as long as there are creatures like us, once naked in the garden, wise and innocent — now wise in our own minds, therefore foolish and half-blind and huddled up in disguises — the play of irony will thrive. We now experience irony mainly as that cold splash that wakes us, when we thought we knew what we did not; a child would experience it rather as that warm and sweet moment of wonder, when something whose meaning he did not know suddenly assumes its surprising and self-displaying place in the garden of knowledge and love and time, the created garden of God.

Posted in Anthony Esolen, Scriptural Exegesis | Tagged Anthony Esolen, the Aeneid, the binding of Isaac | 2 Comments »

“Dost Thou Love Me?”

July 27, 2010

Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of St. Peter, 1600

Anthony Esolen relates the story of Peter and the Irony of Faith seen in Quo Vadis.

LOVE IS STRONGER THAN all the powers of the world. It is hard to remember, after our familiarity with Christianity, how startling an assertion that is. But love is essential to man as a being made for God, and, in God, for his fellow man. So true is this that even what look like feats of wondrous faith — impressive churchliness, we might say — are nothing at all without love: “And though I have the gift of wondrous prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Consider another scene. Jesus has been speaking to the Jews about a manna come down from heaven, bringing life everlasting: “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger, and lie that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). But the Jews say to themselves (again we witness man’s small-hearted refusal to see) that they know better. They interpret Jesus’ words not literally (for surely they are familiar with figures of speech) so much as contemptuously: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven?” (John 6:42).

Jesus gives them no quarter. He does not say, “I was using a metaphor,” as indeed he was not, but goes on to assert that the bread “is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:51). When the Jews again snort — insisting upon a literal interpretation for its absurdity, so that they can dismiss Jesus and his claims — Jesus goes them one better, asserting that “except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” (John 6:53).

At this point it is not Jesus’ enemies alone who leave, but many of his It disciples, muttering, “This is a hard saying: Who can hear it.” (John 6:60). When finally Jesus turns to the twelve, his chosen apostles, he asks them whether they will leave, too. Peter replies. Note that by his own light Peter understands no more of what Jesus has said than does anyone else. He too must feel mystified and disappointed. But he does know one thing: he loves. Beyond all rational argument, he knows that he wants to stand beside the teacher “Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of ever lasting life.” (John 6:68)

Peter’s life is a history of love, of wanting to be beside Jesus. We are told that John was the disciple whom Jesus in his humanity loved most, but it was Peter, not John, who said atop the mount of Transfiguration, “Master, it is good for us to be here and let us make three tabernacles one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias’ (Mark, 9:5), wanting to pitch some tents so that the prophets of old could tarry with them awhile It was Peter, not John, who so loved Jesus that at first he did not want to sully him with his presence “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5: 8 )

It was Peter, not John, who tried to walk on the water to he near Jesus in the storm (Matthew 14:24-31) It was Peter, not the younger and fleeter John, who was first to enter the tomb on Easter morning (John 20:3-6). And after the Resurrection, to soothe the pain of Peter’s having denied that he knew him — a caustic and salutary penance, this — Jesus asks Peter three times, once for each denial, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these?” When Peter replies that he does, Jesus assigns to him again the loving care for his brothers: “Feed my lambs” (John 21:15).

Note that in choosing the chief of the apostles, Jesus does not ask Peter whether he is courageous and self-denying. That is what a good Stoic would take pride in. Nor does he ask whether Peter is fully conversant with scripture. That is what a good rabbi would take pride in. Nor does he ask whether Peter has attended the lectures of the wisest men and read the works of Plato and Aristotle. That is what a Greek would take pride in. Jesus rather wants to confirm Peter in love. It is this love that will confer upon Peter both knowledge and more strength of character than any Stoic could boast, not through Peter’s grim determination but through the gladsome ministrations of the Holy Spirit.

But this passage in John’s gospel, taking as given what the early church knew about Peter’s leadership after the Resurrection, focuses on Peter’s crucifixion in Rome, a slave’s death that conformed him to the One he loved, who set him free. For when Peter, sad and exasperated, says for the third time, “Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee” (21:17), Jesus replies by predicting what would look to the world like weakness and shameful defeat:

“When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.

This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God.”
(21:18-19)

It is well here to touch upon that death — it is the climactic event of Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? (The Latin title means, Where are you going?) Legend had it that Peter was advised by his friends to leave Rome before Nero could lay hands upon him. They were thinking practically: the chief of the apostles must not lose his life. They needed him. Those friends loved Peter, and genuinely strove to build the church. But God’s love is dangerous and brings to bear upon man’s life a power from which he yearns to hide. On his way out of the city, along the Appian Way, Peter sees a vision, a figure emerging from the gleam of the sun. His disciple Nazarius does not see it; but Peter falls to the ground in adoration. The following scene is a small masterpiece of irony, as Peter is confirmed in love:

“He fell with his face to the earth, as if kissing some one’s feet.

The silence continued long; then were heard the words of the aged man, broken by sobs — ‘Quo vadis, Domine?”

Nazarius did not hear the answer; but to Peter’s ears came a sad and sweet voice, which said, — ”If thou desert my people, I am going to Rome to be crucified a second time.”

The Apostle lay on the ground, his face in the dust, without motion or speech. It seemed to Nazarius that he had fainted or was dead; but he rose at last, seized the staff with trembling hands, and turned without a word toward the seven hills of the city.

The boy, seeing this, repeated as an echo, — “Quo vadis, Domine?”

“To Rome,” said the Apostle, in a low voice.

And he returned. (402)

Sienkicwicz understands and presents with keen insight the irony of the event that follows. Rome is about to be stormed and taken by force: its gates will not prevail. No one sees it. Not the debauched Nero, with reason afraid of his sycophants. Not the weary libertine Petronius, who will die by his own hand, witty and sad to the end. Not the soldiers who wait their chance to send the effeminate and cruel emperor to his deserved apotheosis — who would make a god of him with all speed, that they might set up a puppet more to their liking.

But the Christians are even now conquering. Tertullian would say, two hundred years later, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the the church. And that same Peter who sheds his last blood in an act of communion with the teacher he once denied but never ceased to love, that same Peter, we Christians say, will be the savior of Rome herself. As a stranger he did not merit beheading within the city walls; but on his tomb will be built the great basilica, as upon the ruins of Rome will be built a new center of Christendom.

Who remembers Ctesiphon or Susa or Ecbatana, the capitals of once great empires? Carthage is a desert plain sowed with salt. Memphis is a vast sand-rippled tomb. Rome remains; but it was the “criminal” Peter, true to the last to his love for the master, who saved her. A Christian of any persuasion can relish the irony of a redemption that no one but an old Jewish fisherman, about to be executed, could see:

“The Apostle, with his head in the sun-rays and golden light, turned for the last time towards the city. At a distance lower down was seen the gleaming Tibet; beyond was the Campus Martins; higher up, the Mausoleum of Angustus; below that, the gigantic baths just begun by Nero; still lower, Pompey’s theatre; and beyond them were visible in places, and in places hidden by other buildings, the Septa Julia, a multitude of porticos, temples, columns, great edifices; and, finally, far in the distance, hills covered with houses, a gigantic resort of people, the borders of which vanished in the blue haze, — an abode of crime, but of power; of madness, but of order, — which had become the head of the world, its oppressor, but its law and its peace, almighty, invincible, eternal.

But Peter, surrounded by soldiers, looked at the city as a ruler and king looks at his inheritance. And he said to it, “Thou art redeemed and mine!” And no one, not merely among the soldiers digging the hole in which to plant the cross, but even among true believers, could divine that standing there among them was the true ruler of that moving life. “
(404-5)

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Poem: The Lantern Out of Doors by Gerard Manley Hopkins

July 8, 2010

G. M. Hopkins

A poem I hadn’t noticed until Anthony Esolen introduced it in his chapter on Hopkins from Ironies of Faith. The interpretation that follows is so true and rather sad in some ways but in the end deeply affirming of our Catholic faith.

Before the poem, a short bio on the poet written by Fr. Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.

Hopkins the Poet, Hopkins the Jesuit
The major, the finest, poets of Victorian England were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet Hopkins was almost unknown until 1918 when his book Poems was first published, as edited by his friend Robert Bridges, then Poet Laureate.

Born on 28 July 1844 in London suburb of Stratford, Essex, Gerard Hopkins grew up in the London’s Hampstead, among a comfortable family talented in word, art, and music. In 1863 he went up to Oxford where he did brilliantly and anguished over religion. With the counsel of John Henry Newman, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 21 October 1866, and after finishing Oxford in 1867 he taught for some months at Newman’s Oratory School near Birmingham.

Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus on 7 September 1868, and did his novitiate in London and his philosophy in Lancashire. After a year of teaching in the Jesuit Juniorate, he began theology at St. Beuno’s College in beautiful North Wales where, in the winter 1875-76, he flashed into poetic splendor with the long, great ode “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” His annus mirabilis as a poet was 1877, the year of his ordination, when he wrote eleven sonnets including “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” “As Kingfishers catch fire,” “Spring,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” and “Hurrahing in Harvest.”

In October Hopkins left Wales, his “Mother of Muses,” to teach and minister variously in Derbyshire, London, Oxford, Bedford Leigh, Liverpool, Glasgow, and (after tertainship) Stonyhurst College. In these middle years Hopkins wrote fine prose sermons and such excellent poems as “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” “Henry Purcell,” “Felix Randal,” and the poignant, wonderful “Spring and Fall.”

In 1884 Hopkins went to Dublin as Professor of Greek at University College and examiner in the Royal Univeristy. But on Stephen’s Green his chronic depression was magnified by bad eyesight, political irritation, spiritual desolation, and exhaustion from grading hundreds of examination papers.

In 1885-86 he wrote seven sonnets, the “Terrible Sonnets” or “Dark Sonnets,” which scream with pain amid technical perfection. But other poems express patience, even jubiliant hope in Christ, though his final poem describes a “winter world ” in which his “sweet fire” of poetic inspiration has waned. A few weeks later, on 8 June 1889, he died, a victim of typhoid fever.

Hopkins’ poems, first published in 1918, grew into fame after the second edition of 1930. Hailed as experimental and strikingly modern, they display rich music, novel rhythms, clustered words, craggy strength, and poetic power. Later, Hopkins had distinguished followers: notably such important modern poets W.H.Auden, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, David Jones, and Dylan Thomas.

The Lantern Out of Doors
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night
That interests our eyes And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
there, eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind,
Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast, last friend.

We think we love, but how slow and lukewarm our hearts are! How fortunate that salvation depends not on our love, but on God’s. Hopkins seems to have been as naturally curious about other people as anyone alive, but he is honest about how far this love of neighbor takes him: not far.

Many a man would not travel with the lantern carrier to the end of the first stanza. But we are each of us that lantern carrier, traveling the darkness alone. And more: we are that darkness, too. For the physical or intellectual beauty of a man has to fight its way to us: it has to “rain” “rich beams” “against our much-thick and marsh air.” Then we notice him, we of the dismal marsh: a beautiful man with a lantern, going somewhere.

Where does he go? The way of all flesh. He fades into death or, what serves as well for the speaker, into distance. With that, the speaker loses all interest. The metaphor is financial as well as psychological. Death or distance buys up everything we have invested, and then “out of sight is out of mind.” Thus Hopkins says, with sadness, that even friendship is little more than the flickering interest kindled in us by a lantern swinging in the hand of a night traveler.

No, we do not know love from ourselves. That is the affront Christianity delivers to the sentimentalists who divorce the dignity of man from God. The sentimentalist will make a god out of love; Christianity asserts that you do not even know what love is unless in some fashion you know God, for it is God who is love, the Creator and no other. He chose us that we might choose him. We do not say he is our friend, deriving the image by analogy from human friendship. Rather we say that all human friendship is the far and shadowy reflection of God’s true love for us.

For here in a world of night foundered wayfarers, there is yet one who seeks us out. We may “wind our eye after” someone in whom we are interested, but we do not follow. Christ follows. Moving among us mind-misted people of the marsh, who half forget even as we begin to love, is one who not only remembers, but who loves and amends what he sees.

We think we enjoy fellowship, says Hopkins, but that is but an interruption of our solitude. Yet in the same solitude, unseen by us and unsuspected, walks Christ. His interest does not flag, because His is the creature, as His are the winnings. He buys us back from death and distance; He loses, so to speak, that He may win. He alone is our “ransom” and “rescue.” In the beginning, now, and evermore, Christ is ours before we know we are His, closer to us than we are to ourselves, our “first, fast, last friend.”

Posted in Anthony Esolen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poetry | Tagged Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hopkins Bio | 2 Comments »

Robert Browning and the Irony of Humility

July 6, 2010

Robert Browning

Anthony Esolen uses Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book here to demonstrate how the richest irony presupposes truth and order. In his book Ironies of Faith he also shows how irony is used by Shakespeare, Herbert, Dickens and Gerard Manley Hopkins to reveal the mysteries of Christian faith.

*************************************************************

Before I define what irony is, let us examine what habits of mind are necessary for understanding so subtle a feature of language. Those habits are all the more necessary as the language of Christendom grows more distant and the culture more foreign.

Cleverness is not the answer. I would like to illustrate why by turning to a masterpiece of Christian poetry. Robert Browning wrote his longest and most difficult work, The Ring and the Book, precisely to show human beings failing to interpret correctly the actions and motives of one another. They fail not because they are dim-witted, but because their moral compromises limit their vision. Pride — and its concomitant assumption that everyone must be just like oneself, only not quite so intelligent or strong-willed — is the problem.

