The Ground of Civilisation

Hell Hole of the South Pacific Waits in the Wings

Human civilisation is skin deep.  It can only be sustained in a society by a majority of families who live, believe, and practise the values of a civilised society in their homes and communities. This reality was caught most powerfully by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The law, its enforcement agencies, the rules and institutions of state, the courts, the schools, and the institutions of trade and commerce–all these can only continue to exist in any society by warrant of a majority of civilised families. After all, the law and justice are intangibles, grounded in ideas and concepts believed and respected in the heart of a community.  

We have had yet another illustration of these truths.
  In Northcote, a teenage miscreant preyed upon a single older woman outside a supermarket, attempting to snatch her bag.  Such crimes had been systemic in the area over recent days.  A mother of six, who was accompanied by two of her younger children, went to the aid of the attacked woman.  Lucy Knight (pictured below) was, in turn, struck by the criminal, fell to the pavement, and fractured her skull.  The criminal ran off to a waiting car and was driven away.

Police released CCTV images of the bag-snatching suspect near Northcote’s Countdown Supermarket. Inset, Lucy Knight.

Mrs Knight has undergone emergency surgery and is now in a stable condition.

Michael Dudley, 21, works at a takeaway shop nearby and was there when the drama unfolded.  “I was coming out of Countdown and I heard a struggle behind me,” he told the Herald last night.  “I turned around to see a swinging arm. Then the lady fell, she went down really fast and hit her head on the concrete. I saw the young kid take off down the carpark and I started to chase him.”  The youth got into a car that Mr Dudley said was waiting for him. He saw a woman in the driver’s seat. [NZ Herald]

Now this may be a small, insignificant incident in the “grand scheme of things”.  But it is not.  Society and civilisation are made up of, and sustained by, thousands upon thousands of such deeds of goodness and courage.   Reactions to evil like Mrs Knight’s are instinctive and spontaneous.  As a mother of six children she no doubt has devoted her life to the care of others who by nature are vulnerable.  Others.  We are reminded of how William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, sent out a telegram asking for donations to support the work of the Army.  The telegram has only one word: “Others”. Upon such values, civilisation is built and sustained.

No doubt Mrs Knight reacted instinctively and courageously because these values are engraved upon her heart and mind.  She responded without thinking.  She is a truly civilised person.  She represents the essence of the only way a society can maintain justice, truth, respect, honesty, gentleness, generosity, and thoughtfulness.  Without such values of the heart being inculcated in families, society disintegrates into a hell-hole. 

Wabbling Back to the Fire

Western Hollow Men

It is quite a while since the West was racked with self-doubt.  It is now.  Jimmy Carter’s presidency was probably the last previous occurrence.  But periods of self-doubt are likely to become more frequent.  The West has tossed away its Christian foundations.  Secularism reigns.  Atheism is its established religion.  There is no dominant ideological narrative to give direction and the appearance of certainty.

The last fading hope has been represented by the ante-diluvian “hawks” who believe that if people are freed from oppressors, democracy–with an attendant rule of law, respect for liberty of conscience, freedom, and inalienable human rights guaranteed by the Creator–will magically break out everywhere.  Drop a few bombs in Libya.  Arm a few rebels in Syria.  Strafe a few jihadis in Iraq, and overnight everyone will transmogrify into effete Western liberals.  Take a bow John McCain and Hillary Clinton.  They are a dying breed.  Nothing is there to fill the vacuum.  Consequently, self-doubt rises like panic up the throat.

Roger Cohen has caught this emerging new reality in an OpEd for the New York Times:

The Great Unravelling

SEPT. 15, 2014

It was the time of unravelling. Long afterward, in the ruins, people asked: How could it happen?

It was a time of beheadings. With a left-handed sawing motion, against a desert backdrop, in bright sunlight, a Muslim with a British accent cut off the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker. The jihadi seemed comfortable in his work, unhurried. His victims were broken. Terror is theater. Burning skyscrapers, severed heads: The terrorist takes movie images of unbearable lightness and gives them weight enough to embed themselves in the psyche.

