Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 86

I’m sure you’re having a rough day, but consider this: Yo...

I’m sure you’re having a rough day, but consider this: You’re not spending it trying to read Auden’s handwriting.

Sermon for All Souls by Jessica Martin

Sermon for All Souls, 2 November 2022
Ely Cathedral, 7.30 pm 
Canon Jessica Martin 
NT: 1 Peter 1.3–9
Gospel: John 5.19–25

Although you have not seen him, you love him (1 Pet.1.8)

We are joined to the invisible work of love. We are entangled in its bonds, marked by its effects, changed by its force. We steer by its sights.

The writer of the letter of Peter was thinking of the ascended Jesus, part of this invisible Godhead, when he wrote these words to his readers: ‘Although you have not seen him, you love him’. He was speaking of the way that we who are Christian walk by faith and not only by sight. But our making, our being in the visible world, has also been shaped — and shaken — by human lives, human loves, now withdrawn from bodily sight and touch, invisible to the beings we are in this space, this time. For each of us here is joined to the dead that made us, and who we honour through remembrance in this requiem mass.

There are the dead whom we name, bringing them in our naming into the circle of the present. Those beloved names reach beyond sight and touch to the deep knowledge of memory and longing. Their absence is a wound in our present time, but we speak of them believing that past and future are always ‘now’ to God; that what has been is, for our Creator, never lost, never out of reach. Good and bad together, sorrow and joy, bitterness and division, misunderstanding and reconciliation, the blunders that shake our lives, the encounters that make it – all stand within the divine sight, for judgement; and for mercy. In speaking the names of the dead we do not only speak loss; we do not even only speak recollection. We bespeak our hope that all that has ever been exists for redemption in the eyes of God, through the resurrection of his son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. This is what it actually means to walk by faith and not only by sight. 

Just a little out of sight of our remembered and beloved dead, lie those who are being forgotten, the names and beings slipping out of human memory. Sometimes, with the tail of our eye, we see them going. In a conversation with a nonagenarian in my last parish, he mentioned names of local villagers buried in the churchyard. Not all of them had headstones. Not all of them had been living even in his time; their resting places had been remembered by his parents, by the adults of his childhood in the early years of the twentieth century. Are their graves and names recorded, or did their memory slip away when the man I knew died, just a couple of years ago? What are the names and histories of the babies and small children buried in local graves housing members of my mother’s family? Only two or three generations have swept their short lives beyond our sight; we do not know how they felt, what they saw. Yet they live, in the eternal now; in the eye and heart of their loving Maker.

The act of remembering keeps our love in sight. And the act of remembering, the human act of remembering, stands in for everything we don’t know about our beloved dead. The most open, the most communicative of people will take much of his or her life forever away at death, across the river that divides the living from the dead. As the spirit returns to God who made it, its most private thoughts and feelings fall out of the earth and into the divine hand. My own dreams and nightmares, my own betrayals and spiritual victories, the things I saw on a particular day, at a particular hour forty years ago – many of them are no longer available to my memory, let alone anyone else’s. Much of what shaped and shook the person I have become is beyond my own knowing, now. But all this is known to God, before whom we are always and forever fully known. 

As we remember, we participate in the great act of recollection that is God’s constant work. But it is not our work, not primarily. It is God’s work. It is ‘kept in heaven for us; imperishable, undefiled, unfading’. Such a thing is hard even to imagine.  

We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed. The past is not static. It works in us. The Jesus of the past, who died and was raised, makes all the dead live. But the dead are not only raised to life and breathe again. The dead past is brought before the living eye of our Saviour, and changed: from blunder to wisdom, from incomprehension to understanding, from fear to love, from pain to recognition. We are not only meant for life, but for the redemption of our life. Not only shaped, but shaken into newness, into seeing afresh. As we hope to come home, so also do we hope to find ourselves always coming home in the sight of God’s bright homeliness. 

Remember the beloved dead. And remember the forgotten dead. And offer to God the Father all that you yourself have forgotten. For, in the end, through Jesus who lives in the love of the Father, all that is hidden shall embrace the light perpetual, and all that lies unknown shall be for ever recognised. 

