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May 21 - May 30, 2022
“Maybe the problem is that you are trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man.”
In short, the Romantics looked at godless nature, and Christian truth looked back. This, I think, is why C. S. Lewis, like so many others, found the poetry of Wordsworth, for instance, a stepping-stone to faith.
But this approach created a problem, a philosophical difficulty—the philosophical difficulty, when you come to think about it. When artists stopped holding the mirror up to nature, when they held the mirror instead to the mind of man, they were essentially holding a mirror up to a mirror. 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.”
What is truth? That is the central problem of unbelief.
In a way, it’s all a question of storytelling. Who gets to define the cultural narrative, and by what authority does he speak? The truth, after all, is a kind of silence—a silent presence, like Jesus at his trial. Things simply are: being, perception, chains of events. It’s the stories that we tell about those silent things that give them their shape and meaning: this series of actions and feelings is my self, this piece of earth is my country, these events are my biography, the story of my life. Our stories define what we make of what we experience; they are the lyrics we write to what Seamus
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“a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.”12
To hide his suspicions of murder and put Claudius off the trail, he pretends to be mad. But now, his vaunted authenticity is gone. If his inner self and his performance of himself have diverged, how can he know which is real? As he could not tell whether the ghost was speaking truth or not, he cannot now know whether he is actually mad.
As he becomes ever more lost in the maze of philosophical doubt, Hamlet begins to envy those who can play a role with real conviction. If his self is a performance, why can’t he feel as deep a belief in it as, say, the actor who can cry while performing the part of Aeneas? Why can’t he take action like the soldier willing to die in a fight for a meaningless piece of territory?
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.
With unbelief, nothing is certain. Nothing is true. Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so—as Hamlet says in his performed madness.
Even the meaning of words is suspect, a way the powers that be control your thoughts and actions. They’re really just “words, words, words,” as mad Hamlet says, not tools for conveying truth, either the truth about the world or the truth about yourself.
But the Romantics knew better. They were living in the aftermath of the Enlightenment’s failure. The Age of Reason had ended with a Reign of Terror. The liberty, fraternity, and equality promised by politics had given way to worldwide war.
Internal human experience can be creative (the rainbow exists only when I see it), true (I see a rainbow and not a freight train or an oak tree), and unique (I see the rainbow as only I can see it).
The Romantics did not want to see Hamlet-like doubts about the nature of reality strip the internal human experience—the spiritual and imaginative life of mankind—of its wholeness, truth, and beauty.
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.
We speak as if our emotions were chemical reactions rather than spiritual reactions communicated to our bodies by chemical means.
Mary wrote, “I have no wish to ally myself to the Radicals—they are full of repulsion to me—violent without any sense of Justice—selfish in the extreme—talking without knowledge—rude, envious and insolent.”
Men, without babies at their breasts, could leave their farmland for the cities to work in the new mills, but over time, to become a wife, a mother, a homemaker, meant to “leave the workforce” and become an economic “dependent,” rather than a central part of an in-house economic system of mutual sustenance and wealth creation.
They contain within them a fearful premonition of a genderless future of human objects, more its than he’s and she’s.
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.
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. The antifeminine cohort recoil at such Mary-Shelleyan qualities as “submission, love, tenderness, self-sacrifice, devotement, sympathy.”
fundamentally transformed
ISWYDTD
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.
Burke understood the great flaw in radical thinking: radicals seek to overturn the very traditions that created their values.
Burke, by contrast, knew his Aristotle. He understood what we’ll call the paradox of virtue: a society must be virtuous to be free, but it must be free before it can be virtuous because virtue is not virtue unless it is freely chosen.
“It is better to cherish virtue and humanity by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence,” Burke wrote. “The world on the whole will gain by a liberty without which virtue cannot exist.”
Lewis admits that we in our more egalitarian age may find such hierarchies startling. But he says, “Those who cannot face such startling should not read old books.”31
Because God’s reality is reality, there is no way to escape it. Because it is goodness itself, there is no way to defy it with anything but evil.
Rather than rising to become the angel God fashioned him to be, he changes, in Lewis’s words, “from hero to general, from general to politician, from politician to secret service agent, and thence to a thing that peers in at bedroom or bathroom windows, and thence to a toad, and finally to a snake.”
Salutation and Cat.
I’m not a German philosopher and, if you’ve lived your life virtuously, neither are you.
This chain of cocreation is going on every moment we’re alive. 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.
The purpose of poetry, Barfield says, is to reunite the language of the physical with the language of the spiritual in our minds, and so recreate the original human experience of the physical and the spiritual as one thing.
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.
Shakespeare knows this speech is absurd. Macbeth is a player on a stage, and his story not only does not signify nothing, it can’t signify nothing. Even if it signifies that life is meaningless, it has that meaning, and so negates its own message.
Like Milton’s Satan, he thought he had the power to transform evil into good and hell into heaven, but he could only transform himself into evil, and his soul into its own hell.
He forgot that man’s experience of life—from the sound of a falling tree to beauty and truth—is a cocreation, a collaboration with God’s reality. It is that or it is worse than nothing, it is nothingness.
The more we experience the world through Christ, the more we become like Christ and know the world truly.
If the purpose of poetry is to reunite flesh and spirit, nature and meaning, through the human imagination, the two poets would approach that purpose from its two opposing poles. Coleridge would bring the imagination of man into nature, and Wordsworth would recreate nature in the image of man’s imagination.
Keats sees the process of life and death here as one process, life-and-death in a timeless Now. And when he sees it fully and enters it fully, it becomes personified: it has a human face.
What is truth? How can we tell the difference between our prejudices, our assumptions, our feelings, and the reality around us?
His moods distort his experience of the world.
The meaning of Jesus’ life is the meaning of everything. His truth is truth. His right is right. His beauty is beauty. These are human ideas—truth, right, beauty. These are ways we humans experience the indescribable Logos. But how do we know our truths are true, our right is right, our beauty is beautiful? We know by knowing Jesus. He is what Coleridge said he was: “the World as revealed to human knowledge . . . the total Idea that modifies all thoughts.”3
Language connects nature to meaning. Our flesh is language. Our lives are language. They have a meaning.
Numbers connect nature to a truth about nature—or a falsehood—through the mind of man.
This is really happening to Peter. He lives it, so that we can understand its meaning. We know that just to live day to day is like walking on water. What we pretend each day is solid ground beneath us is really wavery death capable of swallowing us at any second. We know what it looks like to sink into that element and despair. We know what it’s like to move forward by pure denial, never looking down at the truth. But we also know a few, a very few, who walk in full knowledge and full faith, unafraid, eyes on Christ: life in abundance.
Parables don’t just convey meaning. The meaning of parables is that they convey meaning. You can’t hear them without interpreting them. They force you to confront the fact that meaning exists.
Stories about life have meaning because life has meaning. Parables teach us that we see meaning in life whether or not we believe it’s there. The person who says life is meaningless is like Macbeth at the end of the play. Even saying life is meaningless is making meaning out of life: nihilism is a nonsense.
Meaning is above nature—it is supernatural—because it is the idea that nature expresses. This is why Coleridge used the literary supernatural—walking skeletons and the like—in Rime of the Ancient Mariner to express the fact that the supernatural Logos is inherent in the natural world. Unbelief in meaning—unbelief in the supernatural—which now seems the sophisticated, intellectual default position, is a nonsense.
servants of the word.”