Browning derives his plot from the account of a notorious series of trials in late-seventeenth-century Rome. Violante, a childless wife, finds a woman of the streets who has recently given birth to a girl. She pays her for the baby and passes it off to her husband Pietro as their own. They christen her Pompilia , and together they live well enough for people with no hereditary title. ‘Worried that the secret of the birth will come out, Violante seeks to marry Pompilia away as soon as she can to someone with the title they lack. She finds one Guido, an Aretine and hanger-on at the cardinal’s court, no priest but enough of a cleric to claim ecclesiastical privilege. He is a short, middle-aged, cowardly, ugly, embittered, and poverty-stricken aristocrat. The marriage is a hugger-mugger affair, Pietro not even present. Guido expects a large dowry; Pietro imagines the wealth of Guido’s ancestral home. When that castle in Arezzo proves dilapidated and cold, and when Guido treats the parents with brute tyranny, they flee to their old home in Rome, leaving Pompilia behind.

There she bides, patient and unhappy, subjected to Guido’s tyrannical whims and to the obscenity of his brother, a canon of the church. When the parents suddenly turn about and attack their attacker, testifying that Pompilia was not their daughter (and that therefore Guido was not entitled to her dowry), Guido counters by attempting to tar her as an adulteress. Fic uses maids and “friends” to try to press Pompilia into compromising herself with a local priest, the dashing Giuseppe Caponsacchi. He goes so far as to compel her to “write” letters at his instruction: he holds her hand and forces the pen along, as she can neither read nor write, nor does she know the content of what he has her compose. Caponsacchi, however, who has never spoken with or met Pompilia but only looked upon her sad, strange beauty once and from afar, sees through the ruse and resists.

Pompilia entreats first the governor of Arezzo, then the archbishop, while weeping like a child, pleading to he rescued from the evil that threatens her, body and soul. But they are worldly men and cronies of her husband. They know better. They wink at the wickedness and tell her to go home. They have no ears to hear.

At that, Pompilia turns to her last hope. She has never spoken to Caponsacchi. By all rights she should know nothing about him. But she does know. She has looked into his eyes once and seen — her knight.

Browning dares the reader to play the archbishop or the governor, to smile and shake his head and say that such “knowledge” is for fairy tales and not for real life (whatever that is). But a true man is what Pompilia sees. She manages to send him a plea to come take her away. After some days of hesitation, for he knows that no one will understand, and that he is about to destroy the churchly career his superiors have chiseled out for him, Caponsacchi submits to the promptings of a holy love. He sweeps her away to Rome. Just before they arrive, they are overtaken by Guido and his henchmen — Pompilia sleeping in a bedroom in a wayside inn, the priest watching over her.

So incriminating are the appearances that Guido might have slain her on the spot and been pardoned. But he is a coward; the priest raises a sword to defend Pompilia, and when the henchmen pinion his arms, the girl herself seizes a sword and raises it against Guido. At this point he retreats and decides to take legal action. The trial of charge and countercharge ends in stalemate: Guido is allowed to keep the dowry, Caponsacchi is removed to a retreat house, and Pompilia is committed to a convent outside Rome. When, a few weeks later, she is found pregnant, the court mercifully remands her to the home of her mother and father, under provision that she not leave. There she gives birth to a son, whom she names Cactano, after a recently canonized saint, for as she sees it, Guido has no part in this son — only heaven.

Infuriated by the perceived insult to his honor, Guido steals to Rome during Christmastide and knocks at the door where the family dwells. When they ask who is there, he utters the magic word, “Caponsacchi.” When Violante opens, he slashes her in the face. He and his fellows cut her mother and father to pieces, and give Pompilia what should have been a dozen death-stabs. But Pompilia does not die, not yet. Guido is discovered fleeing back to Arezzo and is brought to Rome to stand trial. Pompilia gives her full testimony from the bed where she will soon die — the testimony of a young woman in love, chaste love, with her champion, the gallant Caponsacchi The priest and Guido testify and Browning provides us with the “opinions” of the half of Rome that is for Guido, and of the half of Rome that is for Pompilia, and also of what he calls “Tertium Quid,” the sophisticates who see more keenly, so they think, than does either side of the rabble. We are likewise presented with the trial preparations of the prosecutor (the grandly titled Fisc) and the defense attorney — worldly men, not exactly had and not exactly good, full of themselves, and cutting a partly comic figure in their pretending to know everything.

When Guido is convicted and sentenced to death, he appeals to the pope, Innocent XII, himself old and dying. The pope responds that while, everyone might have expected Guido to long outlive him, as it is, in all his weakness the pope will live another day, while Guido shall not see the sun set again.

What Browning shows us in this tangle of purity and wickedness, and half-virtue and shadowy half-vice, is not only how difficult it is for us to “read.” That is what critics of Browning put forth: he is the poet, they say, of multiple points of view, himself coolly distant from judgment. We are granted the irony of seeing that the same events might he viewed in a variety of ways, with all kinds of arguments to justify them.

But the irony Browning relishes is deeper than that. The spokesman for “Tertium Quid,” a cool aristocratic skeptic, dismisses Pompilia’s claim of innocence as incredible and dismisses Guido as a coward who in part got what he deserved. And he expects the pope to do the “reasonable” thing, to commute the sentence. Tertium might well be a modern trader in literary criticism. He is well-heeled, smiling at outrageous claims either to surpassing virtue or to surpassing wickedness. He pretends to a careful examination of evidence, hut actually he works for self-advancement, whispering into the ear of his lordly master just what his lordly master is to believe of all the brouhaha. Yet the irony cuts against him and against all skeptics: for Browning reveals that Pompilia was not only innocent but miraculously pure. We who cannot believe are the ultimate objects of his admonition.

Pompilia is also the most acute “critic” in the poem — she, barely seventeen, who can neither read nor write, and who was married, as she says, “hardly knowing what a husband meant” (7.410). What makes her wise? Browning identifies it unhesitatingly. Pompilia’s humility enables her to move outside herself, to imagine what it might be like to be someone else. So she is the only one in the poem, aside from the similarly humble pope, to excuse the whore who sold her away:

Well, since she had to hear this brand — let me!
The rather do I understand her now, —
From my experience of what hate calls love, –
Much love might be in what their love called hate. (874-77)

So too she reads the virtue in Caponsacchi, though he — trained for worldly expectations, and having priested it so far among the gentry — struggles honestly and abashedly to find the same. And, ironically, she knows that others will “know” better:

So we are made, such difference in minds,
Such difference too in eyes that see the minds!
That man, yon misinterpret and misprise –
The glory of his nature, I had thought,
Shot itself out in white light, blazed the truth
Through every atom of his act with me:
Yet where I point you, through the crystal shine,
Purity in quintessence, one clew-drop,
You all descry a spider in the midst.

One says, “The head of it is plain to see,”
And one, “They are the Feet by which I judge,”
All say, those Films were spun by nothing else.” (7.918-29)

We judge by what we see, and unless we love deeply, we see ourselves. So will a cheat watch the fingers of everyone else at the card table.

What do the Romans make of the evidence? Most often, Browning shows, evidence is a motley’ thing, patched up with fads, haff—heard news, clichés, smug assumptions about how all people must be, self—satisfaction, and, in the case of the, professional Fisc and his hilariously slick—talking opponent Lord Hyacinth of the Archangels, the false alleys provided by a little learning and a heap of rhetorical trash. Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and the pope also have to weigh evidence; but humility opens their hearts to insight. Here is Pompilia, trying to express a joy in bearing a child who xviii never know his mother, but who will probably hear the lies:

Who is it makes the soft gold hair turn black,
And sets the tongue, might lie so long at rest,
Trying to talk? Let us leave God alone!
Why should I doubt tie will explain in time
What I feel non’, but fail to find the words? (7.1756—61)

Her words profess incapacity — and speak to the heart. God, who unties the tongue of the infant, will reveal to Gaetano the truth. An innocent child will hear when all the world is deaf.

The pope hears and understands. We meet him in his chambers, pondering the mystery of evil, knowing he is not long for this world, and wondering what fruit of all his shepherding he will have to show in the end. The world regards him as powerful, but the world is wrong. Consider with what humility and love he regards Pompilia:

Everywhere
I see in the world the intellect of man,
That sword, the energy his subtle spear,
The knowledge which defends him like a shield— Everywhere; hut they make not up, I think,
‘the marvel of a soul like thine, earth’s flower
She holds up to the softened gaze of God!
It was not given Pompilia to know much,
Speak much, to write a book, to move mankind,
Be memorized by who records my time.
Yet if in purity and patience, if
In faith held fast despite the plucking fiend,
Safe like the signet-stone with the new name
‘That saints are known by, — if in right returned
For wrong, most pardon for worst injury,
If there be any virtue, any praise,–
Then will this woman—child have proved — who knows? –
Just the one prize vouchsafed unworthy me. (10.1019-29)

No one sees what is really going on, says the pope; no one can read the narrative of the world from God’s point of view. Yet he sees, humbly enough, that the finest harvest from his priesthood may be just this one poor soul, the illiterate Pompilia, a “woman-child,” of whose virtue and sanctity Innocent considers himself unworthy. She never wrote a book, or even her own name. The papal historian will not remember her. But the Recording Angel will. Does that assertion strike the reader as credulous sentiment? Beware. The problem with skeptics and cynics is not only the faith they lose, but the faith they gain. It is what the pope identifies as Guido’s telltale mark, “That he believes in just the vile of life” (10511). On the night before his execution Guido can “see through,” with what he thinks is ironical acuity, the façade of the pope’s goodness:

The Pope moreover, this old Innocent,
Being so meek and mild and merciful,
So fond o’ the poor and so fatigued of earth,
So . . . fifty thousand plagues in deepest hell (11.55-58)

So the spokesman for “Half-Rome” can also “know” what a curly-haired young priest is all about, “Apollos turned Apollo” (2.794)1 He’ll not “prejudge the case” (68o), he insists, yet so far does prejudge it that he pieces events out with his own sly imagination, picturing the contretemps between Pompilia and Caponsacchi, things that never happened at all: “Now he pressed close till his foot touched her gown; / His hand touched hers” (803-4).

If we must he blind, would it not he better to be dazzled by a piercing light? In this way Pompilia is blind, and therefore she sees — and it is actually there — the virtue of a man, Caponsacchi, who is yet to become the man she imagines. If she is blind to the faults of a less-than-chastely spent youth, it is because she is dazzled by the greater light. These are her dying words, spoken as if even now Caponsacchi were her saving knight, and not she his saving damsel.:

So, let him wait Gods instant men call years
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty! Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise (7.1841-45)

Criticism and Gossip
THE RING AND THE BOOK is a storm of irony, currents and crosscurrents of knowledge and ignorance surefire plans foiled, certitudes that wither awry, and un-possibilities come to pass. To understand the irony we must adopt the stance of Socrates, who in humility, perhaps in mock humility, insisted that he was the only man in Athens who did not know anything. For irony, as we shall see, has to do with what people think they know, or what they think they can expect. All criticism that does not begin in the humility of wonder must end up as the one or the other half of Rome: when correct, correct by happenstance; pretending to analyze, yet studying nothing with that patience that invites us to learn from what is beyond us; mired in gossip, and often gossip with a clear incentive in money or prestige.

From gossip we learn nothing new. If Mrs. Jones flirts with the delivery man, we may find it shameless; but we know nothing more from our self-pleasing gossip than that she has done what we would not (usually, let it be noted, because we happen not to be tempted that way). But of what it might he like to be Mrs. Jones, or the poor workman, nothing. Gossip preempts, then deadens, our half-hearted attempts to enter imaginatively into the life of another. If we could glimpse the world for a moment through something distantly like Mrs. Jones’s eyes, our understanding of her action might be very different. We might then be ready to invite her to tea, or to lock her up. There is no logical reason to suppose that our imaginative entry into her world must make us think the better of her; the pope saw into Guido, and found the lizards of our lower nature. Consider how uncomfortable you would feel if your admirers could enter your thoughts for the twinkling of an eye.

But perhaps I have miscast the action. Most of us are not endowed with what Keats called “negative capability,” the imaginative power whereby we empty ourselves and assume the minds and souls of others. If we are to work our imaginations, we must love or hate. If we hate, we will, from our position of moral superiority, see our own vices smiling back at us, as Browning’s Romans do, the vices we would possess if we were like the people we judge; but, thanks he to almighty God or to a sound education, we are not like them. He whom I imagine is no better than I am. So the Fisc, to win his case for Pompilia, will not concede that she had any love affair with the priest, nor that she committed adultery (unless the priest took his importunate way with her while she slept). Fine; but see how his “defense” patronizes her supposed weakness of character and turns her into a common flirt:

And what is beauty’s sore concomitant,
Nay intimate essential character,
But melting wiles, deliciousest deceits,
The whole redoubted armoury of love? (9.229-32)

No beauty that reflects the grandeur of God, this. The Fisc’s vision is imaginative indeed, drearily so, and many “truths” of the petty and misleading variety can be derived from such a thing. We can happily note the small wickedness of others, and miss the darkness that is our own.

The truly educative act of imagination is spurred by love: that turn of the mind towards the fellow sufferer on his way to the grave. It may he tinged with pity; it need not be, and may be better if not. I turn towards him because he means something to me — he is as I am. Such an act of imagination begins in humility. I am no better than is he whom I imagine. I may be worse. In any case, I will be more apt to aspire to assume his virtues than to assign to him my vices. My understanding of him will thus be far subtler and far richer, far more fulfilling than if were moved by hate. For virtue is to vice as manliness is to machismo, as womanliness is to effeminacy, as any full-blooded reality is to its caricature. In this vision, by an act of humble imagination, I recast my inner world in the image of someone else.

Unfortunately, much of what passes for criticism is little better than idle gossip. Its initial spur is often not honor for the work of genius at hand, but the desire to say something clever. That is not fertile ground for love; thus, neither for the imagination. Yet the result can be impressive in a perverse way. Milton’s Satan, hating Eve, saw his own vices potentially in her, and thus could squat like a toad at her ear, imaginatively entering her and attempting to pollute her. Nor could Nietzsche have misunderstood the Bible so well had he not hated it so thoroughly.

