Beyond the Mundane: William Carlos Williams and John Heath-Stubbs
January 4, 2023 ~ Vincent ~ Leave a comment
A friend and I have a standing engagement to read poetry together and judge which poet is better (using the very precise metric of whatever we happen to enjoy in a given week). Each week, we each pick a new poet to do battle. Not that there's any sense of competitiveness. We often pick poets we've never heard of before. Who cares? It's just a silly excuse to hang out and read stuff. But this week, I've found one of the most imbalanced matchups so far: William Carlos Williams vs. John Heath-Stubbs. I can't fathom giving William Carlos Williams a vote, but not for the reasons you might think.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with William Carlos Williams. He wrote the famous poem This is Just to Say:
This is Just to Say, William Carlos Williams
I hadn't looked at this one since high school, but here it is again. Here's another of his, Danse Russe:
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
Now, WCW's opponent is someone I'm sure most of you haven't heard of: John Heath-Stubbs. Who on earth is that? I didn't even know who he was before I stumbled onto him. He's much less famous and considerably more contemporary, but here's a little selection:
In the middle of the world, in the centre
Of the polluted heart of man, a midden;
A stake stemmed in the rubbish
From lipless jaws, Adam's skull
Gasped up through the garbage:
'I lie in the discarded dross of history,
Ground down again to the red dust,
The obliterated image. Create me.'
From lips cracked with thirst, the voice
That sounded once over the billows of chaos
When the royal banners advanced,
replied through the smother of dark:
'All is accomplished, all is made new, and look-
All things, once more, are good.'
Then, with a loud cry, exhaled His spirit.
Golgotha, John Heath-Stubbs
And, at the risk of posting altogether too much poetry, here's another that's indicative of his style:
The Old Swan has gone. They have widened the road.
A year ago they closed here, and she stood,
The neighborhood houses pulled down, suddenly revealed
In all of her touching pretentiousness
Of turret and Gothic pinnacle, like
A stupid and ugly woman
Unexpectedly struck to dignity by bereavement.
And now she has vanished. The gap elicits
A guarded sentiment. Enough bad poets
Have romanticized beer and pubs,
and for those whom the gimcrack enchantments
Of engraved glass, mahogany, plants in pots,
Were all laid out to please, are fugitives, doubtless,
Nightly self-immersed in a fake splendour.
Yet a Public House perhaps makes manifest also
The hidden City; implies its laws
of tolerance, hierarchy, exchange.
Friends I remember there, enemies, acquaintances,
Some drabs and drunks, some bores and boors, and many
Indifferent and decent people. They will drink elsewhere.
Anonymous, it harboured
The dreadful innocent martyrs
Of megalopolis- Christie or Heath.
Now that's finished with. And all the wide
And sober roads of the world walk sensibly onwards
Into the featureless future. But the white swans
That dipped and swam in each great lucid mirror
Remain in the mind only, remain as a lost symbol.
The Old Swan, John Heath-Stubbs
I'll be the first to admit that Heath-Stubbs isn't my ideal cup of tea. Golgotha, for instance, has some clumsy-sounding alliteration ("gasped up through the garbage" and "discarded dross" are a bit much for my taste). The Old Swan seems to play to his writing strengths a little more, but I recognize that it's a poem that may stick in my mind because I can relate to the circumstances. Not everyone can, and I'm sure some people would just find it dull. All of that to say, I'm not arguing that John Heath-Stubbs is some kind of perfect paragon of poetry (points off for alliteration; it's a bit much for my taste). I do, however, think that his work is infinitely preferable to that of William Carlos Williams.
At first, I didn't really get what WCW was doing at all. Why the jaunty plum poem? Why the weirdo dancing guy? So I read up a little on his goals. Williams wanted to uncover the poetic spirit of the everyday life and the beauty of American language as it was genuinely spoken. No traditional prose was needed. Nothing fancy. Nothing extraordinary. Instead, just look to the ordinary and see it for what it is. Cut away all the unnecessary ideas about what poetry is supposed to be and what fancy words should be used and you're left with an honest statement of what is. While all of WCW's work doesn't conform to this methodology (American Imagism), most of his famous stuff seems to (This is Just to Say, Danse Russe, The Centenarian, Between Walls, etc.). To WCW, what is poetry? It's a note that you left to your wife explaining where the plums have gone. It's a broken bottle in a parking lot. Poetry is nothing pretentious. It's just life! Simple, beautiful life.
Now when we look at the selections from Heath-Stubbs, what do we see? Not a glorification of the mundane, but a yearning for something just beyond the mundane. Why is an old pub worth remembering? Because that place was different somehow. It was a place where community was possible between radically different people. It was a place of ideas and chatter. It may have reeked of a tacky faux-elegance, but both it and everyone there aspired to something more than what was. Even his more straightforward poem of the two, Golgotha, looks at what humans are through deep metaphorical, religious language. We have this brilliant depiction of Adam, the heart of what humanity is, discarded each person's heart, buried in a trash-heap. He's crying out to be created properly. Something beyond has to rescue him. What is poetry to Heath-Stubbs? It's capturing something more. There's something juuuust beyond our eyes. Can we see it directly? No. Can we fully understand it? No. But if we use the right words and look in the right places just right, we might get a peek of this thing that's better than all that we've made.
Ultimately, I see two styles: one content with what is, and one that looks beyond what is to see what really is. One is glorifies the mundane, while the other sees the mundane as something that beckons them onward. William Carlos Williams would see a pub and write a poem about a fun moment that occurred at that pub or a beer glass that gets a special sheen on it when seen in a particular light. Heath-Stubbs sees a pub and he sees the glories of Heaven.
To be clear, I don't think William Carlos Williams is some kind of despicable hedonist. I just think he's missing out. I think the simple, self-contained pleasures are just a shallow taste of what lies beyond them. To paraphrase Saint Augustine in On Christian Teaching, every thing exists either as something to be enjoyed or something to be used. "Toenjoy a thing is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake." (I.4), whereas to use something is to find whatever you're looking for through its proper use. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with using things in Auggie's model. After all, God is the only real end for our desire. Nothing else will fully satisfy us! Even people are meant to be used as means to the end of enjoying God. That's why we ought to talk to people and care for them; we enjoy God through them. William Carlos Williams spends a lot of time on plums and tiny, self-contained ideas. He's enjoying the thing. I wish he would move past enjoying the plum to enjoy the God that we can know through it.
God is Red: Zhang Yinxian and True Discipleship
May 26, 2022 May 26, 2022 ~ Vincent ~ Leave a comment
Back when I was first trying to find good books about Christianity, I went to my local library and grabbed whatever was on the shelves. One of those books happened to be Liao Yiwu's God is Red, a series of interviews with people who endured persecution in communist China around the time of the Cultural Revolution. It made quite the impression on me. Specifically, the story of Zhang Yinxian was one that I never forgot.
Zhang was an orphan that became a nun at the cathedral of Dali in the Yunnan province. That church was MASSIVE. There were over 400 that lived in the church complex and thousands who came from throughout the province to worship. All of that changed when the communists took over. Church property was confiscated. Worshipers renounced their faith to avoid punishment from the government. Out of thousands who worshiped, only three remained faithful: Zhang, her Aunt Li, and Bishop Liu.
They were beaten. They were imprisoned. They were released as pariahs at the bottom of the social ladder with few opportunities to avoid poverty. On top of all that, they had to endure mass denunciations. They would be trotted out in front of crowds that would spit at them and scream about how narrow-minded and backwards they were and how they were leeches on society. They endured all of that for thirty-one years.
In 1983, the Communist Party changed policies. Certain religions were now acceptable. People could worship freely. Church property would gradually be returned. Zhang, Li, and Liu were given modest apartments… but that wasn't enough for them. They went to the local statehouse and started a hunger strike until they got their church back. The people that passed by them weren't sympathetic: "You oughta be grateful for what you got! Be more patriotic!" But they stayed and they prayed and waited. A government official spoke with them and told them that they'd get their church back but these sorts of things took time. They said, "Thank goodness, because we're hungry and we can't eat until we have our church back. Here's to hoping its soon!" The official got furious and called them greedy for demanding a massive building for just three people. They just said that it wasn't for them; it was for God. They wanted to go to his house and worship him.
After 31 years of persecution, they got their church back. Thousands once worshiped there, but after thirty-one years of persecution, only three remained. There may have been a big crowd at that sanctuary, but there were only three real disciples.
