Forma Issue #13

COLUMNS FEATURES

EDITORS’ LETTER

by the Editors

Cultural Currency

RIGHTLY ORDERED: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF LIST-MAKING

by Joshua Gibbs

Book Reviews

BECOME A DEFIANT HOLY FOOL

by Gracy Olmstead

FLANNERY O ’CONNOR: PROPHET IN HER OWN LAND

by Sean Johnson

A COMPLICATED DIALOGUE WITH A LITERARY GIANT

by Heidi White

AN INVITATION TO REMEMBER THE CLASSICS

by Greg Wilbur

From the Classroom THE TEACHER AS NEUTRAL REFEREE

by Joshua Pauling

This magazine is published by the CiRCE Institute. Copyright CiRCE Institute 2020. For a digital version, and for additional content, please go to formajournal.com.

For information regarding reproduction, submission, or advertising, please email formamag@circeinstitute.org.

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Issue 13 Winter 2020

26 I AM FLAMBEAU: CHESTERTON ’S ARTISTIC CONFESSION

by Brett Chancery

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS: A LOOK AT FLANNERY O ’CONNOR ’S HOME PLACE

by Graeme Pitman and David Kern

BOOKS THAT SURPRISED IN 2019 by

Various Contributors

A CLASSICAL AND COSMPOLITAN EDUCATION

by David Withun

THE SOUND BEHIND THE SOUND: A REALIST VIEW OF METAPHOR

by Michial Farmer

The CiRCE Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization that exists to promote and support classical education in the school and in the home. We seek to identify the ancient principles of learning, to communicate them enthusiastically, and to apply them vigorously in today’s educational settings through curricula development, teacher training, events, an online academy, and a content-laden website. Learn more at circeinstitute.com

Editors' Letter

Winter is a contradictory season. On the one hand, darkness and cold reign, driving us to the warmth and safety of hearth and home. Despite its stark beauty, winter is frequently inhospitable, a season lived mostly indoors unless we’re prepared to encounter its frigid welcome. During winter, when the world seems dead, we long to snuggle under soft blankets and read by a crackling fire.

However, winter is not merely the cold fade of an old year, but the burgeoning entrance of a new one; it is a season of possibility. The turning of one year to the next offers opportunities for growth. And FORMA has grown quite a bit this winter, adding scores of new subscribers (and counting!), launching the FORMA Review, and featuring many new and established voices at the intersection of classical thought and contemporary culture. We are proud of what we’re building: a gathering place for lively conversation about the creative and intellectual output of authors, educators, and innovators doing important work in this cultural moment.

Our growth is exciting, but we exist to serve you in 2020. In this Winter Issue, you will find (among other offerings) Gracy Olmstead on Andrew Peterson’s long-anticipated book, Adorning the Dark; a photographic look at Flannery O’Connor’s homeplace, Andalusia; an essay about the American obsession with list-making; a contemplation about the cosmopolitan responsibilities of classical educators; and a reflection on G.K. Chesterton’s neglected but important villain, Hercule Flambeau. And of course, as always, we are pleased to offer original poetry by contemporary poets.

As we enter 2020, FORMA continues on an upward trajectory of growth while maintaining our steadfast commitment to classical standards. Whether you spend your winter curled up by the fire, practicing productivity, or a little bit of both, we are honored that you are with us.

Sincerely,

The Editors

The Editorial Team

Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute

Editor-in-Chief: David Kern

Managing Editor: Heidi White

Art Director: Graeme Pitman

Poetry Editor: Christine Perrin

Associate Editors: Emily Andrews, Sean Johnson

Senior Editors: Jamie Cain, Matt Bianco

Contributing Editors: Ian Andrews, Noah Perrin

Copy Editor: Emily Callihan

Cultural Currency

In October of 2019, with very little fanfare, the music critics at Pitchfork released their list of the two hundred best songs of the last decade. While perusing the titles, I recalled the last time such a list was published. Ten years ago, year-end Best-Of lists were a much bigger deal, not just for Pitchfork, but for every media outlet that reviews books, films, and music. December was the month every self-respecting critic ordered all the releases of the year into a numerical hierarchy, proclaimed one film or book or record “the best,” published links to the list on social media, and waited for the comments section to fill up with nitpickers and naysayers. A decade back, BestOf lists were a sufficiently big deal that some websites acquired corporate sponsors just for their lists. Many websites announced when their lists would be posted weeks in advance, then slowly rolled out their lists day by day in the final weeks of the year. With the end of the 2010s upon us, though, the hype which was typical of Best-Of lists ten years ago is waning.

In the early ’80s, magazines like Rolling Stone would note the ten best records of the year in an off-cover article published in December. By the 2010s, Rolling Stone was annually compiling a list of the fifty best records and one hundred best singles, not to mention separately compiled lists of the same categories as chosen by readers (as opposed to staff writers). The popularity of lists peaked about five years ago, around the same time hashtag activism really took off. But since 2014, the hype which surrounds the publication of year-end lists has gradually declined. The graphic design for the lists is less flashy and less expensive, and the lists rarely occupy a place of prom-

inence on the websites which publish them for more than a few days. As opposed to a retrospective on the year and a celebration of artistic accomplishment, year-end lists now seem embarrassingly obligatory, like a formal apology from a celebrity for saying something unfashionable about race on Twitter. Lists are simply more trouble than they are worth.

The reason for declining interest in lists, of course, is that hierarchies of any kind are an increasingly touchy subject, and any list of the best albums or films of the year is necessarily going to place the artistic accomplishments of one race over another, one gender over another, one sexual orientation over another, and so forth. Every Best-Of list is now occasion for accusations of bigotry or pandering, and while such accusations have become as common as daisies, one gets the sense that few magazines and media outlets want to end the year with controversy and a deluge of online acrimony. I suspect that within ten years or so, no websites will numerically order their year-end lists and ten years after that, the lists will be gone altogether. One also gets the sense that the Academy Awards are just one bad fall away from being euthanized, and when the Oscars are gone, the rest of the accolades industry is sure to follow.

Looking back now, it is strange the popularity of lists came so late in Western history, for the list seems more a medieval art form. Perhaps the modern fascination with lists was a lingering effect of neoclassical tastes, less hierarchical than rational and scientific. The medievals gazed up into a well-ordered night sky, a hierarchy of spheres and angels, and they liked their lives on earth to mirror

After Sei Shōnagon

what they saw when they looked toward God. Regardless, the idea of arranging works of art into a hierarchical order now strikes many people as patriarchal, and a few media outlets have already given up attaching numerical assessments to their reviews of books or records. The one hundred best albums of the year are arranged according to their release date or just alphabetically by the artist’s last name.

When I was young, I loved making lists. In my bachelor days, my friends and I often passed the time by making lists of favorite movies, songs, and meals. Seven or eight of us might stay up until three in the morning, composing lists of singers or bands, then reading the lists out loud in rounds from the bottom to the top. Every man in the ancient world knew Helen was the fairest, but only because he had made a list and compared it with others. Boys still make such lists today, I am sure. I can even recall a dinner party wherein my wife and I and another couple sat around late into the evening making lists of the five most handsome men in the world and the five most beautiful women in the world, then reading our lists out loud to the table. You don’t really know someone until you’ve heard them say Paul Newman was the best-looking man of the twentieth century.

Year-end lists are not just the stuff of dinner parties and Rolling Stone, though, for social media has made every man the editor-in-chief of his own Review of the world. Before I deleted my Facebook account in late November, I made three Best of the Decade lists: Best Songs, Best Records, and Best Films. Six of my friends also published Best of the Decade lists and a few will likely publish separate (but agonized over) lists of the best songs and films of the year, as well.

Among music geeks and film nerds, such lists are something of a competitive sport, for the key to putting together a great list is including a few things that no one has heard of and a few things which everyone else passed on, but also a few mainstream items everyone will recognize. Unspoken rules abound. Placing a song with mass appeal (something by Harry Styles, say) close to the top of your list is a little like paying $200 million dollars for a Jackson Pollock painting—it is an argument that there’s

something more to the music which the snobs haven’t yet noticed. Hidden in plain sight, as it were. However, I think the wealthy musicians in the world are a far more talented lot than the wealthy artists of the world. Anyone who is privately, authentically impressed with Jackson Pollock should not be trusted behind the wheel of a car, but the fellow who gets dumped and cries on the drive home while listening to Three Dog Night’s “One” is perfectly sane, perfectly human. As Noël Coward once said, it is “extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

The Best-Of list is and is not what it purports to be. Any fellow whose year-end Best-Of list is comprised entirely of stuff that hit the top ten spots on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart isn’t worthy of compiling a list. Of course, any list which is entirely comprised of under-the-radar songs that only eight people heard doesn’t really need to exist either. The best Best-Of lists are two-parts aristocracy, onepart democracy. Performative, but self-forgetful. Snobby, but catholic. A good Best-Of list is a bit of a race, as well, for a fellow has less than a year to find the good stuff with which to pack his list. A well-crafted Best-Of list is thus not only a sign of good judgment but represents an ability to dive into the dark corners of popular culture and turn up the hidden pearls which the mainstream could not be troubled to locate. A good Best-Of list says, “Not only can I find the good stuff, I can find it before the middle of December in the year it was released.” The Best-Of list is thus something of a game, but also a manifesto of taste, a time capsule, and a lot of posturing.

On the other hand, the Best-Of list which encompasses an entire decade is a different animal, for the songs which seem remarkable at the end of a calendar year are often stale by the end of the decade. Nothing which shows up on a year-end Best-Of list has more than twelve months of staying power, at least not necessarily. While working on my Best of the Decade (2010–2019) lists, I revisited all the year-end Best-Of lists I had made and found the lion’s share of what had seemed impressive in the short term had ultimately proven forgettable. In December of 2009, I chose “Heartbeats” by The Knife as the greatest song of the decade. However, the song I now think not only the best of 2000–2009, but the greatest pop song of

Inasmuch as a classical education concerns rightly ordered loves, classical education is concerned with the creation of lists. Know thyself.

the last twenty-five years, only ranked fifty-third on the list I made a decade ago.

Not everyone finds it easy to choose a favorite, though I think it an intellectual duty to know favorite songs, favorite books, favorite stories, and all the rest. The establishment of favorites is simply part of the ordering of the soul, the proper arrangement of spiritual furniture. The favorite is a merger of taste and hope, for a man’s favorite song is not simply the song he listens to most often, nor the song from which he gets the most pleasure. Granted, the favorite brings pleasure, but it may also feed and charge the soul, recall bitter things, bittersweet things, and gnaw away at him. A man may understand his favorite book better than any other book he has read, but there is also something elusive and vexing about a favorite which evades a man’s firm grasp. As with the knowledge of God, the more deeply a man knows his favorites, the better he appreciates the fact his favorites cannot be fully known. I have never thought of my wife as my best friend, though she is my favorite person. I understand her far, far less than my best friend, Jon Paul, whom I understand (and who understands me) with telepathic clarity and scientific exactness. My conversations with Jon Paul bear a striking similarity to the conversations I have with my own soul before confessing my sins. While my wife is a stable, predictable human being on the one hand, she also sometimes seems to me like Borges’ book of sand: once the reader has turned a page, he will never return to that same page again.

Inasmuch as a classical education concerns rightly ordered loves, classical education is concerned with the creation of lists. Know thyself. The man who has followed the dictum knows what he loves, the degree to which he loves what he loves, but he also knows how his list of loves ought to look. The pleasure of making lists of anything—songs, books, painters—is judging minute differences in our own affections. A good list is not just a technical assessment of the relative pleasure offered by a number of things, but

a catalog of devotions, prejudices, goals, ambitions, and loyalties, all arranged and proportioned and harmonized in such a way that a single personal credo emerges. Much like common sense, lists are brazenly non-egalitarian. Lists are judgmental, technical, subjective, and offensive to everyone ranked second or lower. Lists of greatness are arguable but unprovable. The creation of a hierarchical list burdens, stresses, and strengthens the imagination, for the task involves seeing disparate things in the light of one another and in the light of the transcendent. All this to say, the creation of lists has become a vestigial pastime inherited from an older world, born of beliefs entirely different from our own. Perhaps the short-lived popularity of lists late in the twenteith century was nothing more than the final stand of a now obsolete view of reality.

No one taught me to make lists when I was young; it came naturally, and so I doubt the inevitable demise of the Oscars and the slow fade of Best-Of lists will keep the reasonable people of the world from measuring and weighing the glory of things. Medieval men not only believed in an ordered and hierarchical cosmos, they also believed that man himself was a little cosmos, a small universe, a fitting and complete icon of creation itself. Every sphere (Air, Fire, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, and so forth) which separates man from God is also mystically present within the soul of the virtuous man—or, as David Bentley Hart once suggested, God is both at an infinite distance from man and yet He also fills that distance with Himself. It is not surprising, then, that men would arrange and represent their loves in the shape of the cosmos, higher and higher toward perfection. To know our loves is to know the path we must take to return to God.

Joshua Gibbs teaches Great Books at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. He is a columnist at the CiRCE Institute and the author of How to Be Unlucky and Something They Will Not Forget. His podcast is called Proverbial.

—Dr. John Frame, Professor of Systematic Theology & Philosophy, Reformed Theological Seminary

Become a Defiant Holy Fool

By Gracy Olmstead

What does it mean to be a “creator”? Frederic Nietzsche once suggested that the “noble man,” or übermensch, is one who regards “himself as determining values . . . he creates values.” And many authors speak of their writing as coming from their subconscious, or from some inner “muse.”

But J.R.R. Tolkien offered a radically different version of creativity, one based not within the self, but outside of it. The creative life, he suggested, is predicated upon our ability to receive the fact that we ourselves are created and thus are sub-creators. Our work will only be beautiful or artistic insofar as it reflects the beauty of God, the ultimate Creator. As Tolkien writes in his poem “Mythopoeia,”

Man, sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we're made.

God is the “single White,” the source of all color and beauty. All our efforts at beauty, novelty, or glory are small refractions of that greater light, greater beauty, which stems from God Himself.

Andrew Peterson’s new book Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making is about this sort of creative life: about the desire to reflect God’s glory and to share it with a dark and hurting world. Peterson is a singer-songwriter, author of the Wingfeather Saga, and creator of a ministry called The Rabbit Room, which focuses on cultivating a “strong Christian arts community.” He has spent more than a quarter of a century seeking to create, to share God’s light in songs and other written works—and as his book makes clear, this has been no easy task.

Adorning the Dark is part memoir, part how-to manual for aspiring musicians and writers. But it is also, in a larger sense, about what it means to be a “sub-creator”—to see the teleological end of your creative work as lying beyond yourself. Adorning the Dark defines the creator not as an übermensch, ca-

pable of self-creation, but rather as a receptor: eager to broadcast the meaning, beauty, and glory you are given (but do not make yourself). For this reason, as Peterson’s subtitle implies, a great mystery rests within our efforts at “making.” We move forward with toil and struggle, but also, Peterson suggests, with grace. He shares stories about loss, hardship, stress, exhaustion, and brokenness. From the story behind his Behold the Lamb of God album, to the early struggles of his musical career, each glimpse of Peterson’s life confirms the fact that creation is a difficult discipline. But each is also inspiring, heartening, encouraging—because through them all, Peterson seems to whisper, “Don’t give up.”

