So much radiance has the Trinity revealed to my eyes,
from the wings and the veil within the divine temple,
beneath which God’s royal nature lies hid. And if something extra is
for the angelic choirs, let the Trinity know what this extra is.
from On God and Man by St. Gregory Nazianzus, whom we commemorate today.
I received a link to this article by Scott Cairns in my email from the new Orthodox St. Katherine College in California. Ambiguity is a trademark of Borderline Personality Disorder, according to Girl Interrupted. Maybe those with that diagnosis have a head start.
During the past dozen years or so, I have developed a healthy taste for ambiguity.
One of the reasons I enjoy poetry, for instance, is how a good poem pretty much insists that the reader learn to savor the swoon of ambiguity. The productive ambiguity of good poems obliges the reader actually to participate with the text, that she collaborate as a co-maker of meaning.
That is to say, a great poem—even a pretty good one—isn’t ever done saying what it has to say, so long as successive generations of alert and energetic readers continue to pick it up.
Ambiguity in any substantial literary text, then, indicates that the significance of the telling doesn’t end with a single reading, and delivers a compelling nudge to the reader that she assist in the telling and the re-telling, the continuing labor of meaning-making.
I also have come to think that this goes for ambiguity in general, ambiguity in life.
And might serve as well for all flavors of uncertainty.
And for perplexity, to boot.
And it occurs to me that perplexity is not such a bad disposition to cultivate, considering the complex circumstances of our lives. Perplexity is, at the very least, preferable to an array of clear, comprehensible, and mistaken certainties.
Confessing our uncertainties in the face of complex circumstances may prove finally to be a very good thing, even something of a gift. They bring us face to face with the limit where human understanding fails—as it inevitably must do. Apprehending that limit serves to make a healthy dent in our pride and sense of self-sufficiency.
Moreover, our noticing that limit of knowledge—that line across which we can never proceed—can nudge us into suspecting how the actual, the True, is immeasurably immense, how it necessarily exceeds us.
I love how W.H. Auden begins his wonderful poem, “Archaeology”:
The archaeologist’s spade
delves into dwellings
vacancied long ago,
unearthing evidence
of life-ways no one
would dream of leading now—
concerning which he has not much
to say that he can prove:—
the lucky man!
Knowledge may have its purposes,
but guessing is always
more fun than knowing. …
I have a very keen sense that our Mr. Auden—prince among poets—also had developed a very healthy taste for ambiguity.
Whatever the Truth turns out to be, it is not a comprehensible body of knowledge, even if that Truth is made manifest—is revealed—in the apprehensible Body of Christ. We do not—will not ever—comprehend the Truth; rather, the Truth, presumably, comprehends us.
Scott Cairns is Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in English at the University of Missouri. His nine books include poetry collections, spiritual memoir, essays, and translations. He serves as a reader/psalti at Saint Luke the Evangelist Greek Orthodox Church in Columbia, Missouri, and will serve as Visiting Professor of English at Saint Katherine College in spring, 2012.
I don’t believe in poems
That aren’t set to music.
It’s as if they aren’t finished
and are waiting for a home.
I know they have rhythm
And most of them rhyme,
But would you go to a drum concert?
Would you spend the time?
The beating of the drum
Needs a pretty tune
To cover it with flesh
To resurrect it from its tomb.
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
I was glad to have two nights to watch Kenneth Branagh’s unabridged Hamlet. I wouldn’t have edited a thing except for the bedroom scenes between Branagh and Kate Winslet. It may seem that I fixate in these nude scenes, but not only because the proximity of children brings out my she-bear protective impulse do they upset me, but because I believe God gave Adam and Eve coverings after the fall for a reason. Am I Puritan prude or could this indicate that I have some other closet problem that I am repressing? May be, but mostly I feel manipulated by nude scenes, and that they show a lack of imagination in the directors as well as either the sad state of audiences who wont go to see Shakespeare without them, or the director’s degraded underestimation of said audiences. Bring back ‘40’s censorship!
Now that that’s out of the way. Lawrence Olivier is said to be the classic Shakespearean film actor, but most seem to think Branagh gave him a run for his money with his Henry V début. Much Ado About Nothing was also very well received. Hamlet followed close on the heals of Branagh’s critical and box office disappointment, Frankenstein. This proved a sad turning point in Branagh’s career. His marriage to Emma Thompson dissolved, and he took up with Frankenstein’s bride, Helena Bonham Carter for 5 years, until he started dating and eventually married her friend.
