Relocating To Elfland

“The mystery of the incarnation of the Logos is the key to all the arcane symbolism and typology in the scriptures, and in addition, gives us knowledge of created things, both visible and intelligible. He who apprehends the mystery of the cross and the burial apprehends the inward principles (logoi) of created things; while he who is initiated into the inexpressible power of the resurrection apprehends the purpose for which God first established everything.” (Maximus the Confessor)

“A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. That is Mrs. Besant’s thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one’s self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. But upon Mrs. Besant’s principle the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.”

This and a following post will offer extended quotes from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I’m ushering in the new year with a review of his splendid little work, which only impresses more with each successive reading.

“It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern ‘force’ that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile or full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of ‘levitation.’ They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One ‘settles down’ into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man ‘falls’ into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”

“When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.” (Joseph Addison, “Westminster Abbey”)

Here Mencken is lamenting the state of a particular strand of American literature:

“What ails it, intrinsically, is a dearth of intellectual audacity and of aesthetic passion. Running through it, and characterizing the work of almost every man and woman producing it, there is an unescapable suggestion of the old Puritan suspicion of the fine arts as such – of the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for good citizens only when some ulterior and superior purpose is carried into them. This purpose, naturally enough, most commonly shows a moral tinge. The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts – not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man. The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it only when it is broken to moral uses – in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.”

I’ve been on an H. L. Mencken kick of late. Sometimes there’s nothing so refreshing as a truly brilliant critic. A taste:

“We all play parts when we face our fellow-men, as even poets have noticed. No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man’s wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there. What she sees, even at times of the most appalling domestic revelation and confidence, is not the authentic man at all, but a compound made up in part of the authentic man and in part of his projection of a gaudy ideal. The man who is most respected by his wife is the one who makes this projection most vivid – that is, the one who is the most daring and ingratiating liar. He can never, of course, deceive her utterly, but if he is skillful he may at least deceive her enough to make her happy.”

Boosts the self-esteem, does it not?

I’m reading through David VanDrunen’s recent work, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought, and I’m a bit hung up in his analysis of Augustine’s City of God (see pp. 22–32). I do want to be clear that in what follows I am simply making notes and asking some questions; I’m nowhere near ready to offer any kind of review of VanDrunen’s work as a whole.

Here is a summary of VanDrunen’s reading of Augustine (p. 32):

“[Augustine] refused to embrace an idyllic, theocratic, or Christianized view of the world. Christians here on earth are a people on pilgrimage, their citizenship and their hope lying in an everlasting, heavenly city. Civil society (the Roman Empire), roughly associated with the City of Man, is ultimately vain and condemned, but serves limited, yet good, earthly and temporal purposes of which Christians ought to make use. Thus, on a certain level civil society is characterized by things that are religiously indifferent per se, though at a more ultimate level – concerning what one loves and what one’s supreme good is – there is no commonality at all with the City of God.”

It’s that little phrase “roughly associated” that keeps blinking at me. Just for fun, let’s replace it with a symbol (=?). On the left side of the “equation” (=?) we have “civil society” with “Roman Empire” immediately following in parentheses. Let’s bracket that first:

[Civil society / Roman Empire] (=?) City of Man

Civil society cannot and should not be equated (=) with a particular civil society. Civil society is ordained by God, and is therefore good; particular civil societies (Rome, for example) are deeply corrupted by sin; so identification of these two things on the left side of the equation introduces a very big question mark into the overall equation. Because, spiritually and morally speaking, civil society really doesn’t equal (≠) the Roman Empire (or any other particular civil society), we have to introduce the question mark (=?).

Civil society (≠) Roman Empire (=?) City of Man

Maybe if we use just one of the terms on the left side, we can erase the question mark? Let’s see. We certainly can’t say that civil society itself is identical to (=), or directly associated with, the City of Man, for this would confuse a good ordinance with its corruption by sinful humans. We might be on firmer ground if we tried to equate the Roman Empire (or another particular civil society) with the City of Man; but, as both Augustine and VanDrunen acknowledge, this doesn’t quite work, either, because there are both lovers of God (citizens of the City of God) and lovers of self (citizens of the City of Man) in any particular civil society (including Rome).

Civil society (≠) City of Man

Roman Empire (≠) City of Man

Hmmm . . . no wonder there’s a question mark. (In fairness to VanDrunen, the question mark is mine; but I think it is definitely implied in his phrase “roughly associated.”) Let me wrap up by offering a few suggestions for further exploration:

Scripture plainly teaches what some have called “the antithesis”: the irreducible distinction, and conflict, between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. I think we could equate the seed of the woman with Augustine’s City of God and the seed of the serpent with his City of Man. Scripture also teaches that God has ordained distinct spheres of human association: church, family, and state, for example. Let’s diagram these two biblical distinctions thus:

1. Seed of woman (City of God) / seed of serpent (City of Man)

2. Ecclesiastical sphere / non-ecclesiastical spheres (e.g., family, state)

I think just setting it out like this underscores the need for extreme caution in collapsing these two sets of binaries into each other: it is hugely problematic, for example, to identify the seed of the serpent with the non-ecclesiastical spheres. Now VanDrunen doesn’t read Augustine as doing this, precisely (and neither do I); but he certainly seems to read Augustine as doing so “roughly,” and that’s where my questions come in. But there’s more: VanDrunen wants to show that early Reformed thinkers, drawing on Augustine and others, “grounded social life in God’s work of creation and providence, not in his work of redemption” (p. 15). Here’s a third set of binaries:

1. Seed of woman (City of God) / seed of serpent (City of Man)

2. Ecclesiastical sphere / non-ecclesiastical spheres (e.g., family, state)

3. Redemption / creation and providence

Did the early Reformers, drawing on Augustine and others, “roughly associate” redemption, the ecclesiastical sphere, and the City of God, while also “roughly associating” creation/providence, the non-ecclesiastical spheres, and the City of Man? I’ll have to read on to see how VanDrunen parses the historical details. And I think I will probably have some more questions.

“[Greek education (paideia) had] a wider sense than our modern concept, including not only the communication of basic knowledge and skills but the transmission of the entire way of life of a civilized people. Students in Greek schools would not have been trained for ‘jobs’ but would have been formed into mature Greeks. Greek education inculcated the values of the city into the next generation, and thus educational methods and goals determined the moral climate of life in the future. Thus, the form of education shapes the form of culture.” (Peter J. Leithart, Heroes of the City of Man, p. 380)

“A Deist is a person who in his short life has not found the time to become an atheist.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.603)

“Believe me, the worst and most miserable sort of idiot is he who seems to create and contain all things. Man is a creature; all his happiness consists in being a creature; or, as the Great Voice commanded us, in becoming a child. All his fun is in having a gift or present; which the child, with profound understanding, values because it is ‘a surprise’. But surprise implies that a thing came from outside ourselves; and gratitude that it comes from someone other than ourselves. It is thrust through the letter-box; it is thrown in at the window; it is thrown over the wall. Those limits are the lines of the very plan of human pleasure.” (Gabriel Gale, in The Poet and the Lunatics)