Google Talk is here!!

So, you want to get Google Talk, do you? Well, I can hook you up.

Drop me a line, and will do.

And it's pretty cool too. I like that the interface is simple. My one complaint is that it shows up with its little windows on my taskbar. I'd prefer it all stay in the system tray.

What does this have to do with literature?

Hmmm. Well, now that you ask . . . Hey, look over there!

(Sound of running, door slamming, car starting, blind guy pealing out.)

(So is it "pealing out" or "peeling out"? Surely it must be the former. The latter makes no sense.)

Read A. G. Sertillanges's The Intellectual Life. It's quite good.

Let's get this into high gear!

So, with The Fall of the Iron Prow now officially out there, self-published I mean, I need to get in gear to get some attention this way. That being said, I hope to start posting seriously again. I'm not sure what the best way to go about it is, though. I'm thinking mostly reviews and comments on books, as well as interesting and cool stuff that comes up from my graduate work here at the Catholic University of America. Yep. I'm a graduate student at the Center for medieval and Byzantine Studies. Cool, huh?

Ah, I love DC! God is good.

This is the poem the Varangians used to sing heading south on the rivers for Mikligard. Sweet.

Riðum ræfils vakri
Rekum ei plóg af akri,
Erjum úrgu barði
Út at Miklagarði.

Þiggjum þengils mála,
Þokum fram í gný stála,
Rjoðum gildis góma,
Gerum ríks konungs sóma.

John Paul II's Letter to Artists - The Text and My Comments (for what they're worth)

(See Part I.)

"The Special Vocation of the Artist

"2. Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece."

Comments: While it is true that most artists have not been saints, it is also true that some have. It is not an empty exhortation which encourages us to read scripture, for therein will we find some of the finest art that ever man has made. You doubt this? Then consider the words of King Hezekiah in his grief: "Once, I said, 'In the noontime of life, I must depart; to the gates of the netherworld I shall be consigned for the rest of my years.' I said, 'I shall see the Lord no more in the land of the living. No longer shall I behold my fellow men among those who dwell in the world.' My dwelling, like a shepherd's tent, is struck down and borne away from me; You have folded up my life, like a weaver who severs the last thread. Day and night you give me over to torment.'" Can you find one passage in a hundred in the canons of east and west that rivals this? Perhaps it can be done, but I do not say that only holy men are great artists; I say only that holy men are better because they are holy. St. John's gospel is unrivaled in the world, for, like a fruit, it was borne upon the tree of a holy life, and so it is more beautiful than the others because of it. "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You pay tithes of mint and dill and cumin, but have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment, mercy, and fidelity. But these you should have done without neglecting the others. Blind guides, who strain the gnat and swallow the camel!" This is from St. Matthew's gospel, the words of Christ. They are not what we think of when we imagine beautiful passages of scripture, but so they are. Perfect, elegant, simple, clear, and sharper than any two-edged sword. And it is worth noting that Jesus Christ Himself was an artist, a carpenter, and we can only imagine what works He made. But the greater work, by far, in fact, the greatest work, is the work He made of His life as a man. O felix culpa! St. Paul says somewhere that God is greater in restoring man than He is in creating him. If that is true, then perhaps the work of our own lives, the masterpiece that we cooperate with God in making with our deeds, is a greater work than our creation.

"It is important to recognize the distinction, but also the connection, between these two aspects of human activity. The distinction is clear. It is one thing for human beings to be the authors of their own acts, with responsibility for their moral value; it is another to be an artist, able, that is, to respond to the demands of art and faithfully to accept art's specific dictates. (Note 2 inserted: The moral virtues, and among them prudence in particular, allow the subject to act in harmony with the criterion of moral good and evil: according to recta ratio agibilium (the right criterion of action). Art, however, is defined by philosophy as recta ratio factibilium (the right criterion of production).) This is what makes the artists capable of producing objects, but it says nothing as yet of his moral character. We are speaking not of moulding oneself, of forming one's own personality, but simply of actualizing one's productive capacities, giving aesthetic form to ideas conceived in the mind."

Comments: Happiness is an activity, not a state or a feeling. In particular, happiness requires the actualizing of potential: we have to do what we are capable of doing. A blanket statement, perhaps, but not one that should be interpreted too broudly. Of course, we all can do certain things, but happiness does not consist in doing merely what it is in our power to do; happiness consists in doing what we are particularly capable of doing, what we can do that no one else can. First and foremost, that happiness, for all of us, artist or not, is the perfection of our lives through grace, for only we are capable of doing that; but second and, in the order of things, less important, that happiness is the perfection of our peculiar talents, our peculiar abilities for doing this or that in the world, whether it be teaching gymnastics or composing a sonnet. God wants the world full of everything each one of us is best at doing. Consider an art museum: while we may sometimes say that such and such painting was our favorite, usually, when viewing art, we are not engaged in some sort of rating game, nor are we interested in discovering which piece is genuine art, so as to exclude all the others. We are interested in art, in its splendor and variety, its depth and its shallowness; it doesn't particularly matter to us who is better or who is best; we want only to see what is good in all its forms. It is an evil of the modern mind that what we do is too often sunk in the mire of the mind, where lurk doubt and diffidence, the twin sons of the last century, the gift our fathers gave us. The man who wrote this letter to artists has an answer to that evil, and it is summed up in the first words of his pontificate: "Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!" "You who feel the need for healing, the need for love, the need for a friend, follow Christ!"

"The distinction between the moral and artistic aspects is fundamental, but no less important is the connection between them. Each conditions the other in a profound way. In producing a work, artists express themselves to the point where their work becomes a uique discloser of their own being, of what they are and of how they are what they are. And there are endless examples of this in human history. In shaping a masterpiece, the artists not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. For him art offers both a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for this spiritual growth. Through his works, the artist speaks to others and communicates with them. The history of art, therefore, is not only a story of works produced but also a story of men and women. Works of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life, and they reveal the original contribution which artists offer to the history of culture."

Comments: "Whatsoever thine hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest." This not merely an exhortation to us to keep busy, lest our idle hands fall to sin. It is an exhortation to us to work because work produces good things; note that it says "thine hand"; we may take this to refer to what each of us finds himself most apt and inclined to do, what work we are most drawn to make. A monk once asked Abbot Nisteru, "What good work shall I do?" The Abbot replied, "All works are not equal. Abraham was hospitable, and God was with him. And Elias loved quiet, and God was with him. And David was humble, and God was with him. Whatsoever thou findest that thy soul desireth in following God, that do, and keep thy heart." It is by doing what our heart longs to do that we will make the finest works that we can make, and it is by that also that our works will show forth who we are. The artist's work as an artist is itself a manifestation of the artist's work as a man, his work of perfecting himself in the love of Christ; this does not mean that a good man will be a better artist than someone who takes no care to love God; it means rather that the artist who is a good man will be a better artist because of it.

Letter to Artists

Below is Pope John Paul II's Letter to Artists. Many of you may know that he was himself an actor, poet, and playright, and thus his thoughts on art and artists come not just from wisdom, but from experience and a deep love for the subject. Because I cannot understand a text or engage it without commenting in written form - for some strange reason - I have added my own comments to this part of the text. As I comment more, I will post more of the letter itself as well as my comments. I hope they are at least enlightening for someone. When I first read this letter, I thought little of it; it has only been since I returned to it with the resolution to think hard about what the letter says and comment on its contents that I have seen its depth and wisdom.

If this isn't transmodern, I don't know what is. :) Oh, and to put this in the context of my personal life from which it comes, I should tell you that I have recently finished writing my epic in prose, The Fall of the Iron Prow, being part of the Song of the Golden Horn, taken from the Lays of Long Defeat. If you want to read it, write me and I will probably send you the book in pdf with the proviso that you give me feedback. But, without further ado . . .

Letter to Artists
Pope John Paul the Great

"1. None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked up the work of his hands. A glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in your eyes when--like the artists of every age--captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colors and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wish in some way to associate you."

Comments: I wish my works were good in some small way as the Father's works are good. I realize that I am trying to subcreate the whole world and the drama of the fallen king, to tell it anew that men may see it again. I want to know all things so that I can be all things. Though I aim at marvels beyond me, let me know my weaknesses and cast them aside, and let what is good in my art and in the works of mine own hands be the best goods that I can make.

"That is why it seems to me that there are no better words than the text of genesis with which to begin my letter to you, to whom I feel closely linked by experiences reaching far back in time and which have indelibly marked my life. In writing this letter, I intend to follow the path of the fruitful dialogue between the Church and artists which has gone on unbroken through two thousand years of history, and which will, at the threshold of the Third Millennium, offers rich promise for the future."

Comments: What rich promise? Further art? Further depictions and glimpses of beauty? Both of these and more. What more? Through art we can know what we cannot know and see what we cannot see. Our story, not only the story each one of us has to tell, but the story WE have to tell, is just that, a story, a work of art, and it needs to be said of both of them, the history of man and the history of this man. I wish to know all and to see all that I might know the Face behind the veil and what lies at the heart of all things: Who art Thou? The creating and enjoying of art can make us holy. How do I know? Because reading and studying scripture can make us holy, truly steeping ourselves in the culture of the sacred word will bring us sanctity. But how is it possible? It is possible by drawing toward beauty, for that draws us toward truth; the vision of God's glory, which certainly must be the one beautiful thing worth contemplating forever, is the Truth, and the Truth is beautiful beyond words. (My innate and inane self-consciousness would corrupt me even now. But I thank God that the words on a page do not convey the bitter feeling of self-consciousness, the excruciating awareness of the self; they do not because this kind of self-doubt and self-consciousness is corrupt and it is meet and right that what is corrupt should fall away. Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Thy Name give the Glory!)

"In fact, this dialogue is not dictated merely by historical accident or practical need, but is rooted in the very essence both of religious experience and artistic creativity. The opening pages of the Bible presents God as a kind of exemplar of everyone who produces a work: the human craftsman mirrors the image of God as creator. This relationship is particularly clear in the Polish language because of the lexical link between the words stworca (creator) and tworca (craftsman)."

Comments: This work then, the work that each artist does takes on a whole new meaning when seen as an imitation of God as creator. Just as God's creation is good solely because He made it so and He loved it and it pleased Him, so too the artist's work is good in and of itself: as a creation, as a mirroring of the foremost of the ways God relates to us men, as creator and as heavenly Father; and this is irrespective of the piece's worth or craftsmanship, whether well or poorly done. When one considers art in some general way, problems at once arises if a definition of the term is sought or if a necessary and sufficient condition for a thing to count as art is sought. While clearly art can be used to evil ends, it is still clear that by making something at all, the artist is imitating God. And that is a good thing. It may be a small thing if the work is intended for evil or the glorification of the wicked, but it is still a good. If an artist is faithful to this small thing, this desire to make something and thus be an imitator of God, a "subcreator" as the Professor says, then the work will not be the result of evil or intended for some evil end. But to do this the artist must know himself and his place in the world, and he must know God as well and what God has designed for the world, for he can hardly imitate God well if he does not know the work of God's hands. Both of these entail having a large measure of wisdom, sophia, which will direct the will and the heart toward what is worth doing. I do not say only the good or beautiful because sometimes it is permissible and even desirable to portray evil and to show it for what it is or to portray evil men so as to show the wretchedness of their condition or the hope of their salvation. I am very concerned that these remarks be straightforward and both in some sense spiritual and practical. The artist has to remember his place and Whom he is imitating and somehow subject his work to that memory and that knowledge. How does one do this? By living in accord with the truth. There is no simple way of taking this mysticism of being constantly aware of God's fatherhood and creativity and applying it directly and straightforwardly to the artist's work. He has to be formed in this way through the studying of scripture, theology, philosophy, science, and the humanities, as well as what is his own peculiar artistic field. He has to live in these things, not merely pass certain classes concerning them. He is never complete and always must be pressing on further. In his study of scripture the scripture should be prayed and read and loved. When an artist has that, then he will have some idea of how it is to live in this way. It is not merely the recognition of certain truths or even of applying those truths to one's own life; it is somehow an encounter with how the world really is; this way of living the faith and in the faith allows us to sit in the silence of a library or a church and simply live, being fully able to draw on the stream of God's revelation is we need or want to. This life is the place beyond education, beyond the mere gathering and systematizing of knowledge or the training of the mind; it is this life that all of these things aim at and which is their highest good: not the books read, but the life of the one who reads them. Knowledge is acquired into this life and assimilated, not merely as a body of propositions, though it may often take that form, but as something which becomes part of who that person is and how he lives. Knowledge of the world enables him to understand it and to live better in it, treating things as they are meant to be treated. That is why the Holy Father's language is so rich and strange; he lived the world in this way because of his deep faith and rich education; he did not know things, in many ways, as we know them, through the medium of propositions and theories, but he knew them as they are because he lived them, he lived with them, and he loved them all. And this is not to disparage completely propositions and theories, for they do have a place in the necessary simplification, organization, and codification of knowledge, as well as in the education of the young, but they are not the end of the matter. Two natures, human and divine in one person is where the mystery of the Trinity begins, not where it ends. That proposition must be defended and held on to, and not compromised, but its place must be recognized. (Whether we have always to use this formulation, I do not know. Guha has introduced doubts, but I do very much wish to go with the Church on the matter.) Still, this living in such knowledge and education as I have pointed to and living in the understanding of the artist as imitator of God's fatherhood and position as the Sole Creator is the best way to make truly great art. And because this is a way of living there are many and various ways of carrying it out, each different for one's own circumstances. I have felt and understood this some times and in some small ways, and for me it was particularly brought on by the reading of scripture. Something comes together then that I cannot describe or explain, other than perhaps to say that truth can come through a story often far better than through a treatise.

"What is the difference between creator and craftsman? The one who creates bestows being itself; he brings something out of nothing--ex nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts it--and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something which already exists, to which he gives form and meaning. This is the mode of operation peculiar to man as made in the image of God. In fact, after saying that God created man and woman in his iamge (cf. Gn 1:27) the Bible adds that he entrusted to them the task of dominating the earth (cf. Gn 1:28). This was the last day of creation (cf. Gn 1:28-31). On the previous days, marking as it were the rhythm of the birth of the cosmos, the Lord had created the universe. Finally, he created human beings, the noblest fruit of his design, to whom he subjected the visible world as the vast field in which human inventiveness might assert itself."

Comments: It is not merely a matter of subduing the world to our ends of agriculture or construction, but dominating it in that we make the universe, or some small part of it, into what we want or need. This domination is not only that of the artist, but also of the engineer, the scientist, even the teacher. The special place the artist has is that he somehow cooperates with God more than the others and in closer imitation of God than the others because he is creating something, not because it is useful to some end, be it a bridge or a textbook, or because it is merely true, as the biologist's collection of data on the mountain laurel, but because it is beautiful and is made subject to the artist's wants and who the artist is. God made what He did because of who He is and what He wants and finds beautiful. So too the artist, unlike the engineer who makes what he does because it is primarily useful. Art is not a luxury. So, one might say that the artist shows man in God the Creator's image, just as the father shows man in God's the Father's image. This image of God the Creator does not necessarily take precedence over the other ways in which man can be seen as in the image of God. It is, of course, spoken of first in scripture, but there is little beyond that to give it any preeminence. If there is any preeminence, we might be best to remember what a gift artistic talent is, that it is something given and not something taken. The bishop and the catechist have a far more important work in the world than the artist, but somehow, what the artist does is closer to what God did in the deeps of time when the world was made.