It was a time of aggression. The leader of the largest nation on earth pronounced his country encircled, even humiliated. He annexed part of a neighboring country, the first such act in Europe since 1945, and stirred up a war on further land he coveted. His surrogates shot down a civilian passenger plane. The victims, many of them Europeans, were left to rot in the sun for days. He denied any part in the violence, like a puppeteer denying that his puppets’ movements have any connection to his. He invoked the law the better to trample on it. He invoked history the better to turn it into farce. He reminded humankind that the idiom fascism knows best is untruth so grotesque it begets unreason.

It was a time of breakup. The most successful union in history, forged on an island in the North Sea in 1707, headed toward possible dissolution — not because it had failed (refugees from across the seas still clamored to get into it), nor even because of new hatreds between its peoples. The northernmost citizens were bored. They were disgruntled. They were irked, in some insidious way, by the south and its moneyed capital, an emblem to them of globalization and inequality. They imagined they had to control their National Health Service in order to save it even though they already controlled it through devolution and might well have less money for its preservation (not that it was threatened in the first place) as an independent state. The fact that the currency, the debt, the revenue, the defense, the solvency and the European Union membership of such a newborn state were all in doubt did not appear to weigh much on a decision driven by emotion, by urges, by a longing to be heard in the modern cacophony — and to heck with the day after. If all else failed, oil would come to the rescue (unless somebody else owned it or it just ran out).

It was a time of weakness. The most powerful nation on earth was tired of far-flung wars, its will and treasury depleted by absence of victory. An ungrateful world could damn well police itself. The nation had bridges to build and education systems to fix. Civil wars between Arabs could fester. Enemies might even kill other enemies, a low-cost gain. Middle Eastern borders could fade; they were artificial colonial lines on a map. Shiite could battle Sunni, and Sunni Shiite, there was no stopping them. Like Europe’s decades-long religious wars, these wars had to run their course. The nation’s leader mockingly derided his own “wan, diffident, professorial” approach to the world, implying he was none of these things, even if he gave that appearance. 

He set objectives for which he had no plan. He made commitments he did not keep. In the way of the world these things were noticed. Enemies probed. Allies were neglected, until they were needed to face the decapitators who talked of a Caliphate and called themselves a state. Words like “strength” and “resolve” returned to the leader’s vocabulary. But the world was already adrift, unmoored by the retreat of its ordering power. The rule book had been ripped up.

It was a time of hatred. Anti-Semitic slogans were heard in the land that invented industrialized mass murder for Europe’s Jews. Frightened European Jews removed mezuzahs from their homes. Europe’s Muslims felt the ugly backlash from the depravity of the decapitators, who were adept at Facebooking their message. The fabric of society frayed. Democracy looked quaint or outmoded beside new authoritarianisms. Politicians, haunted by their incapacity, played on the fears of their populations, who were device-distracted or under device-driven stress. Dystopia was a vogue word, like utopia in the 20th century. The great rising nations of vast populations held the fate of the world in their hands but hardly seemed to care.

True, it seems like a great unravelling. But what else is new? Equal or worse unravellings have always taken place.  World War 1 cost millions…

It was a time of fever. People in West Africa bled from the eyes.

It was a time of disorientation. Nobody connected the dots or read Kipling on life’s few certainties: “The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire / And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”

Until it was too late and people could see the Great Unravelling for what it was and what it had wrought.

Death Valley

Can These Bones Live?

The roots of our rapid devolution from public and official Christianity in the West to radical secularism are fascinating to trace.  You can take a long bow, a short bow or a medium bow vista.  All are valid to some degree.