His Hamlet is probably as well-versed as anyone’s, but there is a self-grandiosity that makes one see Kenneth instead of Hamlet saying those exquisite words.The last scene when his dead body is carried out in cruciform posture is especially over the top. His black silouette from the beginning to his burial, against the stark white Danish backdrop singles him out just a bit too much as the untouchable presence.
I’ve always been a bit put off by Hamlet’s distraction from Ophelia. She is but a shadow in the periphery in other versions I’ve seen which include Olivier’s, Gibson’s and Mystery Science Theatre’s presentation of a German version with English subtitles – my family’s favorite. This movie makes it seem that there was more going on between them, though I’m sorry to know in such graphic detail. Still, he was distracted and neither Ophelia nor his mother, played by Julie Christie, could reach him, though the latter came closer. How Oedipal.
In spite of intense focus on himself from a third person point of view as directors who direct themselves must do, Kenneth does have apparent affection and admiration for other actors. I was not expecting the cameo appearances of so many of my favorites. Jack Lemmon at the beginning seemed the least obvious choice for Shakespeare – he was a little stiff, but maybe that was due to plastic surgery. Gerard Depardieu was not given very good lines – “Yes sir” and the like. Rufus Sewell’s commanding eyes were the perfect choice for Fortenbras, and at the end when he finally speaks, his mouth works pretty well too. Charlton Heston as the Player King was a masterful choice. But Billy Crystal as the grave digger stole the show for me. His witty verbal duel with Branagh was the highlight. Robin Williams seemed a little unsure at the beginning of his part as the fencing official, but his twinkling eyes made up for it. Kate Winslett was very winsome with her delivery and her singing, as she was in Sense and Sensibility. Horatio was played by an actor from Chariots of Fire, whom I also noticed in an episode of Foyle’s War, Nicholas Farrell.
An aside about Horatio. All the attention given to Hamlet was exaggerated in my consciousness in this viewing. I don’t know if the same would be true of the other productions if I were to view them nowadays. Maybe it’s me that changed. I found myself wondering about Horatio’s constancy in deeming Hamlet the more important and worthy of any sacrifice at the exclusion of any consideration for himself. A loyal friend who gives up his life for his friend. Shouldn’t Horatio have had more of a life himself? Apart from just listening to and supporting Hamlet? Or is the Prince of Denmark, who himself is avenging his father, worthy of such fealty? I don’t know, but I’ll also note that the effects around the ghost scene were very well done.
Despite all this, the motivating emotions in this film felt genuine and relatable, more so than in Mel Gibson’s. His performance was even more exaggerated. I think Olivier’s version is the most edited. Despite Kenneth’s playing more to the camera, I sensed a deeper respect for Shakespeare, hence the 4 hours devoted to capturing every word. Subtitles also helped me in my efforts to achieve this goal.
Dr. Hart’s Christ and Nothing is not encouraging me to read Plato either. If modern philosophy denounces Platonic hierarchies, then I think perhaps some proper evolution has occurred. In Christ and Nothing, Dr. Hart talks about how revolutionary Christ was in the pagan order of things.
The great Indo-European mythos, from which Western culture sprang, was chiefly one of sacrifice: it understood the cosmos as a closed system, a finite totality, within which gods and mortals alike occupied places determined by fate. And this totality was, of necessity, an economy, a cycle of creation and destruction, oscillating between order and chaos, form and indeterminacy: a great circle of feeding, preserving life through a system of transactions with death. This is the myth of “cosmos” — of the universe as a precarious equilibrium of contrary forces — which undergirded a sacral practice whose aim was to contain nature’s promiscuous violence within religion’s orderly violence. The terrible dynamism of nature had to be both resisted and controlled by rites at once apotropaic — appeasing chaos and rationalizing it within the stability of cult — and economic — recuperating its sacrificial expenditures in the form of divine favor, a numinous power reinforcing the regime that sacrifice served. And this regime was, naturally, a fixed hierarchy of social power, atop which stood the gods, a little lower kings and nobles, and at the bottom slaves; the order of society, both divine and natural in provenance, was a fixed and yet somehow fragile “hierarchy within totality” that had to be preserved against the forces that surrounded it, while yet drawing on those forces for its spiritual sustenance. Gods and mortals were bound together by necessity; we fed the gods, who required our sacrifices, and they preserved us from the forces they personified and granted us some measure of their power. There was, surely, an ineradicable nihilism in such an economy: a tragic resignation before fate, followed by a prudential act of cultic salvage, for the sake of social and cosmic stability.