Perhaps artists will feel less pressure if they embrace this identity of “sub-creator” and stop looking for some creative muse within themselves. Perhaps those who see themselves as divine copycats, rather than as their own source of innovation and values (as Nietzsche did), will feel less anxiety as they pursue the creative life. But Peterson suggests that it is not this simple. If we believe that God is “profoundly complex, unfathomable, deep as the sea,” and that we are needy, sinful, and small creatures, then the very act of trying to reflect His light, His beauty, can feel impossible and hubristic. Who do we think we are, anyway?

Many artists struggle with imposter’s syndrome—regardless of religious faith or artistic genre. Throughout several chapters, Peterson describes battles that many readers will recognize. He describes that needling, incessant voice that says we are “not intelligent enough, or academic enough, or witty enough” to accomplish whatever it is we want to achieve. I am not an artist, but I recognize that voice, too. For a long time, it prompted me to turn down speaking engagements, to say no to the (rare) invitations I received to speak on panels or come on radio shows. For a lot of people in the secular world, it seems that bolstering one’s self-respect or pride would be the answer to this sort of crippling doubt. One of my favorite tricks for a while, one that enabled me get up on stage when I wanted to cower in a corner, was to pretend to be someone else. I would mentally assume the identity of a friend of mine—a woman who was far more gregarious, eloquent, and funny than I was—and by imaginatively pretending to be her, I could overcome the mental barriers that prevented me from speaking in public.

But eventually, I learned what Peterson writes so perfectly: “Living as we do in dying bodies in a dying world, our best work always falls short of the initiating vision. Toil and trouble, thistle and thorn, we push through the brush and come out bloody on the other side, only to

realize that we’ve ascended a false peak. It’s difficult, yes. But it doesn’t change a thing about who we are.”

The “answer” to imposter’s syndrome is not to assume an importance or rightness we do not have. Our identity and confidence must lie not in what we create, but in our createdness: in the fact that we are beloved, precious, redeemed. Because of this identity, we don’t have to strive for perfection. We don’t have to win Pulitzers or Emmys. We just have to be faithful.

Peterson’s book is about this work of faithfulness: about the dogged persistence required to write poems, paint pictures, sing songs, or pen novels. It is about the humility required for growth and for proper self-expression. And it is about all the other things—homes, families, churches, and communities—that are also, by their nature, creative and nurturing spaces which can glorify God. Two of my favorite chapters in Peterson’s book—“Longing to Belong” and “Community Nourishes Art”—consider the importance of place, of embeddedness, in living a creative life. This book does not suggest, as some secular authors have, that creation is a solitary endeavor—but rather, that it should always happen within a context, a community. It is through community that we receive accountability and support. It is through the creation and cultivation of a home that we embody the disciplines of creation and stewardship.

Although Adorning the Dark focuses on songwriting throughout, many of its principles and stories apply to other creative efforts. As Peterson rightly points out, you don’t have to write songs or paint pictures to be creative: each of us, regardless of whether we are artists, is a creative being. The gardener, the baker, the woodworker, the teacher: each are creators. And each can, as Peterson puts it, “look for the glimmer of the gospel in all corners of life.”

But our efforts at God-glorification can easily, even subconsciously, turn back toward self-glorification. As Peterson writes early on in his book, “I confess, a mighty fear of irrelevance drove me to this vocation, a pressing anxiety that unless you looked back at me with a smile and a nod and said, ‘Oh, I see you. You exist. You are real to me’ . . . I might just wither away and die.”

With time, Peterson’s artistic efforts shifted away from this desperate desire for self-assurance. He assures readers, “The Lord can redeem your impulse for self-preservation by easing you toward love, which is never about self.” Surrender and humility—both necessary to the life of the Christian artist—also help turn our vision outward again. But, he notes, “You have to believe that you’re precious to the King of Creation, and not a waste of space. You and I are anything but irrelevant.

Don’t let the Enemy tell you any different. We holy fools all bear God’s image.”

Only a “holy fool” can defy Nietzsche’s “noble man.” Only a holy fool is willing to, as Peterson puts it, “fumble about in a dark room, feeling for the shape of [a new song],” aware of both the brokenness and the beauty in what they create. Only a holy fool can surrender to the “feeling of diminishment” that comes with realizing nothing you create will ever be as perfect as you hoped. Only a holy fool can sit down to write a book, certain of his or her unworthiness—but certain, too, that God can use even this feeble creation for His glory.

Perhaps my favorite part of Peterson’s book is this quote, an excellent description of what it means to see yourself as a sub-creator:

I am convinced that poets are toddlers in a cathedral, slobbering on wooden blocks and piling them up in the light of the stained glass. We can hardly make anything beautiful that wasn’t beautiful in the first place. We aren’t writers so much as gleeful rearrangers of words whose meanings we can’t begin to know. When we manage to make something pretty, it’s only so because we are ourselves a flourish on a greater canvas. That means there’s no end to the discovery. We may crawl around the cathedral floor for ages before we grow up enough to reach the doorknob and walk outside into a garden of delights. Beyond that, the city, then the rolling hills, then the sea. And when the world of every cell has been limned and painted and sung, we lie back on the grass, satisfied that our work

is done. Then, of course, the sun sets and we see above us the dark dome of glittering stars.

Many of us who write or sing or paint have felt a flame within us—a burning desire to create something beautiful, and to offer it up in praise and thanks. But the work is demanding, exhausting. It is easy, when we see the imperfections in our efforts, to feel like giving up.

Despite that feeling, Peterson urges, plant your seed in the ground—and trust that God can grow something from it. Your imperfections, your smallness, might even help you refract the beauty of the single White.

“Write about your smallness,” Peterson suggests. “Write about your sin, your heart, your inability to say anything worth saying. Watch what happens.”

To the hopeful artist, musician, or writer, Adorning the Dark is a letter from a friend on a fellow journey—a journey that can often be shadowed, cold, and lonely. Each of us deals with the doubt and fear that accompany the discipline of creation. And so each of us needs to be reminded of the vision behind the work: the hope that we might reflect a little splinter of glorious light and make this dark world a little brighter by our efforts.

Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making | B&H Books | $16.99

Gracy Olmstead (@gracyolmstead) is a writer who contributes to The New York Times, The American Conservative, The Week, The Washington Post, and other publications.

EXPLORE the CLASSICS

with other books from this series

ADDITIONAL TITLES FORTHCOMING:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Flannery O'Connor: Prophet in Her Own Land

By Sean Johnson

Iwonder if any age is more likely than the twentieth century to impress a sense of lonesome isolation upon the homebound soul. Shut-ins, the bedridden, et al. have always been with us, but no earlier age provided such abundant means of knowing just how much was going on outside the limiting circle of “home.” Newspaper, radio, and eventually television brought an awareness of the wider world directly into the life of seclusion. The letter, though, was still a medium that could reach in both directions. For Flannery O’Connor, letters were an enduring link to the world her poor health often barred her from.

O’Connor attended the University of Iowa and lived briefly in New York and Connecticut before a lupus diagnosis forced her back to her family home, Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. The prospect of this new retirement so early in her crescent literary career seems to have struck her as bitter and healthful in turns. Two new collections of her letters—Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends and The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon—throw into fresh relief the tension of

O’Connor’s being confined, geographically, to the rim of the literary world just as, professionally, she established her place in its hub.

Of these two collections, The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon is easier to speak about— as this review will probably betray—because its contents are a simple dialogue, arranged chronologically. Good Things Out of Nazareth, though, boasts the more ingenious arrangement. In fact, Editor Benjamin B. Alexander used portions of the O’Connor-Gordon letters as a pillar of the collection. Spiraling out from those are a valuable assortment of uncollected or unpublished epistles from O’Connor’s broader literary circles—Walker Percy and Robert Lowell among them. The twist is that Alexander oscillates between a chronological arrangement and a thematic one. The scheme makes it harder to feel the development of relationships in Good Things than in Letters, but it effectively draws together disparate threads in the thought of these writers and critics so that they can be better understood together. To smooth the less intuitive flow, Alexander also provides far more editorial comment upon the letters and their context. Whether through the specific focus of the one or the novel organization of the other, these collections both strike the reader differently than the well-known edition of O’Connor letters that proceeds them.

Myriad readers love Flannery O’Connor’s jarring fiction, but those who come to an abiding love of Flannery herself repeatedly do so through her letters collected in

The Habit of Being. This earlier collection includes letters to the author, but O’Connor’s own letters dominate and provide a broad personal encounter with the witty, pious, and cheerful young woman suffering in Georgia. The two recently published collections put The Habit of Being in new perspective, though, by revealing facets of O’Connor’s correspondence that it touched on less frequently. Both Letters and Good Things are best described as literary correspondences, largely written about the craft and theory of writing. That first and, for decades, definitive collection included personal exchanges with close friends and family, but was also full of what can only be described as fan mail—appreciations from housewives, questions from children, comically bizarre interpretations from kooky professors—all snapshots of O’Connor reaching out and being touched by an appreciative reading world. By focusing so singularly on communication with her peers, these new volumes punctuate her isolation as a writer so far removed from like-minded artists. Not long after dear friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald introduced her (by mail) to the novelist and critic Caroline Gordon, O’Connor wrote that

There is no one around here who knows anything at all about fiction (every story is “your article,” or “your cute piece”) or much about any kind of writing for that matter. Sidney Lanier and Daniel Whitehead Hickey are the Poets and Margaret Mitchell is the Writer. Amen. So it means a great deal to me to get these comments.

The Fitzgeralds had sent Gordon an unfinished draft of Wise Blood in the hopes of soliciting for their friend the critical input of an established author. “This girl is a real novelist,” she wrote back enthusiastically, her lifelong interest in O’Connor sparked. No writer was ever helped by unalloyed praise, though, and in one of her first letters to O’Connor Gordon obliges with thousands of words of frank technical criticism. “I would like,” she says in summary, “to see you make some preparation for the title, ‘Wise Blood,’ and I’d like to see a little landscape, a little enlarging of the scene . . . and I’d also like to see a little slowing up at certain crucial places I’ve indicated.” In the same letter Gordon—her senior by thirty years—apologizes if her tone is “overly pedantic,” insisting it is “doubtless the result of teaching,” but a teacher is precisely what the budding writer still needed.

O’Connor also found in Gordon, who entered the Catholic church shortly before their acquaintance began, a sympathetic Catholic intellectual. In various letters, she complains to Gordon of her mother’s reticence to discuss her writings, and of an “83 yr. old cousin” who will only

read sentimental religious “trash.” In another place she recalls a pamphlet by a Jesuit who “seemed to think that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was about as good as you could get. Somebody ought to blow the lid off.” Good Things also contains exchanges between O’Connor and several priests with a literary bent. The collections together are an obliging corrective to the common and erroneous notion that at Andalusia O’Connor was a lone Catholic in a “Christ-haunted South.” It was not Catholics she was geographically cut off from, but thinkers.

Gordon was not alone in making up this deficiency, as Good Things thoroughly reveals, but her role as literary mentor was unique. In a letter to Walker Percy, Gordon recommends Wise Blood because she believes he and O’Connor suffer from opposite maladies in their fiction—her stories are all plot and vivid action but no scenery, his are all scenery and reflection but no action. “Her focus seems to me like the spotlight a burglar plays on the safe he is cracking. You don’t see anything else in the room. But she sure is good.” Pages upon pages of their correspondence show Gordon bluntly critiquing manifestations of this weakness in her stories, but the final drafts suggest O’Connor dutifully incorporated the feedback in her revisions.

The exchanges in Letters amount to a master class in technique as Gordon not only critiques O’Connor’s own fiction (sometimes line by line), but also breaks down the method and style of master writers. She unfolds the intricacies of narrative voice in Flaubert, perspective in Henry James, the setting of scenes in Joyce, dialogue in Faulkner, and so on. The most important breakthrough, though, is O’Connor’s growing sense of her vocation— and not mere talent—as a writer. In 1951 she writes, “I don’t really like to write, but I don’t like to do anything else better.” After two years of corresponding with Gordon she says, in a strikingly different tone, “It scares me to death when I think how good the Lord is to give you a talent and let you be able to use it. I re-resolve to become responsible, and to Madame Bovary I go.”

The two would exchange critical evaluations of great writers, living and dead—shared appreciation for James, ambivalence toward Waugh, and concern over the religion of Joyce and Faulkner—but only Gordon could speak at length of spending her time with them. While writing from Rome to O’Connor, who was hobbling on crutches in Milledgeville, the contrast of their situations must have struck her and she writes, “But damn it, it is maddening to see the Eternal City withheld from you and wasted on [others less appreciative] . . . If it’s any comfort, may I say that I think that as a writer you have what the medievals called ‘infused theology’—and I guess one doesn’t get a gift like that without paying for it.”

O’Connor, who could be frank about her illness but never complained of her suffering, seems to have taken Gordon’s proposed economy to heart. At any rate, by 1961 she writes to another friend that “I think anywhere that more than three writers are gathered together the atmosphere is liable to be unhealthy.” If the remark doesn’t convey a true conviction, it at least signals her discovery of a silver lining to isolation.

During periods of good health O’Connor could travel to speaking engagements or to visit friends, though the effort greatly taxed her. Between these brief trips and regular reception of guests at Andalusia, she managed to meet many of her correspondents, including Gordon. And though their relationship would continue to ripen chiefly on paper, at a distance, ripen it did. Early in their acquaintance Gordon can speak impersonally about O’Connor as a young artist who “has some dire illness and may die.” Over more than a decade of interaction, though, Gordon comes to know the gory details of her friend’s worsening illness and a sympathetic O’Connor reads between the lines as Gordon endures the end of her marriage to poet Allen Tate and her daughter’s tempestuous mental health.

Gordon remains O’Connor’s essential editor and literary counselor (“Whenever I finish a story I send it to Caroline before I consider myself really through with it”), but by the time they exchange their final letters in July of 1964 Gordon has playfully detached her “pedantic” critical persona (“Old Dr. Gordon”) in an apparent effort to underscore the personal affection that now characterizes much of her attention to the woman dying of lupus. True to form, however, Gordon’s letter includes thousands of words of feedback on “Parker’s Back.” And yet, she sees a possible end approaching. “I—or rather that old Dr. G—have been writing to you as if you were in the pink of health. But your doctor may have discovered, by this time, that there is a bit of work involved in the writing of fiction and may have forbidden you such effort.” O’Connor, lacking the strength for revision, remarks “I did well to write it at all.” She would die early the following month.

Though lightning doesn’t always strike as close together as it did with Good Things Out of Nazareth and The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon, epistolary collections like these are appearing on at least a yearly basis. The well still seems deep and undrunk, too. Faber & Faber’s attempt at a complete edition of T.S. Eliot’s letters has already run to eight volumes with three decades of his life still to cover. The poet Donald Hall, who died only last year, spoke of still spending hours each week writing or dictating letters. Fat years inexorably give way to lean years, though, and no corner of the West portends to be producing the next generation of letter writers.

