I was delighted to find that Hans Urs Von Balthasar had written on Bernanos when I was searching Amazon for books related to my thesis topic.It was one of those innocuous-looking Ignatius Press "Communio"-line books. Usually you order them and they're tiny things, practically pamphlets (I admit, most of my experience in this line is Pieper, so my word is hardly authoritative). Given my associations with this publishing line, and the fact that I hardly expected a renowned theologian to be devoting a tome to my author-of-choice (who is so greatly undervalued in a world that often associates angst and angst alone with great literature), I was surprised to receive a 600+ pager in the mail a few days after ordering it.
Needless to say, I have not finished this book yet. Within the first hundred pages, however, it is (as one might hope) pretty clear the sort of approach Balthasar is taking. He's far too interested in--one might even say, enchanted by--Bernanos the man to veer off into abstractions about him as some archetype of the Christian writer. Yet somehow he does manage to consider him primarily as an archetype of the Christian writer while avoiding all sense that he's merely abstracting from the man. Sounds a bit paradoxical, but there it is. Balthasar takes Bernanos' life and his ideas, and uses them to present a picture of what the ideal of the Christian author is both in Bernanos' eyes and in Balthasar's own, and then in showing this slips in a hint or two that Bernanos' life, not merely his ideas, supports this ideal.
That's not to say that the book is a hagiography. Part of the respect Balthasar pays this writer is that of recognizing his faults, of pointing them out rather keenly--he never takes him as something superhuman, preferring to show openly Bernanos' failures, but always presenting them as they may be most charitably understood. And in this charitable understanding, one realizes that even these failures often contribute to Bernanos' overall mission. The sensitivity and vehemence of his personality, though his struggles against these never actually overcame them, manage to inform and give vitality to his desire to communicate the drama of God's relationship with man to a world he saw as almost bereft of the proper disposition towards its Creator. A world that is far from God, but never without hope, because the power of grace--Bernanos' most firm conviction, in Balthasar's mind--can do with it precisely what it can do with Bernanos' own failures: redeem them by making them a part of the work which it is only half consciously yearning to join.
The writer's job is not, then, some hallowed vocation above all other vocations, but rather a hallowed vocation like all other lay vocations: the writer's goal is to bring the world to the consciousness of its desires. And if he succeeds in so doing--as Aristotle, Aquinas, Bernanos and Balthasar would all agree--he will simply be bringing it to an awareness of its final end; as a Catholic would say, to an awareness that all its desires can be satisfied only in responding to God and His plan of grace for the world.
Showing posts with label Biographies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biographies. Show all posts
11 June, 2010
24 March, 2010
Teufelsdröckh
Aha! The most recent Am Civ class has cast a wonderful light upon the Teufelsdröckh chapter whose references to Wagner so mystified me earlier. German Romanticism as it connects to American Transcendentalism! There, my friends, is the key. Henry Adams liked neither one, particularly as the wife who committed suicide during that 20 years of silence was an American (Concord) transcendentalist who followed in her mother's, aunt's, sister's and brother's footsteps in deciding that a clock-work universe with an indifferent God wasn't worth living in.
German Romanticism -> Transcendentalism -> Existentialism?
That's the question. I believe a defensible argument could be made for their essential similarity and, who knows, maybe Henry Adams has already made one. I will continue to read and see.
German Romanticism -> Transcendentalism -> Existentialism?
That's the question. I believe a defensible argument could be made for their essential similarity and, who knows, maybe Henry Adams has already made one. I will continue to read and see.
22 March, 2010
The Quest for the Force
No, this post has nothing whatsoever to do with the unfortunate science fiction trilogy (more than that now?), "Star Wars" (I will probably never be able to get past the execrable acting and dismally waffling philosophy of that series).
Happily, my subject is Henry Adams instead. First off, Please tell me not that this book is convoluted or confusing! Its complexity pales in comparison to, say, that of Moby Dick, which itself is not such an arduous read, though certainly (like HA) deserving of multiple readings which will only flesh out a single strongly coherent argument.
For instance, he spends three of his post-twenty-years-of-silence chapters ("The Dynamo and the Virgin", "Twilight", and "Teufelsdrockh") reiterating the same essential point: explaining (more explicitly than is his usual ironic habit) his search for education as a search for a dynamic Force that gives history some direction and thus some meaning. This search he frames in terms (quite brilliantly) of a conflict between the power of Science and the power of Woman (take that, ye twentieth-century feminists!). Is the Dynamo or the Virgin (Woman imagined specifically as imaged in the figure of Mary, the mother of God) the real driving force of history? That's something I'll have to get into later; it's largely the focus of "The Dynamo and the Virgin" and "Teufelsdrockh", whereas "Twilight" has to take a bit of a time out to return to Adam's age old argument for the idea that there should be such a force to identify at all.
People need to recognize someunifying force if they're going to think at all. He comes into the chapter presupposing that, and proceeds to explain a bit. While the multitudinous heirs of the Enlightenment were invested in bringing to light such a panoply of seemingly unconnected bits of information, a similarly multitudinous series of drastically opposing "explanations" for how these might be thought to fit together were springing up on every side--Darwinism, chemistry, physics, progressive history:
A strangely ambivalent statement. You'd think the man whose nostalgia for the 18th century world of the Founding Fathers, even for the unified world of Christian Medieval Europe, would hardly identify unity and directionality in history as itself the very source of multiplicity and the confusion of the early modern (1901) era. Now that's a taste of his irony coming through. Yes, national government and Darwin are examples of modern attempts at a synthesis, but that doesn't mean they succeed, despite his ironic praise of "the Darwinian evolutionists"' triumph "over all the curates". All these efforts for unity prove is that everyone wants it, that "the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a 'larger synthesis' to unify the anarchy again". In actuality, for the thinking individual, Darwin (and his analogues in other disciplines--Hegel, for instance) doesn't have the final answers: "The ganoid fish [a subject of evolutionists' study] seemed to prove--to him--that it had selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in tintensity only by help of outside force...a little more, and he would be driven back on the old independence of species" (my emphasis).
