The Perils of General Revelation

General revelation--the way God reveals himself in nature--is an idea near to my heart. As an ardent outdoor amateur, I revel in the glory of a mountain sunset, a high alpine ridge, a herd of elk spotted from above, the great force of a descending river. 

The topic of general revelation has been much in my mind, lately, given that the first unit I teach each year to my juniors is on nature writing. The first quote we look at together is a famous one by the naturalist and conservationist, John Muir: "Man needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."

I find this a fitting place to begin because it is both beautiful and misleading. Concerning the beauty, Muir is absolutely right to reject mere utility; we may not need beauty in the same way we need bread--no one has ever died for lack of sunrises--but we do need beauty to live a fully human existence. (More on this in another post.) Muir is doubtless riffing off of Christ's famous line in the desert temptation that "man shall not live by bread alone." There must be more to this life than meeting the demands of the body. 

Muir is also right that we need and healing and enlivening strength. In a great paradox, we are constantly worn down and emasculated by the comforts of this world. Our rest--watching TV and eating crap--is not restful and restorative. We are being killed by our own material wealth. (More on this later, as well.)

Muir is wrong, though, in another important respect. After we talk about utility and its emptiness and establish that Muir is right about the beauty part of his quote, the question I ask my students is who has agency in this quote? Who is doing the doing? The answer of course is nature. It is nature that can heal and give strength to body and soul. 

But nature has no agency. Nature's power, if it can be said to exist, has to be derivative. And this is where Muir goes off course. If this restoration can come through nature it can only come as God wills it through nature. The rest, then, comes from God. Muir clings to the first part of Christ's response to Satan--that man shall not live by bread alone--but forgets or ignores the coordinating conjunction and the world of implications that comes in its train: the physical sustenance of our daily bread is insufficient unless joined with "every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." 

This small example illustrates well the problem of trusting to general revelation. Of itself, general revelation is incomplete. It is a partial view of the truth, "like," in the words of a song I still like too much, "looking through a fogged mirror." The mirror is fogged because of our sin and the brokenness of the world we now behold. And while this world still contains and speaks to God's all-encompassing glory, the fullest picture we must behold is not this marred cosmos but the perfection of God himself in the face of Christ. 

Much more on this to come.   

Refugees

One of the things I enjoy most about reading John Calvin (or even reading about him) is how surprising it tends to be. For a man history has labeled The Tyrant of Geneva, he has always struck me as remarkably prudent, grounded, and humane for his tumultuous time. Indeed, after a few minutes of vigorous googling (does that sound slightly dirty to anyone else?. . . no, okay.), I have determined that since there is no book out there titled Surprised by Calvin the door is open for someone to write that book.

Here is what got me today: his attitude toward immigrants and refugees. 

It is hard to broach this topic without getting political, so I'll get political. One of the key factors that will prevent me from pushing the button for Donald Trump here in a few weeks is his attitude towards immigrants and refugees and asylum seekers. I find it horrendous. We have dear friends who are Afghan refugees, their lives disrupted by a war we started, and are trying to make a go of it here in Denver. I know anecdotes make bad policy--a truth which must surely hold both ways: if one positive immigrant experience doesn't mean we should reinstate the call to give me your tired, your poor, and your huddled masses, then one bad immigrant experience certainly should not mean that we slam the door in their Muslim faces. That was a long digression, let me restart: I know anecdotes make bad policy, but there is no justifiable policy reason for tightening immigration in the completely arbitrary way a potential President Trump has suggested.*

Calvin's feelings for the immigrant and refugee emanate from a concern for the virtue of hospitality. Calvin lamented what he saw as the deplorable state of hospitality in his Europe. He complains that the "ancient hospitality celebrated in histories, is unknown to us." Any casual reader of Greek literature can attest that hospitality--xenia, in the original language--is a huge freaking deal to the ancients. A number of the main transgressions in the epics of Homer are breaches of hospitality. This issue of hospitality was so important to Calvin that one of the offices of the church--that of deacon--was almost exclusively responsible for meeting the needs of people within and outside of the church.