For all of our advancements in communication, we also have yet to produce a fitting successor to the letter. The personal diary can be an adequate human record, but is limited in its mono-logic, its self-focus. Email is no better, if my own “Sent” folder is representative. Newer forms of communication have made the very idea of communication so ubiquitous that no single exchange is worth much to posterity. Because we can say whatever we need to say whenever we need to say it, we never say much.

Apparently, my fear was already shared by some in O’Connor’s lifetime, but she balked at it:

I have just finished reading a piece in the Commonweal by a man named Lukacs who says there’s no more literary correspondence and that good writers don’t pay any attention to the young ones because there’s no more charity among them. This has not been my experience. I think of your detailed letters to me about my book and wonder what makes him so sure of what he says.

If she’s right, and the requisite charity and willingness still exist, then perhaps unlooked-for “good things” are still forthcoming from other Nazareths like Milledgeville. If they are, their value cannot be overestimated. Two decades after O’Connor’s death, her literary acquaintance Father Robert McCown wrote to Sally Fitzgerald (who had edited her friend’s letters),

I just finished The Habit of Being and am now taking stock of the marvelous gifts it has bestowed upon my heart and mind. I am still in a kind of amazement as I try to assess the incredible depth and variety of graces that have been bestowed upon this young woman of such limited environment and experiences, of such short and restricted life.

That two more volumes have come into the world proclaiming the same good news deserves a prayer of thanks.

Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon | UGA Press | $32.95

Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends | Penguin Random House | $16.99

Sean Johnson teaches humanities at Trinitas Christian School in Pensacola, Florida. He is an Associate Editor for FORMA.

A Complicated Dialogue with a Literary Giant

By Heidi White

Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson is a book that holds hidden turbulence. Published in April 2019, it is composed of transcripts from Wheaton College’s 2018 theology conference, which examined the work of respected contemporary author Marilynne Robinson (author of, among other books, Gilead, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005). On the one hand, the book is a straightforward collection of essays by (mostly) Evangelical intellectuals about Robinson’s portrayal of Protestant America. If you are a reader who prefers to tread lightly on the surface of things, that is perhaps all there is to see. Simply allow the essays to curate your judgments of Robinson’s work and move along.

But for those willing to go beyond unquestioned responses, the book gets a lot more interesting. There is a lot to love here, but unless you accept the underlying cultural and theological assumptions of American Evangelicalism, much of the book is as likely to feel like a dialogue as Uncle Barney setting you straight about Trump at an awkward family dinner. Not that the contributors are disrespectful of Robinson; in fact, they clearly hold

her in high esteem and, more often than not, articulate her spiritual questions and theological positions with accuracy and honor. But, almost without exception, each contributor toes the Evangelical party line, often dismissing Robinson’s nuanced spiritual contemplations using the very theological gauntlets that she attempts to challenge in her work. Along the way, however, many contributors forge paths into the beating heart of Robinson’s incarnational world, identifying threads of embedded mercy and mystery that entwine Robinson’s work. Featuring contributions by leading intellectuals in Protestant America as well as a few guests from other traditions, the essays address such diverse topics as theology, civil rights, nature, painting, racial divides, metaphysics, psychology, and preaching. Some contributors make almost frantic attempts to explain and correct theological matters, while others accept Robinson’s world on its own terms, offering insights into understanding her larger theology and philosophy. Perhaps unwittingly, then, Balm in Gilead scrutinizes more than Robinson’s canon; it sheds light on the paradoxes embedded within Evangelical Protestantism itself. The book is a fascinating study in the fractures and bonds of theological subcultures within Christendom. However, Marilynne Robinson seems fully in tune with that dynamic, while the Evangelical presenters seem less aware that they represent a subculture, often choosing instead to use their theological framework to make final judgments on Robinson’s orthodoxy rather than engage the

subtleties Robinson uncovers in her work. Thus, Balm in Gilead becomes not only a commentary by leading Evangelical intellectuals on Marilynne Robinson, but also on themselves.

Robinson is, of course, a literary giant, a contemporary intellectual of the first water. A premier novelist and essayist, Robinson is well-known for her fictional contemplations of American religious life. Her trilogy of novels, Gilead, Home, and Lila, trace the complex lives and relationships of mainline Protestant clergy in small town America. In her essays, Robinson addresses issues of religion, social justice, theology, and philosophy with both precision and nuance. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was, until recently, an English professor at the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In 2015, she was interviewed by then-President Barack Obama about her life and work. The following year she was included in Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.” But in spite of her success Marilynne Robinson is no cultural conformist in either the secular or the religious realms. A curious blend of committed-Calvinist and progressive social-justice-advocate, Robinson defies stereotypes. She both represents and challenges Protestant America, speaking for the very underlying institutions that she often incisively confronts throughout her work.

On the other hand, Wheaton College is a premier bastion of Evangelical conservatism in higher education. A deeply respected liberal arts university, Wheaton boasts such graduates as Billy Graham, Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, John Piper, and Josh McDowell. Founded by Christian abolitionists in 1860, Wheaton continues to staunchly uphold historic Evangelical orthodoxy, principled public service, and academic excellence in the midst of a fragmenting culture. Dozens of other Christian universities have abandoned orthodoxy in favor of progressive theology, but Wheaton maintains its conservative identity. One of the ways it does so is by actively resisting encroaching liberal ideas; thus, Marilynne Robinson’s musings on the intersections of faith and mystery potentially verge on taboo positions at Wheaton, a dynamic which in many ways presents a microcosm of the wider Evangelical culture.

The result is curious: a response from Wheaton Evangelicals that attempts to honor an author they clearly revere while at the same time ensuring that they defend their theological positions. An example of this dynamic is found in Dr. Keith Johnson’s essay “The Metaphysics of Marilynne Robinson,” in which Johnson explains Robinson’s rejection of the sacrificial atonement of Christ. Robinson takes a position closer to Eastern Christianity, which understands Jesus’ death and resurrection to

be one unified act of extravagant love aimed at defeating death rather than an act of atoning sacrifice that pays for sin. Johnson presents Robinson’s argument based on her wider metaphysics, but immediately argues against it on his own terms, which are theological, not philosophical. In other words, he counters a metaphysical position with a theological one. Moreover, he ignores the underlying metaphysical quandary that Robinson presents: namely, since God sets the terms for human existence, why require a blood sacrifice at all? Dr. Johnson never addresses this thorny question; he simply presents his own position as the correct one. He also makes an extraordinary claim: “For most of Christian history, the crucifixion has been understood in sacrificial terms as an atonement for human sin,” a statement that discounts Eastern Christianity entirely and Western history partially. To his credit, this is a fracture in Christian theology that goes back to St. Anselm of Canterbury, circa AD 1100 (before which the Eastern position was dominant), so it is a divisive issue in Christian thought worthy of frank contemplation.

Examples like this abound. However, the laudatory tone of each essay indicates that in spite of some overstated dogmatic pronouncements and sometimes questionable scholarship, every essay is presented in good faith from professors and theorists who discover something in Robinson’s work that moves them within their particular academic framework, creating many delightful snapshots of illuminating grace throughout the book. One contributor suggests that readers utilize the trilogy of Gilead novels as a thought experiment—like Schrödinger’s cat—on the doctrine of predestination. Blinking a bit, I wondered what novel Robinson, who is indeed a Calvinist, might write next if she went through the trouble of writing a novel of such magisterial subtlety as Gilead in order to be an exploration of the U in TULIP. I suppose it actually works, if you think about it. Dr. Patricia Andujo from Azusa Pacific University presented an incisive paper on “Marilynne Robinson and the African American Experience,” in which she invites the American church to become “co-sufferers” with Christ on behalf of marginalized peoples. My favorite essay, “Heaven and Earth: Reading Gilead through the Landscape of the Fox River,” by painter Joel Sheesely, describes the slow grace of physical geography on souls, describing how “the witness of nature presses on John Ames and slowly forces on him the ‘sour sap’ of his moral judgment on Jack Boughton.”

Moments like these make Balm in Gilead shine. The book wavers between pedantic theological territorialism and flashes of interpretive brilliance. The pendulum indicates that beleaguered American Evangelicals just don’t know what to do with Marilynne Robinson. Her novels are so compelling, her statements of faith so clear, her

essays so insightful, and her kindness so palpable that American Protestants want to embrace (or perhaps to be embraced by) her, but are not sure what to make of her expansive Christian humanism, inclusive social ethics, frank acknowledgement of the mysteries of faith, and sacramental vision of the created world.

The rising pressures within Evangelical culture shed light on the respectful but ambivalent responses of the contributors to Robinson’s work. Evangelicals are mired in a tough spot in this cultural moment. Once honored in American life, today they are under ideological attack by the larger secular culture, while at the same time enjoying mostly secure social and economic standing. It is a strange and mutable, though dominant, American religious subculture.

Although Robinson’s novels feature characters from mainline Protestant traditions rather than Evangelical ones, Evangelicals also find their own entangled faith experiences, longings, anxieties, questions, and wounds reflected by Robinson in her stories and musings. But Robinson, like all great novelists and essayists, does not

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idealize the experiences she portrays, but probes the ruptures within souls and societies. For an Evangelical culture in flux, it is hard, but necessary, to engage in the contemplation of ruptures. The essays I enjoyed most were the ones in which the contributors joined with Robinson in acknowledging the mysteries of faith rather than attempting to wrestle her nuanced meditations into submission to their accepted doctrines. After all, as Robinson expresses so beautifully, “we have to hope that God is a great deal kinder than we are.”

Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson | IVP Academic | $28.00

Heidi White teaches at Collegium Study Center in Colorado Springs. She is a regular contributor at The Close Reads Podcast Network, the host of the FORMA Podcast, and the Managing Editor of FORMA Journal

An Invitation to Remember the Classics

By Greg Wilbur

In 2011, Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic for The New York Times, wrote a series of articles that attempted to determine the top ten composers of all time. He invited readers to be part of the process and received quite a number of replies and comments in what was a stimulating and engaging conversation. By the time Tommasini was done with the project, he knew that he had a lot more to say about the composers and works that he loved, and The Indispensable Composers, a full-length book of personal reflections, was the fruit of that exercise.

Much like a conversation between friends about your Mount Rushmore of films or favorite desert-island books, the process of making a list helps clarify what you value and prioritize. When making such a list, do you choose composers (or authors or films) that you enjoy or that you know to be objectively good or that have an element of nostalgia for a particular time or state of mind? By what criteria should composers be ranked? Should they be ranked according to the degree that they are well known? Should the revolutionaries who changed the musical landscape be ranked higher? Tommasini is quick to note in the subtitle of the book (A Person-

al Guide) that he is adding his subjective voice to the conversation—at which point the text not only acts as a guide to a substantial list of composers and their works but also as insight into what Tommasini personally values. He settles on Monteverdi, J.S. Bach, G.F. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Robert Schumann, Verdi, Wagner, Brahms, Debussy, Puccini, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartok.

Tommasini asks, “But what is greatness in music? Does it matter? Does there need to be a greatest composer in history? Does the canon expand? And who gets to say what is canonical now?” He writes:

Often a composer seems not at all to be striving for greatness in a work, as with those lovely Grieg piano pieces. A composer might simply think: I’m just practicing my craft, working out something that’s been kicking around within me. Now, if it’s considered great, well, wonderful. Actually, it’s hard to know if the giants in the arts consciously aimed for greatness. Did Shakespeare? From what we understand, he thought of himself as a professional, a man of the theater. Did he write those plays hoping they would endure? I doubt it, which may be why so many of the scripts were left in jumbled states, with missing pages and confusing rewrites. In a way, even Beethoven, who really did strive for greatness, conducted his day-to-day life as a professional musician.

So with these things in mind, Tommasini sets out as a guide to the composers and works that he believes are most significant. Along the way, he introduces readers to the life and context of each artist, their most substantial compositions, what to listen for in their work, and personal reflections about interacting with the works of the composer. Since Tommasini is self-consciously inserting himself as a guide, his credentials in that role merit attention; he is well suited for that task as a musician, performer, and critic. He studied music at Yale and later earned a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Boston University, wrote several books on music, and made multiple recordings of piano music. His assessment is astute and his descriptions of what is happening in a piece of music are precise and inviting.

Claudio Monteverdi is the subject of the first chapter, which is entitled “Creator of Modern Music.” This starting point reveals a couple of Tommasini’s inclinations that are confirmed throughout the book: his love of opera and his affinity for the common practice period (essentially music from the Baroque onward). He defends his starting point by saying, “In truth, starting this survey with Monteverdi may be somewhat arbitrary. Still, he strikes me as the first towering figure with whom we, composers and audiences alike, can identify today.” Monteverdi is also credited with composing the first real opera. Tommasini does take time to introduce the reader to musical terms and developments such as describing counterpoint as a term that

refers to music written in two or more independent lines, or voices. The lines have to go together harmonically, of course. But linearly and rhythmically they must have independent natures for a passage to be considered contrapuntal . . . The challenge for audiences today, when we hear, say, a Renaissance motet or sacred work, is to orient our ears to try to hear complex contrapuntal music the way it was perceived at the time. Renaissance listeners found pleasure in trying to discern multiple lines unfolding simultaneously.

These descriptions are helpful along the way, especially if someone is hoping to fill in some gaps in their musical knowledge.

Tommasini moves on to J.S. Bach in the second chapter, which he calls “Music for Use, Devotion, and Personal Profit” and in which he praises the accomplishments of Bach: “He showed us all, not just the musicians of his time, but of all time, that we had not fully realized the ramifications of what we already knew. In all fields, true profundity comes from immersive examination. No com-

poser has ever looked at music more deeply than Bach.”

In addition to talking about Bach the composer, Tommasini covers the reception of Bach’s music and performance issues on into the twentieth century. He recognizes that particular performers and recordings shape our understanding of a composer’s music such that it is natural for Tommasini to bring up specific performers (“If you want to know Bach the questing giant, Bach the composer who probes deep in the essence of music, listen to Anderszewski play the Partita No. 6 in E Minor”) and recordings (“Gould’s 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations took listeners on a nonstop adventure”).

In chapter 4, Tommasini turns his attention to the “Vienna Four” (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert) and returns to the theme of advancement in the development of music. He writes astutely that he has “never quite bought into the concept of music as an art form that advanced over time to increasingly higher levels of modernity and sophistication. Of course, bold, radical innovations kept coming, but these shifts did not necessarily make music any greater, just different.” He makes helpful connections to intellectual movements that influenced changes in music from the Baroque period to the Classical period:

Another crucial characteristic of Viennese Classicism concerned what can be called the grammar of music, which came to resemble the grammar of language. The more complex forms of music in the Baroque period utilized almost continuously flowing contrapuntal writing, with lines spinning out and chugging along. By the mid-eighteenth century, the periodic phrase, as it was called, became a favored way to speak in music: long phrases were structured out of shorter ones, much the way sentences are structured out of clauses. As many historians have argued, this emerging musical characteristic reflected the Age of Enlightenment, or at least the idealized notion of the Enlightenment that was touted at the time: a movement that championed reason, logic, and discourse.