Would I have been one of those three? I hope so, but I also know that I can't fathom how hard it would have been to endure. Only an unshakable faith can endure trials like that, and an unshakable faith doesn't just spring up by accident. It takes deliberate training and constant nurture. How can we help make disciples like Zhong, Li, and Liu? And how can we become disciples like that? I don't know. But that mental image of little old Aunt Li getting spat on and screamed at while she loved Jesus has certainly stuck with me. Here's to hoping I can be as faithful as she was.
What Did Jesus Write in the Dirt in John 8:1-11? Big Name Theologians Weigh In
March 16, 2022 ~ Vincent ~ Leave a comment
While poking around some different articles on the treatment of women in Leviticus, I stumbled across some wacky interpretations of what Jesus wrote in the sand in John 8:1-11. Let me refresh your memory on that passage (with a verse from chapter 7 to make sure we don't start in the middle of a sentence):
7 53 Then they all went home,
8 1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4 and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" 6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"
11 "No one, sir," she said.
"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin."
What did Jesus write? It's important enough that it's referenced twice at crucial story moments, but apparently not important enough to tell us anything about it. I've heard people say he was writing a passage from Leviticus 20 indicating that BOTH people were supposed to be stoned, revealing that they would be breaking the law if they stoned her because they failed to produce both parties. Others have said that he was writing the names of every accuser along with the sins that they had recently committed. I've even heard that he drew a line in the sand for people to cross if they felt they were worthy. There are a lot of takes out there, but most of them aren't really founded on much apart from one person's random guesswork. What have the major theologians of the Christian tradition said about the writing in the sand?
Naturally, I started with Augustine (because you can never go too far wrong with Augustine). Luckily for me, he preached a series of sermons about the book of John and his take was customarily good. He suggested the trap the Pharisees laid was in making Jesus choose between gentleness and justice. If Jesus approved of the women's death, he'd be the guy that condemned peasant women and his popularity would suffer. If he didn't approve of her death, he was speaking against God's justice and was officially a transgressor of the law! Jesus navigates the dilemma with his typical craftiness by taking neither option. But what about the finger writing?
You have heard, O Jews, you have heard, O Pharisees, you have heard, O teachers of the law, the guardian of the law, but have not yet understood Him as the Lawgiver. What else does He signify to you when He writes with His finger on the ground? For the law was written with the finger of God; but written on stone because of the hard-hearted. The Lord now wrote on the ground, because He was seeking fruit. You have heard then, Let the law be fulfilled, let the adulteress be stoned. But is it by punishing her that the law is to be fulfilled by those that ought to be punished? Let each of you consider himself, let him enter into himself, ascend the judgment-seat of his own mind, place himself at the bar of his own conscience, oblige himself to confess… Each looking carefully into himself, finds himself a sinner. Yes, indeed. Hence, either let this woman go, or together with her receive ye the penalty of the law… [H]aving struck them through with that dart of justice, [Jesus] deigned not to heed their fall, but, turning away His look from them, "again He wrote with His finger on the ground."
Augustine, Sermon on John Chapter VII. 40–53; VIII. 1–11
Brilliant! Rather than focus on non-existent content, he's looking at the symbolism of the act itself. Why would Jesus write on the ground? Because God wrote the law on stone the first time, and now he's writing on the ground. This is the same dust that people were created from. Were they fertile enough to bear fruit after all these years? Or were their hearts still hard as the rocks that the commandments were once written on? He even returns to his idea of gentleness by indicating that Jesus didn't stare them down after the incident, shaming them for their sin. He just keeps writing. Really nice work here.
Other patristic authors are less worthy of sharing. John Chrysostom has a sermon series on John that deliberately skips over this particular story and a lot of ancient theologians (especially in the East) follow suit, leading some to believe that they had copies of John that didn't contain these verses. In Against the Pelagians, Book 2, Jerome suggests Jesus was writing out the names of the accusers to to fulfill Jeremiah 17:13 "Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust," (a passage which seems to have been intended to be more poetic than literal). By and large, Augustine's logic seems to have been attractive. Thomas Aquinas carries it forward to the Middle Ages in his mega-commentary Catena Aurea and includes support from Venerable Bede and Alcuin of York to back him up.
In the Reformation, John Calvin comes out swinging against Augustine and approaches the story without interest in allegory:
By this attitude he intended to show that he despised them. Those who conjecture that he wrote this or the other thing, in my opinion, do not understand his meaning. Nor do I approve of the ingenuity of Augustine, who thinks that in this manner the distinction between the Law and the Gospel is pointed out, because Christ did not write on tables of stone, (Exodus 31:18,) but on man, who is dust and earth. For Christ rather intended, by doing nothing, to show how unworthy they were of being heard; just as if any person, while another was speaking to him, were to draw lines on the wall, or to turn his back, or to show, by any other sign, that he was not attending to what was said. Thus in the present day, when Satan attempts, by various methods, to draw us aside from the right way of teaching, we ought disdainfully to pass by many things which he holds out to us.
John Calvin, Calvin's Commentary on John 13:1-11
Gone is the speculative symbolism! Instead, we have a Jesus that's just not listening. Pharisees are coming around, asking questions that they already know the answer to, and Jesus just starts doodling in the sand. That's how little he cares what they have to say. When he says "Let he who is without sin throw the first stone," Calvin reads that as a deliberate reference to their own sinfulness. They know they aren't being sincere. They're scheming, conniving, wretched men trying to kill someone to prove their own point. It's not that the law isn't legitimate; it's that they aren't being legitimate, and they know it. Again, Calvin is sticking to the Scripture pretty thoroughly and avoiding wild speculation about the writing. Well done.
The Reformation seems to be a bit of a hinge in historical interpretation. After the Reformation, commentaries that I can find seem to take a more practical approach to the matter. The symbolic dimension is swallowed up by the practical. Some lean more heavily on WHY he wrote (to avoid meddling in politics, to calm people down, etc.) while others focus on WHAT he wrote (names, sins, passages of the law, etc.). John Wesley is one of the better big-name interpreters to marry the practical and the symbolic, but his notes are still ruthlessly pragmatic:
God wrote once in the Old Testament; Christ once in the New: perhaps the words which he afterward spoke, when they continued asking him. By this silent action, he,
1. fixed their wandering, hurrying thoughts, in order to awaken their consciences: and,
2. signified that he was not then come to condemn but to save the world.
John Wesley, Wesley's Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, John 8:1-11
Obviously there are oodles of others well worth reading, but these were the ones that I thought were worthy of lifting up. They're all respected enough for their words to carry weight, and each seems to represent the general stream of mainstream interpretation within their era.
Ultimately, I'm really pleased with what I found. I expected to find some really wacky stuff, but a shocking majority of commentators avoided wild speculation about the specifics of the writing and interpreted in light of the information that they had, rather than what they didn't have. Frankly, that was my bias from the outset. If the Bible doesn't say what Jesus wrote, it couldn't have been all that important to the story (sorry Jerome). But really, it was phenomenal to see all the directions people went with it. I have a soft spot for that symbolic dimension. It emphasized the weight of each action within the passage in a way that was far beyond the mundane. So what did he write? Beats me. As much as I like Augustine, I'll side with Calvin for the sheer delightful possibility of Jesus rolling his eyes and playing tic tac toe against himself in the dirt while they were trying to talk to him.
Recovering the Sacred: C.S. Lewis, Philip Rieff, and the Cleveland Museum of Art
February 23, 2022 February 23, 2022 ~ Vincent ~ 1 Comment
A while back I wrote about my visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art and my reaction to all of their Mary-oriented medieval art. Today, I want to think about the bigger journey that gallery was a part of. As I walked through the museum, it was wildly apparent that the artistic ideal of society was deteriorating as each age passed. For example, let's look at something from the medieval exhibit:
Crucified Christ, late 1300s
The point of the piece is immediately apparent: this is what the world is all about. Not only does it clearly present an ideal in the person of Jesus and the event of his crucifiction, but you can tell it's a piece that the public was intended to interact with. It belongs in a church with people worshipping nearby. This is a sign intended to draw people's minds to the highest understanding of perfection. It's not a particularly unique piece for the era. The medieval galleries were stuffed with reliquaries, altars, and religious paintings. I can't help but be staggered by the sheer level of devotion towards the sacred that people were expressing.