With far less of fallen glory the same can be said of many a critic of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. Their words all but confess that they dislike the deepest beliefs these men either possessed or struggled vainly not to possess. Having delivered beauty, sex, love, sport, religion, education, youth, age family life, and even the care of newborns to an obsession with politics, the modem critic sees his own political face everywhere. Lorenzo and Jessica in the Merchant of Venice sing their rallying love-hymn to the night; the critic sees tiresome struggle for power. The traitor Macbeth is beheaded; the critic snickers and says that Malcolm will probably prove worse.

Emptying Ourselves of What We Think We Know
Is it possible to come to wrong conclusions on every important point? If our criticism were subject to random chance, we would be bound to get many things right. But the more intelligent we are, the more consistent our conclusions will be, and if we start from false principles, the more consistently wrong they will be. Take for example a young critic of medieval and Renaissance English poetry. Suppose that he is thoroughly conversant with the language of those old texts. Suppose also that he knows the history of England — and not just the wool trade or the tin mines or other now fashionable niches of economic history. Grant that he knows it well enough to place the poetry in its historic context, the better to understand what the words on the page mean. Grant him the rare knack for catching the well-turned phrase or the well-hewn line. Such a critic must still fail if he does not also understand what it might he like to believe in the Christianity which was the shared faith of Chaucer, Spenser. Donne, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, and Milton.

Can such an understanding he attained? If not, why read books? I am a great lover of the poet Lucretius, though he is a materialist and, for all practical purposes, an atheist, while I am not. When I read Lucretius, the skeptic, the satirist, and the scientist in me can relish his attack upon superstition. So could the ancient Christian polemicist Lactantius, who enjoyed the poetry and then used it as a sabre against paganism. But Lactantius could hardly have done so had he not entered into the spirit of Lucretius.

For the sake of understanding materialist poetry, then, I become provisionally and temporarily a materialist. As C. S. Lewis says, what the critic requires is not so often a suspension of disbelief as a suspension of belief. It is too easy to respond that such self-transformation is an illusion. Of course we cannot leave our minds behind. The point is that our minds possess myriads of possibilities, usually dormant, inactive, unrealized. Good reading sets them in motion. For the sake of Lucretius’ great poetry I allow the materialist in me to take the stage and declaim. That Lucretius’ voice is still bound up with my own does not matter. It could not he otherwise; nor do I require it. All I require is that humbling release of what I am and what I believe now, surrendering to what I might have been or to what I might have believed had I been more like Lucretius. I say with Alyosha Karamazov, who tries to understand his brother Ivan, “I want to suffer too” (The Brothers Karamazov, 287). I surrender in imaginative love.

Now there is a catch to this surrender. The farther you are from the faith of the author you are reading, the more readily you will acknowledge the need to surrender yourself, but the more difficult it will be. The closer you are to the author’s faith, the easier the surrender would be, could you ever he prevailed upon to see the need. In the case of Christianity, it is as Chestcrton puts it. You had better be in the faith completely or out of it completely. The worst position, if you want to understand it, is to be partly in and partly out, or to have a passing, culturally based familiarity with its surface. You are neither so familiar with it as to probe its depths, nor is it so strange that you are moved to approach it with care. You take the attitude of Petronius, or of “Tertium Quid,” You’ve seen it all before.

Apply a two-dimensional Christianity to the mature allegories of Spenser and Milton, and at once you will discover discrepancies and incoherence. Why don’t Spenser’s Guyon and the Palmer kill the witch Acrasia? Are they still tempted by her Bower of Bliss? Why do the devils in hell discourse on philosophy? Has Milton rejected his classical education? Are faith and reason to part forever? Many such false dilemmas arise because the critic has failed to understand the subtleties of the Christian faith.

And Christianity is the subtlest of faiths, yet of a wondrous simplicity “I thank thee,” Jesus observes with biting irony, “O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes” (Matthew 1:25) The kernel of the faith can he grasped by a child. We are sinners. The Lord who created us not to sin sent his obedient Son to die for us. That Son rose from the dead to sit at the right hand of the Father. We may join him in heaven if we have faith.

Christianity is the opposite of a mystery religion: the creed is short and openly professed. Yet its simple tenets belie unfathomable depth. “Matter is a form of energy.” We all know this Einsteinian truth — a child could be taught it, and, to the limits of his capacity, really believe it. But what does it imply? What does it mean? “There are three persons in one God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Again, a child could learn the formula, but what does the Trinity imply? The wise and prudent are struck dumb. A religious anthropologist may chatter about the symbolism of three, and how all cultures attach a mystical importance to it, and on and learnedly on. But to the clean of heart it may reveal the mystery of existence itself. So Dante implies in his invocation to God:

O Light that dwell within thyself alone,
who alone know thyself, are known, and smile
with Love upon the Knowing and the Known.
(Paradise, 33.124-26)

Merely to exist, to be a knowable object, is to have been made by the God of knowledge who knows and is known, whose being is love, and who has loved into being all things that have been, are, and are to come.

Pride is blinding; the moral problem becomes epistemological. Suppose we assume that the lanky fellow across the table is a dullard. When he remarks of someone else’s immorality, “For them as likes that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they likes,” we will find our prejudice confirmed. The statement is tautological arid evasive. But if we knew that the man was Lincoln, we might see the wry condemnation hiding beneath the hayseed humor. We will know, when he assumes the self-deprecatory air, not to take him at his word. When we later discover the same man condemning that behavior, we will know that it is not he who is inconsistent, but we who underestimated him.

Irony and Knowledge
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE to do with irony and faith? Much, if we consider what irony is. Until fairly recently, most writers on irony have defined it as speech that means something other than (or opposite to) what is literally said. The problem with this definition is that it is at once too narrow, too broad, and beside the point. Liars mean other than what they say, but the lie is not in itself ironic; and you may, with irony, mean exactly what you say, but in a way that your audience (or perhaps a putative audience, more foolish than those who are actually listening to you) will not understand. The definition is beside the point, since moments of dramatic irony, or what some have called “irony of event,” may not involve speech at all, but only strange turns of fate.

Contemporary literary theorists have attempted to distill the essence of irony, that which underlies both the winking assertions of ignorance made by Socrates, and concatenations of events that seem (but only seem) to suggest design, or that demolish any sense of design. Irony, they assert, is a universal solvent: no theology or epistemology can contain it. It dissolves— — “deconstructs” every assertion of absolute truth

The trouble with this view of irony now prevalent in the academy is that it enshrines one sort of ironic statement or event and ignores the rest. Worse, the kind of irony it enshrines is destructive, and the first thing it destroys is irony. If there is no objective truth — if irony must undermine and destabilize — then, once we have noticed the fact, there is no more point for irony, just as it makes no sense for the skeptic to embark on a quest for knowledge, when there is no knowledge to be had. How, after all, does one then proceed. by irony, to undermine the “truth” that every truth can be undermined? If all speech is inherently slippery, why trouble oneself with the subtleties of irony? Why pour oil on a sheet of ice?

But in fact, irony commonly is used to exalt rather than undermine. It can stun us with wonder and raise our eyes to behold a truth we had missed. All kinds of unsuspected truths, particularly those combined in paradoxes await our attention, but we are too dulled by habit to notice. Then irony — verbal or dramatic — awakes us. Consider:

1. A bystander watches as a professor, holding forth to his suffering companion on the epistemological subtleties of irony, steps dangerously near a banana peel.

2. In King Lear, Gloucester tries to refuse the help of his son Edgar, whom he cannot see and does not know: “I have no way and therefore want no eyes; / I stumbled When I saw,” (4.1. 18-19)

3. In II Henry IV (and apparently in real life, too) the usurper King Henry, who had wanted to atone for his sin by fighting in the Crusades, removes to die in a room called “Jerusalem,” noting that it had been foretold to him that he would die in Jerusalem. (4.5 236-40)

4. St. Paul sings a hymn of Christ’s Atonement:

Let this mind be in you, which Was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that even tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father
(Philemon 2:5-11)

5. In Moliere’s comedy Tartuffe, the jealous husband Orgon squirms under the table where his wife Elmire has put him, listening as his protégé Tartuffe, the one man he is amazingly not suspicious of attempts to seduce her. (4.5)

What do the cases have in common? The first verges upon slapstick; the second involves a lesson learned in an unusual way; the third hinges upon a play on words; the fourth is a theological reversal of expectations; the fifth is a piece of staged ignorance. Each involves a problem of knowing. The irony lies in a stark clash between what a character thinks he knows and what he really knows. This clash is staged to let the reader or the audience in on the secret. We are, then, not merely watching ignorance, but ignorance unaware of itself and about to learn better, or at least about to teach by way of its own incorrigibility. The irony reveals, with a kind of electric shock, order where randomness was expected, or complexity and subtlety where simplicity was expected.

Each case involves a staged clash of incompatible levels of knowledge:

1. The professor thinks he knows a lot about the subtlest things, but misses the humble and material banana at his feet. The bystander probably knows a great deal less about irony, but he does see the hazard and, if he possesses either a profound moral sensibility or none at all, will stand back to enjoy the tumble. The apparent intellectual hierarchy belies a richer order: the great intellect is not so wise. He “deserves” to slip, falling victim to the very thing, irony, about which he declaims so proudly. Had he known less about it, he might have looked to the sidewalk in time.

2. Only after Gloucester loses his eyes does he ‘see” how rashly and unjustly lie has treated his son Edgar. The irony, a reversal of expectations accompanied by a deepening knowledge, is richly theological as well. For there is an order at work, bringing about Gloucester’s sight through blindness, and his reconciliation with his son through suffering. The man before him is that wronged son, whom he has seen in disguise and taken for one Tom-a-Bedlam, the “poor, bare, forked animal” that “un-accommodated man” is (King Lear, 3.4. 105-106). Now it is the wronged Gloucester reduced to misery who requires assistance from Mad Tom. Gloucester does not yet understand what his “way” is, why he has been blinded and what he must suffer still. He says he has no way, yet his meeting with Edgar shows that a way has been designed for him nonetheless. He will walk towards a final, terrible resignation to his punishment and reconciliation with his son. And Edgar wii1 he his eyes — his spiritual guide — along this way.

3. We “know” that Henry might have died in any room or might have died falling from a horse on a holiday hunt. He had hoped to die in the Holy Land, and when he learns the name of the room, he finally sees the design and resigns himself to its justice. For us, that death feels right–better than if he had died a-crusading, better than if he had been hanged at the Tower of London. The usurper should not be granted a matyr’s death; better that he should he disappointed by his hope to expiate the crime. The place of his death reveals a more subtle order than either he or we had expected.

4. The chasm between human expectations and divine will has never been sung more powerfully. The prophet cries, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord” (Isaiah: 55:8), but here Saint Paul fleshes out that cry with specifics that seem impossible to hold simultaneously. If Christ is equal with God, why should He, or how can He, empty himself, making himself of no reputation? How can God become obedient to God, obedient unto the shameful death on a cross? How can submission exalt? For Christ is not exalted despite his humility but in it and through it. For the believer, then, Paul’s hymn reveals complexities in the notions of equality and hierarchy: because Christ was the Son of God, He set aside that equality, and in his obedience He is set above all things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. He is equal to the Father because he obeys.

5. This brilliant stage business shows dramatic irony at its purest. Of this double-plot no one, not even the audience, can see everything. Elmire knows she is chaste, but as she leads ‘Tartuffe on, to prove to her husband under the table what a fool he has been to trust the charlatan, she must worry lest her trick backfire and Tartuffe ravish her before Orgon manages to get out from under there. For she cannot see him, and cannot be sure that he will come to his senses even when he hears Tartuffe making love to her. Meanwhile Organ can only fry in imagination: he hears but cannot see the couple, and must restrain his wrath and jealousy long enough to let Tartuffe hang himself for certain. The audience, too, can see Tartuffe and Elmire, and so they know’ what Orgon must learn; but they cannot see Orgon, and must guess, from his awkward and frantic movements under the table, what must be going through his mind. Finally, there is Tartuffe, master trickster, steeped in ignorance, believing himself so clever yet missing so obvious a trick — for I do not think Orgon can remain as still as a chuchmouse!

It is, then, not the unexpectedness of a thing that produces irony—a violin flung at a man’s head is unexpected, but not ironic — nor is it ignorance that produces irony — after all, if he saw the violin he would duck. Irony arises, rather, from the ignorance of unseen or unexpected order (or, as it may happen, disorder), from the failure to note subtleties, or from seeing subtleties that are not there, especially when the ignorance and the failure are highlighted before observers are in a better position to see the truth. That is the sort of thing we feel as ironic. A violin flung at a man’s head is not ironic. A man missing a sharp as he tries to hum the Kreutzer sonata is not ironic. The same man botching Beethoven as the violin sails his way — now that is ironic.

Posted in Anthony Esolen, Book Recommendations, Definitions, Poetry | Tagged Anthony Esolen, Christian poetry, irony, Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book | Leave a Comment »

Drawing Closer To The Heart Of The Lord: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty

July 1, 2010

Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough...

This is not the first time I have introduced this poem on Paying Attention To The Sky, but I shall do it again to showcase Anthony Esolen’s prodigious talents of interpretation. I first studied the poem back in a lit class in college and counted syllables and stress, marveling at the intricacies of structure and form of the sonnet. Elsewhere I have related how this poem can easily become a prayer — a cool summer morning following several days in the nineties — you can memorize this and recite it on the way to bus stop. You’ll be surprised how many more counter, original, spare, strange things you’ll notice on the way to work.

“God is Love”
WE ARE USED TO hearing the biblical verse, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and nodding knowingly to ourselves. “Ah yes,” says the modern agnostic with a taste for religion. “I don’t know whether God exists, but I do know that if he does, then He is love. So I will try to live according to love.”

That’s better than nothing. But we are too familiar with the verse. We no longer hear its thundering challenge to the entire Greek philosophical system.