These types of passages assist the reader in making larger connections between what was happening in music history as well as in general history and philosophical thought. Tommasini also does a very good job of giving context for who these composers were and how their personal life affected their art—heresies, illnesses, mistresses, political intrigue, sexual orientation, and family issues. While these details humanize the composers and their struggles, they also raise some interesting questions for those who have only encountered the composers in

children’s biographies or sanitized curriculums. Thus, we have passages like this:

Over the years I’ve come to feel that Schubert’s experience with his sexuality—his strong drives and chronic torment, his coping mechanisms—profoundly impacted his music. That he might have been homosexual may in fact open up some mysteries about his music. In many Schubert works … you often have the feeling that what you are hearing on the surface is not what it seems; or, to put it another way, that Schubert composed in a kind of covert language, like someone speaking in code.

Or this:

Even during an era when anti-Semitism permeated European cultural and political circles, especially in Germany, Wagner’s strident prejudices stood out. For him, all of what he viewed as superficial, ostentatious elements in contemporary music were attributable to the influence of Jewish musicians … Wagner argued, in the words of the scholar and critic Barry Millington, that “the rootlessness of Jews in Germany and their historical roles as usurers and entrepreneurs” have “condemned them, in Wagner’s view, to cultural sterility.” Wagner believed that German art had to be protected from this corrupting Jewish influence.

We discover along the way that music history and the lives of composers are far more messy, nuanced, and complicated than we perhaps normally allow. This fact deserves thoughtful consideration. While Tommasini writes thoroughly and helpfully in discussing some of these lesser known details about composers’ lives, he does not provide any value judgments or extensive commentary. In my opinion, the details Tommasini provides are some of the most helpful elements of the book in sparking discussion about the perspective from which composers sought to

push the boundaries and norms of music and morality.

Yet, because the personal nature of the selections and the interaction with the composers and their works unapologetically represent the preferences of the author, the book favors too narrow a period. Tommasini’s reason for starting with Monteverdi and the Baroque is that the modern listener can identify with this music—thus leaving out medieval and Renaissance music and some of the greatest composers who ever lived. No work can be exhaustive and portable, but there does seem to be an unusual weight towards opera—and your mileage may vary. At times the personal anecdotes provide context and other times they are distracting and a little self-serving.

The invitation that Tommasini makes to consider the great composers and their works causes me to think through who might be on my own list. If I limited myself to just ten, they would include: Josquin des Prez, Palestrina, Thomas Tallis, Heinrich Schutz, J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky, and Richard Strauss. Tommasini’s charisma gives a spark to this tour through his list, but it is an uneven list all the same. I might attribute his preference for Chopin, Schumann, Verdi, Puccini, and Schoenberg to his favoritism toward opera and piano music, and so question their inclusion—although I personally appreciate several of them, especially Puccini. My own list also reaches back to pivotal composers in periods ignored by his. The debt that later music owes to figures like Tallis and Palestrina leaves me to conclude that, while Tommasini has mounted a learned and engaging meditation on what makes a composer “great,” he has ultimately thought too little about what makes them indispensable.

The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide | Penguin Random House | $20.00

Greg Wilbur is Chief Musician at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Franklin, TN, as well as Dean, Co-Founder, and Senior Fellow of New College Franklin. He is the author of Glory and Honor: The Music and Artistic Legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach

If your bliss intersects with contemporary culture and classical thought, then follow it. We'll do the rest.

Aprolific writer, G.K. Chesterton’s works range extensively from economics to theology to fiction. Among his most widely popular works are a series of short stories about a Roman Catholic priest with a keen interest in mystery and an overwhelming desire to save souls. Originally published in a variety of magazines, the Father Brown stories first appeared with the classic “The Blue Cross” in September 1910. Since then, Father Brown has become one of the most recognizable figures in detective fiction, arguably surpassed only by Sherlock Holmes. Much has been written about Father Brown himself, yet an incredible story also appears as readers examine the evolution of Father Brown’s first antagonist, Hercule Flambeau. The notorious criminal Flambeau embodies the evolution of Chesterton’s own religious beliefs as demonstrated by Flambeau’s depravity, conversion, and sanctification.

In his Autobiography, Chesterton describes the inspiration for the Father Brown series. After meeting a congenial priest named Father O’Connor, Chesterton was struck by the priest’s sophisticated knowledge on a variety of topics. Once as they were walking, Chesterton revealed to Father O’Connor a theory about which Chesterton was contemplating writing. The priest, however, politely explained the fallacies associated with Chesterton’s theory. The priest hesitantly cited the depths of human depravity as evidence. Chesterton recalls that “it was a curious experience to find that this quiet and pleasant celibate had plumbed those abysses far deeper than I. I had not imagined that the world could hold such horrors.”

Following this enlightening conversation, Chesterton and the priest once again found conversation among a group of college students. The priest and the students discussed a number of topics ranging from sports to music. The students were impressed, as Chesterton himself had been, with O’Connor’s depth of knowledge. But after the priest left the room,

Chesterton was stunned by the students’ ongoing conversation: “All the same,” one of the students remarked, “I don’t believe his sort of life is the right one. It’s all very well to like religious music and so on, when you’re all shut up in a sort of cloister and don’t know anything about the real evil in the world.” In this singular moment, the concept of the Father Brown detective stories was born.

While Father Brown’s character is based loosely on O’Connor, Flambeau’s antagonistic character demonstrates the evolution of Chesterton’s own spiritual journey. Introduced as a notorious jewel thief, Flambeau provides a surprising means for Chesterton’s confessions. In his essay “How to Write a Detective Story,” Chesterton explains that “the detective story is only a game; and in that game the reader is not really wrestling with the criminal but with the author . . . ” and that “the first and fundamental principle is that the aim of a mystery story, as of every story and every other mystery, is not darkness but light.” This light shines as Chesterton develops Flambeau’s character throughout the series.

In fact, the name “Flambeau” itself may signal Chesterton’s intention. Flambeau is derived from Middle French and means “a flaming torch.” The torch is not the light itself, but the bearer of the light. Thus, Chesterton’s character serves metaphorically as a torch that shines the Light into the darkness of human depravity.

In his biography of Chesterton, Lawrence J. Clipper suggests that Father Brown himself was “perhaps Chesterton’s only fully developed fictional creation” and the only one of “lasting interest.” On the contrary, Flambeau’s character is much more fully developed than some readers initially realize and certainly provides the necessary framework for “lasting interest.”

In his Autobiography, Chesterton acknowledges the depth of his own youthful imagination and the extremes of his moral understanding: “There is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly I could imagine the maddest, when I had never committed the mildest crime.” His imagination certainly inspired many of the exploits on which Flambeau

embarked. Chesterton confesses that “it is true that there was a time when I had reached that condition of moral anarchy within.” He describes his youth characterized “with the morbid imagery of evil, with the burden of my own mysterious brain and body.” Flambeau’s crimes are mostly non-violent thefts, but Chesterton’s dark imagination is clearly at work. Each of Flambeau’s crimes “was almost a new sin, and would make a story by itself.”

In “How to Write a Detective Story,” Chesterton provides an important clue regarding his own confession of sinfulness represented by Flambeau: “The ideal mystery story is one in which he is such a character as the author would have created for his own sake, or for the sake of making the story move in other necessary matters, and then be found to be present there, not for the obvious and sufficient reason, but for a second and a secret one.” Flambeau provides Chesterton an outlet for his inner depravity to be unconstrained by real consequences. As “the colossus of crime” and “the outlaw,” Flambeau’s reputation as the “archangel of impudence” certainly precedes him. Flambeau reveals his true identity in “The Blue Cross,” and the sin of pride clearly surfaces. Railing against his outwitted opponent, Flambeau insults the “little celibate simpleton” as laughable as “a three-act farce.” Father Brown, however, reveals the first clue to Flambeau’s true identity: the spiked bracelet, an insignia declaring his membership in a criminal community. The exchange mirrors the episode Chesterton described earlier with Father O’Connor. The inspiration is plainly reflected in “The Blue Cross” as Brown and Flambeau debate.

While explaining his discovery in “The Blue Cross,” Father Brown suggests a devious method Flambeau could have used to attain his purposes. We learn that Flambeau’s depravity had not reached such depths of sin to learn about “the Donkey’s Whistle.” Chesterton does not explain what the Donkey’s Whistle is nor how it is implemented, but context clearly indicates its association with an extreme depth of evil not yet encountered by the notorious Flambeau. Father Brown exclaims: “Oh, you can’t have gone so very wrong yet!” As Father Brown discovers, Flambeau, though burdened with sin, is not beyond the reach of God’s grace. Flambeau is redeemable.

Yet at the end of their first encounter in “The Blue Cross,” Flambeau does not repent of his sinful ways. He reemerges in “The Queer Feet,” and Father Brown subsequently confronts him: “I am ready to hear your confession.” The priest stresses the need for confession and repentance, hallmarks of the Christian faith. Though Flambeau still does not repent, he returns the stolen goods before fleeing the scene. When later asked if he had caught the suspect, Father Brown responds with wisdom that echoes Father O’Connor: “‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line

which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

In “The Flying Stars,” Father Brown calls out into the darkness: “‘Well, Flambeau’ says the voice, ‘you really look like a Flying Star; but that always means a Falling Star at last.’” The priest begins his third attempt to convert the infamous criminal: “I want you to give up this life. There is still youth and honour and humour in you.” Recognizing the redeemability of the wayward Flambeau, Father Brown continues his appeal. “Your downward steps,” warns Father Brown, “have begun. You used to boast of doing nothing mean, but you are doing something mean to-night . . . But you will do meaner things than that before you die.” The words pierce Flambeau, and suddenly three stolen diamonds fall to the feet of the priest. This third encounter proves transformative. The next reference to Flambeau is in “The Invisible Man” where Flambeau is no longer the culprit. He is described as “an extremely clever fellow, who has set up in business” and “though his youth was a bit stormy, he’s a strictly honest man now, and his brains are now worth money.” Redeemed!

After his experience with Father O’Connor, Chesterton reflected: “It brought me in a manner face to face once more with those morbid but vivid problems of the soul, to which I have earlier alluded, and gave me a great and growing sense that I had not found any real spiritual solution to them. . . . They still troubled me a good deal.” Chesterton’s own conversion evidenced years of internal struggle between good and evil as reflected in the fictional Flambeau. For Chesterton, that final step came in 1922 when he was received into the Catholic Church. For Flambeau, that step came between “The Flying Stars” and “The Invisible Man.”

Incredibly, Flambeau’s conversion receives little attention from Chesterton. In an article called “The Mystical Vision of Father Brown” for FORMA’s online side, Sean Johnson explains how evil becomes commonplace, but good creates an even greater mystery. “In Chesterton’s economy of mystery,” Johnson writes, “human evil is typically boring and usual, while it is human goodness that can surprise and astonish.” Thus Flambeau’s conversion signifies a plot twist in the series.

Though given a new direction, the repentant Flambeau finds it difficult to outlive his criminal past. He puts himself under the tutelage of his new mentor, Father Brown. While Flambeau’s experiences give him a unique perspective for solving mysteries, he yields to Father Brown in the areas of faith. His newfound humility is clearly evident: “‘You must tell us all about it,’ said Flambeau, with a strange heavy simplicity, like a child.” This humility is a far cry from the notorious jewel thief who

Years ago, an acquaintance said that the stories of Father Brown were "too Catholic." I took that opinion as an indicator that the stories were deformed by doctrine. Given how many mystery stories there are in the world, why would I choose to read stories that served goals external to the story? Fortunately, a lovely new Penguin Classics edition caught my eye. The surprise was that the stories are simply stories. They are clearly written by a religious man, and their star's own religious beliefs ground their every move, but the religion here is additive to the art, not destructive of it. These are delicate little puzzle mysteries that are lifted above the game of their plots by Father Brown's awareness that sin is everywhere, men are fallen, the world is imperfect, and that our actions matter not solely because, but additionally because, they have eternal consequences. His sympathies are those of someone who cares deeply about this world while keeping an eye on the next. That Chesterton conveys this with a combination of world-weariness and wonder, that the stories are above all clever and fun, is a marvel. —Levi

Stahl

ridiculed Father Brown as a celibate simpleton during their first meeting; it’s a mark of genuine transformation. The teaching of humility is clearly a defining characteristic of Father Brown and his influence. In his Autobiography, Chesterton routinely expresses this growing sense of humility in his own life: “The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed.” Flambeau’s humble, childlike trust of Father Brown is key to his ongoing sanctification.

Over time, Father Brown’s influence becomes even more apparent. Flambeau’s notorious crimes and conversion both occur within the first five of fifty short stories, yet the vast majority of references to him describe his spiritual growth. Chesterton gives Flambeau a nod of progress in “The God of the Gongs,” describing Flambeau as Father Brown’s “old friend” who was an “ex-criminal and ex-detective.” This, of course, does not mean Flambeau has obtained a degree of sinless perfection. Indeed within the same story, Flambeau wrestles with racial prejudices and he even sympathizes with a murderer. Overall, however, Flambeau’s character is portrayed in an increasingly positive manner throughout the Father Brown series. He settles down by marrying a Spanish woman, having children, and retiring. Chesterton also reveals that Flambeau and the priest “had corresponded constantly, but they had not met for years.” Their friendship endures the test of time and distance, not unlike Chesterton and O’Connor’s.

Chesterton later notes that Flambeau had given up his assumed name “Flambeau” for his birth name “Duroc.” He writes that the name Flambeau, meaning “the torch,” is “like that under which such a man will often wage war on society.” Though intending to wage war against society, Flambeau ultimately becomes a bearer of the Light that brings peace, demonstrating Chesterton’s use of paradox. Flambeau’s character, though, is now too humble to keep the paradoxical name. This change is not without meaning: “Duroc” signifies “any of a breed of large vigorous red American hogs.” Identifying himself with a breed of swine, Flambeau’s humility continues to grow.

In “The Secret of Flambeau,” Flambeau confesses: “‘There is a criminal in this room,’ he said. ‘I am one. I am Flambeau, and the police of two hemispheres are still hunting for me.’” When Flambeau refers to himself as a criminal, he uses the present tense. But as Chesterton refers to Flambeau’s criminal activity, the author uses the past tense. Flambeau internalizes his past sins, but Chesterton (as Flambeau’s creator) has forgiven Flambeau’s sins, as demonstrated by use of the the past tense. So Chesterton confesses his sin, but also experiences forgiveness from the “God with the Golden Key.” Flambeau’s confession continues highlighting the role of Father Brown in his life: “I stole for twenty years with these two hands . . . Only my friend told me that he knew exactly why I stole; and I have never stolen since.” Having been essential to his conversion, Father Brown also continued mentoring the convert, critical for Flambeau’s sanctification.

In “How to Write a Detective Story,” Chesterton concludes: “A tale has to be founded on a truth; and though opium may be added to it, it must not merely be an opium dream.” Admittedly, Chesterton allows some artistic creativity, but in the grand narrative, Flambeau is a manifestation of Chesterton himself in three main areas: depravity, conversion, and sanctification. The transition of Flambeau’s character from pride to redemption is undeniable, though often overlooked. Flambeau’s confession in “The Blue Cross” is also the confession of G.K. Chesterton. It is the confession of the present writer as well. The thief’s words transcend a simple introduction to become the words of a glorious testimony. Though often remembered for his sins, Chesterton’s Flambeau represents the redeeming quality of God’s grace. His name becomes synonymous with redemption. With these straightforward words, Chesterton confesses his own spiritual journey as a bearer of the Light: “Yes, I am Flambeau.”