The “short bow” view traditionally commences with the sixties as the beginning of a time of rapid change: the Beatles, the pill, no fault divorce, secular feminism, a rapid expansion of a vast government income re-distribution system, the legalisation of killing unborn children on a mass industrial scale, the official promulgation of evolutionism as a religious certainty–to name but a few of the many devolutionary milestones–with the result that the West is now in a place which few foresaw when John Lennon and his mates boasted they were more popular than Jesus Christ.  Today the West is engaged in furious debates over whether homosexuals can legitimately be married, whether incest and pederasty should be classified as human rights, and how many genders there are.  As Theoden of Rohan once said, “How did it come to this?”  No doubt many folk today who were alive in the fifties are likewise shaking their heads in astonishment at the devastation wreaked upon the law and culture and religion which had stood unassailable for centuries. 

The causes of such a rapid and comprehensive devolution are complex to be sure.  But we suggest that one precipitous factor was the most widespread religion of the day.
  This particular religious faith is presented cogently in the following profession of faith which appeared in a Melbourne newspaper in 1959 just as the Beatles were coalescing into a “group”.  The occasion was the Billy Graham crusade in that city, and a correspondent wrote:

After hearing Dr. Billy Graham on the air, viewing him on TV, and reading reports and letters concerning him and his mission, I am heartily sick of the type of religion that insists that my soul (and everyone else’s) needs saving–whatever that means.

I have never felt that it was lost.  Nor do I feel that I daily wallow in the mire of sin, although repetitive preaching insists that I do.

Give me a practical religion that teaches gentleness and tolerance, that acknowledges no barriers of color or creed, that remembers the aged and teaches children of goodness and not sin.

If in order to save my soul I must accept such a philosophy as I have recently heard preached, I prefer to remain for ever damned.  [Anonymous, cited by Leon Morris,  The Cross in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1965) p.271f.]

We doubt not that such self-righteousness was typical of the heirs of English Victorianism.  “We are so good, so worthy, so holy, that even the suggestion that we might be sinful and lost without a saviour is offensive.”  The Gospel of redemption from sin is of no relevance whatsoever to someone convinced of his own moral rectitude.  But this false religion was at that time still in its early days–it still spoke of moral values such as gentleness, but in that empty platitudinous manner.  Gentleness and tolerance meant accepting every creed.  It celebrated an intrinsic goodness of all.

What can we conclude about such a portentous, prophetic statement of faith?  Many things, but chief among them is this: it is very clear that the correspondent was a person who had been passed over by the Holy Spirit of the Living God.  Whilst professing a higher, better light they remained in a deadly darkness of soul and mind.  The Messiah of God, Jesus Christ solemnly declared that He had not come to call those who were as self-righteous like the correspondent.  He came only to those who knew themselves to be sinners, lost and without hope. (Mark 2:17)

But how does one come to a certain conviction of their own sinful depravity?  It comes from an encounter with God, the Spirit.  When He comes, said Jesus, “He will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness and judgement.” (John 16:8)  But His coming is as the wind: “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3: 7,8)

The benighted letter writer, who saw himself as upright in thought, word, and deed professed that he would rather be damned than give up on the belief in his self-righteousness.  The Spirit of God had evidently passed him by and left him in his ignorance and darkness.  He had heard the Gospel, but had not heard it at all.

We suggest that the rapid and calamitous decline into the realm of animalist secularism can be explained by the sort of religion espoused by this letter writer, archetypical of a generation.  Now, in the West, a couple of generations later, we are confronted with the fruits of this arrogant, self-righteous, hard-hearted religion.  A people who profess themselves righteous, and without sin are the most dangerous of all, for whatever their hand finds to do becomes righteous in their own eyes.

They would rather be damned than contemplate the alternative possibility: that they themselves are corrupted and all they do is tainted with poison.

Now this does not mean that all it lost for God’s Kingdom in the West.  But it does mean that we must be clear whence our help must come.  We, like the exile Ezekiel, are living in a valley of dry, dead bones.  Only God can raise dead bones to be reconstituted as living beings.  When God asked Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” Ezekiel knew the truth, and replied, “O Lord God, you know.”  (Ezekiel 37).  So, our hope and help is the Lord.  He alone can cause the Western dead, who lie as bleached bones on every hand, to live again. 