For if God is love and not necessity (since what is determined or compelled cannot be an act of love), then none of this universe need have been. Nor need it have been the way it is now. The belief that God creates from nothing, freely, is a logical consequence of believing that he creates from love.

But how can God love man? God needs nothing from man, not even man’s love. Christians believe that God already is a communion of three persons bound by love, each distinct, yet each fully God. Man knows a trace of the love that moves God, or that is God’s movement within himself: as he moves not from need, but from superabundance, from generosity one might even say from playfulness.

Man will cherish animals from which he derives nothing of use; he will potter about a flower garden for delight in the flowers; his heart will soar at the strains of music; he cheers at the sight of a big and boisterous; family. Unlike every other creature on earth, man needs what he does not need, and loves where he does not lack — and he feels that he loves more fully from his plenty and strength, from his fascination with life, and from his will-to-beauty, than from his sense of incompleteness and insufficiency. In those high-hearted moments, man is close to God.

In no classical author do we find the great Zeus, father of gods and men stooping to limn a blade of grass or smooth out a dewdrop. Such affairs would be relegated to some deity so low on the scale as to he nameless. But our God, who made even the creeping things that creep upon the earth, who cares for ostrich egg because the hen is too bird-brained to do it herself (Job 39:13), whose kingdom is as a mustard seed, and who decks the lilies of the field in such glory as would put to shame the tailors of Solomon, delights in works. He enjoys them, he calls them good, he loves them. And, to paraphrase Jesus, if God so loves the grass, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more does he love us, us of the hard hearts?

We might think such things beneath our notice, but the incomparably great God notices them. Small as they are, they provide for the attentive a powerful way to draw closer to the heart of the Lord (Paying Attention, don’t you see!!!). Such was the insight of the Victorian priest-poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The more unusual creature, the more it is peculiarly itself, the greater the delight. Consider this magnificent miniature sonnet on the beauty of all things great and small:

Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-color as brinded cow
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift slow sweet sour adazzle, dim,
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change
Praise him.

The bustling corral of things animate and inanimate defies category, exactly as Hopkins intends. No one really looks upon the sky and thinks of the splotches on a calico cow, probably because no one looks appreciatively enough at the sky and its cowishness, or at a cow and its reflection of a weathering sky. That odd second line brings heaven to earth with a delightful bump. The point, after all, is that heaven can be seen where no one sees it, especially upon the peculiarly beautiful things of earth — on the rosy stipples of a freshwater trout, for instance.

Not only there, though; Hopkins would never settle for being a dreamy little nature poet, a devotee of the pretty, and therefore a pretender of love. For how can you love weeds and thrush’s eggs and not love man?

If God delights in the making of chestnuts, the more does he delight in waking beings who can delight also in his making of chestnuts and everything else. Therefore, man, his labor and his ingenuity, must also be praised; for the quirky beauty of man’s own creativity, as evinced in sickles and ice-tongs and flails and adzes, reflects its source, the beauty of God. Fishing lures, wrenches, lathes, ropes and pulleys, pails of tar, seedbags and harrows, all in “trim,” in order, share in Hopkins’s hymn to muscular love.

But in the second stanza the poet leaves these particular things behind and turns his attention to their typical qualities — there is not one specific noun for the rest of the poem. That is because he wants to reverse the kaleidoscope: we shift our sights from the ever-changing and exuberantly various individual things to the never-changing God who made them.

Now the ironic thing about this shift is not just that a never-changing God would create things which, since they are not God, would be subject to change. It is rather that God would delight in having his never-changing beauty pieced out among, refracted through, so many forms and so odd. Yet it is no derogation of his one and eternal beauty that it should be made manifest in the swift and the slow, the dazzling and the dim. For he does not simply make, as an artificer. He “fathers-forth.”

We should meditate upon that phrase. It suggests neither the pantheism latent in earth-mother cults (whose goddess is identified with the mindless fecundity of nature), nor the fatalism latent in rationalistic theologies such as deism. God “fathers-forth”– the begetter and maker of what he did not have to beget or make. He has loved all things into being.

Begetting them, he is to be found by means of them, whether the spiraling galaxy or the conch on the shore. Man’s proper response, then, after he has paid his loving attention to trout and finches and things that show forth that breathless list of adjectives, is a quiet movement of the heart: “Praise him.” Two simple words, for a simple act that does not change: praising the Maker of change, who dwells in eternal light.

Posted in Aesthetics, Anthony Esolen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poetry, Prayer | Tagged Anthony Esolen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Glory be to God for dappled things, God creates from nothing, God is Love, Pied Beauty | 1 Comment »

Reasonable Damnation, Unreasonable Love: Herbert’s The Temple

June 29, 2010

George Herbert

Anthony Esolen shares a reading of George Herbert’s poem “Love”, the final poem of Herbert’s volume, the Temple. In both biographies of Simone Weil (here and here) you will see the poem noted as one of her “anthem poems,” by which I mean it was a poem she lived her life by.

One of the problems of poetry is that it requires a certain discipline to read. Unless you spend time with a poem, constantly returning and re-reading, or getting a chance to listen to a poet perform the piece, the meaning may elude you. In this case we have a professional scholar sharing his interpretation of the poem. More than an interpreter, Esolen is a true blessing.

LET US BEGIN WITH the final poem of Herbert’s volume The Temple, as it will show us most clearly the love for which we have been made. In “Love (III) the soul is the “reasonable” party, and Love — Christ — is the gentle but firm ironist. The poem is a dramatic dialogue between the mere man, who is right about everything, and Christ, who makes everything right. Here is the poem in its entirety. (Here and throughout, I have modernized Herbert’s orthography,

Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back,
     Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
     From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
     If I lacked anything.

“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here.”
     Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
     I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling made reply,
     “Who made the eyes, but I?”

“Truth, lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
     Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
     “My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down;’ says Love, “and taste my meat.”
     So I did sit and eat.

“Love bade me welcome,” says the speaker, and we should not be too hasty to personify this love. Christ bids him welcome, but as an act of love because there is no reason why the soul should be welcome. In truth, he is not well come,” and he knows it: “Yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” That soul may be timid, but its timidity is rational. It fears the center, as a poorly dressed man would fear the spotlight. It is afraid to be loved, and knows it should not be loved. How much more fitting it would be if the soul could slink away to the justice it deserves.

Fitting indeed, for this soul flatly cites Scripture to its own damnation: it is “guilty of dust and sin.” Into this one strange phrase (how is one guilty of “dust”?), Herbert compacts a theology of justice. He alludes to Christ’s parable comparing the kingdom of God to a wedding feast that a king gave for his son. When one of the guests arrived unsuitably dressed for the occasion, the king ordered him bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness, where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 22 11-13).

To be “guilty of dust” is to be mortal, to suffer death, the wages of sin. The “dust” lies on the clothing of the arriving soul — but it is also what the body is made of, and what the body must return to is a consequence of sin. No sin, no offending dust; but there is sin, and so there is death, and so there is also the dust of a deeper mortality that soils the garments we bring when we meet our Maker. We cannot fit ourselves for the wedding feast, just as we cannot bring ourselves to life. We are all that poor man in the parable.

The soul in Herbert’s poem would courteously spare the king the trouble. It sees itself in that shameful light, and is eager to fall away from Love and embrace the darkness. The love of God is more terrifying than his justice for in love his essence shines forth more radiantly. That love exalts dust. It raises the tattered mortality we are robed with, and it forgives sin when there is no reason in our natures or in the world why it should do either.

The trans-logic of God’s forgiveness is celebrated by Herbert’s daring reversal of the parable from Scripture. The soul flings Christ’s own words back at him, to prove why he should not show mercy. But, in seeming to violate his own just law, Love fulfills his just mercy, giving us what we cannot have expected, and thus, from Love, what is above all to be hoped.

Love is “quick-eyed” — as a solicitous bridegroom orchestrating the celebration, careful to observe any hesitation or discomfort among his guests. The lord of the universe, who spies the secrets of man’s inmost heart, is here a cheerful, tactful young man, the prime servant for the feast held in his honor. That homely reduction is part of the message of the Incarnation and the Atonement: who would have thought that God could or would become man?

The rational soul resists the invitation. No surprise our rational souls, in action, are but bundles of pride laced up with a thread or two of logic. We do not deserve the invitation, we say, when secretly we feel that the invitation offends high sense of our tragic insignificance. But if the soul will not move to the center, the center will move to it. So the young groom, the host of the feast, Creator of life and light, asks the stunningly understated question “Do you lack anything?”

How can such a question be answered? Love asks it, as if he were asking the newly arrived guest whether he needed a trifle, like a place to leave his coat, or a drink, or a chair. Yet, as with the phrase “guilty of dust and sin,” the question implies a theology. In the presence of its redeemer the soul lacks everything. Christ’s question is both invitation and gentle accusation. The speaker understands it so. What does he lack? Knowing that he falls infinitely short of the glory of God, and infinitely short of the love he owes to the Lord who has loved him, he fashions a reply which he thinks leaves no room for exception. “A guest… worthy to be here.”

The lack is not in what the speaker has, but in what he is. That lack is total. He himself, what God meant him to be, is lacking, is absent, all that remains is for the sinner he has become to make himself absent too. The speaker knows he lacks the slightest quality to merit the host’s attention. But this host is called Love, and that literally makes a difference “Love said, ‘You shall be He.”

The sentence is not to be construed rhetorically. The soul will not simply be considered or named a worthy guest, but will actually be one, by the creative fiat of Love. What in an earthly host would be a polite pretense (“You are worthy after all.”) or a jocular exercise of authority (“You are worthy, because it is my day, and I say you are”) is here a command and an act. Love supplies the lack by making the speaker a worthy guest, drawing good not only out of evil but out of nothingness.

Still the soul holds to its view of the fitness of things: “I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, / I cannot look on thee.” Why should it be loved? It is not natural, for the soul has been unkind,” a perversion of its “kind” or “nature,” a frustration of its innate purpose. It is not just, for the soul has scorned or misused the free gifts of God, ungratefully returning evil for good. The last thing ingratitude merits is another free gift, another grace, the last thing kindness can arouse is the warmth of natural affection.

Yet the soul, overcome with shame and love, utters its truest and least calculated phrase: ‘“Ah my dear.” In this phrase the speaker acknowledges the transcendent worth of Christ he is ‘dear’ or “priceless,” the one whose precious blood redeemed or bought us back from the bondage of sin. He also confesses that he longs for Christ as the only object of his deepest and truest love. Yet he uses the phrase as a way of excusing himself from love!

One endearing irony of Christian love is that it should be at once so modest and so bold, the bride in the Song of Songs who, drunk with love, dares to ask her Creator and Redeemer for a kiss. With the exclamation ah my dear the soul wavers in its small rationality. It moves uncertainly between the shy bravery of true love and the proud diffidence of rejection. The soul is that of a sinner, caught between desire and disdain; wanting much to be loved, and wanting much not to be loved. On its own it can do nothing. All is up to Love, who takes the speaker’s hand. The gesture is firmly paternal and gently respectful of the poor sinner’s dignity. Then Love fixes the speaker’s gaze with a smile, and, not scorning to use the lowly pun as an instrument of grace, asserts his sovereignty over all things material and spiritual “Who made the eyes but I?”

At this, the speaker’s last hold upon his paltry dignity slips away. A note of desperation enters his abrupt reply “‘Truth, Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame / Go where it doth deserve.” Herbert touches upon a psychological profundity that only the strongest believers or the strongest resisters perceive: most sou1s would find it more comfortable not to be saved. The speaker does not plead justice, though that is the logical content of his plea. He begs for mercy, the mercy of mere justice! He argues for justice as a strange form of compassion. “Look at how filthy I am;” says the embarrassed beloved. “Please, please let me leave this place I deserve no better” But the soul leans upon a straw, in calling the name of justice for mercy’s sake, and instead is reminded that the claims of justice have already been mercifully fulfilled “And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”

Of course the soul knows, to its anguish. Beaten from his last ward, the speaker capitulates, but upon condition: “My dear, then I will serve.” I will agree to my salvation, so long as I retain the appropriate judgment attendant upon my sin. Since I do not deserve to be here, if I must be here, let me be saved only somewhat. Let me, in a dainty reserve that looks like humility, serve the others, and thus not be so searing a focus of Love. Yet even that will not do. For Love is jealous, and will have all. “You must sit down; says Love, and taste my meat.” You must submit to your exaltation. Emptying yourself of all self-centered judgments of worthiness or unworthiness, you must allow yourself to be the center of Love’s attention. You, Simon Peter, must have your feet washed. You must be served by Love.

It is fitting that Herbert should recall that moment at the Last Supper. In “Love” we have the servant, Christ, present at his wedding feast, at which he himself, the Paschal sacrifice, is served. As Love by his own power supplies the :worthy guest, so Love himself is the feast he serves. Christ’s giving of himself is not figurative. When Love insists that the soul taste “his meat,” he means not the food that belongs to him, but the food he is: “For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (John 6:55).

Love invites the soul to taste of Love, to be nourished by it, to be refreshed and re-created by it. So it is both true and misleading to say that the salvation of an individual soul is the center of Herbert’s Christian universe. The soul attains that honored rank, or rank is granted that honored rank, by emptying itself, rejecting the decisiveness its sin, and accepting Christ, who is center and circumference both. The human is subsumed in Incarnation: in sharing this great communion, it is not the man who assimilates the food to himself, but the food that assimilates the man to itself. Of all the mysteries of Gods love for his people, this is the improbable. There is nothing left to say. The poem and Herbert’s volume end on a note of submission and sublime simplicity “So I did sit and eat.”

Why should God so love the human soul? I do not know. If I thought I knew, I would not be Christian.