Brett Chancery teaches secondary school with Brewton City Schools. He is an adjunct professor of history at Coastal Alabama Community College.

When Flannery O'Connor died in August of 1964 at age thirty-nine following a prolonged battle with Lupus—the same disease that killed her father at a similarly young age—she left behind one of the most unique canons of work in the history of American letters. Her mesmerizing stories and the ornate characters that populate them have been haunting and inspiring readers for nearly three-quarters of a century, and her voice is one of the most uniquely recognizable in twentieth-century literature. As critic Oliver Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1960, “She [wrote] with blazing skill about the most appalling horrors." She had a "talent for fiction," he continued, "so great as to be almost overwhelming.”

O'Connor's memorable canon is revered for it's humane vision of community, its equitable treatment of human oddity, and its incarnation of the essential tenets of the Christian faith, all wrapped up in the exotic conventions of the Southern Gothic form. She's remembered not just because she produced weird work, but because she produced weird work that told us more about how to live and breathe.

Today the site where she produced most of that work, Andalusia, her family's farm in central Georgia, is hallowed ground to her admirers.

Andalusia feels like a religious site for literature lovers not solely because the life that went on there inspired beloved stories like "A Good Man is Hard to Find," but also because the spirit of those stories is still so present. The place is haunted, in the best way, by O'Connor's sense of humor and intelligence, by her imagination and her view of the good life. It's been said that O'Connor was a prophet for her age, and that may be true, but perhaps more importantly she was also a voice for a place. She didn't lionize what didn't deserve honor, but she did revere the humanity that was all around her. Flannery O'Connor was more than a master storyteller. She was an enlivener, an animator, a restorer.

Andalusia manages to preserve that soul thanks in large part to the work of nearby Georgia College, O'Connor's alma mater, which has restored the property to the period when O'Connor lived there (1951-1964), while also maintaining (and improving, where necessary) the structural integrity of the buildings themselves. After the college acquired the property from the now-defunct non-profit, The Flannery O'Connor-Andalusia Foundation, Matt Davis, Director of Historic Museums at Georgia College, set to work. He and his team closed the museum for a year so they could evaluate the property. They studied the various artifacts available across the farm, repaired decaying structures, and hired new staff members to write the history of the site. And when they reopened in June 2018, they offered one of the more vibrant literary sites in the South.

The following pages provide a glimpse into the place they've curated, the story it tells, and the artist it remembers.

As with any great rural literary site, the entryway to Andalusia is a long, winding driveway bordered by fields and forest. It’s easy to imagine Manley Pointer trotting up the lane, a bundle of “Bibles’’ under his arms, or young Asbury riding up to the front house, sick in the head and the heart and ready to die a dramatic death. Or, leaving aside O’Connor’s fictional characters, one might imagine John Kennedy Toole (author of the cult classic novel A Confederacy of Dunces) trudging along, his heart set on a view of the house where his favorite author lived, just weeks before his suicide in 1969.

The property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and originally opened as a museum in 2003 by the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation.

The foyer at Andalusia features this photo of a young O’Connor, as well as photographs of her father, Edward O’Connor, and her uncle, Bernard Cline, who originally purchased the property as a hunting retreat.

From the bedroom in which she wrote each morning, O’Connor would have been able to spy on the various outbuildings that made up Andalusia, at the daily life of the farm. Today, Andalusia remains a remarkably well-preserved example of a mid-century farm thanks to the efforts of Georgia College.

Students of O’Connors life will recognize this porch for its presence in many famous photographs. In one such picture, she perches on the top step, leaning on her crutches, while one of her beloved peacocks pecks at the base of the screen door.

O’Connor’s desk was set up in the middle of her bedroom, only a few feet from her bed. Because she couldn't move without great pain and difficulty, she minimized the amount of walking she had to do. She slid from the bed to the desk and got right to work each morning, the size of the desk walling her off from any potential distractions. Although the original typewriter is not on site, the one pictured here is the same style as the one O’Connor typed on (she once tried an electric typewriter and, self-proclaimed luddite that she was, hated it).

Symbols of the lupus that drove O’Connor home, and eventually killed her, are myriad at Andalusia. Medicine bottles with her name on the label, the crutches that bore her brittle bones, and even the arrangement of her furniture reveal the deep difficulties she endured during her final years.

One of the more remarkable (and telling) artifacts on site at Andalusia, this blue dress reveals not just fascinating period detail, but also O’Connor’s small stature and the degree to which lupus ravaged her body. In fact, when she died her bone structure was that of a much older woman, as photos from late in her life prove.

In a house of well-preserved rooms, the O’Connor kitchen is perhaps the most well-preserved. It’s both a treasure-trove of 1960s quotidian paraphernalia (spices, jars, cookware, and dishes from the era, among other things) and a glimpse at the way a particular family lived. As Matt Davis says, this is a room that humanizes O’Connor. The refrigerator that sits in there today was purchased by O’Connor for her mother with the profits of the sale of her story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" to CBS Playhouse. That television production, which starred Gene Kelly in one of the most odd casting mishaps in TV history, was a flop, but the financial boost it provided the O’Connor women almost made up for it. O’Connor called the refrigerator a “new-fangled contraption’’ and she was terrified it would tip over onto her.

Run by O’Connor’s mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, Andalusia was a fully functioning dairy and beef farm during (and after) O’Connor's life. The property included more than five hundred acres and fourteen buildings like the ones you see here. While Flannery wrote from her bedroom each morning, Regina would run the farm’s operations from a desk in the foyer of the house, where she could see the yard and driveway through the open front door. Without the day-to-day work of Regina O’Connor the literary canon of Flannery O’Connor probably wouldn’t exist. As Matt Davis, Director of Historic Museums at Georgia College, said, Andalusia is important not only because it is where an American icon lived and wrote, but also because it is an “important living-legacy piece to the story of a family.” And today the museum is committed to telling the story of the whole family, not just the story of the famous writer.

Originally the main house of a cotton plantation settled in 1814, Hill House sits adjacent to the farm house in which O’Connor lived during the final decade of her life. At that time, Robert “Jack” and Louise Hill, and Willie “Shot” Mason, their border, lived here. They were farmers who helped Regina O’Connor run the property and were the inspiration for several characters and scenes in O’Connor's fiction.

Want to visit Andalusia for yourself? To learn more or to schedule a visit go to gcsu.edu/andalusia.

Books That Surprised in 2019

Year-end lists that propose the “best” books of 2019 are a dime-a-dozen, so we wanted to take a slightly different approach. We asked five of our favorite book reviewers to share the book that they read last year that most surprised them. Here are their choices.

Jeffrey Bilbro, author of Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry's Sustainable Forms, Editor at Front Porch Republic

IN SEARCH OF THE COMMON GOOD: CHRISTIAN FIDELITY IN THE FRACTURED WORLD

by Jake Meador

In one sense, Meador’s argument in this book is a fairly standard one: healthy churches bring measurable benefits to communities and our broader culture. But what makes his book so refreshing is that it never falls into consequentialist justifications for the church. In other words, the church is not like a Rotary club or a bowling team. Rather, it is when the church is most sacramental, most faithful to its transcendent calling, that it has real gifts to offer its non-Christian neighbors.

Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

COMPETING SPECTACLES: TREASURING CHRIST IN THE MEDIA AGE

by Tony Reinke

I spend a lot of my professional and personal time thinking about the word vs. the image, trying to distinguish and appreciate the nature of each in its proper way. Tony Reinke’s book has helped flesh out my understanding of the power, for better or worse, of visual images. Many of us, myself included, are prone to distrust the allure of the image over the logic of the word. Yet, as Reinke reminds us, the glory of God and the spectacle of the cross are visual manifestations of the divine nature whose image we bear. Because he created us with eyes to gaze, we are ever seeking visual delights that can be satisfied only in him. Reinke’s book is an excellent companion to Neil Postman’s classic examination of electronic images, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

THE COSMOPOLITAN TRADITION: A NOBLE BUT FLAWED IDEAL

by Martha C. Nussbaum

I was expecting to disagree strongly with this book because I assumed it would be a defense of open borders or a warning about the supposed foolishness of provincial and parochial attachments. Instead, Nussbaum defends national sovereignty and explains that a genuine cosmopolitanism (a love for the human qua human) is formed in the fundamental attachments of family, neighborhood, and house of worship. But the book was surprising in another direction too; namely in challenging the Stoic view that external circumstances and contingencies (like how much money you're born into) are not connected to justice, virtue, and human flourishing. Nussbaum instead zeroes in on our human vulnerability (never something I want to be reminded of!) and makes a compelling case for safeguarding the precariousness of human life.

Anthony Barr, contributor to Ethika Politika, University Bookman, and the CiRCE Institute

Gracy Olmstead,

ALIENATED AMERICA: WHY SOME PLACES THRIVE AND OTHERS COLLAPSE

by Timothy P. Carney

Tim Carney’s book was a surprising and encouraging read. It proffered readers a more nuanced understanding of our current religious and political moment than has been offered by many in recent months. President Trump’s widespread support from white working class Americans and evangelicals has brought a great deal of criticism from the press—much of it deserved, I would argue. But the question of why Trump received this support has been a thorny one. In Alienated America, Carney considers the collapse of civic institutions in American towns, and then connects the collapse (or strength) of those institutions to the way these Americans voted in the 2016 election. His book demonstrates that where civic (particularly religious) energy remained strong, Trump received far less support than in those towns where local associations were weak. Along with Chris Arnade’s book Dignity, it offered an important perspective on places where people believe the American Dream is dead, and hope has slipped away.

John Wilson, contributor to The Englewood Review of Books and First Things

AGENT JACK: THE TRUE STORY OF MI5's SECRET NAZI HUNTER

by Robert Hutton

In Agent Jack: The True Story of MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter, British journalist Robert Hutton tells a story that’s exceedingly strange precisely because, in some respects, it’s so mundane. In a “Note to the Reader” at the outset, Hutton seems to be worrying a bit about this, contriving a Big Point to justify the project (and the reader’s investment):

Since 1945, Britain has told itself a story about the war. In this narrative, not only did the country stand alone against the military forces of fascism, but it was also uniquely resistant to the ideology itself. While other nations succumbed to such ideas or collaborated with invaders, Britain stood firm. That strength of character saved not just the UK, but all of Europe.

But MI5 knew a different story. By the end of the war, it had identified hundreds of apparently loyal British men and women who longed for a Nazi conquest. A few had gone further, risking their lives to help Hitler.

And so on for another couple of paragraphs. Yet if you read the book, you’ll learn that what you’ve always supposed requires no revision: yes, there were fascists in Britain; no, they never got much momentum.

Does this mean that Agent Jack is a rather predictable read, even boring? Not in the least! What you’ll get is the true story of Eric Roberts (codename: Jack King), a young man who held a very modest job at a bank when he was recruited by Britain’s Security Service, MI5, to infiltrate a network of fascist sympathizers. He turns out to excel at deception, and yet at the same time there’s a wonderful ordinariness about him that sets him apart from his spy-fiction counterparts. The same is true of many of the plotters and would-plotters he encounters, some of whom are clearly motivated by personal spite or sheer nastiness rather than by any ideological commitment.

Surprising, loaded with ironies, in some ways heartening, in some ways depressing, but never tedious, Agent Jack will beguile you and get you thinking.

Grace is a Hong-Kong-born, Chinese-Canadian writer living in TkaRonto, part of the territory of the Mississaugas, the Anishnabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. Her debut collection of poetry is coming soon from Guernica Editions. Her work has been nominated for the Best New Poets and Best of the Net anthologies and is published or forthcoming in Grain Magazine, Frontier Poetry, Arc Poetry, Sonora Review, Mud Season Review, Yes Poetry, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter at @thrillandgrace.

Poetry Grace

OSCAR WILDE'S LAST PRAYER

Is it a greater sin to sin or to write about the face of sin and make it beautiful?

If love dare not speak its name then let it sing a Song of Songs

I will seek Him whom my soul loves, measure pleasure in our garden of carnations, devour the fruit from every tree. Must he who bears the cross of genius also bear the blessings of poverty, grief, and hunger?

My God, I have nothing to declare but this: Tu m’as blessé.

Amen.

Poetry Eoin Meagher

Eoin Meagher has been “doing” literature for almost all the fifty years of his life: reading it, writing it and for twenty-five years, teaching the reading and writing of it. He comes from Ireland, but has spent twenty years in France, Ukraine, and Germany doing literature. In Ukraine he added editing it to the list when he cofounded and coedited a trilingual literary journal. He has now returned to Ireland with his three-year-old son and his partner, reduced his hours of teaching literature and thus increased his hours for writing it, and some subsistence organic gardening.

I

I hear the manic swallows’ cries Carving the shrill air where they fly Filling the vacant arcs their wings describe.

They are all shape and sound And spinning ellipses round and round Against an ever-changing ground.

For suddenly from this balcony I face, Across a gulf of echo-vaulted space, Another memory haunted place;

Where the circling swallows filled Deep summer evenings, and stilled A childhood moment’s ripples

And I, as a boy, in wonder and dread, Thought I was the Eoghaneen1 of whom I read Flew with them when summer and he were dead.

II

They weave and shriek occult contours; The mindscape’s geomantic figures, An arcane alphabet that thought obscures, But circles the mind back to old sorrow, Their cries clawing memory like a harrow Engraving the hollow vessel of tomorrow.

For again the mind spills through the eye Of the vortex, to another evening sky, Another courtyard round which the swallows fly;

Where the Norman still keeps his vigils, And horses’ hooves ring on the cobbles, And I relive a memory no longer personal.

Circling ever back and back, now, to where Their cries first pierced our shielded fear And carried it beyond us on the air.

Perhaps some prehistoric sorrower Standing on a shrinking glacier

First read their cries as the sun lowered.

And felt the sudden joy pitched so It becomes a keenly pleasurable sorrow Achingly beyond what we can know.

III

Now, as their dark-winged eyres Wind down the darkness by degrees, And my mind is mesmerised to ease:

They shriek the end of all summers’ suns And line the wires like the dead days done, Numbering down to nothingness one by one.

umerous important criticisms of the vapid multiculturalism that dominates American public schools have been offered by the proponents of classical education and the Western canon. The loss of a common vocabulary in the public sphere, for example, is a valid concern. Some commentators have fearfully suggested that multiculturalism may undermine the binding ideas of Western civilization, causing it to fracture into disparate interest groups that pose an existential threat to democratic government and Christian faith. In our current highly polarized political environment, one can readily see these fears realized in the inability of various political factions to communicate meaningfully with those holding opposing viewpoints, and in the general lack of appreciation for the received tradition. Other critics of multicultural education among classical educators have offered critiques that are less convincing and that border on their own sort of identity politics. Often, it seems that any hint of a more diverse curriculum is anathema.