[...]This is true even of Platonism, with its inextirpable dualism, its dialectic of change and the changeless (or of limit and the infinite), and its equation of truth with eidetic abstraction; the world, for all its beauty, is the realm of fallen vision, separated by a great chorismos from the realm of immutable reality.
It is true of Aristotle too: the dialectic of act and potency that, for sublunary beings, is inseparable from decay and death, or the scale of essences by which all things — especially various classes of persons — are assigned their places in the natural and social order. Stoicism offers an obvious example: a vision of the universe as a fated, eternally repeated divine and cosmic history, a world in which finite forms must constantly perish simply in order to make room for others, and which in its entirety is always consumed in a final ecpyrosis (which makes a sacrificial pyre, so to speak, of the whole universe). And Neoplatonism furnishes the most poignant example, inasmuch as its monism merely inverts earlier Platonism’s dualism and only magnifies the melancholy. Not only is the mutable world separated from its divine principle — the One — by intervals of emanation that descend in ever greater alienation from their source, but because the highest truth is the secret identity between the human mind and the One, the labor of philosophy is one of escape: all multiplicity, change, particularity, every feature of the living world, is not only accidental to this formless identity, but a kind of falsehood, and to recover the truth that dwells within, one must detach oneself from what lies without, including the sundry incidentals of one’s individual existence; truth is oblivion of the flesh, a pure nothingness, to attain which one must sacrifice the world.
Granted, some of these concepts can be translated or corrected into a Christian view, but I don’t think a pagan would have done that for himself.
It is worth asking ourselves what this tableau, viewed from the vantage of pagan antiquity, would have meant. A man of noble birth, representing the power of Rome, endowed with authority over life and death, confronted by a barbarous colonial of no name or estate, a slave of the empire, beaten, robed in purple, crowned with thorns, insanely invoking an otherworldly kingdom and some esoteric truth, unaware of either his absurdity or his judge’s eminence. Who could have doubted where, between these two, the truth of things was to be found? But the Gospel is written in the light of the resurrection, which reverses the meaning of this scene entirely. If God’s truth is in fact to be found where Christ stands, the mockery visited on him redounds instead upon the emperor, all of whose regal finery, when set beside the majesty of the servile shape in which God reveals Himself, shows itself to be just so many rags and briars.
This slave is the Father’s eternal Word, whom God has vindicated, and so ten thousand immemorial certainties are unveiled as lies: the first become last, the mighty are put down from their seats and the lowly exalted, the hungry are filled with good things while the rich are sent empty away.
Since my background with the pre-Christian world is mostly in the Old Testament, I do not think that the pagan order was a universal view. There were coups of power all the time, like that of the younger sons, Seth, Jacob, and Joseph, the Hebrew slave, Moses, thwarting Egypt, pagan Ruth being the great-grandmother of King David, who supplanted his birth order and Jonathan’s right to the throne. It seems Israel was influenced at times by their pagan neighbors, but God brought about cleansings of the idols and admonitions against the wrong attitude of offering sacrifices, (like Psalm 50/51). Many Jews did not recognize Christ, but they were not the ones who followed their own tradition in spirit and in truth. Many Jews did, and they were the first converts. I get the idea that the OT people I mention above would have. In other words, types of Christ had existed throughout all time, even though a minority may have recognized them.
I am also pondering what would have happened if Greek (Athens) had not been the language of the Early Church. Since the Jews (Jerusalem) rejected Christ and the early Church did not continue in Hebrew, we will never know. However we still have the Old Testament which was decidedly Hebrew, the Septuagint Greek’s translation notwithstanding. I have read a little about how Hebrew storytelling is metaphorical and pictoral. Being mostly a concrete thinker I identify with Christ as Shepherd, the Lamb of God, the Rock of Ages. I also believe that there are enough references to the Old Testament in the services and Church Fathers to keep that imagery and method alive (maybe a friendship between this method and the idea of forms and analogeia entis can be made, which I may explore later). The Church Fathers, starting with St. Paul on Mars Hill, apparently did not inact a dialectical antagonism between the two in practice, at least not to the point of cleansing the language references of either one, Tertullian’s and Justin Martyr’s differences of opinion notwithstanding.
