s’s home, slaying cattle, guzzling wine, and debauching the maidservants, while suing for the hand of Penelope in marriage.
My students are not used to reading so polyphonically, nor was I, when I was their age. But when my favorite professor at Princeton, Thomas Roche, showed me the coruscating language and plot devices of the plays of Shakespeare, glimmering and illumining one another in ways that a modern reader would find quite unexpected, I felt as if I’d been given far more than a new and useful tool: a new way of beholding the world of poetry. Of course, it was only new to me. I felt what I’ll call the joy of recovery. It was perhaps something like what Donatello felt when he traveled to Rome literally to unearth the sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome. Or what C.S. Lewis felt when, with the eyes of faith, he returned to the pagan sagas of the northland that he had loved so well and saw them now as intimations of the truth.
So it is in the history of man. Dante returned to Virgil, Milton returned to Dante, Keats returned to Milton, Wallace Stevens returned to Keats. The work of Bach the elder — Johann Sebastian, the one we all remember now — lay forgotten for nearly a century, till Mendelsohn returned him to the world. Look at the vague brush strokes and the dramatic uncertainties of the late work of Titian, for instance in his lastScourging of Christ, painted when he was more than 90 years old, or that of Rembrandt in his own advanced years, and see if they do not anticipate, and perhaps surpass, the work of Monet and Degas and Pissarro, three hundred years later.
We do not forget forever. God will not allow it. And that leads to the immensely cheerful conclusion that no one will ever be able to tell the future, except to say that people will return to the past, as they have always done, for its seemingly inexhaustible font of wisdom. So will the Church, too; such instances of returning home, after years and years at sea, are at the heart of her history. For we too have known the joy of recovery, and will know it yet again and again.
Take, for example, something infinitely more significant than the reading of a pagan epic. Take the reading of Scripture. For many decades we have been taught, in schools of higher learning, how to identify an author, from what century he came, to whom he was preaching, what were his insights or his supposed prejudices, and what he simply could not have known. We have been taught, at its best, analysis, the reduction of a text to its constituent parts. But withal we have committed what I call the constitutive fallacy, which is the fallacy of believing that to identify what a thing is made of, who made it, where it came from, and even what it was made for is to know what it really is. At best, it is to know what it generically is, but the individual thing, and even the genus itself, abides in its mysterious wholeness.
If that is true of something beautiful but lowly, like my dog Jasper, it is infinitely more true of human poetry, and it does not even begin to access the riches of the word of God. So we must here engage in recovery. We must learn again how to read the word of God, taking our instruction from Jesus Himself, or St. Paul, or the writer to the Hebrews, or the Fathers, or such saintly theologians as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure.
Hear for instance the words of Saint John: “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” When we read these words with the eyes of faith — when we keep what lesser things we have learned from scholarship, yet also hold them in their place — what astonishing vistas of significance open out to us! It is no flight of sentiment, this saying that God is light. For we must recall the very beginning of creation, when God spoke the light into existence, saying, “Let there be light.” To read with faith is now to confront a profound mystery. God cannot create Himself, so there must be a light that is created and a Light that is uncreated — the Light of that same Spirit that was hovering over the “waters” of nothingness in the beginning, the Hebr