Orthodoxy

I just finished listening to G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (via LibriVox). It is part of a project to work my way through the Bannockburn reading list.
Anyway, it is a book with amazing application. Several points struck me as I listened to it. I used an online version to read back through some that were especially striking. Near the end, Chesterton makes a comment that I have been saying for some time now.

Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man; for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence is very much the other way. In the earliest legends we have, such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods. History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time. There is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall. Amusingly enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity. Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it. I cannot keep pace with these paradoxes.

I have been telling my students for years that the very fact that almost every ancient civilization on record has a flood narrative is evidence that the thing happened, not evidence it did not. But the modernist would rather believe that every ancient civilization was involved in a mass conspiracy than accept that the Bible could be right about something.

Modernity and Medievalism

A thought coming together by reading Angels in the Architecture and I'll Take My Stand at the same time is the crisis of modernity. It really matters very little if we put it as Wilson and Jones do (Modernity vs. Medievalism), as the Southern Agrarians do (Industrialism vs. Agrarianism), or as we moderns would likely phrase it (liberalism vs. conservatism), the end result is the same.
The main thing each group is talking about is a level of responsibility. In Angels and I'll Take My Stand, both groups are arguing that responsibility is local.
The modern world wants responsibility to consist entirely of the rights and privileges of life, if they acknowledge its existence at all. They want to cut it short of the duties and labors of life. We have seen this most obviously in the creation of the welfare state. Growing up in Middle Tennessee, I worked at a grocery store while still in high school. I remember moms who would give their children a dollar food stamp each to buy a pack of gum or piece of candy. Then they would collect the change (food stamps always had cash value once they got below a dollar) and buy cigarettes (which you couldn't spend food stamps on). The welfare state has created this image. If the medieval, conservative, agrarian conception of life were still in place, we would know better.
The medieval, conservative, agrarian conception of life, its worldview, would state that an individual is responsible for himself or herself. That responsibility could and would be gladly shouldered by an entire community of like-minded folks, but never the state. Prior to Reconstruction, men say it was possible to go one's entire life without seeing evidence of the federal government. Now it is impossible to make it through a single day without their hand being felt.

Angels in the Architecture "Te Deum"

Te Deum reads more like a commentary on Beowulf than an essay that fits in this collection; which is why it is one of the best in the book. Wilson, begins with an excellent statement about how limited our language is in describing God or His attributes. This is an excellent point to make, especially in our time. We have begun to assume some of the scientific mindset of our age and falsely believe that if we can name an attribute or doctrine we can fully comprehend that attribute or doctrine. Wilson draws us back to the truth of historical theology, something the medieval theologians and poets had a better grasp of than we moderns, that description is necessarily limited and does no justice to reality in the long run. Even the Westminster Divines understood this. While they took great pains to describe the nature and character of God:

There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him; and withal, most just, and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty. (WCF 2.1)

They understood they could not even begin to fully describe Him and that even the Scriptures were unclear in one way or another, being bound by human (created) language:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them. (WCF 1.7)

From this discussion on the limits of language, Wilson suggests that we might understand the character of God and His divine attributes a little better if we listened to the language of poetry. While poetry is often imprecise (a topic we will cover again in the essay on Poetic Knowledge) it expresses the truth in more understandable ways. Consider the language of hymns, which are essentially poetic. Not only poetry, but he suggests the poetry and language of the North Sea region will be helpful in thinking through our own limitations and needs in describing the goodness and glory of God.

It is Wilson’s hope that the language and culture of the Beowulf writer will remind us of the essential medieval qualities that will help us repent of our modernity in the arena of theology. A healthy dose of medieval protestant theology is what is needed in the modern world.