Or should I title it, “Forward Women”
The end of Part I
*Spoiler Warning* Dmitri Karamazov is engaged because Katarina Ivanovna offered in a note to be his fiancée, and the last thing in Part I is Alyosha happily receiving a note from Lise offering the same thing. *end Spoiler Warning*
Add to that, today’s delightful Saint, Saint Scholastica, memorialized at Logismoi, detaining her brother, Saint Benedict, to stay and talk with her against his will. In Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, and I think in much of Classic British Literature, the virtuous woman silently waits, like a flower on the wall, for the man to make any advances or to initiate conversations. Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility scandalizes people when she approaches Willoughby in an open and direct way. From this brief foray into Russian Literature, it seems the social constraints of the same century were different over there. It’s been so long since I read Tolstoy that I don’t remember how the codes of etiquette of this nature are presented in his works.
Today’s poem seems fitting,
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
by Robert Herrick
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a getting;
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
That age is best, which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times, still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time;
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
I still haven’t finished That Hideous Strength, but I’m getting excited about what I want to pick up next. 
Namely, my copy of Father Seraphim Rose, His Life and Works has been calling me, and then, or simultaneously, I think I’ll try David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens for two reasons. I have previously not been able to clear the hurdle to read Dickens after seeing the 40′s movie of DC, which was heavy on the emotional angst and exaggerated caricature side. How could it not be with W.C. Fields? Plus the assignment of Great Expectations in High School yielded mixed reviews. I don’t mind the wordiness so much as how depressing it was. I don’t remember that much of Dickens’ style, but for some reason I was more motivated to read other 19th C writers, probably because the romances were more satisfying. Dickens’ characters seemed in even gloomier circumstances with not as much emotional relief. On to my reasons why I do want to read him, which actually may be three in number. Or more. When I was converting to Orthodoxy, I read that an Athonite monk recommended David Copperfield to a novice for basic Christian teaching. That started my warming to the idea. But more recently, since having the occasion to spend a couple of hours at a stretch driving my son to college when George doesn’t go in to his office, I have been in the mood to hear words instead of songs. This is the circumstance for my listening to the podcasts I’ve mentioned in posts previous. At home I don’t listen to my pod for some reason. Wednesday I happened to think of listening to David Copperfield which is available for free on iTunes from Librivox. The guy who read chapter one, “I Was Born”, was pretty good, but chapter two’s lady, though possessing an interesting Cockneyish accent, read groups. of three words. at a time. in the exact. same. way. But still, Dickens’s humor, wit and charm show through, unlike in the movie.
The last (maybe, maybe not) reason is more convoluted. A few weeks back, on “Second Terrace” there was a post on Chesterbelloc. At the time, I wondered, which I don’t think was explained, if this word in the title was a combination of G.K. Chesteron’s (whom I woefully also haven’t read, and who was influential in C.S. Lewis’ conversion) name and someone else’s. But I shelved my curiosity in the back of my head. Then yesterday and this morning, my About.com daily classic poem email sent me a couple by Hilaire Belloc called “The Big Baboon”,
The Big Baboon is found upon
The plains of Cariboo:
He goes about with nothing on
(A shocking thing to do).
But if he dressed up respectably
And let his whiskers grow,
How like this Big Baboon would be
To Mister So-and-so!
and “The Birds”,
When Jesus Christ was four years old
The angels brought Him toys of gold,
Which no man ever had bought or sold.
And yet with these He would not play.
He made Him small fowl out of clay,
And blessed them till they flew away:
Tu creasti Domine
Jesus Christ, Thou child so wise,
Bless mine hands and fill mine eyes,
And bring my soul to Paradise.
Eureka! The other half of the combined Chesterbelloc! So I googled that combo to find the relation, and read this fine article about the two artists. This is the last paragraph,
Chesterton said that the world of Charles Dickens was the best of all impossible worlds, and something similar is often thought of his. After all, he was an optimist, he wrote a rollicking prose that often runs away from sense to become a music that mystifies and delights. He can seem so innocent, almost prelapsarian. I suspect that this is one of his greatest accomplishments.