Now let's look at something from the modern gallery:
Metal Fence, Cady Noland
What's being conveyed? Certainly nothing positive. It's a critique. Perhaps something like "Why build fences when you could build bridges," "America is built on keeping others out," "we need to knock down exclusionary structures," etc. There's no positive statement being made. There's no indication that there's a sacred ideal. If anything, it's just the opposite. The plaque that accompanies this particular piece indicates that the author intended it as a critique of the history of the United States. This is a piece specifically intended to tear down images of the sacred. It's definitely not beautiful. There's also no possible way that a piece like this could be identified as an artistic endeavor outside of a museum. If you popped this in a community center, people wouldn't stop to admire it. They would assume you were doing construction and avoid that part of the building! This is a piece intended for appreciation by cultural elites, not everyday people. Again, this example is anything but unique for the modern gallery. You have your fences, you have your baby carriages full of spray-painted phalluses, conglomerations of nude body parts, etc.
All of this is what came to mind as I read through C.S. Lewis's A Confession:
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening–any evening–would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker's nose;
Waterfalls don't remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I've never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops' brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.
Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d'estaminet.
I'm like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things . . . peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran,
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem. (Poems, p. 3-4)
Right out of the gate, Lewis is striking out at the people who are deconstructing classic visions of beauty. T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is put on blast because there's nothing sterile or dead about the evening sky. The evening is beautiful, melancholy, and momentous, but certainly not sterile. All these other popular poetic metaphors are equally unfitting. People keep taking these visions that should be massive, beautiful, even transcendent, and warping them into things that are mundane and ugly. The leading poets seem intent to warp the things that once inspired us into things that should disgust us.
As someone particularly fond of William Blake, I couldn't help but think of him. He was one of the great masters of subverting the sacred. Take, for example, his poem Infant Sorrow:
My mother groand! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my fathers hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.
This was part of a collection called Songs of Innocence and of Experience. It was a two part collection. In Songs of Innocence, he presented the beautiful ideal of something, and in his later Songs of Experience, he warped it to show how a world-weary mind mind might experience the same circumstance. In this case, we have birth. Is there a miracle of life? In one sense, sure. But in another, there is the horrible burden of life.
The longer he writes, the clearer that basic motif becomes. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell blurs the lines between the sacred and the profane to suggest that both good and evil, in their own way, are sacred. Devils and angels both have wisdom that we need to learn from. He even creates his own mythology and writes grand creation stories about the history of the world. He portrays God the Father (especially as seen in the Old Testament) as hideously oppressive and in constant war against the great spirit of artistic inspiration and human freedom. What was once sacred is now profane as Blake's spirit of freedom descends upon the world.
That's exactly what we have in the contemporary art gallery. We have people eager to call what was once sacred profane. Any sense that something is beautiful or worthy of particular praise is dangerous. Who is one person to tell another what is beautiful? To restrict in any way is wrong. That is the great truth in our era.
It pairs perfectly with the famed sociologist Philip Rieff's critique of modern culture. Historically, a massive part of culture has been that series of restrictions placed on us (via both taboo and law) in the hopes of helping us live a good life. Do you want to be like Jesus? Then don't sin. Do you want to honor the gods? Then don't forget your sacrifices. By coming together around one great vision of purpose and orienting ourselves towards that vision, meaningful community is possible and visions of the sacred are kept. Modern culture, however, no longer has a meaningful vision of the sacred apart from autonomy from all external obligations. People do not long to be a grand embodiment of the good so much as they long to be free to do what they please. Under these circumstances, discussions of good or evil becomes almost laughable because so few people aspire to become more than what they already are:
Evil and immorality are disappearing… mainly because our culture is changing its definition of human perfection. No longer the Saint, but the instinctual Everyman, twisting his neck uncomfortably inside the starched collar of culture, is the communal ideal , to whom men offer tacit prayers for deliverance from their inherited renunciations.
The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 6.
What we end up with is what Rieff calls an anti-culture. It can't bind together or orient people towards a vision of the good life. The only thing really binding us together is mutual disgust at the thought of people telling us how to live, be the source older visions of natural law, religious obligations, or something else entirely. To paraphrase another great thinker, Stanley Hauerwas, the modern story is that we have no story except the story we choose for ourselves (Community of Character, 84). We end up rudderless in a life without meaning, desperately trying to create meaning for ourselves while knowing we just made it all up.
And what of the great thinkers and artists? Historically, their efforts were part of what bound us together. Buonarroti's Creation of Adam, the icon Christ Pantocrator, the stained glass of Sainte-Chapelle and other great works served the public by bringing them together to aspire to be like God. Today's intellectual class does not feel the same burden:
I suspect the children of Israel did not spend much time elaborating a doctrine of the golden calf; they naively danced around it, until Moses, their first intellectual, put a stop to the plain fun and insisted on civilizing them, by submerging their individualities within a communal purpose. Now, although there is some dancing again, the intellectuals mainly sit around and think in awe about the power and perversity of their instincts, disguising their rancorous worship of self in the religion of art.
While Rieff's Moses seems a little elitist for my taste, I think there's truth to what he's trying to get at. We live in a world without a sense of the sacred with intellectuals and artists that would rather root out any remaining bits of transcendence than attempt to build anything that points to more than our own disenchantment and appetite.
That's what I see Lewis lamenting here. The threads that have bound our culture together are unraveling. The waterfall is no longer a sign to point our eyes to God, so much as a mundane thing that might remind us of sex. The glaciers are no longer a sign that we are tiny, limited things in the world, so much as they are reminders of garbage. We have lost the sense that the world is pointing to something greater, and so historic memory of the sacred becomes bizarre. All we can do is ironically poke fun at the old world and trudge through our flattened-out world in frustration and disappointment.
But Lewis points to a solution: don't give in. Don't be someone who loses your sense of wonder. Be fascinated by the things that others think dull. Look at fresh cut crass and delight. Observe the miracle of honey. Taste it and be satisfied. Be astounded by the great cities of Jerusalem and Athens and the ideals they represent. Don't lose hope, and don't start defining yourself by opposition. Yes, he is absolutely being critical of his rivals in this poem, but the great hope he points to is not in opposition. That was Blake's hope. "Opposition is true friendship," he wrote (MHH20; E42) and eternal opposition seems to be the best that the modern anti-culture of self-gratification can offer. Don't be like that. Be amazed. Rejoice in old stories about satyrs, magic, miracles, and devils. Recover the sacred, which never abandoned us even as we attempted to abandon it. Live a life defined by hope and beauty. Be the dunce in the eyes of the elites, "for the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom," (1 Cor. 1:25).
C.S. Lewis's Nerdy Poetry: The Country of the Blind
February 2, 2022 February 2, 2022 ~ Vincent ~ 1 Comment
Most of my experience with C.S. Lewis comes from those approachable classics that sit on many a Christian's bookshelf: The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, A Grief Observed, The Great Divorce and a few others. Only recently have I started to see the more academic, professorial side of him. Books like The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval Literature are way more intense than Narnia, and frankly, they're a bit of a slog. And now, I found out the man wrote poetry! Not just any poetry either. He wrote the nerdiest poetry you'll ever find. These poems were not intended for general audiences. They're just a smart guy playing with ideas in verse. If you enjoy them, great! If you don't get 'em or don't like 'em, I don't think he would particularly care. My current success rate of "getting" his poetry is about 70%. Some of them are loaded with mythology and theory that I'm not familiar with (especially the Greek mythology, which he clearly loves), but the ones that I do get are brilliant. I thought I'd share a couple of them on here along with my thoughts as I work through them.
The Country of the Blind
Hard light bathed them-a whole nation of eyeless men,
Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long
Process, clearly, a slow curse,
Drained through centuries, left them thus.
At some transitional stage, then, a luckless few,
No doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date,
Normal type had achieved snug
Darkness, safe from the guns of heavn;
Whose blind mouths would abuse words that belonged to their
Great-grandsires, unabashed, talking of light in some
Eunuch'd, etiolated,
Fungoid sense, as a symbol of
Abstract thoughts. If a man, one that had eyes, a poor
Misfit, spoke of the grey dawn or the stars or green-
Sloped sea waves, or admired how
Warm tints change in a lady's cheek,
None complained he had used words from an alien tongue,
None question'd. It was worse. All would agree 'Of course,'
Came their answer. "We've all felt
Just like that." They were wrong. And he
Knew too much to be clear, could not explain. The words —
Sold, raped flung to the dogs — now could avail no more;
Hence silence. But the mouldwarps,
With glib confidence, easily
Showed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set
Fools concocting a myth, taking the worlds for things.