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

Who going through the barren valley find there a spring; and the pools are filled with water.

They will go from strength to strength; and appear before God in Zion.

(Ps.84.4-6)

Amen.

Ross Douthat:One of the master keys to understanding our ...

Ross Douthat:

One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.

I think about this all the time. It’s been so disorienting.

refugees from human nature

Matthew Loftus:

Our communities and households must be active in reaching out to those whose lack of virtue, tradition, or culture is harming themselves and others, the countless refugees from human nature that technological destruction is creating. This of course includes political refugees fleeing climate change or violence, many of whom probably have a thing or two to teach us about human nature, but far more often it includes the people in our neighborhoods, towns, cities, and counties whose capacity for flourishing has been decimated by the forces conservatives love to decry but rarely have a strategy to do something about. Going from “a rearguard defense of tradition to take up the path of the guerrilla” means that we are no longer protecting “ourselves” from “them”, but trying to help the most of vulnerable of them become one of us. 

As Loftus wrote in an earlier essay: 

This is not simply a matter of the rich and powerful sacrificing for the sake of people in poor urban communities. It is also not a matter of poor urban communities since many rural places and even many suburban places need more good neighbours working with local churches. But we need to come to terms with the fact that exercising ourselves in service and challenging ourselves by frequent, intimate exposure to another culture’s expression of faith is a means of discipleship. It also a testimony to the watching world that Christ’s sufficiency transcends our cultural impetus to protect ourselves from “those kinds of people.” We don’t need an elite corps of radical Christians, we need faithful believers with power and privilege to simply spread out and join with brothers and sisters who don’t have the same resources we do.

Good heavenly days, this is a challenge.

I want to return to these thoughts in a couple of months, when an essay of mine appears: I’ve written for The New Atlantis about the fiftieth anniversary of Oliver Sacks’s book Awakenings. 

Also, I’ll have more on “the path of the guerrilla” in another post. 

Vulcanology

Here’s a little offshoot of my work on Auden’s The Shield of Achilles.

This painting by Piero di Cosimo — see a larger version here — is called The Finding of Vulcan on the Island of Lemnos, but it wasn’t always called that. For a long time it was thought to represent the story of Hylas, the beautiful warrior and companion of Heracles who was abducted by nymphs. But, the great art historian Erwin Panofsky pointed out in his 1939 book Studies in Iconology, the image doesn’t really fit the story. Compare Piero’s painting with that of John William Waterhouse and you’ll see the difference: Waterhouse’s nymphs are clearly drawing Hylas into the water, in accordance with the myth, but Piero’s nymphs are doing something different: they’re helping a fallen youth get up from the ground. (Or, rather, one of them is: the others are looking on with curiosity, amusement, or concern, and talking about this odd stranger.) 

What’s going on here? To answer you have to go back to Homer: Iliad, Book I. There Hephaestus speaks to his mother Hera: 

You remember the last time I rushed to your defense? 
[Zeus] seized my foot, he hurled me off the tremendous threshold 
and all day long I dropped, I was dead weight and then, 
when the sun went down, down I plunged on Lemnos, 
little breath left in me. But the mortals there 
soon nursed a fallen immortal back to life. 

But “the mortals there” is not what Homer wrote; instead he wrote Σίντιες ἄνδρες, the “Sintian men.” The problem for later scholars is that nobody knows who the Sintian men were. Servius, a Latin grammarian and contemporary of Augustine of Hippo, wrote a learned commentary on Vergil in which he drew on that passage from Homer: Vulcano contigit, qui cum deformis esset et Iuno ei minime arrisisset, ab Iove est praecipitatus in insulam Lemnum. illic nutritus a Sintiis…. “Vulcan, because he was deformed and Juno did not smile on him, was hurled by Jove onto the island of Lemnos. There he was nurtured by the Sintii.”