And God, let us remember, is never held back from working, either through many or through few.  As the old saint put it, one man, with God at his side, is a majority. 

The Giants

Foundational Literature of Western Civilization

June 24, 2014

Justin Taylor

 

 

In his book The Case for Classic Christian Education (Crossway, 2003), Doug Wilson offers a list of “foundational” books for Western Civilization (some of which, but not all, would make their way onto his desert-island reading list.)
I’ve reproduced his list below, along with my own parenthetical recommendations on some translations, editions for kids, etc.

The Scriptures
Of course, the Scriptures are not included in the list of twenty-five books. The Bible is necessarily in a class by itself and forms the center of every class a student takes. But at the same time, the Bible is an important part of our broader literary heritage, particularly in the Authorized Version, popularly known as the King James. . . .

The Iliad
Written by Homer (c. 750 B.C.), this great work is about the fall of Hector in one sense, as well as the tragic fall of Achilles during the siege of Troy. The Trojan War is the setting, but this is not what The Iliad is about. Homer’s poetic gifts were great, but we should remember C. S. Lewis’s comment that it was his giftedness that made his granite despair shine as though it were marble.

[See Robert Fagles’s translation. For kids, see Rosemary Sutcliff’s retelling, The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of the Odyssey—or wait until July 2014 for a new edition of this retelling with illustrations by Alan Lee. For a Christian literary guide to the book, see Leland Ryken’s work.]

The Odyssey
Mark Twain once quipped that we now know that Homer was not the author of these works, but they were rather to be attributed to another blind Greek poet with the same name. The Odyssey, more accessible to many modern readers than The Iliad, is about the return of Odysseus from a life of freebooting to his home country and his adventures on the way.

[See Robert Fagles’s translation. For children, see Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of ‘The Iliad.’ Or wait till August 2014 to get her version with Alan Lee’s illustrations.]

The Oresteia
Aeschylus was the father of Greek tragedy (525-456 b.C.). The Oresteia is a trilogy of three plays (458 b.C.)—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers (Choephoroe), and The Kindly Ones (Eumenides). The apostle Paul’s language indicates his familiarity with these plays. The plays are about the return of Agamemnon from the Trojan War, his murder by his wife, and the unraveling of his dynastic order followed by the rise of another, more balanced order.

[The link is to the Fagles translation.]

History of the Persian Wars
Herodotus (484-c. 424 B.C.) was a great storyteller. He was first called the father of history by Cicero, but the appellation has stuck. Modernist historians want to qualify this somewhat, thinking that he has insufficient quantified boredom in his footnotes to be called a true historian. Nonetheless, he is a lot of fun to read.

Oedipus Rex
Sophocles (c. 497-406 B.C.) wrote this play about a man fated to kill his own father and marry his mother. Aristotle used the play as his model for tragedy, and it has had a great influence on the definition of tragedy. Oedipus Rex also serves as a good springboard for discussions about fate and free will.

[The link is to the Fagles translation.]

The Republic
Plato (c. 428-c. 347 B.C.) was great because he raised great issues. Of course, he also answered them from within his pagan worldview. This book should be read because it is important in the history of ideas, not because the ideas therein represent anything that Christians would want to adopt. Karl Marx was an intellectual who suffered misfortune because people tried to put his ideas into practice. Had Plato suffered the same misfortune, the world would still be talking about that totalitarian hellhole.

[For serious study, see Alan Bloom‘s essentially literal translation and notes.]

Nicomachean Ethics
As Plato’s greatest student, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) served as a tutor for Alexander the Great. His Nicomachean Ethics has had a major influence in Western moral philosophy, much of it problematic for the Christian. The pernicious influence comes more from the basis of the standard (reason versus revelation) than it does from what Aristotle praises or blames. When Paul asks, “Where is the wise man?” he is almost certainly talking about Aristotle. Man through all his knowing does not know God.

