Hamilton the Musical, or When You Need to Pull Your Car Over and Cry to a Broadway Tune

I am not what you might call trendy. (As every previous student, friend, and general acquaintance nods their head vigorously.) So I am a little late to the Hamilton frenzy, but boy am I glad this play exists. If this means nothing to you, I suggest this article from the now unfortunately-shuttered Books and Culture to get you up to speed.

Basically Hamilton represents a classic unexpected success story. A musical about an oft-neglected founding father with a mostly minority cast that covers the scope of Alexander Hamilton's fascinating life. I don't want to give background here. Read the article. I just love that it happened. There is much to bemoan about our culture; Hamilton is something eminently worth praising.

This post is nothing but budding fanboy praise. I have it on my phone and have been listening to it almost constantly. We have been listening as a family, too. My daughter now regularly requests it when she gets the chance. It has usurped Jack Johnson as her most requested artist. We dance together in the kitchen as we listen. 

We have been trying to teach our kids about music in a more systematic way. We are starting with Bach, listening to a ton of his music, reading a biography about him. I want my kids to understand the power that music can exert, and not just the easily accessible stuff. I want them to love the hard stuff, too. I want them to be moved as they finish Beethoven's Ninth, Dvorak's New World Symphony, Bach's Cello Suites, Vivaldi's Four Seasons. 

But I want them to love this stuff as well. I was listening to the soundtrack the other night while out running errands. It was dark and I was thinking about my kids and how much I love them, how blessed my life is by them. And then I heard this song that plays after Hamilton's son Phillip was killed in, ironically, a duel defending his father's honor. And it just got me. I had to pull off Arapahoe onto a side street and cry. I'm taking sobs. I can drive through misty eyes. I've done that plenty in my life. This was different. As I got myself under control and pulled back onto the main road and drove home I was so grateful for that chance to cry. I got home and hugged Owen tight and told him I loved him and how proud I am of how he is growing.

We talked in my class the other day about "knowing" truth through our emotions. Emotional knowledge is dangerous. Our emotions can just as easily mislead us as benefit us. But when you can trust your emotions, when they lead you to the Good, well, there is nothing else so capable of moving our souls. And music, perhaps more than any other art form, has the power to take us there.

You Shall Love Your Crooked Neighbor With Your Crooked Heart

One of my major personal afflictions is my self-righteousness. I want to believe, and generally do believe, that I am better than most other people out there. Humans are inveterate experts at self-righteousness and self-justification. Our motives are so clear to ourselves (or so we think) that if only people could see it from our perspective our actions would all make sense. Part of becoming an adult is realizing that you're actually a bastard. That your motives are neither pure nor clear. That your self is neither righteous nor just. Obviously, I still struggle living out this knowledge, but it's there now. Mercifully, God has revealed to me just how deep the depravity goes in my own soul. 

I was thinking about these things as I read W.H. Auden's poem "As I Walked Out One Evening" a few weeks ago and have incessantly returned to it in the meantime. I don't want to explicate the entire thing, but you should most certainly for the sake both of your humanity and your appreciation of beauty go and read this poem now. Here is a link for your convenience. 

Pertaining to self-righteousness and its nonexistence, I want to zero in on a few lines from the end of Auden's poem (again, I can't recommend highly enough to read it in its entirety). The conceit of the poem is a lover singing to his beloved about the depth of his love in ridiculous romantic diction: "I'll love you dear, I'll love you,/ Till China and Africa meet"; "I'll love you till the ocean/ Is folded and hung up to dry"; etc. 

The clocks in the city answer the lover's outlandish claims in rather more pessimistic language. They warn: "O let not Time deceive you/ You cannot conquer time." Time is a real douchebag in this poem. "Time watches from the shadow/ And coughs when you would kiss." Gah! What an image. The clocks assert that you are not going to be carpe-dieming your way through life. Rather, "in headaches and in worry/ Vaguely life leaks away." Vaguely, purposelessly, imprecisely--there goes life.

The clocks chill out after a bit, though, and add some dark encouragement to their admonition. Here it's worth quoting at a bit greater length:

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.'

That last stanza. It is hard not to cry reading that. This is not blithe moralizing. There are tears scalding your eyes. You are looking in desperation out of the window. Out at a world that often seems careless. At a world full of crooked people. But, you shall love your crooked neighbor, in the end. With your crooked heart. 

Self-righteousness gleefully recognizes the crookedness of your neighbor. Despair sees only your own. But this, this is something different altogether. This acknowledges your fundamental brokenness and that of your neighbor. And its command is love. When we see the crookedness in our neighbor we are not moved to self-righteous pity, but love that recognizes a fellow pilgrim. 

And that is beautiful, despite the tears. We will love each other in our crookedness until the day we are made straight.

Hell is Yourself

My main problem with teaching Dante is pacing. The Commedia is such an overwhelming treasure that it is hard to keep making forward progress. As such, I am miserably behind schedule. To wit, we are three weeks in and I am still trying to get us into the latter half of Inferno. Oh well. Here's a moment from Canto 14 that I find true of sin and sinners.

