Light On Dark Water

52 Authors: Week 9 - Ronald Blythe

Ronald Blythe, born in 1922, published his first book in 1960 and more than half a century on is still at it. His most recent release was a privately printed collection of poems, which came out late last year. In the interim he has written fiction, literary criticism, biography, and nature and travel books. And since the 90s he has written the column “Word From Wormingford” for the Church Times in England, and many of these essays have been combined and released in book form.

I first came across Blythe’s work in the late 90’s in the much-lamented Common Reader catalog. I didn’t actually read him, however, until about five or six years ago. Word From Wormingford (the book) had sat on my shelf for nearly ten years without my having looked at it, and when I finally did pick it up, I did so because I had been reading a lot of Wendell Berry at the time, and I had the notion that Blythe was a sort of English Berry. Although there are some similarities I was mostly wrong, although I would say that folks who like the one would probably like the other.

What you find in Blythe is a rare combination of literary erudition, keen observational skills regarding both men and nature, and a sort of peaceful piety that borders on the devotional. When one reads one of his pieces, he is as equally likely to come away with a recommendation for an unknown poet or novelist, as with a desire to learn more about some forgotten English saint or a wildflower that you recognize but never knew the name of. What is most appealing to me about his work is his obvious love for everything he writes about–literature, nature, the cycle of the Church Year, his particular place in rural England. His writing exudes charity, in the original and best meaning of that word.

Three examples, chosen rather at random, from Word From Wormingford:

Sexagesima:

The old don’t like to be hurried away after the service. They want to huddle and chat and beam and ‘belong.’ My dreams take a sociological turn and I think, looking at the aged women, there go the last of the gleaners, and the last of those who rang for tea. ‘Eighty – why that’s nothing these days!’ But it is and they know it. They know it by their prayer… George Herbert was only thirty-nine when he found words to say, ‘The day is spent and hath his will on me:/ I and the sun have run our races.’

During a nighttime Lenten walk:

A Quaker friend apprenticed to horse farming in the thirties remembers his master getting up at two o’clock sharp every morning to reassure his beasts. A word here, a pat there. And I can recall the stockmen’s lanterns as they made their rounds. ‘Fareyouwell, then.’ Max the cat will accompany me on these strolls when he feels like it, now and then shinning up a tree to show off. On a light dark night I can just make out a Norman church whose windows, wrote Adrian Bell, ‘are no more than dream holes, the walls so thick that the light has the effect of being poured in through a funnel’. Well, that is how they liked it, our ancestors, a bright Saviour in a richly gloomy cave.

The autumn equinox:

St. Matthew’s collect contains a favourite finger-wagging word–‘inordinate.’ It is getting at the apostle’s past as a taxman. Not for us covetous desires and inordinate love of riches. Nor for us inordinate affection, although quite how one is to keep this within bounds I have failed to understand. Some friends, the cat, some books, this landscape familiar to me since boyhood, are all in receipt of my inordinate affection and the cat would not be pleased with anything less. But if I am not covetous, it is because I have all I need. So no virtue in this. The epistle is far from equinoctial. No equality of light and night there. Light reigns. The autumn days are days to savour. There is a sweet rot in the air. Grey squirrels are allowed to do what we must not do, lay up treasure in the earth.

All of Blythe’s “Wormingford” writing has this quality. I’ve not read any of his fiction, but his literary criticism and biographical writing carries it as well. In a way, he’s like a meeker, milder C.S. Lewis – similar sensibilities, but more heartfelt, less strictly rational. He’s a very “peaceful” writer, and makes a wonderful companion at those times when you want to slow down and enjoy something for its own sake, even if you do learn much in the process.

For the “Wormingford” writing Word From Wormingford is the place to start. It has been followed up by many volumes, but it started off as a trilogy, the second and third books being Out of the Valley and Borderlands. As far as the literary writing goes, I’d recommend Characters and Their Landscapes (also known as From the Headlands) and Divine Landscapes. His most famous book is Akenfield, which is a fictionalized account of the life of an English village from 1880 to the mid 60s. It’s very good but a little different from his other works, as it is somewhat journalistic in style.

—Rob Grano has a degree in religious studies which he's put to good use working on the insurance side of the healthcare industry for the past 20 years.  He's published a number of book and music reviews, mostly in the small press, and sometimes has even gotten paid for it. He lives outside of Pittsburgh, Pa.

Of Course

I saw this headline on Google News yesterday:

Huge New Holes In Siberia Have Scientists Calling For Urgent Investigation Of The Mysterious Craters

and immediately thought "Someone will blame it on global warming/climate change."

