APSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH to FICTION
With a new preface by the author
Originally published in 1974 by Indiana University Press
Published 2010 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2009046333
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paris, Bernard J.
A psychological approach to fiction : studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad / Bernard J. Paris ; with a new preface by the author. p.cm.
Originally published: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1974. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-1317-4
1. Fiction--19th century--History and criticism. 2. Psychology and literature. I. Title.
PN3499.P3 2010 809’.3’83--dc22
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1317-4 (pbk)
2009046333
To My Mother and The Memory of My Father
Contents
Preface ix
Preface to the Transaction Edition xiii
I The Uses of Psychology: Characters and Implied Authors 1
II The Psychology Used: Horney, Maslow and the Third Force 28
III The Psychic Structure of Vanity Fair 71
IV The Transformation of Julien Sorel 133
V The Inner Conflicts of Maggie Tulliver 165
VI The Withdrawn Man: Notes from Underground 190
VII The Dramatization of Interpretation: Lord Jim 215
VIII Powers and Limitations of the Approach 275 Notes 291 Index 301
Preface
This is a psychological study of five novels- Vanity Fair, The Red and the Black, The Mill on the Floss, Notes from Underground, and Lord jim. Its understanding of neurotic processes is drawn mainly from the writings of Karen Horney, and its conceptions of health are based on what Abraham Maslow has called Third Force psychology. Since these theories are not well-known among literary critics, I have provided a full exposition of them in the second chapter. This study is concerned neither with authors as historical persons nor with reader response. It treats each of the novels discussed as an autonomous work of art; and it uses psychology to analyze important characters and to explore the consciousness of the implied author. In the opening chapter, I try to show why it is both necessary and proper to study certain kinds of characters and implied authors by a psychological method.
The psychological approach developed here answers a number of needs in the criticism of fiction. The greatest achievement of many realistic novels is their portrayal of character, but we have as yet no critical perspective that enables us to appreciate this achievement and to talk about it with sophistication. Realistic novels are often flawed by incoherence and contradiction. In some, like The Red and the Black and The Mill on the Floss, there is
a disparity between representation and interpretation, between the implied author as a creator of mimetic portraits and the implied author as analyst andjudge. Movements from one neurotic solution to another are interpreted as processes of growth and education. The implied authors glorify unhealthy attitudes which are close to their own, while at the same time showing their destructiveness. In other novels, like Vanity Fair, the interpretations are not only inappropriate or inadequate to the experience dramatized, but they are also inwardly inconsistent. Such works are thematically unintelligible. The psychological approach employed here will help us to make sense of thematic inconsistencies, to account for disparities between representation and interpretation, and to evaluate the adequacy for life of the solutions adopted by characters and implied authors.
This study began with an attempt to discover the unifying structural principle of Vanity Fair. The more I thought about the novel, the more clearly I came to see that it lacks a coherent thematic structure, that the interpretations of experience inherent in its rhetoric are not consistent with each other. As I struggled to understand the novel, I suddenly remembered Karen Horney's statement that inconsistency is as sure a sign of neurotic conflict as a rise in temperature is of bodily disorder. A fresh reading both ofHorney and of the novel bore out my hypothesis that the inconsistencies of Vanity Fair make sense when they are seen as manifestations of a neurotic psyche, the structure of which includes and is, indeed, made up of conflicting attitudes and impulses. I soon perceived also that the major charactersBecky, Dobbin, and Amelia-are subtle portraits of troubled persons whose inner lives and patterns of behavior are best understood in terms of Horneyan psychology.
I have subsequently seen that Horneyan theory has wide applicability to literature. Though her psychology (like any other) is far from providing a complete picture of human nature, Karen Horney deals astutely with the same patterns of intra-psychic and
Preface
interpersonal behavior that form the matter {and often the structure) of a good many novels and plays. In addition to applying her theories to the characters and implied authors of five realistic novels, in Chapters III through VII, I suggest in my concluding remarks a variety of other possible uses.
The five novels to be discussed here were chosen not only because they are all helpfully illuminated by Horneyan psychology, but also because they offer an interesting variety of personality types, of modes of characterization, and of narrative techniques. Comparing the novels with each other will help us to determine the virtues and defects of various modes of narration and the kinds of insight for which realistic fiction is most properly a vehicle.
In the course of writing this book I have been fortunate enough to incur many debts. Theodore Millon first made me aware of Karen Horney; Max Bruck has helped me to become aware of myself. I have had the opportunity to discuss Horney's thought with Doctors Harold Kelman, Helen Boigon, Norman J. Levy, Isidore Portnoy, Ralph Slater, Bella S. Van Bark, and Joseph Vollmerhausen, all of whom are practitioners and teachers ofher theory. Doctors Kelman, Boigon, and Portnoy have read Chapter II and have given me the benefit of their advice. Abraham Maslow was kind enough to read this chapter also, and to assure me that it is accurate.
Herbert Josephs has discussed Stendhal with me many times; he and Laurence Porter have read my chapter on The Red and the Black and have shared with me their expert knowledge of the French text. Denis Mickiewicz has checked my quotations and my reading of Notes from Underground against the Russian original. Portions of this work have been read by Michael Steig, Richard Berchan, Richard Benvenuto, Joseph Waldmeir, Sam Baskett, Lore Metzger, Barry Gross, E. Fred Carlisle, Avrom Fleishman, J. Hillis Miller, and Frederick Crews; I am grateful to all of them for their comments. Michael Wolf, George Levine, Mark Spilka,
and Henry H.H. Remak have provided thoughtful criticisms of earlier versions of Chapters III, V, and VI in their capacity as readers for Victorian Studies, Novel, and PMLA; such service is not frequently enough acknowledged. Herbert Greenberg has offered me the kind of dialogue without which the mind does not grow and the spirit sags.
I am grateful to Michigan State University for a sabbatical leave and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Fellowship which gave me the time to write this book. A grant from the Norman J. Levy foundation permitted me to visit New York for conferences with the Horneyan psychiatrists named above. Typing, photocopying, and other clerical assistance have been paid for by All-University Research Grants from Michigan State University.
The portions of my study which have appeared in Novel, Victorian Studies, The Centennial Review, and PMIA are included here, in revised and expanded form, with the kind permission of the editors of these journals.
My deepest debts are to my wife, whose objections have taught me more than the praise of others, and to Alan Hollingsworth, who has believed in what I am doing more than anyone else and who has given me unfailing encouragement and support.
BJP
Preface to the Transaction Edition
In this book, I laid the foundation of a psychological approach to literature that has proven to be useful in studying many authors and works and in addressing a variety of critical issues. The original Preface provides an introduction to the book with which I remain satisfied, but I should like to expand my discussion of how I came to develop this approach and to give a brief account of its subsequent applications.
