2. NEW TESTAMENT

a. The Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John b. Historical Books: Acts c. Epistles (Letters): Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and Jude d. Prophetic/Apocalyptic Literature: Revelation.

These books vary in length, time period, and foci and yet are combined into one canon. Many authors knew nothing of each other as individuals, yet they each cite each other and build on each other’s knowledge such that through this Holy Canon we learn Jewish and Christian history. This is the way the books of the canon of humanity should work: one overall work, with different testaments. The books of the canon of Western civilization contain their own testaments, revealing more about the people who came before us. To engage in focused study of this cannon is to seek to understand ancient humanity better. However, the key is not to remain stuck in that canon. As Bartholomew and Goheen write, “By sharing personal narratives, we come to know one another. We want to understand not only who that other person is now, at this moment, but also how he or she came to be so.”

When one reads the Bible without identifying how it connects to others, one cannot grow or learn from it. Likewise, we need freedom to build bridges from the canon of Western civilization to ourselves and to other people. From this we create more empathy, which leads to the creation of more Human Story Books. For example, in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis took what he learned about Jesus and created a bridge through allegory, helping us understand the story of Christ. Watching Aslan die on the Stone Table helps us to visualize the sacrifice God made for us. If Lewis had merely stopped with Scripture, we would have missed his beautiful retelling of the story of Jesus and God’s love for all of us.

This is what all Human Story Books do. Just as the Bible inspires works like Augustine’s Confessions, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or Aquinas’ Summa Theo- logica, they touch our imagination and our hearts to express how the text moves and changes us. Bartholomew and Goheen write,

There are . . . stories that are basic or foundational: they provide us with an understanding of our whole world and of our own place within it. Such comprehensive stories give us the meaning of universal history. These have been called “grand narratives,” “grand stories,” or “metanarratives.” Each of us (whether we’re conscious of it or not) has one. To frame and give shape and meaning to our experience of life, all of us depend upon some particular story.

When inspired by the bigger story, many great artists have created their own Human Stories that express spiritual revelations. Just as the Old Testament inspired the creation of the New Testament and thus creates another aspect of faith, the Human Story Books lead us to new enlightenment that can change our lives and communities. In fact, in reading through the Bible, we see how one book inspires the next, sometimes after centuries or even millennia. In 2 Samuel we see David warn his son Solomon to live wisely and be a successful king, and then we see in Ecclesiastes how Solomon realizes the wisdom of his father. Those two books together reveal the relationship between King David and his son Solomon, yet the books are decades apart, written by two very different people, Solomon being half African and half Jewish, and David being fully Jewish. Similarly, we see the connection between Ezra and Nehemiah; Nehemiah reported his work restoring the wall of Jerusalem, while Ezra shared his ministry to the remnant coming back to Jerusalem at the same time. From those two books we gain a clearer understanding of the physical labor it took to rebuild the wall and the emotional/spiritual labor it took to keep the faith as the wall was being rebuilt. These perspectives are just two in a plethora of ideas woven throughout the overall canon of Scripture. Can’t this same structure be applied to all the other canons of humanity? In identifying them as the Human Story Books, it is possible to remove some of the stigma often associated with them by oppressed peoples.

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we see how different accounts of Jesus’s life give a complete picture of the Savior. Each Gospel has its own purpose and message, yet offers a unique peek into the Messiah and his ministry. Bartholomew and Goheen write,

The Gospels are not like modern biographies; they do not try to give a precise chronological record of the events of Jesus’ life. Rather, each of the Gospel authors shines the light of the good news on a particular historical situation, selecting events from the eyewitness stories of what Jesus said and did. Each evangelist interprets those events in light of the needs of his own moment in history, arranging the events to convey a particular theme.

These four men did not hold a meeting and divide tasks to cover these themes. They were students of the Tanakh who believed in Jesus Christ as He walked this earth. In fact, Only John and Matthew were among the original disciples. Each wrote his own story of what he experienced with Christ that, taken together, offers the full picture of His birth, life, death, and resurrection. These four books are included in the overall canon of Scripture. Reflecting on this, we can see how different texts, written by different authors, give us a fuller historical account of Jesus and the beginnings of the early church. We do not fault the author for giving only a partial account. Rather, we read it along with the other Gospels to gain a more complete picture.

Applying this understanding to the canon of Western civilization, we can see how it provides us with specific accounts of ancient times. We learn mostly of Greek and Roman culture, but we also get a glimpse of other cultures mentioned in these texts. We learn that ancient times were a mixing bowl of ethnic groups and cultures, seeking to learn from each other. The books have been misused plenty of times in history, but the books themselves simply tell a human story from a specific time, place, and perspective. Linked together as a canon, each story reveals a piece of a larger puzzle which helps us to identify the story of ancient times and how those times have impacted humanity through the ages.

Additionally, we can look closely at the Tanakh, which is also called the Torah (five books written by Moses), the Nevi’im (the Prophets), and the Kethuvim (the Writings). These books tell the story of the Jewish people. Though many of the authors lived centuries apart, we can discover a full picture as each author shares the human story of his or her experience with God, creating the lineage of the Savior. The early Christians read the Jewish canon and connected its writings with their experiences with a man called Jesus. Those connections with an earlier canon bridged Jewish tradition to the lives of the early Christians. Out of their experiences with Jesus, they created the canon of Scripture, revealing the birth of the Christian faith. The creation of the New Testament reveals exactly what happens when people come face to face with the Human Story Books, whether the Bible, the Tanakh, the canon of Western civilization, Eastern classics, or African American texts. These ignite our collective imagination, memory, and heart to connect with what we know or experience. They help us devel- op our worldviews, and they inspire some to add to the collection of the Human Story Books.