"God therefore called man into existence, committing to him the craftsman's task. Through his artistic creativity man appears more than ever in the image of God, and he accomplishes this task above all in shaping the wondrous material of his own humanity and then exercising his own dominion over the creative universe which surrounds him. With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his own creative power. Obviously, this is a sharing which leaves intact the infinite distance between the creator and the creature, as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa made clear: "Creative art which it is the soul's good fortune to entertain, is not to be identified with that essential art which is God himself, but is only a communication of it and a share in it.""

Comments: Here the Holy Father underscores again the importance of this gift of artistic talent and creativity as well as the perfection of that gift in the object of art itself, the thing produced. It is, he makes clear, a gift and a calling: that spark God gives only draws us on toward kindling the flame of inspiration and the flame of love. God wishes that these two should be the same, as in St. Francis the poet or St. Thomas Aquinas the poet, but He will not so force us, and very often He allows the artist to turn his own talent onto himself or He allows the artist to create something that was not what God wanted him to create. Every artist's true masterpiece is himself, for he is first called to craft his own life before dominating the created order. It is true that he often does the first by means of the second, but the first must be the goal, the perfection of self and the expression of truth and love which make a life beautiful--an example of which we find ready to hand in the very author of the letter, Pope John Paul the Great; his plays may not be famous, and his poetry may not be great, but the greatest work of art he ever made was himself, and that by the grace of Almighty God and for the salvation of souls. Though this is a calling from God and a gift of a spark of divine inspiration, of the same Spirit that moved over the face of the deep, it does not make man a god; his art is truly his, but only by divine grace, for every good gift and every perfect gift is from above coming down from the Father of lights. Because all grace is a communication in some way of God Himself, it is so here too. Hence the quotation from Cardinal Cusa: the quotation speaks of God as art, and surely He is. He is perfect in every way, and is all-powerful, and thus is perfectly in control of Himself and at harmony with Himself, recognizing that these are the pale images of His creatures being projected back onto Him; it is at this point that projecting backwards and digging for analogies breaks down; God is not the product of Himself as the painting is the product of the painter, clearly; still, in some way, while we cannot think of God as the product of any actions, even His own, still, we can say that He is perfection and beauty and all in all, and that such a thing is not merely so incidentally, but intentionally, and the most beautiful work of art without exception, though, again, we use "work of art" in reference to God only as an analogy from experience and the infinitely lesser to the infinitely greater; nothing is taken from His majesty. This makes sense in some way, again analogously, of the beatific vision: it is a vision of the greatest "work of art", a perfect and infinite vision that gives the possessor the thing itself somehow, though he cannot receive it all; we all know the joys of contemplation of something or someone, the flash of understanding of great truth, the flash of understanding a great friend, the flash of love for another; these same things come from experience of art, and the last especially comes from the experience of the art that is another person's life.

"That is why artists, the more conscious they are of their “gift”, are led all the more to see themselves and the whole of creation with eyes able to contemplate and give thanks, and to raise to God a hymn of praise. That is the only way for them to come to a full understanding of themselves, their vocation, and their mission."

Comments: In my own life, I understand this very well. In so far as I think of my work as something I do, exclusively myself, I tend to fall short and to look about me and see nothing good and nothing perfect. It is only when I begin to look at the work with the eyes of faith, the eyes which tell me that God has given me this talent and it is His Will that I use it as I do and it is His Will that what I make be a good thing for His service and for the beautification of the world, it is only when I see my work in that way that I am able to know it and love it and carry it out more perfectly. One thing is clear: the more we turn in, the more we will turn in, and it is out that we must turn, out to the world and God; it is the self that we flee, not to destroy it, but to set it free. In fact, it is only in the recognition of this art as a gift that we can be free and it is only in that that we can be great artists, for this is the attitude of humility, of accepting the world and ourselves the way they were made and desiring them thus, and while being aware of our own limitations and the limitations of those around us, we are able to see past them and, above all, to have faith in God and so to hope in God and both of those precisely because we love Him. The world the artist makes, if it is good and done in the spirit of the image of God and the spark He has given us, is itself a praise of God, a giving of thanks to Him, and a contemplation. But this leaves us with at least one question: if art is a man’s vocation, what is his mission? The Holy Father speaks of the artist’s mission in the last phrase of paragraph one. But what is it? Generally, it is the mission of all men, the salvation of souls and the raising up of the world to God. But what is the specific mission of the artist? I suppose that depends on the artist and for what end God has sent him out into the world. Perhaps one might make a distinction between vocation and mission. A vocation is God’s call of a man to him. A mission is God’s sending out of a man back into the world. The vocation is the way in which God wants a man to come to Him. A mission is the way in which God wants to send the man back into the world. One way of fleshing this out is that Bernini was called to be an artist, but his mission was building St. Peter’s Basilica. The mission is more specific to a man because a man cannot be merely a great artist; he must be great in some way or other with reference to some thing or some person; that way or that thing or those people are the person’s mission.


More to come...

The Art of Sigurd the Volsung, Part III

Here are two small selectiosns of lines, the first of rare beauty and majesty, the second, simply good lines.

After speaking of what his father Reidmar gave to his older brothers, Regin begins to tell what gifts his father gave to him:

(pg. 85)

"And to me, the least and the youngest, what gift for the slaying of ease?
Save the grief that remembers the past, and the fear that the future sees;
And the hammer and fashioning-iron, and the living coal of fire;
And the craft that createth a semblance, and fails of the heart's desire;
And the toil that each dawning quickens and the task that is never done;
And the heart that longeth ever, nor will look to the deed that is won."

In these lines Morris succeeds twice over. First, he tells us precisely what he wanted to tell us; there is no doubt of what he is speaking, no doubt of the nail biting man who longs for what is not his, riddled with ambitions and envies, and cloaked too often in the shadow of thought. He succeeds secondly because he shows us this in poetry of real beauty; we are given image after image and we cannot help but know them for what they are: the toil that each dawning quickens. Any man who has risen early to work when he did not have to, any man who has forsaken a party or a picnic in order to work when it is not required of him, any such man will understand these words.

Reidmar is here speaking to the gods who have assembled to pay his son's ransom in gold, which will come to be called "Andvari's hoard".

(pg 89)

"Then Reidmar laughed and answered: 'So much is thy word of wrath!
And they call thee Odin for this and stretch forth hands in vain,
And pray for the gifts of a God who giveth and taketh again!
It was better in time past over when we prayed for naught at all
When no love taught us beseeching, and we had no troth to recall.
Ye have changed the world and it bindeth with the right and the wrong ye have made,
Nor may ye be Gods henceforward save the rightful ransom be paid.
But perchance ye are weary of kingship, and shall deal no more with the earth?
Then curse the world and depart and sit in your changeless mirth;
And there shall be no more kings, and battle and murder shall fail,
And the world shall laugh and long not, nor weep, nor fashion the tale.'

These are not Morris's best lines, but they are rather good. "And pray for the gifts of a God who giveth and taken again." This is the mocking response to true religion that comes from the mighty of the world. We contrast this with the words of Blessed Job: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: blessed be the Name of the Lord!"

Medieval Bibliography

This is from a certain book of the last decade, and it gives a good bibliography, in English of medieval studies. I have found it worthwhile and I hope others might to. As far as I know, one cannot copyriight a list, but if that turns out to be untrue, please email me, and I will remove it.

Abulafia, David. Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1988. Barlow, Frank; Thomas Becket. London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.

Baron, Salo Wittmayer. A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2d ed. rev., Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1965 [vols. III-VIII 1957]. V ols. III-IX.

Barraclough, Geoffrey. The Origins of Modern Germany, 3d ed. Oxford, England: B. Blackwell, 1988 [1947].

Bartlett, Robert. Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Order. _Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.

Bischoff, Bernard. Latin Paleography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Translated' by Dalbhi O. Croinin and David Ganz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Blair, Peter Hunter. An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966 [1956].

Bloch, Howard, R. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Litem? Anthropology of the French Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19H,I.

Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society. Translated by L. A. Manyon. Andover: Routledge, 1989 [1961. Paperback, 2 vols. University of Chicago Press, 1963].

Bolgar, Robert Ralph. The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries. New York: Har­per & Row, 1964 [1954].

Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in West­ern Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chi­cago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Brown, Peter Robert Lamont. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New York: Dorset Press, 1986 [1967].

Society and the Holy in Late antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Brucker, Gene A. Renaissance Florence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 [1969].

Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: Univer­sity of Chicago Press, 1987.

Bury, John Bagnell. The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians. New York: Norton, 1967 [1928].

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Caenegem, R. C. van. The Birth of the English Common Law, 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1st ed., 1973].

Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Edited by Michael M. Postan et aI., vols. I-II, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966 [1941, 1952].

Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From Aristotle to the Dis­integration of Scholasticism, 1l00-1600. Edited by Norman Kretzmann, An­thony Kenny, Jan Pinbors. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Chenu, Marie Dominique. Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on the New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West. Preface by Etienne Gilson. Selected, edited, and translated by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little. Chi­cago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Clanchy, Michael T. From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

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Princeton University Press, 1970.

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The Words of Thiodolf to the Chooser of the Slain

The following is taken from William Morris's book The House of the Wolfings. It is a poem sung by Thiodulf to his love, one of the Choosers of the Slain, whom he meets upon the grass of a moonlit forest meadow. The poetry itself shows again, as in Sigurd the Volsung, the distinctive features of Morris's work. Some lines of appaling worth, others of striking and pure beauty, for example, "Till the heavens were dark as the hollow of a wine-stained iron cup". Here follows the selection:

“We were wrought in the ring of the hazels and the wine of war we drank:
From the time when the sun stood highest to the hour wherein she sank;
And three kings came against me, the mightiest of the Huns,
The evil eyed in battle, the swift-foot wily ones;
And they gnashed their teeth against me, and they gnawed on the shield-rims there;
On that afternoon of summer, in the high tide of the year.
Keen-eyed I gazed about me, and I saw the clouds draw up
Till the heavens were dark as the hollow of a wine-stained iron cup;
And the wild deer lay unfeeding on the grass of the forest glades,
And all earth was scared with the thunder above our clashing blades.
There sank a king before me and on fell the other twain,
And I tossed up the reddened sword blade in the gathered rush of the rain,
And the blood and the water blended and fragrant grew the earth.
There long I turned and twisted within the battle-girth
Before those bears of onset; while out from the gray world streamed
The burned red lash of the lightning and in our byrnies gleamed.
And long I leapt and labored in the garland of the fight
Mid the blue blades and the lightning; but ere the sky grew light
The second of the Hun-kings on the rain-drenched daisies lay;
And we twain with the battle blinded a little while made stay,
And leaning on our sword hilts each on the other gazed.
The rain grew less and one corner of the veil of the clouds was raised
And as from the broidered covering gleams out the shoulder white
Of the bed-mate of the warrior when on his wedding night
He layeth his hand to the linen; so down there in the west
Gleamed out the naked heavens, but the wrath rose up in my breast,
And the sword in my hand rose with it, and I leaped and hewed at the Hun,
And from him too flared the war flame and the blades danced bright in the sun
Come back to the earth for a little before the ending of day.
There then with all that was in him did the Hun play out the play,
Till he fell and left me tottering, and I turned my feet to wend
To the place of the mound of the mighty, to the gate of the way without end.
And there thou wert; How was it, thou Chooser of the Slain,
Did I die in thine arms and thereafter did thy mouth-kiss wake me again?”

“The Word of God”

NOTE: This is a fantastic chapter. It gives a broad overview of the course of revelation and the themes and cycles in the scriptures. If you ever watned to know how everything fits together in scripture, what Thessalonians has to do with Jeremiah, then this is the work to read. This post is fifty one pages long. I recommend you copy and paste it into MS Word for later reading.

From The Christian Approach to the Bible, Dom Celestin Charlier (Paulist Press, 1967); Chapter VI, “The Word of God”

This book bears the mark of the nihil obstat and the Seal of the Imprimatur.

I

HUMAN AND DIVINE

The free gift of faith and reasons for believing; the Bible, human without and divine within; faith and reason in the study of the Bible; the Bible, object of faith and motive of credibility.

The profoundly human character of the Bible is obvious enough to anyone who reads it. The divine character can be seen only through the eyes of faith. Now faith does not come from man but from heaven: it is God giving himself. We cannot grasp God of our own free will unless he first bestows himself. We do not, therefore, intend to prove that the Bible is divine. It is part of our faith that it is so, because we believe in the church of Christ which gives us the Bible from God. We do not look to the Bible to justify our belief in Christ and his Church; other than in Christ God does not give himself to us, and without Christ the Bible is deprived of its divine element. It is only because Christ has left it for a witness of him that we put our trust in it.

All the same, we must not imagine that faith is a thing apart, unrelated to human experience. The truth known by faith and the truth known from reason or experience are both elements which go to the making of the one divine truth. Faith can never be a product of human reasoning or intuition, but if it is to be true faith it must be fully reasonable and capable of enriching the human soul. Without this interaction of one sphere on the other there is no faith. There may be illuminism or rationalism, but in either case we stay on the purely human level.

Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in the Bible. To the unbeliever the Bible is no more than a collection of unrelated books of unequal merit. The humanity of the Bible blinds his eye to anything else. To the believer, its profound logic convinces him more and more that this book bears the stamp of God’s hand. Those people whose faith was shaken some fifties years ago by the difficulties of the Bible were not clear in their minds about this relationship between faith and reason. If they had read Pascal they would have had a deeper understanding of their mutual interaction. Mere scientific and technical weapons will never allow a man to penetrate into the divine citadel hidden behind its human outworks; in fact they will only lead him astray. Only a spirit of burning faith and submission will allow him to turn those scientific and technical weapons to good account, and let him realize that the blemishes and surface inequalities are indications of a latent strength. Only a Christian, armed equally with divine faith, intellectual honesty, and a willingness to look at the Bible as a whole, will be able to see its profound unity and divine direction.

Yet faith must not be appealed to indiscriminately. It is the easiest thing in the world to represent an opinion or a prejudice as a dogma of divine faith. Many an obvious fact has been sacrificed to this sort of “faith”. Intellectual honesty and common sense go for nothing if a man is really determined to stick to the “truth” he is familiar with. How can faith do anything but slumber in such an atmosphere? It is bound to become weak and unable to face reality. Teal faith is fearless. It is confident that there can be no quarrel between God’s right hand and his left. It knows that contradictions are only apparent, and are occasioned by a human weakness which has either obscured the divine element or misunderstood the human.

Faith like this will reach the very heart of the Bible. It will not vacillate on the fringes of signs and wonders, but will make straight for the heart of the matter which is God’s overall action. Rather than risk getting lost in a maze of detail, it will seek to find the broad trends which flow smooth and unbroken beneath the ripples of human fortune. If it does happen to meet an extraordinary manifestation of God’s power, it will treat it as a climax in the rhythm, a sort of “shock” given in moments of crisis, emphasizing a movement which was already present in principle.

In this light the Christian will see that the Bible with its two Testaments, distinct but complimentary, is the key to the divine plan. Out of the raw material of humanity the Spirit fashions the Word of God. The Bible cannot give faith, but the open mind cannot fail to see in it the hand of God. It is not the source of our faith in Christ, but it is the Church’s surest guide to that faith. It does not create faith, but it does dispose the soul to receive faith, since without Christ the Bible is a puzzle. Furthermore, without the Bible in its context, which is the Church, we would have no knowledge of Christ under the human aspect in which the Son of God became incarnate.

