More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 20 - June 10, 2022
With the coming of Romanticism—to paraphrase the title of another book by M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp—the role of the artist was no longer, as Hamlet said, “to hold the mirror up to nature” but to illuminate nature with the lamp of the artist’s mind and its perceptions.
For man to see only what man sees is to see endless reflections of himself, empty of certainty and of certain meaning. As one of the greatest of the Romantic poets, William Blake, put it, “The eye altering, alters all.”4 So if all we know of reality is what we perceive in our minds, and if our minds are hampered by limited perceptions, and our perceptions are distorted by feelings and prejudices and delusions, how can we know the true nature of things? If all we really believe in is the inside of our own heads, how can we know reality is real at all?
This was not a new question. It was the question Pontius Pilate posed to Christ at his trial: What is truth? Christ said that he was—he was truth—that he testified to the truth and everyone who belonged to the truth listened to his voice.
On Christ’s reply, the West had built a church and the church had helped form a civilization. As long as westerners believed in that reply, believed in Christ and his church, the civilization stood on solid ground or seemed to. But once faith in Christ was gone, only Pilate’s question remained. What is truth? That is the central problem of unbelief.
If you deny God, you cannot find truth!
Purgatory was not just a story, in other words, it was a certain kind of story: a false story, a fiction, a lie.
Purgatory and the corruption of selling indulgences was all false, so when it fell in the reformation, the authority of the Catholic Church fell with it. And then, what is truth? Civilization began to crumble.
William Shakespeare saw the problem to its depths early on. He understood not only what the Reformation meant but what it was going to mean as the idea of it unfolded in the centuries to come. That, I think, is what the play Hamlet is about. As Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt writes in his book Hamlet in Purgatory, it’s a story in which “a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.”
Hamlet is about Martin Luther?!?!
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.
Objective truth comes from God!
With unbelief, nothing is certain.
If you are an atheist, there is no solid ground to stand on!
We need God to give us ground to stand on, and not just God, but our God, the Christian God, who will confirm the good values the generations of the West have discerned and learned to live by over time. But we can’t just choose belief if we don’t, in fact, believe. We need God truly, not just as a useful stopgap against chaos or oppression.
God is the only rational basis for civilization!
When we cry out to the universe, “What is truth? Who’s there?” we need to be able to hear the voice of some essential reality respond to us: I AM.
In Hamlet, Shakespeare saw that the problem of unbelief was unleashed by the challenge to church authority that had arisen in Wittenberg. But the Enlightenment thinkers who came after him—and those thinkers today who feel the Enlightenment was true to its name—assure us that the problem is no problem at all. We don’t need God, they say, not the God of churches and blind faith, anyway. Reason—science—will find the truth, they tell us. Politics will turn that truth into policy. Man alone will make the earth a heaven, or close enough for jazz. But the Romantics knew better. They were living in
...more
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.
Science was a victim of its own success. It found answers and in so doing, lost sight of the question: how did God build the universe?
Despite that persistent failure, because of scientists’ bias toward materialism, it is now the mainstream psychiatric belief that your unhappiness is a chemical event and can therefore be fixed with chemicals.
Ah, scientific materialism is at the root of this!
When you are drugged out of your sorrows, as a cousin of mine once remarked, “You’re still sad, you just can’t feel it anymore.” You see the rain, but the crops die.
But with the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century, much of the practical and economic usefulness of women began to be stripped away. Factories destroyed many of the home industries that gave women their rubies-plus economic standing.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that protofeminists like Mary Wollstonecraft came into being at exactly the same time as the Industrial Revolution. It is the moment when women’s essential economic contributions began to be undermined, and the integrated social role of spiritual femininity was sundered from women’s physical existence.
The march of technology also brought materialism in its wake like a camp-following prostitute, and that had its effect on women too. What is “free love,” after all, but materialism in the flesh?
Through the miracle of science, a woman can now medicate her body so that men may use it for their pleasure without consequence or attachment.
Ouch. Harsh but true, unfortunately.
The TV show Star Trek—a reinvention of C. S. Forester’s Hornblower novels about the Napoleonic War at sea—projected the old imperial narratives into deep space. Star Wars took place “a long time ago” and fused ancient mythology with knightly values as well as moral conflicts drawn from the American Revolution.
It was very much as if our collective unconscious had finally caught on to what Mary Shelley was brooding over more than two centuries before: the only thing standing between us and our perfect but soulless materialist destiny is the inconvenient fertility of the female body and the humanity-producing power of motherly love.