All this (the truly last reason) is under the unfolding umbrella of the nature of this blog, which I’m seeing as being an inquiry into what to do with one’s western roots when becoming Eastern Orthodox. I currently say, make them proud.
Now I’m caught up, having finished the rest of day 10 and day 11 of The Bulgakov Conference, I read 12 previous to the rest (link in the previous post). Day 11 compares Augustine to Bulgakov and that put me in a defensive state, which the author could also be in. I’ll just, as dispassionately as possible, reiterate one of the criticisms in my last post, that there is a confusion in Augustine and perhaps in Bulgakov’s Sophiology between created and uncreated, and the humility required of the former to not only keep from prelest, but theoretical annihilation into Divine Simplicity.
In defense of Sophia, not having read Bulgakov’s works except the parts which are quoted by very engaged commentators who seem to agree with each other (I like discussions from multiple people because I think individual biases and passions get better sifted out, which is why I like the internet. Back to defense of Sophia), I think Bulgakov is valuable because he speaks of intimate relationship, kenotic love, and what was intended for our fallen, now buried in sin, nature. Sophia’s union of the divine and creaturely seems to me a poetic expression of the union in the person of Christ of His divine and human natures. The feminine personification of wisdom in Sophia also speaks to the union of divine and human accomplished through theosis, most evident in our greatest human Saint, Mary, the Theotokos. I get lost when it is described in more abstract and novel ways, but when I think of Christ and His Mother, I believe I gain an understanding of the beautiful, loving, intended relationship that is possible between God and man, which strict theological language can make too dry. Yet a foundation in the dogmatic proclamations of the Church, especially Chalcedon, and the explanations of Sts. Maximus and Gregory Palamas, is a necessary prerequisite so that one does not go off the deep end with this stuff.
Another thing about Sophia and other treatments of female personifications of wisdom and beauty by Dante and others, which I’ve barely studied, is that such a device, if it is not literal, builds a more normal human relationship than abstract concepts do. I read recently in Father John Romanides’ Patristic Theology that Hebrew tradition describes truths metaphorically with natural elements like rocks and rivers, and that the early Church described truths mostly through concepts using philosophical language. These both point to the difficulty of description that has to employ alternate means of communication. “Sophia” is a more direct thing that seems more accurate or containable than metaphor or allegory. But since there isn’t a forth person of the Trinity and she is more about the border (semi-permeable membrane?) between the created and uncreated, then I think it is safer to think of Mary, yet call her Sophia because the description is second-hand, to avoid presumption. The only way to say it is an accurate depiction of Mary would be to draw from Patristic witness, and since some of it would not apply, it can be criticized as speculation. About the charge of speculation in regards to Bulgakov, which I believe Romanides makes, btw, I do not discount that Sophia is based on supernatural encounter, as I believe he had a feminine visitation, that seems to my inexperience and lack of thorough memory and study, to be similar to Dante’s. I know that we are to be highly skeptical of stories of visitations, but when such love accompanies the description, it lends credibility, from my point of view. A lot of people’s “relationship” with Mary can be discounted as speculative. Indeed I think it is highly likely that impure imaginations and focus on the sensual aspects of loving femininity can distort and misdirect this relationship. This is why we need Orthodox icons, to show us the nature of Mary’s humanity, love, and relationship with Christ. The Church also guides us in our communication to her and the nature of her intentions toward us, loving intercession. Bulgakov invites us to take this further, and the Church cautions us against some of the inaccuracies, but at the same time, we are to grow in intimacy and love with God and His Saints. Perhaps it is safer to keep this relationship on the level of our human personhood, and the human personhood of Christ and the Saints, and not speculate about the interaction of the divine which is everywhere present and fills all things, beyond what the Church has revealed already. I know when I contemplate these things I can sort of get in an abstract mode of possibilities, and it seems I can neglect my own realities of fighting against my passions and loving my own family. Plus trying to get into mystical realities can get kind of weird. I trust more when the actual sunlight makes lovely patterns through the leaves or an interesting angle on the icons, to reveal that God is love, warmth, and light. I need actual physical manifestations, though they can be deceptive too. But I think personal love is such a deeply recognizable thing, that as long as it is in the context of the Church’s teachings, we can trust it. Feminine beauty though… I think it has been so misused in our generation especially, that we all, male and female, need to be retaught how to relate to it properly. And maybe reading Bulgakov, Dante and Donne would help.
