William Blake--The Early Works

This is very much a work in progress, so don't take what I'm about to say too seriously, unless I wind up seeming really brilliant, in which case this is exactly what I meant.
In the fashion that way leads onto way, I found myself amidst William Blake this afternoon. Having not read Blake in a very long time, I decided to spend a bit of time in his neighborhood, beginning with the earliest works:

• All Religions are One (1788), and
• There is No Natural Religion (1789).

Part of me could simply dismiss these works as the pseudo-philosophical ruminations of a young man. However, at age 31 in 1788, Blake would seem old enough to recognize self indulgence in his thinking, one would hope.
The simpler of these works, the earlier one, is the more difficult to reconcile with a Christian worldview.

The Voice of one crying in the WildernessThe Argument. As the true method of
knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which
experiences. This faculty I treat of.
Principle I. That the Poetic Genius is
the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the
Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their
Genius, which by the Ancients was call'd an Angel & Spirit & Demon.
Principle II. As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same
infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius.
Principle III. No man
can think, write or speak from his heart, but he must intend truth. thus all
sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic Genius adapted to the weaknesses of
every individual.
Principle IV. As none by travelling over known lands can
find out the unknown, So from already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire
more; therefore an universal Poetic genius exists.
Principle V. The
Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation's different reception of
the Poetic Genius, which is every where call'd the Spirit of Prophecy.
Principle VI. The Jewish & Christian Testaments are An original
derivation from the Poetic Genius. This is necessary from the confined nature of
bodily sensation.
Principle VII. As all men are alike (tho' infinitely
various), So all Religions , &, as all similars, have one source. The true
Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius.

Here's an argument that we hear from a lot of secular people. In an effort to avoid seeming isolationist or intolerant, they'll argue that all religions are basically the same. They'll claim that all religions take people to the same place. The distinctions, they insist, come not from any essential difference but from various people looking at the same goal from a different vantage point. To those people, I'd have to politely say, "Rubbish."
More specifically, as we read Blake's words here, I notice that he's finding the source of true religion not in a transcendent God but in a human genius. No Christian can read these words and feel comforted.
The second of Blakes works, the 1789 There is No Natural Religion, is not quite so clear. Let's look over its few words.

The Argument. Man has no notion of moral fitness but from Education.
Naturally
he is only a natural organ subject to Sense.
I. Man cannot
naturally perceive but through his natural or bodily organs.
II. Man by his
reasoning power can only compare & judge of what he has already perceiv'd.
III. From a perception of only 3 senses or 3 elements none could deduce a
fourth or
fifth.
IV. None could have other than natural or organic
thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions.
V. Man's desires are
limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perceiv'd.
VI. The desires & perceptions of man, untaught by anything but organs of
sense, must be limited to objects of sense.

(b)
I. Man's perceptions are not bound by organs of perception; he
perceives more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover.
II. Reason, or
the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we
know more.
III. [This proposition is missing.]
IV. The bounded is
loathed by its possessor. the same dull round, even of the universe, would soon
become a mill with complicated wheels.
V. If the many become the same as the
few when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul; less than All
cannot satisfy Man.
VI. If any could desire what he is incapable of
possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
VII. The desire of Man being
infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite. Conclusion. If it
were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic &
Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable
to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.

Application. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who
sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are,
that we may be as he is.

Here we have a lot of confusing words, hardly the sort of thing that Blake will give us next in the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In fact, if this were all that Blake had left us, we'd ignore these words. But since Blake is an important English poet, we can't simply dismiss him, regardless of how bizarre his theology or philosophy might seem.

However, before we write William Blake off as a complete nut-case, I would suggest that we might be able to read here a more orthodox thinker than we saw in the previous work. Look at that final sentence: "God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is." Before you start letting all of that Poetic Genius nonsense from the year before bother you, imagine this statement as describing the Incarnation. Indeed, man cannot by his own powers effect things beyond the physical realm. Only when God became man did man manage to attain to holiness and salvation. This is Christianity.

I'm not saying that this was Blake's intention. Blake's theology is troubling enough that we should never read him without a healthy bit of skepticism and caution. But when we read these sentences, we can wonder if an understanding of Christ, albeit a twisted one, might not have been lurking in his thought.