This caused great confusion for scholars in the Renaissance for whom the word Sintii was meaningless. They therefore assumed, as learned philologists of that era were wont to assume, that some scribal error had occurred. Instead of nutritus a Sintiis Servius’s original text surely was nutritus absintiis, nurtured on wormwood. No, said others, it was nutritus ab simiis: He was nurtured by apes — and thus, we might say, a type of Tarzan. (Lord Greystoke, meet your ancestor Vulcan.) Boccaccio, in his enormously influential Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, accepted the Simian Hypothesis, and so evidence of it turns up in, for instance, an allegorical fresco, possibly by Cosmè Aura, in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara: 

See in the upper-left corner Vulcan’s forge, and, nearby, the apes pulling some kind of elaborate palanquin? 

But there was a third opinion — philologically the least convincing, surely, but artistically the most appealing: Servius’s text read nutritus ab nimphis — nurtured by nymphs. And that, Panofsky convincingly argued, is the reading Piero adopted. Those nymphs aren’t drawing Hylas into the water — there is no water — they’ve come running when they heard a big thump, or perhaps saw “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,” and now they’re chattering away about this remarkable event as one of them helps the stunned but unharmed god to his feet. Poor little fellow. (He looks about two-thirds their size.) Some of the nymphs seem to find the whole thing funny, but in the end they’ll take good care of him. 

UPDATE: I’ve been corresponding with Adam Roberts about this and we’ve both been searching for the mysterious Sintians. The wonderful Sententiae Antiquae blog quotes from the Homeric scholia:

“[The Sintian men}: Philokhoros says that because they were Pelasgians they were called this because after they sailed to Brauron they kidnapped the women who were carrying baskets. For they call “harming” [to blaptein] sinesthai.

But Eratosthenes says that they have this name because they are wizards who discovered deadly drugs. Porphyry says that they were the first people to make weapons, the things which bring harm to men. Or, because they were the first to discover piracy.

This story of a god being raised by PIRATE WIZARDS sounds like the best idea for a fantasy novel I have ever heard.

so let’s chill

Noah Smith:

So, Elon Musk bought Twitter. Personally, I’m pretty sanguine about this development. It’s no secret that I think that Twitter is a uniquely dystopian feature of the modern media sphere — a bad equilibrium that traps the nation’s journalists, politicians, and intellectuals in close quarters with all the nastiest and most strident anonymous bottom-feeders. There’s a nonzero chance Musk will be able to improve this situation; if not, it’s hard to see how he could make it particularly worse. If he destroys the platform, we’ll find something else — probably a number of different somethings, which I think would be good for the media ecosystem. Our entire society was not meant to be locked in a single small room together; we need more room to spread out and be ourselves. 

This is the right take, I think. For those who haven’t seen it, here is a collection of my posts on micro.blog in particular and and open web more generally. And here is a useful brief guide to getting started with blogging. 

this blog’s mission statement

Auden, from “The Garrison”:

Whoever rules, our duty to the City
is loyal opposition, never greening
for the big money, never neighing after
a public image.
 
Let us leave rebellions to the choleric
who enjoy them: to serve as a paradigm
now of what a plausible Future might be
is what we’re here for.

Manton Reece – Dear Elon Musk:I agree that we shouldn’t ...

Manton Reece – Dear Elon Musk:

I agree that we shouldn’t be stuck in our own bubbles of misinformation. But the part Elon gets wrong is the premise that there should even be a “common digital town square” controlled by a single company. I reject that idea.

The common digital “square” should be the entire web, with a diverse set of platforms. There should be common APIs but many communities with their own rules, goals, and business models. Concentrating too much power in only a couple social media companies is what created the mess we’re in.

Adam Atheist

The other day I emailed my friend Adam Roberts and told him that I would have something to say about his despicable atheism.

Adam: “SCANDALOUS atheism! Not despicable! Scandalous!”

Me: “That’s just what a despicable atheist would say.”

Do please read Adam’s post; it’s extremely thoughtful and nuanced. Adam is responding to a claim by the late great literary critic Frank Kermode – a model of critical excellence for both Adam and me – that “From poetry and music I derive the little I know about holiness.” Adam wants to counterclaim that as much as he also is moved by poetry and music, that’s not really a religious experience.