Now please don't dismiss Mr. Adams as a stodgy old conservative afraid of scientific ideas. He was actually obsessed with science to an almost amusing degree throughout his life, and quite the rabid Darwinian (by his own account) as a young man. No, he's not afraid of evolutionary theory as it exists in biology. What he's protesting against is that that single biological concept (not less than physical theories about magnetism and electricity a little later) is being held up as an alternative to traditional faith. These modern "wise men" would have us believe not merely that Darwinism explains something, but that it explains everything.
Aside from being an excellent bit of prose, this comment helps (ironically, once again) to further refine his position. Both the old mind and the child as depicted here are seeing part of a truth, but each one is to some extent missing the whole. The child--seen again and again in Henry Adams' depiction of his younger self--thirsts for the type of unity that all these theories attempt to provide, and has faith in man's potential to find it. In a way, the child is right. Unity is real, and it can be accessed by men. What he doesn't have such a strong natural instinct for is the idea that it can't be discovered by men. "For human purposes a point must always soon be reached where larger synthesis is suicide." In this, Henry Adams is shamelessly hearkening back to the traditional Christian conviction of the necessity of revelation to provide the final "synthesis" of history that human reason cannot discern for itself. As appealing as their claims to authority may be, Darwinism, Hegelianism, Marxism, Scientism, etc. are ultimately misleading in the way they narrow the meaning of the universe to whatever their proper discipline can comprehend.
This latter point is precisely what the older mind comes to comprehend. Attempted on a purely human level, the synthesis seems an impossibility, an invitation to ruin, an intellectual suicide. Complexity seems unavoidable as one begins to learn that while Darwin might have a decent explanation for the meaning of life and Hegel a slightly different one, the physicist and chemist is in possession of a hundred other facts that reduce the former to a jumble (though maybe one that can still be synthesized). And none of these have even the slightest explanation for the mysterious power of Woman--Adams' way of figuring those other forces of duty, faith, love, and family. Yet to ignore these (as is so often done) is to mutilate human history; one must simply take everything up to Descartes and lop it off ("Oh, those were just the 'Dark Ages'"), then proceed to explain the post-Cartesian believers in such antiquities as fascinating sociological relics of a long-extinct Age of Ignorance.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Woman vs. the Machine is a fight to save for a later post. All I'm trying to get at is the idea that once you've seen more of the world than the young Darwinian or young Hegelian, one human explanation for everything begins to seem a bit pale. Blast! Can't we have a sythesis after all then? Maybe we should just do as the turn-of-the-century society was beginning to do: "throw up [our] hands and [avow] that progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself." Why not? Well, it all comes back to the very quotidian fact that we can't think, we can't see ("Unity is vision") except in context...of something. The mid twentieth century would begin to admit utter meaninglessness as a possible "explanation" for the world; cf. Jean-Paul Sartre and the other Existentialists for whom nothing means anything and only the stark fact of free choice has any reality. Henry Adams is not an existentialist. And who can blame him? Existentialism is really the most logical answer to anyone who tries to locate the core of reality in human measurements of a physical world, or even in human measurements of what various theoretical models of that world, but no one wants to be one. Sartre's students had an unfortunate tendency to throw themselves off bridges when hearing one of his particularly dismal proofs of the meaninglessness of life.
There's an alternative, of course. You could--but don't do it: you'll be anathema to the orthodoxy of modernism--you could search for that meaning...outside of human society. You could admit the fact that perhaps the faith of the Church, which Adams so frequently refers to in ironically degrading-but-really-uplifting-because-he's-echoing-the-modernists terms. Because that's what Adams wants you to get out of these chapters, "Twilight" in particular.
Henry Adams' desperate protest rather reminds me of Puddleglum's heroic speech in The Silver Chair, when the witch is trying to enchant away the childrens' belief that there is anything real beyond the dim, two-dimensional reality of her cave world: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."
Anyway, more to come, most likely. The book certainly deserves it.
Happily, my subject is Henry Adams instead. First off, Please tell me not that this book is convoluted or confusing! Its complexity pales in comparison to, say, that of Moby Dick, which itself is not such an arduous read, though certainly (like HA) deserving of multiple readings which will only flesh out a single strongly coherent argument.
For instance, he spends three of his post-twenty-years-of-silence chapters ("The Dynamo and the Virgin", "Twilight", and "Teufelsdrockh") reiterating the same essential point: explaining (more explicitly than is his usual ironic habit) his search for education as a search for a dynamic Force that gives history some direction and thus some meaning. This search he frames in terms (quite brilliantly) of a conflict between the power of Science and the power of Woman (take that, ye twentieth-century feminists!). Is the Dynamo or the Virgin (Woman imagined specifically as imaged in the figure of Mary, the mother of God) the real driving force of history? That's something I'll have to get into later; it's largely the focus of "The Dynamo and the Virgin" and "Teufelsdrockh", whereas "Twilight" has to take a bit of a time out to return to Adam's age old argument for the idea that there should be such a force to identify at all.
People need to recognize someunifying force if they're going to think at all. He comes into the chapter presupposing that, and proceeds to explain a bit. While the multitudinous heirs of the Enlightenment were invested in bringing to light such a panoply of seemingly unconnected bits of information, a similarly multitudinous series of drastically opposing "explanations" for how these might be thought to fit together were springing up on every side--Darwinism, chemistry, physics, progressive history:
All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had always won. The National Government and the national unity had overcome every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were triumphant over all the curates; yet the greater the unity and momentum, the worse became the complexity and the friction.
A strangely ambivalent statement. You'd think the man whose nostalgia for the 18th century world of the Founding Fathers, even for the unified world of Christian Medieval Europe, would hardly identify unity and directionality in history as itself the very source of multiplicity and the confusion of the early modern (1901) era. Now that's a taste of his irony coming through. Yes, national government and Darwin are examples of modern attempts at a synthesis, but that doesn't mean they succeed, despite his ironic praise of "the Darwinian evolutionists"' triumph "over all the curates". All these efforts for unity prove is that everyone wants it, that "the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a 'larger synthesis' to unify the anarchy again". In actuality, for the thinking individual, Darwin (and his analogues in other disciplines--Hegel, for instance) doesn't have the final answers: "The ganoid fish [a subject of evolutionists' study] seemed to prove--to him--that it had selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in tintensity only by help of outside force...a little more, and he would be driven back on the old independence of species" (my emphasis).