The Aeneid
Virgil (70-19 B.C.) was the court poet for Augustus, the Caesar when Jesus was born. He retold the story of the founding of Rome, connecting it to the fall of Troy. Trojan refugees fled after the fall of their city, and after many adventures, they settled in Italy. Aeneas, their leader, is a man in the first part of the Aeneid, but as the poem progresses, he becomes a personification of Rome itself.

On the Incarnation
Athanasius (A.D. 295-373), the bishop of Alexandria, was the orthodox champion against the heresies of Arius, who denied the deity of Christ. The testimony of C. S. Lewis on this point should be sufficient: “When I first opened his De Incarnatione, I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece.”

[You can read an online version, including Lewis’s introduction, here.]

The Confessions of St. Augustine
Augustine (A.D. 354-430) was one of the greatest thinkers the church has ever produced, and it would be hard to overstate his influence. His Confessions are autobiographical, devotional, philosophical, and everywhere rich. The Protestant Reformation should really be understood as Augustinian Christianity coming into its own, and Protestants would do well to get reacquainted with their spiritual father.

[See Tony Reinke’s translation comparison. Peter Kreeft says that F.J. Shedd’s translation opened up the book for him like no other. I usually use Maria Boulding’s translation. For more commendations of this book and why you should read it, go here.]

Beowulf
The author was an unknown Christian poet from the eighth century (c. A.D. 700-750). The story is of a great hero who slays the monsters Grendel and Grendel’s mother, and who at the end of the epic lays down his life for his people in a fight with a dragon. This is a wonderful poem.

[There are several recent publications of this classic. The best-known is probably the NYT bestseller by Seamus Heaney. Last year Douglas Wilson published a new alliterative verse rendering. And this year has seen J.R.R. Tolkien‘s translation and commentary. For younger readers, see Ian Serrailier‘s rendering in modern verse narrative (sixth grade and up).

The Divine Comedy
In this work many believe that Dante (A.D. 1265-1321) produced the supreme Christian literary work. Throughout the course of this “sacred poem,” Dante as pilgrim is escorted through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and comes finally to the Beatific Vision.

[See Anthony Esolen’s translation of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.]

The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer (A.D. 1343-1400) belongs to the high medieval period. His greatness as a poet is generally recognized. Pilgrims on the way to Canterbury tell one another stories to pass the time, and the stories reveal many of the tensions and contradictions of medieval life—from sacred to profane, from holy to bawdy. With regard to the bawdy aspect, Chaucer himself believed that he sometimes got carried away, and much to the consternation of modern liberated scholars, he said he was sorry. Chaucer was almost certainly influenced by his contemporary, Wycliffe, and was probably numbered among the Lollards, followers of Wycliffe.

[For a retelling for children, see Geraldine McCaughrean’s version.]

Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare presents us with some difficulties. The first is the question of dates, which depend on who Shakespeare was. Since I follow Joseph Sobran’s arguments for the Oxfordian authorship of the plays, I simply refer you to him. The other difficulty is that of selecting which plays should represent his genius, whoever he was. The five above will have to do. Since they are plays, they were meant to be seen, not read. Good videos of some of these are available.

[For a critical complete set of Shakespeare’s works, see the Pelican edition. Leland Ryken has a guide on Macbeth and on Hamlet. For children, see Ten Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb.]

Institutes of the Christian Religion
John Calvin (1509-1564) was a strong personality who still evokes strong and sometimes passionate responses, both for and against. Nevertheless, the stubborn historical fact remains that he was the single greatest systematizer and organizer of the Protestant theology and faith. He was a truly great man, and this great work was published in its first form when Calvin was still a young man.

[The definitive two-volume edition is edited by John McNeill; unfortunately it seems to be currently in print only in paperback. For help, see A Reader’s Guide to Calvin’s Institutes, by Anthony N. S. Lane.]