Even a quick glance at the curricula of almost any classical school reveals a firm focus on Europe throughout the curriculum with a jump to the United States following the Enlightenment. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to conduct a thorough survey of the curricula of classical schools, a brief review reveals that many classical schools do not have a single text by an African American, Native American, or Latino author in their entire curriculum, and almost none have a text by any author not from Europe or the United States. While criticisms of classical schools as excessively Eurocentric often spring from false premises such as those that provide the basis for the multiculturalism of public-school curricula, the accusation that classical schools are Eurocentric is demonstrably accurate. And this is undoubtedly a serious problem for classical schools in reaching their stated aims.

While the purposes of classical education come packaged in various forms, two claims are consistently proclaimed by its advocates: (1) classical education provides a sound grounding in cultural literacy, the things a young person needs to know in order to understand the world around them and to be an engaged citizen; and (2) classical education seeks what is always and everywhere True, Good, and Beautiful and inculcates into the student the desire to seek these highest

aims of human life. It is doubtful, though, whether an exclusively Eurocentric curriculum can actually achieve these ends.

Hannah Arendt once opined that a school should be the most conservative institution in any community. Its purpose, she writes in her 1954 essay “The Crisis in Education,” is to conserve and to pass on the received tradition, not to artificially manufacture a new tradition in the hope of engineering a better society. Schools must induct new people into the old world that predated them. To this end, schools must provide students with the cultural vocabulary to enter into, to understand, and to participate in the world. They can grow into adults who do much to improve the world, but, ultimately, they do so by building upon the received wisdom of the past.

A purely Eurocentric curriculum of the sort most classical schools offer, however, hardly seems consonant with this end. While an education steeped in the greatest works of European and American literature will certainly induct students into a world, it is difficult to support the idea that it inducts student into the world—an increasingly mobile world in which more than half of the world’s inhabitants live in Asia. More than one in seven people worldwide are Muslim; at what point in any of the classical curricula currently in use will students seek to understand Islamic history or the Qur’an? The two most populous countries in the world are China and India, each of which has a population in excess of a billion people, in addition to large diasporas sprinkled throughout the world. At what point does the classical student study Confucianism or the great Indian epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana?

While I do not want to fall into prognostications on our geopolitical future, it can hardly be denied that India and China are important countries economically, politically, and militarily, and their importance is likely to increase in coming decade—the decades for which we are preparing children who are entering kindergarten today. The same is true of the Middle East, long a center of American business and military involvement. A fair understanding of Islam, of the culture of China, and of the traditional religious and philosophical thought of India are key aspects of cultural literacy if we want our children to be able to participate in the world beyond their front door. I was a soldier deployed

to Baghdad—the epicenter of the brewing sectarian conflict in Iraq—when I listened to a top American political leader struggle to define the difference between Sunni and Shi’a Islam in 2004. That sort of dangerous cultural illiteracy cannot be acceptable for our children if we want them to be future leaders of our country and our world. A further end of classical education frequently put forth by its advocates is the recognition and inculcation of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, the eternal verities of human nature, God, and the world. This is undoubtedly a worthy end and indeed the dramas of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the art of the Renaissance open wide the doors to the realm of the Absolute. And, yet, if it is indeed the Absolute, if it is indeed the truth of human nature that we are entering into here, and if it is indeed the Good, the True, and the Beautiful for all people, it would seem rather strange if these Perfect Forms chose to alight on only one rather small peninsula at the far western extreme of the Eurasian landmass. This is, however, the impression that most classical curricula gives. We are invited into what is Good, True, and Beautiful at all times for all people in all places, and we are instead given a view that extends only across the 1500 miles from Greece to Great Britain, a culturally and intellectually fertile tract of land to be sure, but hardly a sufficient reflection of the fullness of the human experience of the Absolute.

In his appendix to The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis quotes liberally from the great works of ancient China, India, Greece, Egypt, and elsewhere to substantiate his claims concerning the eternal verity of Natural Law. Following Lewis’ model, would it not be wise to allow our students to discover virtue in the thought of the Analects as much as in the thought of Aristotle, thousands of miles away and cultures apart? Or for our students to discover in the epic tradition of ancient India as much heroism as they already find in the Iliad and the Odyssey? There would be nothing lost and much gained by our students were they to see in the rich tradition of Japanese poetry as much beauty as they might find in a Shakespearean sonnet.

A turn away from a Eurocentric model for classical education would, in fact, be a greater embrace of the classical tradition that it seeks to uphold through its realization of the ancient ideal of cosmopolitanism. In Of Good and Evil Ends, Cicero explains that “reason prompts one to begin with caring for friends and family and from there to widen one’s concern to include fellowship first with one’s fellow citizens and then with all mortals.” Herein is contained a succinct definition of the cosmopolitanism of the ancient Mediterranean world. For the classical cosmopolitans, one began with love of one’s family, gradu-

ally expanding out to encompass one’s community, one’s countrymen, and eventually the whole world. Cicero, in fact, describes the trajectory of history. At the risk of oversimplifying, it can be said that the story of human history is in part the story of humans learning to live with and alongside increasingly diverse groups of other humans. This process is both the process of the history of humanity as a whole as well as the process of each individual human life, as the person progressively learns to live with a family, a community or polis, a nation, and, finally, with people on the other side of the world. If the rapid technological globalization of the twenty-first century, which has greatly expanded the demands of this process, is to mean anything aside from the universal commoditization of culture in the form of popular media and the global uniformity of trinkets, it must mean what the great twentieth-century civil rights leader and cosmopolitan thinker W.E.B. Du Bois hoped this process of learning to live together would mean: a mutual appreciation between persons and people groups of their respective histories and cultures and a firm belief that the treasures of each are the treasures of all.

Such a belief is not a departure from the classical tradition; it is, rather, a return to ancient wisdom. While the idea of a golden thread passed down to each successive generation has some veracity, we should not overlook that the ancients who stand at the head of this thread did not view it as a fragile egg never to be disturbed or altered, nor did they see it as a monolith. On the contrary, Plato and Herodotus enthusiastically borrowed from the wisdom of their neighbors, and the ancient Christians delighted in the prolific diversity of the early church, seeing in it the fulfillment of the cosmopolitan hope.

The key point of divergence between classical cosmopolitanism and the sort of multiculturalism that is rightly eschewed by modern classical educators is that while the latter seeks to foster diversity for the sake of itself and encourages an identity-based approach to this diversity in which each person remains within his or her own small faction, cosmopolitanism instead seeks after the unity at the core of the external diversity of the human experience. While the multiculturalist divides people into groups based on race, religion, and other differences, the cosmopolitan instead looks for what is eternally True, Good, and Beautiful within the diverse array of cultures, peoples, and experiences. The multiculturalist, then, looks only at the exterior expressions of difference, whereas the cosmopolitan appreciates the variety of the exterior but goes beyond it to look for what each unique experience can teach all of us about the universal human experience. The multiculturalist ignores the universal in his obsession with the particular; the cosmopolitan seeks to extrapolate

from the particular to the universal.

Perhaps the most succinct formulation of this hope is found in the words of Terence: “Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto” [“I am human; I think nothing human is foreign to me”]. This line is spoken by a character in one of Terence’s plays to justify his eavesdropping on the conversations of others, which is something of an illustration of cosmopolitanism as the act of overhearing. The debates among the Confucians, Taoists, and Legalists of ancient China and the debates among their Platonic, Aristotelian, Epicurean, and Stoic contemporaries in the Mediterranean world are something like private cultural conversations upon which the modern intellectual descendants of both groups may now listen. And it is classical education, with its focus on careful reading and listening, its desire to seek eternal truths wherever they may be found, and its immersion in the best that has been thought and said, that can and should lead this movement toward listening in.

On a practical level, an education that is both cosmopolitan and classical will look different at different schools. A classical school in California starts with a different “little platoon”—to use Edmund Burke’s phrase—than does a school in Florida or Michigan. The abilities, expertise, and interests of the faculty must also be considered. The starting point and trajectory may be slightly different, just as there are currently different classical schools that place greater emphasis on one ancient Greek philosopher over another. As the saying goes, “variety is the spice of life,” which is, of course, very much to the point.

On the K–8 level, I have been impressed with E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge curriculum and his attempt to provide young people with the knowledge they need to participate thoughtfully in the cosmopolitan public square of the United States. Core Knowledge is already in use at many classical schools, and elements from it could certainly be adopted by others. Hirsch and his compatriots have done an excellent job of providing a thorough curriculum that introduces students to a variety of world cultures, such as Indian religions (Buddhism and Hinduism) in second grade, medieval Africa and China in fourth grade, and Japan in fifth grade. The literature and

fine arts selections could use some expanding to include more fairy tales, myths, and other stories and art from those cultures, but there is a fair amount already offered.

At the high school level, an education that is cosmopolitan and classical means a gradual expansion of one’s focus from the immediate and the provincial to the global and the universal. Admittedly, classical high schools are already pressed for time and space in the curriculum. With the great wealth of the Western canon, it may seem a daunting task to have to make more room to include texts from India, China, and elsewhere in the world. But it seems more appropriate to think about what will be added to the curriculum in terms of depth and richness than what might have to be removed. While it may be necessary to drop one of the Greek dramas or a beloved American novel, the gain of an Indian epic like the Mahabharata with its imaginative story, fascinating characters, and philosophical depth will make up for the loss and contribute substantially to the curriculum as a whole, thanks to the light it shines on some of the perennial themes of human experience.

The connection to the current curriculum of most classical schools is perhaps even more obvious when one looks at modern canonical texts. A reading of some of the Upanishads in a study of ancient philosophy would lend itself well to interpreting T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which quotes them directly. Rather than having to backfill and explain in thirty seconds or less what Eliot is talking about (or simply skip over it because the teacher is herself at a loss—as I have seen a teacher do) one could instead rely on the students having some familiarity with these texts, their contents, and their cultural milieu.

I want to conclude with a caution for those schools, homeschooling families, and others who might decide to adopt a more cosmopolitan classical curriculum. A haphazard cosmopolitanism brings with it the same drawbacks as contemporary curricular multiculturalism—the possibilities of falling into cultural relativism, the creation of a segmented curriculum with no center, and the hodgepodge effect of learning a little of everything and a lot of nothing. American students should still focus largely on

While the multiculturalist divides people into groups based on race, religion, and other differences, the cosmopolitan instead looks for what is eternally True, Good, and Beautiful within the diverse array of cultures, peoples, and experiences.

the Western tradition—the received and dominant tradition in American thought. Other cultures are best taught from the perspective of a respectful inquirer well-grounded in one’s own tradition. It is also important to realize that one simply cannot teach students about every culture on earth; it is better to learn well about one or two other cultures than to get only a surface-level view of a dozen others. The goal is to provide children with the foundation they need to be culturally literate adults capable of navigating the varieties of world cultures when they travel to China for business, say, lead our country in conflict zones in the Middle East, or vacation in Latin America. Our children will be the next generation of leaders of our country, and that leadership will demand the ability to participate in the world with confidence, compassion, and competence.

Creating a cosmopolitan curriculum out of the current classical curricula, then, would be a challenge, but ultimately a rewarding one for both teachers and students. The result would be a wider scope of the human experience, a deeper appreciation for its richness, and a more fervent belief in the truth that there is an eternal Good, True, and Beautiful, that is indeed present everywhere always for all.

David Withun is the Head of School of Jacksonville Classical Academy. His work has been published in Phylon, The Explicator, The Imaginative Conservative, the Journal of Faith and the Academy, Black Perspectives, and elsewhere.

mmanuel Kant famously divided the world into two constructs: the world as we experience it and the world in its unknowable essence. He called this operation his “Copernican revolution in philosophy.” However, I think it’s more apt to call it a Galilean revolution, in that it was made possible only by a prior and more drastic change in philosophical vision, which has come down to us as nominalism. Nominalism is so dominant in the twenty-first century that it almost does not need to be defined; most Westerners of our day would likely call it “common sense.” But in its most basic form it says that the words we use to describe the world—words like “goodness,” “beauty,” and “truth”—are mere human constructs rather than descriptions of actual existing things.

The Copernicus to Kant’s Galileo was a fourteenth-century English Franciscan named William of Ockham, who, like Kant four centuries later, severed us, possibly irrevocably, from the essence of things. Ockham was one of the leading logicians of the late Middle Ages, although he wrote on many other subjects as well: politics, science, and in this case, metaphysics—which is what he is likely to be most remembered for. We live in Ockham’s world, arguably more so than in the world of any philosopher who came after him, and it was Ockham who opened the door for radical individualism and the widespread nihilism that characterizes twenty-first-century life in the West.

Ockham’s philosophy has proved so triumphant that it’s easier for us to understand than the work of other medieval philosophers. The relevant section of his Summa Logicae deals with the difference between universals and particulars—for example, the difference between the category of “pencil” and the specific pencil that I’m using to write these words. Most philosophers before Ockham believed that I refer to something real when I refer to both of these things; that is, they would have accepted that the pencil I’m holding is a real thing, and that the category of pencil is also real. The category of the pencil could be what Plato thinks it is: an abstract form, more real than any particular, physical pencil, from which all particular, physical pencils receive their “pencil-ness,” the quality that makes them pencils. But one need not be a Platonist to believe that the category “pencil” exists: Aristotle and his medieval disciples say that the universal exists, but only as it is instantiated in the particular. In other words, pencil-ness is a real thing, but it exists as a quality of the various pencils that exhibit it.

This view is called realism, in that it posits that categories, universals, and essences really do exist. When I’ve taught ancient and medieval philosophy, my students—even my committed Christian students—have had trouble understanding it, let alone accepting it.

That’s because nominalism, the view Ockham sets out, reigns triumphant in our society. That dominance has a number of very bad effects, but probably the worst is that it severs our minds from the world, privileging the former over the latter. In particular, it makes the notion of value a merely intellectual (and eventually individual) notion and says that objective thought has nothing to do with value, which becomes a sort of mental addendum to the “real world.” In this essay, I will attempt to fight back against this de-valuing of value by constructing a realist view of metaphor, especially poetic metaphor.

Ockham’s basic premise is that a universal like pencil-ness exists only within the collective mind of humanity, and that only particular things exist in the world itself. Thus, the object I call a pencil is a pencil because we have decided what pencil-ness looks like: a straight implement that leaves a trail of graphite on paper.

Note that Ockham is not making more the modest claim that we could have called pencil-ness whatever we wanted. The existence of multiple languages proves that much: what we call a pencil, the French call un crayon That doesn’t disprove the existence of the essence of a pencil. Instead, what the nominalist ultimately claims is that the range of objects called pencils or crayons is more or less arbitrary, and that if we wanted to narrow the definition of a pencil to, say, require blue rather than black lead, or to expand it to include straight implements that leave trails of color on paper, we will have actually changed the essence of a pencil, because that essence exists only in the conventions of our language. It is hard to avoid agreeing with this stronger claim because different languages clearly divide up the range of objects differently. It would be much easier to learn another language if they didn’t because languages would essentially be codes of one another: just switch out the words, and you’ve got it. But translation doesn’t work that way. For example, French has five words—fenêtre, carreau, vitre, vitrine, and vitrail—whereas we have only window and pane. So are we talking about five universals (five immortal essences), or just two?