Now please don't dismiss Mr. Adams as a stodgy old conservative afraid of scientific ideas. He was actually obsessed with science to an almost amusing degree throughout his life, and quite the rabid Darwinian (by his own account) as a young man. No, he's not afraid of evolutionary theory as it exists in biology. What he's protesting against is that that single biological concept (not less than physical theories about magnetism and electricity a little later) is being held up as an alternative to traditional faith. These modern "wise men" would have us believe not merely that Darwinism explains something, but that it explains everything.
Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see. The older the mind, the older its coomplexities, and the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars resolve themselves into multiples; yet the child will always see but one.
Aside from being an excellent bit of prose, this comment helps (ironically, once again) to further refine his position. Both the old mind and the child as depicted here are seeing part of a truth, but each one is to some extent missing the whole. The child--seen again and again in Henry Adams' depiction of his younger self--thirsts for the type of unity that all these theories attempt to provide, and has faith in man's potential to find it. In a way, the child is right. Unity is real, and it can be accessed by men. What he doesn't have such a strong natural instinct for is the idea that it can't be discovered by men. "For human purposes a point must always soon be reached where larger synthesis is suicide." In this, Henry Adams is shamelessly hearkening back to the traditional Christian conviction of the necessity of revelation to provide the final "synthesis" of history that human reason cannot discern for itself. As appealing as their claims to authority may be, Darwinism, Hegelianism, Marxism, Scientism, etc. are ultimately misleading in the way they narrow the meaning of the universe to whatever their proper discipline can comprehend.
This latter point is precisely what the older mind comes to comprehend. Attempted on a purely human level, the synthesis seems an impossibility, an invitation to ruin, an intellectual suicide. Complexity seems unavoidable as one begins to learn that while Darwin might have a decent explanation for the meaning of life and Hegel a slightly different one, the physicist and chemist is in possession of a hundred other facts that reduce the former to a jumble (though maybe one that can still be synthesized). And none of these have even the slightest explanation for the mysterious power of Woman--Adams' way of figuring those other forces of duty, faith, love, and family. Yet to ignore these (as is so often done) is to mutilate human history; one must simply take everything up to Descartes and lop it off ("Oh, those were just the 'Dark Ages'"), then proceed to explain the post-Cartesian believers in such antiquities as fascinating sociological relics of a long-extinct Age of Ignorance.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Woman vs. the Machine is a fight to save for a later post. All I'm trying to get at is the idea that once you've seen more of the world than the young Darwinian or young Hegelian, one human explanation for everything begins to seem a bit pale. Blast! Can't we have a sythesis after all then? Maybe we should just do as the turn-of-the-century society was beginning to do: "throw up [our] hands and [avow] that progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself." Why not? Well, it all comes back to the very quotidian fact that we can't think, we can't see ("Unity is vision") except in context...of something. The mid twentieth century would begin to admit utter meaninglessness as a possible "explanation" for the world; cf. Jean-Paul Sartre and the other Existentialists for whom nothing means anything and only the stark fact of free choice has any reality. Henry Adams is not an existentialist. And who can blame him? Existentialism is really the most logical answer to anyone who tries to locate the core of reality in human measurements of a physical world, or even in human measurements of what various theoretical models of that world, but no one wants to be one. Sartre's students had an unfortunate tendency to throw themselves off bridges when hearing one of his particularly dismal proofs of the meaninglessness of life.
There's an alternative, of course. You could--but don't do it: you'll be anathema to the orthodoxy of modernism--you could search for that meaning...outside of human society. You could admit the fact that perhaps the faith of the Church, which Adams so frequently refers to in ironically degrading-but-really-uplifting-because-he's-echoing-the-modernists terms. Because that's what Adams wants you to get out of these chapters, "Twilight" in particular.
Henry Adams' desperate protest rather reminds me of Puddleglum's heroic speech in The Silver Chair, when the witch is trying to enchant away the childrens' belief that there is anything real beyond the dim, two-dimensional reality of her cave world: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."
Anyway, more to come, most likely. The book certainly deserves it.
20 March, 2010
The Education of Henry Adams
This is a marvelous book. And I must say, that's not hyperbole in the least, despite the fact that beyond a few remaining strongholds of stodgy academia it's barely known. And that is despite the fact that it's a Pulitzer prize winner consistently reaching the pinnacle of lists of "Best Non-Fiction of all Time".
It is perhaps a tough read in certain respects. At least, if you go into it expecting a clear and direct account of precisely what Mr. Adams thinks about 19th and early 20th century America, you'll most likely toss the book across the room before getting through the first few chapters, frustrated by what seems egregiously scattered thought and woefully ambiguous attitudes towards everything he mentions. Don't read it that way. It's ironic, and obviously so, as long as you're alerted to the fact (I came into it alerted, fortunately).
It's superficially an account of Henry Adam's attempts to educate himself, yet its underlying aim is to delve into the heart of what America really means, to provide an account of the purpose of this country during a time when various attempts at consolidation of Senatorial power and the growth of utilitarianism throughout the western world was challenging the Founders' original conception of its purpose. Did I say challenging? The entire structure of academia and the practice of government at the time directly contradicted the idea that we're a government not of liberty for license but of liberty for excellence; that the Declaration of Independence was affirming not freedom from traditional structures, but recognizing the contemporary European attempts (especially in England and France) to collapse the boundaries between Church and state as antithetical to one of the most essential tenets of Christianity since the late Roman era (see Pope Gelasius' declaration of the necessary separation of Church and state all the way back in 492 AD: "There are two powers by which chiefly this world is ruled: the sacred authority of the priesthood and the authority of kings."). Puritains, Cavaliers, Non-Conformists, Scottish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics all came to America to evade the tradition-squelching bulldozer of the modern homogeneous nation-state, in particular the Leviathan state of the British parliament (which drew into itself first religious, then royal power before absorbing the Scottish and Irish parliaments).