Vindicae Contra Tyrannos
Junius Brutus is a pseudonym for an unknown Huguenot writer of the sixteenth century. This book represents a Protestant marriage of medieval and modern thinking about political civil order. The book was enormously influential in the American colonies prior to our War for Independence.

The Temple
George Herbert ( 1593-1633) was a devotional Anglican poet whose great theme was the authority of grace. Like his contemporary John Donne, he was a poetic craftsman of the first order. The catholicity of his writing has given him a broad appeal among Christians.

[See Leland Ryken’s guide to the devotional poetry of Herbert, along with Milton and Donne.]

Paradise Lost
John Milton (1608-1674) was a genius of the first rank. One astute observer said that the English language collapsed under the weight of that genius. Paradise Lost is an artistic monument, but it is not an easy one to apprehend at a first reading. Taking a class on it or reading some companion volumes would be very helpful.

[Here is a version for children. See also Leland Ryken’s Christian guide.]

Pilgrim’s Progress
John Bunyan (1628-1688) was an unlettered tinker turned preacher who wrote a book that continues to astonish the world. The allegory is straightforward, but the book nevertheless has depths that account for its incredible staying power. C. S. Lewis said of this work: “The greater part of it is enthralling narrative or genuinely dramatic dialogue. Bunyan stands with Malory and Trollope as a master of perfect naturalness in the mimesis of ordinary conversation. . . . In dialogue Bunyan catches not only the cadence of the speech but the tiny twists of thought.”

[If you like things in the original, I don’t know of anything better than Banner of Truth’s deluxe edition. See Leland Ryken’s literary guide. See also Derek Thomas’s Ligonier class, “The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Guided Tour.” For children, the two most famous versions are Dangerous Journey (an illustration-rich abridgment, using a lot of original wording) and Helen Taylor’s Little Pilgrim’s Progress, a full retelling with the characters as children.]

Pensees
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a Jansenist, part of a movement within the post-Reformation Roman Catholic Church trying to turn Rome back to an Augustinian foundation. The Jansenists are best understood as “Protestants” who never left the Church of Rome. Pascal was a great mathematical genius as well as a devotional mystic. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.”

[I have used Peter Kreeft’s Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensees, which intersperses Pascal’s Pensees with Kreeft’s helpful commentary and application.]

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote one of the finest examples of a comedy of manners. Her writing displays an understanding of great psychological depths without becoming pathological about it, as more recent writers have done.

Faust
Johann Goethe (1749-1832) created in this drama a work that is archetypical of the great Romantic themes of his era. Many German legends told fantastic stories of the fifteenth-century magician Georg Faust, who sold his soul to the devil. Christopher Marlowe wrote a play about Faust in the late sixteenth century, at the end of which the soul of Faustus is lost. Goethe ends the story differently, and in that difference we can see the desolations of our modern era. Instead of salvation by grace, we have salvation for free.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain published this book in 1885. The fact that just about every- one reads it in high school and that it is a really good story enjoyed on the surface tends to obscure for us just what a great book it is. Hemingway said that all modern literature descends from Huckleberry Finn. H. L. Mencken praised Twain to the heights.

The Brothers Karamazov
This novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) is in the minds of many one of the contenders for the title of the greatest novel ever written. This is a strange way to talk about a novel, too reminiscent of People magazine’s tendency to declare someone or other the sexiest man alive. Nevertheless, this kind of praise does give some idea of the novel’s reputation, and it is fair to say that it represents “a consummate work of Christian imagination.”

[According to Joseph Frank of Princeton University, the 2002 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is “Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible.”]

The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) wrote what is already being called the novel of the twentieth century. While it is far too early to make this judgment, it is certainly not too early to hope that the judgment proves correct. The story of the one ring, of Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, and every other creature in Middle Earth will no doubt be read for centuries to come.

[If you like big one-volume editions, you can get it in paperback or hardcover.]