Happy Birthday G.K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, author of Orthodoxy, What's Wrong With The World, the Father Brown Mysteries, and many other well-known books, was born on this day (May 29) in the year 1874. His writing continues to be influential to many readers around the world. If you have not been exposed to his writing, check out the American Chesterton Society (on the sidebar) and read a little about this literary giant.

This Day in History-The Beginning of Philosophy

Today, May 28 is one of the beginning dates offered for the beginnings of philosophy in Ancient Greece. The reason is quite simple really. A solar eclipse happened, as predicted by Thales of Miletus on this day in 586 BC. This solar eclipse happened to lead to truce between the Lydians and the Medes, a truce that would be in effect until Croesus of Lydia was conquered by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 546 BC. But that is another story.
Why would a solar eclipse begin philosophy? Because under the paradigm of Greek mythology, the religion of the Greeks, he should not have been able to do it. Under Greek mythology every event takes place because of the gods. Consider the cause of the plague in Homer's Iliad that is distressing the Greeks as the epic opens. "Apollo, who in anger at the king drove the foul pestilence along the host, and the people perished, since Atreus' son had dishonoured Chryses, priest of Apollo" (Il. i.9-11). Typically, as in Homer, events have an immediate course in the wrath of the gods. Thales usurps the possibility of the gods by predicting something. Prediction implies one of two things for the Greek worldview. Either the gods to not exist or Thales is a prophet with the mind of the gods.
This involves just a just brief foray into causality. In human experience (shut up Hume), causes always precede events. In Greek mythology, all events had supernatural causes with immediate causes. By predicting an event, Thales called into question the immediate supernatural causes of this event, and thus all events. If Thales can predict the effect, the cause is known or knowable. But Greek mythology held that the causes of storms, plagues, even the seasons are known only to the gods. The consequences of Thales prediction are obvious. Either the gods did not really control events like the eclipse Thales predicted or they planned the event do far beforehand that Thales was able to deduce it or discover it. But either of these negates the traditional understanding of causality according to the worldview of the Greek mind.
Thus Thales, by using reason and science, began philosophy by predicting an event that the gods did not cause.

The Grotesque in Fiction

In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.
In the introduction to a collection of his stories called Rotting Hill, Wyndham Lewis has written, "If I write about a hill what is rotting, it is because I despise rot." The general accusation passed against writers now is that they write about rot because they love it. Some do, and their works may betray them, but it is impossible not to believe that some write about rot because they see it for what it is.
Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer & His Country" in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 31.

The Trouble with Socialism

"The trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister.

On This Day in History

On May 16, 1532 Sir Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor of England. This was done because he could not condone either the divorce of King Henry VIII from Catherine or the marriage of Henry to Anny Boleyn.
Thomas More (1478 - 1535) was the leading anti-Protestant in England at the time of the Reformation. More spoke vehemently against Luther and his views. He held a number of offices in English politics as he worked his way up to being Lord Chancellor.
In 1530, however, he had refused to sign a letter asking the Papacy for an annulment of the marriage of Henry to Catherine. This put a serious wedge between the monarchy and More. The decision of the monarchy to terminate the Roman Catholic Church and institute the Church of England with the king as the head did not sit well with More. Whereupon, in 1531 he refused to take an oath demonstrating loyalty to the king as the Head of the Church of England.
In 1532, following several attempts, More was finally allowed to resign when it became clear that no reunion between the King and More was going to take place. The next year when More refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn as the Queen of England, Henry had More arrested on charges of accepting bribes and high treason, although no evidence existed for either crime.
In 1534 More appeared before a parliamentary commission and accepted that Parliament had the right to declare Anne the legitimate queen of England but refused to swear an oath himself to that effect. More's problem was not with the Act of Succession, but with the language in it that declared the Parliament had more right that the Pope to legislate in matters of religion.
More was imprisoned in the Tower of London. In 1535 he was brought to trial for denying the validity of the Act of Succession, which he did not do. More maintained he could not be convicted of denial of the Act if he did not actually deny the Act. He refused to answer questions related to the King's authority as Head of the Church or any of his opinions on the subject.
Nevertheless, the jury convicted him of the crime of high treason based on testimony of other witnesses. More was executed on July 6, 1535 by decapitation.
More was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1886.
A fantastic film version of his life and trial exists in the adaption of A Man for All Seasons.