The Pattern of Rome

Along with Angels in the Architecture I've been reading the Southern Agrarians, hoping to find a Masters thesis idea in there. It has been enjoyable reading and has confirmed some thoughts I've had for a little while now. One of these thoughts has to do with modern parallels to the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Beginning just after the death of Domitian (AD 51-96) the Roman Empire entered into a crisis from which it would never fully recover. Diocletian (AD 244-311) and Constantine (AD 272-337) made some needed improvements that kept the Empire afloat for a while longer but nothing could really halt the building disintegration of Rome. Scholars have debated the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire for centuries. Some have, of course, located the cause in the invasions of the German tribes in the fourth century. Others have seen an economic problem as central to the collapse of Rome; a failing agrarian economy and rising unemployment. Still others have seen the collapse of the currency as essential to the demise of the imperial power.
As I've been reading the agrarians I have seen that it was not any one of these issues that finally caused the fall of Rome, but a mixture of them. Certainly barbarian invasions were the most obvious event in the 200 years of the fall of Rome. However, we must understand what created a situation where the barbarians could invade. For all intents and purposes the fall of Rome can be attributed to three sources. Failure to protect their borders. Failure to develop a balanced economy, namely agriculture and industry. Failure to stop inflation.
These three issues, working together created a collapsing situation from which even the mighty Roman Empire could not escape. Sadly, 1500 years later we have not learned these lessons. An article from the Economist several years ago showed a scary parallel between American troop dispersement throughout the world and Roman troop placement near the end of the empire. Our troops are so far flung that we can not address our own national borders we are too busy fighting little brush fires in other nations, while our own borders are overrun. However, please understand I am not against immigration, just against illegal immigration. Agriculture continues to be one of the most ignored problem spots in the American economy. The idea of the family farm has largely disappeared from the American landscape, an idea that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus literally died for in 133-129 BC. Our current currency crisis is a direct result of inflation. The dollar buys less because the supply is too large. A old story from pre-WWII Germany can show where this can lead. The story goes that an old woman was walking down the street with a basket full of money. She stopped to look at something in a store window and when she turned around again she found that her basket had been stolen and the pile of money was left lying in the street. It can get that bad right here as well. If we don't curb some of these alarming trends, we could easily be facing the same collapse that Rome faced. And I doubt we will fare much better.

First experience with death

Saturday evening I had my first real, first-hand experience with death. There was a accident up at the church we rent from and a car hit one of the rock pillars at the corners of the parking lot. The car and the fragments of the pillar went about thirty feet. The car had locked its brakes up and slid sideways into the pillar. I was lying in bed just dozing off when I heard the brakes lock up and the hit. I wasn't sure what I'd heard. I got up, dressed, grabbed a flashlight and headed up the driveway to see what had happened and if I could help at all.
Upon reaching the car I saw the driver still in the car, seemingly unconscious. A female passenger was roaming about the scene hysterically. Another guy and girl had just beat me to the scene; they were playing in the backyard of the subdivision behind us when they heard the wreck and drove over. They both worked in a hospital nearby so had training and experience (though I didn't know that until later). The female passenger had cuts all over her arms and said she had crawled out of the passenger side window. The guy had checked the driver's pulse and found nothing. He and I yanked at the passenger side door to get it open and he tried to pull him free but he was stuck. I helped as much as I could and we all came to the realization that this young man was already dead. No CPR was going to help, even if we could get him free of the wreckage. The rock pillar had hit on his side and the indentation from the impact was a good two feet into the side of the car.
911 had been called and I did my best to talk them to the exact location. As they approached we settled into the background and I began to reflect on what I'd just witnessed. I had been holding, touching, pulling, and pushing on a man who had been alive just moments before. I was looking at the reality of death. I began to try to play the events from his perspective in my mind. I could not imagine how he felt. Locking the brakes meant he must have been somewhat aware of the situation, even if he was too late. There were broken beer bottles all over the scene and a busted cooler in the back. I can't be sure that alcohol was involved but it certainly seemed likely.
All too often we think of death in a very abstract sort of way. Many of us have had family members die; grandparents and other relatives. Perhaps we have even had parents die. But this was not abstract death. This was not death as it is presented in a funeral home or a visitation service. This was 3 minutes ago living and breathing death. I began to consider how true it is that life is fragile. Other than funerals and visitations, my experience with death was limited to television, movies, and books. They were no substitute for the feelings I had about this event. Looking at a dead man helped me understand some of what the books I read were trying to get across to me. This past year my juniors read All Quiet on the Western Front and often read about death and all its hideousness. While I academically agreed with and knew what Remarque to be saying about the experience of death was right, I had no real context for it until Saturday night. Saturday night I understood what Paul understood when he took Kat off his shoulder and found him dead. Death is quick.
Of course all this musing would be in vain if it did not have eternal value. Hebrews 9 speaks of the swiftness and finality of death and the coming judgment. Death is just once. Death is final. It is impossible to prepare for death when death is happening. That young man, a 21 year old I later learned, had no time between the moment he locked up his brakes and the moment he died (which was almost certainly instantaneous) to consider eternity or to do business with God.
I considered, most of all, all the times God spared me his fate. I began to see with new eyes the kind of mercy and grace God had shown to me in the years prior to my conversion. I drank and drove home. I sped down dark roads at night. I did stupid things and am here telling all about it. I lived through it. But that has nothing to do with my skill as a driver or anything else in myself. What Saturday night showed me, reminded me, was that God had providentially cared for me and overlooked "the times of ignorance" in me and made me live through my foolishness. It reminded me of God's love for me.