America, Adams argues (though not explicitly till after the chapter "Twenty Years After") is the land of those free to abide by their traditions, not of F.J. Turner's frontiersmen, stripped of their tradition by their encounter with the State of Nature, not of Benjamin Franklin's utilitarianism that would have us all be finding happiness as nice, comfortable, productive machines (traditions? holidays? Holy Days? Ritual? what useless bosh!). It is a deliberately UNprogressive place, he holds, though his younger self whom he sometimes mercilessly parodies in the earlier chapters at times seems to find the Progressive model of history appealing in its claims to bring about "The Perfection of Human Society".
At the risk of sounding a bit self-important, I must say I think some of my earlier posts might be helpful if the idea of liberty for excellence seems extremely alien, so I've been linking to them throughout (plus they help to round out what must necessarily be a skeletal account of things if it is to avoid being far too long for a blog post). It's not a popular idea nowadays, as Henry Adams already discerned all the way back in 1918. If you really want some good stuff on that idea though, I recommend Cicero's De Officiis (how we can understand man's natural rights in terms of his moral obligations), Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, John Paul II's "Veritatis Splendor" (intrinsically evil acts), or Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's account of women's experiences in slavery (Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South).
This is a book that I will almost certainly keep writing about from time to time. However simple its main point may be, it is rather brilliantly complex on a more detailed level, making its point in a hundred different ways, using a thousand different images for what he means. And any of the chapters that relies heavily on a concept that you may not be familiar with (as I was not familiar with the overall meaning of Wagner's oeuvre while reading "Teufelsdröckh") automatically becomes a bit more difficult as it demands that you do a bit more leg work to get at his meaning than you may be accustomed to (unless you're a classics major or something).
It is perhaps a tough read in certain respects. At least, if you go into it expecting a clear and direct account of precisely what Mr. Adams thinks about 19th and early 20th century America, you'll most likely toss the book across the room before getting through the first few chapters, frustrated by what seems egregiously scattered thought and woefully ambiguous attitudes towards everything he mentions. Don't read it that way. It's ironic, and obviously so, as long as you're alerted to the fact (I came into it alerted, fortunately).
It's superficially an account of Henry Adam's attempts to educate himself, yet its underlying aim is to delve into the heart of what America really means, to provide an account of the purpose of this country during a time when various attempts at consolidation of Senatorial power and the growth of utilitarianism throughout the western world was challenging the Founders' original conception of its purpose. Did I say challenging? The entire structure of academia and the practice of government at the time directly contradicted the idea that we're a government not of liberty for license but of liberty for excellence; that the Declaration of Independence was affirming not freedom from traditional structures, but recognizing the contemporary European attempts (especially in England and France) to collapse the boundaries between Church and state as antithetical to one of the most essential tenets of Christianity since the late Roman era (see Pope Gelasius' declaration of the necessary separation of Church and state all the way back in 492 AD: "There are two powers by which chiefly this world is ruled: the sacred authority of the priesthood and the authority of kings."). Puritains, Cavaliers, Non-Conformists, Scottish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics all came to America to evade the tradition-squelching bulldozer of the modern homogeneous nation-state, in particular the Leviathan state of the British parliament (which drew into itself first religious, then royal power before absorbing the Scottish and Irish parliaments).
America, Adams argues (though not explicitly till after the chapter "Twenty Years After") is the land of those free to abide by their traditions, not of F.J. Turner's frontiersmen, stripped of their tradition by their encounter with the State of Nature, not of Benjamin Franklin's utilitarianism that would have us all be finding happiness as nice, comfortable, productive machines (traditions? holidays? Holy Days? Ritual? what useless bosh!). It is a deliberately UNprogressive place, he holds, though his younger self whom he sometimes mercilessly parodies in the earlier chapters at times seems to find the Progressive model of history appealing in its claims to bring about "The Perfection of Human Society".
At the risk of sounding a bit self-important, I must say I think some of my earlier posts might be helpful if the idea of liberty for excellence seems extremely alien, so I've been linking to them throughout (plus they help to round out what must necessarily be a skeletal account of things if it is to avoid being far too long for a blog post). It's not a popular idea nowadays, as Henry Adams already discerned all the way back in 1918. If you really want some good stuff on that idea though, I recommend Cicero's De Officiis (how we can understand man's natural rights in terms of his moral obligations), Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, John Paul II's "Veritatis Splendor" (intrinsically evil acts), or Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's account of women's experiences in slavery (Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South).
This is a book that I will almost certainly keep writing about from time to time. However simple its main point may be, it is rather brilliantly complex on a more detailed level, making its point in a hundred different ways, using a thousand different images for what he means. And any of the chapters that relies heavily on a concept that you may not be familiar with (as I was not familiar with the overall meaning of Wagner's oeuvre while reading "Teufelsdröckh") automatically becomes a bit more difficult as it demands that you do a bit more leg work to get at his meaning than you may be accustomed to (unless you're a classics major or something).
16 November, 2008
Jolly exciting, all this!
Going back to what I was saying last night:
Essentially, Stowe's argument is that slavery dehumanizes people by treating them like "isolated selves", as though they were individual pawns to be separated from ties of family and friends at the whim of their masters. There is no recognition in law of their personal identity in terms of their family or larger community. You see this in her constant centering of the plot around various types of homes: we start in the "ideal" slave-owning household where the slaves are treated with incredible kindness by their owners. The lack of respect in law for their community however results in Uncle Tom and Eliza (for her son's sake) being torn from this community in order to satisfy his master's debts. The first dozen chapters end with Eliza arriving safely at the idyllic Quaker home in the north. The second dozen follow Uncle Tom south to where we find Eva, a sort of symbol of purity in the midst of the deep south, saddened by the sin of her own home and longing for an eternal one. Finally we have the tragic scene where Uncle Tom is killed yet dies a freer man than any of his murderers because he has held on to the one community - the Christian (real Christian) community that no earthly law can rob him of.