As a final example of people connecting to a classic text, let us examine how American enslaved peoples connected to the canon of Scripture and created a body of work to be added to the Human Story Books. The Negro spirituals “are the religious songs sung by African Americans since the earliest days of slavery and first gathered into a book in 1801 by Richard Allen.” This liturgy of songs reveals how, in the midst of the pain of being enslaved, abused, and oppressed by a people who used the canon of Scripture to justify injustice and cruelty, enslaved peoples were able to create their own connection to the text. When they sang “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” they believed that if God could knock those walls down, then he could deliver them too. When they sang “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” they believed that if God could shut those lions’ mouths, then he could deliver them too. When they sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” they believed that if God could carry Elijah away, then he would deliver them too. As The Norton Anthology of African American Literature explains, these enslaved people had many reason for creating the spirituals:

For one thing, along with a sense of the slaves’ personal self-worth as children of a mighty God, the spirituals offered them much-needed psychic escape from the workaday world of slavery’s restrictions and cruelties. Certainly, “this world is not my home” was a steady theme in the spirituals, one that offered its singer/hearers visions of a peaceful, loving realm beyond the one in which they labored.

Enslaved people were not deterred from reading Scripture because the slave master quoted (or misquoted) it. Many were illiterate but upon hearing the text somehow found their own story—and even found hope. If, through all of this, these people could compose such beautiful songs of lament and praise inspired by the very canon the master used against them, then how much can we connect to these texts and find our own story within them?

Dr. Anika Prather has degrees from Howard University, NYU, the University of Maryland at College Park, and St. John’s College in Annapolis. She teaches Classics and she is the founder of the The Living Water School.

THOSE WHO HAVE READ RUSSELL KIRK’S CLASSIC

book The Conservative Mind will have observed a curious shift of attention as the volume approaches the end of its last chapter. For nearly five hundred pages, Kirk has offered short sketches of statesmen and historians, philosophers and theologians. But at the very conclusion of the book he shifts his focus. There, he turns to the poets: to Robert Frost, Dante, Rudyard Kipling, John Betjeman, and above all to T.S. Eliot. While he had discussed the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge early in the volume, he only considered Coleridge’s theory of church and state. But here, in a section titled “The Conservative as Poet,” Kirk considers poetry as a central source of the conservative disposition he has defined in his book. He emphasizes that the poet need not answer to the name of conservative, as Frost certainly did not, to accomplish nonetheless the particular social function Kirk praises. “No less than politicians do, great poets move nations, even though the generality of men may not know the poets’ names,” Kirk writes. Such poets as those he features in his book have an “armed vision” that communicates “the idea of a community of souls,” the “enduring themes” of “order and permanence,” and which gives expression to “normative and ethical” truth. Kirk puts his trust in their vision as a source of renewal of “the principles of order” and “normality” in the present age. Indeed, as Bradley J. Birzer has noted in the fourth edition of The Conservative Mind, Kirk proclaims “the poet the center of all true civilization.” What is the source of this great confidence in the poets to achieve what, on balance, Kirk’s book shows that philosophers and statesmen have failed to do?

To answer that question is to explain the entire mind and vision of Russell Kirk. Happily, Kirk himself distilled that vision in a short lecture he delivered in 1981, called “The Moral Imagination.” The title of his essay is also the principle he has come to enounce. It is borrowed, as he notes, from one of the most memorable of many purple passages found in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. There, Burke recalls the humiliation and imprisonment of the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, in the wake of the Revolution. He depicts the Queen as one who stood “just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy.” The revolutionaries violate all that; they ravage her of her beauty, not by recognizing it and violating all decency, but by denying the reality of that beauty in itself; in that denial of fact, the revolution issues in a new epoch. “The age of chivalry is gone,” he laments; “That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

How have the revolutionaries brought this about, Burke asks? The passage from which Kirk draws the phrase “moral imagination” provides the answer, and Kirk quotes it at length, though incompletely, in his lecture. “All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off,” Burke writes;

All the superadded ideas, furnished in the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

The revolutionaries are what Michael Oakeshott would later call “rationalist in politics.” They will accept as true only that which can clearly and plainly be demonstrated; but only lesser truths lend themselves to such facile or technical demonstration. Human nature does not. “On this scheme,” Burke writes, “a king” will be viewed as “but a man,” and “a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.” Everything but material realities that can be displayed by a plain logic will be torn away, leaving only “naked shivering nature,” a world of physical bodies and force. Rationalism in politics results not in the triumph of reason, therefore, but in the establishment of force itself as the principle of all social arrangements. The objects to be arranged are to be judged as stripped bodies, absent of any sort of intrinsic or acquired meaning or significance.