A Psychological Approach to Fiction (1974) was my second book. My first was Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (1965), a revised version of my doctoral dissertation. I did my graduate work at The Johns Hopkins University at a time when the history of ideas was being combined with close explication of texts, and Experiments in Life reflected my training. It analyzed George Eliot’s novels in relation to her ideas and her ideas in relation to her intellectual milieu. Its predominant concerns were thematic, and it saw Eliot’s novels as efforts to discover enduring values that were naturalistically based. There was no interest in psychology in my graduate program, and I had no training in it. How did I come, then, to write a book about a psychological approach to fiction that contained an analysis of The Mill on the Floss that was so different from my original one?
I left graduate school with my dissertation incomplete and took a position at Lehigh University, where I became friendly with Theodore
Preface to the Transaction Edition
Millon, then an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. Ted urged me to read Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan, whose theories, he thought, would be of value to students of literature. I was so busy teaching and writing my dissertation that I had no time for such reading; but I gave the books Ted suggested to my wife, who was especially enthusiastic about Horney.
When I finished my dissertation, I was given a graduate course to teach, which I devoted to George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. While I was writing the dissertation, I was enthusiastic about George Eliot’s Religion of Humanity, which I expounded with a proselytizing zeal that annoyed some members of my committee. I was quite excited by the opportunity to teach George Eliot, to preach her gospel to a live audience. I was bewildered, therefore, to find that my enthusiasm for her ideas had faded and that I did not get the thrill I had expected from propounding them. I thought I had understood them correctly, and I had no specific criticisms, but they no longer excited me as they had done.
I think that Karen Horney had such a powerful impact on me because I first read her at this time, and she helped me to understand the shift in my attitude toward George Eliot. Horney describes the defensive strategies we adopt when our basic needs for safety, love, and esteem have not been well met. These strategies are of two kinds, interpersonal and intrapsychic. The interpersonal strategies involve moving toward, against, or away from other people, becoming compliant, aggressive, or detached. Each strategy carries with it a repertory of behaviors and a constellation of beliefs about human nature, human values, and the world order. Intrapsychically, we develop an idealized image of ourselves that is based on our predominant interpersonal solution, and we embark on a search for glory in which we try to actualize that image. The idealized image generates what Horney calls the pride system. We take pride in the exalted qualities we have attributed to ourselves, we drive ourselves to manifest those qualities (“shoulds”), and we demand that others treat us in accordance with our grandiose self-conception (“claims”). If we fail to live up to our “shoulds” or our “claims” are not honored, our defensive strategy is threatened, and we may experience a psychological crisis.
Horney’s is a theory of inner conflict. Although one strategy becomes predominant, the conditions that gave rise to it also give rise to the others. This produces inconsistent behavior and contradictions within our idealized image. We may be caught in a crossfire of conflicting “shoulds,” so that we become uncomfortable with ourselves whatever we do because in obeying one set of inner dictates we are bound to violate others. If our predominant strategy fails, we may embrace one of our subordinate solutions and feel that we have undergone a conversion. This very brief account is far from doing justice to Horney’s ideas—there is a much fuller account in Chapter 2 of this book and a fuller one yet in my 1994 biography of Horney; but it may be enough to help me explain how Horney enabled me to understand my loss of enthusiasm for the value system George Eliot advanced in her novels.
For a variety of reasons that I need not go into here, I grew up with a need to be a high achiever, to do great things. Being a graduate student at Johns Hopkins fit in with my search for glory. The program was notoriously selective and demanding, and very few students completed it. Only five of the eighteen members of my entering class obtained the Ph.D., and that was an unusually high percentage. Succeeding in this program would make me the very special person I craved to be. I survived the first two years but ran into trouble on my doctoral orals, during which I frequently went blank—for reasons I uncovered many years later in therapy; and I had to retake two of the fields.
This experience was traumatic: it crushed my pride, threatened my ambitions, and made my dissertation extremely difficult to write. It had to be perfect if it was to vindicate me, and nothing I wrote seemed good enough. I did complete it, however, when I was threatened with the loss of my job; and it was received very well. It was at this point that I taught George Eliot and found that my enthusiasm for her ideas had mysteriously disappeared. This disturbed me a great deal. While I was writing my dissertation, I subscribed to George Eliot’s beliefs and knew what I thought about everything. Now I was confused.
Reading Horney helped me to understand what had happened. I had been arrogant and ambitious and had sacrificed my human relation-
Preface to the Transaction Edition
ships to my need for academic glory. What had initially appealed to me about George Eliot was her search for secular values, for a source of meaning in a universe without a supernatural presence. What I found in the course of writing my dissertation was a philosophy of living for others, of giving significance to our lives by setting our own needs aside and helping others to fulfill theirs. Horney helped me to see that this spoke to me powerfully at the time because my pride had received a great blow on the orals; and needing to cope with my sense of failure and the possible frustration of my ambitions, I had changed defensive strategies. I would be a good husband, son, father, and teacher; instead of pursuing my own glory, I would give meaning to my life by living for other people. George Eliot’s religion of humanity was exactly what I needed, and I embraced it with ardor. All the while I was trying to work eighty hours a week, I was ignoring my wife and daughter, and my students complained in their evaluations that I seemed to feel that I was wasting my time teaching them. I did feel that way; their impressions were correct. I was full of inner conflicts, and there was a disparity between my behavior and the values I had consciously embraced and was propounding in my dissertation.
The defense of my dissertation was a triumph. I was told that my study of George Eliot should be published, and I was invited to return to Johns Hopkins for post-doctoral work in philosophy. My pride was restored; the disgrace of the oral exam was erased, and I was once more in pursuit of my ambitions. The successful completion of the dissertation in which I had embraced the self-effacing defense of being humble and self-sacrificial did away with my need for that defense—hence, my loss of enthusiasm for George Eliot’s Religion of Humanity when I had the chance to talk about it in the classroom. By the time I wrote the analysis of The Mill on the Floss that is contained in this book, I had arrived at a very different perspective. I have told the full story of my shifting views in Rereading George Eliot: Changing Responses to Her Experiments in Life (2003).
I completed my dissertation in1959 and spent the next five years revising it and seeing it through the press. I was in therapy for much of that
time and kept changing too constantly to write anything new. I moved to Michigan State University in 1960 and knew that I had to publish, but writing my dissertation had been such an ordeal that I did not want to go through that again. I had come out of graduate school with enough material to give me some breathing space, but I was afraid that I would not be able to write anything new unless I again had my back to the wall.
I went into therapy to get help with my difficulty writing but discovered, of course, that I had many more problems that needed to be resolved. Although my therapist was not a Horneyan, I kept reading Horney, who seemed to be writing about me; but I made no connection between what I was learning about human behavior and my professional activity as a teacher and critic of literature.