Posted in Anthony Esolen, Poetry, Simone Weil | Tagged George Herbert, LOVE by George Herbert, Simone Weil | 4 Comments »

A Discussion On the Meaning of Suffering

June 15, 2010

Thousands of stateless Rohingya people have fled to Kutupalong makeshift camp in Cox’s Bazar District after being driven from their homes. Nearly 29,000 people find themselves camped on a patch of ground with no infrastructure to support them, posing a serious threat to health. Bangladesh 2010

The following exists by way of a series of links(some now broken) on the site of Touchstone Magazine. It is derived from an article David Hart wrote (Tremors of Doubt) which came to be a longer article in the WSJ (reading selections here) and finally a book, The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami?

The article precipitated the falling out I had with Jerome that became the subject of the Failing Fellowship post a while back so I followed the back and forth between the distinguished participants in this exchange closely. Although I was unfamiliar with William Luse, Anthony Esolen is someone I deeply admire.

I’ve really only bolded the portions of David Hart’s arguments because I consider it important and one that many Christians don’t fully comprehend. The fact that two intellectuals such as Luse and Esolen have some trouble following it is instructional to say the least. Along the way they say some very interesting things but the day is clearly Dr. Hart’s, IMHO.

Tremors of Doubt:What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami? by DAVID B. HART
Friday, December 31, 2004 12:01 A.M. EST

On Nov. 1, 1755, a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon. In that city alone, some 60,000 perished, first from the tremors, then from the massive tsunami that arrived half an hour later. Fires consumed much of what remained of the city. The tidal waves spread death along the coasts of Iberia and North Africa.

Voltaire’s “Poëme sur le désastre de Lisbonne” of the following year was an exquisitely savage–though sober–assault upon the theodicies prevalent in his time. For those who would argue that “all is good” and “all is necessary,” that the universe is an elaborately calibrated harmony of pain and pleasure, or that this is the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire’s scorn was boundless: By what calculus of universal good can one reckon the value of “infants crushed upon their mothers’ breasts,” the dying “sad inhabitants of desolate shores,” the whole “fatal chaos of individual miseries”?

Perhaps the most disturbing argument against submission to “the will of God” in human suffering–especially the suffering of children–was placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by Dostoyevsky; but the evils Ivan enumerates are all acts of human cruelty, for which one can at least assign a clear culpability. Natural calamities usually seem a greater challenge to the certitudes of believers in a just and beneficent God than the sorrows induced by human iniquity.

Considered dispassionately, though, man is part of the natural order, and his propensity for malice should be no less a scandal to the conscience of the metaphysical optimist than the most violent convulsions of the physical world. The same ancient question is apposite to the horrors of history and nature alike: Whence comes evil? And as Voltaire so elegantly apostrophizes, it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God’s hand and he is not enchained.

As a Christian, I cannot imagine any answer to the question of evil likely to satisfy an unbeliever; I can note, though, that–for all its urgency–Voltaire’s version of the question is not in any proper sense “theological.” The God of Voltaire’s poem is a particular kind of “deist” God, who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Not that reckless Christians have not occasionally spoken in such terms; but this is not the Christian God.

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to “powers” and “principalities” — spiritual and terrestrial — alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him –”He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not”– and his appearance within “this cosmos” is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.

Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God’s glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light.

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering–when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children’s–no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God’s inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God’s good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms — knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against “fate,” and that must do so until the end of days.
————————————
William Luse, who has written for Touchstone, responds to David Hart’s Wall Street Journal article on the Indian Ocean tsunamis:

I read David Hart’s “Tremors of Doubt”, which you linked to, and a few lines caught my attention. He says:

Of course, I am no theologian and may not possess a theologian’s understanding of “ultimate meaning,” but I had always thought that human suffering and death did have meaning, and that it was Christ’s own that allowed us to see it. In a world not created for suffering, our first parents let it in (that “primordial catastrophe” to which Hart refers), implicating not only themselves but all their descendants as well in the guilt for it and the restitution that must be made to God. What makes this imputation of universal guilt most difficult to bear is not merely the fact of suffering, but the suffering of innocents (the “infants crushed upon their mothers’ breasts”). We are all guilty, but some are guiltier than others. We don’t understand why the (relatively) innocent must suffer in the company, and sometimes at the hands, of the implacably evil or indifferent. Our sense of justice (and, we hope, God’s) demands that punishments and rewards be distributed according to our just desserts, and that if we cannot see it in this life, it will be completed in the next.

But Hart refers to Voltaire’s ‘deist’ God — “who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality’ — and says that, though Christians sometimes speak in these terms, “this is not the Christian God.” And I agree, but he then goes further:

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering — when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children’s — no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God’s inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God’s good ends.

I agree that it might be prudent in the crisis of grief to swallow the “banalities about God’s inscrutable counsels”, but how is it that they become odious? And it might be wise in that same moment to bite one’s tongue on the matter of God’s good, though mysterious, ends. But how does mention of them become blasphemous, as though He would be offended by our acknowledging His providence, or by submitting our minds to His in matters beyond us?

Perhaps I’m misreading him, or reading too much into his piece, but Hart seems uncomfortable with Christians who speak of God as the great (though mysterious and secretive) balancer of accounts, as when he notes: “And as Voltaire so elegantly apostrophizes, it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God’s hand and he is not enchained.”

People who “utter odious banalities about God’s inscrutable counsels” (with or without a license) are saying one thing and one thing only: we either have faith in those counsels, and His “good ends”, or it’s all a big nothing. Either the suffering of those innocents participated in Christ’s own, bearing spiritual fruit for themselves and for all mankind, or…what? Nothing. Suffering has meaning. It can save us. (Can, not must.) To me, it would be a great sorrow and a pity to find out in eternity that it were not so.

So I ask: am I seeing something in his words that isn’t there?

And David Hart replies:
One must attend to the meaning of “ultimate.” The story Christian doctrine tells is that sin and death are accidental to our created nature, and so they never occupied any necessary place in God’s intentions for his creatures; nor has he need of suffering and death to realize his nature or ours. Whatever good God may bring from suffering or death does not, therefore, endue (vocab: To provide with a quality or trait; endow) suffering or death with any eternal or ontological meaning in itself.

I shall skip over the matter of universal aboriginal guilt, as it presumes an understanding of original sin that is not quite in keeping with Eastern tradition, and I am of course Orthodox. But let us grant original sin its place, and that we all sin.

Still, the notion that the suffering of, say, dying babies somehow participates in Christ’s suffering and is part of some vast providential calculus whereby God balances accounts is a Stoic parody of Christian orthodoxy, and were it true Christian teaching I should advocate apostasy. There is no biblical or doctrinal warrant for such a view. Yes, the deaths of innocents are indeed meaningless, even if God’s providence will indeed bring good from that evil; there is no spiritual fruit to be reaped from the drowning of tens of thousands of infants, for them or for us; the reign of death in all things is not the same as the justice of every particular death in the great scheme of things; that is why Christ came to save us from suffering and death, and why God will raise the dead. This world is fallen, and nowhere does God promise to make the sum total of its suffering add up to some greater spiritual truth. Rather, through taking our suffering upon himself, he rescues us from the meaninglessness of death, and even graciously allows us to offer up our own sufferings in obedience to him.

This is the gospel: it does not announce the perfect rationality of the history of the fallen world, but the perfect love of God who overcomes the powers of this age.

I earnestly implore all who have not done so to read Ivan Karamazov’s remarks in the chapter entitled “Rebellion” in The Brothers Karamazov, and to reflect upon them.

William Luse has this further reply to David Hart:
It seems I did read [Hart] right, which disappoints me. I had no idea there was such a divergence in Orthodox and Catholic traditions on the matter of original sin. Either that or I have a poor understanding of my own faith’s teaching. But Hart seems to acknowledge that the divergence is real, not peculiar to me. As to the value of individual suffering, he holds my position as “a Stoic parody of Christian orthodoxy,” a rebuke that will sting once I confirm it to be the case. If his remark is true — “Yes, the deaths of innocents are indeed meaningless, even if God’s providence will indeed bring good from that evil” — I will find it a hard pill to swallow.

My difficulty is in seeing how their deaths can be meaningless if good can be brought from the evil. The balancing of accounts I referred to is a spiritual one, of course, and I am not quite ready to abandon it.

And David Hart has this brief response:
This is not a difference between East and West. The view that Mr. Luse has advanced belongs to neither tradition, and I wish he would make an effort to rethink the implications of what he has said. Again, I recommend Dostoyevsky as a good starting point, and Aquinas’s De Malo thereafter. And as for bringing good from evil, that still does not make evil good or necessary; it means only that God is omnipotent and loving and that the gates of hell cannot prevail against his Kingdom.

Anthony Esolen, translator of a new edition of the Divine Comedy and a contributing editor of Touchstone, responds to the conversation on suffering:
Perhaps I too am not quite sure what the word “ultimate” means. But I recall the medieval frescoes and triptychs of saints bearing their wounds as marks of glory — Saint Peter Martyr most startlingly, with the axe wound that cleft his tonsure in two — and I think that the artists perceived something important. The incarnation of Christ has allowed us men to do some things that the faithful angels themselves cannot do. We can, as Paul struggles to say, make up by our suffering what is lacking in the sacrifice of Christ; that is, we can partake of that sacrifice by uniting our sufferings with that sacrifice. We can repent, and conform ourselves to Christ; and we can die, as Christ himself died, as he would have had to die even had there been no malign Sanhedrin to condemn him. Upon Christ’s glorified body there were no bruises, no lacerations, but the five wounds remained, and, as the great hymn puts it, the faithful will one day gaze upon those glorious scars — scars which we and not the angels will share with him, because we and not the angels will have borne them.

We were not meant to suffer and die; but we sinned, and having sinned, indeed we are meant, in the re-creating Providence of God, to suffer and die, but not as Satan would have it. I must believe that the incarnation and the atoning death of Christ does not simply undo the harm of sin — does not simply restore to us a lost innocence — but delivers for us the greater glory of a victory over sin and death, a victory accomplished in us through Christ. Surely David believes this too; again, perhaps I am misconstruing his use of the word “ultimate.” But will I not always, if God should see fit to save me, be the one who suffered and repented and died in a way peculiar to myself? Will not that strange eventful history be ineradicable from my being? This hope—and for me it is an abiding hope—in the ultimate meaning of suffering seems to lie behind the strange words of Christ, illogical if a found sheep is the same sheep that once dwelt in the fold, that there is more rejoicing in Heaven at the finding of the one lost than at the keeping of the ninety nine that were never lost.

I trust I’ll not be accused of creeping Stoicism merely for noticing that adumbrations of Christlike suffering are to be found in the ideals of the best of the pagans; nor, I trust, will I be tagged as a follower of that charlatan Voltaire, who, when he rejected the Incarnation, rejected also the tremendous mystery of human suffering, and of course fell back upon a cold impersonal God whom Cicero would have found appalling, much less Boethius.

The Holy Innocents, whose feast we’ve recently celebrated, suffered the same evil as did the children who died in the recent disaster. We Christians should see in that terrible incident long ago all the blind sufferings of weeping and (relatively) innocent humanity, all of us children dying we know not why, whether it is at the hands of a Herod or in the wake of a tsunami or after the slow wasting away of our vigor. Holy Innocents, martyrs who did not know to whom you were witnesses or that you were witnesses to anyone at all, pray for us, young and old alike, that one day we may bear our wounds as gloriously as you bear yours.

David Hart replies:
I’m sorry but this is utterly irrelevant to my remarks, and has nothing to do with what Luse said either. It seems tedious to rehearse again and again this simple point, but I shall try once more: that we are allowed to offer up our sufferings to God as oblations of obedience, that we are able to find grace in the midst of our sufferings (and so on) is entirely unrelated to the claim that suffering and death in themselves are meaningful or are part of the ontological “truth” of God’s creation; it is certainly unrelated to the absurd, obscene, and grotesque claim that the sum total of suffering in the world adds up to a precisely calculated “balancing” of the score for original sin. This latter suggestion is most definitely incompatible with the message of the gospels, and indeed would make a nonsense of all atonement theology. The economy of salvation should not be confused with a Hegelian passage through the finite, nor providence with a universal teleology.

Also, the notion that a triumph over sin and death won along the hard path of fallen nature is a higher good than would have prevailed had we not fallen at all is nonsense (all talk of the felix culpa aside); such a notion would require a view of evil as something in addition to God, something positive over against the divine, required to fecundate the good within creation. There is a very good set of doctrinal and metaphysical concerns behind the Church’s insistence upon a privatio boni view of evil. To suggest that evil can serve to increase the good sounds marvelous and dramatic; it is also quite heretical and quite philosophically incoherent.

Anthony Esolen continues his dialogue with David Hart:
I’m a great admirer of David Hart’s work, and have actually used to good effect his brilliant article, Christ and Nothing, to bring at least one young prodigal back to sanity and the Church. So I’m in the odd position of arguing with someone whom I consider a great comrade in the current unpleasantness, if it be no presumption in a sergeant to look for comrades. But since I’m no philosopher or theologian, I’ve probably slipped on a patch or two of rhetoric.

What worries me (and, if I read him right, what worries Bill Luse) is that assertion that suffering is of no ultimate significance. Now it seems to me that the words “suffering” and “significance” can be read in more than one way. If by “significance” we mean ontological significance — that suffering adds to the created nature that God has endowed us with—then of course we must reject the proposition.

Suffering is a privation of a good that we ought to possess, as sickness is a privation of health and not a thing-in-itself. But “significance” can mean, literally, the property of being a sign of something else. In this sense, suffering—even considered as a privation of good, simply — can possess significance, if by the will of God it is a sign of something else, in this case a sign of Christ. God did not need suffering, to establish such a sign; in that sense, suffering in itself has no meaning. But God also did not need the medieval pelican, to establish a sign of the self-sacrificing Christ; pelicans in themselves bear no such significance. Attributively, by the will of God, they do bear such significance, and one of the medieval mystics, I think Richard of Saint Victor, supposed that God created the pelican precisely so that it would serve us as a sign of Christ. And maybe “attributively” is too weak a word to use, since it implies a mere notional, linguistic significance, rather than a cogent and irresistible pointing. When, for instance, Christ said, “When I was hungry, you fed me; when I was thirsty, you gave me to drink,” he was identifying the sufferings of mankind with his own. This was more than external, “forensic” imputation. Thus the suffering of human beings has meaning because it points to Christ who suffers, and because in fact it is Christ who suffers.