II

THE BIBLE’S CONVERGENT THEMES

The cycle of the divine plan with its themes of election, covenant, people of God; the cycle of the fall with its themes of sin, punishment, repentance; the cycle of redemption with its themes of mercy, messianic salvation, the desert; the cycle of the accomplishment with its themes of setback, hope, the kingdom; the continuing theme of thanksgiving.

Before all else in this search after the true meaning of the Bible, we must accept the texture of the cloth into which the Word of God has been woven. It is made up of a number of threads tightly laced together. These threads are the doctrinal themes which run the whole length of Israel’s history. Supported one by the other in a hierarchy of mutual dependence, they gradually converge and become identified with a single central theme—the Incarnate Word. Each theme is a pre-incarnation of this Word, outlining its individual aspects and effectively preparing for its final revelation.

It will not be possible to mark the development of all these themes, for they are numerous and deftly interwoven. Often they are entwined with minor themes which serve to underline a particular aspect. It is equally difficult to arrange them in precise order of importance, because even that varies according to time and circumstance in Israel’s history. The nearer they come to their common realization in Christ, the more difficult it is to separate them. All that we can do here is to pick out those that seem to form the warp on which the complex unity of revelation has been woven.

First among these is the theme of election. It appears in a number of guises, but whether it is social or individual, whether it is a miraculous birth or an unlooked for victory, a reversal of human precedence, a free gift, or a minor theme like that of the “faithful remnant”. It always emphasizes the primacy of the divine initiative and the absolute sovereignty of God over the affairs of men. From the call of Abraham to the magnificent statement of Christian predestination in the opening verse of the Epistle to the Ephesians, this is the burden of God’s plan. It rings out in the episode of Esau and Jacob, in the conquests of Joshua, in the passage through the Red Sea, in the choice of David and the rejection of Saul, in the preservation of Judah from the fate of the ten tribes of Israel, in the wondrous return from the ruin of Exile, in the unexpected triumph of the Maccabees. It gives significance to the birth of John the Baptist, to the conversion of St. Paul, and to the phenomenal growth of a movement which had its humble beginnings among the handful of Galileans.

Throughout, God’s strength is shown in weakness, in the exaltation of the lowly and the humbling of the mighty, in the triumph of life over death. Throughout, outlines are being sketched of one who was to take flesh from a Virgin and be born the Son of God, the archetype of all those who are predestined, whose humility and abandonment to the Father lifts them up to the right hand of God. Throughout is prefigured his Mystical body, embracing all those on whom he has freely bestowed his Spirit and Life. The theme of divine election begins with the account of creation in Genesis, and achieves its fulfillment in the song of the blessed in the Apocalypse. Without doubt this gift of God is the most profound, the most revolutionary, and the most distinctly divine theme in the Bible. From it stem all the other themes.

Another fundamental theme is that of Covenant, flowing directly from the idea of divine gift or testament implicit in the theme of election. This is not a covenant in any ordinary sense. If it involves a sort of bilateral contract, it is only because the divine initiative demands a response. God’s gift is entirely free. It puts him under no obligation to man. Yet those who receive it are necessarily bound by certain obligations, and this interchange between God and his people forges a bond so close that there is communion between them. The elect shares in the holiness of God: he is a man apart. For his part, God binds himself to ensure happiness, on condition that he is acknowledged as the highest good.

It is a legal covenant in so far as it implies conditions for both parties. But its truest terms are bonds of love. It is already present in the first beginnings in the patriarchal religion, where God is looked upon as the Father of the clan (a concept which forms part of the religion of the people from whom Abraham came). With Moses and Sinai, it assumes a more formal aspect, though the intimacy of individual piety is not altogether forgotten. After the Exile, so much emphasis is placed on the remoteness of God that the element of love seems at first to be compromised. But both themes are needed if they are to be harmonized in revelation of the Father in the Son, under the new law of the Spirit.

Together the two themes of election and covenant give rise to a third. The recipients of God’s favors are set apart: they are God’s people, stamped with his seal. The religious exclusiveness which made Yahweh the private property of Israel and Israel the heritage of Yahweh may surprise and trouble us. Yet the very transcendence of Christianity, this religion of revelation and superhuman life, is the product of the tension in the apparent contradiction in the exclusiveness of a God who is one. Yahweh is the God of Israel, but he is also the only God and the world is his. He chooses Israel, but only that through her he may assert his claim over all mankind. The people of Israel are, like the Church of Christ, a theocracy. They were very keenly aware of their mission in the world. It is the explanation of their intransigence, and the cause of the invincible dynamism which they have handed on to the Church, the new Israel of God. From the tribes wandering out of Egypt for the conquest of the promised Land to the kingdom of David pushing out the national frontiers, from the post-exilic community awaiting a miraculous victory to the eschatological kingdom of Christ established through the preaching of the Church, always there is the theme of God’s chosen people, the divine leaven which must transform the whole world.

These three themes, election, covenant, and the people of God, form the basic trilogy which underlies the whole unfolding of revelation. But as a cycle it is not closed. In its themes of covenant and conquest there is room for development: covenant implies the cooperation of man, and in his conquests man is liable to suffer setbacks. Thus a new cycle opens out of the first, in the theme of sin. Sin in the Bible does not mean the scar left on the integrity of arrogant human natures, as it does in the pagan conception of morality. Sin is a defection of loyalty to the Covenant, a rejection of God’s love and God’s Gift. By sin, man breaks away from the charmed circle of independence: in the desert it is the apostasy of the idolaters; with Saul it is a failure to observe the prescribed ritual; during the period of the Prophets it is moral corruption; after the Exile it is the pride of the ritualist or the self-sufficiency of the materialist; in the time of Christ it is the rejection of the Messiah; among the Pauline converts it is blasphemy against the Spirit. Whatever shape it takes, it is always a breaking of the Covenant of love and a rejection of God’s courtship.

It involves the necessity for punishment. This too varies with the aspect of the sin. The almost arbitrary and unaccountable vengeance of God is expressed at the height of Israel’s victory in terms of temporal misfortune and national catastrophe. At this stage there seems to be no connection at all with what we conceive to be the primary effect of sin, namely the loss of God. After the Exile a deeper understanding of the interior life and the personal implication of the problem of evil brought new light to the question of temporal retribution. For Job, human suffering is not inevitably the result of sin. In the book of Wisdom the punishment begins to be regarded as something immanent—the eternal loss of God.

In Christ, the theme reaches its perfect expression. It is he who finally revealed the depth of the void left in man by such a loss. Those who were inspired to interpret his message did no more than clarify this revelation. For St. John, the gift of eternal life means accepting the Father in his Son; for St. Paul, sin is the utter emptiness of the man who has cut himself off from the Spirit of God. Thus the Bible grafts the problems of evil and pain and death on to the theme of punishment, whether it be personal punishment or social, moral or material, spiritual or eschatological. Always the problem is set against the background of God, always it emphasizes man’s absolute need of God. No other book has so pointedly depicted in “existentialist” terms the confusion of man without God.

In the depths of his nothingness, there is one course left open to man, the acknowledgement of his guilt. The very nothingness to which he is reduced impresses upon him the knowledge that this is all he has. And so the theme of repentance is of cardinal importance in the development of the plan of redemption. It is the fallen soul’s only way back to God. It may be motivated by contrition or merely by self-interest. Sometimes it is the poignant experience of the disasters which follow his breach of the Covenant; sometimes it is the misery of the man who knows he cannot escape God’s wrath; sometimes it is the melting of a sinner’s heart before the infinite love of the Father in his Son. The one theme embraces such apparent diversities as the moralizing book of Judges, the weary disillusionment of Ecclesiastes and the passionate appeal for love in the Song of Songs. From all of them comes the same cry of man’s acknowledged nothingness, a cry which is echoed in the New Testament by Mary’s Magnificat and the vibrant doxologies of Christian thanksgiving. This confession of need with its awareness that all man are “under the bondage of sin” (Gal. 3:22) completes the sin-cycle and introduces the cycle of redemption.

The God of Scripture hears the cry of man’s distress. If he is a jealous God and one who punishes harshly, it is because he is a loving Father. The theme of mercy is the pivot around which all other biblical themes revolve. It is an echo, a poised overtone of the election theme, a new and richer development of it. A gift is twice-blest if it has already once been refused. In Scripture God “repents”, he relents, there is no limit to his love. He has pity and is moved with compassion for his well-beloved. He swears he will not harm mankind again, he mourns for his trampled vineyard, and he weeps for his holy city which has rejected him. From the infinite treasury of his divine pity he reveals his breathtaking plan, determined from all eternity in “the hidden purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:9). From Paradise lost to the first Christmas night, he re-asserts his promise in ever more glowing terms. Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, the Prophets, John the Baptist, these are all its witnesses, the forerunners to the Angels’ song “Glory to God in high heavens, and peace on earth to men that are God’s friends.” The whole Bible is the detailed publication of the “good news” which reaches its climax in the Gospel.

This mercy of God is not an empty word. It is infallible and efficacious. The Word of God does not return to him until it has accomplished its task (Isa. 55:11). God’s pity is translated into action and his promise is made flesh. To bring his people out from the bondage of Egypt he raises up Moses, a leader for his people, strengthened with the power of his Spirit and commissioned to make with his people a covenant of blood. Joshua conquers the “Land” in his name. Each of the Judges is an incarnation of God’s desire to rescue Israel from the plight to which her sins have reduced her. The long line of divine mediators, the instruments of Yahweh in the founding and restoration of his Kingdom, culminates in David, a second Moses. Henceforth God’s captain is a King Messiah, the Anointed of Yahweh’s own Spirit. It is David who gives direction to the theme of messianic salvation. Before him Israel had always looked for a second Moses. Now Judah would look for a second David to be both King and Prophet. The darker the gathering clouds in the political sky before the Exile, the more eagerly did the Prophets turn their eyes to the day of wrath when the Messiah would eventually appear as the hoped-for Savior. When that hope became dimmed in the pallid Restoration after the Exile, Daniel looked to heaven to see the Son of Man coming on the clouds in a victory which was to be the consummation of all things.

As these glorious messianic traits are more precisely developed, so are they unexpectedly modified. Persecuted like David, like Jeremiah hated by God’s enemies, like the Psalmist the victim of wicked men, like Job the innocent in the power of Satan, so the servant of Yahweh will suffer for his people, their guilt imputed to him. He will be the new Paschal lamb, led to the slaughter. The salvation of his people will not be won by force but by the shedding of his blood. He will give them God’s life at the price of his death. He will carry them along in his triumphal glory, but only when he himself has drained the cup of the divine anger. The poignant songs of the Servant of Yahweh are a symptom prefiguring those of St. Paul and St. John on the mystery of Christ. Jesus, son of David and son of God, unites and synthesizes in his own person all the characteristics of the long awaited Mediator. He is the expression of God’s love, the firstborn of his beloved children, the scapegoat for God’s anger over his sinful people, the supreme lawgiver of the new Covenant in his blood. He is the harbinger of new life by his victory over death, through sanctification in the Spirit of God.

The cycle of redemption is not completely achieved by the work of Christ. He is the mediator, joined with his Father, but joined too with those whom he has redeemed in his blood. Therefore he is the firstborn of the new race of God’s people and his victory is not communicated to his own except by their sharing in his death. This brings us to the “in-between” theme or the theme of the desert. It completes the third cycle and opens on to the fourth. Noah’s ark must wander for forty days on the bitter waters; forty years of pilgrimage separate the Red Sea from the entry into the Promised Land; before he is king in Jerusalem David must go to earth in the hill country of Judah; before he receives his commission to anoint the kings Elijah must fast for forty days in the desert of Negeb; the Exile is a painful confinement for the eventual rebirth of God’s people. Christ himself finally inaugurated his own mission with forty days of Lenten fast and so hallowed the custom he gave to his Church. In the symbolism of the Apocalypse (12:6) he consigns the woman in childbirth to the desert for three and a half years (half of the perfect seven) so that she can escape the persecution of the Dragon and bring forth her Son to triumph.

The desert theme gives point to the theme of life through death. This paradox is truly the fundamental principle which gives biblical morality its supernatural quality and distinguishes it from the so-called “natural” morality of paganism. Judged by worldly wisdom, the morality of the cross is folly. There is no promise of happiness but only of future suffering, death and perhaps martyrdom. It is a divine promise that biblical morality offers the Christian, God’s wisdom that it prepares him for, and the Spirit of sonship that it breathes. For entrance fee into this world of God’s fullness a man has nothing to offer save his own nothingness and the confession of his misery. Christian morality is a morality of death to the old so that the new man may be born. It is only to babes that the Father reveals the splendor of his Son, only to those who are parched that he gives the water of life. With set purpose Christ turns upside down the world’s accepted design for happiness (Mt. 5:3-12) and smashes the proud code of human perfection. The justification preached by a humanism of good works is not pleasing to God. Man was created to be satisfied not with himself but with God.

The humble whom Christ calls “blessed” are those whom the Psalms have called the “poor” and whom St. Paul will call believers, the true sons of Abraham. The faith which brings salvation is the passionate surrender of that nothingness which is all a soul has to give when it is faced with God’s own gift of his Son. To believe in the Son of God is to die to one’s own self-sufficiency, to make over the whole heart to the call of that Spirit’s love. Thus the life of a Christian here on earth is a constant battle, where the forces of the world are straining to check his escape into the joy of the Spirit. The Christian suffers Christ’s own agony, completing in his body what is lacking in the Passion of Christ. In the Church he is in the world, but not of the world. It is here that he goes to earth to be transformed from death to the life which was won on the first Easter morning. The Church is in the Desert, waiting for the Body of Christ to achieve that absorption of Death by life which was began by Christ, and which will not be complete until all men belong to him as he belongs to God.

This brings us to the last cycle in the fullness of revelation, the cycle of accomplishment. To every advance in the realization of the messianic hope there corresponds a qualifying disillusionment and partial setback. Abraham was not to know his numerous posterity. Moses was not to see the promised land. Joshua’s conquest was not the fondly imagined military rout. David saw portents of ruin in the civil war of his own lifetime. Judah was confident of resisting Assyria, but like Israel she was led into exile. The Restoration saw little of the grandeurs promised by Isaiah. Even before it finally collapsed under Pompey, the triumph of the Maccabees was compromised by the successors of the early heroes. Finally Christ himself was put to death. Where was the end to this insistent rhythm of failure and success, of defeat and victory? With Easter morning the disciples thought that it had reached its climax, but instead of the glorious Parousia they were given the Consoling Spirit. There was to be no victory in fire and thunder, but only a slow and painful conquest in teaching and blood. Their Kingdom turned out to be a Church. Disillusion is the very first theme in this cycle of accomplishment.

But disillusion is only an aspect of death to the world. Out of that death God’s people are to be reborn to God’s life. Each failure is a prelude to the rebirth of a stronger and more vibrant hope. The Bible is constantly looking beyond what is, to the wider scope of what will be. With Christ that scope becomes present, it is begun. Yet it too lacks completion; Christ’s victory has not yet realized its accomplishment. The theme of hope is the Bible’s expression of the believer’s last resort, the living synthesis of his faith and love, of his death and life, of his need for salvation and his thirst for the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is begun, the seed has been sown and it grows. But there are tares among the wheat. The combat between Good and Evil, between Christ and the Devil, between Light and Darkness, this is not the supreme battle. That has still to be fought when all these preliminaries are done. The Serpent in the Garden, Pharaoh and Assyria, false brethren of Moab and Edom, Philistenes uncircumcised, Balal and Mesha, Gog and Magog, Antiochus Epiphanes and Herod the Great, these are just names, incarnations of Antichrist, personifications of the “man of sin”, agents of the Mystery of Iniquity (2 Thes. 2:7). Before the end comes, Satan will all but prevail and apostasy will be widespread, until the Son of Man appears in all majesty to destroy the Enemy with the Breath of his mouth. Resurrection and judgment will follow to set the final seal on the Kingdom and restore all things to the harmony of divine fullness.