This is all pretty evident from even the most brief summary. The real controversy remains whether this is at all what Douglass and Jacobs are trying to say. (Fortunately we only have to deal in detail with Douglass for the paper - if we had to treat Jacobs too, this really could get to dissertation length.) Just as with Stowe's book, Douglass's argument becomes much more apparent if you start by looking at it from a more architectonic standpoint. Chapter 1 opens with Douglass' regrets that he knows neither his birthday nor his father nor his mother. Chapter 2 centers around his lack of a home and on the slaves' innate attraction to the idea of the "Great House Farm" which will be not just their master's but theirs as well. In chapter 3 we get an account of his inability to live the way he wishes to - not just of his lack of independence to do whatever he feels like, but of his freedom to live well: he speaks of how slavery creates a disjunct between the "thoughts of the heart" and one's moral obligations, and what the slaves must in fact say and do. They are forced to lie, to ignore familial bonds, to keep their own self-interest at the forefront of their minds if they are to survive at all. The introduction of the overseer in the fourth chapter and accounts of killings perpetrated by him and his ilk for which the slaves have no hope of legal redress emphasize the lack of protection in law for their community. (Isn't this cool stuff?) Finally, in chapter five and following, Douglass learns to read. This reintroduces him to a community, gives him a notion of it that in turn gives him the courage to claim his freedom. Once able to read he has "reached the period in [his] life when [he] can give dates"; he receives a new set of "fathers" in the figures of the Founding Fathers and others whose writings educate him in a sense of his humanity; in the language of scripture, he receives a new mother tongue. When he finally has this new sense of community (sense of time, forebears, church), of where he belongs as an individual in relation to other people, he fights to preserve it.
So that's the idea, more or less, from an architectonic point of view. Seven pages will leave plenty of room for explicit quotations and so forth, which will be fun.
Essentially, Stowe's argument is that slavery dehumanizes people by treating them like "isolated selves", as though they were individual pawns to be separated from ties of family and friends at the whim of their masters. There is no recognition in law of their personal identity in terms of their family or larger community. You see this in her constant centering of the plot around various types of homes: we start in the "ideal" slave-owning household where the slaves are treated with incredible kindness by their owners. The lack of respect in law for their community however results in Uncle Tom and Eliza (for her son's sake) being torn from this community in order to satisfy his master's debts. The first dozen chapters end with Eliza arriving safely at the idyllic Quaker home in the north. The second dozen follow Uncle Tom south to where we find Eva, a sort of symbol of purity in the midst of the deep south, saddened by the sin of her own home and longing for an eternal one. Finally we have the tragic scene where Uncle Tom is killed yet dies a freer man than any of his murderers because he has held on to the one community - the Christian (real Christian) community that no earthly law can rob him of.
This is all pretty evident from even the most brief summary. The real controversy remains whether this is at all what Douglass and Jacobs are trying to say. (Fortunately we only have to deal in detail with Douglass for the paper - if we had to treat Jacobs too, this really could get to dissertation length.) Just as with Stowe's book, Douglass's argument becomes much more apparent if you start by looking at it from a more architectonic standpoint. Chapter 1 opens with Douglass' regrets that he knows neither his birthday nor his father nor his mother. Chapter 2 centers around his lack of a home and on the slaves' innate attraction to the idea of the "Great House Farm" which will be not just their master's but theirs as well. In chapter 3 we get an account of his inability to live the way he wishes to - not just of his lack of independence to do whatever he feels like, but of his freedom to live well: he speaks of how slavery creates a disjunct between the "thoughts of the heart" and one's moral obligations, and what the slaves must in fact say and do. They are forced to lie, to ignore familial bonds, to keep their own self-interest at the forefront of their minds if they are to survive at all. The introduction of the overseer in the fourth chapter and accounts of killings perpetrated by him and his ilk for which the slaves have no hope of legal redress emphasize the lack of protection in law for their community. (Isn't this cool stuff?) Finally, in chapter five and following, Douglass learns to read. This reintroduces him to a community, gives him a notion of it that in turn gives him the courage to claim his freedom. Once able to read he has "reached the period in [his] life when [he] can give dates"; he receives a new set of "fathers" in the figures of the Founding Fathers and others whose writings educate him in a sense of his humanity; in the language of scripture, he receives a new mother tongue. When he finally has this new sense of community (sense of time, forebears, church), of where he belongs as an individual in relation to other people, he fights to preserve it.
So that's the idea, more or less, from an architectonic point of view. Seven pages will leave plenty of room for explicit quotations and so forth, which will be fun.
Another seven page paper!
Well, I've got another 7-page paper assigned in American Civ. The prompt is even more exciting than the last one. Seriously, you could write a dissertation on the thing. The actual prompt is only a sentence long: "Does Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin betray or convey the slaves' own argument against slavery." Ok. Maybe on first reading it doesn't sound all that enthralling (or maybe it does). But if you've been doing the reading, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, if you know even a bit about the virulent controversy revolving around the question of the proper way to interpret the slave's demand for freedom and the black Americans' demand for civil rights (Martin Luther King vs Malcom X, anyone?), and if you've just been bowled over by the realization that Uncle Tom's Cabin isn't just a silly, sentimental novel but has a valid and well-structured argument at its base, you probably will reconsider.
Add to that the fact that Dr. Hanssen handed out several very cool readings - one from Cicero (De Officiis) on how we can understand man's natural rights in terms of his moral obligations, one from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, an excerpt from John Paul II's "Veritatis Splendor" which discusses intrinsically evil acts, part of an address from Pope Benedict, and a very interesting chapter from a book about women's experiences in slavery by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese - and you can see how this paper has the potential to be very fun indeed. I'm going to argue that Uncle Tom's Cabin, contrary to the ideas of more recent literary criticism ("more recent" being the '60s), does in fact convey the Douglass' and Jacob's main argument against slavery. How does it do that? Well, that's where everything should get so interesting, of course.
I shall post about it tomorrow.
Add to that the fact that Dr. Hanssen handed out several very cool readings - one from Cicero (De Officiis) on how we can understand man's natural rights in terms of his moral obligations, one from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, an excerpt from John Paul II's "Veritatis Splendor" which discusses intrinsically evil acts, part of an address from Pope Benedict, and a very interesting chapter from a book about women's experiences in slavery by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese - and you can see how this paper has the potential to be very fun indeed. I'm going to argue that Uncle Tom's Cabin, contrary to the ideas of more recent literary criticism ("more recent" being the '60s), does in fact convey the Douglass' and Jacob's main argument against slavery. How does it do that? Well, that's where everything should get so interesting, of course.
