Friday’s Child, W. H. Auden
(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945)
He told us we were free to choose
But, children as we were, we thought—
“Paternal Love will only use
Force in the last resortOn those too bumptious to repent.”
Accustomed to religious dread,
It never crossed our minds He meant
Exactly what He said.
Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
“THEORY” From “The Scheme of Things” by Allen Wheelis
Note: Wheelis wrote an interesting little book called “How People Change”. I don’t share his apparent rejection of the Christian faith, of course, but he is an honest and thoughtful writer, as this excerpt of another of his books shows. Be patient, the first paragraph is the slowest.
I have yet to conceive the relation between the scheme of things and the way things are, and how the scheme of things affects the way things are. In some way it relieves an unbearable vision. But how? My sense of it now is that with the advent of man, for the first time, one form of life gains a vision of life as a whole. The immediate horror man perceives is his own death, but beyond that he begins to see the entire life process as carnage, as eating and being eaten. A terrible screaming pervades the universe. Man is the first to hear it. This is the vision we cannot accept. It drives toward madness or despair. This is the way things are. Does the scheme of things simply say it isn’t so?Christianity is the scheme of things I know best, know in the sense that once, for a while, it really worked for me. What does Christianity do with this vision? It does not deny it; it makes it acceptable. What Christianity does for the Christian is give him strength to bear it. It redeems it. That’s the word! The scheme of things redeems the way things are. But what is redemption? It must be an interpretation. The scheme of things interprets the way things are as necessary to something grand. The scheme of things, therefore, is both a diagram of the something grand and an interpretation of the way things are as an essential part of the something grand. The life process thereupon becomes less horrible and more bearable because it serves, however obscurely, a glorious end. One’s individual life is redeemed when it is in the service of the something grand.
St. John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul
On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.
In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised–oh, happy chance!–
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.
In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my
heart.
This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me–
A place where none appeared.
Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.
The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.
I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
T.S. Eliot: excerpt from Little Gidding
I
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
Whem the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
***********************************************
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Christian Classics (my list)
Everybody has their own list, so why not?
- The Beauty of the Infinite, by David Bentley Hart
I lack the vocabulary to do justice to this magnificent work. See the many quotes from the book on this site…here, for example.
- The Ethics of Freedom, by Jacques Ellul
- New Seeds of Contemplation, by Thomas Merton
- No Man Is An Island, by Thomas Merton
- Tears of the Blind Lions and Man In A Divided Sea, by Thomas Merton
The poems he wrote while immersed in the scriptural and liturgical world of Gethsemani Abbey, before he got interested in being relevant again.
- Iconostasis, by Pavel Florensky
- The Aesthetic Face of Being: Art in the Theology of Pavel Florensky, by Victor Bychkov
Not many books about somebody else’s work attain to such high status. In this category are also Dorothy Sayers’ “Introductory Lectures on Dante”, C.S. Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost” and the little known “The theology of romantic love: A study of the writings of Charles Williams” by Mary Shideler.
- The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, by Vladimir Lossky
- Life Together, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Creation and Fall, Temptation, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Everybody knows Bonhoeffer’s “Cost of Discipleship”, but these little books are at least as good. Bonhoeffer’s pages in Life Together on “The Day Alone” and “The Day With Others” are a classic treatment of the place and need of strong individuals in a cenobitic community.
- The Descent of the Dove, by Charles Williams
- The Figure of Beatrice, by Charles Williams
- Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, by Owen Barfield
Not sure you can call Barfield a Christian, but he’s such a great Platonist we can use him anyway.
- The Ministry of God’s Word, by Watchman Nee
In the matter of teaching and preaching Scripture, in a category all by itself. Nobody else understands what Nee understands. He has critics, most of whom just hate anybody who experiences anything in the spiritual life.
- The Spiritual Man, by Watchman Nee
- The Release of the Spirit, by Watchman Nee
There may not be 100 people in America who understand these books. How much I flatter myself in that, I’ll let you decide.
- The Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, by Ananda Coomeraswamy
Also not a Christian, but we are going to steal everything we can use, like Rome stole the Unconquerable Sun. See also his “The Transformation of Nature in Art.”
- Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, by Umberto Eco
- How People Change. Wheelis, A. (1973), New York: Perennial Library/Harper & Row.
“Something of an underground classic within the clinical psychological and counseling disciplines, this short book of nine essays by psychotherapist Allen Wheelis explores questions of freedom, necessity, and change for patients and others. He tells several extremely compelling stories of his own experiences with his father and points to the centrality of “meaning” in therapeutic processes which lead to real character transformation.” (quote from here)
- The Politics of Jesus, by John Howard Yoder
THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING by Dorothy Sayers
THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING
——————————————————————————–
by Dorothy Sayers
——————————————————————————–
That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology; the most irrelevant people are appointed to highly technical ministries; and plain, blunt men write to the papers to say that Epstein and Picasso do not know how to draw. Up to a certain point, and provided the the criticisms are made with a reasonable modesty, these activities are commendable. Too much specialization is not a good thing. There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or another, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing–perhaps in particular if we learnt nothing–our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.
However, it is in the highest degree improbable that the reforms I propose will ever be carried into effect. Neither the parents, nor the training colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the boards of governors, nor the ministries of education, would countenance them for a moment. For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.
Before you dismiss me with the appropriate phrase–reactionary, romantic, mediaevalist, laudator temporis acti (praiser of times past), or whatever tag comes first to hand–I will ask you to consider one or two miscellaneous questions that hang about at the back, perhaps, of all our minds, and occasionally pop out to worry us.