Then in 1964 I had an “aha” experience that led to the writing of this book and to all of my subsequent work. While teaching Vanity Fair from a thematic perspective, I found it to be full of inconsistencies of which I was unable to make any sense. In the process of preparing my notes, I suddenly remembered Horney’s statement that inconsistencies are as sure a sign of inner divisions as a rise in body temperature is of a physiological disorder; and in the next instant I began to see that the novel’s thematic contradictions do make sense as part of a system of psychological conflicts. As I continued to ponder the novel, I realized that Becky, Dobbin, and Amelia are brilliantly drawn characters whose motivations and personalities are also illuminated by Horney’s theories.
While I was revising my dissertation for publication, I did not reread George Eliot’s fiction because I did not want to take the chance of finding that I no longer agreed with what I had written; but by1964 the book was in press; and while teaching The Mill on the Floss, I read the novel again. I found myself arguing with George Eliot’s rhetoric, which I had embraced before, but being awe-struck by her mimetic portrait of Maggie, which I had entirely missed in my earlier readings. At that time I was teaching not only Victorian literature but also courses in comparative fiction, involving novels from a variety of national literatures; and as I saw the books I was teaching from my new psychological perspective, the idea for this study began to form.
Preface to the Transaction Edition
This book was a long time in the making—it was published nine years after my first because I had to continue my education in order to qualify myself to write it. I did a great deal of reading in psychological theory and sat in on courses in the Psychology Department at Michigan State. I consulted with Horneyan analysts and submitted drafts of my chapters to them for comment. In the course of my reading, I discovered a number of other theorists who are highly compatible with Horney and who, together with her, belong to Third Force or Humanistic Psychology. These include Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Ernest Schachtel, and especially Abraham Maslow. I sent a draft of Chapter 2 of this book to Maslow, who enthusiastically wrote back that it was “excellent and accurate.” Given my lack of formal training in psychology, I needed assurance that I knew what I was talking about. I deepened my study of literary theory as well so that I could explore the implications of my approach and place it in relation to others.
Once I began to look at literature from a Third Force perspective, I felt that I should try out other modes of psychological criticism. I offered courses in which I employed a variety of theories, as did colleagues with whom I sometimes team-taught. I came to realize that while Third Force psychology works really well with numerous literary texts, there are also many with which other theories are a better fit; and I utilized whatever theory seemed most appropriate for what I was teaching. Although I have used a wide range of theories in the classroom, in writing I have confined myself to the ones I feel that I understand best, both intellectually and in terms of my own experience.
I have also confined myself to texts with which the theories I use seem highly congruent. Many authors have intuitively grasped and mimetically portrayed the same patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that Third Force psychology helps us to comprehend conceptually. No theory accounts for everything—the human psyche is too complex and multifaceted for that; but Horney and Maslow deal with major components of human psychology and illuminate works from a wide variety of periods and national literatures. Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs manifests itself differently in different times and societies, but it seems to be an
essential feature of human nature. Horney’s interpersonal solutions are highly evolved forms of the basic strategies of defense in the animal kingdom—fight, flight, and submission. They, too, are to be found in various forms in various cultures. Self-idealization and the pursuit of glory are portrayed in literature from early times to the present, and every society has many kinds of glory systems. Literature focuses on characters in conflict with themselves and each other, and the dynamics of such conflicts are often clarified by Horney’s theories. As I have said, Horney has been especially useful in helping me to make sense of inconsistencies that frequently appear in literary works and to recover psychological intuitions that are often obscured by authors’ interpretations and judgments.
One of the most splendid achievements of realistic literature is its mimetic portrayal of character, but criticism tends to look through the characters to their formal and thematic functions rather than at them in all their human complexity and richness. Psychoanalytic critics analyze characters’ motivations, of course; but their theories often require them to account for the behavior of adults by positing infantile origins that are not depicted in the text. Horney explains behavior in terms of its function in the present structure of the psyche, its role in the individual’s defenses and inner conflicts. Realistic fiction often provides the information we need for such explanation in very great detail. There is no need to posit originating events that are outside of the work.
In the concluding chapter of this book, I discuss the powers and limitations of the approach it introduces. In my subsequent work, I have continued to develop the applications of the approach. In my next book, Character and Conflict in Jane Austen’s Novels (1978), I discuss not only Austen’s wonderful mimetic creations and the tensions between them and the formal and thematic components of her novels, but also the authorial personality that can be inferred from all of her writings and the defenses and inner conflicts of that personality.
Third Force Psychology and the Study of Literature (1986) is a collection of essays by my students, colleagues, and me that explore issues raised by the use of Third Force psychology, including the dynamics of literary response. In addition to theoretical essays, there are discussions
Preface to the Transaction Edition
of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Green, William Faulkner, William Styron, Saul Bellow, Tim O’Brien, and Jerzy Kosinski.
After completing my study of Jane Austen, I spent the next decade immersing myself in Shakespeare, teaching his plays, and writing two books on his works. Bargains with Fate: Psychological Crises and Con flicts in Shakespeare and His Plays (1991) begins with an analysis of the four major tragedies as plays about characters who are in a state of psychological crisis as a result of the breakdown of their predominant strategy of defense. Each strategy Horney describes involves a magic bargain in which if we live up to the dictates of our solution (our “shoulds”), our claims will be honored; and we will receive what we feel to be our just deserts from the world. When our bargains break down as a result of the frustration of our claims or our failure to live up to our inner dictates, we may experience a psychological crisis and engage in destructive behavior in an effort to repair our defenses. This is what happens, I argue, to Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, as well as to some other characters in these plays.
In the second half of Bargains, I analyze Shakespeare’s authorial personality by reading the entire corpus as though it were the expression of a single developing psyche with its own bargains, crises, and conflicts. The psychological traits of the authorial personality may or may not be those of the historical person. In the case of Shakespeare, there is not enough independent biographical evidence to enable us to be certain; but I feel that my analysis of his authorial personality probably sheds light on Shakespeare the man. Bargains with Fate has also been reissued by Transaction Publishers and is once more in print.
In Character as a Subversive Force in Shakespeare: The History and Roman Plays (1991), I argue that in most of these dramas Shakespeare employs a powerful rhetoric that is designed to shape the moral, intellectual, and emotional responses of the audience, but that this rhetoric is frequently undermined by its own inconsistencies and by mimetic characters who develop a life of their own and subvert their aesthetic and illustrative functions. The conflicts of the rhetoric with itself and with
the psychological portraiture generate disagreements among interpreters, since some respond to one set of signals, some to another, and some to all of a play’s contradictory messages.