Rip Van Winkle--Washington Irving

There's probably no character in American Literature, excluding those of Mark Twain, better known than Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, yet he's also singularly misunderstood. Show most people an image of a hillbilly-ish character, sporting a long beard, asleep under a tree, and many of them, perhaps most of them will identify him as Rip, but what do they know about Irving's story.
To my mind, the most interesting thing about this short story is not that Rip Van Winkle wandered off into the mountains, met spirits of some sort, slept for twenty years, and then came home. That's the surface level of the tale, but it's not what made Irving's literary reputation. Unfortunately, in our visual culture, the original tale of Rip has been drowned in its own plot. After all, how do you portray his story on screen without simply telling the tale as it is related.
The problem with these portrayals is that they miss out on the vagaries of narration. Let me explain. First of all, who is the narrator of Rip Van Winkle? How does the story move from the events that actually happened to our own minds? In a film version, we perceive directly. We see it happen. There's not much room for ambiguity in viewer's mind. Yes, sometimes film-makers will play with reality and withhold information from us, but largely we see what is.
Not so in Washington Irving's story. Notice that the story is not a typical first- or third-person account. Instead, we get the events filtered between the time they happened and the time we read them. The story is told to us by a narrator, presumably Washington Irving, but since the narrator is clearly making some of this up--for example, there is no Diedrich Knickerbocker--I would suggest that the story comes by way of Washington Irving the writer and then his literary creation, "Washington Irving" the narrator, who in turn claims to have taken information from one Knickerbocker. Knickerbocker apparently gathered his information from the townspeople who knew Rip (although DK claims to have met Rip as well). The townspeople gathered their information from Rip who experienced the events firsthand. Thus our narration comes to us in this sort of progression:

1. Events experienced by
2. Rip, who told them to the
3. Townspeople, who shared with
4. Knickerbocker, who wrote and was read by
5. "Washington Irving," who is a literary creation of
6. Washington Irving, who wrote a account for
7. You.

That's a bit complicated, but there's more. We have to wonder whether Rip's tale is true. Why should we doubt him? Most obviously, his story is rather incredible. How could it be true. But there are further reasons to doubt its veracity, most notably its constant insistence on its own truthfulness.
Start with the epigraph, by William Cartwright, especially the third line: "Truth is a thing that ever I will keep." Then plunge into the first section, a sort of editorial addition by "Washington Irving," which insists on the "scrupulous accuracy" of Knickerbocker's accounts. Reading the second paragraph of the story, one encounters three affirmations of Knickerbocker's accuracy in a single sentence. Methinks the narrator doth protest too much.
At the close of the story, "Irving" adds an editorial note supposedly from Knickerbocker. There again, we are greeted with a series of insistences on the truthfulness of the whole affair. After all, Knickerbocker points out, he heard it straight from Rip Van Winkle's mouth.
If that's not enough to make us doubt the truth of the story, read the last paragraph before that concluding note: "He [Rip] used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at Mr. Doolittle's hotel. He was observed, at first, to vary on some points every time he told it, which was, doubtless, owing to his having so recently awaked. It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related." Clearly, if Irving was not trying to infuse doubt about the trustworthy nature of this story, he included a lot of very odd and unproductive extras.
If Rip did make the story up, what was he doing during this twenty year period? Let me suggest the following:

Wandering in the mountains one day, Rip grumbled about his life. Tired of his
wife and her demands, he determined not to head home. Instead he got far enough
away from his village to live as he liked, undiscovered, and passed those two
decades. Only as he started to move into old age did Rip begin to think of home
again. Perhaps driven by a desire to see his children, perhaps because of guilt,
perhaps because he had no where else to go, Rip returned to the village.
However, he knew that he couldn't simply stroll into town and laugh off a
twenty-year absence. He would instead tell a tale sure to excite wonder and
(hopefully) belief in his neighbors. He told that tale, perhaps eventually
starting to believe it himself.

What is uniquely Christian about this story? Nothing really, but there are lessons for the Christian reader to draw, most notably about the unreliable nature of the human heart and the deceptions and self-deceptions that progress out of that heart. The mind will believe many things that it should not believe, often convincing itself to believe what one can scarcely imagine to be true. A skeptic might say that this is what the Christian does in believing the account of the Bible. Obviously since some people believe the Bible and some believe the Book of Mormon and some believe the Koran and some believe other things, some of these people, these people walking in absolute certainty, must be mistaken. How do we know that it is not us? How do we know that we are not Rip Van Winkle's dupes?
I don't get the sense that Washington Irving was a mean-spirited writer dedicated to humiliating and lampooning the credulous people who believed Rip Van Winkle's story. However, I do read him as somebody who wanted us to question the veracity of our sources and the trustworthiness of our own minds at every opportunity. If what we follow is indeed the Truth, we can do much worse than to heed Irving's admonitions.