Materialism is, of course, by nature hostile toward spiritual humanity. That hostility plays itself out in the inherent tension between technology and the human feminine—the feminine, which brings life into matter and spiritual being into life.
The threat that technology will render womanhood obsolete is, I believe, the unconscious fear that powers the more antifeminine strains of feminism: those strains that can imagine women’s “empowerment” only in traditionally male terms of physical strength, career success, and work in scientific professions centered on things rather than the professions centered on people that women all over the world prefer.
Now France was to be fundamentally transformed into a crystal city of immaculate goodness, justice falling on the thirsty multitudes like rain. Every inequality would vanish.
Sounds a lot like social justice warriors of today, trying to right every possible wrong, no matter how slight.
Religion would fall. Reason would rule. And of course anyone who wasn’t willing to be reasonable would be reasonably slaughtered.
This could never work. Without God, there is no way to estblish truth and morality. Reason alone is a house built on sand.
With the logic of all political utopians, murder began to seem to the Jacobins a tool of virtue. The only thing standing in the way of human perfection, after all, is humanity.
Without God, there is no reason not to murder!
Evil is not evil when we do it, in other words, because our cause is just so very good.
As time passed, the years did to Wordsworth what years will do, if you keep your eyes open. They gave him both reasons to become more conservative and the experience to see the wisdom in old ways.
If you're yound and not liberal, you hve no heart. If you're old and not conservtive, you have no brain!
Burke has been dead more than two hundred years, but he can still drive radicals to distraction with his simple wisdom. He had the annoying habit of being right about everything. He foresaw American greatness and supported the Americans in their grievances against his own king, George III. He warned Parliament that oppression would drive the Yanks to revolution and begged them to make peace when the revolution came. But when the French rose up, he predicted early on that terror would follow.
Burke understood the great flaw in radical thinking: radicals seek to overturn the very traditions that created their values. As radicals today condemn Thomas Jefferson for holding slaves without realizing they learned their hatred of slavery at Jefferson’s knee, so the French slaughtered priests in the love of liberty the church had instilled in them age by painful age.
In the American colonies, for instance, he saw a people striving to live into their traditions and principles. They were demanding their rights as Englishmen. But from France, he heard nothing but the high-toned gabble of “a man’s abstract right to food or medicine,”20 which justified murderous oppression and criminality. Universities had become “seminaries” for revolutionary gatherings where, he said sarcastically, “amidst assassination, massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the good order of future society.”21
This sounds exactly like today! Universities breeding radicals and people declaring rights to all sorts of things: money, medical care, jobs, etc.
Burke praised his fellow Englishmen for their “sullen resistance to innovation.”23 They had learned that trait from hard experience. The English had killed a king of their own not long ago—not a century and a half before the French king and queen were killed—and it had not ended well.
Milton did not sign the king’s death warrant, but shortly after Charles was beheaded, the poet did write a treatise justifying the execution. His reasoning was derived from Genesis, making it easy to see the chain of thought that eventually led from the Bible to the American Declaration of Independence: “No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey,” he wrote.
It was only in the ruined world of sin created by “Adam’s transgression” that men were forced to band together for self-defense, necessitating the creation of governments and kings.
Each night, he would memorize the portion he had fashioned in his head. Then, in the morning he would dictate what he had created either to one of his daughters or to a hired scribe. In this way, he produced a work of more than ten thousand lines, the greatest long poem in English, and one of the greatest poems of any kind.
Whoa!!!
This, finally, is the model of all radicalism, in the grip of which men reenact the fall of man as adults so often reenact their childhood traumas. Radicals transgress the paradox of virtue because they claim the knowledge of good and evil for themselves and strip the power to freely choose virtue from others. In this way, they transform their imagined paradise into a living hell.
Wow. That's a powerful idea. Radicals claiming the knowledge of good and evil for themselves is what cuses them to create hell on earth. The only way to improve things on earth (and in eternity) is to run towards God.
Because they did not believe in God—the author of all good—they could not imagine an absolute power that was not fundamentally abusive. Rebellion against such a power was therefore morally justified. Ipso facto, Satan was a hero.
These Romantics could not read the poem as Milton wrote it and so assumed he wrote it as they read it.
They could conceive of God as He is - our loving Father. How sad!
I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”
What a great outlook!