Do you think this a far-fetched
Picture? Go then about among
Men now famous; attempt speech on the truths that once,
Opaque, carved in divine forms, irremovable,
Dear but dear as a mountain-
Mass, stood plain to the inward eye.
This one especially has consumed me as of late. I can't help but read it and think about Jesus's response to the disciple's question: why do you speak in parables?
13 This is why I speak to them in parables:
"Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.
14 In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
"'You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15 For this people's heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.' (Matt 13:13-15)
I generally assume that Jesus wants everyone to understand what he's saying. Sure, I might rail against visions of him that are altogether too polite and soft, but by no means do I assume he would intentionally make his points opaque to keep people from understanding them. And we could go back and forth trying to soften the impact of the verse by applying different theological methodology to it (after all, it does say that they closed their eyes first), but it seems like it would be almost impossible to erase the sense that not everyone will understand what Jesus is saying and that that is intentional (John Calvin is smiling down on this paragraph, I'm sure).
Lewis's poem is right in this same vein. We still have people that do not see, but it's not their own willfulness or crafty parables that are keeping them from seeing. They've shut their eyes for so long that their biology has shifted to accommodate their decision. Even if they wanted to see, they lack the capacity. Worse than that, they refuse to confront the reality of their own blindness. They're happy to discuss the world with the small amount of people that can still see, but only insofar as they're treated as complete equals. Whatever is being discussed is primarily understood as a matter of internal experience, rather than external truth. "Of course, we've all felt like that," they croon, completely missing the simple fact that they haven't. Every piece of information being shared is radically different from anything they've ever conceptualized, but rather than admit it, they just insist that they already know and continue on.
What a tremendous way to look at the modern shift in metaphysics. I can't help but think of it in terms of pastoral expectations as they were laid out in Andrew Root's, The Pastor in a Secular Age. In each era, Christians have expected different things from pastors. In the medieval era, the priest had power. Even if the whole service was in Latin and you didn't quite understand how communion worked, the popular imagination had such a strong sense of God's action and a dynamic range of entities beyond human senses that you knew he carried power. He was the bridge between this world and the next. In a magical world, the priest stood as an obvious and clear figure worthy of your attention. With the shift to Protestantism, there was a fundamentally new way of imagining metaphysics. Suddenly, it wasn't just the priest that was responsible for navigating the path between this world and the next; it was the individual believer. You were responsible for what you believed! You had to devote yourself to the highest ideals of Christian life and take responsibility for your own faith if you wanted to please God. Here, we see this tremendous shift towards the pastoral ideal as a professor. People like Luther and Calvin are the obvious legendary figures in this tradition, but the example Root provides is Johnathan Edwards. According to legend, Johnathan Edwards studied and prayed for thirteen hours every day. And his congregation was happy! They wanted to understand the intricacies of the world around them and the claims that were being made in the Bible, so if the pastor preached an hour long sermon that relied on multiple commentaries and theological bigwigs? Awesome! Bring it on. These were people that strove to see. They wanted to know the nature of the universe, and no watery spirituality would be an acceptable substitute.
Root details a long history of philosophical shifts that slowly lead to modernity, but as we approach our own era, the assumptions about what a pastor does have totally shifted. A pastor does not tell objective truths. That's what math and science are for! No, a pastor works in the realm of values. They tell you how to live a good life. They help you understand who you are. They belong in the humanities section of a university, not the sciences side. Their value comes from their ability to befriend people, reflect an identity for others to consider, and build a massive church with multiple satellites to reflect the vitality of the community. The ideal pastor is a mix between an entrepreneur and an instagram influencer, encouraging us to try on a way of living that will make us happy. We moved from a world in which the Church was expected to teach objective truths about the world around us to a world in which the church was expected to help us feel subjective somethings within ourselves.
Unfortunately for moderns, Scripture is devilishly difficult to cast as something that's primarily concerned with subjective feelings. The whole of the book bursts with objective claims about creation! And yet, religious dialogue is often dominated by what feels right and how we can live moral, decent lives. Not that either of these are inherently bad things, of course, but when they're uprooted from the metaphysical grounding of the objective claims that surround them, they wither and shift whatever way the wind blows. Our cultural hesitance to let the audacious claims of Scripture be what they are muddies them considerably and betrays a certain unwillingness to claim them as true knowledge. Christians and non-Christians alike are put into a position where truth is what we make of it. We fail to see the reality around us because we're so busy constructing our own narrative that suits us.
We do not see.
Even the claims in Scripture start to look less and less like truth claims and more and more like "sheer metaphors" and "myths." What if Jesus was not actually Jesus? What if he's only intended to be a metaphor for humanity's capacity for good? What if Jesus's resurrection is no longer an actual resurrection, but a symbol intended to reflect the eternal resurrection of hope and goodness in the world? That slow erosion of the claim slowly eats away at it, giving more and more authority to us and less and less to the claim itself. Symbolic meaning can always be uncovered in an objective event, but once the event or story is stripped of objectivity, not only does it lose the core of its meaning, but the possibility for symbolism becomes infinite. Without any semblance of authority, the claim exists only to allow others an opportunity to create their own meaning. The "divine forms, irremovable" that were once so obvious and clear to every eye have become "symbols of abstract thought;" ideas to toy with and little more.
The ultimate consequence is a sort of de-evolution. Lewis never was shy about suggesting that things in the premodern world were better, and here he's said it in an incredibly direct way. The people he's considering aren't portrayed as the same bipartite beings that were created in Genesis: "God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life," (Gen 2:7). Their descriptors lack that sense of divine spark. The language surrounding the blind creatures is primitive and earthy. They are "mouldwarps" with "fungoid" ways of describing things. They lack that spirit that separates them from the plants that preceded them.
And yet, the poem isn't just a gripe about the good 'ol days. At least, I don't think it is. It's profoundly melancholy. Some of these creatures still see. They see the grandeur of the stars, the waves, the human form, and the misty dawn. But even as they see the wonders around them, they have so few to to share it with. By the eyes they were given, they are able to see tremendous beauty, but they also become the bearers of an incredible sense of loneliness. What Christian in the postmodern era has not felt like that? Who has not lamented the inability of others to see the throngs of angels singing, the cloud of witnesses watching, the divine spark that lingers in every eye, and the glory of God in every rock? But attempts to uncover the transcendent turn shallow all too quickly. Even semi-regular churchgoers are all too often concerned with mere morality and tradition than the vibrant eternity around them, frustrating the Christian all the more. To see is to be lonely and burdened. How do you awaken others to the world?
Part of me wants to cut the intensity of the poem by suggesting that the claim isn't quite what it is. It sounds hopelessly arrogant to claim to see when everyone else is blind. To say that you understand a reality that the rest of the world can only hopelessly grasp at until they are somehow granted sight is brash! But didn't Jesus make those claims? Isn't that the whole of the history of Christianity? Lewis has claimed to see, and while it would be more comfortable to mask the arrogance of claiming to know truth, it's critically important for us to let his statement stand and consider it not as arrogance, but as humility in the face of a truth beyond himself.
The History of Mary Veneration: A Protestant Perspective
November 29, 2021 May 26, 2022 ~ Vincent ~ 1 Comment
My wife and I went to the Cleveland Museum of Art a few weeks ago. As a theology nerd, I went straight to the Christian art section hoping to have a little bit of a mini-retreat there in the gallery. Unfortunately for me, a MASSIVE portion of the art focused on Mary:
And this one that really took the cake…
Mary's coronation as the Queen of Heaven.
It was hard to have a spiritual response when everything was so Mary-centric! When I looked up, Mary's gaze was the first thing I encountered. Jesus wasn't even looking at me most of the time! If he wasn't looking off in the distance, he was looking up at Mary, drawing even more attention to her. Naturally, that led to the question, "when did Christians start venerating Mary and why did Protestants stop doing it?" Some Protestants might agree that Mary is uniquely worthy of admiration, but even the most intense Protestant admiration is a far cry from the veneration that she enjoys in Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. So what happened? Did we ditch something that was passed down from the beginning, or did we actually manage to strip away a medieval innovation that had little to do with the Christianity of the apostles?