David may be growing impatient with me here — all this must strike him as quite elementary, as his own reference to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov struck me. I’m trying to work out my own thought; I don’t intend to be condescending. He may say that such significance is not “ultimate.” And here I think we need to look at that word “suffering.” In one sense it is a mere privation, or it is a removal of some good that ought to be there. But suppose we consider it in the same light as we consider the word “emptying.” That word even more strongly than “suffering” suggests privation; surely emptying, in itself, can possess no significance. When we empty ourselves of obedience we sin — and that sin is better described as a failure to act, an impotence, than as an act in itself. It can thus have no ultimate meaning, or even any meaning in itself at all.

But the emptying that Christ assumed for our sake is the ultimate act of grace, and perhaps had better be described as a filling: not of Himself, but of us, with Himself. Now he need not have conquered death by dying; but he chose to do so, and, more than that, he willed that “dying” be the means of our regeneration, and, as I think we are allowed to hope, of our being raised to a glory beyond that with which the sinless Adam had been endowed. In Heaven, Christ will be, and is, and has ever been, Priest and King and Sacrifice: and He has willed that our deaths here be a shadowing forth, a sign, of what He is, the Son from all eternity filling Himself with Divinity (words are failing me here) by emptying Himself in obedience to the Father.

And that seems to me to be the hope offered by Dostoyevsky. It isn’t that Marcel’s suffering and death, in themselves, signify; but they are no longer suffering and death in themselves, or, better, we now have it revealed to us that no human suffering or death is or ever was merely suffering and death, because Christ is He who suffered, and because Christ is He who was obedient unto death. Death is, through the power and wisdom of God, not what we thought it was, the cessation of bodily function: “Except a corn of wheat fall to the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

The terrible questions Ivan poses about the suffering of the innocent child are played out in the book itself, with Ivan nearly oblivious to the drama. When the real — and persecuted — lad dies, he has already become, through God’s grace, a sign of Christ, because in fact Christ was suffering in him, and the boys who form a band around Alyosha are a brotherhood, an apostolate, remembering in love the one whom they had helped to pierce. When Kolya, the leader, asks Alyosha whether, in the resurrection, they will see their friend again, and all be together, Alyosha responds that they shall — and he can say so with confidence, because the promise is that we shall see Christ, and be one in Christ.

Maybe what I’m saying is too obvious, and I’m missing a distinction between “meaning” and “ultimate meaning.” I can’t drive from my head the marks upon the glorified Christ. They are signs. He didn’t need them. But he chose them; they are therefore His; and I hope one day, doubter that I have been, to ask to probe them, like the patron of the hardheaded, Thomas. I trust they will still be there.

David Hart continues his conversation with Anthony Esolen:
First, if I seem to be growing impatient, it has more to do with a number of communications I have received that have not been posted for general perusal; one in particular, from a pompous Calvinist who as far as I can tell is an inadvertent Moloch worshiper, put me in an especially foul mood; so excuse me. I am an admirer of Esolen’s work; until his rendering of Tasso appeared I thought I could not possibly enjoy any translation as much as the old Fairfax version, with which I fell in love when I was twelve. I plan to order all three volumes of his Dante when my next check for an article comes.

Second, let us defend the created goodness of the noble pelican, one of God’s grandest achievements. While I agree in principle with Esolen’s remarks, I insist on this distinction: the pelican is the good creature of God, possessed of its own proper essence and nature, and as such is an analogy of the divine in its very being, whether posteriorly appropriated as a symbol of Christ or not; evil, suffering, and death — being privations — can signify God’s love only through an act of divine subversion, conquest, and economy. And, then again, this is a distinction of more than passing importance.

Third, one can become lost in a thicket of pieties if one is not careful, and so miss the obvious. Here I think I have quite a good grasp on what Dostoyevsky is doing in the chapter “Rebellion” — among other things, he is making Ivan, unwittingly, an apologist for a true vision of God’s goodness over against the sort of sickly Teutonized idealism that had corrupted the “religious movement” in Russia in his day, a vision that later Zosima will carry into its true depth. It is not, however, quite the vision that Esolen suggests, I think; but here more clarity would be necessary for me to judge. What is essential — and this is all I ever meant to say — is to distinguish between two understandings of God’s power over creation. In one — a deist understanding — the world was created from eternity to be an intricate machinery of good and evil, darkness and light, exquisitely balanced between felicity and moral gravity, wherein death and suffering constitute necessary elements of God’s creative purposes, without which he could not bring his purposes to fruition, and wherein every event is part of a perfectly coherent scheme of cosmic and spiritual harmony. In the other — the Christian understanding — God creates us for union with himself, requiring no passage through evil to realize the good in us and to divinize us, but we fall away into the damnable absurdity of sin, death, and hell, from which God then rescues us; while indeed God, in the economy of salvation, makes even death obedient to his saving purposes, he does so as the one who on the last day will judge and damn the meaningless brutality and absurdity of fallen existence, and — far from disclosing the inherent rationality and moral necessity of death — will conquer it utterly on behalf of its victims. Yes, God uses suffering and death for the good; but, no, in themselves they are contrary to the nature of the world, in enmity to God’s goodness, and “meaningless” (that is, they do not possess that ontological or moral necessity that either a deist or a semi-Hegelian theologian would assign them).

Fourth — and this seems to be the sticking point — it is simply wrong to say that the scars of sin and redemption make the glory of union with God greater than they otherwise would have been. This is a tempting belief, but one that must end in absurdity. Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine (and Thomas) are wonderful curatives of this particular error. If God is the supereminent fullness of all actuality and all goodness and all love, then the kenosis of God in Christ is nothing in addition to what would have been communicated to us had we not fallen; nor is the good lacking in anything necessary to manifest itself in and to creatures. It is metaphysically and doctrinally necessary to insist upon this; not to do so compromises both God’s transcendence and goodness. But that would take many many pages to unfold.

And Esolen replys:
Thank you for your reply — and for being a fan of Tasso, who does not exactly pack the stadium seats.

We agree on everything until that fourth point. I too find the Deist calculator-god as revolting as Johnson did when he lashed out against the idea in Pope’s Essay on Man, and in the work of the prelate Jenyns — if memory serves me. That’s the splendidly dour vision of Marcus Aurelius. It is haunted by Truth, but it’s an abyss of despair.

On that fourth point, though: I understand that if God communicates His fullness to a creature, there is nothing beyond that to be communicated. But the creature receives the fullness according to its capacity. Is there a way to believe that the redeemed creature is a new creation with a wholly new, not simply restored, capacity for such blessedness? Again, God would not have required the sin-and-redemption to re-create man; but could he not have willed that it be so for sinful man? Maybe I’ve been teaching Paradise Lost for too long, and trying to meet the typical student’s objection, that Satan does seem to have achieved a kind of victory after all. If you’re not worn out by the Molochites, I’d appreciate hearing how you would respond.

David B. Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and author of The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003). Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College. He has translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Johns Hopkins Press) and Dante’s Divine Comedy (Modern Library).

Esolen and Hart Finale
David Hart responds to Anthony Esolen’s reply in last night’s Hart by the Numbers:

No, that cannot be. It really cannot, and there is not much room here for argument. The capacity of the creature for God is not elevated by sin, nor would our primaeval innocence have been a static condition. In either case, union with God must be a progress from glory to glory, an elevation of the creature to the fulfillment of the divine image within it; and to this nothing can or need give increase. An intellectual creature’s innate capacity for God, after all, could not possibly be limited to a specific scope — it must expand towards ever greater knowledge (otherwise it would not be knowledge of God at all, who is infinite and so never conformable to a finite intellectual intention). We are called to contemplate and enter into the life of God himself, and that is not something that admits of fixed degrees. How can the infinite be an “object” of contemplation except through an eternal growth in knowledge?

To think otherwise would also be to say that God’s intention for us apart from sin was deficient, that the divine image was not meant to be fulfilled in union with God as perfectly as it might be, and that union with God is an extrinsic accommodation with finite cognition. It would also mean that sin can somehow “enhance” the divine image in us.

Look, honestly, there are ten thousand very well worked out arguments on this matter, many of which are there to be found in Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Maximus, Thomas Aquinas…Henri de Lubac (et ceteri). I am not spinning out my own opinions here. And when one understands these arguments, one cannot really dissent from them. To advance the view that you want is to do damage not only to a coherent view of our created nature, but to any proper understanding of the transcendence of God’s goodness.

I really must end the conversation here, I fear; I am well past a deadline already.

Oh, but I must add one more observation on the Pelican. You do appreciate, I hope, that even the cross of Christ would not reveal to us the true nature of divine love were it not for the resurrection. In itself, death is not a sign, but only death thus assumed, thus conquered, and thus imitated. The pelican — that mighty sign of God’s goodness – would reveal something true about God simply by virtue of its pelicanity in any possible world. This is actually quite important.

Anthony Esolen has his final say:
David Hart justly warns us against any easy and sentimental belief that it was, after all, good that Adam sinned. Scripture is unequivocal about this, as it is about what Hart calls the absurdity and brutality of our fallen world.

Sin cannot elevate the capacity of the creature for God. Nor, as he says, would our primeval innocence have been static. What exactly it would have been is the subject of great speculation on the part of theologians; but unless God had created Adam in vain, Adam’s fulfillment must have been attainable only in the contemplation of God himself.

It was not clear to Thomas, however, that even the desire for union, rather than communion, with God — the sharing of the very life of the Trinity that David so eloquently speaks of — was present by nature in Adam: “Eternal life is a good exceeding the proportion of created nature, as likewise it exceeds its knowledge and desire, according to 1 Corinthians 2:9: ‘Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man.’” Thus, when we’re talking about our capacity for blessedness — “capacity” is Thomas’s word — we are talking about two things: “Duplex capacitas attendi potest in humana natura.” One, he says, is the capacity we possess by nature, and this, says Thomas, God fills accordingly, as he does for every created thing. But the other is the capacity we possess by the divine will, that is by grace; and this indeed may be increased, nor is it to be considered a defect if God wills not to increase it (Summa Theol. III, q.1, a.3).

Thomas is answering the false assertion that the Son had to become man, even had Adam not sinned; otherwise, the argument goes, a capacity for blessedness in Adam would have remained unfulfilled, since, after Adam, and after the Incarnation, fallen man now has the blessings of grace. Now Thomas does not reply that Adam was no recipient of grace, nor does he imply that Adam’s state would have remained what it was; about the details of such a providential economy, as it would have unfolded, we have no witness. But Thomas does hold open the possibility of the felix culpa: “There is nothing to prevent human nature’s being raised up to something greater [i.e., than it had been in Adam], even after sin; God permits evil in order to draw forth from it some greater good (Nihil autem prohibet ad aliquid maius humanam naturam productam esse post peccatum: Deus enim permittit mala fieri ut inde aliquid melius eliciat). Thus Saint Paul says, ‘Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’; and the Exsultet of the Paschal Feast sings, ‘O happy fault, which gained for us so great a redeemer!’”

Thinking of such grace, then, Francis de Sales can say, with a tad more assurance than Thomas says it but with no heresy, that “our ruin has been to our advantage, since human nature in fact has received greater graces by the redemption wrought by its Savior than it would ever have received from Adam’s innocence even if he had persevered therein.” (Treatise on the Love of God).

Professor Hart’s language describing the rush of being lifted or embraced more and more deeply into the life of God, from glory to glory, with ever expanding knowledge, is as glorious as that of any prose writer I know, and is Dantesque in its ardor and sweep. He is right, Paradise must be so! Nor would I wish to think of our “capacity” for blessedness rather as a pint pot or a gallon jug.

But even in mathematics there are orders of infinity. Grant that man’s natural capacity for blessedness is infinite (because it is the infinite God who will fulfill it), it does not then follow that grace cannot raise that capacity, nor does it follow that there cannot be “degrees” of blessedness, if by “degrees” we are talking not of finite numbers but of ranks and hierarchies of endless (and endlessly deepening) bliss. Such degrees, from one blessed soul to the next, imply no defect in God’s goodness, no more than is implied by the fact that men are not seraphim, and seraphim are not cherubim. Thomas follows the Fathers in interpreting “In my Father’s house there are many mansions” as asserting such “degrees” — not fixed capacities, but still degrees, or “gradus,” to use his term (Suppl. 93, art. 2; and for the inequality of the blessed, and the diversity of their blessedness, see Summa Contra Gentiles 3.58).

Sometimes Thomas uses the language of “closeness” to describe these orders: “Quanto aliquis erit Deo magis coniunctus, tanto erit beatior” “The more closely one is conjoined with God, the more of blessedness will one enjoy.” (Suppl. 93, art. 3). This closeness is a consequence of charity, itself a gift of God’s grace.

I agree with Professor Hart about the worthy pelican’s showing forth his Creator in his natural pelicanity, original sin or no; and of course if the Cross signifies anything, or by means of anything, it is the victory of the Resurrection. But we have ventured far from the original discussion about suffering. I am not committed to the “strong” version of the felix culpa, as comforting as I have found it. May God one day show me whether it was true. I am grateful to David for his patience and his exertions in this discussion, which have helped me at least sort out my thoughts and feelings at this time, and I wish to join him in the wholehearted reverence he advises. We suffer; God is just and good. Let us not make light of the suffering. Let us place our hope in Christ, and be silent.

And David Hart, responding, brings this discussion to a close:
There may be some obiter dictum in Thomas’s discussion of the question of infralapsarian (vocab: Christian theology, chiefly Calvinist, a person who believes that foreknowledge of the Fall preceded God’s decree of who was predestined to salvation and who was not.)incarnation that would alter my view of him; I will consult your references. Incidentally, Aquinas is wrong — the incarnation is the premise of creation, with or without sin. But that is another argument.