Movie--The World, The Flesh and the Devil

It's not my intention to post a lot of entries regarding films here, but I burned away a couple hours this morning watching this film on TMC and found myself with some lingering thoughts. The World, The Flesh and the Devil feels like a take on I Am Legend although it hit theaters 48 years earlier in 1959. In the older film, we have a lone man, Ralph Burton, played by Harry Belafonte, surviving technological holocaust and living a peculiar life in Manhattan. Eventually he runs into Sarah Crandall, played by Inger Stevens, who prances around town looking awfully fresh and lovely despite all the carnage that has gone before. In time, this pair is joined by Ben Thacker (Mel Ferrer), and we all know where this is going. The World, the Flesh and the Devil has no hordes of light-fearing zombies to keep at bay. No, the real problem is how do two men deal with one woman. The writers tried to make this an enlightened race film, but that pretense seemed pretty feeble. When you're the only two (or three) people on earth for all practical purposes, then race becomes a fairly irrelevant matter right away. It all gets very primal as the story reaches its crescendo. Evil Ben--or maybe he's just misunderstood--grabs a rifle and starts shooting at Ralph. Ralph gets his own rifle and shoots back. They sprint all over Manhattan, magically moving from the U.N. headquarters to the financial district in just seconds. But they had to go to the U.N., as Ralph finds himself standing in front of the scripture quotation about beating swords into plowshares from Isaiah 2:4. A statue with that theme had been given to the U.N. by the Soviet Union in 1959, so the theme was fresh, I suppose.
In front of those words, Ralph bravely tosses down his rifle, dashes to Wall Street (several miles) and confronts the still-armed Ben. After one wild shot, Ben cannot dispatch his rival, eventually collapsing and saying, "If you'd been scared, then I could have done it." As the movie closes, Ralph and Sarah wind up together, joining hands and then calling Ben to join them. The trio then strolls up the deserted canyons of lower Manhattan with the words "The Beginning"--get it? It's not "The End"--superimposed over them.
The word that jumps into my mind at the conclusion of this film is "facile." This is "the beginning," eh? What's going to happen next? Are the love triangle problems going to magically disappear? Will Ben and Ralph share Sarah? And before that, there's the facile aspect of Ben throwing his rifle down. Yes, the Bible does prophesy a time when people will beat swords into plowshares, but there's another passage, Joel 3:10, that reverses that process. There are times, it seems, when violence is the only answer. When a person is firing a deer rifle in your direction would be such a time. Frankly, it would have served Harry Belafonte's character right if Ben had just blown him away.
If I were to draw a larger conclusion from this film, it is that valuable literary productions are not reductive. They embrace the messiness, the paradoxes, the contradictions of human life. Once the bullets started flying in this production, all subtlety and nuance went out the window, leaving us with something treacly and soon to be forgotten.