The uncomfortable truth about Mary veneration is that the historical evidence is a lot less black or white than most parties would like it to be. The veneration of Mary started waaaaay earlier than your average Protestant would hope, but it also happened waaaay later than your average Catholic assumes. First and second century Christians would have found any prayers to Mary a totally alien practice, but in the midst of the raging battles against heresy in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries, it started to develop as a way of preserving the same orthodoxy that Protestants and Catholics share today. In the centuries that followed, it continued to grow and intensify, leading to eventual skepticism from Protestants that wanted to go back to the basics. Even though our tradition ceased the practice of Marian veneration (and had a reasonable claim on recovering early orthodoxy in doing so), a study of how the practice came to be can help us appreciate how that veneration helped our theological ancestors cling to orthodoxy at a time when the nature of Jesus was under fire.
Let's start our journey with the first century. Easy enough, since there's no evidence for Marian veneration in this era at all. If we take the Scriptures as the clearest evidence of first-century Christian thought and practice, there's just not much there. The gospels bring up Mary sparingly, usually during the birth narrative, and the epistles only reference her a handful of times, usually indirectly (for example, Galatians 4:4 reads "God sent forth his Son born of a woman"). If you're going Sola Scriptura, Mary is a relatively minor Bible character that exists within the narrative as Jesus's mom. You can definitely find some commentaries out there that try to push the mystical importance of certain passages. For example, some Catholic commentators make much about John 19:26-27: "When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, 'Woman, here is your son,' and to the disciple, 'Here is your mother.' You can read that to mean that Jesus is mystically speaking to every disciple today, encouraging them to accept Jesus as their own mother… or you can conclude that Jesus was worried about his mom and sent her off with John. The latter seems a great deal more likely than the former. Emphasizing the small passages that Mary does appear in doesn't solve the big problem: nobody in the Scriptures is venerating Mary or explicitly telling others to do it.
There aren't a ton of indisputably first-Century Christian documents readily available outside of the Scriptures. We could look at documents like the Didiche (also known as The Teachings of the Apostles) and the Epistle of Barnabas (both of which tend to be considered first-century) and note that neither of them mention Mary at all. First-century Christians just don't seem particularly concerned with the place of Mary within the order of Christianity. She was Jesus' mom and that's about it.
So, onwards to the second century… in which evidence is still pretty scant, all things considered. The Catacomb of Priscilla has the first recorded painting of Mary and Jesus:
There's a few other paintings from the second century as well, all of which depict Mary as the mother of Jesus. Nothing really new here, but they do speak to the broader concern regarding Mary in this era: was Mary actually Jesus' mom? The big heresy in the second century was docetism; the belief that Jesus wasn't really human, so much as he was a spiritual being that looked human. Was he born? Not really. Spiritual beings can't be born. There wasn't a consensus among the docetists as to where Jesus did come from. Some claimed that Jesus only appeared to live among us while others suggested that Jesus was just an average man that was born by Mary and the spirit of the Christ descended upon him at his baptism. One famous heretic by the name of Marcion went so far as to totally remove all birth stories from the Scriptures, solving the problem of Jesus' birth by just having him show up on the scene as a fully-grown man. Regardless of the specifics, the basic message of docetism was the same: Jesus Christ wasn't really a man, but he was really God. Mary starts to garner more interest from orthodox Christians because she establishes both the human-ness and the divinity of Jesus.
The big theologians in this era reference Mary while they're making arguments against the docetists. For example, take this passage from Tertullian's On the Flesh of Christ:
Why is Christ man and the Son of man, if he has nothing of man, and nothing from man? Unless it be either that man is anything else than flesh, or man's flesh comes from any other source than man, or Mary is anything else than a human being?
One popular technique used to emphasize the crucial role of Mary is recapitulation (retelling the story of humanity but with all of the bad things from the fall being fixed by similar events during salvation). For example, here's Tertullian again: "As Eve had believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel," (On the Flesh of Christ, Ch.17). And here's a longer example from the famous second-century apologist, Justin Martyr::
[Jesus] became man by the Virgin, in order that the disobedience which proceeded from the serpent might receive its destruction in the same manner in which it derived its origin. For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy, when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her that the Spirit of the Lord would come upon her, and the power of the Highest would overshadow her: wherefore also the Holy Thing begotten of her is the Son of God; and she replied, 'Be it unto me according to your word,' (Luke 1:38).
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Ch 100
Recapitulation holds to that same anti-docetist thought pattern: if Eve sinned and humanity was doomed through the error a woman, how can humanity saved without the faithfulness of a woman? We need a Mary that genuinely participated in the story of salvation to reverse the damage that was done during the fall. Similar ideas float around in the works of other theologians in this era (Irenaeus, for example) and even start to pop up in some of the apocryphal writings. The Gospel of James, for example, is a retelling of the story of Christ's birth which explicitly includes a (really uncomfortable) section in which a midwife inspects Mary's hymen after the birth to make sure that she was genuinely a virgin. Jesus isn't just a regular baby; he's a miracle baby! He's a man that's also God! She's genuinely his mother, but the birth is miraculous and mysterious.
Onward to the third century! Mary continues to increase in stature. The teacher of teachers, Origen of Alexandria is supposedly the very first person to write the word "theotokos" (mother of God) down as a title for Mary. Not only would this be remarkable because of the level of authority a title like that naturally bestows upon the listener (it's a fair bit more impressive sounding than "disciple" or "deacon"), but because this is the exact title that will start to normalize Mary veneration in the 5th century. Tying this title to such an ancient and dignified teacher would lend an incredible amount of legitimacy to the practice! But in all of his recorded writings, Origen never used the word "theotokos." Not even once. A 5th century author, Socrates of Constantinople, made that claim while he was attempting to dismiss the objections of someone named "Nestorius":
Origen also, in the third volume of his Commentaries on the Apostolic Epistle to the Romans, gives an ample exposition of the sense in which the term Theotokos is used. It is therefore obvious that Nestorius had very little acquaintance with the old theologians[.]
Ecclesiastical History 7.32.17
Unfortunately for Socrates of Constantinople, we have a copy of Origen's commentary on Romans and can clearly see that no such passage exists. Not only does it not exist, but Origen never uses the same language of high veneration that later authors will use. Despite some poor claims that continue forward into modernity, Origen's writings don't have any real jumping off point that naturally leads to the veneration of Mary.
I bring up this false claim because it indicates that things are really starting to get moving. The water is starting to get muddied. Even though the claims don't have much legitimacy, the fact that someone made such a claim specifically targeting this era reflects that Mary's status within the faith is growing. Origen may not use that particular power-phrase, but he does focus on Mary even more than most previous theologians. We start to see Mary stuff start to pop up more and more in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. Somewhere in this timeframe (depending on which person is doing the dating), we even see see the Sub tuum praesidium hymn pop up for the first time:
Beneath your compassion,We take refuge, O Theotokos [God-bearer]:do not despise our petitions in time of trouble:but rescue us from dangers, only pure, only blessed one.
Sub tuum praes., earliest manuscript of which is from a Coptic fragment known as John Rylands papyrus 470
We still regularly see theologians say that Mary was sinful and there are very few clear recommendations of praying to her from leading Christian figures, but language about perpetual virginity that started popping up in the second century is carrying forward. She is not only a mother, but she is a mother that remained ever-virgin. And again, we have the odd scraps of evidence (like the Sub tuum papyrus) that seem to suggest that some communities are starting to pray to Mary and hold her in particularly high esteem. As we get more thoroughly into the fourth century, big-name theologians like Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus start using the phrase "theotokos." The mother of God has officially arrived.
We could spend ages looking at the slow evolution of the practice of Marian veneration, but I think I've already established the trend— Marian veneration slowly developed as a way of battling heresies that claimed that Jesus was not both all-man and all-God. She established both realities; her miraculous birth established Christ's divinity, while her humanity established Christ's humanity. But the fifth century offers one more large leap in the history of Mary veneration: the Council of Ephesus and their official endorsement of the title "theotokos."