Wisdom from Chesterton

Many clever men like you have trusted in civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
The Napoleon of Notting Hill

This Day in History

While every one else is blogging about Cinco de Mayo, I am going to write about another event that had greater ramifications but led to fewer parties and less drunkenness.
On this day, May 5, in 1640, Charles I dissolved the Short Parliament. This event has been claimed as the fuse of the English Civil War. Charles had learned from his father, James I, that kings owed their position to God. So far so good (as per Rom. 13:1-7). But James also taught his son that he was above the law and could do anything he wanted to because he owed nothing to the people. Problem! Charles repeatedly tried to rule without respect to the people of England, even though Magna Carta required certain powers be reserved for the people (represented in Parliament). When his foreign wars began costing more money than he actually had, he was forced to call Parliament into session. Only Parliament could authorize monies for war and soldier's wages.
When Parliament came into session on April 17, they refused to conduct any business until Charles recognized the authority of the people in government. After only three weeks, Charles dissolved the body and attempted to raise the money to fight his Scottish war alone. Charles was able to hold out until November of 1640 when lack of funds forced him to recall Parliament. This Parliament session lasted until 1649 and saw the outbreak of the English Civil War.
Royalists and Puritans fought each other over basic principles of government. Was the monarchy totalitarian or did it derive its power from the consent of the people? Charles fled before the Puritan Parliament and gathered his own forces. Oliver Cromwell rose as the leader of the Puritan forces and eventually Charles was captured, tried for treason against the state, and beheaded.
Issues such as religious freedom also entered the picture. Charles had appointed William Laud as Archbishop and Laud wanted to force the Anglican liturgy and form of worship on Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and others. In the period following Charles death, Parliament called together a diverse group of religious leaders, called divines, and charged them with drafting a confessional statement for the Protestant churches in England that all could assent to. The result, in 1648, was the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms.
So while I have nothing against beer and margaritas, I prefer to raise a glass in honor of the Short Parliament and the men who stood firm in their resolve against tyranny today.

How to Change a Culture

The other night my wife and I were flipping through channels in hopeless attempt to find something to watch. For one thing, we don't have cable, by design. We have decided that we already watch too much television with only the over-the-air broadcast channels we receive. For another thing, we can't justify spending the money. But the first reason is more important.
Nonetheless, we were flipping the channels and lighted upon NBC for a few moments. I could tell it was one of the incarnations of Law and Order. I have enjoyed some of these, especially the way they take a story currently in the news and twist it a little to make a fictional story. However, what I saw that night was nothing to be amused about.
The version I caught was SVU (Special Victims Unit). I rarely like these because of their attention to children and sexual crimes. I didn't like this one either, but for different reasons. I caught the story most of the way through, but I got the gist of it pretty quickly. A child had died and the evidence had led the investigators to a mother whose own child was known to play at the same public park as the victim. What happened next left me dumbfounded. The woman was arrested for murder because she had refused to vaccinate her own child and that child had spread a mild disease to the victim.
I actually didn't even finish the episode. I had seen everything I needed to see in those few moments. The characters provided the commentary that was necessary to change or establish public opinion on the issue at stake.
The people who make Law and Order and most of the other shows like it are at the forefront of culture change in our day. They are the George Eliot's of today, making it seem reasonable to think in ways that are actually quite contrary to biblical attitudes. Eliot, as I've posted here before, used the subtlety of her novel to slowly change attitudes toward aristocracy and wealth. Law and Order and the shows like them do the same thing for sexual preference, socialism, abortion, and the whole host of social actions in the news today.
The longer we watch shows like this without questioning them and their assumptions, the easier we make it to change the very foundations of our culture. The people who make these shows know this. This is the big game now. We are having our attitudes of culture and society changed around us without our even knowing it. These new thoughts are presented as matters of justice and common sense. Only really uptight and bigoted folks would reject the premises presented by the show. Only prudes would maintain sexual purity in the modern world. Only over-protective religious freaks would homeschool their children in the modern world (also seen lambasted in a Law and Order show).
This is the world we inherit if we watch carelessly and without thinking.

Antigone

Last night I had the unique opportunity to see a production of Antigone. Some friends told me they had a spare ticket and asked if I'd like to go. I met them at Bob Jones University's Performance Hall and we chatted a while before they opened the doors. When we got in we were given programs which informed us that it was not Sophocles' Antigone we were watching, but one written by Jean Anouilh.
Anouilh was a French playwright who lived from 1910 to 1987. He was largely unsuccessful as a playwright until 1942 when he wrote his version of Antigone. It was first performed on February 6, 1944, during the Nazi occupation of Paris. As the ancient work of the same title, Anouilh's Antigone addressed issues such as state control and the citizen's responsibility to obey.
To get it past the Nazi sensors, the play pictures a very different Creon from Sophocles. The message that men have the responsibility to obey God rather than men is less central. Creon appears less like a tyrant and more like a man trying to hold together a bad situation in the midst of modernity. Antigone begins with a carefully worked out righteousness that crumbles into something like whining and a simple dogged resolution that she was already right and no new information can alter her own opinion.
The play is very similar to Sophocles' original and does little damage to the well-known story line. Anouilh made some modern alterations, but managed to keep the Chorus who solemnly proclaim at one point that they know how things will end up because it is their "job to know."
I was enthralled. I watched eagerly as the events I knew took form and played themselves out on stage. I have not fully processed the message of the play and want to get my hands on the text to read it.
The production itself was fantastic and I was glad I went.