Burke’s source in this reflection is his own appreciation of the queen’s beauty, we know, but he has also placed the tragedy of her humiliation, by way of allusion, within the setting of an actual stage tragedy, that of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). In the second act of Lear, the king, who has resigned his power but not his crown to his two daughters’ husbands, discovers that he has made a grave error. He thought his daughters loved him, and rewarded them generous- ly, reserving only his title and one hundred knights as his privilege. The daughters conspire to winnow down that number by way of what might be called sophistical reasoning or, in Oakeshott’s sense, rationalism. When his daughter Regan, after a lengthy exchange, at last poses the rhetorical question of “what need” Lear has even to retain “one” knight, when a whole household stands ready to wait upon him, Lear cries out:

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest things superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st, Which scarcely keeps thee warm. (2.4.261–68)

The daughters have reason on their side, concedes Lear. He has lost the argument insofar as he cannot answer them with reasons of his own. But beyond the limits of reason, he feebly intuits some truth. Our nature requires only what satisfies its needs, meaning, in this context, the requirements of its bodily life. But, by the sisters’ own vestments, they testify against their confident words: there is more to our life than need. For there is also the “gorgeous,” that which is beautiful and may even hinder one’s needs as it serves another, higher purpose.

Lears’s accusation goes unanswered; he succumbs to rage and madness, wanders out from castle to heath, and is lost in a world-cracking storm. But we know how the daughters would answer it: there is need and there is the “gorgeous” ( that which is vain ornamentation and therefore unnecessary). Lear has conceded that, rationally speaking, man is but a “beast,” a low animal, and though he demands more for himself, he has all but acknowledged this as the indulgence of vanity, an illusion that belongs to his ideas and wishes and not to nature and necessity.

Burke’s meditation on the queen risks making the same concession. In lines that Kirk does not quote, Burke begins, “All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.” The old regime was beautiful, but was this beautiful appearance merely a cloak of “sentiment” thrown over the body of “power” and “conquest”? Were noblesse oblige and the distinctions of rank but an illusion to make the facts of power less brutal and more sufferable? Are the revolutionaries correct, as far as reason goes, but the truth of reason too terrible to bear? Will the encounter with reality, including that of real power, drive the modern age mad, just as the disputations of the daughters drive Lear to madness?

Some have interpreted Burke and the conservatism he begot in just this way, to be sure. To conserve, they presume, is to preserve the old illusions that make life gentle, that ornament it with a grace that charms us but which cannot stand up to the scrutiny of reason. Our lives really are as cheap as beasts; the terror of the revolution is that it would hold us all to account for our shivering nature by tearing away the cloth with which we have gowned ourselves. But this is probably not Burke’s intended meaning. He holds, rather, that what we perceive as beautiful—the gentle, the gorgeous—may be a sentiment, but sentiments are the language of human nature, first discovered by the “heart” and only later “ratified” by that higher form of reason he calls the “understanding.” In his early treatise Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke indicates that to study how the human body responds to experiences of beauty and sublimity is to discover how God, as our creator, has ordered us, bodily and mentally, to respond to the world. To observe how an apple falls from a tree is to discover the law of gravity, said Newton; to discover how the mechanism of the body responds to a woman’s beau- ty is to discover the law of human nature, says Burke. In the Reflections, he certainly suggests that manners, countries, social orders, and the English Constitution are artifices made by human activities no less than a “gorgeous” gown must be made by the seamstress, but these artificial undertakings are rooted in human nature. Our natural passions instruct our reason as it elaborates and civilizes a world. The hard division between nature and art falls to incoherence, because man’s nature is art, to build up by his activity a society according to the laws of his nature. Kirk concludes by taking for a principle that phrase Burke utters only in passing—the moral imagination.

Burke’s way of thinking suggests that in order to attain to a mature understanding of the proper order of things we must learn to feel in accord with our moral nature. We can only come to know and understand, therefore, if our first impression of (our feeling for) the world is well fortified. For that, we need to experience the beautiful forms of things, natural and social. But it is precisely such beautiful forms that the rationalists aim to tear away.

It is well known that Burke’s treatise on the sublime and the beautiful was one inspiration for the idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who would argue that the specific judgments we make about the phenomena of the world are made possible by the a priori conditions of our own subjectivity. I will not bother to explain such a notion on Kant’s terms, but it is important that we note a mutual disciple of both Burke and Kant who joined the thought of the two in a way that clarifies why Kirk would, two centuries later, latch onto that phrase, “the moral imagination.”

That mutual disciple is William Taylor Coleridge. Kirk notes Coleridge’s distinction between discursive reason—which knows specific concepts—and understanding—which is intuitive, more profound, and of wider breadth. This is a difference Coleridge borrows from Aristotle, where the terms refer respectively to the first principles of reason and reasoning as an activity; but he also borrows them from Kant, where their meanings refer only to our perception of the phenomena of the empirical world. Coleridge makes an analogous distinction when discussing the faculty of the imagination between primary imagination and secondary imagination. The primary imagination is our interior vision of the world as we perceive it; it is our vision of the world as a whole, equivalent in this way to Kant’s idea of understanding. The secondary imagination, Coleridge argued, is the specific activity of making that defines poetry, the echoing of our perception of the world as a whole in the making of a little world.

Here, at last, Burke’s use of the word “imagination” becomes clear. It refers not to a fantasy superimposed upon nature, or a fancy standing apart from what is in the ideal of the mind, but rather to the particular scheme through which we order and understand our experience of the world. It is of the primary imagination that Coleridge’s friend William Wordsworth speaks in “Tinturn Abbey,” when he writes, of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive.