I shall post about it tomorrow.
02 November, 2008
A Practical Religion
“I fancy,” Benjamin Franklin muses in discussing his famous decision to run away from his apprenticeship, “[my brother's] harsh and tyrannical Treatment of me, might be a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro' my whole Life” (Franklin, 69). This is only a side comment – no more than a note to the main text, in fact – yet it succinctly summarizes the spirit of Franklin's legendary bid for independence. Preceding this symbolic break with the convention of apprenticeship, he had already broken with his family's conventional Puritan religion in favor of a temperate liberal deism, but it was not until several years later that he codified his personal beliefs. The thirteen precepts he outlines focus entirely on moral issues and he refuses to favor any specific doctrinal teachings. Franklin's approach underscores his independence and practicality in all spheres of life. He “conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral Perfection” in a spirit of self-sufficient practicality which led him to renounce the authority of church dogma in favor of the natural virtues which could be ecumenically agreed upon and which a man of any religion could follow to become a model of “Probity and Integrity” (Franklin, 148, 158).
His moral code is marked above all by an ethic of tolerance which stems in part from a laudable desire to respect individual freedom, but also from a distorted definition of humility. In his list of virtues, humility stands at the end as a sort of addendum expressing his overarching concept of religious tolerance. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates” he instructs himself (Franklin, 150). The dichotomy in this instruction, obvious to anyone who understands Jesus as the Answer which Socrates stubbornly denies knowing, seems unapparent to Franklin. He strove for the classic Socratic modesty of “knowing that he knows nothing” and gains “at least the Appearance” of such humility, but it is not the humility of a Christian which arises from actual though unmerited knowledge of the Truth (Franklin, 157). Franklin's definition may indeed suffice for most practical purposes, and his primary concern was “the Utility and Excellency of [his] Method” (157). Through it he hoped to encourage human virtues among all sects. Reserving declarations of knowledge would promote respect for individual freedom with regard to beliefs about God and the nature of life, and adoption of a non-doctrinal code of virtue would, he believed, be in “every one's Interest... who wished to be happy even in this world” (Franklin, 158).
In evaluating the benefits of Franklin's purely moral religion, one must distinguish between its application in the sphere of government versus its application in the individual. Reducing religion to moral precepts discoverable by reason may be justified in the public sphere. Indeed, in a world where the religious turmoil of the 1500s and 1600s still reverberated throughout the West, removing governmental attachment to any “particular Sect” would be wise (Franklin, 157). However, within a church or an individual soul such tolerance becomes no more than false humility. Assuming that churches typically claim to be qualified to lead their members to the truth of Christ (or whatever else they hold to be ultimate truth), they must have certain convictions in context of which other beliefs are considered wrong. The human person, moreover, created for the truth as he is, will (like Franklin) be incapable of attaining true victory over pride, that “one of our natural Passions [most] hard to subdue,” if he does not recognize that there is a truth much deeper than the moral rules man can discover through unaided reason (Franklin, 160). Franklin's ethic of tolerance, then, is a useful guide for the government's approach to religious matters, but it cannot on its own produce the breed of upright citizens he hoped for (Franklin, 162).
Franklin was not alone in his distrust of arbitrary religious authority, this spirit having been predominant to some extent among the early colonists who had been driven from England by the new monolithic state religion. Principles of religious liberty as outlined in the First Article of the Bill of Rights underscore our Republican government's historic attachment to Franklin's Socratic humility with respect to religion. As long as churches have flourished within the consequent atmosphere of tolerance the tendency of this spirit to undermine individual citizens' prerogative to devote themselves to the Truth has been held in check. Today, however, as tolerance becomes more and more an autonomous religion in America and across the world, the Socratic mindset threatens to overwhelm Christian certainty of Truth. Franklin's style of tolerance is now many people's sole “religion” and the morality Franklin so valued, robbed of any firm foundational doctrine, is weakened to the point of collapse.
His moral code is marked above all by an ethic of tolerance which stems in part from a laudable desire to respect individual freedom, but also from a distorted definition of humility. In his list of virtues, humility stands at the end as a sort of addendum expressing his overarching concept of religious tolerance. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates” he instructs himself (Franklin, 150). The dichotomy in this instruction, obvious to anyone who understands Jesus as the Answer which Socrates stubbornly denies knowing, seems unapparent to Franklin. He strove for the classic Socratic modesty of “knowing that he knows nothing” and gains “at least the Appearance” of such humility, but it is not the humility of a Christian which arises from actual though unmerited knowledge of the Truth (Franklin, 157). Franklin's definition may indeed suffice for most practical purposes, and his primary concern was “the Utility and Excellency of [his] Method” (157). Through it he hoped to encourage human virtues among all sects. Reserving declarations of knowledge would promote respect for individual freedom with regard to beliefs about God and the nature of life, and adoption of a non-doctrinal code of virtue would, he believed, be in “every one's Interest... who wished to be happy even in this world” (Franklin, 158).
In evaluating the benefits of Franklin's purely moral religion, one must distinguish between its application in the sphere of government versus its application in the individual. Reducing religion to moral precepts discoverable by reason may be justified in the public sphere. Indeed, in a world where the religious turmoil of the 1500s and 1600s still reverberated throughout the West, removing governmental attachment to any “particular Sect” would be wise (Franklin, 157). However, within a church or an individual soul such tolerance becomes no more than false humility. Assuming that churches typically claim to be qualified to lead their members to the truth of Christ (or whatever else they hold to be ultimate truth), they must have certain convictions in context of which other beliefs are considered wrong. The human person, moreover, created for the truth as he is, will (like Franklin) be incapable of attaining true victory over pride, that “one of our natural Passions [most] hard to subdue,” if he does not recognize that there is a truth much deeper than the moral rules man can discover through unaided reason (Franklin, 160). Franklin's ethic of tolerance, then, is a useful guide for the government's approach to religious matters, but it cannot on its own produce the breed of upright citizens he hoped for (Franklin, 162).