There’s not much at stake when we’re talking about different kinds of windowpanes, but nominalism gets dicier when it moves into ethics: Is there such a thing as goodness, or is it just a word we’ve given to things that make us feel good? Are actions right and wrong by their very nature, or have we decided (somewhat arbitrarily) to think of them that way? Christians are typically much less willing to say that goodness is arbitrary than that “pencil-ness” is, but it’s harder than it may seem to draw a hard line between modes of nominalism.

One of the most extreme nominalist visions—an extremism that exposes the friendlier forms for what they really are—is Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1873 essay “On Truth

and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense.” Nietszche begins with windowpane nominalism, suggesting that when we talk about trees, we’re talking about a range of particulars, a range whose limits we arbitrarily set. We set those limits by grouping together particulars that have some things in common—but they also have all sorts of differences that we ignore in classing them together. All our categories come from our arbitrarily choosing similarities to accept and differences to ignore.

But Nietzsche takes the necessary and logical next step: he posits that all our knowledge works like our knowledge of trees. We think by categories, he claims, but all of those categories are mere arbitrary projections onto the bare and meaningless mass of human existence. The absurdist term I use when I teach this essay is that human beings are Homo Libraricus—“library man”—who endlessly shunts the books of the world into a Dewey Decimal system that is no more intrinsic to reality than a system I could create using a random number generator. Most of us are unaware of this sorry position, so we mistakenly believe that we’re saying the truth about things. Nietzsche believes that there are only particulars things: there is no God, honesty is foolish if it’s even possible, and as for truth, it is just

a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in the Non-Moral Sense“)

In other words, human beings, who are relentlessly categorizing animals, end up saying nothing at all about the world. All we can talk about is ourselves. And the animal that does the talking cuts a pathetic figure indeed:

In some remote corner of the universe, flickering in the light of the countless solar systems into which it had been poured, there was once a planet on which clever animals invented cognition. It was the most arrogant and most mendacious minute in the “history of the world”; but a minute was all it was. After nature had drawn just a few more breaths the planet froze and the clever animals had to die. (Ibid.)

Nietzsche’s ideas are the purest form of nominalism. Not coincidentally, they are also the purest form of nihilism. To say that universals do not exist objectively is to say that they don’t exist at all because all of the lovely words we use to describe values are merely expressions of opinion. But if words like “goodness,” “beauty,” and “truth” merely express our opinions, they have nothing to do with the real world, and there is nothing good, beautiful, or true. In this way, and as Nietzsche demonstrates, all nominalism will eventually slide into nihilism.

This is not to say that every nominalist in modern society understands that. Ask the man on the street if he believes that all truth is constructed by human will, and he’s quite unlikely to agree. But ask him if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and he’ll almost certainly say that it is. The problem that Nietzsche’s essay demonstrates is that aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics are tightly bound together, such that nominalizing one is bound to nominalize the others. If you say beauty is a human projection, sooner or later, you’re going to have to say that truth and goodness are, too.

The best book I know on this subject is C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, which examines the perniciousness of a nominalist educational system and demonstrates the danger of teaching students to denigrate values as a real mode of understanding the world. We risk becoming, as he puts it, “men without chests,” who imagine that we have eliminated emotion and operate on pure logic but really cannot think any better than we can feel. Assuming for the moment that realism is true—that things like goodness and beauty and even pencil-ness really exist and that they adhere to objects and actions rather than being a screen that our mind projects over objects and actions—I want to try to understand what realism means for language and especially for analogy. And my conclusions will have serious implications for the poet, whose stock in trade is analogy: If universals really do exist, the poet becomes substantially more limited than he would be under the reign of nominalism. But he also becomes substantially more powerful, perhaps even necessary for society.

Analogy refers to a comparison between two things. Typically, when English teachers and literary critics talk about analogies, they’re talking about figures of speech— that is, non-literal language. The two best-known analogical figures of speech are similes, which use the words “like” or “as” to make their comparisons, and metaphors, which don’t use those words. One of the most famous similes in English-language poetry is Robert Burns’ “My love is like a red, red, rose / That’s newly sprung in June.” Obviously, he’s comparing his love to a newly blooming flower, but he’s doing so, as it were, from a distance: the

word “like” lets us know that Burns knows there are a large number of ways that his love does not resemble a rose and that he’s concerned with only a few analogies— perhaps both the rose and his love are fresh and beautiful. Metaphors lack that distance. Had Burns written, “My love is a red, red rose,” the identification would be much more complete. Metaphors, in other words, are notably stronger, more daring, than similes; although, because we use them all the time, we’re scarcely aware of it. For example, I’ve subtitled this article “A Realist View of Metaphor,” but we’re so accustomed to using the word “view” metaphorically to mean opinion that it may not even even register as a metaphor.

A good metaphor is delightful, and this is one source of its power. Aristotle says in Rhetoric that “we all naturally find it agreeable to get hold of new ideas easily: words express ideas, and therefore those words are the most agreeable that enable us to get hold of new ideas” (1410b). Love is a hard thing to understand, but roses are relatively simple, and so the comparison sheds light on the more distant, difficult term. Love in its fullness may be beyond my comprehension, but thinking of it as a flower makes one aspect of it easier for me to grasp.

This view of metaphor is true as far as it goes, but it is a philosopher’s definition. Poetry is capable of metaphors that don’t really explain things, at least not in the way Aristotle expects them to. The Roman orator and rhetorician Cicero understands this usage of metaphor. He argues that most of the time, metaphor is there to help give new names to things that don’t have names, but he notes that,

even in the greatest abundance of proper words, men who are much more charmed with such are uncommon, if they are used metaphorically with judgment. This happens, I imagine, either because it is some manifestation of wit to jump over such expressions as lie before you, and catch others from a greater distance; or because he who listens is led another way in thought, and yet does not wander from the subject, which is a very great pleasure; or

because a subject, and entire comparison, is despatched in a single word; or because every metaphor that is adopted with judgment is directed immediately to our senses, and principally to the sense of sight, which is the keenest of them all.

(3.40.159-160)

Cicero expands the power of metaphor. It is not enough to say that it explains distant terms with near ones. Metaphor turns things that we already know over and around in our hands, showing us sides of them that we would never have seen with merely literal language. And this is especially true with metaphors about abstract ideas: they materialize spiritual things. When Emily Dickinson says that “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” she performs a magic trick, bringing something incorporeal into the physical world.

I’ve used semi-religious language here to call attention to the vital role that metaphor plays in theology. Thomas Aquinas says that many of the words we use to describe God are used metaphorically, as when He is called a roaring lion in Amos 3:8. Even some of the ethical terms we use for God, especially the ones having to do with the passions, like meekness or fortitude, are essentially metaphorical, since God has no passions. This whole analysis springs from Aquinas’ argument early in the Summa Theologicae that the Scriptures use analogical language all the time and that they are right to do so: “For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in Holy Writ, spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the likeness of material things” (1.1.9). Aquinas has essentially baptized the Aristotelian and Ciceronian views of metaphor. Sacred metaphor does what regular metaphor does: it explains the distant by the near and the spiritual by the physical. And that’s true. But, while all three of these thinkers are realists, I contend that they don’t take their realism far enough when it comes to metaphor.

To understand why I’d say that, we have to compre-

Cicero expands the power of metaphor. It is not enough to say that it explains distant terms with near ones. Metaphor turns things that we already know over and around in our hands, showing us sides of them that we would never have seen with merely literal language.

hend something about post-Ockhamian and especially post-Nietzschean views of language. Nominalism more or less forcibly wrests language away from the world it purportedly describes, so much so that the twentieth-century Swiss linguistic Ferdinand de Saussure claimed that all language is arbitrary—not in the sense, as he is sometimes caricatured, that we can change the meaning of words willy-nilly. Rather, he argued that words are relatively firm once they’ve been integrated into a given language, but their initial creation has nothing intrinsic to do with the world of undifferentiated matter which they purport to describe. After Nietzsche, words were radically severed from reality. They became, in a real sense, just words. Yet they are all we have, because in addition to being Homo Libraricus, we are also Homo Lingus (linguistic man) and Homo Semioticus (symbol-using man). Our whole access to the world comes through the language we arbitrarily create to describe it. This is what Jacques Derrida’s infamous statement “There is nothing outside the text” means. The French is “Il n’y a rien de hors-texte,” which might be better translated, “There is no outer-text.” In other words, there is no access to the world that’s not mediated by interpretation, which is ultimately to say that there’s no access to the world that’s not mediated by our arbitrary categories. And that means we have no access to the world as it really is. Ockham begat Kant, and Kant begat Nietzsche, and Nietzsche begat Saussure, and Saussure begat Derrida.

Again, I’m not sure I don’t believe all this. All I can say is that I don’t want to, which is why I wrote this poem several years ago:

“Toward and Beyond”

Our language is a web. Once spun, It stretches on infinitely (Or so it seems) in all degrees To swallow every horizon And grin unknowingly. Each word’s A node—a dictionary’s worth Of them. And then each calls to each, Their voices blending in the air, A chorus of materials Like double-sided tape.

But still—

There must be gaps between the strands, Invisible and odorless, Without the traces of the glue That binds us to our words. Or else Horizons past the last one, where There calls to us a voiceless voice,

A sound beyond the sound that can, Sometimes, be heard below the din.

Perhaps all we have in terms of disputation of the nominalist view of language is an understanding of its terrible implication, a longing to see it destroyed, and a recommendation to read The Abolition of Man. And maybe, too, an understanding of the way poetry might be able to help us push beyond it. Nominalism says, in effect, that all language is metaphorical. Because we have no access to the thing in itself, everything is a distant term that is only apparently brought closer by the term we arbitrarily invent for it. To call a thing a tree is the same basic process as to say, with Joyce Kilmer, “I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree.” Neither of them tells us anything meaningful about the thing itself. My proposed realist version of metaphor, oddly enough, will also collapse the difference between figurative and literal language, but rather than turning all language into metaphor, it will restore metaphor to the real of straightforward language. Poetry—as I conceive of it, or hope to conceive of it—is much closer to daily speech than we imagine it to be.

Any commitment to realism is necessarily a commitment to teleology. Philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition tend to insist that to understand a given thing, we have to understand its telos—the purpose for which it was made. Thus, a pencil is not whatever we decide to call a pencil, as if colored lead would become a pencil by collective fiat. A pencil is what was made to do the things that a pencil does (that is, make trails of graphite on paper) and it doesn’t really matter whether you call it a pencil or un crayon. The telos binds all of these diverse objects together, such that a wooden No. 2 and a mechanical pencil, despite their obvious differences, can coherently both belong to the same category. This also allows us to say that different categories might exist in different cultures without saying that the essence of a thing is entirely arbitrary. Think, for example, of a culture that had never encountered an airplane. When they saw one, they wouldn’t have a category or a word into which it would easily fit, and so they might be tempted to call it a “flying ship” or a “metal bird.” But airplanes are still things, and their “thingness” is based on their purpose: something is an airplane if it fulfills the purpose of transporting goods and people through the air in a particular way. Perhaps our hypothetical pre-airplane culture classes it with ships. That’s legitimate, provided that it matches the telos of a ship, transporting goods and people in a particular way. But once the category of airplane exists, it’s clear that an airplane is no longer really a ship. A new telos is available, so a new category is

available. Likewise, we can now understand the success and failure of a thing within its category: a pencil without graphite is not something other than a pencil; it’s a bad pencil, and its badness has to do with its failure to achieve its telos.

We didn’t create trees and other natural objects, of course, but we can think about them teleologically by thinking about the reasons that God might have made them. He says in Genesis 1:11, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it” (NRSV). So the telos of a tree is to create more trees, which means, perhaps, that an individual apple tree doesn’t exist except as connected to other apple trees—except as a particular item in a category, one manifestation of a universal. Later in the chapter, God hands the vegetable world over to humanity: “I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food” (1:29). In a real sense, the telos of a tree is to provide sustenance for human beings (and for other animals, as the next verse makes clear). That’s not something we use the tree for, the way we might take medications off-brand to treat conditions they were not created for—it’s what the tree was literally made for.

But there’s more: trees serve, throughout the Bible, as analogies for godly and ungodly modes of life. For ex-

ample, the psalmist says that he is “a green olive tree in the house of God,” whereas God will “snatch and tear” his enemy “from your tent; / he will uproot you from the land of the living” (Ps. 52:8, 5). And Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed says that “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field” (Matt. 13:31). Even his cursing the unfruitful fig tree (Mark 11:12–25) serves as a kind of real-life metaphor. If the words of the Bible are inspired by God, I think we have to believe that it’s part of the telos of a tree to serve as a model for these things. It’s part of its nature as surely as bearing fruit is part of its nature. The tree exists to reproduce itself, to feed us, and also to provide metaphors to help us understand the spiritual world.

The making of metaphors is not the sole province of God (and of His official analogues like the psalmist). We are all poets every time we come up with a new analogy, even though we lack the direct inspiration of the biblical examples. And our poetry is true when it is revelatory— that is, when it tells us something legitimate about the distant object. So, for example, Sylvia Plath calls herself “a riddle in nine syllables.” We recognize this metaphor as true because it reveals Plath’s psychological complexity—and that of the whole human race. Perhaps even the average nominalist would agree with that. My realist suggestion is that a true metaphor reveals something legitimate about the near term as well: We see that riddles,

perhaps, are genuine reflections of human psychological complexity. I posit that all true metaphor works this way. Take, for example, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy”:

I know why the caged bird beats his wing Till its blood is red on the cruel bars; For he must fly back to the perch and cling When he fain would be on the bough a-swing.

The central metaphor here compares the experience of African Americans in a world that hates and oppresses them (the far term) to that of a bird locked in a cage (the near). It is obvious that the metaphor reveals the truth about the far term. My contention is that it also reveals the truth about the caged bird: not just that it really is like us, but also that it was created in order to show us ourselves.

The obvious objection to this proposal is that it looks radically anthropocentric in a post-Darwinian world, that it assumes humanity to be the spiritual center of things, remaking the world in man’s image. But I don’t know how to read Genesis 1:26—“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth”—without seeing humanity at the center of creation. Besides that, nominalism is also anthropocentric, albeit more nefariously so: it puts meaning in the human mind, and nowhere else. Realism gives human beings a dignity that Nietzsche would never allow; and it allows the world around them to be made, as it were, of the same stuff as them. But it does so by limiting the

Works Cited

power of the human imagination. We are part of nature, not set off from it by our meaning-making, and we don’t make meaning so much as we discover it. The likeness between us and the caged bird is not a projection. It’s real, and Dunbar helps us to see it.

I said that this view of metaphor would both limit and empower the poet. The limits are natural limits. The realist cannot agree with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous assertion that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”; the law is one of the universals that are given, that adhere to the objects and actions themselves. We do not decide what things are. We observe them and tell the truth about them. But therein lies our power: If we are not just making things up, not just projecting meaning (or more accurately, the illusion of meaning) onto a fundamentally meaningless material universe, then the metaphors we discover in our writing can be true, really true, true as scientific discoveries are true, albeit in a metaphysical rather than a physical sense. Poets are as indispensable as any scholar, not because they tell us what we live for in the Dead Poets Society sense, but because they help us to go deeper into the actual nature of reality—they tell us what really is. We grow inured to the metaphysical reality of things, that mysterious individuality that Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “inscape.” It’s the poet’s job to find the reflection of the rest of the world in those things, and in so doing, to help the rest of us see everything involved more clearly. The poet’s job is to see the invisible world in the visible, to see the universal in the particular, and to speak it in new, true words.