Our primary imagination is the means by which we weave the myriad fibers of perception into a single reality. The moral imagination, then, is a particular realization of the primary imagination. But what sort of realization is it?

Answering this becomes Kirk’s first business in his essay. The moral imagination is “that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events.” It entails “the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.” In sum, it describes the world in terms of “norms,” the enduring standards that belong to human nature and human dignity; it is the perception of things as they are and also things as they ought to be, of things that pass away in light of the permanent things, teaching us “what it means to be genuinely human.” To possess the moral imagination means, therefore, not necessarily to be good, but it is to have one’s imagination—one’s perception of reality—formed according to “normative consciousness.” Those possessed of the moral imagination respond to reality as the philosopher responds to perceiving the light of the Good in Plato’s Republic.

The moral imagination, then, is a species of primary imagination. But we may imagine the world in more than one way. The moral imagination perceives the world as ordered by transcendent laws, the knowledge of which may be handed down in the form of wisdom from age to age. In the modern age, the rationalists of the French Revolution and their successors sought to sweep away that vision in favor of a reduction of the human world to its material contents, as Burke tells us. Kirk draws upon Irving Babbitt, the early twentieth-century founder of the new humanist movement, to describe one modern alternative to the moral imagination that fostered such a revolution and spread widely thereafter. In his study Rousseau and Romanticism, Babbitt discusses the romantic or idyllic imagination as a distinctly modern way of perceiving the world. In this scheme, every norm handed down to us from the outside is judged a form of constraint and “the imagination is to be free, not merely from outer formalistic constraint, but from all constraint whatever.” This is to envision the world not in terms of the norms handed down to us, but in terms of what the newly “emancipated” imagination might make of it. Truth is no longer imagined as a thing dis- cerned and discovered as a transcendent order, but a thing made by man himself.

The idyllic imagination is a dream that—eventually and after doing much harm—fails. Having wiped from the world everything that could actually bring order to society and to souls, the modern victim of the idyllic imagination falls into a further degradation. This Kirk names—following another student of Babbitt, the poet T.S. Eliot—the “diabolic imagination.” The diabolic imagination follows to its logical end the view of the revolutionaries: that the world and its contents are just bare matter subject to our creative will. But, while the idyllic imagination seeks to construct that bare matter into conformity to its sovereign idea, the diabolic imagination is helpless to do so. It sees the emptiness of things, and yet it still yearns for some order beyond itself, and thus it gives way to every pandering form of lust that promises a moment’s ecstasy. The diabolic imagination lies “devoid of spiritual and intellectual discipline—empty, indeed, of real desire for anything.” It has only the memory of desire.

Kirk hoped to counter this decadence by restoring the moral imagination. To that end, he proposes that men must recall the way in which human beings had been formed to live within the moral imagination for many centuries before the late decline of the modern age. Literature “exists to form the normative consciousness,” Kirk writes. Yes, there is romantic and diabolic literature, but the great works of our tradition have always served to reveal and affirm the true nature, dignity, and place of the human person.

The moral imagination found in literature serves to form the primary imagination of its readers. The King James Bible, the Lives of Plutarch, Shakespeare, Cicero, and Virgil formed generations of minds, lending to them the forms of normative perception, perceiving the miseries and misadventures of the human condition, but also the shape of lives well ordered. Kirk’s conception of literature is very close to that of Aristotle in The Poetics: stories depict human actors in the performance of some action. In learning of that action, we perceive the consequences of it, for good or ill, and have revealed to us the character of the actors, good or evil. For Aristotle, literature is an imitation of an action. He does not say so himself, but his readers have long recognized that these imitations— when good—are themselves exemplary and are to be, in various ways, imitated by those who contemplate them. This is the principle of emulation, where we fashion our souls to the form of those great characters of history and literature whose glorious actions attract of themselves our admiration and conformity. Providing admirable forms for our emulation, for our ethical formation, was long the province not only of literature but of history as well. This was the basis of Aristotle’s claim that poetry is a kind of philosophical activity. It is a great one indeed, for we sense the possibilities for human life, as well as its dangers and limits, in the imitations of life that are found in literature.

Kirk’s was in many ways an eighteenth-century (or Augustan) sensibility. He viewed the formation of the imagination by literature primarily in moral terms. And indeed literature does form our imagination in its moral dimensions. Literature helps us envision what should be the content of our character, how we live our lives in company with others, and to what end that society tends, in terms of the establishment and practice of order and justice.

But there is more to Kirk’s vision. Late in the essay, he claims that fantasy ought to be the first form of literature studied for formation of the moral imagination and that philosophy and theology ought to be the final one. Here his master seems to be less Burke and Aristotle, and more Plato, Coleridge, and their descendents: G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. For these writers, it was important to form the imagination first on what Chesterton called the “Ethics of Elfland,” which is something more than a merely ethical vision. It is a vision of the world as the creative love of God, a mystery represented by such fantastic creatures as elves and monsters, precisely because these things remind us that the world lies open at both ends to the expansive creative genius of the God who first imagined it. The only ethical dimension here is our ascent to it, our saying “yes” to it or, as Chesterton would remind us, to say, in response to all that we find given to us, “thank you.” The rest is contemplation: an act that passes beyond what we normally call morality to the higher plane of the intellectual (without of course ceasing to be moral). What I want to emphasize is that this entails a formation of the moral imagination that is not mere morality. It entails a way of perceiving things as a whole, not only in their practical dimension of actions for good or evil, but in their full metaphysical dimension. Kirk’s syllabus, as it were, encourages us to encounter the world, first, in childlike wonder as its fathomless possibility and, second, in the mature wonder of wisdom that recognizes every finite thing as a signature of the infinite.