Lewis on p.56 then discusses that polytheism is naturally replaced by monothiesm where the One is more powerful than the Many. “The best minds embrace monotheism. What is to be done with the gods of the popular religion?… The gods are to be aspects, manifestations, temporary or partial embodiments of the single power”. Sort of like colors are manifestations of different frequencies of light. “They are, in fact, personifications of the abstracted attributes of the One… They are the necessary stage in the life of ancient religion and the poet in attempting to depict them, is giving expression to the deepest experience of his age. It is [Statius]‘s mythological treatment of Bacchus which is purely literary and derivative in its allegorical treatment of Bacchus and of Mars which is alive.” The One “is the Whole (or God, or Nature, or Cosmus) of the Stoics; the [greek word] of Marcus Aurelius, the Natura of Seneca; the ancestress of Alanus’ Natura and Chaucer’s Kinde.”
The allegorization of the pantheon… depends upon a profound change in the mind of antiquity; but this time it is a change of moral experience rather than of thought… For us moderns the essence of the moral life seems to lie in the antithesis between duty and inclination… All our serious imaginative work, when it touches on morals, paints a conflict: all practical moralists sing to battle or give hints about the appropriate strategy. Take away the concept of ‘temptation’ and nearly all that we say or think about good and evil will vanish into thin air. But when we first opened our Aristotle, we found to our astonishment that this inner conflict was for him so little of the essence of the moral life, that he tended to thrust it into a corner and treat it almost as a special case. The really good man, in Aristotle’s view, is not tempted… the truly temperate man abstains because he likes abstaining. The ease and pleasure with which good acts are done, the absence of moral ‘effort’ is for him the symptom of virtue.
Now when we turn to the moralists who lived under the Roman Empire, all this is changed. I do not know whether they were better or worse than the contemporaries of Aristotle; but they were certainly more conscious of a difficulty in being good. ‘Fight the good fight’ – how oddly the words would sound in the Ethics! Under the Empire, they are on every moralist’s lips. The examples which could be drawn from the writings of St. Paul alone would be enough to prove a far-reaching change. But the phenomenon is by no means a result of Christianity, however much Christianity may have done to deepen and perpetuate it. Here again, as in the case of monotheism, we have to do with a characteristic, not of Christianity alone, but of the whole period from which the Christian empire emerged.
He then gives examples of poets and Stoic philosophers contemporary to the Epistles who emphasize fighting against passions.
If they had not discovered the moral conflict, had at least discovered in it a new importance. They were vividly aware, as the Greeks had not been, of the divided will… But to be thus conscious of the divided will is necessarily to turn the mind in upon itself. Whether it is the introspection which reveals the division, or whether the division, having first revealed itself in the experience of actual moral failure, provokes the introspection, need not here be decided.
Previous to this thought, Lewis distinguished between innocence and virtue. Innocence is yet untried.
Whatever the causal order may be, it is plain that to fight against ‘Temptation’ is also to explore the inner world; and it is scarcely less plain than to do so is to be already on the verge of allegory. We cannot speak, perhaps we can hardly think, of an ‘inner conflict’ without a metaphor; and every metaphor is an allegory in little. And as the conflict becomes more and more important, it is inevitable that these metaphors should expand and coalesce, and finally turn into the full-fledged allegorical poem. It would be a misunderstanding to suggest that there is another and better way of representing that inner world, and that we have found it in the novel and the drama. The gaze turned inward with a moral purpose does not discover character. No man is a ‘character’ to himself, and least of all while he thinks of good and evil. Character is what he has to produce; within he finds only the raw material, the passions and emotions which contend for mastery. That ‘unitary ‘soul’ or ‘personality’ which interests the novelist is for him merely the arena in which the combatants meet: it is to the combatants – those ‘accidents occurring in a substance’
Transubstantiation again.