The Memory of Old Jack--Wendell Berry

This may be a peculiar novel to have as my first entry in this blog, but it is what I've been reading. Therefore, it's what you get.
Wendell Berry has become one of my favorite contemporary writers in recent weeks, as I've dipped into his essays, poems, and now this novel. Berry, a one-time English professor at the University of Kentucky, is distinguished by his embrace of a mindful agricultural life. What sort of a person abandons the cushy world of academic life, especially at a fairly prestigious university, to farm the Kentucky hill country with a team of horses?
My understanding of Berry's novels is that they all revolve around the same fictitious Kentucky town, Port Royal, and the same interlocking cluster of characters. Having seen some of the other titles, Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, and having been introduced to these characters in the pages of the current novel, I have a sense of Berry's approach.
Although Wendell Berry's Christianity is vital to his identity and to his thought, this novel would not fit onto the shelves of many Christian bookstores, which is one of the things I feel recommends it as a worthy read. In this book, Berry presents a very appealing portrait of rural life without romanticizing that life. Old Jack's life is hard, but he wouldn't trade that life for anything. Similarly, Berry presents married life as a virtue while detailing Old Jack's largely disappointing marriage. You could not say that the love between Jack and Ruth Beechum did not die because it really never lived. Nevertheless, they remained married and largely loyal to each other until her death. Berry describes Jack's adultery with a local widow in a way that allows us to understand it without condoning it. I would contrast this portrayal with Kate Chopin's rather bloodless portrayal of a dissolving marriage and adultery in The Awakening. In Chopin's novel, there is no reason for Edna Pontellier to abandon her husband. In Old Jack, there is every reason for Jack to abandon Ruth (and from Ruth's point of view, every reason for her to abandon him), yet Jack and Ruth remain together functionally if not emotionally, riding out their disappointment and making the best of things. Jack possesses far more reason for his straying than does Edna, and he seems to consider the matter much more fully.
This book's title has at least two meanings. In one sense, the title reflects the organizational plan that Berry employs. Old Jack, in his 90s, is the senior sage of Port Royal. The book tracks through the last two days of Jack's life, peppered with lengthy flashbacks that convey the steps and missteps that brought this man to this point. As admirable a character as Jack seems in the minds of his neighbors, his life is hardly a steady march to triumph. In fact, Jack's life contains failings in romance, fidelity, business, and friendship. In short, Jack is a sinful man. He's no paragon of virtue, unless that virtue is hard work. Yet he stands, in the minds of the people of Port Royal, as an exemplar of human life. Human life, you see, regardless of what anybody says to the contrary, involves muddling through, making mistakes, and not always having everything turn out all right. Had Jannete Oke written Old Jack's story, she would have had Ruth eventually come around to recognize Jack's good qualities. She'd have had Jack take great pains to become the man Ruth wanted him to be. Neither of these things happened, because that's not how real people generally behave, and in the end, only a warm handclasp showed that Ruth still held some genuine love for Jack. There's no deathbed proclamation of regret or desire.
In Berry's eyes, life is beautiful and worthwhile not when all the plot elements line up to create a satisfying climax. It's worthwhile when people struggle on through it, regardless of the bad things that come along.
Berry spends a good bit of time in this novel--and perhaps comes closest to damaging the artistic product--preaching his view of two kinds of life: city vs. country, mercantile vs. agricultural, consumption vs. production. Ruth does not fall on Berry's side of those dichotomies, believing that "no place may be sufficient to itself, but must lead to another place, and that all places must finally lead to money; that a man's work must lead not to the health of his family and the respect of his neighbors but to the market place" (65). Those who subscribe to such thinking, cannot wait to get out of Port Royal and on to bigger things. For them, forty acres must yield to eighty acres and beyond. This reminds me of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. The memory of Old Jack is ultimately then the memory of his dedication to his land and the people on the land around his. Toward the novel's close, Jack speaks to his protege, the son of his mentor Ben, about the value of the land: "That's all you've got, Mat. It's your only choice. It's all you can have; whatever you try to gain somewhere else, you'll lose here. . . . And it's enough. It's more than another."
Whenever I read Berry, I find myself thinking of Matthew 6:33: "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you." Of course, I tend to come back to that verse in just about anything I read. Jack Beechum does not lead a charmed life. His gal doesn't come around to his way of thinking in the end. He doesn't come around to hers. His only child, a daughter, winds up living a life of affluence and respectability that Jack cannot respect. He experiences financial setbacks that leave him far less materially successful than he might have been. He experiences the same moral failing that largely undid King David. Yet Jack, to some degree, seeks the kingdom of God--not within the walls of the church but within his own heart--and finds that like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, he has all that he needs.

My Heart is Stirred by a Noble Theme

In the 45th Psalm, the sons of Korah begin their praise of the king like this:

My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses for the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer.

The Psalmist here sings in praise not just of the king of Israel but of the King of Israel, the Lord God. He extolls the virtues of the man, the king, while at the same time suggesting the limitations of man that only God can transcend. All the while, this author, inspired by God but also blessed by God with a human gift for words, fires the human imagination, attempting to convey the unconveyable, to transcend the limitations of our means of perception, and to connect a reader, bounded in time and space, with the Master, indeed the Creator of all that is, was, or will ever be.

I mention these things because if we look at Psalm 45 aside from its status as Scripture, we see the same sorts of things at work that we find in many great works of literature. Humans, for centuries, have used literature, art crafted not in marble or paint but in words, to convey the subtleties of human understanding. These authors have been Christians, Buddhists, pagans, and atheists. They have worked in genres such as poetry, fiction, and drama. They have inspired and provoked readers across the ages. Their work, ultimately, explores the constant quest of all thinking people to understand the question: What does it mean to be human?

In these postings, I do not hope to answer that question. That question, of course, cannot truly be answered. It can simply be asked. In fact, I would suggest that part of what it means to be fully human is to ask that question, to seek for an answer. As a Christian, I claim to hold an answer to the question of human meaning. However, I don't believe that Christians should consider the answer that they have in Christ to be an all-encompassing answer. It is a permanent answer and a most reassuring one, but it does not explain everything. What it does is provide the Christian with the liberty and assurance to not require absolute answers on absolutely everything.

What you will find as I post in coming days is a series of Christian readings of various literary texts. Whether I'm reading someone relatively obscure or a household name, overtly Christian texts or defiantly anti-Christian ones, I will share my thoughts and analyses, hopefully providing other Christian students of literature with fresh ideas and approaches.