I say so with a certain sorrow, for, like Kermode, poetry and music are very important to my life, and in them I often find the transcendence, the holiness of which he speaks here. But I don’t think his larger point is correct, actually. I cannot avoid the self-knowledge that this merely secular pseudo-faith lacks the blood, the force — lacks, the stationed and parrhesiastic surrender to absolute otherness — of religious faith in the Kierkegaardian sense I just mentioned — which is to say, in the sense that Kierkegaard understood the Christian idea of eternity as something applied to every moment of human existence.

Of course, it’s possible that speaking from experiential ignorance, as I necessarily am, leads me to over-romanticise what it is that people of faith have, and I lack. For many faith is, perhaps, a far more mundane business; it is surely, for most, a more quotidian business. Religion is a taxonomy of beliefs, yes; and it is (what I’m talking about here) an access to a transcendent otherness, an intensity of affect and apprehension, a power and glory. But more than that it is a social mode of being-in-the-world, a form of community, of belonging to a particular tribe: not just going to church, temple or mosque on high holy days, but helping-out at the church jumble sale, running the soup kitchen, reading-groups, social events, all that. It is something that serves to identify self and help it bond with others. Of seeing in other people not just strangers but brothers and sisters. Sitting at home and listening to a Bach cantata on your stereo isn’t any of that.

This is just one part of a complicated essay, but it should at least give the flavor.

All of what Adam says about religious faith – with its vertical (Godward) and horizontal (Neighborward) dimensions – seems to me correct, and useful in distinguishing such faith from whatever it is we most powerfully experience when we encounter the arts. But …

First of all, I don’t feel that I know anything about religion or religious faith in general; I only know what it means to be a Christian, or rather what it means to me to be a Christian. And to me the deepest heart of the matter is neither the ethical life of neighborliness nor an encounter with the transcendent but simply that as I read the Gospels I see in the life and words of Jesus an astonishing thing: Though I am unloveable, God loves me, and is willing to pay an enormous price to reconcile me to Himself. God loves me and hopes – “hopes” is a strange word to use with regard to the Omnipotent and Omniscient, but it’s the best word I have – God hopes that I will love Him in return.

Kierkegaard, in Philosophical Fragments:

And the cause of all this suffering is love, precisely because the God is not jealous for himself, but desires in love to be the equal of the humblest. When the seed of the oak is planted in earthen vessels, they break asunder; when new wine is poured in old leathern bottles, they burst; what must happen when the God implants himself in human weakness, unless man becomes a new vessel and a new creature! But this becoming, what labors will attend the change, how convulsed with birth-pangs! And the understanding – how precarious, and how close each moment to misunderstanding, when the anguish of guilt seeks to disturb the peace of love! And how rapt in fear; for it is indeed less terrible to fall to the ground when the mountains tremble at the voice of the God, than to sit at table with him as an equal; and yet it is the God’s concern precisely to have it so.

From my sense of this love, and its call upon my life, everything else, including the love of my neighbor, flows. Auden in “Winds,” the first of his “Bucolics”:

One bubble-brained creature said — 
   “I am loved, therefore I am” — :
And well by now might the lion
   Be lying down with the kid,
Had he stuck to that logic.

I’m trying, heaven knows I’m trying, to stick to that logic.

That when reading about Jesus I feel drawn to this life I perceive as a free gift, a gift that, I well understand, not everyone receives. (I also understand that others receive it with far greater power than I do. I am a man of vague and shaky faith.) My friend Adam may be, like Max Weber — and the metaphor is especially appropriate given the contrasts at the heart of Adam’s post — “religiously unmusical.” But I do hope that one day he will hear the now-hidden harmonies of the Christian way; and even should he not, I trust that this ever-loving God will be infinitely merciful to him. It seems to me that Adam is a man after God’s own heart, whether he feels it or not.

announcement

I won’t be blogging here for the foreseeable future, for reasons I explain here. 

I will continue, God willing, to produce my weekly newsletter, and I will post photos and links at my micro.blog page. 

Thanks to all for reading.