I clicked on it and read the story, at the Huffington Post. Sure enough: 

The leading theory is that the holes were created by gas explosions triggered by underground heat or by rising air temperatures associated with climate change, the Siberian Times reported last December.

 

The Searchers

You have to make allowances for movies made in the 1950s and earlier, I know. Well, you have to make allowances for movies in general, but it was sometime in the 1960s that movies (American ones, at least) made a noticeable turn toward a greater realism, or at least believability (not necessarily the same things). Part of the change, I suppose, was technical. Perhaps part of it was just an increase in skill. In any case a movie like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) seems realistic in a way that few films of the 1950s and earlier do, in spite of its factually inaccurate portrayal of the title characters. It's not just the realism of the violence, which was shocking. It's in the details--the way the people look, the way things look, the dialog, the acting. Maybe in the latter case it's an increasing distance from the acting styles of the pre-cinema stage.

But anyway: I don't generally have much difficulty in making whatever allowances are required for movies of the '40s and '50s that are set contemporaneously. Considered with detachment, Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade is not really believable as a person whom you might actually encounter. But I accept the character...well, perhaps there's a touch of irony in that acceptance, but it doesn't stop me from entering into the world of the film.

Westerns, though, are another story. I've seen a few of the old classics over the past decade or so, and have been a little disappointed. The Searchers has been on my list for a long time, and since it's widely considered the greatest Western of all time I expected to like it.

But I found myself unable to overlook the many unconvincing aspects of it. I got off to a bad start with the fact that the story is supposed to take place in Texas, and the door of the cabin opened onto what I was pretty sure was no Texas landscape (it's Monument Valley, Utah). The cabin is made of brick and heavy timber that seem unlikely building materials for an isolated house in a remote desert, and in any case too comfortable and substantial for the time and place. "Outdoor" scenes that were shot in the studio are too obviously fake--one reviewer at the time said that the campfire scenes could have been shot in the window of a sporting goods store. Most of the actors are unpersuasive, and I have to include John Wayne in that group. One minor character, Charlie something, has the most ludicrous fake southern-western accent I've ever heard, and that's saying a lot. The Indians, at least those with speaking roles, mostly seem like caricatures. (What I thought was the worst Indian portrayal, the chief Scar played by a blue-eyed actor named Harry Brandon, may not be that at all: there is a plausible argument that the character is meant to be a white man taken captive as a child.)

The story is powerful, and unsentimental to a degree that surprised me a little. The search alluded to in the title is for a girl taken captive by Comanche raiders who have killed the rest of her family. She is the niece of Ethan Edwards, John Wayne's character, who spends years searching for her. He has a grim hatred of the Indians and speaks of them in viciously racist ways that are a bit shocking today. And the Indians as portrayed are not entirely undeserving of his fury. But probably one of the things that has made the film's reputation is that it doesn't leave the picture--either Edwards' hatred or the savagery of the Indians--entirely as it first appears.

If you are an admirer of The Searchers, you can put the blame on me rather than on it for my lack of enthusiasm for it. I wanted to like it, and I really did try to overlook what was unconvincing, but it just got in my way too much, too much for me to feel entirely the impact of the narrative.

What I did like, very much, maybe enough to make me see it again, was the landscape, and the way it was filmed. Never mind that it's not Texas; it's stunning, and magnificently photographed.

52 Authors, Week 8: Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988)

I read Theology at Manchester University in 1979-1982. I was a book lover, and I spent most of the summers reading the book lists for my courses. I planned to take Christology in my third year, so in the summer of 1981 I read The Myth of God Incarnate. That’s a collection of essays published around that time by Anglican professors, which argues that, as one of them puts it, the traditional idea of the Incarnation as God literally assuming humanity is a ‘square circle’. It’s a ‘square circle’, the author and editor of the book, John Hick, argues, because the idea of God becoming incarnate in humanity is a contradiction in terms.

I was a bit of a contradiction myself at the time. Even if being contradictory is part and parcel of the human condition, that was no excuse. Because I thought the arguments in this book were weak and silly, but I did not myself believe that Christ is God. This contradiction pressed in on me, as the summer wore on. I realized I could not dodge the question, that I had to say ‘yes Christ is God or no he is not.’ I decided to say, yes, Christ is God. I began to attend an Anglican church, and then a few months later, after returning to University, I decided to become R.C.

Later in the same year, this person who had seldom voluntarily taken her nose out of a book had to decide what to do when University ended, so naturally, I opted to apply for grad school, and write a PhD. In Great Britain, the Ph.D program in the humanities consists in writing a long dissertation – about 300,000 words. My plan for my PhD, which I submitted, was to write a refutation of The Myth of God Incarnate.