In any event, Francis de Sales is speaking nonsense, and in fact rather silly nonsense, and if we had many many days to spend on the topic I might be able to convince you. I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but there is a level of technicality that this entire discussion invites that makes this an unappealing project.

I will make only three closing observations:

1) Logically, the end for which an intellectual creature is intended — even though that end be supernatural and gratuitous — is the perfection of its nature in the highest good, which is to say union with God. It would indeed be a deficient creative act of God were he to will in the creature anything short of the consummate perfection of that union proper to the creature in its divinized state (in, that is, the condition of grace). To imagine that for a creature created in the divine image there could be a sufficient natural fulfillment proportionate to the creature’s capacity that is anything less than the supernatural elevation of his nature to the highest knowledge of God is to fail to grasp what it means to be created in the divine image. Without final grace, human “nature” cannot be complete. True, Aquinas would not seem to agree; though Henri de Lubac is very good at showing that in fact he does. Also, God wills the highest good possible for his creatures because he must: not to do so would be to fail to will the infinite goodness of his own essence (which is the sole “real” object of his will) in the reditio of all created things to him.

2) The mathematical model of greater and lesser infinities is not germane here, obviously, inasmuch as the question is one of finite consciousness of the infinite simplicity of God, not one concerning the size of a set. As God is infinite, and cannot therefore be the object of a finite intuition proportioned to eidetic consciousness, the vision of God must always be of the same simplicity — communicated by grace — ever more deeply apprehended, without surcease, term, or limits.

If this is the end to which rational creation is called, it becomes meaningless to speak of greater and lesser graces. God’s very being is manifestation of his essence in his Logos, in the light of his Spirit, and our being as logikoi (vocab: In the original creation, all rational spiritual beings logikoi)is to be joined in perfect living knowledge of the Logos, which can mean only one thing. Divinization is not an extrinsic accommodation between two objects set over against one another: it literally is our eternal act of “becoming God,” which is not something that comes in greater and lesser versions. A mathematical model of the infinite is a philosophical red herring here. Better to discuss Husserl’s discussions of intuitions following from an infinite intention, or Henri de Lubac’s treatment (better than Marechal’s or Rahner’s I think) of how the prior orientation of God’s infinity is the ground of all finite consciousness, even of finite things.

3) Whether one wants to accept it or not, the simple and incontrovertible truth is that, if sin can lead to a greater grace than would otherwise have been available, then sin and evil are positive elements of the divine will, of created nature, and even of the divine nature: there is no other actus in which creation participates, and so if evil can even occasion an increase in the good, then evil has real being and must participate in God. And since God is infinite goodness, and wills his own goodness infinitely, and since a higher good could be accomplished by means of evil, then we must believe God does in some sense will evil, and that evil therefore resides in the divine essence. I doubt you are following my argument here, as this really requires about 200 pages, and it is 1:18 a.m. as I write this; but what I am saying is simply correct. Either you believe in the privatio boni view of evil (and so in the convertibility of all the ontological transcendentals with the divine essence), or you do not; only in the latter case can you assert the “hard” version of the felix culpa, though you can no longer believe God or subsistent being is goodness as such.

Look, there are varying levels of theological discourse, I know. To my mind, all talk of the felix culpa remains always on the homiletic plane, where it does some good perhaps. I am only a student of classical Christian metaphysics and you could not pay me to give a sermon; within that metaphysical tradition, the notion that we will profit from evil more than we would have done from innocence is not only morally problematic, but renders Christian ontology and any coherently Christian understanding of God impossible.

Please, though, we have said enough.

————————–

Wither Job?

William Reichert responds to Esolen and Hart:
This exchange is fascinating, and I hope it does not end soon. However, I’m curious why none of the participants has mentioned the Book of Job. It seems a bit odd that the whole question of theodicy could be discussed without reference to Job.

I believe I understand Dr. Hart’s argument, but I am troubled by its pastoral application. Surely we’d make “Job’s comforters” look good if we responded to those who suffer by saying, “Be of good cheer: the evil you suffer is ultimately meaningless.” I don’t believe that is what Dr. Hart would say in such circumstances, but I’m afraid that’s what many people who read his article may carry away from his argument. Perhaps, however, he regards such application as the pastor’s, and not the theologian’s, responsibility

———————–

Hart Replies to Wither Job?
David Hart responds to William Reichert’s question:

It is precisely Job’s comforters I wish to cut short. Tell me, at the end of Job, what meaning — what justice — does God tell Job his particular suffering served?

Perhaps Christ’s words in Luke 13:1-5 would make my meaning clear.
[“At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them -- do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”]

In any event, please, please, please try to see only this: to say that in your life of faith your suffering can be taken up into a greater good, by grace and economy (which is of course true), is different from saying that suffering and death are in themselves ontological and moral goods for God that constitute proper elements of his designs for his creatures. It was this latter view of evil as somehow IN ITSELF a positive good that bears fruit that could not by any other means have been brought forth in creation that I was identifying as a deist corruption of theology, and on this point how could any Christian disagree? Please remember what the original column was about.

Hart’s Last Word
David Hart sends this “final valedictory” letter:

No one is more annoying than the guest who announces his departure again and again but never leaves. I keep saying I am done, but obviously I am not. This is the last — honestly, the last — thing I want to say.

Since that accursed column ran in the WSJ (and I shall never again attempt to say so much in 750 words), I have received an average of 280 e-mails a day. Who knows how they find my address, but with a paper whose circulation is so great I should not be surprised. Most go unanswered, but I have foolishly replied to many. I also foolishly agreed to dash off another 2500 words on the matter for First Things as a rush job — one day — for the March issue. The result is that I am writing in ever greater haste, in an ever deepening condition of fatigue and of anxiety over the other obligations I am neglecting, and looking back over the last few exchanges I cannot help but notice a note of asperity sneaking in, and a sort of rhetorical sloppiness. So I apologize.

All I ever meant to point out in that piece was that Christians are not deists. Of course, our suffering and our death — on account of the empty tomb — can have ultimate moral and spiritual meaning. When Christ went hence, he took many captive — including even death, the final enemy. The issue addressed in the piece was whether suffering and death were ontological necessities for God and his great scheme, which no Christian who knows his tradition could possibly affirm. Thus it is wrong not only for skeptics to think that earthquakes should shake the faith of Christians (in fact they merely confirm what we believe about a fallen world), but for Christians to assume that God’s providential governance of things requires the notion that God directly wills evil in the world as the necessary vehicle of a final harmony or that every death or loss corresponds to an exact deistic calculus of the balance between felicity and morality in this world or the next. This is why Ivan Karamazov is helpful: he reminds us what we do not believe.

I shall go to my grave convinced that most versions of the felix culpa are fundamentally wrong and incoherent, and I believe that the totality of Thomas’s thought clearly backs me up (but if not, so be it). At the most rudimentary level, it seems to imply that God rewards sin more than sinlessness, that he therefore wills evil, that his righteousness is divided aginst itself, and that the good he wills (which is of his essence) must require evil to be perfect (which is monstrous). Or it implies a voluntarist divine freedom that responds to evil as a real power outside his nature with a decision to alter his primordial intentions for man (which makes God finite and evil substantial). But why argue about it? What inspires revulsion in me may inspire adoration in another. And while Francis de Sales was a fairly mediocre theologian (he was, as it happens, and this is no insult), he was a great saint, and holiness knows what mere metaphysics can never grasp.

Posted in Anthony Esolen, David B. Hart, Theodicy, Theology, Understanding Affliction/Suffering | Tagged Anthony Esolen, David Hart, death of innocents, felix culpa, sin and death, Suffering | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections from The Freedom of Heaven & the Freedom of Hell by Anthony Esolen

July 31, 2009

The Barque of Dante by Eugene Delacroix

Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College, where his classes are featured in the college’s Western Civilization Core Curriculum. He is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, Ironies of Faith: Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature and is the translator of several epic poems of the West, including Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things: de Rerum Natura, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and the three volumes of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Anthony Esolen has published many scholarly articles and essays, including several on Renaissance literature. A graduate of Princeton and the University of North Carolina, Esolen is proficient in Latin, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, French, German and Greek.

As you know, I am on an eternal read of the Divine Comedy and it is one of my favorite topics for posts. This essay, appearing in First Things several years back, is a splendid read and I don’t think you can find a better piece that correlates the Christian faith to Dante’s work. The Christian faith is rooted in a narrative, the narrative of the Gospels. You can also find it in Dante’s creation. Selections from the essay here:

The Modern Suspicion Of Heritage
Woodrow Wilson once remarked that the purpose of the modern university was to make young men as unlike their fathers as possible, fathers who had immersed themselves in business and could no longer see the grand sweep of history. Otherwise, their sons would be hard to enlist in the progressive movement, man’s march toward greater enlightenment and freedom.

Wilson’s dictum was, in a way, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, translated into practical politics. Man is growing at last into adulthood, Kant suggested in his 1784 manifesto What Is Enlightenment? Man is learning to think for himself, liberating himself from the malign influence of traditional authorities and the past. “Reason,” wrote Kant, “must regard itself as the author of its principles, independent of foreign influences; consequently, as practical reason or as the will of a rational being, it must regard itself as free.” Those foreign influences include the claims of loyalty impressed on us by those among whom we live: the “book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth.”

There is something chilly about Wilson’s vision of liberated men, marching, like Christian soldiers, away from their forefathers — individuals all, and good party members. And there is something treacherous in Kant’s dismissal of tradition and community, as though they were not gifts to be received in gratitude, whatever their limitations.

Nonetheless, we in the West have inherited this suspicion of heritage. We share the assumption that freedom must mean freedom from — freedom from the limitations imposed on us by the old institutions: church, community, family. It seems not to matter that such freedom presupposes our alienation from one another. Existential alienation is a small price to pay for enlightenment, the fulfillment of the progressive movement, or the satisfaction of appetites.

The Medieval Definition Of Freedom
It is hard to recall the medieval definition of freedom, which was not the political license to follow our bellies or the philosophical encouragement to send our elders packing. Freedom was understood, rather, as a growing into the habits, the virtues, that allow us to fulfill our end as human beings without the impediments of vice.

In the Divine Comedy, the pilgrim Dante, having climbed the mountain of Purgatory and scoured away the effects of habitual sin, hears Virgil say that the fruit of joy once lost in Eden is now near. And so he fairly rushes into the freedom of being what he has been created to be:

Will above will now surged in such delight
to climb the top, that with each step I took
I felt my feathers growing for the flight.

Dante’s callow soul will soon be welcomed into the community of the blessed saints, for whom freedom means the grace-filled incapacity to will anything but the good for themselves and for one another. Thomas Aquinas steps forth from the constellation of the wise to express this freedom as the now utterly natural and supernatural virtue of love. Says he to Dante, who has been too stunned with wonder to ask his name:

When the radiance
of the Lord’s grace, which lights the flames of true
love and by love still grows in eminence,
With such multiplication shines in you
it leads you up these stairs no man may take
descending, without climbing up anew,
He who’d deny his flask of wine to slake
your thirst would not be free, would have such power
as rivers not returning to the sea!

Thomas cannot do other than love. In that very propensity, as of a rushing river, consists his freedom.

Dante’s Rejection of Wilson and Kant’s Modern Notion of Freedom
In his way, Dante has foreseen our modern notion of freedom — the notion expressed by Wilson and Kant — and he has rejected it. That is not because such false freedom is often directed toward evil, as when it becomes the license to snuff out the life of an unborn child. It is, rather, because any freedom that severs us from one another, from our memories of those who came before us, is built on a lie about being. It is a misunderstanding of that Being whose essence is to exist. It is autonomy collapsing into antinomy [vocab: A contradiction between principles] , the denial of law itself and of our created being. Dante knows both that there is an autonomy in accord with the structure of created existence, which is truly free, and that there is an autonomy that violates it, caught by its own snare.

On The Nature Of Hell and Satan
In the first part of his epic, Dante and his guide Virgil descend ring by ring, down into the sludgehole of the universe. This is the funnel of hell, leading to an icy and windswept wasteland. Students who read the Divine Comedy for the first time may be surprised by the relative absence of fire from hell. Dante employs fire as punishment for sins that affront the majesty of the Deity: blasphemy, for instance. But, for the poet, the activity, freedom, and divinity of fire, and the love that fire suggests, make it less fit for the worst sinners — the traitors — than the hard, dead stasis of ice.

So there Dante and Virgil are, picking their way among the ice-encased traitors, slowly making their way toward Satan, the creature of fundamental sin, error, and falsehood — fundamental, because traitors mistake what it means for any of us to be. This is not a Satan who spits out a volley of abuse, like the demonic stooges of the popular drama. Nor does Dante create a grand antihero, uttering Milton’s great words of defiance: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven! Indeed Satan does not speak at all. The creature called by Christ “the father of lies” says nothing. He seems sublingual, even subsapient. And his speechlessness reveals the poet’s deep insight into the nature of truth and love and created being.

Though he says nothing, Satan does do a few things, with the terrible regularity of an automaton. He has three mouths, from three faces, joined ignobly “where the cock sports his crown,” and in those mouths he gnaws forever the naked bodies of the great traitors of Church and empire, the two great communions Dante believed were ordained by God. Satan gnaws Judas Iscariot headfirst, in the central mouth, and Brutus and Cassius feet first, to the left and right. With his claws he strips the leather off their backs — blood is a rich part of this diabolical communion. He strips and chews, strips and chews. And he does one thing more:

Beneath each face extended two huge wings,
large enough to suffice for such a bird.
I never saw a sail at sea so broad.
They had no feathers, but were black and scaled
like a bat’s wings, and those he flapped, and flapped,
and from his flapping raised three gales that swept
Cocytus, and reduced it all to ice.