Franklin was not alone in his distrust of arbitrary religious authority, this spirit having been predominant to some extent among the early colonists who had been driven from England by the new monolithic state religion. Principles of religious liberty as outlined in the First Article of the Bill of Rights underscore our Republican government's historic attachment to Franklin's Socratic humility with respect to religion. As long as churches have flourished within the consequent atmosphere of tolerance the tendency of this spirit to undermine individual citizens' prerogative to devote themselves to the Truth has been held in check. Today, however, as tolerance becomes more and more an autonomous religion in America and across the world, the Socratic mindset threatens to overwhelm Christian certainty of Truth. Franklin's style of tolerance is now many people's sole “religion” and the morality Franklin so valued, robbed of any firm foundational doctrine, is weakened to the point of collapse.
09 September, 2008
Chateaubriand
François-René de Chateaubriand, founder of the French romantic movement, is the first author my French Literary Traditions class is covering this semester. He wrote at the very beginning of the 19th century, only a few years after the French Revolution.
He seems to have been a rather interesting chap. He grew up in what he describes as having been a very dark, gloomy castle in Brittany where he developed a close friendship with his sister Lucille and a fairly dysfunctional relationship with his father. When the Revolution broke out, he was initially sympathetic, but, disillusioned by its violence, he went off to America. It appears that American culture - and more importantly the "American myth" of independent man (particularly exemplified by the Indians) in nearly the state of nature - influenced him deeply, because the country is the setting of several of his works (Atala and René) This trip also reveals him as a bit of a liar: he makes a fair number of outrageous claims in his writing, swearing that he met George Washington, lived with the Indians, visited Niagra Falls, and encountered a fair number of other stereotypically American entities (Niagra Falls, by historical records of his journey is the only of these things he had any likelihood of having seen). Rather lovable.
Almost all of his work is (so I read) strongly autobiographical. He wrote, in fact, that "We are convinced that the great writers have told their own story in their works. One only truly describes one's own heart by attributing it to another, and the greater part of genius is composed of memories" (Génie du christianisme). There are two characteristic elements of his writing which would influence the Romantic movement as a whole quite strongly. First of these is the plethora of stirring, detailed descriptions of nature and emphasis on the purity of the world unmarred by the noise of human society. Second but just as important is the attention he pays to human emotions: these he analyzes practically to a pulp in places, and that's exactly what his many successors and admirers would be doing for quite a few years to come.
On his return to France, he had a rather odd but apparently sincere reconversion to Christianity. It seems that much of his reasoning is quite tied up in his aesthetic responses to the beauty of Christianity - the beauty which formed the central argument for the Catholic religion in his book Génie du christianisme (The Genius of Christianity). Hopefully he found a bit more to value in Catholicism than its aesthetic value eventually; he probably did: God can build on much stranger foundations.
29 August, 2007
More Thought-Provoking Chesterton
He never really fails to do it, does he? Even when his style is at its most jocose, Chesterton can give you something to think about.
The latest book of his to hit my "books in progress" shelf is his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas. It's only my first read through of course, but I think it may become a favorite of mine, largely because I find it one of his most convincing.
The chapters exploring Thomas' philosophy are worth reading by themselves, being admirably succint. Chesterton manages to distill the main points driving Thomas' philosophy, and to really explain them, with all the clarity of a teacher who genuinely understands the subject matter. Although his arguments do suffer occasionally from generalizations, this results merely from the brevity of his treatment, and none of these generalizations are lacking plenty of arguments in their favour made by other authors.
Anyway, one such philosophy chapter particularly struck me. Chesterton focuses on the distinctive character of Thomas' thought. According to him, this distinction lies in Thomas' emphasis upon the permanency of being. Thomas' starting point could perhaps be summed up in the very common-sense statement "There is and IS". The world and the realities it contains are solid and true. (I say the "realities it contains" because the influence of evil certainly has left an imprint in the form of absence of good, absence of beauty, absence of reality.)
For Thomas, a single object such as a plain rock is true, not because it is a symbol of some abstract reality, or is a rock in spite of its gray-ness or hardness or any other physical characteristic. It has genuine existence as a rock; its essense is that of a rock and its physical characteristics are in integral part of that identity.
Many ancient philosophers focused entire schools of thought around the concept of the constancy of change. According to some the only consistent truth was the fact that everything was constantly changing or "in flux" - really, this was a wicked common idea, it seems if Fr. Copleston's "History of Philosophy" is accurate. The general impression schools like these would give is that the material world is untrustworthy at best, and that to put faith in things like the senses or even common sense, is a rather naive gesture.
Considering that the majority of even more Catholic philosophies subsequent to these have concentrated on the intellectual life, the soul, or the superiority of the mind, it's likely enough that some of this tendency results from the aforementioned ancient Greeks and their contemporaries.
Fortunately for us, we have Thomas, showing in his dry, matter-of-fact, penetrating prose the Catholic view on the constancy of being. We see change all the time in this world, not because change is the supreme reality, but because the intensely real "is-ness" of every created thing is flawed by some absence of its intended perfection. Evil produces imperfections, but God, in bringing creation back to Himself, allows change in order to return everything to its intended state of being.
Moreover, change (in the ideal form of growth rather than regression or some such thing) exists because even in any object's ideal state of being, it is not Being itself. A created object is not at any time all that it could BE. These are very imprecise terms; they give only the barest approximation of what Chesterton is talking about. Chesterton himself puts it: "Things change because they are not complete; but their reality can only be explained as part of something that is complete. It is God."
Being is real, there is and IS. God is the Supreme Being, as trancendentalist and the term may sound. He is I AM. Acceptance of this fact provides a jumping off point for Thomas.
The amazing thing is, although Thomas' view may require leap of faith, what is in the end more common-sense than his premise: "There is an IS"?
The latest book of his to hit my "books in progress" shelf is his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas. It's only my first read through of course, but I think it may become a favorite of mine, largely because I find it one of his most convincing.
The chapters exploring Thomas' philosophy are worth reading by themselves, being admirably succint. Chesterton manages to distill the main points driving Thomas' philosophy, and to really explain them, with all the clarity of a teacher who genuinely understands the subject matter. Although his arguments do suffer occasionally from generalizations, this results merely from the brevity of his treatment, and none of these generalizations are lacking plenty of arguments in their favour made by other authors.