By way of conclusion, I want to address two questions that arise from Kirk’s taxonomy of the imagination. When Kirk describes the moral, idyllic, and diabolic imaginations, their normative arrangement from goodness to decadence is self-evident. But, by conceiving the idea of a primary imagination, Coleridge opened the possibility that we may fruitfully discuss different ways of envisioning the world without immediate reference to a norm. The American poet and critic Allen Tate, for instance, composed essays on the angelic, symbolic, and unliteral imaginations, and though there is a moral valence to his arguments akin to Kirk’s, he also suggests that there are what Charles Taylor has called various “imaginaries” by which we may attempt to understand the world. So also, in recent decades, theologians and literary critics alike have discussed the Catholic and the Protestant imaginations, sometimes called the analogical and dialogical imaginations, as distinct visions of reality that each have something to teach us. An intellectual descendent of Tate, the literary critic William F. Lynch gave this compelling expression in his book Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination, with its description of the two visions of the Apollonian and the Christian imaginations. Kirk’s discussion of the moral imagination is normative, and rightly so; indeed it is broad enough that the acceptance of the reality of a permanent norm is its most conspicuous feature. But recognizing that we may imagine the world in multiple ways, not all of them diabolical, can be a fruitful way to understand human experience and the fine arts alike.

Yet it is important that we nonetheless hold our imaginations accountable to such norms. Discussion of different kinds of “imagination” or “world-view” can obscure our responsibility to reality. The difference between one person’s vision of things and another’s is not relative, as if everything depended on the kind of imagination in which our selves have been formed, and there was nothing more to be said about it. For this reason, it has sometimes seemed to me obscurantist to speak of the imagination in these terms. It risks suggesting that we may be subjectively formed to view the world in better or worse ways, based upon a transcendent idea of goodness that stands apart from reality specifically as an idea. But must not our minds be formed simply by way of our maturing reflection on reality in its fullness? Norms inhere not in us, but in the structure of being to which our lives respond. Discussions of the imagination, in other words, often entertain beauty, our vision of order, in light of moral goodness, but without reference to truth; they risk bifurcating the world into the ideal and the real, a frequent and frustrating pathology in the modern age.

For those of us with such concerns it is good to observe that Burke and Kirk’s idea of the moral imagination can be reconciled to a classical realist vision of the world such as that found in Plato’s dialogues. Most people will know something of the moral education that Aristotle proposes in his Ethics. Our appetites, when we are young, are unformed. They are ordered to what is good, but their conception of the good is primitive and tied to the native pleasures of the body. Moral education is specifically the training of the mind and the body, of the character as a whole, to desire the pleasures of the mind in themselves and the pleasures of the body that are in accord with the mind’s right reason. If we turn to Plato, however, we find a similar depiction of education and character formation, but, in Plato’s account, the human soul is far less determined, far less pre-formed in childhood, than it is for Aristotle. He compares the soul to fertile soil; soil in itself has potential for fruitfulness but it is utterly lacking in seed, in a directed tendency to some specific end.

Aristotle thought people need to be planted with images of what is good, and that this is done in part by poetry. Plato, in contrast, argued that we need poetry to sow within us images of truth and goodness alike. That is, our capacity to envision the world and arrive at knowledge of what is requires a certain kind of founding, formation, and cultivation, a cultivation he identifies with music and poetry. Aristotle believed we need to be habituated to virtue, to goodness. This was to be done primarily by how we are brought up, but the narratives of poetry also served this end. Plato had a vision of human beings that is under-determined in comparison with Aristotle’s, and a theory of poetry that plays an even more expansive role than it does in Aristotle’s philosophy. He believed that we need to be habituated to metaphysics, to the very capacity to perceive the intelligible order of things. We need habituation not only to what is good but also to the truth. Poetry played a central role in such habituation. As was the case with Aristotle, so with Plato, the stories found in poetry plant us with images of what is good, but in Plato alone, the rhythms or measures of poetry also condition us to the perception of form and order—and so prepare us to perceive the truth. Is this not what it means to impart the moral imagination?

There are differences to be sure between the idealistic framework of Coleridge’s theory of the imagination and the realist ones of Plato and Aristotle, but the moral imagination, in Burke or Kirk’s handling of the term, draws them into close proximity. We must be habituated to see the world, so that we may perceive it as it really is if we are to be responsible to the norms it has to teach us. From fantasy, theology, and philosophy to stories, poetry, and history, Kirk believed just such a habituation could be achieved—even in an age like ours, compromised by the blindness of decadence and the inanition of the diabolical.

James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. Wilson is a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in various magazines and journals and he has published nine books, including The Hanging God (Angelico, 2018). Wilson is the Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine, the series editor of Colosseum Books, of the Franciscan University at Steubenville Press, and is director of the Colosseum Institute for writers.

Poetry J.C. Scharl

J.C. Scharl is a poet and critic. Her work has appeared in the New Ohio Review, the American Journal of Poetry, Dappled Things, and Measure Review, among many others.