A fifth-century archbishop by the name of Nestorius didn't approve of the title "theotokos" that some Christians had started using (yes, this is the same Nestorius that Socrates of Constantinople made up a fake quote to argue against). Mary couldn't have given birth to God. God is eternal! God has neither beginning nor end! So he recommended the title "Christotokos" (mother of Christ) as a more accurate title for Mary. She gave birth to the human aspect of Jesus, but was not truly the mother of the divine trinity. The ancestors of orthodox Christianity noted that this effectively split Jesus into two parts: the human and the divine. The human part was born, but the divine part wasn't. Mary was the mother of half of Jesus, but the other half descended after the fact. If Jesus' divinity and humanity could be isolated and held responsible for different events, did Jesus work miracles, or was that just his divine half? Did Jesus die on the cross, or was that just his human half? A split Christ was no Christ at all. They insisted that Jesus had to be both God and man, not two separate aspects that could be split for the sake of certain events. Cyril of Alexandria, acting in accordance with both the Pope and a synod of Egyptian bishops, wrote the famous Twelve Anathemas Against Nestorius, the first of which openly affirmed the language of the theotokos:
If anyone will not confess that the Emmanuel is very God, and that therefore the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God, inasmuch as in the flesh she bore the Word of God made flesh [as it is written, The Word was made flesh] let him be anathema.
The First of Cyril's Twelve Anathemas Against Nestorius
When Nestorius didn't relent, the Council of Ephesus officially followed through on Cyril's anathemas. There's a lot of politics and lofty theological argumentation behind all of that, but note the true focus of the argument: the nature of Christ. While Mary's title is the most obvious sticking point, in all of the official documentation surrounding this controversy, almost all of it is primarily concerned with the nature of Christ. Only the first of the twelve anathemas mentions Mary, and none of the canon judgements of the Council of Ephesus mention her at all. What we're seeing here is that same tendency to use Mary to establish Christ's divine and human nature, but elevated to the highest point thus far. Now Mary has been given an obligatory title, and one that carries a fair amount of prestige at that.
Now, you might say, "Wait, that just establishes that it's legitimate to call Mary the mother of God. What about the veneration? That's what we're here for!" It continues to ramp up over time after this decision. We're still a long way off from our Salve Reginas, Hail Marys, and the title "the Queen of Heaven," all of which start popping up between the 11th and 13th century, but the Council of Ephesus really does kick off a period of renewed emphasis on Mary and the first really decisive evidence of large-scale veneration. After this event, churches started being named in honor of Mary and influential theologians like Augustine of Hippo started focusing even more time and attention on doctrines elevating the position of Mary. What was born out of a conflict regarding establishing Christ's nature resulted in new titles, new theological lines in the sand, and new heresies defined around Mary. In the following centuries, the veneration of Mary would continue to increase. Devotional practices would be oriented towards Mary. Theologians would continue to make even bolder claims about Mary's importance. Monasteries especially would introduce worship practices to appeal to Mary. What we've observed here in the fifth century is the first bud that would eventually bloom into full high Marian veneration during the Middle Ages.
Now onto the big question: why did Protestants reject Mary veneration? If it was built up over centuries specifically to avoid certain heresies, why get rid of it? Perhaps the simplest reason is that they were trying to reform the faith in the pattern of early Christianity. They thought the medieval church had strayed too far from the pattern set out by early Christianity, and so they turned to the Scriptures and tried to get back to the basics, but now they weren't asking the same questions they were 500 years before. There was no doubt that Jesus was both God and man. Nobody wondered if he was some kind of purely spiritual being or a really nice guy who was acting in cooperation with a divine spirit. Conversations about Mary were no longer necessary to battle active heresies about Christ's nature, and with the new radical emphasis on Scripture, a suspicion of tradition, and an emphasis on the priesthood of all believers, many of the core tenants of Mariology were completely removed. Why should anyone pray to Mary? It's not modeled in the Scriptures or in the writings of the early church fathers. Besides that, what would make her more important than anyone else? In Luther's words:
Your prayers, O Christian, are as dear to me as hers. And why? Because if you believe that Christ lives in you as much as in her, then you can help me as much as she.
Luther's 1522 sermon on the Feast of our Lady's Nativity;
Unfortunately, there's no good English translation readily available, but excellent details are available through Grisar's work on Luther: "Werke," Weim. ed., 10, 3, p. 321 f. 499. as Cited in Hartmann Grisar, Luther, trans. E. M. Lamond (Project Gutenberg, 2015) p. 503.
There was a radical equality being emphasized in Protestantism, and the elevation of Mary did not fit. The hundreds of years of debate that crafted this practice seemed more like years of embedded pagan influence and error than compelling doctrinal formulation.
As I poured over articles to gather all of this info, I found more than a few cries from within Protestantism that Mary needs to be returned to a prominent role (if not her rightful historic role) within our theology. Perhaps… and perhaps not. There can be little doubt that there's no harm in emphasizing the role of Jesus' mom within the Scriptures. It is doubtless that she was a person of outstanding faith and moral character on top of being a person intimately involved in God's work of salvation. At the same time, I don't know that I'm eager to return to praying special prayers to the "high queen of heaven." The major Protestant creeds all keep Christ enshrined as both 100% God and 100% man. While I readily concede that there are plenty of self-proclaimed Christians today that disagree with that basic point of orthodoxy, they're certainly not uniquely Protestant. The early Protestants set out to turn away from medieval innovations and return to the basics Christianity while preserving Christian orthodoxy, and I think they did a reasonably good job of it in the case of Mary veneration. I think it's lovely that the first few centuries of Christians share our view of Mary and could pray alongside us without any qualms. At the same time, I like to think we can appreciate where some of the emphasis on Mary came from in the case of our Catholic and Eastern Orthodox siblings. Their practices were born out of a defense of the same orthodoxy that we hold dear. Even if we don't agree with their specific expression of piety, I think we can at least appreciate where those practices came from and how they're trying to preserve orthodox Christianity in their own way.
Mind you, I'm still probably not about to have a spiritual experience at the Cleveland Art Museum.
Asherah and TikTok Apologetics
November 9, 2021 November 9, 2021 ~ Vincent ~ Leave a comment
@maklelan
#stitch with @the.bible.teacher
♬ original sound – Dan McClellan
One of the students in my youth group sent me this TikTok and wanted to know if it was true. He always finds the best stuff to ask about. A lot of people don't know much about Baal and Asherah, and there's been a significant amount of theorizing done by different scholars on that point, so I thought I'd share the answer that I sent him. And before you ask, YES, I absolutely sent a teenager a giant answer to a one minute TikTok. He's a smart guy. He can handle it.
The professor in that video represents one school of thought regarding the creation of the Bible. I would argue that it's a very unchristian way of thinking (which is supported by the fact that the creator of this theory is a professed atheist). The core assumption here is that the Bible isn't actually true, so much as it is an expression of exploitative power. Note how Dan said that Josiah wanted to "centralize the cult" and rewrote everything before that date to make Asherah seem evil. Before that date, "Asherah worship was 100% normative." Right there he's told us that he thinks that the Bible is a document that powerful people created to control others. A king wrote it to gain better control over his populace. If you read the article he's referencing, the woman who created this theory (Francesca Stavrakopoulou) wrote that Asherah worship was banned primarily because of sexism. Men wanted to control women, and so they had to remove religious iconography that honored femininity. Both of them assume that the Bible is a tool of oppression created to control people, rather than a book of liberation that is trying to tell us the truth about existence.
Before I get into what orthodox Christians believe (orthodox meaning those Christians that believe the basic tenants of the faith that have been handed down for a few thousand years), I do want to look at the evidence Dan and Francesca provided. They gave us some dates as to when the documents were written, and they referenced some archaeological information. The dates about when the Bible was written are very disputable. I could get into the weeds about different methods of dating the Bible, but let's keep it simple. Problem 1: paper does not preserve well. How can you know how old an idea is when the primary way of recording said information is so easily destroyed? Problem 2: how can you know the date of ideas that were passed down orally before they were written down? If I tell you a story and it's so good that you tell it to your kids who tell it to your grandkids and then your grandkids finally write it down, how would a person that found the paper know how old the story was? They couldn't! And that only gets more complicated when you consider that the paper might get destroyed, which would make it even harder to trace the idea. Whenever someone starts dating the different parts of the Bible and claim that certain parts are "written late," what they're usually trying to do is suggest that those parts are suspect. They are not authoritative. They are not true. Given that there's no way to inerrantly trace the history of the story written on that paper, the claim that certain parts are "written late" boils down to, "I don't believe that." Which is fine. They're welcome to say they disagree with what's written in the Bible at any time. Many people do. Pretending that it's rooted beyond reasonable doubt in the history of the document itself is just inaccurate.