For Calvin, all the grounds required for extreme hospitality to others is that we are sharers both in the image of God: "whatever man you meet who needs your aid, you have no reason to refuse to help him. . . Say that he does not deserve even the least effort for his sake; but the image of God, which recommends him to you, is worthy of your giving yourself and all your possessions." In another place he draws on the same theme in much stronger language: 

God has impressed his image in us and has given us a common nature, which should incite us to providing one for the other. The man who wishes to exempt himself from providing for his neighbors should deface himself and declare that he no longer wishes to be a man, for as long as we are human creatures we must contemplate as in a mirror our face in those who are poor, despised, exhausted, who groan under their burdens.

And, should we be tempted to assume that Calvin is merely talking about our "neighbor" as other Genevan Christians, he finishes this line of thinking with the following shocking statement: "If there come some Moor or barbarian, since he is a man, he brings a mirror in which we are able to contemplate that he is our neighbor." Moor, for those wondering, would be sixteenth century speak for Muslim.

This is a fascinating, and as I mentioned earlier, surprising, language to me. It is not just that we are to be hospitable to those in our sphere, but we have here the Tyrant of Geneva saying that we should welcome Muslims into our homes since we share the imago Dei with them. What is surprising, in one sense, is that this is surprising. Calvin took Scripture seriously, including the parable of the Good Samaritan which enjoins just this sort of love and hospitality. 

But here is where it starts to hit home for me. Because people can say, with some rationality, that we ought to be super careful who we admit into our country, that the threat of terrorism demands that we take a tight stance on this issue. I agree, to a degree. But I trust the checks we have in place now and don't feel that a blanket refusal to admit members of a despised religious faith is being wise but being governed by fear, a far less Christian response to the world. And, what do you know, Calvin warns about this as well. After counseling wisdom in this matter, he writes, "let us beware that we seek not cover for our stinginess under the shadow of prudence." I have felt this temptation Calvin warns against so often in my life. Any impulse to means-test the aid we give can fall into this category. Calvin's antidote for this temptation is to not be "too exacting" and give forth our aid (and hospitality) with a "humane heart, inclined to pity and compassion."

*I didn't want to get political here for another reason: there are a lot of young evangelical types who sound off about immigration and refugees and make Trump out to be a monster who would never consider doing a damn thing to ameliorate the conditions of a refugee themselves. They like immigrants in the abstract, but don't have many particulars to lean on in their all-white enclaves. These people are annoying and must shut up.

On the Holding of Views

I made the horrible decision the other day after finishing the novel I was reading at the time to start Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as my next piece of fiction. An 815 page tome is a bad choice for the middle of an already busy semester, but it has been a decade now since I first read the book and I have looked at it wistfully on my shelf for the past year or so and finally gave in last night.

Six pages in, I was so glad to be back:

Stepan Arkadyich subscribed to and read a liberal newspaper, not an extreme one, but one with the tendency to which the majority held. And though neither science, nor art, nor politics itself interested him, he firmly held the same views on all these subjects as the majority and his newspaper did, and changed them only when the majority did, or, rather, he did not change them, but they themselves changed imperceptibly in him. 

Stepan Arkadyich chose neither his tendency nor his views, but these tendencies and views came to him themselves, just as he did not choose the shape of a hat or a frock coat, but bought those that were in fashion. And for him, who lived in a certain circle, and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with maturity, having views was as necessary as having a hat. If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many in his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but because it more closely suited his manner of life.

Is this not the great majority of our voters? Holding opinions because opinions must be held; holding only those that comport well with our previously held biases; changing our affinities imperceptibly as public opinion moves on. 

I have no problem, in most cases, with people changing their political convictions. Sometimes upon reflection this is warranted. I have certainly changed my mind on things. But what Tolstoy is fairly explicitly critiquing here is not a genuine and reasoned shift but one made simply to accommodate current fashions. And then, of course, we applaud ourselves for believing the right thing.