The Leap

One night along the path I come upon a rabbit, wounded, lamed, his one bright eye a vast of black around a single star, head bent, back broken, but sleek forelegs still rampant, pumping in a final splendid frolic all alone, the mighty hindlegs inert and bone thrusting from the fur, and still the great forelegs leap on, milling the whole little body in a great arc upon the ground all dark with blood, and still those legs leap on, springing as the muscles beg for life, for movement learned and learned and by time burned into those sinews that begin to still, but, as the single star dims, will still, unto the very end, leap on

Spring Evening

There are evenings braced by light like a pillar, when time hang in the air like dust, suspended. This is one of them. Even the breeze is its own calm. The unending ripples on the pond become, by repetition, a calm beyond stillness.

This, I think, may be how the world ends: in a moment that simply stays, trembling in place like an apple blossom but forever.

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

T.S. Eliot, “East Coker"

Over

FIFTY

Years

AGO, Robert Farrar Capon wrote an idiosyncratic little book called Bed and Board (1965). Repurposing Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling for families, Capon argued that the task of modern parenting is an absurd undertaking. Because we’ve abandoned the traditions of our parents and grandparents, the American family must be constantly reinvented. We have no common life to bind us to one another and to the past. Ecology and economics tell us that it’s expensive and risky to raise a family. So why take the leap?

For Capon, modern “innovative parenting” was a burden. Rather than following what their parents taught them, each parent was expected to find their favorite developmental psychologist (Piaget, Spock, Skinner, and so on) and embark on the great theoretical project of parenting. He and his wife raised their children during those free and prosperous years after the two great wars. The whole world seemed to lie open to them. Along with so many other parents in the 1950s and 1960s, he felt the responsibility of creating the world anew after many years of violence and displacement. It was a time when the birth rate in America exploded, when parents were trying to bring a new kind of nuclear family into existence. After so much chaos, many families wanted a self-enclosed womb of safety.

Consider Capon’s description of the dilemma of the modern parent:

The world is going mad because it has too many reasonable little options, and not enough interest or nerve to choose anything for good. In such a world, the marriage service is not reasonable, but it is sane; which is quite another matter. The lunatic lives in a world of reason, and he goes mad with thinking sense; it is precisely paradox that keeps the rest of us sane. To be born, to love a woman, to cry at music, to catch a cold, to die—these are not excursions on the narrow road of logic; they are blind launchings on a trackless sea. They are not bargains, they are commitments, and for ordinary people, marriage is the very keel of their commitment, the largest piece of ballast in their small storm-tossed boat. (17)

What Capon describes is a world wrenched free from necessity: that age-old cycle of birth, marriage, kids, death, repeat. It’s a world where you can choose freely what kind of family life to establish, how many kids you want, the innumerable cereals to choose from at the grocery store, the potential partners you could marry, the style of house and neighborhood you want to live in.

Of course, this illusory freedom has only expanded over the last fifty years. Today we have social media to show one another the interesting papier-mâché crafts our kids have made, the kombucha we successfully convince them to gulp down, that rustic-farmhouse pumpkin patch we visited, the weekend subway-tile project we completed only after intense effort and multiple failures. In light of all this choice (or perhaps the illusion of choice), how do we sail through the modern world as a family? Children remind us that we have bodies, that we are all frail, and that one day we will die. They are our very own replacement models, our planned obsolescence.

Historically, the church has been Noah’s ark sailing over the flood of the world. The metaphor also applies to the family, pointing to the risky, uncertain venture of family life. We cast out upon unknown waters and hope that we have enough wisdom and courage to sustain us. Parents know that disaster can strike at any point: illness, financial loss, or unresolvable conflict within the family. Yet, in our world, nothing else quite awakens us to the gratuitous mystery of life, the unexplained and contingent gift of incarnation.

The Despair of a Single Day

Imagine a woman standing before her vanity as she prepares to take her children to Communion. She looks in the mirror and sees a much older woman than she expected, a body that’s marked by wrinkles and scars from the seven births she’s endured (one of which ended in a stillborn child). She dreads the public exposure if her children act badly. She’s tired just thinking about carrying her six young children to church all by herself. She’ll parade them around in their finest clothes, all the while praying they stay clean and tidy before the service begins.

This mother is always wrung out from directing her children to eat right, to obey, to learn their grammar, to practice the piano. But this time the children act perfectly. They don’t tear or stain their clothes. They sit, kneel, and stand at all the right times. One of the girls politely asks if she can have a little more wine, and the congregation smiles at her naïveté.

Later that day, the mother takes her children to pick fruit and go swimming. There are several other mothers at the pool, and they all marvel at the beauty of those children kicking and splashing. The mother herself takes joy in her kids as she watches all the arms, legs mixed up together in the pool. She jumps in with them, and out of the corner of her eye sees how the other women at the pool envy her good fortune. How beautiful and well-behaved her children are!

On their walk home they meet a young man, an old friend of the family who’s still single. He longs for the family life that this mother so clearly enjoys. He follows her home where he hopes to feed himself on the hope of one day having the family life she has. But once he arrives, things turn sharply for the worse. The children begin to fight and scream. One of the daughters yanks her brother’s hair out and whales on his head with as much power as her little arms can muster.

At this moment, the mother begins to despair. She sees her friend silently judging her. He thinks to himself, “I would never let my (admittedly imaginary) children fight like this. She can’t even control her kids!” In the end, he leaves her to her struggles and pushes his desire for a family out of mind.