So the doctrinal themes of the Bible come back full circle to their starting point. From the eternity in which mankind’s election is first planned, they carry us through to the vision of eternal life. In the very first pages of Genesis, the Bible portrays the memory of this vision: God in the garden of Eden talking with man in the cool of the evening. It is with the same thought that the Book closes in the Apocalypse: a picture of the heavenly Jerusalem. If the earthly Paradise was only a nostalgic memory of a home that was lost, and the promised Land only a narrow strip in the Middle East, they yet expressed a yearning for the place where God has pitched his tent. It was Christ himself who showed the significance of these images when he gave to his own Kingdom the title of “Land” and “Paradise” (Mt. 5:5, Lk. 23:43). If the Kingdom is prefigured in a way which is human and inadequate—the clan of Israel, the twelve tribes, the kingdom of David, the religious community of the Restoration after exile, even the Church which rules the earth—the reader of the Bible knows that they are but pale reflections of that everlasting glory which the Father has destined for his elect, through the life-giving Spirit of his Son.

We conclude this section with a theme which is outside the main scope of those we have dealt with. It will serve as a frame to certain of them: the theme of thanksgiving. This is the form in which the Bible most happily expresses the overall view of salvation. Here the organic unity of all the themes is underlined. Whether it is expressed in a simply formula of praise like “Blessed be God”, or more fully as in some of the Psalms, always there is an attempt to draw a picture of God’s great “mercies” in the three or four successive movement which correspond to the cycle we have described. First there is the statement of praise. This is followed by a description of some favor, pictured as one aspect of salvation. Thirdly this favor is connected with a promise made in the past, and so becomes part of God’s hidden and eternal design. Finally the purpose and effects of the favor point to the last times, of which these present times are a presage.

There are classical examples of such doxologies to be found in both Testaments. Some comprise a single short stanza, like Christ’s song of thanksgiving in Mt. 11:25-27 and the Nunc Dimittis. Other, like the Magnificat, the Benedictus, and especially the opening of the Epistle to the Ephesians, repeat the theme time and again with continual variation on the original four movements. These are perhaps the most perfect examples of of the circular movement which characterizes the poetry of the Bible. When the first Christian liturgies came to express their own thanksgiving in the “eucharistic act” (the climax until Christ comes again of God’s eternal mercy incarnate in his Son) they found here a ready-made and natural framework.

III

THE GRADUAL TRANSPOSITION OF THE BIBLICAL THEMES

The organic development of revelation;

1. The Cycle of the Promises: the Patriarchs and God the Father.

2. The Cycle of the Mosaic Law: the God who is; his Covenant with a nomad band; purification in the desert; Yahweh the warrior God and the agricultural Baals of Canaan.

3. The Cycle of the Royal Law: David the founder of the Kingdom of Yahweh; moral decadence after the Schism.

4. The Cycle of the Prophetic Law: the Prophets, traditionalists and pioneers; religion of the Spirit; collapse of a national kingdom.

5. The Cycle of the Priestly Law: cult of the Law and the law of cult; a community consecrated to the God of Heaven; personal and interior religion of the Wisdom literature.

6. Final Bearings: the three currents at the advent of Christianity: messianic, legalistic, and sapiential.

The organic development of revelation

The doctrinal themes of the Bible can all be reduced to a few closely knit cycles, each leading to the next, each incomplete without the rest. As outline of these themes in their mutual relationships should resemble a series of concentric circles, and illustrate both their organic unity and their living complexity. To see revelation thus in its entirety is to see a perfect blueprint of the eternal plan of God. Yet it has its dangers. Such a view is so rich that we are liable in our fascination to be unaware of its dynamic progression.

In fact such an outline must of its nature be abstract, and in value can only be relative. The fact that we have caught it poised in the order of logic must not blind us to its movement in the order of time. Revelation is necessarily bound up with its development at any given moment in history, and the concentric circles of the different biblical themes open out historically into a spiral. The explanation of the themes given above was a bird’s eye view. It showed the inner structure, the fixed woof across which the shuttle travels. What we must do now is to give this view a third dimension, to see it in its side elevation. In this way, we will see its garland unfolding. The four cycles and the dozen or so themes which we have singled out are present in embryo from the beginning of revelation, just as all the organs of a man are present in a fetus. If we pluck revelation from the perspective of history in which God wished it to grow and develop, if we level out all the different themes and forget their dimension in time, we will pervert the full sense of revelation. Our contact with the eternal is made at some point in time, and we cannot think of it except in that context. There is indeed a similarity of proportion between the different human expressions of the divine thought (they are related to each other by analogy), but they retain their essential differences. There is a world of difference, for example, between Yahweh’s Covenant with a roving band of Bedouins bent on the conquest of the land they covet, and the transcendental design in which the Spirit of Christ sanctifies the union between the Father and his elect, and bestows on them the eternal life of the Son.

All the same, the similarity between the different expressions is not merely superficial. The realities they represent are cognate, and one is the flowering of the seed contained in the other. Though it is something less than identity, there is more than mere analogy between the Covenant of Sinai and the Covenant ratified in the Spirit by the risen Christ, between the crossing of the Red Sea and Christian baptism, between Abraham’s race and the royal race of the elect. Between these realities there is a living unity, which progresses but is constant, which is able to effect change without itself changing, which can operate on different levels without losing its irresistible and unifying dynamism. The external similarities are simply the spontaneous manifestations of this dynamism. They are the confining shell, the curbs which define the road. To rip up the curb-stones and set them side by side to show their similarities is to lose both the confines of the road and its direction. The Bible is like a reel of film which shows the different forms assumed by a living tradition through the ages. To cut this film in order to rearrange the sequence of its frames is to take all meaning out of it and destroy the possibility of it ever being screened. The Bible will have meaning only if its sequence is preserved and its upward movement understood. This cannot be done without the living Spirit which continues to breathe this tradition in the Church.

It is difficult to know which to admire most, the constancy of the themes or the rich variety of the ways in which God has taught them. It is of the utmost importance to mark this divine technique as one stage succeeds another. With infinite tact God moulds his approach to suit prevailing needs. He will hasten on disillusionment to raise men’s hopes to a higher level; he will turn a material failure into a spiritual victory; he will try every expedient that a Father’s love for his child can fashion. The rationalist’s microscope here sees nothing that is not human; the eyes of faith alone will see beneath the surface the guiding hand of God, weaving this mass of humanity into the unity of his plan. It is not a heavy hand—more often than not it is imperceptible and almost furtive. But it is always there, interlacing the divine thread into every section of the human pattern, showing itself occasionally to impart a twist to the direction or stimulate a new beginning. Generally the movement is scarcely noticeable except as a gradual upward trend. Now and again, when a hidden snag has fouled the work, a sudden acceleration of pace is a sure sign that the divine hand is there. When the work of revelation is eventually viewed as a whole, it is seen to fall into a number of clear-cut stages. In each the same basic pattern may be recognized, sublimated and transposed as one stage leads to another. In each transposition it is possible to see the human elements at work, but under the direction of God’s firm hand. It is this hand alone which can explain the unwavering continuity of the movement, and the overwhelming transcendence of its final achievement.

St. Paul divided the two thousand years of revelation’s development into three main periods. We could do worse than follow his example and mark the progress towards Christianity in three stages, the cycle of the Promises, the cycle of the Law, and the cycle of the Spirit. Alternatively, we could lay emphasis on the historical, geographical, and spiritual aspect of these stages by calling them patriarchal, national and universal. Or again if we wish to mark the development in the concept of the God who is the pivot of this evolution, we could see them as the cycles of the God of the clan, absolute monotheism, and the revelation of the Father. Finally, by underlining the unique influence of God’s Word on the human founder of these three stages, we could call our three cycles Abraham, Moses, and Christ. The name is not important. What is important is that we realize the length of the road between the stages and the unswerving unity of its direction. In the last two stages especially, we should take notice of a number of secondary themes which define more closely this direction.

The Cycle of the Promises

Abraham is well named the Father of those who believe. If there was a rudimentary revelation made before his time, the patriarchal traditions are the only evidence we have of it. Some historians are inclined to believe that the prehistoric religion of the Semitic peoples had a monotheistic bias. This may well be: they were all of nomadic race, and the constant use by the whole group of the name El to designate the divinity may be an indication of a common monotheism. The crowded pantheon Babylon was a later development, and in any case more symbolic and imaginative than real. Even so, the possible existence of an ancestral monotheism which may have survived to Abraham’s time does not in any way detract from him. His Babylonian background was one of polytheism, and his own clan most likely paid cult to the moon gods of Haran. His sudden determination to break with his clan and its gods may have been made under pressure of historical circumstances. Even so they were subordinate to a religious experience which was the end cause of the break, for which the world will ever stand in his debt. This was the first of those divine “shocks”. Abraham retired to the desert under the spell of the mysterious call, a call which was to take hold of him and dominate the rest of his life. In this call he became aware of his vocation. He was to be the chief of an autonomous clan; the fact that it was called into being by a new and unknown God would ever be the mark of its uniqueness. That is all there is. But in that little is contained the germ of the fullness of revelation.

The Patriarchs were not theologians or metaphysicians. They were simply sheiks of the steppe land, occupied with their flocks and fully intent (as was all mankind at the dawn of history) on ensuring the power and growth of their clan. We see their numbers growing but making no great mark on the naturalistic polytheism of the Corridor. Now and again the Experience is repeated, sometimes brutally, sometimes graciously, but always insistently. Those who suffer the Experience are possessed, for it is a shock which has no parallel in the petty religions of their neighbors. But the first feeling of terror is followed by a more reasoned calm. The shock has rocked the foundations of their religious ideas, but they still keep to the old religious forms, and they try a little clumsily to make these old forms contain their new emotion. Thus Jacob erects a menhir, and Abraham is prepared to sacrifice his only son. But these are surface things. Beneath is the forceful grip of a new and mysterious God who has captured their imaginations and established a new claim to their hearts. They express their feelings in the only way they know, and see themselves as the children of a divine Father. When the shock of the first impact has passed, their childlike candor reasserts itself in the sly and self-interested familiarity engendered of this new relationship. Whatever profit there is in being adopted by this rather disturbing God, it must be turned to the account of the clan. It is a down-to-earth sort of religion, with little or no appreciation of the transcendence of God. Yet this same infant candor which babbles to the God-Father about the good of the clan is more than the germ which will later develop into the formidable Covenant of Sinai. Already it has the flavor of that filial piety which will mark the feelings of the true sons of Abraham for God, their Father.

The Cycle of the Mosaic Law

The promises of the nameless God were fulfilled in Egypt. The Israelite clan had become a great people there. The God of their Fathers had not fared so well: a demoralizing slavery had almost destroyed their national identity and religious personality. The Experience had ceased to grip their souls. The smooth waters of the Nile had washed away the slinging sand of the desert, and the heavy hand of Pharaoh had speeded the work of time. Then, suddenly, the shock come again. Moses had fled into the desert and there, before the burning bush, he found once more the faith of his Fathers.

This second manifestation of God’s design is not just a return to the past; it bear the hallmark of a new departure. The God of their Fathers at least speaks out his name. The name of Yahweh, “He Who Is” or “He Who cause to be”, is not a metaphysical abstraction. It is a name which distinguishes him from the important gods of other nations. This is the God who is as opposed to those other who are not. This is the living God who causes all things be. And this God has chosen the race of Israel for his own people. Until now, they had been only separated groups without a bond of unity; but now Yahweh would snatch them out of Egypt and lead them into the desert, and there, in the crucible where their ancestors were fashioned, he would weld them together by giving them a leader, a law, a religion, a God, and a destiny. The Covenant of Sinai was a strange and unprecedented contract. The God of their Fathers bound himself to be to this tribe of nomads what Kamosh was to Moab and Marduk to Babylon. For the Israelite, Yahweh was an exclusive possession, and yet also (though less articulately) a God who had sovereign rights over all the earth, the living God who is and who created all things. Israel’s stupendous destiny stems from this belief. In the matrix of this tiny people, hemmed in both geographically and mentally, there lay hidden an intuition with infinite possibilities. The history of this people is the gradual opening of the matrix under the pressure of divine force.

At first the achievements were modest enough. All that these wild Bedouins expected from their formidable and strange God, whose claims they hardly understood, was immediate military success. His power was like the elements: he was Yahweh of Armies, the warrior God with the lightning in his hand. The burning faith which energized their dynamic power was tribute enough to his transcendence. All other gods were dead. This was the living God who must conquer his land, and Israel was certain of victory. Canaan must fall into their hungry hands like a cluster of ripe grapes. Yahweh would bring his people back to Canaan, where he had first revealed himself in the promise made to the Patriarchs that they would one day share this land which was his home. The cycle of Egypt had closed with the crossing of the Red Sea; the cycle of the desert closes on the banks of the Jordan, with the coveted paradise in sight.

But just as the rescue from Egypt was followed by the despair of the desert wanderings, so too the victories of Joshua were succeeded by the long and disappointing period of the Judges. Quite clearly Yahweh was not like other gods. His jealousy had already kept them wandering in the dry southern steppes. Now he again deserts his people: alone they must grapple with the difficulties of a slow campaign of infiltration. He had undeniably proved himself to be a God of war, and occasionally would raise up a captain to “wage the wars of Yahweh”. But why did he not now rise up, and with one fell blow smash these peoples on whom he had pronounced his anathema? The Baals of Canaan were easier to please and had a better understanding of flocks and herds then the rough warrior God Yahweh. What harm could there be in consulting them in this new and settled life which they must learn to live? Hardly had the little band of invaders become united before they were in danger of crumbling before the sensual gods they had vanquished. At the end of this period they are back to where they were under the Egyptian oppression. The Philistines have them by the throat, for all the allegiance their Fathers swore to Yahweh. Even the Ark, the symbol of the Covenant and Conquest, the memorial of their second resurrection, even that had fallen into the hands of the uncircumcised.

The Cycle of the Royal Law

This was the depth of despair for which Yahweh had waited. Now he would return a third time to show his people the dazzling prospect of an even more wonderful salvation. Backed by the new prophetic movement, David not only crashes the power of the Philistines but leads Israel under her God to a state of political, social and geographical significance beyond her wildest dreaming. In his Anointed One, Yahweh inaugurates the Kingdom of God already inherent in the terms of the commitment made at Sinai and in the promise given to the Fathers. The national aggrandizement was based on what was in essence a religious conquest. Israel’s faith in Yahweh has been tried and has become deeper, purer and wider. Henceforth Israel is sure that Yahweh alone is the living and omnipotent God. Henceforth she is open in admitting that boundless ambition which has been her secret hope since Sinai. Yahweh would no longer be content to defend his own against enemy people and strange gods: he would now carry the fight to them, destroy those false gods and subdue their followers. Through Israel the whole world must be dominated and serve the Kingship which is Yahweh’s by right.

David’s reign marks a climax in Israel’s religious development. Two salient interventions of God have so far given it direction: the call of Abraham and the revelation of the name Yahweh. Yet in spite of the progress that has been made David’s faith is still the faith of Abraham. Both are bounded by the confines of this world; for both salvation is thought of in terms of man’s temporal happiness; both are primarily social and national in outlook.