The refutation was going to be based on art. It’s hard to reach back into the intuition my twenty-two year old self had without improving on it and falsifying it. I think the intuition for the PhD was that beautiful things, especially paintings or poems, have something of ‘the infinite’ or ‘the divine’ in them. But they are also just finite blocks of wood or texts with a beginning, middle and end. This seemed to me to disprove the ‘square circle’ contention: if finite works of art can be beautiful, that is, have something godlike about them, then is it a contradiction in terms to say that God assumed a human nature? I’m not putting my intuition up there for approval now! I can see it has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese.

My idea was less intended as a refutation than as a description: I wanted to say that people who came up with the idea that the incarnation of the infinite God in one particular human being has to be ‘just a myth’ are, so to speak, poorly educated or philistinical. I know that sounds snobbish but I was snobbish, especially about art! If only they had spent time in meditating on the incarnation of meaning in paintings and poems, I wanted to say, these Anglican clergy folk would have been seen right off that the Incarnation of God in human flesh makes perfectly good sense. Now I’m not improving on my intuition but mocking it by way of deprecation.

PhDs cannot just be about intuitions. They have to have chapter plans. So I was to have a chapter on Maritain on Art, and one on Gilson on beauty, and chapters on the Southern Fugitive Agrarians on Art, and a Chapter on William Lynch, author of the great Christ and Apollo, and … a chapter on Hans Urs von Balthasar. I included Hans Urs von Balthasar at the suggestion of Michael von Waldstein, who wrote his PhD on him.

It was 1984. Von Balthasar’s great ‘Trilogy’ was then just being translated and published in great violet-grey hard-back tomes by Ignatius Press and by T and T Clark in Scotland. The ‘Trilogy’ is three sets of books. The first is called the Theological Aesthetics and it's about Christ as the revelation of the beauty of God. The second ‘set’ is the Theo-Drama and it's about Christ and his action, saving us by his life, death and resurrection, as the revelation of God’s goodness. The third set only came out in English much later: it’s the Theo-Logic, and of course it’s about Christ as the Truth of God. You can see that I was getting into way, way more than I bargained and planned for.

As I began to feel my way into the first of those violet-grey volumes (The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. I Seeing the Form), I experienced another flash of light. My second insight was that Christ is ‘finite form and infinite light.’ The insight is that Christ is beauty, and beauty must be defined as ‘light and form,’ That’s not an intuition, you may say, it’s a metaphor. The ‘form’ is the particular human flesh of Jesus, born in one place and time. It’s the figure of Jesus as he appears in history, in that one province of the Roman empire. Jesus as ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate’, as the creed puts it. The light is Christ making himself intelligible as who he is, as God made man.

Every art work has a structure, a particular form, but it also has a dense and bottomless intelligibility. In a painting the ‘form’ is the colours and the figures; in a poem or novel the form is the structure the words take on. But the light is its self-communication, the way it grips a viewer or reader, with its layers of meaning which go on and on like a bottomless stair. I’m not sure if I can explain ‘light’ except with more metaphors, like ‘staircase to the work’ or ‘bridge to the work’. There’s only so far metaphors can be unpacked, because there’s a reason one uses them to articulate an idea - it can’t be explained any other way. Something mysterious happens when a work of art shows us its beauty, and this mystery is netted if not pinned down with metaphors such as ‘form’ and ‘light’. Form is the solidity of the work of art and light is its hypnotic, transporting quality which fixes our gaze upon it and draws us into it.

C.S. Lewis has an essay called ‘The Parthenon and the Optative.’ Or maybe he doesn’t and he just has an essay where he talks about those grave matters. It opens with a school master grimacing over some exam scripts and saying to a colleague, ‘These boys know too much about the Parthenon and too little about the optative.’ That means: the school boys’ masters have spent too much time dwelling on the glories of Greek culture, and endued their pupils with the ability to chatter about the splendour that was ancient Greece; and they have spent precious little time inculcating them with knowledge of the optative, the Greek verb form meaning ‘he would do so and so’. And of course, one cannot really ‘get inside’ the Parthenon, or understand Greek culture from within, without a sound grasp of Greek optative verbs.

For several centuries, our culture has been a mixture of the ‘classical-empirical’ and ‘the Romantic’, with the Romantic winning out in pedagogy and the hard-headed classical-empirical winning out in business and economics. So a lot of Christian rhetoric wants to chose one side or the other, with liberal Christianity going with the ‘Parthenon’, Romantic side of things, with a very drippy God, and the more conservative Christians buying into the empirical-classical, and speaking of Christianity as if it were a mixture of facts and conclusions that can be reached by logical analysis. So now, von Balthasar, with his idea of Christ as ‘form and splendour,’ is, as it were, saying that Christ is where the Parthenon and the optative meet. Christ is where the splendour of God speaks through the grammar enfleshed in one Jewish man. And this communication of splendour in human words shows us how to believe in him.