While I was working on Shakespeare, I was frequently asked why I was using Horney instead of psychological theories more commonly employed in literary criticism. This led me to write Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding (1994), which started out as a case for the value of Horney’s thought and turned into a psychobiography, a Horneyan analysis of Horney as it were. Bringing together Horney’s personal history, her conflicts, and her evolving ideas, I examine how her inner struggles both inspired her theories and are revealed by them. Her personal problems induced her to embark on a search for selfunderstanding, the record of which is contained first in her diaries and then in her psychoanalytic writings. Horney’s insights arose from her efforts to relieve her own pain, as well as that of her patients. If her suffering had been less intense, her insights would have been less profound.
Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature (1997) emphasizes some things that my previous books do not, such as plot and narrative technique; and it applies the approach to a wider range of literary texts, including works by Sophocles, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Flaubert, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Hardy, Kate Chopin, and John Barth. It explores the tensions between form, theme, and mimesis in both education and vindication plots and the ways in which conflicts between representation and interpretation can be either exacerbated or reduced by the choice of narrative technique.
In Rereading George Eliot: Changing Perspectives on Her Experiments in Life (2003), I reexamine Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda from my psychological perspective, much as I have done in the present volume with The Mill on the Floss. I analyze why I saw George Eliot as I did in my earlier book and try to account for my shifting attitudes. I use myself as a case history in exploring the psychology of literary response.
In Conrad’s Charlie Marlow: A New Approach to “Heart of Darkness” and Lord Jim (2005) and Dostoevsky’s Greatest Characters: A
New Approach to “Notes from Underground,” Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov (2008), I greatly expand the discussions of Conrad and Dostoevsky in Chapters 6 and 7 of the present study and analyze other works by these writers. The psychological perspective I employ in these books makes them quite different from the existing body of criticism on these authors. In the book on Dostoevsky, I show how my approach differs from that of Bakhtin.
My most recent book is Heaven and Its Discontents: Milton’s Characters in Paradise Lost, also published by Transaction. This book also uses the psychological approach initiated here, though less systematically than in some of my earlier work. It focuses on God, Satan, Adam, and Eve as brilliantly drawn, inwardly motivated characters and explores their inner conflicts, their relations with each other, and the ways in which they tend to subvert their thematic roles. The main figures of the epic almost always have been discussed primarily in terms of their illustrative functions, and Milton’s genius in mimetic characterization has been largely ignored. I argue that the poem has given rise to such persistent critical controversy in part because Milton’s psychological portraits of his characters have lead many readers to interpretations and judgments different from his.
A Psychological Approach to Fiction opened a rich vein of inquiry for me and for others as well. For more information about the Third Force approach, and particularly the applications of Horney’s theories, please visit my web site (at http://grove.ufl.edu/~bjparis) and the web site of the International Karen Horney Society (http://plaza.u fl.edu/bjparis).
There is a review of the uses of Horney’s theories in the study of literature, biography, culture, and gender in Appendix A of Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding (1994), which was updated and posted on my web site in 2004. There remains much room, I believe, for further interdisciplinary applications of this powerful analytic tool.
BJP Gainesville, Florida August 2009
The Uses of Psychology:
Characters and Implied Authors
Norman Holland finds it "hard to see how a psychology [can] deal with a work of art qua work of art," and observes that in practice psychoanalytic critics "do not." 1 Psychology cannot consider works of art in themselves, he argues, because psychology as such is concerned "not with literature, but with minds" (p. 293). "Any psychological system," therefore, "must deal, not with works of art in isolation, but with works of art in relation to man's mind" (p. 151 ). The "three possible minds to which the psychological critic customarily refers" are the author's mind, a character's mind, and the audience's mind. It is only the study of the audience's mind, Holland feels, that can lead "to a bona-fide method; the other two tend to confusion" (p. 294). I believe that there are two kinds of minds within realistic novels that can be studied in psychological terms: they are the minds of the implied authors and the minds of the leading characters.
Holland argues that "we should use psychology on our own real and lively reactions" to the work "rather than on the characters' fictitious minds" (p. 308). He feels that character study is useful and legitimate only when it is incorporated into our analysis of the audience's mind. Then it is seen to "identify 'latent impulses' of the characters which may be considered as stimuli
2
A Psychological Approach to Fiction
to or projections of latent impulses of the audience" (p. 283). Character study is not legitimate when, as in most psychological criticism, it talks "about literary characters as though they were real people" (p. 296). Holland's strongest argument in support of this position is that "Homo Fictus and Homo Dramaticus do not so much what Homo Sapiens would do in similar circumstances, but what it is necessary for them to do in the logical and meaningful realities of the works of art in which they live" (pp. 305-306). The artist "hovers between mimesis, making like, and harmonia, the almost musical ordering of the events he depicts . . . . The psychoanalytic critic of character neglects the element of harmonia, the symbolic conceptions that must modify the mimetic" (p. 306). Other critics of literature have learned to avoid this mistake: " as a plain matter of fact, most literary critics do not-any more-treat literary characters as real people" (p. 2g6). 2
Holland is participating in what W. J. Harvey calls "the retreat from character" in modern criticism, a retreat which Harvey's book, Character and the Novel, is intended to halt. "What has been said about character" in the past forty years, Harvey observes, "has been mainly a stock of critical commonplaces used largely to dismiss the subject in order that the critic may turn his attention to other allegedly more important and central subjectssymbolism, narrative techniques, moral vision and the like."3 In the criticism of realistic fiction this has been especially unfortunate, for "most great novels exist to reveal and explore character" (p. 2 3). There are many reasons for this retreat, Harvey continues, the most important of which is the rise of the New Criticism:
The New Criticism was centrally concerned to apply close and rigorous analytical methods to lyric poetry; it is noticeable how ill at ease its practitioners have been when they have approached the bulky, diffuse and variegated world of the novel. What we might
The Uses of Psychology: Characters and Implied Authors 3
expect is in fact the case; the new critic, when dealing with fiction, is thrown back upon an interest in imagery, symbolism or structural features which have little to do with characterization. (p. 200)
The danger that the critic of novels must now be warned against is not the neglect of harmonia, but the neglect of mimesis; for harmonia has had its due of late, and "a mimetic intention" was, after all, "the central concern of the novel until the end of the nineteenth century" (p. 205).