If Israel’s faith during this period is something less than monotheism, it is something more than monolatry. Yahweh is more than one among many gods, to satisfy the material and political hopes of his people. He is totally unlike the blind tyrannical gods of other nations. He is a living God, who searches the reins and heart of those he wants to possess. From Sinai onwards, Israel’s religious outlook has a moral, personal and interior bias. There is only one God; his name is Yahweh and his will is binding.

The conclusion reached in these first stages mark a revolution in religion. They contain a seed that has the power to grow into the most supernatural of revelations. The one and only moral God will not be satisfied with outward observance. His object is the very soul of man: he will go to the very fiber of man’s being and be his beginning and last end. He breaks the barriers which divide the human from the divine, and tears down the iron curtain of a “natural” religion, to establish between God and man the mystery of Fatherhood which Abraham had glimpsed, which the Covenant of Moses had consecrated, and which was the mainspring of David’s unclouded love for his God. All this is inherent in the faith of Israel on the eve of the great prophetic movement.

Inherent, but not obvious. The ordinary man was still thinking in terms of a national and earthly kingdom. The cult of Yahweh is merely the highest expression of the political life of the nation. He is expected to vouchsafe human bounty to the nation as such. Whatever he may demand by way of moral injunctions and ritualistic prescriptions are simply his conditions for granting salvation. There is no intrinsic connection between the two. Yahweh is the desire of all hearts because he brings earthly bliss. It will need some catastrophe to swing the balance between the two axioms of their traditional faith. Only in this way will the more fundamental axiom win the day and the other sink back into its proper context. Prophetism marks the third intervention of God: its precise purpose was to achieve this swing of balance.

The Cycle of the Prophetic Law

The Prophets up to the time of the Exile seem at first to revert to a merely national messianism, to be reformers conserving the work of the past. In fact, even the triumph of Yahweh in the time of David could not escape the downward trend to decadence, and Solomon’s glory was thin enough covering for the impending ruin. If the nation had risen to great heights, it had farther to fall. After the Schism the apostasy in both kingdoms was almost absolute, and the first impression given by the Prophets is that they were men who had arrived too late to prevent the apostasy and could only refer the realization of the disappointed dream to a remoter future. In point of fact, however, the Prophets belonged to the future as much as to the past. Not that they were innovators—salvation was still thought of on a national and earthly level, to be achieved by religious reform. But insofar as they championed this reform, they were forced to delve deeper than ever before into the real significance of the Covenant which had dictated earlier conceptions of salvation. In this way the glory that was Yahweh emerged from the twilight of polytheism. His moral requirements outgrew the ritual which had clothed them, and his political horizon reached to the ends of the earth. Salvation assumed a personal aspect, in answer to the tormented cry wrung from the heart of a people oppressed by sinners. In his love, Yahweh would make Israel his bride, with the nations for her dowry.

Thus these apparent survivors of a past generation became pioneers of the future. Incapable of understanding the new language they spoke, Israel and Judah went the accustomed way of infidelity. Then came the momentous disaster. Moses had staved it off once by his timely intervention. David, too, had managed to postpone it. But the slavery of Egypt and the oppression in the time of the Judges were as nothing compared with this. Yahweh’s people were simply wiped off the political map, once for all. Never again, not even under the Maccabees, would the Jewish people have even a semblance of freedom and independence. They should have disappeared altogether, the ten tribes of the northern kingdom. Yahweh himself had been conquered in the defeat of his people, and by rights his name should have been obliterated in the destruction of a nation whose only purpose was to perpetuate his name.

And yet the seed which the Prophets had sown bore fruit in the land of exile. For the fourth time, the dawn of salvation was to break, this time for the “Remnant” which germinated there in penance and the spirit of hope. Freed from the confines of its national and ritual framework, its faith was slowly re-fashioned and purified. Shorn of its national and earthly ties, religion went deeper and its perspectives became wider. Salvation was no longer national but personal; the things of the world made way for the things of the spirit; a narrow exclusivism gave way to a world-wide proselytism. Above all, there was a deepening of the concept of God. The name of Yahweh with its nationalistic connotation gave place to the almost too transcendent “God of Heaven”. The Exile marked a profound stage in the history of God’s people. They were no longer a nation but a religious community: here a national cult was transformed into a spiritual force.

The Cycle of the Priestly Law

Important though this metamorphosis was, we must not exaggerate it. The old nationalistic hopes were to endure for a long time yet. Even up the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 they would be for the ordinary people the most natural expression of the that infinite happiness which is the inspiration of all religion. It was the fortune of history which gave these aspirations a new shape. The meager results of the Restoration from exile sowed disillusionment in their hearts. Even the successes of the Maccabees were soon a bitter memory of what might have been but for the enslaving hand of Rome. Hers was a rod that no human Messiah could break. So it is to the clouds of heaven that they look for their messianic deliverance, and they live for the day when the cataclysm promised by their apocalyptic literature will create a new Israel and establish here dominion over the world.

The messianic hope, transformed though it was into an eschatological one, was no longer the only source of the Jewish community’s religious energy. For the very first time the people are governed by priests. Under them, religion becomes a cult, and all the main themes of the past begin to shift on to a moral and juridical plane. The teaching of the Prophets in particular is taken up and made more precise. The idea of God’s transcendence is pushed to its furthest limits, and the moral aspect of the Covenant is the only one that receives recognition. In fact the theme of the Covenant becomes the pivot on which all Jewish thought turns, and the narrow confines of the community give it a new look: it becomes more rigid and polished, more legalistic and juridical. Whereas prophecy was a dynamic movement which looked forward, the cult of the Law looked back to the past. Where the interior religion of the Prophets made them hope for an actual historical Messiah to fulfill their ideal, the spirituality by the letter of the law and its fulfillment. The Covenant becomes more of a contract than a testament. So compelling is the concept of God’s transcendence that eventually all relationship with him is inconceivable, apart from the purely external one flowing from this contract. No longer does God give himself to men, he simply exacts their obedience and worship.

This conception is not without its splendor. The chosen people are priest of God, whose office is to proclaim his transcendence and order his praise in all righteousness. The theme of accomplishment and eternal life is enriched by this new revelation. However, the conception contrasts too violently with the wretchedness of human misery for it to be sufficient. What is worse, it tends to upset the delicate balance of the whole of revelation on the very eve of the Christian era. In seeking to base the Covenant on moral perfection rather than on the free choice of God, and by setting God at an incommunicable distance from his people, this outlook threatened to split apart asunder the two basic aspects of salvation which revelation had constantly tried to bring together. In such an outlook, man with his free will has no absolute need of divine grace, and with his inner perfection he can look God in the face. In place of a religion where wretchedness called forth mercy, where nothingness gave birth to free election, where the cry from a child’s heart stirred the love of a Father, there is substituted a natural and water-tight religion, where man has nothing to offer God but his own self-sufficiency and nothing to hope for but what he has earned.

The cult of the Law was bound to be at loggerheads with reality. It was inconsistent with man’s weakness in giving him no support save a code of rules. It was incompatible with God’s goodness in making the existence of evil incomprehensible. In fact the “just” man did not inevitably receive his reward: not infrequently it was the sinner who prospered. Such a cult of the Law could never suppress that yearning for consummation and new life which was at the root of all messianic expectation. The yearning remained, and it was deeper than ever; the mere fact is that the hope of political power was now gone and that the Law itself assumed a moral aspect only shifted its emphasis from an earthly and social level to a personal and spiritual one. The book of Job first showed the utter bankruptcy of the kind of Law and Covenant which automatically rewards man’s perfection with God’s happiness. Ecclesiastes went further, showing from experience that the very opposite is true; a soul filled with every human bliss could still be empty and famished. These “stages” of the post-exilic period remained true to the real current of prophetic revelation. While they enlarged its moral import and applied it to the problem of personal salvation, they still managed to preserve the prophetic conviction of man’s inadequacy, and to insist on the need for a justice which came entirely from a merciful God. By admitting their own inability ever to achieve it, they underlined the traditional hope all the more.

Final Bearings

Thus the old religion of Israel had reached the threshold of Christianity in three distinct forms, the down-to-earth messianism of the ordinary people, the religion of the Law, and the ideal of the sapiential books. So clear-cut had these three become that they sometimes seemed to delineate three separate sects. The mass of the people were fired with hopes of national sovereignty. The ruling classes took refuge behind a religion which they claimed to be definitively closed, the Sadducees smiling at the popular illusions, and the Pharisees expecting nothing of the Messiah except his endorsement of the Law. Even the immortality promised by the last inspired books was seen only as a confirmation of their belief that revelation was to reach its perfection in the eternal cult of the Law. Certainty of an afterlife had done no more than take away their hope of receiving anything on this earth.

It was the third, the sapiential school of thought, that inspired the final surge of revelation, the greatest and most revolutionary yet. The triumph of the Maccabees had increased the anxiety and dissatisfaction of men like Job and Ecclesiastes. They were bewildered by the pointless sacrifice of men who had not lived to enjoy the fruit of their work. It was the Greek hope of a life after death that gave the eventual answer to these soul-searchings. Ben Sirach bad already pointed to the solid foundations for such a belief; the book of Wisdom asserted it with God’s own authority, and with a boldness and precision which left no room for doubt. In this new hope of immortal life contained a conception that was to upset all previous ideas. The author of Wisdom appealed to it, drawing revolutionary conclusions as if they were self-evident. In making eternal life the end-term of personal salvation, of the last judgment and of man’s happiness, he brought together the two parallel streams in which the old yearnings of Israel had by-passed legalistic orthodoxy and survived. Eschatological and interior, national and personal, earthbound and moral, historical and sapiential, these aspects were for the first time fused together. Unfortunately, this reconciliation in eternity left the present life empty, and this happiness with God still required a name.

To sum up then, on the eve of the birth of Christ, revelation had reached such a stage of maturity that it seemed to the more responsible elements among the Jews to have reached its term. And yet some vital thing was wanting. This happiness, whether it was given or promised or only hoped for, still had to be given a name. Official Judaism looked for it in the satisfaction of legal fulfillment; the ordinary people awaited it in the Conqueror who was to vanquish the Romans; the Sages turned to the unknown beyond. If this prodigious growth of Abraham’s faith was to be given some unity, if this threefold harvest was to be gathered together, nothing less was demanded than the revelation of this happiness in person. God must name himself.

IV

THE CHRISTIAN TRANSFORMATION OF THE BIBLICAL THEMES

The problem of Christ; traditionalist and innovator; the new fact of a Messiah-Son of God; the indispensable setback; renewal in the Spirit; the final illusion—Kingdom or Church; growing pains; St. Paul and Judeo-Christianity; St. Paul and Hellenism; St. Paul and Christian anxiety; the hostility of the “world” and the Johannine synthesis.

The Problem of Christ

So far, we have tried to disentangle the themes which constitute biblical revelation. We have traced them in broad outline from the beginning to the period immediately preceding the Christian era. Enough has been said to allow the reader to assess the revolution occasioned by the appearance of Christ.

In a study like this, it is as important to underline the continuity of the two Testaments as it is to mark the differences brought about by the new leaven which is Christ. Anyone who has grasped the logical and upward trend of revelation will be able to appreciate the place occupied in the scheme by the fact of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth is not only the term of the evolution; he so transcends it that its whole perspective is changed. He is not only the building’s keystone; he is, in his own words, the “corner stone”.

A merely human appraisal of the beginnings of Christianity will always boggle at this duality. Judeo-Christians of all time have looked upon Christ as no more than the fruit of Judaism at best. By contrast the Marcionites have always made of him a revolutionary pure and simple, whose aim was to give the deathblow to a Judaism already on the point of death. Either he is put into an eschatological and social framework, and his scope restricted to the achieving of Israel’s old hope for a definitive Kingdom, though on a higher level; or else only the moral content of his teaching is recognized, and he takes his place in the line of the ancient Prophets, as artist with a talent for communicating an intimate experience of God.

In point of fact, Christ did present himself both as a national Davidic Messiah of the Jews and as the supreme Prophet of renewal in the Spirit. His teaching embraces both streams of Israel’s divided hope. At one and the same time he claims to be God’s wonder-working messenger to his people Israel, and also the deal of personal intimacy with the Father, the model for all men of good will. He is the answer to those who yearned for a Messiah, and to those whose hearts were heavy with dissatisfaction. He finds only one insurmountable barrier, the self-sufficiency of Pharisaism, which sill not admit any need for hope and faith, no room for one who claims to be the answer to all hopes. All the same, he is careful not to add fuel to the feverish expectation of the mob, and he paints his pictures of the eschatological kingdom in colors striking enough to deceive even the “liberal Protestants” of his day. He puts himself at the very center of the two streams, messianical and sapiential, so that he can the more happily embrace both and transform them in his own person.

The New Fact

In its immense simplicity, the message of Christ simply put a name to the expectation of Israel. It is his own name—the Son of God—and he died rather than renounce it. This unprecedented claim sums up all that was now in his teaching, and in its light everything else is changed. Happiness, or “salvation” as the Jews called it, does not consist in the triumph of Israel, nor in human perfection, not even in immortal life. It is identified with God himself. The Covenant is no longer concerned with a promised land or a mere earthly paradise; it is a divine betrothal, a gift greater than the numerous posterity of Abraham, a favor more wondrous than the rescue from Egypt, an election more radical even than that of David or Solomon. It is God himself that Christ brings to a humanity waiting in the emptiness to which sin has consigned it, a God who, like a loving Father, bends down and begs men to open their empty hearts so that he may fill them with his fullness.

Christ alone can reveal this Fatherhood, for he alone is the true Son of God. But this sonship is to be shared by those who accept in Christ the witness of the Son of God, and so discover the Fatherhood of God for themselves. For Christ is both the Messenger and the Message of God, and the bond that ties his disciples to him ties them also to his Father. He is strictly the Gift of God to men; when God gives men his Son, he gives them himself as a Father, and thereby accepts them as his children, asking only that they open body and soul, mind and heart, to receive the fullness of his gift.

In short, Christ unites in himself all the themes of past revelation, and thereby transposes them. He answers the anxious cry of the masses for a Messiah who will found an earthly kingdom by bringing a heavenly kingdom into their midst. He meets the self-sufficiency of the Pharisees by showing them the deep void which can only be filled by the Father’s love. The personal dissatisfaction of the sage he answers with his revelation of God’s vast plan for a renewed Israel. He is indeed the promised Messiah, though his kingdom is from within—in the world but not of the world. To those who receive him he brings a gift from God, and that gift is himself, for he is the Messiah-Son of God, whose mission is to show forth his divine sonship as testimony to God’s Fatherhood. He has come to give to the world the life of the Father, which he shares by right, as the pledge of a new Covenant, to which man is asked to contribute only his nothingness, and commit it into the hands of God.

The Indispensable Setback

There is nothing in the above outline of Christ’s doctrine which cannot be fathered from an objective study of the oldest Gospel traditions, even if no account were taken of the miracles. But those who first heard Christ did not grasp the full significance of this doctrine. They colored it with their own prejudices and pre-conceived ideas. Nor was Christ under any illusions about that. As he approached the end of his ministry, he foretold in ever clearer terms that there would be a fatal setback. He had set himself to co-ordinate in his person all the traditional themes, and to raise them to a supra-terrestrial level. It would have been remarkable if such a program had not led to misunderstanding and provoked conflict with commonly accepted views.