Consider the flapping of those wings. It is natural for earthbound human beings to see in the flight of birds a symbol of freedom — a disconnection with the earth. If we could fly, we think with our misty apprehension of infinity, we would make contact with a terrestrial world only when and where we wanted. We should be princes of the air.

Yet it is that very motion of the wings that raises the gale above the River Cocytus and freezes Satan in his place, along with all the other traitors. If he could cease to move those wings, the gale would subside and the Cocytus would melt. In other words, if he could cease to act on his will to rise, he would be able to rise.

Now the foolish way to regard this is to see in it only an adventitious connection between Satan’s flapping and the ice that locks him in place. That is, God has decided, with malice, to stick Satan in just that hole wherein his sin — if it be a sin to wish to rise and be free — would be self-thwarted and self-punished. It is exactly as if God were to plunge a thirsty man into saltwater, with the added zest that the man would never die.

The Essence Of The Sin Is Made Manifest In The Punishment
But readers of Dante’s Inferno who have traveled with him all the way to the bottom know that the essence of one’s sin is made manifest in the punishment — that the punishment is the sin repeated endlessly and inexorably. And appropriately so. Thomas Aquinas, in justifying the eternity of hell, notes that mortal sin is an infinite and self-defining act of enmity against the peace of the City of God. Such sinners long for immortality, he says (quoting Gregory the Great), so that they might sin forever — for, even more than they love life, they love the sin to which they have given their lives.

What exactly, then, is the sin made manifest here in hell’s deepest pit? The flapping of wings, the ice, the act of treachery, and the temptation of Satan that penetrates time all derive from falling to the temptation, “Ye shall be as gods.” These four motifs have much to teach us about freedom and autonomy, rightly and wrongly understood.

The Psalms lend a hint: All things, says the psalmist, declare that “he made us; we did not make ourselves.” Even the atheist must agree that we did not make ourselves. The statement expresses contingency and dependence, and these are plainly discernible by reason. I did not come into the world self-made. Indeed, I came into a world already present for me to enter: an intelligible world, not a congeries of arbitrary and unrelated forces. Had there been no such world, I would not have existed.

To claim, then, that we did make ourselves would be to deny the real contingency of our beings — which would also be to deny the web of relations into which we have entered by our being and without which we must cease to be. Deep at the heart of this denial is the prideful sin of ingratitude. We see that we are provided with what we could not have provided for ourselves: not only the material conditions that support our existence — our food and drink, the care of our parents — but the fact of our existence itself. Yet we respond with a lie. We repeat what Satan implicitly affirms at the bottom of hell, the loneliest words ever uttered: “I am my own, I am my own! My mind is my own, to fashion what truth I shall please. My body is my own, to dispose of as I please. My will is my own. I rise — by my power. I exist — by my power.”

A Chaos Of Isolated Atoms Of Will
If this is autonomy, if this is what it means to be a law unto oneself, then law is the first thing that must die. No genuine communion among such autonomous beings is conceivable. We would be left with a chaos of isolated atoms of will, sometimes rebounding against one another in war or in the falsely called love that is often worse than war, but always essentially alone. To deny that “we did not make ourselves,” either explicitly or by our behavior, is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world and the community into which we have entered.

The man who says, “I am my own, good and evil are what I declare them to be,” may happen to have a gentle temperament, never lifting his hand in anger. But when he dies, he dies a traitor nonetheless. If we missed it in the murderous history of the twentieth century, we can still see it in the frozen Cocytus of Dante’s hell. Frozen in isolation from one another are the traitors — those who partake most fully of the fundamental lie that is also the fundamental mistake, those who in their treachery most clearly say, “I am my own, I rise by my power.” They are free in the sense in which a being, cast out of the universe and severed from true connection with every other being, would be free. They have made their law, and they obey it; they are bound to it.

With every flap of his wings, Satan sins again, commits treachery against God and also against all contingent and dependent beings. That treachery locks him in the ice of his self-imposed law. While he flaps those wings, he engages in an act that should remind him of his contingent being, but it becomes a sign of his brute power over other beings: He eats Judas and Brutus and Cassius, everlastingly. Not that he derives nourishment from them. His wings never manage to lift his hide out of the ice.

Why Satan Does Not Speak
It is no surprise that Satan does not speak. What would he say? The idea of a word, for a contingent being, implies the existence of one who is not myself (the one to whom I speak) and the existence of a truth that is not myself (that about which I speak). Language is a robe for love. The fundamental lie is that we are not for or from one another. Such a lie distorts existence itself. The devil is a liar and the father of lies, says Dante, quoting the Word of God, and that is why, in the end, Satan has nothing to say.

Freedom Is A Good Thing And Good Has Substance
Let us affirm, as Dante did, that freedom is a good thing and that the word good has substance to it. What, then, is freedom good for? If it is supposed that some contingent beings are free, then freedom must be good for them, and for them as contingent beings. But then freedom must unite them, precisely because they do not possess their existence from themselves. Such beings can be, together, a law unto themselves — autonomous — if they recognize that the law in question is not one they give themselves. That is, if they recognize and accept their contingency.

They will then see that the law that binds them together depends not on any one contingent being nor on all contingent beings taken in a collective but rather on the fact of contingency itself. It will depend on what it means to depend — one on another, and all together on a world that no contingent being has made. They will thus be free in their gratitude for that world, in their humble recognition that their existence is not necessary, and in their love for all those who share their mode of being and on whom they rely.

Purgatory Where We Learn How To Be Free
Gratitude, humility, love — we do not see these in hell. But we do enjoy them in that realm of the Divine Comedy where souls go in fellowship to learn how to be free; we enjoy them in purgatory. At the base of the island-mountain of purgatory, Dante and Virgil see a light swiftly approaching them through the mists of dawn. Virgil recognizes what is coming and cries:

Now fold your hands in prayer! Fall to your knees!
Behold, it is the herald of the Lord!
Now you will see such ministers as these.
See how he holds man’s instruments in scorn:
he needs no oars nor any other sail
but his own wings, between such distant shores.
See how he lifts his pennons to the sky,
sweeping the air with his eternal feathers,
changeless — unlike the hair of those that die.

Their crossing of the waters of hell required many of man’s instruments, notably the long pole that Charon, the ferryman of the dead, plants in the mud of the Acheron to punt his miserable vessel along, bringing the damned to their eternal loss. The angel pilot in purgatory, however, needs no oar, no sail; he sweeps the air with his wings and speeds the blessed souls across the ocean with a swiftness that befits their journey to freedom.

In that angel’s beating wings, there is no likeness to Satan’s. The blessed spirit lifts his pennons “to the sky,” to the heavens, and thence comes his power. He is immersed in the curious freedom of one who acknowledges that he is not his own, that he is neither from himself nor for himself. For though he need not bother with an oar, the angel pilot is not too haughty to deal with air and boats and human souls. He assists those souls, and his last act is to bless them with the sign of the cross as they disembark. He is free to love them. The exaltation whereby he can ferry them across the seas is one with the free humility whereby he will do it; though an angel, he is a member of their community.

As for those souls, they’re glad to be in the boat and are eager to reach the mountain where their purgative suffering will begin. They are singing their burial hymn, In exitu Israel de Aegypto, the psalm that the priest and acolytes chanted as they took the body from the church to the grave. Yet it is a jubilant song of freedom, not from the body but from the bondage of sin, which is itself a living death, a turn toward nonbeing. They rejoice to have begun their journey of liberation from Egypt, with all its worldly might, its fleshpots and vast tombs, across the sea and desert to the Promised Land.

The Souls In Purgatory
The souls in purgatory do not seek a freedom to be found after death. They seek, instead, a freedom from death to be found by dying to themselves. As Christ says, “Whosoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it.” These souls in the boat have made their final and complete confession of being from and being for.

That gives them the strength and the freedom to do a few things the reader has not yet seen in the Divine Comedy. They are together, not just in space but in spirit, as they sing with one voice. They reverse the curse of the traitors, because they reverse the sin. They can form a community. By their song they assist one another in hope and worship. They are not disconnected Israelites but Israel, and it is only in their being together that they individually find themselves. To paraphrase Aristotle, man, the contingent being — not self-sufficient even for his modest material needs, let alone for his intellectual thirst — is the sort of being that thrives only in the context of a community. Man is an ecclesiastical animal.

Thus the blessed souls of purgatory can be trusted to love. They do not need to be “herded like sheep into hell,” as Psalm 49 puts it. No Minos confronts them, slinging his bull’s tail round his waist to indicate the number of their prison cell. No one in purgatory pushes them. The discipline of the mountain, embraced by all the souls, will cure them of the remaining effects of the lie they no longer accept, until finally they will enjoy autonomy, needing no one to enforce from without the law of their created beings. Lord of yourself I crown and mitre you are Virgil’s last words to Dante after he has passed through the final stage of purgation, the wall of fire separating the mountain slopes from earthly paradise at the peak.

There Is No Prayer In Hell
To be free of the delusion that I am my own: This is what the souls, praying and singing in the boat, illustrate and foster. Prayer is impossible for a soul trammeled up in itself, and therefore there is no prayer in hell. There is also no song in hell, for song would require bursting the prison walls in the freedom of exuberance. But we may justly say that song and prayer are what purgatory is, as a foretaste of and preparation for paradise. The prayer is a confession of dependence, and the song is an expression of gratitude for what has been given. What the angel does with his wings, they do with their hearts and voices.

But the song means more. Consider again the mystery of singing. There is something about song that is playful and gratuitous, like the splendor of finches’ wings. It swells forth from the abundance of the heart. Whence should contingent beings derive this plenty, if not from a being that possesses it in himself? It is insufficient to say that God is capable of love. God, as the Gospel of John puts it in one of the most misunderstood verses of Scripture, is love. His love is not contingent on creation. God is Love, before he ever spoke the light into existence and saw that it was good. Love is essential to his being, his life. He is, as Dante puts it, “the One who moves all things,” loving them into being and loved by them in turn, whence comes their motion.

To dwell on the meaning of God’s love, for the Christian poet, is to stand at the brink of a glorious and unfathomable sea. When Dante has risen to the utmost heights of paradise, he stands before a vision of that one God — the unity that comprehends plurality. There is a plenty in the being of God, and this plenty admits of love, receives love, and is love:

O Light that dwell within thyself alone,
who alone know thyself, are known, and smile
with love upon the knowing and the known!

Dante revels in the plenitude of God, for whom even the ancient Israelites, to whom we owe the clearest expressions of his oneness, used the plural Elohim to describe a power and glory that burst the bonds of what we can comprehend as single and alone. “Let us make man in our image,” says God (Genesis 1:26).

The Trinity and Freedom
The Trinity, then, has something to teach us of freedom. Even had he never created a universe, God would himself have been a universe of love. As Benedict XVI has written, God, in his own being, comprehends being from and being for; “man is in the image of God precisely because the being for, from, and with constitute the basic anthropological shape.” Thus, if any contingent being longs to be truly free, he must reflect that ultimate freedom of God. His autonomy can make sense only in the self-emptying of love.

Love opens our eyes, allowing one contingent being to reveal the mysteries of beauty to another. But it also gives us wings, prompting the intellect to soar in contemplation of that beauty. Throughout the Divine Comedy, Dante’s beloved Beatrice has been preparing the pilgrim for the ultimate and yet infinite flight, to see the Beloved face to face.

In harsh contrast is the vision of Satan and his trinitarian heads. They are seamed together, but incongruously. There is no harmony among them, as there is no interaction among the traitors he gnaws. No community, no exit from the self. “Hell is other people,” said Sartre, and he was correct in this sense: If for you hell is other people, then you are in hell, and so are your fellow traitors.

Satan’s lie, then, is also Satan’s mistake. He who is not God wants to be God, to rise by his own power and be his own. But God is his own precisely in his love — in his being for. “You should be as gods,” Satan says to Eve, and he unwittingly speaks the truth. We should be as gods, and we can be, in gratitude and humility and love. For the outpouring of a grateful heart, which loves because it receives what it has not deserved, reflects the exuberant power of God, who loves into existence beings whom he does not need. And the self-emptying that is essential to love — the humble willingness to acknowledge that, as we did not make ourselves, we do not exist for ourselves — reflects the plenitude of God, who in his creation deigns to put himself at the disposal of the contingent beings he loves.

He is the cup that runneth over — in love. He can be sung about; he can be prayed to. If we would be laws unto ourselves, Dante would say, we must wisely and freely embrace the laws of our contingent being, obeying them as an obedient and beloved son cheerfully obeys his father, growing into the father’s authority by deeper and wiser and freer acts of obedience. And in obeying those laws we will find ourselves great-souled, able to love one another. We should be as gods.

Contingent Intellect Grasps Incontingent Love
Therefore, Dante’s last vision is not of God as Creator but of God as the power and wisdom and love that lie at the heart of reality — the three Persons that Christians adore in the Trinity. Within that Trinity, Dante beholds the central mystery of God, the ultimate being for: the Word made flesh. He sees two rings, with a fire proceeding between them, and in the second ring the image of a man. He cannot fathom how this can be: “Mine were not the feathers for that flight.”

The pilgrim poet is straining to understand with his contingent intellect what incontingent love is all about. He is flapping his wings, to no avail. Yet it is God who has given him these wings, and it is he who descends to speed Dante on an instantaneous flight, smiting his mind like a bolt of lightning.

This is, finally, what it means to be a law unto oneself, utterly free from the shackling self-will of the traitor. The law is Love, who freely gives the freedom to fulfill the law:

Here ceased the powers of my high fantasy.
Already were all my will and my desires
turned — as a wheel in equal balance — by
The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Posted in Anthony Esolen, Apologetics, Understanding Dante | Tagged Anthony Esolen, autonomy, being from and being for, Dante's Satan, He made us; we did not make ourselves., Immanuel Kant, Psalm 49, purgatory, the denial of our created being, The Divine Comedy, the temptation of Satan, Woodrow Wilson | 1 Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Anthony Esolen’ Category

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