Theologian of Glory/Theologian of the Cross

I am reading Michael Horton's excellent volume Calvin on the Christian Life now and it has my mind spinning. In discussing Calvin's beliefs concerning what we can know about God, Horton draws on a distinction that I ashamed to say I am not sure I have come across before. I will quote him at length:

Martin Luther drew his famous contrast between 'the theologian of glory' and the 'theologian of the cross.' Climbing ladders of speculation, merit, and mystical experience, the naked soul seeks union with the naked God. As a theologian of glory, the monk tries to ascend to heavenly realms, away from this world--the body and its senses, in specific historical events. In such a presumptuous ascent, we miss God on his way down, descending to us in our world, in our flesh, lying in a manger and hanging on a cross. The theologian of glory judges by appearances: how things seem to look on the surface. However, the theologian of the cross trust the promise of God that he hears in God's Word, even if it seems to be contradicted by how things appear. . . We try to ascend to heaven, expecting to find God in glory, when he is only to be found in the small and even despicable things--like the cursed cross.

I love this distinction. The problem with works-based righteousness of whatever form is that it denies the incarnation and the efficacy of the cross. We no longer need to rise to God on our own steam; the work has been done for us in the descent of his Son. So many of my own errors in piety are this type of category error: forgetting that the theology I follow is one of the "small" and "despicable" and not the great glory and struggle I often imagine for myself.

Which, thank God, because if it were up to my own "heroic" struggle I wouldn't have the power to climb one rung on that ladder to heaven.

Lust and Law Were One

One of the joys of my life (maybe for my students, too!) is teaching Dante's Commedia. We focus most of our time on Inferno, the famous hell section, but are trying to give more time and weight to the succeeding sections, Purgatorio and Paradiso. 

Dante is unbelievable to me. That he existed. That he wrote this amazing poem. That he still speaks to us thundering down through the ages. I read an article David Foster Wallace wrote on Dostoevsky this week and it spoke about his power as a novelist to be inhabit time and transcend time: "a comprehensive reading of Dostoevsky's fiction is impossible without a detailed understanding of the cultural circumstances in which the books were conceived and to which they were meant to contribute." Despite this temporal concern, Dostoevsky's fiction is animated at its core by a "concern" with "what it is to be a human being--that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal." This human-centric focus goes beyond the parochial concerns of nineteenth century Russia. Dante has that same power: to be totally of his moment--mired in the grit and grime of thirteenth century Italy--and yet totally transcend it.

I'll probably be writing about the poem with some frequency as I teach my way through it this fall, but the first moment I want to slow down on comes early in Inferno, in Canto 5 (of 34). Canto 5 is the second circle of hell, reserved for the Carnal--those whose intemperance in the flesh led to their deaths. This circle is a maelstrom as the damned wing about in "hellish flight. . . here, there, up, down, they whirl and, whirling strain/ with never a hope of hope to comfort them,/ not of release, but even of less pain." It's a bleak punishment, no doubt, but fitting for souls "who betrayed reason to appetite." 

Where I want to pause, though, is over the first soul Dante meets at this level--Semiramis, a legendary queen of Assyria. Here is how Virgil, Dante's guide, introduces her crimes in stunning lines: 

Mad sensuality corrupted her so  

that to hide the guilt of her debauchery 

she licensed all depravity alike, 

and lust and law were one in her decree.

The indictment here is worth unpacking. Her corruption stems from a rampant and perverted sensuality. She feels guilty for this. But since she has power, she has the power to hide her guilt. Which is exactly what she does. In order to cover the genuine (and appropriate) guilt she felt, she changes the law to make her sins legal.

I do not want to draw too many immediate connections to our contemporary moral culture. I don't know what Semiramis's besetting sins were and how they played out in her life. But I do think it is worth thinking through what Dante the poet is saying here through Virgil. Which, as I read it, is this: if it becomes a matter of changing our desires or changing the law to accommodate our desires, many of us would prefer to do the latter. We are not ready to sacrifice our sensuality so we sacrifice the sense of decorum given by the law. And then we pretend, blithely, that now that the legal question has been answered we can move on with our lives, into a brave new and guilt-free world.