No study of character should ignore the fact that characters in fiction participate in the dramatic and thematic structures of the works in which they appear and that the meaning of their behavior is often to be understood in terms of its function within these structures. The less mimetic the fiction, the more completely will the characters be intelligible in terms of their dramatic and thematic functions; and even in highly realistic fiction, the minor characters are to be understood more functionally than psychologically. But, as Harvey points out, the authors of the great realistic novels "display an appetite and passion for life which threatens to overwhelm the formal nature of their art" (pp. 187188). There is in such novels "a surplus margin of gratuitous life, a sheer excess of material, a fecundity of detail and invention, a delighted submergence in experience for its own sake" (p. 188). The result is "that characterization often overflows the strict necessities ofform" (p. 188). This is especially true in the characterization of the protagonists, of"those characters whose motivation and history are most fully established, who conflict and change as the story progresses ... " (p. 56). What we attend to in the protagonist's story "is the individual, the unique and particular case .... We quickly feel uneasy if the protagonist is made to stand for something general and diffused; the more he stands for the less he is" (p. 67). Though such characters have their dramatic and thematic functions, they are "in a sense end-products"; we often feel that "they are what
A Psychological Approach to Fiction
the novel exists for; it exists to reveal them" (p. 56).
The retreat from character of which Harvey complains has been in part a reaction against reading plays, stories, impressionistic novels, and other tightly structured or basically symbolic works as though they were realistic fiction. This has frequently resulted, ironically, in the study of realistic novels as though they were tightly structured or basically symbolic forms. In our avoidance of what Northrop Frye would call a low-mimetic provincialism, we have often failed to do justice to the low-mimetic forms themselves.
Fortunately, the most recent trend in literary criticism has been to emphasize the qualities that distinguish the literary modes and kinds from each other. In the study of narrative art, we are learning to appreciate a variety of forms and effects; and this, in turn, is enabling us to grasp the distinctive characteristics of each form with greater precision. 4 We are coming to see, among other things, that character is central in many realistic novels and that much of the characterization in such fiction escapes dramatic and thematic analysis and can be understood only in terms of its mimetic function. A careful examination of the nature of realistic fiction as modern criticism is coming to conceive it will show that in certain cases it is proper to treat literary characters as real people and that only by doing so can we fully appreciate the distinctive achievement of the genre.
The diversity of aesthetic theories and of critical approaches is in part a reflection of the multiplicity of values to be found in literature and in part a product of the varying interests and temperaments with which different critics come to literature. Not all approaches are equally valid: the most satisfying kind of criticism is that which is somehow congruent with the work and which is faithful to the distribution of interests in the work itself. The approach employed here attempts to stress values which are inherently important in realistic fiction and to make these
The Uses of Psychology: Characters and Implied Authors 5
values more accessible to us than they hitherto have been.
The primary values of fiction can be described in a variety of terms; I shall classify them as mimetic, thematic, and formal. Fiction is mainly concerned with the representation, the interpretation, and the aesthetic patterning of experience.5 In different works and in different fictional modes the distribution of emphasis varies; and in some works one of these interests may be far more important than the others. When a work concerns itself seriously with more than one of these interests, it must bring its various impulses into harmony if it is to be organically unified.
From the middle of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, the novel attempted, by and large, to realize all of these values; but its primary impulse seems to have been the mimetic one. Henry James is reflecting not only his own taste, but the essential nature of the genre when he characterizes the novel as "a picture" and proclaims that "the only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life."6 It is not its interpretation of life or its formal perfection but its "air of reality (solidity of specification)" that James identifies as "the supreme virtue of a novel" (p. 14). Arnold Kettle distinguishes between the moral fable, which is dominated by "pattern" or "significance" and the novel, in which "pattern" is subordinate to "life." Despite a frequently strong commitment to thematic interests, the great realists, says Kettle, "are less consciously concerned with the moral significance oflife than with its surface texture. Their talent is devoted first and foremost to getting life on to the page, to conveying across to their readers the sense of what life as their characters live it really feels like. " 7
The view of realistic fiction that we are developing is confirmed by such classic works on the subject as Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. Formal interests cannot be paramount in a genre that, as Watt describes it, "works by exhaustive presentation rather than by elegant concentration." 8 Like E. M. Forster, Watt sees "the portrayal of 'life by time' as
A Psychological Approach to Fiction
the distinctive role which the novel has added to literature's more ancient preoccupation with portraying 'life by values' " (p. 22). The domain of the novel is the individual and his social relationships, and it tends to present its subject less in terms of ethical categories than in terms of chronological and causal sequences. The distinctive characteristics of the novel are, for Watt, its emphasis upon the particular, its circumstantial view of life, and its full and authentic reporting of experience (pp. 31-32).
To our statement that the novel's primary impulse is a mimetic one, we must add the qualification that the reality imitated is not general nature or the world ofldeas, but the concrete and temporal reality of modern empirical thought. The novel came into being in a world dominated by secularism and individualism, a world in which men were losing their belief in the supernatural and institutional bases of life. "Both the philosophical and the literary innovations," says Watt, "must be seen as parallel manifestations of a larger change-that vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one-one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places" (p. 31).
For Erich Auerbach the foundations of modern realism are, first, "the serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation"; and, second, "the embedding of random persons and events in the general course of contemporary history, the fluid historical background. "9 Throughout A1irnesis Auerbach is concerned with the contrast between the classical moralistic and the problematic existential ways of presenting reality. The distinction is basically between the representation of life in terms of fixed canons of style and of ethical categories which are a priori and static, and
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by His baptism by John the Baptist, when He prayed as He was baptised, and immediately the Holy Spirit descended upon Him like a dove. More than prophetic and illustrative is this hour to Him. This critical hour is real and personal, consecrating and qualifying Him for God’s highest purposes. Prayer to Him, just as it is to us, was a necessity, an absolute, invariable condition of securing God’s fullest, consecrating and qualifying power. The Holy Spirit came upon Him in fullness of measure and power in the very act of prayer.
And so the Holy Spirit comes upon us in fullness of measure and power only in answer to ardent and intense praying. The heavens were opened to Christ, and access and communion established and enlarged by prayer. Freedom and fullness of access and closeness of communion are secured to us as the heritage of prayer. The voice attesting His Sonship came to Christ in prayer. The witness of our sonship, clear and indubitable, is secured only by praying. The constant witness of our sonship can only be retained by those who pray without ceasing. When the stream of prayer is shallow and arrested, the evidence of our sonship becomes faint and inaudible.
PRAYER INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF OUR LORD
(Continued)
Sin is so unspeakably awful in its evil that it struck down, as to death and hell, the very Son of God Himself. He had been amazed enough at sin before. He had seen sin making angels of heaven into devils of hell. Death and all its terrors did not much move or disconcert our Lord. No. It was not death: It was sin. It was hell-fire in His soul. It was the coals, and the oil, and the rosin, and the juniper, and the turpentine of the fire that is not quenched.
A W , D.D.