As to the second piece of evidence (that archaeology proves that people worshiped God's wife before King Josiah), they're only half write. There have been archaeological findings that Canaanites worshiped three gods: a dad (El) a mom (Asherah) and their son (Baal). If it sounds vaguely like the trinity, it really doesn't the more you get into it. It's much closer to the Greek gods than anything else. They fight with each other, they go on adventures, etc.. This archeological evidence is absolutely true. The claim that the Bible is making on this point is that some Israelites were tempted to worship like the Canaanites and add a mom and a son to their worship ceremonies, casting God as the Canaanite father God, El. Was it "100% normative" for all Israelites? No! That's the whole point of the story! A lot of Israelites were doing it, but they weren't supposed to be doing it. That's why it was upsetting! To say, "we have archaeological evidence that PROVES that everyone was worshiping Asherah in that era" is impossible, since no archaeological evidence can prove that literally everyone in a region was doing anything; they can only prove popular practices. The Bible agrees that worshiping Asherah and Baal were popular practices, and the archeological evidence reflects that as well. The question isn't "was the common man worshiping Asherah?" We all agree on this point. The question is "was that whole God thing just made up after the fact because powerful people didn't like Asherah and Baal?" Christianity says no. These professors say yes. The truth is not in the evidence; it's in your core belief. Is God actually real and has he revealed himself to certain people throughout history? Or is the Bible a document that primarily exists only to oppress and marginalize people? At the end of the day, the real question here is much less exciting than it pretends to be: is Christianity true? And that question has been around since the dawn of Christendom.
We've looked at their core assumptions and we've evaluated their evidence, so let's move on to the real feast: what is it that Christians actually DO believe on this particular issue? We believe that God is actually real and he's the only god that exists. He is not the husband of Asherah and the father of Baal because those two are not actually real. He is also not a biological man. Jesus was a man in the incarnation, but the triune God in its fullness is not biologically male. Even that person of the trinity known as the Father is not male. The name "father" denotes his closeness to us and his love for us, not his biological chromosomes. Christians believe that this God that really does exists has communicated with certain people since the beginning of time. The Bible is a record of this, and it sets us free from the tyranny of this world's power structures by pointing us towards the truth. If an orthodox Christian were to respond to these professors, I think they'd just be sad that their assumptions about the world are so different from ours. Where we assume that the Bible is setting people free, they assume it is a tool of oppression. One of us is right and one of us is wrong. I'd say that it's a matter of faith, but that misrepresents what Christian faith is. It is not a guess that might be wrong and might be right. It is, to quote Hebrews, "assurance of what we do not see," (Heb 11:1). I don't think that God might exist. I know he does (though my evidence would probably look as sketchy to those professors as their evidence is to me). Rather than say that it's a matter of faith, I'll keep it simple and just say this: they're wrong.
Equipping Congregations for Theological Conversations
November 1, 2021 ~ Vincent ~ Leave a comment
Exciting news! I had the opportunity to write an article for MinistryMatters.com about how knowledge of great theologians helps Christians evangelize. Check it out:
https://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/11098/equipping-congregations-for-theological-conversations
Through the Eye of an ACTUAL Needle: The Fake Gate Theory
October 12, 2021 October 12, 2021 ~ Vincent ~ 5 Comments
Matthew 19: 23-24 famously reads:
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
There are two popular interpretations for the phrase "eye of a needle." The first theory is that it is a reference to the tiny hole at the top of a sewing needle. Simple enough. The second theory is that it is a reference to a gate with the name "the eye of the needle" that was in first century Jerusalem. The gate was so small that anyone that hoped to get a camel through would have to take all of their baggage off the camel, get it down to its knees, and kind of shimmy the camel through the tiny opening.
You can see why this is important for Bible readers. Either Jesus is saying that it is impossible for a rich man to get into Heaven, or he's saying that it's really challenging for a rich man to get into heaven. There's a big difference between impossible and barely possible. So which is it? Is it hard or impossible? What is the eye of the needle?
After a little research, I wasn't able to find a trustworthy modern commentary that genuinely advocated for the gate theory. In varying detail, they all disproved it with archaeology, translations from the Greek, interpretive history, and the plain sense of the story. That being said, I didn't find a single place that really poured out all of the evidence for the reader's consideration (especially when it came to the history of interpretation). So here we go! This is my attempt to round up all of that evidence and hand it over to you.
The archaeological evidence for the gate theory is pretty poor. There's no legitimate evidence of a gate known as the "eye of the needle" gate existing in Jesus' lifetime. I would cite something, but you can't cite evidence proving a lack of evidence! A quick google search reveals that even modern claims about eye of the needle gates in Jerusalem are dubious at best. There's one small Orthodox church that claims that they have the actual gate that Jesus was referring to (which looks suspiciously like a hole in an old wall). There's also a handful of travel blogs from people that claim they went to the eye of the needle gate. None of these claims are citation-worthy. Church websites often make dubious claims (see my article about fake quotes from famous saints for more church website sins) and the travel blogs pictures feature people smiling by a variety of totally different "eye of the needle" gates. Were there gates in different times and locations referred to as eye of the needle gates? Yes. There's gates like that in German castles from the Middle Ages and obviously a handful in Jerusalem today that claim to be eye of the needle gates. That being said, there's no record of a gate being referred to by that title until after the year 1000. In first century Jerusalem, there is absolutely no evidence that such a gate existed. Strike one.
The Greek manuscript makes the gate theory even less viable. If the "eye of a needle" was the name of a specific gate or a reference to a type of gate, that would make the language a title. You'd have to use the same words, "eye of the needle," every time you talked about it because you're not actually talking about eyes and needles; you're talking about a type of gate known as an eye of the needle gate. The story comes up three times in the Gospels (Matthew 19, Mark 10, Luke 18) and each author uses slightly different words for this phrase. Matthew calls the eye of a needle the "trypēmatos rhaphidos" (τρυπήματος 'ῥαφίδος), while Mark calls it the "trymalias tēs rhaphidos" (τρυμαλιᾶς τῆς 'ῥαφίδος). Both are using the same word for needle (referring specifically to a tailor's needle), but they're using different language to talk about the eye of that needle. Luke not only adds a third option for the eye, but uses the word for a surgeon's needle rather than the word for a tailor's needle: trēmatos belonēs (τρήματος βελόνης ). If they're trying to use a title for a specific kind of gate, they're all over the map! Two of the three of them are using the wrong words to refer to that gate. If, on the other hand, they're talking about needles and the tiny holes in them, the differences in their accounts present no problem. Strike two.
Now to the history of interpretation. Most commentaries I looked at claimed that the gate theory was a legend from the Middle Ages, but there wasn't much detail provided beyond that. I saw a lot of people throw around dates like the 9th century (maybe), the 15th century (definitely wrong), and the 19th century (right out), but few provided direct quotes from their sources, much less cited sources at all.
The oldest reference I could find that's absolutely airtight comes from Thomas Aquinas' megacommentary, Catena Aurea. It packed great quotes from multiple noteworthy church fathers into one convenient commentary. In the section on Matthew 19, he provides the following commentary from Anselm of Canturbury:
It is explained otherwise; That at Jerusalem there was a certain gate, called, The needle's eye, through which a camel could not pass, but on its bended knees, and after its burden had been taken off; and so the rich should not be able to pass along the narrow way that leads to life, till he had put off the burden of sin, and of riches, that is, ceasing to love them.
Anselm of Canterbury as cited in Catena Aurea, Thomas Aquinas, CCEL Edition.
I can't find a primary source from Anselm on this one, nor can I find anyone else who was able to track one down, so we'll just have to take Thomas's word for it. Anselm wrote in the early 12th century, so there's definitely an uncomfortable gap here. Sources legitimately interested in uncovering the source of the theory often quote this as the its first official appearance, and I have to agree. I can't find an earlier source than Thomas quoting Anselm. Did Anselm say it? Probably. Did he get it from someone else? I have to imagine he did. Someone that spent most of his life in England seems an unlikely candidate to start spouting off about gates in Jerusalem.