Dante's problem with this is obvious. It might work for awhile. But Semiramis is in hell.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Let's see if this sounds familiar:

Thus, in the society of Cato's great-grandson, the last shreds of traditional restraint had been contemptuously flung aside, and the dominant note was one of individual freedom and self-assertion. Inflamed by an insatiable thirst for novel forms of experience, members of the aristocracy let themselves go in a protracted orgy of extravagance and debauchery. The world was ransacked to provide the rarest and most exotic means for the satisfaction of the senses, and the last refinements of luxury and vice were introduced to titillate appetites already jaded by pleasure in its cruder forms. . . history and satire, developing about the same time, adopted a somewhat peevish and moralizing tone which, as it presently became conventional, was to be imitated by writers who, generations later, lashed at social evils which by their day were largely obsolete.

--Charles Norris Cochrane,  Christianity and Classical Culture

File this under: Evidences We Are Rome.

Romantic Realism

Every year I try to come up with a theme to govern my classes. Most of the time I forget what this theme is in the hubbub of the year and come back to it in the middle of May with a "hey, did you guys remember this?" moment right before finals. This year one of my goals is to be a bit more attentive to the stated theme and hopefully to carry it throughout the year. Perhaps I'll do another post on the theme for my sophomore Honors class, but the theme for my juniors--who comprise the bulk of my students--is "Romantic Realism." I want to explain what that means, but I want to do it--fittingly, for an English teacher--through a poem. So, enjoy this absolutely brilliant envisioning of Romantic Realism by Mary Oliver.

The Ponds

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them —

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided —
and that one wears an orange blight —
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away —
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Gah! Isn't that perfect, so to speak? At the beginning Oliver wants to romanticize the scene. The "perfect" lilies in their hyperbolic plenitude crowding out the darkness of the abyssal waters and enlightening the world. But she shifts in the middle of that fourth stanza with a rhetorical question: "But what in this world/ is perfect?" The answer of course is nothing, least of all the lilies.

Upon further scrutiny each bears some mark of imperfection from the minor--"lopsided"--to the decidedly more serious, "a slumped purse/ full of its own/ unstoppable decay." You think this flower is pretty? Well, guess what? It's DYING!!! And so will you, loser.

The rhetorical question shifts us into decidedly realist territory. No romanticizing here. And a starkly realist poem would end with the word decay. Sucks to you for thinking this was a beautiful scene. But Oliver doesn't do that. She transitions yet again with the word "still," as if to say, hold on, decay is not to be the last word. And then she has line that knocks me off my feet: "what I want in my life/ is to be willing/ to be dazzled." Oliver doesn't just want to be dazzled; she wants to be willing to be dazzled. In other words, she doesn't expect the dazzling to just happen. She does not resign herself to being merely a passive agent in this process. She wants to be willing. She wants to open herself up to the possibility of being blown away by the beauty and majesty of this world. She wants to be willing to make a choice. 

A choice “to cast aside the weight of facts” (28). A choice to “believe that the imperfections are nothing” (34). A choice to, in a conscious nod to William Wordsworth's famously Romantic "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," “maybe even/ to float a little/ above this difficult world” (29-31). Oliver acknowledges the brokenness of the world, the decay of the flowers, the marred nature of creation. But she returns to the choice of seeing the beauty. In the final three words of the poem, in language reminiscent of the marriage vow, Oliver weds herself to this vision of the world, saying “And I do” (36). She is accepting the flaws with the glory that still remains present in this world. She is clear-eyed to the true condition of a fallen world, but chooses the “lapped light” over the abyss of the “black” waters.

This is what I mean by Romantic Realism. It is a view of the world that does not deny an often harsh reality and its pain and decay and degradation. But it doesn't stop there. It chooses to see the world as, in Hopkins' phrase, charged with the grandeur of God. A world that maintains its beauty and glory and God-infused nature despite its flaws, in the same way we maintain God's image within us despite our sin. This is what I want my students to believe about the world; this is what I want my own children to believe about the world; this is what I want to believe about the world. 