- that he must attend. Nor will he long attend to them – specially if he has had a Roman training in the schools of rhetoric. For such a man allegory will be no frigid form. It is idle to tell him that something with which he has been at death-grips for the last twenty-four hours is an ‘abstraction’; and if we could be free, for a little, of our own Zeitgeist, we might confess that it is not very much more abstract than that ‘self’ or ‘personality’ on whose rock-bottom unity we rest so secure and of which we would so much rather hear him talk. (p.61)
I believe he’s saying that the novelist is too distracted by these passions whom he has personified. That perhaps Aristotle had it better when he considered passionlessness a more natural state, and thus more bedrock to our personality. I agree that I would rather the novelist had dwelt on that. I wrote a story of an innocent once, but I was told that it lacked conflict, and thus content. I am tired of conflict. I want it to be shown how it is to dwell correctly related to onesself and one’s environment. So many stories end at the defeat of evil, but hardly any show what life is like after that. What’s it like dwelling in the warm, glowing sunset? It’s as if it is too boring to speak of. The death of the story is when the characters actually get together. Stories that go on after that are only barely kept alive by new conflicts, or a new generation of apart people who will eventually come together. I’ll try to get my story ready for display and maybe make a “page” out of it for my header.
This post by Sister Macrina on Andrew Louth’s chapter called The Return to Allegory provides another perspective on Allegory. Most of it is a criticism of historical criticism, but this passage points to how to read the Scriptures,
Christianity is not, properly speaking, a ‘religion of the Book’: it is a religion of the word (Parole) – but not uniquely nor principally of the word in written form. It is a religion of the Word (Verbe) – ‘not of a word, written and mute, but of a Word living and incarnate’ (to quote St. Bernard). The Word of God is here and now, amongst us, ‘which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled’: the Word ‘living and active’, unique and personal, uniting and crystallizing all the words which bear it witness. Christianity is not ‘the biblical religion’: it is the religion of Jesus Christ. [Exégèse Médiévale, II/1 (Paris, 1961), pp. 196-9.]
And in those words de Lubac echoes the cry of St. Ignatius of Antioch: ‘For me the archives are Jesus Christ, and the inviolable archives his cross and death and his resurrection and faith in Him.’ [Ep. Philad. VIII. 2.] The heart of Christianity is the mystery of Christ, and the Scriptures are important as they unfold to us that mystery, and not in and for themselves.
Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). 101-102.
Christ unites the words in us. That is a mystery indeed. Not that our minds are passive, we constantly pray for His will to be done as we attend to the Scriptures and other words and messages, even pictorial. I don’t see this as allegory in that characters in Scripture personify a particular passion or thing, they are more complicated than that. But meaning must be revealed to us as we read. Meaning is subjective in that it is personal and imparted with relationship. Yet it will not contradict what has been revealed to others, namely what the Church says is true. So if the Scriptures teach that “Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.” Numbers 12:3, they point to a person who demonstrates meekness. But do we learn meekness by rationally studying Moses in the Bible? Perhaps, in that we believe our rational minds are commonly grace endowed. We can come to a certain understanding, but will this impart to us salvific meekness? No, we have to have a similar relationship with God as Moses had, which lead to his glowing face. So our faces wont glow if we rationally understand meekness, but if we develop the same relationship with God through desire, prayer and obedience. So I don’t see the Scriptures as Allegory in the same way as “My love is like a red, red rose.” Yes meekness is like Moses, and both point to something invisible, but there is more of a literal Incarnation of Presence – the love of God is actually in a rose. It is not just a utilitarian means of speaking about something else where it’s hypostasis of being a rose is irrelevant. The rose is love enough in itself. Light, color, beautiful scents and softness are gifts from God. But I can say, thank you God for roses and Moses (Singing in the Rain, anyone?) and meekness and beauty, please make me meek and beautiful unto your glory. Then there’s the lillies of the field. God gives them their beauty while they remain still – yes that ties in with the above quote. Christ arranges the words that we hear while we look with open faces at Him. So we come into communion with flowers when we acquire similar attributes to them, who are alive and prospering by His grace. Perhaps my distinctions are right and the above mentioned poem should be corrected by saying,
[By not resisting Me (Christ), she] is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
[And] like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.
So fair art thou, my bonny [Church],
So deep in love am I;
And I will love thee still my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only love!
And fare thee weel awhile!
For I [am with thee always even unto the end of the age]
Borrowed from Robert Burns
I do not know how roses that fade and sparrows that fall and seas and sand and rocks will fare in the new world and the final resurrection. I believe somehow they will be made new and that their decomposition does not mean annihilation.