There are some people that point to an eastern bishop from the 11th century named Theophylact as the actual originator of the gate theory. If he did, it's bizarre that he didn't write it down anywhere and actively contradicted himself in writing. Here's what he says on the matter in his commentary on Matthew:
As long as a man is rich and he has in excess while others do not have even the necessities, he can in no way enter the kingdom of heaven. But when all riches have been shed, then he is not rich and so he can enter. For it is just as impossible for a man with wealth to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. See how Christ first said it was difficult to enter, but here that it is completely impossible.
Theophylact's Commentary on Matthew, Ch. 19, trans. Christopher Stade.
You can hear where he gets a little close: "when all riches has been shed, then he is not rich and so he can enter…" If there was a tiny gate where you had to get all of your gear off your camel and shimmy it through, the process might be something like that. But note that he still definitively says that it is impossible for a rich man to enter. Theophylact is describing the process of a rich person becoming poor, not talking about unpacking your camel for the sake of a narrow gate. Just to cover our bases, let's see what he says about the same story in Mark 10:
Understand 'hard' here to mean 'impossible'. For it is impossible for the rich man to be saved. This is clear from the example which the Lord gives, saying, 'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.' For it is impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.
Theophylact's Commentary on Mark Ch. 10, trans. Christopher Stade.
Yeah, this guy is absolutely not the originator of the gate theory. Some people just misread his commentary on Matthew. This is why primary sources are so critical: because people don't always say what others claim they did.
There are a number of proto-claims that come way closer to the gate theory than Theophylact did. For example, check out this commentary from Jerome (a Roman theologian from the 4th century):
By this saying it is shown to be not difficult but impossible. For if, in the same way that a camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle, so a rich man cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven, then no rich man will be saved. But if we read Isaiah, how camels of Midian and Ephah come to Jerusalem with gifts and offerings, and those that were previously bent and distorted by the depravity of vices entered the gates of Jerusalem, we will see how even these camels to which the rich are compared, when they have laid aside their heavy burden of sins and the crookedness of their whole body, they can enter through the narrow and strait road that leads to life.
Jerome's Commentary on Matthew, trans. Scheck, 220-221.
Like Theolphylact, Jerome EXPLICITLY says that it is impossible. Buuuut there is that passage in Isaiah (60:6) where camels with loads of fancy gifts and people who were bent and distorted get into Jerusalem. Sooo maybe rich people can get in too if they lay aside their riches and vices? A bit of a comforting stretch for a passage saying that something is impossible. In his commentary, John Broadus goes so far as to suggest that Anselm got the idea from a misreading of Jerome's fanciful explanation. A bit of a stretch, I think, but the connection between proto-claims like this and the gate theory are definitely real.
There's a definite instinct in the history of this passage to try to soften the blow. Whether the eye of the needle is made a gate, the camel is made a rope (a suggested mistranslation that's just not viable, as you can tell from the simple fact that no reputable Bible translates it that way), or the reading of the story is followed up with long statements about how being rich is actually fine if you manage to resist the allure of your riches (Clement of Alexandria among others), there are a lot of people that want this to be a little easier to swallow. Which is surprising, because all of this evidence pales in comparison with the words of Jesus in the following verses (Matt 19: 25-26):
When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, "Who then can be saved?"
Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."
Jesus literally says that the point of bringing up the whole camel and needle thing in the first place was to say that it is impossible. He's intentionally using an absurd image to talk about something that can't happen! If his words aren't enough to put the final nail in the coffin of the gate theory, I don't know what would be.
The Historic Challenge of Christian Parenting
September 24, 2021 September 24, 2021 ~ Vincent ~ 3 Comments
I just ran across this quote from the famous 4th century Christian preacher, John Chrysostom:
We spare neither labors nor means in order to teach our children secular sciences, so that they can serve well the earthly authorities. Only the knowledge of the holy Faith, the service of the Heavenly King are a matter of indifference to us. We allow them to attend spectacles but we care little whether they go to Church and stand within it reverently. We demand an account from them of what they learned in their secular institutes—why do we not demand an account from them of what they heard in the Lord's house?
as cited by Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation, trans. Fr. Seraphim Rose, 331
It was kind of a shock to read! Here's a man in our heralded Christian past, preaching in an era which I all too readily assume was full of devotion and piety, and he's addressing the same thing that we face today: parents often care more about secular education than they do the Christian faith. After all, life is long! A child has a whole lifetime to think about God. The window for getting into a good school? That's approaching fast. So should their child attend church or piano lessons? Wake up early on Sunday for an entry-level job, or head over to worship? The piano lessons and job look better on a college application than anything the Church has to offer. A good application means a good school. A good school means a good job. A good job means a stable income and a higher chance of job satisfaction. Job satisfaction means a higher chance of being happy! And what more could a person ask for than a happy child? Conversion can happen anytime; the road to happiness is happening now. Children need to get on or get left behind.
It's easy to suggest that this is a phenomenon that only really effects nominal Christians that attend church on Christmas and Easter, but it's not quite as simple as that. Even the great Augustine of Hippo, bishop and theologian extraordinaire, had parents that prioritized his academic education before his faith journey. When he took a concubine (or started living with his girlfriend, to try to translate a weird ancient idea into a modern one), his Christian mom was surprisingly calm about the whole thing. If anything, she was glad they weren't getting married:
The reason why she showed no such concern was that she was afraid that the hope she placed in me could be impeded by a wife. This was not the hope which my mother placed in you for the life to come, but the hope which my parents entertained for my career that I might do well out of the study of literature. Both of them, as I realized, were very ambitious for me: my father because he hardly gave a thought to you at all, and his ambitions for me were concerned with mere vanities; my mother because she thought it would do no harm and would be a help to set me on the way towards you, if I studied the traditional pattern of a literary education. That at least is my conjecture as I try to recall the characters of my parents.
Augustine, Confessions, trans. Chadwick, p. 27
In Confessions, Augustine almost NEVER says anything bad about his momma. She is the shining pinnacle of saintliness that follows him around, praying for his conversion and hoping that her son might know God! But even SHE buys in to the theory that he needs to put his studies first while he's young and then maybe someday he can convert when he's nice and settled. This isn't just a thought pattern for nominal Christians; this is a pervasive way of thinking for a lot of Christian parents.
Andrew Root talks extensively about this in his book, The End of Youth Ministry. He suggests that each society has a different vision of what a parent is supposed to be. Obviously, a good parent produces happy children. That tends to be universal. But what does it mean to be happy? Is happiness luxury? Elevated social standing? Religious identity? What does the culture say that happiness is? Because regardless of whether or not you personally affirm it, you're going to find yourself influenced by it:
It would be super weird for even me (the theologian and husband of a pastor) to say [to my next-door neighbor], "Yes, [my children are] doing very good. Owen fasted all week and saw two visions. And Maisy felt the deep conviction of the Holy Spirit and has entered a time of confession and penance. She wore our family hair shirt to school today. It made gym class difficult, but that's the point: doing penance for sin isn't easy!" There was a time in history when this might have been exactly how a person would respond. But not today. The moral imagination has changed, and if I did respond like this, even a churchgoing neighbor would make all sorts of moral interpretations about me… My neighbor might even call social services, assuming that I'm some crazy religious freak, because my sense of the good feels wrong to her. And what would give her the moral high ground is her assumption that my poor kids are being kept from living a full life.
Andrew Root, The End of Youth Ministry, p. 25
So what is good parenting today? What is that thing that our society strives to achieve? For people in the eras of Augustine and Chrysostom, it was clearly tied to an increase in wealth and standing. Are things so different today? Not to suggest that the core of all goodness is located in a person's pocketbook, but we clearly assume that more money will lead to better opportunities for happiness. Augustine's parents got all kinds of admiration for saving up and sending him off to a top-notch school! That made them good parents in the eyes of the world. Good parents just like that were being lectured by Chrysostom: don't let material success take priority over faith, regardless of how good it makes you look in the eyes of the world. If we want to avoid being good parents and be godly parents, it's going to be a challenge that we can't embark on alone.
I have no kids. It's easy for me to say that Christians need to find ways to push back against the presiding social imaginary and put faith first when raising children. That being said, I'm still a church member. I'm responsible for helping raise children within my church community, and I'm responsible for supporting their parents. I hope I can can help them on that difficult journey, and I hope I can find a community to help me when that time comes. Raising children faithfully been a challenge for thousands of years, and the lure of defining parenting by the measure of secular success isn't going away anytime soon.