No one can see the form of Christ without faith. He simply does not add up without the light of faith: he is a ‘square circle.’ Faith is a kind of seeing the meaning of things. The act of faith has traditionally been described using the metaphor of light. So what von Balthasar is doing here is to explain what we mean by the act of faith – what we mean by ‘seeing Christ with the eyes of faith’ – by reference to how we understand a beautiful object. As I drove home this evening there was a sign outside the Church of Christ which said, ‘Jesus is the light which only your heart can see.’ That is lovely but it is not what von Balthasar means here, or precisely what any Catholic would want to say. For a Catholic ‘the light which only your heart can see’ is not only subjective sounding. It’s Pelagian sounding – as if some special power within us did the seeing. In the Catholic tradition, von Balthasar would say, rather, ‘Jesus is the light who illuminates your heart.’ So to have faith is to have illuminated vision. And in von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, it is Christ doing the illuminating, showing us the meaning of his ‘form’ and using it to transport us into ever deeper love and appreciation of him.

I did find those big gray-violet tomes of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics reassuringly solid and dense. In my first job, at Manchester University, toward the end of my PhD writing, I had a single student taking a ‘Special Paper’ on Hans Urs von Balthasar. I made him read all seven volumes of The Glory of the Lord. It never occurred to me to do anything else. I thought anyone would want to read them straight through. I taught students about von Balthasar by setting little chunks of The Glory and the Theo-Drama and the Theo-Logic for the next twenty years or so.

It was only when I came to teach in the United States that I read on one of our grad student's blogs that most people who begin on von Balthasar through ‘The Trilogy’ abandon the enterprise and never read any more of him. I took note, and now I would recommend that you begin with one of the many ‘little’ books von Balthasar wrote. For instance, Elucidations (both I and II are fine), and Does Jesus Know Us, Do We know Him? There are also some middle size ones – the book called Prayer is not too difficult for anyone who reads this blog. Nor is Love Alone is Credible – but you should skip the first three chapters unless you like great dense chunks about the history of metaphysics.

Here is a quotation from Elucidations to show you the kind of thing it is and how important metaphors and symbols are in von Balthasar’s theology:

The communion of saints can only be an open circle of those who ‘give without counting the cost,’ who let their light shine into the world without looking for its reflection. ...if one equates the communion of saints with the ‘Holy Catholic Church,’ then there will indeed be many profiteers whom one has to count among its number. ... Who, even among the true saints, does not profit from Mary’s word of assent? ...We all take shelter under her cloak. But there are others within this cloak who themselves have smaller cloaks, and they do not know who it is that finds shelter under them, for, at least on earth, only God knows what the extent..of the fruitfulness of the saints may be. Then by stages we come to those in whom sin grows and takes the upper hand but who nevertheless contribute a few drops of blood to the general circulation. Perhaps they take more than they give, but all the same they do give something. The serious sinner is the one who absorbs all grace for himself without giving anything at all away. ...the goal of the communion of saints is not properly the communal struggle against evil ...but ..the dissemination of the good; indeed, not even that, for the good disseminates itself; the aim is quite simply to hold oneself ready; the aim is the abandonment of all aims of one’s own, in order that God’s aim may be fulfilled through his own people.

--von Balthasar, Elucidations, pp. 96-97

--Grumpy is a professor of theology in the Midwest.

52 Authors, Week 8

This week's entry will be a little late. I hope it will be posted Monday evening.

Internet Mobs

There are such things, and they are frightening. Someone mentioned here a while back the case of Justine Sacco, who said something stupid on Twitter, and was ruined for it. You can read the whole story in this New York Times piece, which also includes stories of other people who made the wrong sort of joke in the presence of the wrong sort of person and paid for it with their jobs. Possibly the most striking thing in the piece, though, is that the author is a former participant in such mob actions, and thought them entirely justified when aimed at "powerful institutions and public figures." And it wasn't clear to me whether or not he still sees it that way.

I have to admit that I was slightly shocked that people deliberately stir up these things. I had supposed they were more spontaneous than that. Most disturbing, there are in fact groups who monitor the internet activities of their ideological enemies and attack them at every opportunity. Here is the account of one victim, Robert Oscar Lopez, a bisexual man who "had nothing against gay relationships, but didn’t think same-sex parenting was fair to children." 

The idea that bringing people closer together is a step toward peace always was a bit naive.