We note that from the revelation and inspiration of a transporting prayer-hour of Christ, as its natural sequence, there sounds out that gracious encouraging proclamation for heavy-hearted, restless, weary souls of earth, which has so impressed, arrested and drawn humanity as it has fallen on the ears of heavy-laden souls, which has so sweetened and relieved men of their toils and burdens:
“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
“Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
“For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
At the grave of Lazarus and as preparatory to and as a condition of calling him back to life, we have our Lord calling upon His Father in Heaven. “Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me, and I know that thou hearest me always.” The lifting to Heaven of Christ’s eyes —how much was there in it! How much of confidence and plea was in that look to Heaven! His very look, the lifting up of His eyes, carried His whole being Heaven-ward, and caused a pause in that world, and drew attention and help. All Heaven was engaged, pledged and moved when the Son of God looked up at this grave. O for a people with the Christly eye, Heaven lifted and Heaven arresting! As it was with Christ, so ought we to be so perfected in faith, so skilled in praying, that we could lift our eyes to Heaven and say with Him, with deepest humility, and with commanding confidence, “Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me.”
Once more we have a very touching and beautiful and instructive incident in Christ’s praying, this time having to do with infants in their mothers’ arms, parabolic as well as historical:
“Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them.
“But when Jesus saw it he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God.
“Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.
“And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them and blessed them.”
This was one of the few times when stupid ignorance and unspiritual views aroused His indignation and displeasure. Vital principles were involved. The foundations were being destroyed, and worldly views actuated the disciples. Their temper and their words in rebuking those who brought their infants to Christ were exceedingly wrong. The very principles which He came to illustrate and propagate were being violated. Christ received the little ones. The big ones must
become little ones. The old ones must become young ones ere Christ will receive them. Prayer helps the little ones. The cradle must be invested with prayer. We are to pray for our little ones. The children are now to be brought to Jesus Christ by prayer, as He is in Heaven and not on earth. They are to be brought to Him early for His blessing, even when they are infants. His blessing descends upon these little ones in answer to the prayers of those who bring them. With untiring importunity are they to be brought to Christ in earnest, persevering prayer by their fathers and mothers. Before they know, themselves, anything about coming of their own accord, parents are to present them to God in prayer, seeking His blessing upon their offspring and at the same time asking for wisdom, for grace and Divine help to rear them that they may come to Christ when they arrive at the years of accountability of their own accord.
Holy hands and holy praying have much to do with guarding and training young lives and to form young characters for righteousness and Heaven. What benignity, simplicity, kindness, unworldliness and condescension and meekness, linked with prayerfulness, are in this act of this Divine Teacher!
It was as Jesus was praying that Peter made that wonderful confession of his faith that Jesus was the Son of God:
“And it came to pass, as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him; and he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am?
“And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias or one of the prophets.
“He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?
“And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
“And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
“And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church: and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
“And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
It was after our Lord had made large promises to His disciples that He had appointed unto each of them a kingdom, and that they should sit at His table in His kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, that He gave those words of warning to Simon Peter, telling him that He had prayed for Peter “And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, so that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not. And when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.”
Happy Peter, to have such an one as the Son of God to pray for him! Unhappy Peter, to be so in the toils of Satan as to demand so much of Christ’s solicitude! How intense are the demands upon our prayers for some specific cases! Prayer must be personal in order to be to the fullest extent beneficial. Peter drew on Christ’s praying more than any other disciple because of his exposure to greater perils. Pray for the most impulsive, the most imperilled ones by name. Our love and their danger give frequency, inspiration, intensity and personality to praying.
We have seen how Christ had to flee from the multitude after the magnificent miracle of feeding the five thousand as they sought to make Him king. Then prayer was His escape and His refuge from this strong worldly temptation. He returns from that night of prayer with strength and calmness, and with a power to perform that other remarkable miracle of great wonder of walking on the sea.
Even the loaves and fishes were sanctified by prayer before He served them to the multitude. “He looked up to Heaven and gave thanks.” Prayer should sanctify our daily bread and multiply our seed sown.
He looked up to heaven and heaved a sigh when He touched the tongue of the deaf man who had an impediment in his speech. Much akin was this sigh to that groaning in spirit which He evinced at the grave of Lazarus. “Jesus therefore again groaning in himself, cometh to the grave.” Here was the sigh and groan of the Son of God over a human wreck, groaning that sin and hell had such a mastery over man; troubled that such a desolation and ruin were man’s sad inheritance. This is a lesson to be ever learned by us. Here is a fact ever to be kept in mind and heart and which must ever, in some measure, weigh upon the inner spirits of God’s children. We who have received the first fruit of the Spirit groan within ourselves at sin’s waste, and death, and are filled with longings for the coming of a better day.
Present in all great praying, making and marking it, is the man. It is impossible to separate the praying from the man. The constituent elements of the man are the constituents of his praying. The man flows through his praying. Only the fiery Elijah could do Elijah’s fiery praying. We can get holy praying only from a holy man. Holy being can never exist without holy doing. Being is first, doing comes afterward. What we are gives being, force and inspiration to what we do. Character, that which is graven deep, ineradicably, imperishably within us, colours all we do.
The praying of Christ, then, is not to be separated from the character of Christ. If He prayed more unweariedly, more self-denyingly, more holily, more simply and directly than other men, it was because these elements entered more largely into His character than into that of others.
The transfiguration marks another epoch in His life, and that was pre-eminently a prayer epoch. Luke gives an account with the animus and aim of the event:
“And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray.
“And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering.
“And, behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias:
“Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.”
The selection was made of three of His disciples for an inner circle of associates, in prayer. Few there be who have the spiritual tastes or aptitude for this inner circle. Even these three favoured ones could scarcely stand the strain of that long night of praying. We know that He went up on that mountain to pray, not to be transfigured. But it was as He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was altered and His raiment became white and glistering. There is nothing like prayer to change character and whiten conduct. There is nothing like prayer to bring heavenly visitants and to gild with heavenly glory earth’s mountain to us, dull and drear. Peter calls it the holy mount, made so by prayer.
Three times did the voice of God bear witness to the presence and person of His Son, Jesus Christ—at His baptism by John the Baptist, and then at His transfiguration the approving, consoling and witnessing voice of His Father was heard. He was found in prayer both of these times. The third time the attesting voice came, it was not on the heights of His transfigured glory, nor was it as He was girding Himself to begin His conflict and to enter upon His ministry, but it was when He was hastening to the awful end. He was entering the dark mystery of His last agony, and looking forward to it. The shadows were deepening, a dire calamity was approaching and an unknown and untried dread was before Him. Ruminating on His approaching death, prophesying about it, and forecasting the glory which would follow, in the midst of His high and mysterious discourse, the shadows come like a dread eclipse and He bursts out in an agony of prayer:
“Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour
“Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.
“The people therefore that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others said, An angel spake to him.
“Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.”
But let it be noted that Christ is meeting and illuminating this fateful and distressing hour with prayer. How even thus early the flesh reluctantly shrank from the contemplated end!