Angels in the Architecture "A Wine Dark Sea and Tumbling Sky"

Like many others, I first gave serious consideration to the holiness of God after reading R.C. Sproul’s book on the subject. I also watched a video series on the subject. I remember being struck by the comprehensiveness of that attribute. The idea that God’s holiness is so pervasive and so complete that not even the angelic creatures can “fully bear that sight” was unimaginable. This first real essay calls us back to a proper understanding of God’s holiness as “the manifestation of all His attributes in all their splendor.” What a great way to put that! But Wilson doesn’t just want an academic contemplation of God’s holiness. He wants a practical application of the doctrine. Specifically to our understanding of beauty.

In short, while beginning with God’s holiness, as I am becoming more and more convinced everything should, the chapter is really about a return to an objective, universal, and invariant doctrine of beauty. Wilson actually says that sound doctrine should include a love of the beautiful.

What is beauty? Where does it come from? In the throes of modernity we have come to accept as gospel truth the maxim “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” What rubbish! And yet, it is difficult to get around the differing ideas of beauty and taste. How can I say that your love of green apples is doctrinally flawed while my love of red apples is orthodox? This isn’t really what the Bible teaches about beauty. When the Bible considers beauty it does so in contrast to the pagan notions of beauty. While we offer living sacrifices to God out of our gratitude for salvation, the pagans offered their babies to the fire and their daughters to prostitution. Which is more beautiful? While Bezalel fashioned the ark of the covenant and the implements for the worship of the living God, we have “artists” who stick a crucifix in a jar of urine and go on about their right of free speech to do it, and isn’t it clever?

While I need to think more about the standards of beauty to come to grips with what they say, I have no doubt that there are such standards. Wilson is right. Our sense of beauty, like our sense of truth is derivative, not originative. We live by presupposition. This must affect our aesthetic as well. I haven’t worked it all out, but I know it works. Wilson points to two basic responses we, as modern evangelicals, typically have to this.

“The modern evangelical either says that our aesthetic vision should be borrowed from the world, or … we must be content with no beauty at all.”

This is no way to live. Art is to reflect the glory of the living God as we are to reflect the glory of the living God. God is the first and greatest artist, and we (as well as creation) are His handiwork. We are some of the first pieces of art. Let us bask in the freedom this allows.

Angels in the Architecture - Introduction "Positively Medieval"

Wilson begins the book with an introductory essay and posits a medieval / modern antithesis. He admits it may be odd, but says it is important to flesh out the Christian worldview and “Christian medievalism” is the best way to flesh out that story. The essays that follow cover subjects ranging from predestination, lovemaking, feasting, and agrarianism.