Those who saw this most clearly were the Jewish theologians. Their own instinct of preservation made them realize the revolutionary character of this seemingly traditional doctrine. If such a Messiah-Son of God should ever find his way into the already completed edifice of Jewry’s official religion, even if it was only through a side door; then the whole structure was in danger of being blown sky-high. How could the barred and bolted framework of Judaism contain a Messiah whom the earth itself could not contain? What would become of established tradition under the influence of such an unknown quantity? Born conservatives that they were, the Jewish theologians were not going to take chances. He must be put to death. It took longer for the ordinary people to reject him. Charmed by his miracles and his forthright approach, they found his preaching ambiguous and harmless enough. It was only when they decided that this gentle Messiah was an idealist incapable of striking a hammer blow for freedom that they, too, lost interest and dropped him. Even those who were attracted more by his personality than by his sublime wisdom were amazed that he did not clear away all misunderstanding by a dazzling manifestation of his apocalyptic glory. The disciples themselves understood little of their Master, except that he had looked into their heart, and left a mark which would remain always.

So the inevitable catastrophe came. It had to come to shatter the illusions which had dogged this people from the beginning, from the racial ideal to the escape from Egypt, from the promised Land to the messianic Kingdom, from the Restoration after exile to the justification of the Law. The oppression of Pharaoh did not shatter it, nor did the arid desert or the Philistine invasion. Deportation, exile, suffering, oppression, the promise of immortality even, none of these had destroyed it. What was needed was something that would pluck the illusion out by the roots. Man must learn once for all that his happiness does not lie in himself, that heaven is not to be found on earth, that God cannot be called upon to vouchsafe a perfection that is exclusively human. Christ must die, in order to reverse the scale of values established by the mummified laws of a paralyzed Judaism. An unbridgeable chasm must be driven between man and the mirage of a happiness of which he himself was the center. Man must himself be split in two, take a blind leap to the sublime level of the divine Fatherhood, without ever ceasing to plumb the sickening depths of his own nothingness. Man must learn to see death and suffering, evil and sin, as the springboard for this twofold leap. Christ must die, and show up the emptiness of the earthbound mystery. Christ must die, if the Jewish masses were to die to their earthly Messianism, if official Judaism was to be shaken out of its false security, if his own disciples were to be rescued from their intoxication. Judaism must die to whatever was perishable in the Promises and inadequate in the Law, in order that the letter should die and the spirit live. The ambiguity which made the Promise its own fulfillment and the law an end in itself must be shattered. Shadow must give way to reality, and the fair copy replace the rough draft. The earthly setback must become the pledge of a heavenly success. The human matrix must be cracked to reveal its divine content. Christ must tear himself away from the earth and so open the way to the Father. “Christ must suffer and die and so enter his glory.” (Luke 24:26)

Renewal of the Spirit

The death of Christ is incomplete without his resurrection. Good Friday is the annihilation of all that was only human: it is Easter Sunday that begins the work of recreation. For the disciples, the death of their Master would always be regarded as a catastrophe beyond imagining and the deathblow to their illusions. It is not until Easter morning that a new faith is born, and that they discover a new world. If Christ is truly risen, then the enterprise is not doomed. It needs only to be taken up again, though on a higher and wider level then before. Hardly have they had a chance to glimpse this new world before it comes on them like a might wind, in the wake of a Christ ascending to heaven. The Spirit descends on the little hand. There is no room now for hesitation. The very vitality of Christ, which had so captivated them before his death, is now surging through their veins. The glorious life which he now lived was being poured out on them. His mission from the Father had been precisely to share this new life with them, as a new gift of himself and a new mode of his presence among them. The Spirit filled them now, as the principle of an otherworldly covenant and the giver of heavenly life. Through the Spirit, Christ bestowed on man the privileges of his own divine sonship. The Spirit was the very life of Jesus, the Son of God sitting at the right hand of the Father.

It is impossible to over emphasize the effect that this experience of the heavenly Vitality of the risen Christ exercise on the infant growth of Christianity. Admittedly it was not an altogether unknown experience. Throughout its long history, Israel had known the Breath of God as the irresistible power behind his Word. When the Word commanded creation, already the Spirit of God stirred over the waters (Gen. 1:1). It was the breath of God which dried up the waters of the Flood (Gen. 8:1) and divided the Red Sea to provide a passage for the chosen people (Exod. 14:21). It was his fire that surrounded Sinai when God proclaimed his law (Exod. 19:15f), his strength that filled all those through whom the divine Promises were effected. In the Prophets, especially, it was he who gave a supernatural light and life, his Breath that energized the Word of God they proclaimed. But in the person of Christ the disciples had touched this vital power of God as its very source. No one else could have said with such truth “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me”. The new Moses had published the terms of the new Covenant. The son of David had been anointed God’s Messiah from the womb of his mother, proclaimed Son of God at his baptism, and crowned as such from the moment of his resurrection by the sanctification of the Spirit. The Prophets had only been given the Spirit to speak of this Prophet. He knew the Father before ever Abraham was. This greater than Solomon had received the fullness of the Spirit. He had been singled out by the voice of the Father and the descending dove, as the one in whom the Father was well pleased, and on whom the Spirit rested.

Now, it seemed, the roles were to be reversed. Up to this the Spirit had been the symbol of God’s incommunicability and the mainspring of his holiness. If the disciples had seen Christ as the Son of God it was because they saw the fullness of God’s Spirit in him. But now it was no longer the Spirit who pointed to Christ, but Christ who communicated the Spirit. It was no longer Christ who pointed back to the Spirit, but the Spirit who pointed to the hidden glory that was Christ’s. It was no longer the Spirit who consecrated Christ as Son of God, but the Son of God who at his Father’s right hand freely bestowed the Spirit. Pentecost had indeed turned the world upside down. The disciples found themselves suddenly transported from earth to heaven, lifted up by the Spirit into the incommunicable world of God, taken up in the risen Christ to the very center of this new world.

To the Spirit, then, must be attributed the vast misunderstanding between Judaism and Christ. The Spirit alone, through Christ, was responsible for the friction from which the Church emerged. It was the Spirit who compelled his Anointed One to be untrue to the fossilized letter of the Law. It is the same Spirit who will now gradually make the disciples realize that by his death and resurrection Christ was faithful to the deepest meaning of Israel’s revelation. If Christians today do not understand their faith, it is not because they have forgotten Christ, but because they have forgotten the meaning of Christ, which is the Spirit.

The Final Illusion: Kingdom or Church

At Pentecost the disciples learned only the bare essentials of this meaning of Christ. Although they were in contact with the divine through the person of Christ, their minds were still burdened by the cramping framework of a moribund Judaism. Far from making a clean break from this framework, they clung to it and tried to remodel it along new lines. The old illusions had died with Christ, but this new Spirit of Christ seemed to lend them a new leave of life. And indeed the unfolding of revelation was not completed at Christ’s death, or even at Pentecost; it would not be completed until the last Apostle died. Until then the Spirit of Christ must work through Judaism like a leaven, must put new life into those old limbs, and bring them to their full stature.

The New Testament writings bear witness to the fact that the first disciples took time to realize the change that the new Spirit was going to introduce into their traditional ideas. Only very slowly did the Spirit bring about that evolution of ideas which enabled the disciples to adjust their minds to the new outlook, and draw the line at the end of the verbal incarnation of the Word incarnate. They had accepted Christ as Israel’s true Messiah. His death taught them that he had not come to deliver Judaism from the yoke of Rome, and his resurrection that his messianic rule had indeed begun but that it was an entirely spiritual one, the final flowering of Israel’s prerogative. The coming of the Spirit had convinced them that all things were now accomplished. In the little group of Christ’s followers the Kingdom was established on earth in all its heavenly reality. The end could not be far off. Christ would soon return, to consecrate by his presence the triumph of his reborn people.

So the illusion came back for the last time. The first generation of Christian thought that the Spirit was the key to the Kingdom, the whisper before the storm of the Parousia. They were not entirely wrong. But the Spirit was no more concerned with earthly achievement than was Christ. Neither of them came to set up a heaven on earth, but to lift up earth to heaven. It was not enough that Christ himself should die: the sons of the Kingdom would have to die too. The life of the Spirit could be made manifest only in the death of all flesh, the Kingdom achieved only in the Church. The final combat was joined between Life and Death: the Kingdom itself must die if it was to yield its hundredfold.

Growing Pains: St. Paul and Judeo-Christianity

The first delusion that had to die was that of nationalism. In its attempts to get the Jews to accept the promises, the little community met with failure and bitter opposition. All the hatred that had been vented on Christ was now turned in its direction, and there seemed to be little or no future for this tiny offshoot of Judaism. It fed on a hope that grew weaker as the looked for miracle failed to materialize. By all human reckoning it could not survive for long. There was little point in being heir to the promised Kingdom if the Kingdom had no subjects. This was the moment for which the Spirit had been waiting. Out of this death be forged a new life, totally unexpected and tremendous in scope. It was almost by chance that the pagan masses came rushing headlong to inherit the Kingdom which the rightful heirs had abdicated.

The movement first started in Jerusalem. Peter had baptized Cornelius the Roman centurion, and Philip the Ethiopian eunuch. The Spirit had come down on the Samaritans and declared clean the Gentile food that no Jew would touch. But all this was insignificant compared with the revolution brought by St. Paul. For him, the surrender to the goad of Christ on the Damascus road meant the renunciation of his whole past. Cured of the blindness of Pharisaism, the scales fell from his eyes and he saw the dazzling vision of the mystery of Christ. He had not known, as the other disciples had, the slow development from the baptism of Christ to the day of Pentecost, from illusion to reality, a development which still held them in the clutches of Jewish preferment. For St. Paul the issues were clearer: his conversion was a complete break. Either Christ was a Jewish impostor, in which case all his claims must be denounced, or else he was the Son of God, who could not be the exclusive property of a restricted group. Paul envisaged the conquest of the world, and Jerusalem, dumb with astonishment, agreed that the Spirit was on his side.

This numerical emancipation was not enough. Before things could be finally settled there would have to be a spiritual emancipation too. Liberation from Judaism meant nothing unless there was a liberation from the Law as well. Considerable anxiety was felt among some section of the Jerusalem community over this open invitation to the “lame and halt” to come and fill the places left empty by those who had refused the feast. As they had seen at Antioch, Gentile conversions inevitably threw convert Jews and pagans together. Jewish law forbade such contacts. The Jew, indoctrinated from early childhood, felt almost a physical revulsion against such proximity. Was he expected now to deny all that he had been taught? The Judaizers at Jerusalem maintained that it was for the pagans to submit to the law and adopt circumcision. Clearly principles were here at stake: the whole meaning of the Christian revolution was being questioned.

Judeo-Christianity was Pharisaism’s last effort to absorb the Church of Christ back into Judaism by cutting her off from the Spirit that was her inspiration. If a baptized pagan must first be circumcised before he could consort with a baptized Jew, then baptism in the name of Jesus was not the passport to the Kingdom. It meant that sanctification by the Spirit was of no avail without the Law, and Christ was no more than the Law’s complement. Salvation was achieved by the law and its observance, and man was back where he started. Instead of the free outpouring of divine life into the empty soul of man, there is only the old juxtaposition of the two parallel perfection which never meet—that of the just man and that of God. The whole metamorphosis involved by Christ’s death and resurrection, and the incorporation of man into that risen life through the Spirit, that was the point in question.

In his piercing wisdom, St. Paul saw the danger. His was the task of weaning the infant Church from the dried-up breasts of Judaism and imparting to her a consciousness of her own dynamism. In no uncertain manner he cut away the parasite growths of outworn ideas, and revealed the deep intuition which the first disciples had drawn from their faith in Christ. Christ was not the servant of the Law but its Master; not its fruit but its meaning. He was not only the keystone of the old Covenant, but also the corner stone of the new; not only the Jewish Messiah but also the universal Lord. His Kingdom was not the privilege of one people, but the mystical body, in which Jew and Gentile have their place and receive the Spirit of sonship freely bestowed by the Father. All mankind, Jew and Gentile alike, stand in need of this justification—the Gentile caught in the abyss of his moral indulgence and the Jew chained in the prison of his legal arrogance. It was not only from Judaism that Christ freed man by his death; it was from the whole law of sin which Judaism symbolized even while it denounced it. Christ’s death undermined both Jewish righteousness and Gentile corruption, to lay hold of the very root of man’s insufficiency, wring from him the admission of his nothingness, and open to him through the resurrection the way to heaven and that free justification in the Spirit of the Son who makes him cry out, “Abba, Father”.

Henceforth salvation is not achieved by the works of the Law, but by faith in Christ (the epistle to the Romans is full of the theme). This means, first of all, that Christianity and not Judaism is the way of salvation. It means further that salvation is a personal and interior attitude of abandonment to God in Christ, and not the automatic privilege of those who observe the Law. In the last analysis, it means that the very adhesion of the believer to the salvation achieved by the Son of God is the free gift of new life, whereby he becomes, through the sanctification of the Spirit, a child of God.

Growing Pains: St. Paul and Hellenism

While St. Paul was still occupied with the Judeo-Christian problem, his attention was being drawn in another direction. Before he had even begun to marshal the doctrinal justification for his work among the Gentiles, he had organized the people into independent “assemblies” or churches to take the place of the synagogues which were now closed to them. Here he had spent much effort in trying to translate the Jewish message of Christ into concepts which would be understood by the Greek mind. But at the very moment when he had finally settled the emancipation from Judaism, he found that must apply his own brake to the movement. One of the churches had gone too far, and the great teacher of Christian freedom had to insist that the pure spirit of Israel must be preserved in the Church.

To bring about the complete emancipation of the Christian movement St. Paul had selected words, images, ideas, and themes which were more sympathetic to the Greek mind. In this way he tried to overcome the obvious difficulty which the Greeks felt when they were faced with the Jewish vocabulary of words and ideas in which the Gospel was written. As we have already seen, the primitive Christian faith had grown naturally out of the national hopes and the religious themes inherited from the Jews. These would not mean very much to the Gentiles. Their inheritance was one of a hope for immortality, for a new life to be found by rites of initiation. The inspired genius of St. Paul saw what could be achieved if the finest elements of both these religious currents were combined and boldly sublimated to a new level. The Greeks would understand the mystery of Christ if it was presented to them as a “wisdom” of divine life. The Christian fact would be accepted by them if he could show them that it alone held the true “mystery” of death and life. Moreover, the simple religious rites which the first Christians had brought with them from Judaism to express their new faith would translate immediately, without adaptation, to become the rites of initiation into the salvation of the risen Christ. With magnificent skill and tact St. Paul was able to change a thoroughly Jewish movement into a universal and Hellenistic religion, without losing anything of the essence of primitive Christianity.

Such a transformation was not without its dangers. Would the convert pagans press the adoption of forms so far as to alter the content of the Christian message? Since they were dispensed from initiation into Judaism, would they think that they were also free to throw over the fundamental religious values of Israel which remained as the foundation stone of Christianity? In other words, would this process of the Hellenization of Christianity threaten to cut Christianity away from its origins, and make it an easy prey for the prevalent syncretism? These were the dangers which had troubled the minds of Judeo-Christians, and prompted their conservatism. It would be sheer folly, in their view, to bring straight into the Christian fold pagans who could not overnight shake off their legacy of idolatry and immorality. The decision of the Council of Jerusalem in the year 49 (Acts 15) had given some support to these fears: the Corinthian crisis was to show how well founded they were.