This story could be any day in a family’s life from the past five years. But it comes from perhaps the most famous novel ever written on family life: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It’s a day in the life of the scorned wife Dolly Oblonsky, whose husband Stiva has committed adultery and destroyed the peace of their family. Raising her children in the country while her morally vacant husband sleeps around in St. Petersburg, Dolly attempts to save money and live a good life under the difficult circumstances of what amounts to single parenthood.

As Dolly thinks to herself that day, her children often “repaid her griefs with small joys. These joys were so small that they could not be seen, like gold in the sand, and in her bad moments she saw only griefs, only sand; but there were also good moments, when she saw only joys, only gold” (262). Family life provides just this severe back-and-forth between gold and sand. Children irritate us and drive us to frustration and anger, but when the very same children squeal with joy in the pool or spontaneously forgive each other, family life shines like the gold in Tolstoy’s novel.

Dolly lives between the poles of possibility and fatalism. She’s often very close to losing hope in the future of her kids. She wonders if they’ll be lost to vice and selfishness when they’re older, and she boils over in anger when they fight with one another. But somehow Dolly remains hopeful. She never loses sight of that pale sheen of gold, even if she feels like the sand is swallowing up her life. Through a glass darkly, she sees the moral creatures her children can become. She has faith that someday they will learn to love others.

While Levin, a single man in the story and the nov- el’s surrogate for Tolstoy, is the novel’s main character (despite the novel’s title), Dolly is the novel’s moral heart, the woman who is willing to fall on her face in front of others. She keeps struggling to raise her kids in love and discipline. She wants them to learn to love others, to practice unselfishness and forgiveness.

In The Sickness unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard comments on the dangers of silence. He writes that a person who stays silent is often thought by the world to be prudent and wise. The truth, however, is that silence is too safe:

We say that one regrets ten times for having spoken to once for having kept silent—and why? Because the external fact of having spoken can involve one in difficulties, since it is an actuality. But to have kept silent! And yet this is the most dangerous of all. For by maintaining silence, a person is thrown wholly upon himself; here actuality does not come to his aid by punishing him, by heaping the consequences of his speaking upon him. No, in this respect it is easy to keep silent. . . . If I have ventured wrongly, well, then life helps me by punishing me. But if I have not ventured at all, who helps me then?

(35)

To stay silent as a parent is impossible. Everyone has been in the grocery store or at church when a child decides to wail about something that impedes the path of her will. But many try to be as quiet as possible, to sail through life without venturing anything. Kierkegaard challenges parents to live before others, to speak and commit themselves to the moral life of parenting.

As I taught Anna Karenina a couple of years ago, I realized that my wife is like Dolly. She invites other families and single people into our house for meals. They see her attempts to mix homeschooling and public schooling for our children. They watch her make food for thirty people when she has her own children to feed. She goes to older women for advice and makes herself vulnerable by admitting her own ignorance. She lives her life before others and asks her friends to give her their best wisdom.

This receptivity is not innate. She has also cultivated this openness as she’s lived among and learned from other families. When we worked as teachers in

Ghana, we watched missionary families who daily invited strangers into their homes, and who raised their kids in front of others’ curious eyes. They practiced family life not only in front of other missionaries but in front of Ghanaians, who didn’t understand the world as they did. Observing families with older children renews your hope and gives you the wisdom to experiment, to try a new method of discipline or a schooling tactic you were too afraid to try. Living among other families also shows you what’s universal and necessary. Everyone’s kids disobey. Every kid resists learning what you have to teach them. All parents struggle with the daily demands of sustaining another life.

Children and the World of Things

When my wife and I had our first child, we had never felt such settled calm. Despite the pain of childbirth and the sleeplessness of those first months, she felt secure in her new identity as mother. That settled feeling didn’t last, but it was strong enough to hold on for a while. Like Father Capon and Dolly Oblonsky, I have a large-ish family. I don’t say this to brag. It really was an accident. At the end of graduate school, I had no immediate prospects, no postdocs lined up, just a stack of unanswered job applications.

With two kids already at home, my wife got pregnant with our third child in the late fall of our last year in South Bend. This time the pregnancy was different. She could barely move through the first months. She was sick to the point of incapacity, barely able to eat and completely powerless over her body. She had taught high-intensity fitness classes up to the day of the birth the last two times, so this was a strange new reality for her. What we didn’t know was that my wife had three babies growing inside her at once. She had triple the hormones, triple the bone-shredding pain that separated the fibers in her pelvis, triple the prescribed caloric intake from previous pregnancies, triple the babies.

In a violently immediate way, parenthood made us part of the world of things. Each time we had another child (and especially after the triplets), I felt more alienated from the self that had lived so freely before parenthood. When we lived in Ghana, we rode our bikes to school on dirt roads where smells attacked our noses as we flew past. The mixture of open sewage, exhaust, and burning goat hair has left an im- pression I’ll never wash out. Yet even in that place where I couldn’t escape the burning sun and pungent smells and the singing of the Ghanaians, there was still a limitless unreality to my life. I felt I could do whatever I wanted.