The obvious question for Wilson and Jones is how to define modernity and medievalism? Modernity is the current shape of the world, with all its sterility and loneliness. Modernity is whatever rejects truth, beauty, and goodness. This is why postmodernism is simply the child or grandchild of modernity, according the Wilson and Jones. The rejection of these categories means little until we recognize what they replace them with. Rationalism and sentimentalism are the virtues that modernity puts in the place of truth, beauty, and goodness. Modernity is the Enlightenment lived out to the n^th degree. It is a world without feeling, only sentimentalism. It is world without love, only cold rationalism. Medievalism, on the other hand, is the fullness of truth, beauty, and goodness and all the things that go with them. Wilson says,

“The medieval period is the closest thing we have to a maturing Christian culture.”

This maturing culture was cut short in the 16^th century by none other than the Reformation and the Enlightenment. While the Reformation was cut of the same cloth as medievalism, neither survived the Enlightenment very well. The Reformation was a revolution of sorts and revolutions always call for some serious calls to be made. Shipwreck survivors must make some very serious decisions about life and death in the immediate wake of the wreck that do not necessarily reflect how they would live normally. But the situation determines the actions. This is not a call for or an endorsement of situational ethics. No one can do anything immoral in the wake of a shipwreck or plane crash and call it OK because of the wreck. The situation never justifies the choice, but it can reasonably inform the choice. Luther and Calvin and the others made some societal and cultural choices to distance themselves from Roman Catholicism so much that their descendents mistook the emergency decision for the proscribed norm and made it normative for the resulting group.

But the true test between medievalism and modernity is the appeal of the story. Which has a better tale to tell? Would you rather hear the tale sitting before a roaring fire in a Danish Mead Hall with a mug of dark brew or in a cold, sterile restaurant on 5^th Ave in New York while you daintily sip your trendy mixed drink? Would you rather hear the tale after a long hard day’s work in your fields or after a long shift in the cubicle? To ask the question is almost to have it answered. We consider the medieval story more valuable because it was so rich. Yeah, it was dirty and we can learn that lesson later.

The introduction tells us that the medieval story was taken over by Protestantism but then lost in the trenches of modernity. We can recover it and move forward. The rest of this book, the essays that follow are guides to what medieval Protestantism would look like.

End of a school year reflection

The end of a school year always calls for a little reflection. I would recommend this for students as well. What have we accomplished? What did we intend to accomplish? For teachers the first question is always a little short of the second question. However, I would submit that once we reflect a little, many wonderful things, experiences, conversations, and discussions that were not intended took place. That is the joy of teaching to me. I love it when honestly spontaneous discussions of an eternal nature break out in the classroom. It makes a difference, I suppose, that I teach humanities and not math (but I imagine good conversations could be sparked there as well). The conversation is what it is all about. After all, we are trying to get these students to engage in the Great Conversation. If they are not going to engage in the Small Conversation (their own classroom) how can we expect them to engage the culture?
I would hope that next year as I make my intention plans, I would take the unforeseen conversations into account. I hope to make more time for them. I think it is where the true learning takes place.

Angels in the Architecture Foreword

George Grant wrote the foreword to this book and if anyone has listened to or seen his Modernity lectures through Gileskirk, many of the themes contained herein are going to sound familiar. This foreword is typical George Grant, which is always a good thing.

Grant begins with a statement concerning the oddity of naming the period between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the rise of the Renaissance the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, or even medieval. The naming convention reflects pure Enlightenment thought concerning this time period. Read a little Voltaire and you can figure where the terminology came from. Interestingly it only came from those Enlightenment gurus who were hostile to Christianity. Artists like Van Eyk, Michelangelo and scientists like Newton and Bacon were not as harsh toward the previous thousand years or Christendom.

Grant makes a point, as do Wilson and Jones, of calling the period Christendom. It makes a difference. The dominant ideology in place during the thousand years between say AD 500 and AD 1500 was Christianity. This is reflected in its art, architecture, culture, feasting, economics, theology, politics, everything. It was not always reflected perfectly, we do live in a fallen world.

Looking at and considering what Christendom still has to say to Modernity is what the book is about. The rest of the essays reflect that theme in very remarkable ways.