Michial Farmer is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction. His poems have appeared in St. Katherine Review, Relief, and Curator

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Burns, Robert. “A Red, Red Rose.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43812/a-red-red-rose. Accessed 11 March 2019. Cicero. Cicero on Oratory and Orators. Translated by J.S. Watson. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970.

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Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “Sympathy.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46459/sympathy-56d22658afbc0. Accessed 11 March 2019.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” Translated by Ronald Speirs. In Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent Leitch, 752–62. New York: Norton, 2018.

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Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled ‘The Four Ages of Poetry.’” In Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent Leitch, 601–19. New York: Norton, 2018.

Poetry S.P. Cooper

Dr. Shawn Phillip Cooper is a scholar of medieval literature, specializing in Arthuriana and the intersections between chivalry, kingship, and the church. He is the Vice President of the North American branch of the International Courtly Literature Society, and is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Rochester University in Rochester Hills, Michigan. His hobbies include playing the piano and watching Test Cricket.

A HARVEST FABLE: DECEPTION AND INIQUITY

The fields were green ‘til the waving grass, Darkened by dusk, bowed in the night: A waste of shame beneath sullen skies

(Ah! Night, deceiver of the eye!).

Well the stars compassed, in silence aloof— Winking instead!— How they little esteem

The expense of spirit spent clutching at corn, Or the weeping of men for a harvest of ash.

Tear-damp the grass!— Those deceived by the dark, The stars, and their doubts, denounce the Sun.

Swaying grass and swaying men; Darkened by dusk, deceived by the night.

Poetry Marly Youmans

The most recent book by Marly Youmans collects poems starring the transforming Fool, the mysterious Red King, and the lunar Precious Wentletrap into The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia Publishing, 2019.) Now in pre-order is a novel (massacre, witchcraft, soulmates, escapes!) set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the late seventeenth century, Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius Press, 2020.)

THE WEAVER AND THE LOOM

The weaver threads the loom with silk, Stretches her soul across the rack. Much bleached, the yarn is white as milk, Though spun so long ago from gloom When every path seemed grief and doom.

The weaver threads her loom with silk At the new moon, when stars are fume And midnight skies lean close to black— The shuttle whispers to the room, Sharing her secrets with the loom.

The weaver threads the loom with silk, Stretches her soul across the rack Of years to make its tendrils bloom, Sharing her secrets with the loom.

The Teacher as Neutral Referee

By Josh Pauling

In teacher training programs at colleges across the country, there is an ideology shifting teachers from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.” The widespread popularity of this sleek slogan can be traced back primarily to the work of Alison King in the 1990s, although the phrase can be found at least as early as 1981. No matter its exact origins, catchphrases like this abound in progressive education, reinforcing the idea that students must take charge and determine the direction and content of their own education, while the teacher is relegated to the sidelines as neutral referee. In this view, the teacher ends up simply monitoring the game of school for egregious rule violations, avoiding deep moral commitments and claims of universal truth in the process. While the motto may be catchy, the concept has consequences.

First, a brief analysis of the pairing “sage on the stage” and “guide on the side” is in order. This proposed shift emerged in response to the factory model of schooling, with its mechanistic view of information transmission from teacher to student, preparing students for economic productivity in modern society. In this context, as King notes in her work From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side, the sage on the stage “model of teaching assumes that the students’ brain is like an empty contain-

Ier into which the professor pours knowledge.” King is right to critique factory-style schooling, as humans are more than economic plug-and-play devices designed to download information from instructors. Education transcends the transactional, being at its core a moral activity of mutual trust between teacher and student.

Upon further review, though, it is misleading to position the “sage” and the “guide” as opposites. A true teacher exhibits the best aspects of both archetypes, knowing when to lead and when to step aside. If sage and guide are best embodied in one person (i.e., the teacher), then the only difference left in the parallel phrase is the locus of the teacher, moving from the stage to the side. In progressive educational practice this move causes many teachers to strive for neutrality in virtually all aspects of the educational process. The simple attempt to create a memorable rhyming couplet has brought grim consequences in sanitizing the sage and gelding the guide in an epic exit, stage left. Out goes the mystery and awe of the sage, and in comes the sideline referee. Out goes the principled mentor leading pupils towards an ideal, and in comes the cheerleader. Think of it: Gandalf, Yoda, or any one of your favorite sages made powerless to lead, inspire, discipline, or train—instead relegated to the sidelines.

This change supposedly prepares students for “the

twenty-first century, when individuals will be expected to think for themselves, pose and solve complex problems, and generally produce knowledge rather than reproduce it.” But are we really such chronological snobs to assume this century is the only century that requires students to think for themselves and solve complex problems? Why are we so certain that educational outcomes will improve when we shift the teacher to neutral referee? How can the teacher empower students to “think for themselves” when he has been trained to forsake his own moral and intellectual commitments? Clearly, something is amiss here, as the philosophical underpinnings of this view make evident.

By positioning the teacher to “the side,” progressive education enthrones students as drivers, directing their own education and constructing their own knowledge. The rationale for this comes from the student-centered theory in progressive education known as constructivism, and it is here that the “guide on the side” approach reveals its true philosophical colors. Constructivism presupposes innate human goodness and relativism, two principles at odds with both the Christian worldview and classical education. Constructivism’s romantic view of the student assumes too much of human nature and too little of the brokenness of the world. Christianity and classical education provide a more realistic view of the human person as capable of great evil and great good, thus requiring discipline, training, and guidance to develop tastes for what is true, noble and pure. Moreover, the relativism inherent in constructivism is logically self-defeating. If truth and meaning are relative to each individual’s construction, why bother with the educational endeavor in the first place? The constructivist view of the teacher as sideline referee is not only found philosophically wanting, but also has dire practical effects in the classroom.

First, this approach breeds moral relativism. If the teacher’s response to student opinions is something like: “That is a good opinion, Jane,” and “I appreciate your ideas, Johnny,” this unintentionally models the belief that all ideas and opinions are equally valid. A 2002 Barna study revealed that an alarming 83 percent of teenagers believed moral truth depends on the circumstances, while only a paltry 6 percent said moral truth is absolute. How does this happen to students, when moral relativism is so embarrassingly easy to refute philosophically? Certainly there are many cultural forces influencing students towards such a view, but the role of the neutral teacher in all of this cannot be overlooked. The silence of the teacher on issues of truth and morality speaks vol-

umes to students, reverberating throughout their years of schooling and beyond. Teachers must not just sit on the fence, but model moral and intellectual commitments. If they don’t, it should come as no surprise that students don’t either.

A second outcome of the teacher as “guide on the side” is that it breeds narcissism by sending the message that students know what is best for themselves. Instead of leading students out of their ignorance, this model encourages them to continue wallowing in the mud of lower instincts and entertainment. The word “education” itself provides a lesson here as it comes from the Latin educere which means to lead out, as in leading one out of the limiting shadows of Plato’s cave into the liberating experience of reality. While in the cave, students are trapped in a narcissistic cycle of the self, digitally reflected and intensified via social media dopamine hits and reinforced by popular culture. Teachers must unshackle such students by bringing them into the meaningful world of ideas beyond themselves. The role of the teacher is not to cater to whatever shadows students think are relevant, but to refine their tastes and abilities to contemplate the deeper matters of humanity. The “guide on the side” model, however, short-circuits this process, assuming the child knows best. In his classic book Norms and Nobility, David Hicks drives home this point: “Child-centered education produces the exact opposite of an educated person: a self-centered adult.”

What’s more, the neutral-referee approach breeds intellectual laziness. Instead of challenging students’ ideas by pointing out areas of ignorance or contradiction, the teacher affirms them. This ultimately atrophies a student’s ability to engage with difficult ideas that challenge their assumptions. Thinking is replaced with crass emoting. Like toddlers, students revert to temper-tantrum mode when confronted with uncomfortable truths. Reason shuts down; gut instincts take over. We see this evident in the all-too-common phrases, “Well, I just feel that way,” or “Whatever floats your boat,” and even more disconcertingly on college campuses where opposing (usually conservative) ideas are shouted down by students who can’t handle being exposed to such perspectives. When the teacher is merely referee, students learn quickly that their ideas go unchallenged and their opinions entitle them to a coddling “thank you.”

These three consequences reveal that teacher neutrality is ultimately a mirage. A teacher cannot be neutral, and such an attempt quickly indoctrinates students into a secular worldview. Teaching entails countless decisions about what information to include or exclude, which is

not an unbiased process. The teacher as “guide on the side” eviscerates the curriculum of absolute truth, which is the very thing that sustains a unified worldview. Students need teachers who embody the truth in all its beauty and complexity and who are willing to grapple with relativism—and its concomitant forces—head on. When teachers challenge students in this way, intellectual indifference quickly ends.

I recall an Old Testament professor who unashamedly argued for higher criticism and a mythological view of the Old Testament. His willingness to own this position (at a fairly conservative Christian college, no less) was authentic, requiring me to further hone my own, more historic, orthodox view of biblical authority. This professor did not accept simple regurgitated defenses of the Bible, but required intelligent, nuanced positions from his students. This actual exchange of ideas between teacher and student owning and defending their positions facilitated real learning.

Furthermore, when teachers make a logical case for their own positions, student apathy and lack of interest quickly fade. Now the classroom becomes an authentic place of engagement with ideas where teacher and student are vulnerable and transparent (concepts that are very important today). To be sure, there is a bit of a Kierkegaardian risk for teachers and students in putting forward their positions, but the risk is worth it, for these moments of authenticity facilitate deep learning. Hicks is again helpful at this juncture: “The great teacher, in fact, is necessarily dogmatic in the sense of being committed to ideas. . . . The great teacher shares . . . the conviction that life and letters reflect the normative truths and moral imperatives immanent within nature and within language.”

I once had a philosophy professor who took this risk. He was a master of philosophy and theology with credentials from several prestigious European universities and with an elocution and delivery unlike any I had encountered before, with each word precisely chosen and aptly spoken. As he waxed eloquently on the great dilemmas of philosophy and theology and then posed a question, a hushed sense of anticipation spread across the room packed with students. Who would attempt to answer the question, and declare themselves willing to reveal their knowledge (or lack thereof) in front of the master? Would the student be revealed as naked at the feet of the sage? This was not fear based on intimidation or arrogance in the professor, for he was the most personable and genuine teacher I ever had. Students knew their proper place under the instruction of a master. Knowing that we had to present logical, informed posi-

tions because the teacher would not accept anything less enabled us to engage in the exciting interplays of philosophy and theology in everyday life (imagine that—philosophy made relevant!).

This professor was also willing to take the risk to own his theological positions (Lutheran) and challenge the views that were more commonly held at this college (Evangelical, Baptist, Anabaptist). This led to lively discussions in class, which were always winsome and civil. Many discussions extended beyond class time as the professor patiently answered questions. He met with students individually for dinner, had groups over to his house, and provided students with just the right books to read. Fifteen years hence, this professor is still in contact with many of his students, who continue to be profoundly impacted by such a master teacher; and never once did he use a small-group project, an inquiry-based model, or play the role of neutral referee.

Both of the professors I mention here lived out their deep commitments and engaged in meaningful classroom dialogue around such topics. This was a great antidote to moral relativism, narcissism, and intellectual laziness; it forced students to realize that ideas matter. Such classroom exchanges develop empathy and provide training in the much needed lessons of civil discourse. Much more of education than we’d like to admit is achieved through this sort of imitation. So who will our students imitate—the neutral teacher who in his amoral attempts actually leads students into similar nothingness, or the principled teacher who, in owning his commitments, spurs students on to maturity?

The kind of teacher presented here is not a new one. It is, rather, the ancient idea of a teacher surrounded by disciples who come together to discuss topics and texts under the teacher’s wise tutelage. Here, the power of imitation is unleashed towards its proper end: students internalize their master’s best dispositions and habits and develop into virtuous human beings. This older image transcends the “sage on the stage”/“guide on the side” dichotomy. Education is not simply a transactional process by which information is exchanged, nor is it a student-centered path to relativistic truth paved by narcissism. When held up to scrutiny, the progressive notion of teacher as neutral referee crumbles in comparison to the ancient image of the teacher as an authentic and intelligent expert who models and defends the true, the good, and the beautiful and inspires students to join the chase.

Josh Pauling lives in Lancaster, South Carolina, where he teaches high school history. He and his wife, Kristi, classically homeschool their two children.

Back Page Books

Selections from the editors

How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend, by The Monks of New Skete

The Christian monks of New Skete monastery in New York have been raising and training German shepherd dogs for more than fifty years. They have written two books based on their experiences— How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend, and The Art of Raising a Puppy—which are both highly regarded by dog trainers. The monks found that working with dogs went perfectly with their spiritual endeavors. They believe that when we listen to our dogs’ natural communication, we find a reflection of ourselves. As a result, How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend is half training manual, half meditation. You will come away with a deeper appreciation for dogs as dogs, a better picture of what understanding another being requires of you, and some tips on dog ownership. —

Emily Callihan, copy editor

The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

Two of my favorite theologians, both named Gregory, appear to disagree on a particular question: can corrupt, ordinary, physical beauty raise us to higher desires? One says that the corrupt, ordinary, physical beauty of a woman, for example, can be used to draw a man’s desires to God. The other says that this is, I think his word was, nonsense. In Greene’s The End of the Affair, this is the very question he and his characters are wrestling with: can men and women who ignore, deny, or even hate God but have an overwhelming desire for one another be lifted up, above, beyond the desire for each other to the higher desire that is God? This is an incredibly well-told story, whether you are interested in these larger metaphysical questions or not.

—Matthew Bianco, senior editor

What Are We Doing Here? Essays, by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson’s latest collection of essays delves deep into the assumptions that lie at the heart of her fiction. Her aim is to encourage us to expand our vision, drawing on modern science and historical taboos to challenge our unexamined presuppositions. She calls us to a grander, more sacred respect for creation. And unlike her previous essay collection, The Givenness of Things, her tone remains soft and generous throughout, allowing those who may not share the niceties of her political or theological perspectives to stick with her and wrestle respectfully with her ideas. As is the case with most of her nonfiction, these essays are expansive and wandering. But the overall effect is a humbling encounter with wonder.. —

Emily Andrews, associate editor

Evening in the Palace of Reason, by James B. Gaines

A piano exhibition may not sound like the natural battleground for the soul of the world, but Evening in the Palace of Reason hazards to suggest it anyway. When Frederick the Great of Prussia invites the aged Johann Sebastian Bach to give a command performance, he discourteously sets him an impossible improvisational challenge. Bach, the last great inheritor of medieval culture, responds with a prodigious composition that cryptically rebukes both Frederick and the Enlightenment he championed. James Gaines tempers extensive scholarship with a novelistic attention to human conflict in order to tell the story of these two colossal figures with remarkable sympathy. To quote the bookseller I bought my copy from, “I have always known Bach was a great composer, but after reading this book I realized he was a hero!” —Sean

Johnson, associate editor