St. Paul accused the Corinthians first of all of moral indifference: the case of incest and the question of idol-offerings were evidence of it. Such indifference was not only the legacy of their former paganism; it sought to justify itself in the very teaching of St. Paul, and in his proclamation of the Christian’s emancipation from the Law and the man-made conventions of religion. So far removed was this interpretation from the true tenor of St. Paul’s thought, and so obviously indebted to Greek philosophy, that the Apostle came down on it with all his vigor and denounced the “wisdom” that had inspired it. What had these pagans done but idolize “wisdom” as the Jews had idolized the Law?

Worse still, such moral indifference was based on a misconception of Christ’s mission that was reminiscent of the Greek “mysteries”. The whole religious yearning of the Corinthians seemed to be satisfied with the experience of salvation they received from the rites of Christian initiation. It was to soothe the worries of the first Christians over the delay of the Parousia that St. Paul had gone out of his way to emphasize the “spiritual” reality of the Kingdom. What the Corinthians had done was to exaggerate this to the extent of losing sight of the essentially dynamic and moral aspect of Christianity.

To those Jews who wished to prolong the economy of the Law, St. Paul had preached the scandal of the Cross, which dealt the deathblow to hope of Jewish nationalism. To the Greeks who now, with typical optimism, made Christ a salvation-myth he preached the foolishness of the Cross, and its lesson of the Christian ideal of suffering and self-immolation. It is this context of sin, suffering and hope that puts the “mystery” of Christ solidly in the tradition of Jewish thought. The Kingdom is not yet realized, except in faith (it is a variation on the theme of Romans and Galatians). It will be manifested in glory, but not until it has followed Christ dead and risen. It was to reach its full stature, but not until “death is absorbed by life” and the day of the Parousia dawns.

Growing Pains: St. Paul and Christian Anxiety

The Judeo-Christian crisis and its Corinthian correlative were not the only factors which gave St. Paul this wide view of Christianity that embraced both the New Testament and the Old. There were other factors to influence him, and of these the most important was the inner development of Christianity itself. The Judeo-Christianity which he was fighting outside had taken an even subtler form inside the Christian communities themselves. The specter was still there, finding an unlooked for ally among the Greek converts, with their yearning for that tangible earthly happiness which he had condemned in the Corinthians.

For the elite Judaism had meant the cult of the Law, but for the ordinary folk it had always meant the expectation of a Messiah. Christ had supplanted the Law, but surely his title of Messiah still remained. Surely Messianism was the very soul of Christianity. For the Apostles and for St. Paul himself, the burning desire to see the Kingdom established for all time was the mainspring of their dynamism in the Spirit. And yet it had not happened, and any hope of it happening grew fainter as the ideal frontiers of the Kingdom were extended further and further in the Gentile mission. Christian faith was troubled. If Christ was the definitive Messiah, why was salvation delayed? Had there not been disillusionment enough—the long desert journey, the failure to subdue Canaan, the divided Monarchy, the Restoration that misfired? Were these now to be crowned by a disappointment more cruel still, that of a Kingdom which was given only to be taken away again? Was not the bitter blow of Good Friday disillusionment enough? How could it be said that faith in Christ had saved his followers if it brought them nothing but hatred from the Jew and Gentile alike? Faithful but perplexed, the Thessalonians became impatient. The Corinthians gave up hope altogether and fell back on their Greek “wisdom”: the delay and Paul’s explanation of Christian freedom meant that the Kingdom was a Greek mystery, amoral, outside time, a mere serviceable pledge of immortality. The two attitudes were radically distinct. The first, typically Jewish, aggravated the all too earthly yearning for external salvation by making it no more than a spiritual pledge already given. Both had this much in common (and they always will have until the Parousia), that they made salvation something entirely human—an earthly crown which can be fondled and enjoyed. In St. Paul’s words, both are “unspiritual”. Both imprison man in the very way that the Law had done.

St. Paul himself had known the pangs of this evolution. In the Captivity Epistles he made the synthesis of ideas which were still unresolved in Romans, Galatians, and 1 and 2 Corinthians. His final solution lies no longer in Christ, but in the Spirit of Christ, and it is from the intimate experience of that Spirit that his synthesis springs. Those who wait impatiently for the Parousia Paul counters with a Parousia of Christ already established in the Spirit. Those who have given up all hope of Christ’s second coming he counters with the unquestionable groanings of the Spirit laboring in a new creation in Christ. To both he shows the essential mystery of the Church, the new half-way stage of the “desert”, where the people of God, the new Israel, are slowly transformed from the flesh of sin into the glory of the risen Christ. He emphasizes the utter necessity of this struggle between death and life, as a preparation of Christ’s own death and resurrection, where evil and suffering serve as the catalysts essential for the Christian’s spiritualization in Christ. He paints a bold picture of the unfathomable designs of the Father, begun in eternal pre-destination, slowly unfolded and transposed through the ages, and reaching their achievement in Christ and their full flowering in the Spirit. The whole human race and its fortune are held in a complex rhythm of evolution. Already the last phase has uttered its birth cry, but it has not yet reached its full stature.

Having announced the death of Jewish exclusivism, the death of the Law’s humanism, and the death of the Greek idea of happiness, St. Paul now proclaims the death of the Kingdom in the Church, until such time as the Church shall be absorbed in the victory of the Kingdom.

The Hostility of the “World” and the Johannine Synthesis

At this point, revelation had reached such a degree of fullness in form and thought that its completion was imminent. In fact the Johannine writings, the last of the inspired Book, make no new advance but only a final review of precision, force, and harmony.

The fall of Jerusalem was the signal for the last convulsive kick of Judeo-Christianity. The Church had spread so widely, throughout Asia especially, that Christians found themselves far more involved in the civil life of pagans than they had originally intended. What was worse, the fall of the holy city had not brought the return of Christ that his words had led them to expect, and they were left to face the gathering storm of paganism alone. St. John met their growing anxiety with the solution which St. Paul had offered, although his presentation of it is distinctly his own. He gives the Christian mystery the atmosphere of peace and certainty that Paul’s genius lacked, and fixes his vision far above the shifting horizons of this earth. Not without reason has he been called an eagle: he hovers without apparent effort, his eyes fixed on the divine Sun. Not that he has no feeling for men; he is no metaphysician or dreamer. He can scale these heights only because he has measured the depths of his own heart, and has reached far beyond the void of his own nothingness to discover the Word of God which sets him free.

His first thought is to look back at what has gone before. To those who stand hesitating at the crossroads he gives a warning—they must not go back. It is the whole purpose of the Fourth Gospel to render impossible, once for all, any such return to Judaism. By the end of the first century Christianity had reached a much fuller appreciation of its own meaning. In the light of this, and with his own astonishing power, John applies his mind to the life of Christ and recognizes it for the revolution it was. He picks out precisely the elements in this history which give it promise of the way Christianity would go after the resurrection. He delves deeply into the essence of Christ’s thought underlying the ambiguity of expression forced upon him by the mentality of his hearers. He singles out its message of eternal life in this world, gained by dying through faith in the Son of God. He offers that life to the Christians in Asia, in answer to their fears of the mounting persecution and their frustrated hopes of the Parousia.

In this sense, the aim of the Fourth Gospel is to allow the meaning of Christ’s life to shine in its true light. The first catechesis, found in Mark, Luke, and Matthew, had given a detailed account of the outward facts of Christ’s life. Time was needed for the true import of that life to appear. At fist sight St. John’s Gospel seems for removed from the picture given by the Synoptics, but a closer study reveals that he has remained as true to the picture as he has penetrated deep beneath it. Not only is it an authentic interpretation of the basic facts of Christianity, it is also the key to the Synoptics. In his Christ, the Son of God, St. John shows the hidden meaning of the Scriptures as they are recapitulated in the person of the Word incarnate. The old Covenant had one purpose—to support the new; the new Covenant had one meaning—to transform the old in the Spirit. The final balance is struck between the Jewish revelation and the Christian revolution. Between them he establishes a unique rhythm of types and fulfillment. Grace answers grace, and the believer learns to die to justification by Law, and be born again in the Glory of the Father.

John stands between the past and the future, synthesizing the one and looked toward the other. Having cut off all possibility of a return to Judaism, he now faces the persecution of paganism, in the Apocalypse. The Church has been newly born from the womb of its Virgin Mother, but it still has to learn from her how to walk the hard way of the Desert before it can reach the fullness of maturity in Christ. It is a pity that the Apocalypse has so often been regarded as a secret code containing details of the whole of Church history. In fact the only prophecy that it makes is that there will always be persecution until the final triumph. It is much more than a cipher—it is a prolongation throughout time of that rhythm of God’s plan which was conceived in eternity and gradually woven into the very material of this world through the double incarnation, verbal and personal, of the Son of God. The entire history of all ages in the framework of the Father’s plan—that is the theme of the Apocalypse. The Father’s merciful design has not been cut short, nor is his love in any way exclusive. Christ is infinitely more than the climax of God’s plans—he is the beginning of a new cycle of redemption which penetrates heaven itself. Revelation is born: it must now grow. Redemption is achieved: it must now be applied. Christ is dead and risen from the dead: his death and resurrection have still to be fulfilled in his Church. The Parousia of the Lamb, slain but triumphant, is not, in the Apocalypse, something still to be achieved in the far future: it is here and now, within us. It begins and comes unceasingly, as new life is born out of death, and as the world’s persecution blossoms into the liberation of the Spirit. How is it that we have been able to lose the meaning of this book, which is the only one that was ever written directly for us? Standing as it does between the two comings of Christ, its message is one of consolation and hope to a Church that will reach its glory through suffering. This book should be for us a most powerful encouragement to await with patience the fulfillment of God’s eternal designs.

Thus the Apocalypse sets its seal on the Bible’s message. It is the last “revelation”. The long unfolding of man’s yearning and God’s answer comes to an end in the mystery of the life in the Spirit. In one sense the Apocalypse is the least eschatological of all the books of the Bible, since it spells the end of the tormenting delusion which God was able to use to such effect throughout Israel’s long history. Henceforth the Christian knows that he can expect nothing but suffering and death from without. He knows that within him this death will be exactly balanced by the life of the Spirit flowing to him from the throne of the triumphant Lamb. The ultimate victory over the forces of Evil will come, to establish the harmonious completion on earth of the work begun at the creation. But already the victory of the Christ-like is announced in the death of the Christian. Already it raises him from earth to heaven.

V

CHRIST THE FOCAL POINT OF THE SCRIPTURES

Inner continuity and unity of the revelation from Abraham to Christ; Christ the historical culmination, logical term and sum content of the Bible.

In the light of what has been said, the reader will at least know what to look for when he reads the Bible. If he concentrates too much on detail, he will rarely feel the touch of God’s hand; he will even risk losing himself altogether in a welter of secondary causes behind which God is hidden. Revelation and the supernatural are rarely obvious in the Bible. It is frequently possible to explain things by natural agencies and causes. What the reader must look for is rather the constant, sure, and irresistible movement of the whole towards one end, irrespective of human conditions. It is here that the hand of God is most surely in command. Every nation has a history of success and failure, but no nation has a history like this one, where success and failure alike conspire to produce a living and complex upward movement towards a single end. The call of Abraham can be explained by natural causes. So can the Exodus from Egypt, the Conquest, the success of David, Israel’s survival after exile, even the “miracles” by which neither Persia nor Greece nor Rome are able to absorb this nation. What cannot be so explained is how all these events gradually and surely led this tiny, materialist, dull-minded people to the conclusion that the God of Abraham was the supreme creator of all things. What passes understanding is that a people as hardheaded as this could pin their hope on an unbelievable manifestation of love, and see that hope realized in such splendor that their hearts could not contain it.

All the lines of this history converge. All the Bible’s themes, whether we consider them horizontally or vertically, logically or historically, at rest or in motion, all meet at a single point. We might well compare the Bible to one of those elegant turrets which decorate the great towers of our Cathedrals. They are really spiral staircases, where each step fans out from a slender central column which is itself made up of the angle end of the successive steps. The whole turret is built on the base of this central column, and the roof is the fan vaulting which springs from its top, and keys the outer walls. Every full circle of the spiral is a repetition of the last. The same number of equidistant steps lead from one floor to the next, and so to the top. The cycles of doctrinal themes in the Bible are rather like these winding steps. One leads into the next with a similarity of construction which argues to the constancy of the part they have to play. On different levels, each depends for its support and function on the basic central column which gives cohesion and vital direction to the whole. This central column is Christ.

Christ is the focal point of the Scriptures on a historical level first of all. He is the fan vaulting which concludes the spiral. If we are to understand the Bible, we must before all else be absolutely clear about the line of direction of every single event and idea it contains. They have no meaning except insofar as they effectively prepare the way fro the supreme event in this history—the incarnation of the Word and the revelation of his message. From this point of view, the call of Abraham and the revolt of the Macabees are of equal value. The only difference is that one is at the beginning and the other near the end of a succession of events which produced a background on earth against which the Son of God could be revealed. Man could never have assimilated that revelation if it had appeared out of the blue, divorced from this movement through time. It needed a favorable historical context (a people, a religious tradition, and a place in the economy of that tradition) and a favorable psychological climate (a faith inexorably directed toward a future revelation, a religious fervor, and above all a yearning). These were the components which God so slowly collected together when he determined to set apart that people of Israel in this particular corner of the Mediterranean to prepare a humble cradle for his Son.

Christ is not only the term of an historical sequence. He is there in germ at each of its stages, in the first as in the last. As the evolution advances, so his features become more and more precise. He is therefore the logical focal point of the Scriptures. At whatever stage they are considered, the various doctrinal themes are still centered on the idea of a divine and freely bestowed salvation, realized by an envoy sent from God. Basically each theme is only one aspect of this ingle theme, whose potentialities are not fully brought to act except in Christ. His foreshadowing in the Bible is not therefore merely a subjective one; he is prefigured on the objective plane of reality (whether potential or actual). Only rarely were its writers, the Prophets included, even implicitly aware of the persons of Christ. It was not important that they should be. His presence in the Bible transcends the consciousness of men. God had himself infused it into the profound logic of events and ideas and into the living flesh of his People.

Christ is consequently the focal point of the Scriptures on the even deeper and altogether supernatural level of revelation. The Bible contains both revealed truths and truths attainable by the unaided use of reason. But there is only one Truth, living and revealed, and that is the incarnate Word. Reflection on the concept of supernatural revelation will show that God can reveal nothing which is not his Son. God, alone and in himself, is beyond the attainments of created reason. Outside God there are many truths which man has not attained, but none that he could not attain. In this sense truth is natural to man, it is within his scope. God alone lies outside the scope, and everything else insofar as it is rooted in God. He alone bestows himself freely. The natural knowledge that we have of God brings God into our minds, but it does not place us in God as he is, in all his ineffable reality. If we are to know God in that way (and our whole being cries out for it, since he made us for himself) then God must give us the knowledge he has of himself. This knowledge of God, subsistent and personal, the eternal Word, is his Son. The eternal design of God from Paradise lost to the Parousia, the entire plan of salvation to which he invites us, consists precisely in this revelation of himself in his Son. Thus when God reveals “something” in the Bible, that something can only be his Son, reduced to human and halting symbols. That something can only be a logical and historical preparation for the revelation of his Son in person, in the flesh.

