The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

by Andrew Klavan

If all we really believe in is the inside of our own heads, how can we know reality is real at all?

Without some sort of standard of perception, some kind of received gospel truth, there can be no truth at all that goes unquestioned, no truth we hold self-evident, no axioms of morality, no way to determine what is objectively right and wrong.

Your right to speak your mind, your right to defend yourself by force of arms, your right to profit off hard work and merit, even your right to life—if they are not God given, are they there at all? Or are they illusions of privilege and power designed to hold the underdog in his place?

But the wonderful success of science at explaining the material world threatens to create in scientists a bias toward materialism, the idea that there is nothing in life but stuff. What these Romantics feared was not the science itself, and certainly not reason itself, but a growing materialist worldview that threatened to destroy the poetry not of the rainbow but of our experience of the rainbow.

The unique power of the feminine, then, is not just to confer life on matter but to infuse life with creative humanity. Even God, when he wanted to become human, chose for himself a mother. Without the experience of the feminine, a person may well become, as Wordsworth says, an “outcast . . . bewildered and depressed.”

But he who rebels against God’s hierarchy only thinks he will achieve equality and freedom. Without submission to the natural order, there is nothing left but to create new orders by Jacobin force. Rather than the freedom of submission to God’s creation, you are left with a world ruled only by power. It is the paradox of virtue knit into the fabric of reality: you will not be free unless you are virtuous; you cannot be virtuous unless you are free.

Trees are falling, the sun is setting, people are acting cruelly and kindly, artists are making books and songs and shows—and we, at every moment, are collaborating with reality to transform these events into sounds and beauty, good and evil, wisdom and delight. To be a human being is to be a continual work of art.

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The purpose of both mass and poetry is to remeld the world of flesh and spirit, of things and meaning, into one experience, to regain our original perception of creation, the lost perception of Eden, you might say, before we divided creation into good and evil, back when we saw along with God that it was good.

For now, the name of Christ was silent. In this increasingly irreligious age, the poets had woven him invisibly into the interplay of nature and the imagination. For now, skeptics like Mill were not asked to believe in God or religion but only, in the words of the psalm, to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”50 It might be that in the end this strategy would undermine Romanticism as a fully reasoned approach to life. It might be there would come a time when, in order to experience the inward joy the Romantics offered, we would be compelled by force of logic to confront the infinite I AM and ask ourselves the old question, Can we believe? But for now, in this hinge of history, at the start of the crisis of unbelief, for men like Mill and all the men like Mill who followed, the poets had found a way to reconstruct the human soul.

A work of art speaks a truth we can’t speak outright: the truth of the human experience. Love, joy, grief, guilt, beauty—no words can communicate these. We can only represent them in stories and pictures and songs. Art is the way we speak the meaning of our lives.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. That’s a metaphor. At its simplest, the metaphor tells us that the kingdom is a very small thing that can become a very great thing. But, of course, once you start to think about it, the meaning of the metaphor is far vaster and more complex than that. You have to plant a seed, tend it. Once it grows, it attracts more life: the birds in the tree. The meaning goes on and on, deeper and deeper. It’s a huge idea. You could think about it forever. If this weren’t so, we wouldn’t need to use a metaphor. We could simply say the kingdom is a very small thing, but it can become important. That just doesn’t do the trick. We need the metaphor to convey and experience the full meaning.

Essentially, this is an instruction for us to perform our femininity and masculinity as a means of expressing the Logos with our lives, to use our bodies as the language of holy meaning, the flesh made Word. Woman, become womanhood, which is humanity in its relationship with God. Man, become manhood, which is a metaphor for Christ. He for God only. She for God in him. To give your life over to such spiritual meanings is an affront to the material world and is sure to incur the world’s hostility. The marketplace does not want to lose its women workers to the nursery. The state does not want to cede its power to the fathers of families. In material terms, it’s unfair; it’s oppressive. So the world is sure to turn its science and technology and social systems to “solving the problem” of gender, which is really just the problem of femininity and its core in spiritual action.

But if Coleridge was right, and humanity and nature are one creation; if Wordsworth was right, and we find our humanity at our mother’s breast; then Mary Shelley was also right, and if we “solve” our natures with science, we might end up “solving” our humanity entirely. And women—women-as-women—will be the first thing to go.

I can report anecdotally that all the most joyful people I have ever met were married, and all the happiest marriages I have ever seen were arranged, in some sense, on the Ephesian principles. Like many spiritual endeavors, such marriages seem to the materialist mind like they should be unfair and oppressive, but in actuality, they’re not. They’re the very opposite.

In his time, when there were living witnesses, Jesus could cite the miracles as reason to believe in who he was. But now, long after, in this scientific age, with all the witnesses dead and gone, our belief in who he was is our reason to believe in the miracles.

The very presence of law—without which we cannot live as civilized people—is in conflict with the presence of virtue. Virtue—goodness—can only be chosen freely. If it is not chosen, it is not truly good. If I point a gun at you and order you to give money to charity, that does not make you charitable. It just means you’re afraid to die. To do good, and therefore to be good, you must be free of constraint and yet freely allow yourself to be ruled by God—like the Israelites before they had a king.

In fact, Jesus never says his injunctions will make the world a better place. Give your money to the poor, he says, but the poor you will always have with you. Be the light of the world and the salt of the earth, he says, but the world will hate you. Follow me, and, congratulations, you’ll probably get crucified. Your only reward will be in the kingdom of heaven, which is within you. Jesus says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” not because it will transform your enemies into your friends. He says do it “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

Typical religions call upon us to do good and be good. But Christ calls on us to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That’s another line that keeps the pastors busy with explanations. But the Greek word translated as perfect here is τέλειοι: be complete, fulfill your telos, your purpose, as God fulfills his. Live completely into what God made you to be. The Greek word for sin, hamartia, means to miss that target, to miss your telos.

But to love without judgment transforms the lover. To love as God loves, to behave toward the world as God does, to shine on the good and evil alike gives us eyes to see with, ears to hear. You begin to lose your life—your opinions, your fake and precious virtue—your identity, as Keats said—and so you find your life, your true life, the perfected identity God made in you from the start. You become like a little child again. You recapture the idea of yourself that lived in God’s mind even before he formed you in the womb.

Jesus is not an idol. He is not a moveless statue of a god. He is fully a man who fully embodied God. He lived once in time as we do now. He grew and developed and came into himself as every man must. But he was perfect as his Father in heaven was perfect. He was sinless: he did not miss the target. He came into himself completely. It is not that Christ is who we should be. It is that he became what we are trying to become.

But you also know the shame you hide from yourself, the self-disdain you project onto those around you, the smallness you don’t even dare to acknowledge, the desperate and increasing need to condemn others in order to perform a virtue you know you don’t have, the need to tell lies and then more lies to yourself and all the world. That—that soul in sin-forged manacles—is you. It is, at least, the ruin of the person God made you to be: the shriveled shadow held within its cell, striving to break free into the shape of its bright entirety. The way to that freedom is just outside the prison door. Behold, he stands at the door and knocks.

Jesus was the truth and had to speak the truth, and the world was the world and had to kill him for it: that’s tragedy. He wasn’t betrayed by an act of evil. He wasn’t murdered by a villain. He would not have avoided dying had he been born among another people or in another time. He was the living truth. The religious had to kill him because they were religious. The leaders had to kill him because they were the leaders. The people had to kill him because they were the people. The law had to kill him because it was the law. That was what it was like to be the truth in the world. That was the tragic nature of the experience. It still is. It would happen all the same this very day. More than likely, you and I would be in the crowd, screaming, “Give us Barabbas!”