How fully does His prayer on the cross for His enemies synchronise with all He taught about love to our enemies, and with mercy and forgiveness to those who have trespassed against us! “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Apologising for His murderers and praying for them, while they were jeering and mocking Him at His death pains and their hands were reeking with His blood! What amazing generosity, pity and love!
Again, take another one of the prayers on the cross. How touching the prayer and how bitter the cup! How dark and desolate the hour as He exclaims, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This is the last stroke that rends in twain His heart, more exquisite in its bitterness and its anguish and more heart-piercing than the kiss of Judas. All else was looked for, all else was put in His book of sorrows. But to have His Father’s face withdrawn, God-forsaken, the hour when these distressing words escaped the lips of the dying Son of God! And yet how truthful He is! How childlike we find Him! And so when the end really comes, we hear Him again speaking to His Father: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit. And having said this, he gave up the ghost.”
OUR LORD’S MODEL PRAYER
What satisfaction must it be to learn from God Himself with what words and in what manner, He would have us pray to Him so as not to pray in vain! We do not sufficiently consider the value of this prayer; the respect and attention which it requires; the preference to be given to it; its fulness and perfection; the frequent use we should make of it; and the spirit which we should bring with it. “Lord, teach us how to pray.”—A C .
Jesus gives us the pattern prayer in what is commonly known as “The Lord’s Prayer.” In this model, perfect prayer He gives us a law form to be followed, and yet one to be filled in and enlarged as we may decide when we pray. The outlines and form are complete, yet it is but an outline, with many a blank, which our needs and convictions are to fill in.
Christ puts words on our lips, words which are to be uttered by holy lives. Words belong to the life of prayer Wordless prayers are like human spirits; pure and high they may be, but too ethereal and impalpable for earthly conflicts and earthly needs and uses. We must have spirits clothed in flesh and blood, and our prayers must be likewise clothed in words to give them point and power, a local habitation, and a name.
This lesson of “The Lord’s Prayer,” drawn forth by the request of the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray,” has something in form and verbiage like the prayer sections of the Sermon on the Mount. It is the same great lesson of praying to “Our Father which art in
Heaven,” and is one of insistent importunity No prayer lesson would be complete without it. It belongs to the first and last lessons in prayer. God’s Fatherhood gives shape, value and confidence to all our praying.
He teaches us that to hallow God’s name is the first and the greatest of prayers. A desire for the glorious coming and the glorious establishment of God’s glorious kingdom follows in value and in sequence the hallowing of God’s name. He who really hallows God’s name will hail the coming of the Kingdom of God, and will labour and pray to bring that kingdom to pass and to establish it. Christ’s pupils in the school of prayer are to be taught diligently to hallow God’s name, to work for God’s kingdom, and to do God’s will perfectly, completely and gladly, as it is done in Heaven.
Prayer engages the highest interest and secures the highest glory of God. God’s name, God’s kingdom and God’s will are all in it. Without prayer His name is profaned, His kingdom fails, and His will is decried and opposed. God’s will can be done on earth as it is done in Heaven. God’s will done on earth makes earth like Heaven. Importunate praying is the mighty energy which establishes God’s will on earth as it is established in Heaven.
He is still teaching us that prayer sanctifies and makes hopeful and sweet our daily toil for daily bread. Forgiveness of sins is to be sought by prayer, and the great prayer plea we are to make for forgiveness is that we have forgiven all those who have sinned against us. It involves love for our enemies so far as to pray for them, to bless them and not curse them, and to pardon their offences against us whatever those offences may be.
We are to pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” that is, that while we thus pray, the tempter and the temptation are to be watched against, resisted and prayed against.
All these things He had laid down in this law of prayer, but many a simple lesson of comment, expansion, and expression He adds to His statute law.
In this prayer He teaches His disciples, so familiar to thousands in this day who learned it at their mother’s knees in childhood, the words are so childlike that children find their instruction, edification and comfort in them as they kneel and pray. The most glowing mystic and the most careful thinker finds each his own language in these simple words of prayer. Beautiful and revered as these words are, they are our words for solace, help and learning.
He led the way in prayer that we might follow His footsteps. Matchless leader in matchless praying! Lord, teach us to pray as Thou didst Thyself pray!
How marked the contrast between the Sacerdotal Prayer and this “Lord’s Prayer,” this copy for praying He gave to His disciples as the first elements of prayer. How simple and childlike! No one has ever approached in composition a prayer so simple in its petitions and yet so comprehensive in all of its requests.
How these simple elements of prayer as given by our Lord commend themselves to us! This prayer is for us as well as for those to whom it was first given. It is for the child in the A B C of prayer, and it is for the graduate of the highest institutions of learning. It is a personal prayer, reaching to all our needs and covering all our sins. It is the highest form of prayer for others. As the scholar can never in all his after studies or learning dispense with his A B C, and as the alphabet gives form, colour and expression to all after learning, impregnating all and grounding all, so the learner in Christ can never dispense with the Lord’s Prayer. But he may make it form the basis of his higher praying, this intercession for others in the Sacerdotal Prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer is ours by our mother’s knee and fits us in all the stages of a joyous Christian life. The Sacerdotal Prayer is ours also in the stages and office of our royal priesthood as intercessors before God. Here we have oneness with God, deep spiritual unity, and unswerving loyalty to God, living and praying to glorify God.
OUR LORD’S SACERDOTAL PRAYER
Jesus closes His life with inimitable calmness, confidence and sublimity. “I have glorified Thee; I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.” The annals of earth have nothing comparable to it in real serenity and sublimity. May we come to our end thus, in supreme loyalty to Christ.
E B .
We come now to consider our Lord’s Sacerdotal Prayer, as found recorded in the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel.
Obedience to the Father and abiding in the Father, these belong to the Son, and these belong to us, as partners with Christ in His Divine work of intercession. How tenderly and with what pathos and how absorbingly He prays for His disciples! “I pray for them; I pray not for the world.” What a pattern of prayerfulness for God’s people! For God’s people are God’s cause, God’s Church and God’s Kingdom. Pray for God’s people, for their unity, their sanctification, and their glorification. How the subject of their unity pressed upon Him! These walls of separation, these alienations, these riven circles of God’s family, and these warring tribes of ecclesiastics—how He is torn and bleeds and suffers afresh at the sight of these divisions! Unity—that is the great burden of that remarkable Sacerdotal Prayer. “That they may be one, even as we are one.” The spiritual oneness of God’s people—that is the heritage of God’s glory to them, transmitted by Christ to His Church.