So we come to the final level: Christ is the focal point of the Scriptures as the incarnation of the Word. If God is to give himself to man, he must come to man’s level, the level of fallen nature. When man wrenched himself form God’s grasp, he had nothing but himself to fall back on. From that time onward he knew only himself, and whatever else he knew beneath him only led him back to himself. If God would now take a hold on him again, he must stop down to man’s fallen level, and there offer his hand. The divine Word must be spoken in sounds that the human ear can hear; the divine Light must shine in a way that the human eye can see. The Bible is the Word of God become audible; Christ is the Word of God become visible. Whether its function is to be heard or to enlighten, God has only one Word, and he speaks it only to give it. The pre-incarnation of his Word in the Bible is the prelude to the incarnation of the Word in the womb of the Virgin Mary. “This is eternal Life, that they may know Thee, the Father, and Him whom thou hast sent, Jesus Christ.” (John 17:3).

The Art of Sigurd the Volsung, Part II
(For Part I, click here.)

Most of what follows are short quotations: a line or a few lines taken to show that Morris had a rare gift for eloquence and nobility. Before that, though, we will quote a lengthy speech from the first book. This will serve a number of ends: it will give the reader a fair picture of what reading the poem is actually like; it will also illustrate one of the joys of reading Morris, namely, the flow of his big syllable stress meter, and it will serve our study well because this is one of the few lengthy passages in Morris that is actually rather good. This is Signy’s speech to Sigmund in the forest while he awaits some chance to slay those who have destroyed his family (I am presuming that the reader knows the story of the Volsunga Saga; if not, go here):

As the moon and the twilight mingled, she stood with kindling eyes,
And answered and said: “My brother, thou art strong and thou shalt be wise:
I am nothing so wroth as thou are with the ways of death and hell,
For thereof had I a deeming when all things were seeming well.
In sooth overlong it may linger; the children of murder shall thrive,
While thy work is a weight for thine heart, and a toil for thy hand to drive;
But I wot that the King of the Goth-folk for his deeds shall surely pay,
And that I shall live to see it: but thy wrath shall pass away,
And long shalt thou live on the earth an exceeding glorious king,
And thy words shall be told in the market, and all men of thy deeds shall sing:
Fresh shall thy memory be, and thine eyes like mine shall gaze,
On the day unborn in the darkness, the last of all earthly days,
The last of the days of battle, when the host of the Gods is arrayed
And there is an end for ever of all who were once afraid.
Where as thou drawest the sword, thou shalt think of the days that were,
And the foul shall still seem foul, and the fair shall still seem fair;
And thy wit shall then be awakened, and thou shalt know indeed
Why the brave man's spear is broken, and his war-shield fails at need;
Why the loving is unbeloved; why the just man falls from his state;
Why the liar gains in a day what the soothfast strives for late.
Yea, and thy deeds shalt thou know, and great shall thy gladness be;
As a picture all of gold thy life-days shalt thou see,
And know that thou too wert a God to abide through the hurry and haste;
A God in the golden hall, a God in the rain-swept waste,
A God in the battle triumphant, A God on the heap of the slain:
And thine hope shall rise and blossom, and thy love shall be quickened again:
And then shalt thou see before thee the face of all earthly ill;
Thou shalt drink the cup of awakening that thy hand hath holpen to fill;
By the side of the sons of Odin shalt thou fashion a tale to be told
In the hall of the happy Baldur: nor there shall the tale grow old
Of the days before the changing, e'en those that over us pass.
So harden thine heart, O brother, and set thy brow as the brass!
Thou shalt do and thy deeds shall be goodly, and the day's work shall be done
Though naught but the wild deer see it. Nor yet shalt thou be alone
For ever-more in thy waiting; for belike a fearful friend
The long days for thee may fashion, to help thee ere the end.
But now shalt thou hide in the wild-wood, and make thee a lair therein:
Thou art here in the midst of thy foemen, and from them thou well mayst win
Whatso thy heart desireth; yet be thou not too bold,
Lest the tale of the wood-abider too oft to the king be told.
Ere many days are departed again shall I see thy face,
That I may wot full surely of thine abiding-place
To send thee help and comfort; but when that hour is o'er
It were good, O last of the Volsungs, that I see thy face no more,
If so indeed it may be: but the Norns must fashion all,
And what the dawn hath fated on the hour of noon shall fall.”

We cannot, of course, go through line by line, laying out what is well done and what is not. Let it be enough if we mention what is best. “Fresh shall thy memory be, and thine eyes like mine shall gaze, / On the day unborn in the darkness, the last of all earthly days, / The last of the days of battle, when the host of the Gods is arrayed / And there is an end for ever of all who were once afraid.” The expression “on the day unborn in the darkness” is simple, eloquent, and powerful; it brings to our minds something that is known to us all: death, and the ending of the world of men. Such an end must surely one day come, when our sun swells to a red giant and its circumference exceeds that of the orbit of our planet; the fire giant will destroy us first, and then we will face the frost. For the Christian, Morris’ image is one of great hope mingled with just a little fear, but one need not be religious to appreciate it; we need only remember in the Time Machine when the protagonist stands under a starry sky far in the future and watches the last living thing on earth die by the sea. This line, and the two that follow it, communicate an idea more than an image; it is not that we see the last day; it is rather precisely that we do not see it; instead, we can somehow feel it, for we know what it is and we know what it means. Moving on, we come quickly to a series of four good lines: “And thy wit shall then be awakened, and thou shalt know indeed / Why the brave man's spear is broken, and his war-shield fails at need; / Why the loving is unbeloved; why the just man falls from his state; / Why the liar gains in a day what the soothfast strives for late.” They are not moving lines because the poetry itself is beautiful; it is not, in fact. They are moving lines because they express a deep longing of every man and woman who has ever lived, a longing to understand why men do not get what they deserve. For sure, words like “soothfast” detract from otherwise good lines, but they cannot take away from the nobility any man must see in our tragedy, the drama of the fallen king.

More to come...

The Art of Sigurd the Volsung, Part I

The art of William Morris’ epic poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs is worth our attention for two reasons. First, a careful study of his style can point out things that a sensible poet should not do; second, such a study can also reveal what is great about Morris and his work, what makes him sometimes climb to the heights of the great masters, and also explain why some people are greatly affected by his books. Let us begin with a few general remarks. William Morris is not a great storyteller; he is systematically unable to develop tension, either in characters or in actions; even when his characters are in dire straits, somehow we remain unmoved. William Morris is not a great poet because he almost always tries to write what is beyond him; he tries to render the Aeneid into English verse, and he ends up doing such a poor job that no one even remembers that he tried; he attempts to write a great English epic built on the Volsunga Saga, but fails because he is not a narrative poet. William Morris does not have a master’s command of the English language; if he were a master, he would not repeatedly invent such ill-conceived locutions as “morn-dusk” and “war-gear”; if he were a master, the greatest poetry that he wrote would be the poetry that he put forth his best effort at perfecting; Sigurd the Volsung is the poem at which he put forward his best effort, but it is not his best work. Despite all of these shortcomings, William Morris rises above many other authors with a power and beauty that can rival the greatest poets we have. Let us move, therefore, to the poem itself.

The story itself, the plot, that is, need not detain us much. It is presented below so that the reader unfamiliar with the book will know the outline of the story. Here follows a brief synopsis of the story: . . . Why need the story not detain us? It need not detain us because it is essentially the same story we find in the Volsunga Saga; what differs is the way in which the story is presented. That is what we must look to.

Here, then, are the opening lines of Sigurd the Volsung:
There was a dwelling of kings ere the world was waxen old;
Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;
Earls’ wives were the weaving-women, queens’ daughters strewed its floors,
And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.

In these first lines may be readily seen the chief flaws of Morris’ poetry throughout the epic. First, he tries to give his expressions life by making them archaic, but he ends up taking what little life they had. The first line does almost nothing for us. It should propound the epic theme, or at least it should grab our attention. The only thing about it that grabs us is that he has put the first stress of the entire epic on the word “was”. Instead of using the archaic and negative “ere the world was waxen old”, he could easily have used a simpler, positive phrase: “in the days when the world was young”, or some clause more suited to the meter. I will trade ten poets who tell me that the world was not old for one poet who tells me that it was young. We also find some of Morris’ archaisms in these first lines, though they have not yet come out in force. “Door-wards”, while we know what he means by it, fails completely as a piece of poetic expression; it is neither simple, nor surprising, nor creative, nor evocative; it is as dead as a door nail - which Morris gets to in the next line, “and silver nailed its doors”. Let that be enough on his archaic expressions. Second, we notice Morris’ leaps in logic. “And its roofs were thatched with gold”, if true, is just absurd; and not only is it absurd, it is plainly unimaginative in two senses of the word: Morris did not use his imagination to come up with it, and we find it difficult to use ours to see it. (I do however recognize that there are instances in Old Norse poetry where roofs are spoken of as “thatched with gold”; still, a bad expression is a bad expression, however ancient it may be.) Then, Morris tells us that “queens’ daughters strewed its floors”. Are queens’ daughters hay that they should strew the floors of a hall? Surely not. How then are we to take this word “strewed”? I suppose if the roofs can be thatched with gold, then the floors can be strewn with women. Morris, who seems to care very much that we learn that gold is worthless and women are to be highly treasured, has gilded his roofs with the worthless and strewn his floors with the priceless. Again, the ideas themselves are simply ill-conceived. It is as though Morris did not take the time to think about what he was writing. Third, we notice in these lines that Morris can be so vague as to elude most attempts at understanding what he actually means. While his strings of words are not nonsense, we cannot quite figure out what it was he was trying to tell us. “And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast / The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.” Does all of this just mean that the poets of this particular hall were mighty warriors? To my mind, he would have done much better just to say that or something like it. It is almost as though he were trying to give us too much: first the men are crafters of song, and then they are mighty warriors, and then they are casting sails, and then they are in a fierce battle, and then they are back in a storm. It is just too much. The first lines of this epic, therefore, are poorly thought-out and poorly written. A former critic has said that these opening lines “rise to a height as to which there can be no question”; he also says that “these lines are enough to satisfy any intelligence that knows what epic poetry is that here we are to be in the presence of fine issues finely wrought.” While I do not know what this critic would say to my view of these lines, it is at least fair to say that I have presented a good case that these lines are second rate at best. Unfortunately, things do not get better for Morris. A good majority of the lines in this poem have faults similar to those I have laid out for these. As such, while it is worthwhile to note their shortcomings, we will turn now almost entirely to the passages in this book where Morris, often despite himself, rises to great heights.

Literary Theory: The Way Out

Beginning as a Review of Literary Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition by Terry Eagleton

I am glad that I read this book. Eagleton can write well and present the main points and criticisms of a theory with simplicity and straightforwardness. On the whole it is very informative about literary theory in the twentieth century, which is the aim of book after all.

That’s one side of the matter. The other side is rather different. In some way which I cannot describe this is the hardest book I’ve read in a long time. It is not intellectually difficult, although it does require the reader to think on more than one occasion. It is rather dense with theory and technical terms and ideas of a lifetime boiled down to their underwear, but that is almost a good thing in my mind. What makes it so hard is not what happens while I read the book. It’s what happens when I put it down and do something else for a while. I don’t know how to explain it other than to say that this creeping depression comes over me like a cloud. I attribute it to the book because as far as I can tell that’s where it’s coming from. Still, that won’t help you understand me very well. It may well be just because the book tries to strike at the core of, well, everything under the sun and strike hard and fast with all the forces of intellectual navel-gazing that have gathered through that last century of centuries, because of that I have found it hard to wrestle with, not that I have found it an enemy not to be overcome, but just that it is has given me a run for my money. And it hurt. If that was his objective, then he succeeded. If his objective was to convince me out of what he would probably call my “liberal humanism”, then he failed.

Literary theory presents a series of ever-increasing difficulties for the student in defining literature, in denoting its primary features, in answering questions like “What does literature do?” and “Why do we read it?”, in dealing with questions of language and ultimate truth and the ways we narrate reality, and in many other ways. Once the question has been posed, we find ourselves sinking deeper and deeper in the miry clay. Still, at the end of the day, when we have sat in the shadow of doubt for long enough, we realize at once and with some measure of clarity that there is an easy way out of all of this.

What is it? Well, just don’t play the game. If you don’t want the roller coaster ride, then don’t put your two bits in the slot and get on. You may see that the roller coaster of theory will take you high, even seem to carry you to the stars of understanding what we all love so much, but you might not see and you might not understand that there are lows on this ride too, and in the end, someday you have to get off it, and that the end is always right at the beginning. You’ll be left standing on the platform with a dizzy head, the same platform from which you embarked those years ago with a still dizzier head, convinced that you could soar to the skies and grab literature by the nose and wrap yourself around her like a cheap suit, and now on that platform again you shake your head that you wasted all those years riding a roller coaster. The important thing is that you know what literature is; you know that King Lear is it and John Norman’s books about Gor aren’t. Really, who has ever had a problem identifying literature? And if we did have a problem, who cares to solve it? What is important is that we read and love the books, and that we be willing to talk rationally about them with our friends. Remember what Socrates said: "Just as others are pleased by a good horse, or dog, or bird, I myself am pleased to an even higher degree by good friends... And the treasures of the wise which they left behind them by writing them in books I unfold and go through together with my friends, and we pick it out and regard it as a great gain if we thus become useful to one another." So there, that’s literary criticism.

Yes, criticism is useful. Yes, art is useful. It is useful because it is thereby that we are led to see the truth of something or other or to contemplate its beauty (and, yes, there can be a beauty in having no other beauty except the beauty in having no other beauty except the beauty in having no other beauty except the beauty in having … well, anyway, a thing can be beautiful precisely because it lacks all of the other beauties). And, even if we are based in the circular, so what? The man who denies first principles, say the Muslim philosopher Avicenna, should be beaten and exposed to fire until he admits that there is a difference between being beaten and exposed to fire and not. So, we do this because we love it. I for one love literature a hell of a lot more than I love literary theory, so I think I’ll just stick to doing criticism and trying to show people what is true and good and beautiful in the world. “But ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ and ‘beauty’, those are all words, man. And they are so totally relative to your culture and your environment.” Oh, put a sock in it. To this stripling theorist, I should say that he has seen Matrix Revolutions one too many times. We know that postmodernism is finished when it is reduced to popular and idiotic expression in the Matrix movies, which were among the greatest letdowns of recent film history.

If a man won’t admit that 2+2=4 then, as much as we might try to wrap him in philosophical terms and whish him away to never-never-land on a flight of linguistic self-indulgence, he remains an ignorant ass, and the only thing to do with him, just as a teacher might do with a child, beat him over the head with the equation until he sees the truth of it; in short, he must be woken from his dream, his dream of irreason. The Enlightenment was a dream; and postmodernism is a nightmare. The way to win is just to wake up. You’ll wake up and realize that you went to sleep when you were about fifteen – no eight year old would buy into this mess – and now you’ve woken up to find that truth is where you left Him, beauty looks just as good, and goodness, why, goodness is just as far from you as He ever was.

Such at least is my view. Having read and understood in a small way most of the literary theories of the past century, I can honestly say that I find myself now in the same place I was before, wanting to tell people what’s so great about the Aeneid, wanting to show people the beauty of Donne’s "Holy Sonnets" or of Milton’s "Lycidas" or The Saga of Burnt Njal. The heroic literature of Iceland developed independently of the rest of the Western Canon, but somehow, those stories are the rivals of any of the others. So, maybe, after all is said and done, though we need not play the theorists’ game, we may find out one day that they were wrong about the facts of great literature, and that we just didn’t have the perspective to see it.

The book, though, is quite good and worth reading. I recommend it.