They are in Circle 7, a three-tiered level that punishes crimes against God (blasphemy), crimes against nature (homosexuality), and crimes against art (usurers, or people who charge interest). In this canto we're in the first of these tiers with the blasphemers. The spirit that the pilgrim Dante slows down to talk to here is Capaneus, a mythological warrior most famous from a play by Aeschylus. 

Capaneus is a member of a faction trying to overthrow Thebes. Imagining himself unbeatable, he declares that not even Zeus could stop his action and save Thebes. Zeus takes that challenge and lays Capaneus flat with a lightning bolt. Dante encounters Capaneus in this level where sinners are punished by either lying down or walking around on burning sand (depending on the severity of their sin) while fire-rain pours down on them, and rather than trying to ameliorate his fate Capaneus "sets his face against the fire in scorn." He disdains the punishment, refusing to give Zeus (Jupiter in Dante's Roman pantheon) the "small satisfaction" of pleading for relief.

There is something pathetically heroic about Capaneus' stand. In the midst of the fires of hell he refuses to repent or cry out. His pathetic heroism is redolent of another character in epic literature, and not a flattering analogue: Satan in Paradise Lost who likewise refuses to "bow and sue for grace/ With suppliant knee." Neither will bend to God's will, his power, or his judgment. The adverb before heroic, though, is important. And heroism here is pathetic. Moreover, it only serves to darkly affirm Capaneus' earlier self-serving words that "[w]hat I was living, the same am I now, dead." He imagines this to be an assertion of his independence and his integrity, but it is hard to see how the very characteristic that ended him up in hell is worth extolling. It is amazing what people will cling to.

Virgil, Dante's guide, chimes in helpfully here to rebuke Capaneus' vaunting pride:

"O Capaneus, by your insolence
you are made to suffer as much fire inside
as falls upon you. Only your own rage
could be fit torment for your sullen pride."

These lines remind me of the playground taunt from my childhood years: sucks to be you. Virgil is telling Capaneus basically that: "Capaneus, it sucks to be you. And now you're stuck with you forever." The heat of his rage only highlights the abject condition in which Capaneus now finds himself. And the fire burns inside of him in a more brutal way than that which rains down on his supine body.

And how true this is of us and our sin. We cling to it, cherish it, apologize for it, pretend it requires no apology. I know and have known people who are alive who are just like Capaneus. Scorning the flames. Refusing to bow. Carrying a hell within themselves. A hallmark of Christian theology that I imagine I read for the first time in C.S. Lewis is that every resident of hell is there by choice. The choice to deny God, hate truth, and exalt self is forever enshrined in hell. You are free there to worship at your own altar.

The Perils of General Revelation, 2

In the first post on this subject I talked about John Muir and the Romantic notion that nature has agency dependent of God. In other words, one of the category errors that we can make (and I have often been tempted to make) is one that goes back all the way to the fall of man: "exchange[ing] the truth about God for a lie and worship[ing] and serve[ing] the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever" (Romans 1:25). In this post I want to address another problem with relying on general revelation: forgetting that simply acknowledging God's existence has no power to save us from our sins.

Calvin begins his famous Institutes acknowledging that "true and sound wisdom consists in two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves." He goes on to make it plain that we all know at least something of God through our human nature which, while fallen, still maintains "an awareness of divinity." Even pagan idolatry is proof that we are born discerning God's existence even if we miss the mark.

Moreover, we do not merely discern God's existence and nature in the hard sciences but people who have "tasted the liberal arts penetrate with their aid far more deeply into the secrets of divine wisdom." Humans stand as the chief object of the glory of God's power in creation. Our creativity and powers of discernment and wisdom are unrivaled. Yet, for Calvin it is simply not enough. As Michael Horton points out, "the grandeur of our species measures the depth of our depravity." 

Because of the fall our knowledge of God is only ever partial. However, can this partial knowledge through general revelation lead us to saving faith in Christ? For Calvin, the answer is no. Horton distinguishes the function of general revelation in Roman Catholicism compared to Calvin's thought: "In Roman Catholic theology, general revelation is a stepping stone to redemption. In Calvin's view it, is the rope by which we hang ourselves." We hang ourselves by our slavery to idolatry, by the way we "flatter ourselves most sweetly, and fancy ourselves all but demigods," by the way we have "fashioned [God] in [our] own presumption," making him a deity to fit our needs.

Calvin argues that this process is deliberate. We know we are not worshiping God as he is, but God as we choose to make him and we don't care. We want our vision even if it's false. In our elevating ourselves to the role of demigod, we willfully obscure the actual God.

This is why general revelation inevitably falls short. We are too mired in sin and sunken in depravity to worship God as he is. Therefore, as Horton argues, the "fall requires special revelation both because we willfully misinterpret God and ourselves even in natural terms and because it is only in the gospel that God announces his saving purposes to sinners." In other words, we need a better witness than creation to the work of the Creator to save us. We have that witness in Scripture alone.*

*Incidentally, I had one brilliant student point this out immediately when we started talking about general revelation. He intuited right away that its main deficiency is that it leaves us without knowing we're damned and how we can be saved. I usually have to coax this out of students, but he jumped to it right away.

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.