First of all, in this prayer, Jesus prays for Himself, not now the suppliant as in Gethsemane, not weakness, but strength now. There is not now the pressure of darkness and of hell, but passing for the time over the fearful interim, He asks that He may be glorified, and that His exalted glory may secure glory to His Father. His sublime loyalty and fidelity to God are declared, that fidelity to God which is of the very essence of interceding prayer. Our devoted lives pray. Our unswerving loyalty to God are eloquent pleas to Him, and give access and confidence in our advocacy. This prayer is gemmed, but its walls are adamant. What profound and granite truths! What fathomless mysteries! What deep and rich experiences do such statements as these involve:
“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.
“And all mine are thine, and thine are mine, and I am glorified in them.
“And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it, that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.
“And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.”
Let us stop and ask, have we eternal life? Do we know God experimentally, consciously, and do we know Him really and personally? Do we know Jesus Christ as a person, and as a personal Saviour? Do we know Him by a heart acquaintance, and know Him well? This, this only, is eternal life. And is Jesus glorified in us? Let us continue this personal inquiry. Do our lives prove His divinity? And does Jesus shine brighter because of us? Are we opaque or transparent bodies, and do we darken or reflect His pure light? Once more let us ask: Do we seek God’s glory? Do we seek glory where Christ sought it? “Glorify thou me with thy own self.” Do we esteem the presence and the possession of God our most excellent glory and our supreme good?
How closely does He bind Himself and His Father to His people! His heart centers upon them in this high hour of holy communion with His Father.
“I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world; thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word.
“Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee.
“For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.
“I pray for them; I pray not for the world; but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine.
“And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.”
He prays also for keeping for these disciples. Not only were they to be chosen, elected and possessed, but were to be kept by the Father’s watchful eyes and by the Father’s omnipotent hand. “And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.”
He prays that they might be kept by the Holy Father, in all holiness by the power of His Name. He asks that His people may be kept from sin, from all sin, from sin in the concrete and sin in the abstract, from sin in all its shapes of evil, from all sin in this world. He prays that they might not only be fit and ready for Heaven, but ready and fit for earth, for its sweetest privileges, its sternest duties, its deepest sorrows, and its richest joys; ready for all of its trials, consolations and triumphs. “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.”
He prays that they may be kept from the world’s greatest evil, which is sin. He desires that they may be kept from the guilt, the power, the
pollution and the punishment of sin. The Revised Version makes it read, “That thou shouldst keep them from the evil one.” Kept from the devil, so that he might not touch them, nor find them, nor have a place in them; that they might be all owned, possessed, filled and guarded by God. “Kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.”
He places us in the arms of His Father, on the bosom of His Father, and in the heart of His Father. He calls God into service, puts Him to the front, and places us under His Father’s closer keeping, under His Father’s shadow, and under the covert of His Father’s wing. The Father’s rod and staff are for our security, for our comfort, for our refuge, for our strength and guidance.
These disciples were not to be taken out of the world, but kept from its evil, its monster evil, which is itself. “This present evil world.” How the world seduces, dazzles, and deludes the children of men! His disciples are chosen out of the world, out of the world’s bustle and earthliness, out of its all-devouring greed of gain, out of its moneydesire, money-love, and money-toil. Earth draws and holds as if it was made out of gold and not out of dirt; as though it was covered with diamonds and not with graves.
“They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” Not only from sin and Satan were they to be kept, but also from the soil, stain and the taint of worldliness, as Christ was free from it. Their relation to Christ was not only to free them from the world’s defiling taint, its unhallowed love, and its criminal friendships, but the world’s hatred would inevitably follow their Christ-likeness. No result so necessarily and universally follows its cause as this. “The world hath hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”
How solemn and almost awful the repetition of the declaration, “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” How pronounced, radical and eternal was our Lord Christ’s divorce from the world! How pronounced, radical and eternal is that of our Lord’s true followers from the world! The world hates the disciple as it hated his Lord, and will crucify the disciple just as it crucified his Lord. How
pertinent the question, have we the Christ unworldliness? Does the world hate us as it hated our Lord? Are His words fulfilled in us?
“If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.
“If ye were of the world, the world would love his own; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.”
He puts Himself before us clear cut as the full portraiture of an unworldly Christian. Here is our changeless pattern. “They are not of the world even as I am not of the world.” We must be cut after this pattern.
The subject of their unity pressed upon Him. Note how He called His Father’s attention to it, and see how He pleaded for this unity of His followers: “And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.”
Again He returns to it as He sees the great crowds flocking to His standard as the ages pass on:
“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
“And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one.
“I in them and thou in me that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.”
Notice how intently His heart was set on this unity. What shameful history, and what bloody annals has this lack of unity written for God’s Church! These walls of separations, these alienations, these riven circles of God’s family, these warring tribes of men, and these internecine fratricidal wars! He looks ahead and sees how Christ is
torn, how He bleeds and suffers afresh in all these sad things of the future. The unity of God’s people was to be the heritage of God’s glory promised to them. Division and strife are the devil’s bequest to the Church, a heritage of failure, weakness, shame and woe.
The oneness of God’s people was to be the one credential to the world of the divinity of Christ’s mission on earth. Let us ask in all candor, are we praying for this unity as Christ prayed for it? Are we seeking the peace, the welfare, the glory, the might and the divinity of God’s cause as it is found in the unity of God’s people?
Going back again, note, please, how He puts Himself as the exponent and the pattern of this unworldliness which He prays may possess His disciples. He sends them into the world just as His Father sent Him into the world. He expects them to be and do, just as He was and as He did for His Father. He sought the sanctification of His disciples that they might be wholly devoted to God and purified from all sin. He desired in them a holy life and a holy work for God. He devoted Himself to death in order that they might be devoted in life to God. For a true sanctification He prayed, a real, whole, and thorough sanctification, embracing soul, body and mind, for time and eternity. With Him the word itself had much to do with their true sanctification. “Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is truth. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified by the truth.”
Entire devotedness was to be the type of their sanctification. His prayer for their sanctification marks the pathway to full sanctification. Prayer is that pathway. All the ascending steps to that lofty position of entire sanctification are steps of prayer, increasing prayerfulness in spirit and increasing prayerfulness in fact. “Pray without ceasing” is the imperative prelude to “the very God of peace sanctify you wholly.” And prayer is but the continued interlude and doxology of this rich grace in the heart: “I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.”
We can only meet our full responsibilities and fulfill our high mission when we go forth sanctified as Christ our Lord was sanctified. He
sends us into the world just as His Father sent Him into the world. He expects us to be as He was, to do as He did, and to glorify the Father just as He glorified the Father.
What longings He had to have us with Him in Heaven: “Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me.” What response do our truant hearts make to this earnest, loving, Christly longing? Are we as eager for Heaven as He is to have us there? How calm, how majestic and how authoritative is His “I will”!
He closes His life with inimitable calmness, confidence and sublimity “I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.”
The annals of earth have nothing comparable to it in real serenity and sublimity. May we come to our end thus in supreme loyalty to Christ.