Anyway, one such philosophy chapter particularly struck me. Chesterton focuses on the distinctive character of Thomas' thought. According to him, this distinction lies in Thomas' emphasis upon the permanency of being. Thomas' starting point could perhaps be summed up in the very common-sense statement "There is and IS". The world and the realities it contains are solid and true. (I say the "realities it contains" because the influence of evil certainly has left an imprint in the form of absence of good, absence of beauty, absence of reality.)
For Thomas, a single object such as a plain rock is true, not because it is a symbol of some abstract reality, or is a rock in spite of its gray-ness or hardness or any other physical characteristic. It has genuine existence as a rock; its essense is that of a rock and its physical characteristics are in integral part of that identity.
Many ancient philosophers focused entire schools of thought around the concept of the constancy of change. According to some the only consistent truth was the fact that everything was constantly changing or "in flux" - really, this was a wicked common idea, it seems if Fr. Copleston's "History of Philosophy" is accurate. The general impression schools like these would give is that the material world is untrustworthy at best, and that to put faith in things like the senses or even common sense, is a rather naive gesture.
Considering that the majority of even more Catholic philosophies subsequent to these have concentrated on the intellectual life, the soul, or the superiority of the mind, it's likely enough that some of this tendency results from the aforementioned ancient Greeks and their contemporaries.
Fortunately for us, we have Thomas, showing in his dry, matter-of-fact, penetrating prose the Catholic view on the constancy of being. We see change all the time in this world, not because change is the supreme reality, but because the intensely real "is-ness" of every created thing is flawed by some absence of its intended perfection. Evil produces imperfections, but God, in bringing creation back to Himself, allows change in order to return everything to its intended state of being.
Moreover, change (in the ideal form of growth rather than regression or some such thing) exists because even in any object's ideal state of being, it is not Being itself. A created object is not at any time all that it could BE. These are very imprecise terms; they give only the barest approximation of what Chesterton is talking about. Chesterton himself puts it: "Things change because they are not complete; but their reality can only be explained as part of something that is complete. It is God."
Being is real, there is and IS. God is the Supreme Being, as trancendentalist and the term may sound. He is I AM. Acceptance of this fact provides a jumping off point for Thomas.
The amazing thing is, although Thomas' view may require leap of faith, what is in the end more common-sense than his premise: "There is an IS"?
22 August, 2007
Over the Course of August
This August I've been reading two biographies of a greater than usual writing quality and subject interest. The aforesaid tomes are: "John Adams", by David McCullough, and "Isabel of Spain: the Catholic Queen", by my favorite history author, Warren Carroll.
I tend to see similarities and connections in rather absurd places (I would be fairly successful as a professional conspiracy theorist if I put my mind to it, I think). Be that as it may, I don't think it's too far fetched to draw a brief comparison between the Catholic monarch and the revolutionary hero of Puritan ancestry.
For a start, I ought to mention that Isabel (the queen "made famous" in this country by her association with Columbus) was not nearly as hard-headedly old fashioned and strict as most historians portray her as being. Neither was John Adams at all akin to some of his contemporaries (eg. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Sam Adams) whose revolutionary sentiments ran to the lengths of praising the vicious French revolution. Isabel was indeed, rather liberal (in the traditional sense), running her government more "democratically" - in the sense of consulting representatives of parts of the country - than monarchs were apt to do right up until the 1800s. John Adams was fair minded enough to point out repeatedly that there are benefits in manarchy as well as in Republicanism - monarchy, he believed has the advantage of appealing particularly to something in human nature which tends to attract people throughout history to genuine (i.e. not empty) pageantry.
I'm not going to laboriously catalogue either person's character or life time-line, because it's not the school year yet, and I'm not trying to write a paper.
But I'm going to throw out a few ideas that both would have agreed on.
- Any government can work only insofar as its leaders and citizens center their lives around God.
- Christian morality is a necessary foundation for any country's laws.
- The Native Americans are children of God, and should be treated with perfect equality. - An uncommon idea for their times, and one (despite the claims of the politically correct crowd that no white male or Spanish monarch ever cared for the Native Americans) which is well documented in letters and decrees.
- The government exists to serve the temporal needs of its people, not to be served by the people. A monarch had to do this nearly on his or her own, while in the case of a Democratic Republic every citizen, being partially self-governing, must bear some of the burden although in degrees.
That's all I'm going to come up with for now, but you should get the idea.
I tend to see similarities and connections in rather absurd places (I would be fairly successful as a professional conspiracy theorist if I put my mind to it, I think). Be that as it may, I don't think it's too far fetched to draw a brief comparison between the Catholic monarch and the revolutionary hero of Puritan ancestry.
For a start, I ought to mention that Isabel (the queen "made famous" in this country by her association with Columbus) was not nearly as hard-headedly old fashioned and strict as most historians portray her as being. Neither was John Adams at all akin to some of his contemporaries (eg. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Sam Adams) whose revolutionary sentiments ran to the lengths of praising the vicious French revolution. Isabel was indeed, rather liberal (in the traditional sense), running her government more "democratically" - in the sense of consulting representatives of parts of the country - than monarchs were apt to do right up until the 1800s. John Adams was fair minded enough to point out repeatedly that there are benefits in manarchy as well as in Republicanism - monarchy, he believed has the advantage of appealing particularly to something in human nature which tends to attract people throughout history to genuine (i.e. not empty) pageantry.
I'm not going to laboriously catalogue either person's character or life time-line, because it's not the school year yet, and I'm not trying to write a paper.
But I'm going to throw out a few ideas that both would have agreed on.
- Any government can work only insofar as its leaders and citizens center their lives around God.
- Christian morality is a necessary foundation for any country's laws.
- The Native Americans are children of God, and should be treated with perfect equality. - An uncommon idea for their times, and one (despite the claims of the politically correct crowd that no white male or Spanish monarch ever cared for the Native Americans) which is well documented in letters and decrees.
- The government exists to serve the temporal needs of its people, not to be served by the people. A monarch had to do this nearly on his or her own, while in the case of a Democratic Republic every citizen, being partially self-governing, must bear some of the burden although in degrees.
That's all I'm going to come up with for now, but you should get the idea.
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