The Ghanaians I interacted with certainly didn’t feel this way. They were rooted to their world of familiar things: the mango stands and open-air churches and fish-markets had been with them all their lives. As a recent college graduate with a head full of books and ideas, my mind was infinitely more real to me than my wife’s favorite fruit seller, who was there one day and gone the next, hit by an errant car and killed instantly. I had ideas of what I wanted to do with my life, what graduate school to attend, how many kids to have, what new Ghanaian dish to try tonight at that new restaurant. Everything was possibility. I was dangerously, insufferably free. What jerked me out of my disembodied world was our kids.

Sometimes I hear from grad school friends or read articles in The Atlantic or Vox that say we should all stop having children. But children root us to the earth. They let us know through their bodily existence that we are accountable to others.

Even trying to have children can be an especially painful reminder of our contingency. We exist only through God’s mysterious acts of creation. In every place I’ve lived, some of my closest friends have struggled with infertility. Their faithfulness and hope through infertility reveal how loss teaches us to trust that God works through the absence of children as well as their presence. Existence isn’t owed to any of us.

We need disorder. We need moments in our life that can be grasped only as paradoxes. In his book on Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams has written, “Christ is apprehended when something not planned or foreseen in the contents of the world breaks through, in an act of event that represents the gratuity of love or joy” (30). The desire to have children—and the painful process of raising them—throws these moments of disorder into our paths and helps us glimpse a hidden order, the spiritual reality that is everywhere.

Building the House of God during a Pandemic

In the middle of the pandemic, my wife decided to start a school. Without a building or any other families initially committed, she developed a plan to establish a cottage school (a school that meets once or twice a week, while parents homeschool the other days). As she began to reach out to others through text and social media, she was surprised—in the middle of the pandemic, no less—to find so many people she could draw on to help her build the school. She’d spent years cultivating friendships and connections with people around our town. When we moved here, we had no family nearby, no friends, just us and our two young girls and newborn triplet boys. She cultivated friendships for companionship but also to survive the sleeplessness and anxiety. Without that community, no one survives.

As she has set out for socially-distanced coffee meetings, outdoor get-togethers and playdates, and FaceTime calls, she is inspiring parents toward the vision of the classical cottage school: studying ancient and modern texts in the pursuit of Truth. But more importantly, she is persuading others to join her in planting a community. In the process, she has become a moral architect. She doesn’t know exactly how every piece will fit, but as she keeps talking to parents, she finds ways to integrate teachers, children, and families into the imaginative edifice of the school. She certainly didn’t invent this school out of whole cloth. But she’s the one uniting these families in this shared vision.

In his book on the classical virtues, the Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper uses an architectural metaphor to describe a life guided by prudence:

The man who does good follows the lines of an architectural plan which has not been conceived by himself and which he does not understand as a whole, nor in all of its parts. This architectural plan is revealed to man from moment to moment. In each case he sees only a tiny segment of it, as through a tiny crack.

While Pieper describes the individual life, his analogy could just as easily apply to the family or even to the church. Not one of us discerns the whole metaphysical and spiritual order of Being that brings meaning to everything we do, but we do glimpse it in part. To build God’s house is to bring others to an awareness of the kingdom of God. In the evangelical circles of my childhood, the emphasis was purely on the nuclear family. No one talked about connecting one’s own family with other families. How is our cluster of grapes connected to the vines in the vineyard?

For the last fifteen years, Psalm 127 has been a riddle to me. This song of ascent, which begins with the famous sentence “Unless the Lord builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it,” ends perplexingly with what’s now known as the “quiver-fuller” passage: “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them! He shall not be put to shame when he contends with his enemies in the gate” (Ps 127:1, 5–6 AV).

The meaning of this psalm unfolded to me as I taught the Psalms and Aristotle to a freshman seminar this past fall. Certainly, the house of God is built by laying the foundations of temples, churches, schools, and family homes. But building the house of God is primarily an act of communal belief. As Pieper explains in his essay on faith, “To believe means to participate in the knowledge of the knower” (42). Knowledge comes by trusting the trustworthy. By seeing knowledge embodied in someone else’s words and actions, you can trust and believe that their message is true. To build is to pass the vision of Christ’s house to others. I didn’t know it at the time, but the families we knew in South Bend, Indiana, and in Accra, Ghana, laid the foundation of the house of God in our minds and hearts. They invited us into their homes, allowed us to observe them reading Scripture after dinner, disciplined their kids in front of us, and passed on their own practices of family and church life. In his lesser-known work The Rock, T.S. Eliot writes:

The soul of man must quicken to creation. / Out of the formless stone, when the artist united himself with stone, / Springs always new forms of life, from the soul of men that is joined to the soul of stone. / For man is joined spirit and body, / And therefore must serve as spirit and body. / Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in man.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Eliot understood the peculiar combination of soul-work and material creation that goes into building the kingdom. He never had any children. He was forced to look beyond the narrow present moment, to ancient rites and spiritual friendships that were “tongued with fire beyond the language of the living,” to build the family of God outside his own solitary house.

For those of us who do have children, the best stewardship of God’s gift of creation is to share our families with others. Sharing our families shatters our self-enclosed silence and disrupts our restless autonomy. And it saves parents from the delusion that we can sail the ark all by ourselves.

Jonathan Callis started at OBU as an Assitant Professor of English in the fall of 2015. He has a bachelor's degree from Rhodes College and PhD from Notre Dame. He started his teaching career at a small international school in Accra, Ghana, where he and his wife, Amy, taught a variety of subjects to students from all over the globe.