And I want this so badly because I think it is the Christian view of the world. And, in my own Romanticism, I think it's possible to win people over to seeing the world this way.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

From Richard Flanagan's extraordinary novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 

It was hot in the room, but it felt to him far less stifling than the poetry reading below. He pulled out a book here and there, but what kept catching his attention were the diagonal tunnels of sunlight rolling in through the dormer windows. All around him dust motes rose and fell, shimmering, quivering in those shafts of roiling light. He found several shelves full of old editions of classical writers and began vaguely browsing, hoping to find a cheap edition of Virgil's Aeneid, which he had only ever read in a borrowed copy. It wasn't really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted though, but the aura he felt around such books--an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone.

And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work--an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.

Any lover of books recognizes this sentiment. This is why Kindles and other electronic formats can never best the printed word. I go into my office or my living room or my family room and I am surrounded by artifacts of civilization, imagination, and learning. One of the jokes of Western philosophy is that everything written in the past 2500 years is a footnote to Plato, and the sentiment Flanagan expresses here gets at the truth in that truism. As we read and write we participate in a conversation that was begun thousands of years before us and will continue thousands of years after us. 

World without end, amen.

Might vs Right

In what I find the most crucial scene in T.H. White's excellent Arthurian retelling The Once and Future King, the newly-crowned Arthur is trying to discern his role as the King of All England. Beset by the rebellion of King Lot and the Orkney faction of the North, Arthur is about to face the first real test of his reign in the Battle of Bedegraine. In the passage I will quote he is trying to articulate what Merlyn has been trying to teach him throughout his long tutorship. This is what he decides:

"'Now what I have thought,' said Arthur, 'is this. Why can't you harness Might so that it works for Right? I know it sounds nonsense, but I mean, you can't just say there is no thing. The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can't neglect it. You can't cut it out, but you might be able to direct it, if you see what I mean, so that it was useful instead of bad.'

The audience was interested. They leaned forward to listen, except Merlyn.

'My idea is that if we can win this battle in front of us, and get a firm hold of the country, then I will institute a sort of order of chivalry. I will not punish the bad knights, or hang Lot, but I will try to get them into our Order. We shall have to make it a great honor, you see, and make it fashionable and all that. Everybody must want to be in. And then I shall make the oath of the order that Might is only to be used for Right. Do you follow? The knights in my order will ride all over the world, still dressed in steel and whacking away with their swords--that will give an outlet for wanting to whack, you understand, an outlet for what Merlyn calls the fox hunting spirit--but they will be bound to strike only on behalf of what is good, to defend virgins against Sir Bruce and to restore what has been done wrong in the past and to help the oppressed and so forth. Do you see the idea? It will be using the Might instead of fighting against it, and turning a bad thing into a good. There, Merlyn, that is all I can think of. I have thought as hard as I could, and I suppose I am wrong, as usual. But I did think. I can't do any better. Please say something!'

The magician stood up as straight as a pillar, stretched out his arms in both directions, looked at the ceilinged said the first few words of the Nunc Dimittis."

The Nunc Dimittis is the prayer of Simeon from Luke's gospel, beginning "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." In other words, at this declaration of Arthur Merlyn sees his life's purpose fulfilled, to form the great king into the man who will undo the cycle of pointless death that characterized their culture. He can depart in peace.

Might still trumps Right in so much of our world. But the greatest dreams of humanity have been to harness Might for the work of Right. The infinitive there is imperative--to harness Might, which as Arthur acknowledges can never fully be sublimated. We will always bear within us that "fox hunting spirit." But the first condition for true democracy and true freedom is that Might be under the dominion of Right.

White named the book The Once and Future King. The name comes from the legend that King Arthur (and Merlyn) will return to England (or Logres) and restore it to its former glory. He is, like Christ, the once and future king. He will return and redemption will follow. It is a beautiful idea and one that always gives me goosebumps to think about.