Epistemology

I.
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

II.
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, “You are not true.”

May God bless you with discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,
So that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger
At injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
So that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,
So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them
And turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done
To bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

Amen.

HT:  Michael Hyatt

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

“Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop inside itself a hothouse mutual admiration, and towards the outer world, a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the “Cause” is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal.  Even when the little group exists originally for the Enemy’s own purposes, this remains true.  We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique…Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours–and the more ‘religious’ (on those terms), the more securely ours.  I could show you a pretty cageful down here” (Letter VII).

• Educating the mind and character begins with stories: “true stories and fiction.  Our education must use both, and start with fiction” (Republic).
• All art (especially poetry) is a means not only of real and valuable knowledge, but of knowledge of the highest things–of permanent things.
• Art has “limitless power” to shape and guide the soul (psychogogia).
• In his ideal curriculum, art means poetry, music, and gymnastics–all of which teach rhythm and harmony.
• This understanding of art complements Plato’s view of a world of transcendent reality, his “Idealism”; but this Idealism “rests on a carefully cultivated, vibrant, sensory-emotional contact with a very real and knowable objective reality” (Taylor 17).
• The combination of experiences with songs, poetry, music, and gymnastics aims to awaken a “sympathetic knowledge of the reality of the True, Good, and Beautiful, by placing the child inside the experience of those transcendentals as they are contained in these arts and sensory experiences” (Taylor 15).  This employs a child’s natural tendency to imitate–to become the thing they have experienced or learned.
• The mind and character trained by stories, poetry, music, and gymnastic have gained enough refinement and balance to take up the more demanding disciplines of geometry, logic, and philosophy.  But these more advanced areas of knowledge depend on the earlier experiences in the poetic mode–they do not make them obsolete–they are the full-leaved branches that cannot exist without the roots and trunk.
• Rhythm and harmony have an inevitable shaping influence on the character; this means that the rhythms and harmonies of education must be carefully chosen in order to develop the proper character.

And finally, Plato argues that the end of proper education is love:  ”to love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way…for the object of education is to love what is beautiful.”

At the same time, the notorious Communist mayor of El Toboso loses his campaign for reelection.  The mayor (who shares a surname with the Sancho Panza of Cervantean fame) proposes a brief vacation across the Spanish countryside with the new monsignor.  Father Quixote reluctantly agrees, and so the unlikely companions load cases of local wine, sausage, and Manchegan cheese into the back seat of the father’s ancient, but reliable car–named Rocinante.

And so begins another quixotic adventure, this time through post-war Spain.  The conversation deals not with the conflict between romantic chivalry and modern realism, but between Christian faith and Communist theory (actually, that might be the same conversation).  Probing their antithetical visions of the world, the two friends exchange books and arguments, eventually discovering that they share a common human struggle:  doubt and fear in a world marked by pain, suffering, injustice, and (most of all) mystery.

As the adventures continue, an odd friendship grows out of commonalities–a mutual love for strong cheese and local wine, shared doubts and doubtful fears, a similar longing for a better world.  In spite of their contrary faiths, Mayor Sancho and Father Quixote become the heroes of a modern romance that weaves through war and betrayal, timid faith and fearful hope.  And like all good romances, this one ends with a tragedy that opens the way to the very center of Mystery–the terrifying center of hope, peace, and the end of suffering.

Read it:  Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene

Read it: Why I like Graham Greene.

I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for country cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa” (Letter XIII).

These simple, intensely personal tastes that Screwtape mentions have no great claim to superiority, but “there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust,” says the senior tempter.  These personal tastes are the “deepest likings and impulses,” which God gives us individually to lead us to the source of true Joy–which, when we find it, only multiplies the joy we have in these very personal tastes.

This summer, I plan to heed Lewis’s advice and pursue my “deepest impulses and likings” in my summer reading.  Here’s the list so far:

Novels
I’m hooked on the authors of the Catholic renascence of the early 20th century.  Their honest, earthy characters wrestle with sin, suffering, love, death, and forgiveness, all in a world that is profoundly (and thus painfully) beautiful.  In the pages of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor, I always find myself–rarely is it delightful.  But, heeding Socrates’ great exhortation to “Know thyself,” I’ll be spending the summer with these four “modern Thomists.”

Classics (Greek and Roman)
An essential category for anyone who teaches humanities at a classical school, this part of my list has only three titles:

1. Plato, Republic
2. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
3. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, bks. 1-3

With Plato and Aristotle, I’m aiming for leisurely (!), careful, first “through-readings”; later close-readings will dig deeper.  Quintilian isn’t nearly as difficult, and he writes about topics familiar to me.  His common-sense style and intelligence will be a welcome change of pace from the head-scratching brought on by the other two authors.

School Prep
To prepare for my classes next year, I have four texts that will bolster my vision for teaching literature:

1. James S. Taylor, Poetic Imagination
2. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
3. Josef Pieper (yes, pronounced “peeper”), The Four Cardinal Virtues
4. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (re-read)

What a list!  I don’t expect to finish all of these titles, but who knows?  If June apes May, I’ll have lots of rainy days to read.  Now I just need to find another bookshelf…

“no situation and no person are hopeless.  No marriage is beyond repair, no child beyond recovery, no pagan beyond the reach of the gospel, no sin beyond forgiveness, no womb permanently sealed, no one and nothing beyond restoration.

If it really happened, giving up is simply not an option, because if bodily death is reversible, so are all the other little deaths that we suffer in life.  If it really happened, hope is not a delusion, but the driving power of abundant life…

…Go to the darkest shanty town of the darkest city on the darkest continent, and there too the Risen Jesus is king.  Wade into the waste of the most ruined life, and there too Jesus is the Living Lord.  Sort through the wreckage your own sin has caused in your own life, face it in faith and hope, and you will see resurrection life at work through the Spirit, and the liberating power of God’s forgiveness.”

And the angel of the Lord solemnly assured Joshua, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: If you will walk in my ways and keep my charge, then you shall rule my house and have charge of my courts, and I will give you the right of access among those who are standing here.  Hear now, O Joshua the high priest, you and your friends who sit before you, for they are men who are a sign: behold, I will bring my servant the Branch.  For behold, on the stone that I have set before Joshua, on a single stone with seven eyes, I will engrave its inscription, declares the Lord of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of this land in a single day. In that day, declares the Lord of hosts, every one of you will invite his neighbor to come under his vine and under his fig tree”‘  (Zechariah 3).

A Man, A Devil

Mr. Shiftlet is a hardened con-man, and actively attempts to swindle the old woman from the moment he arrives.  Though his behavior seems promising (as it certainly does to the old woman), it is deliberately staged to get two things:  the old woman’s money and her car.  This becomes apparent, of course, when Shiftlet abandons his idiot wife, but becomes apparent earlier, in the old woman’s most vigorous attempt to marry her daughter to Shiftlet.

Shiftlet dodges the old woman’s arguments with quasi-metaphysical responses about a man being divided body and soul.  (These arguments mean more than he intends, of course.)  Finally, the old woman agrees to “pay for the paint” for the car.  This is the old woman very first mention of having any money, and Shiftlet response shows his true character:  ”In the darkness, Mr. Shiftlet’s smile stretched like a weary snake, waking up by a fire.  After a second he recalled himself…” (152).  He recalls himself and then weasels another $75 bucks out of the old woman–but feels “deeply hurt” when the old woman accuses him of “milking” money out of her.

O’Connor writes this about Mr. Shiftlet:  ”[He is] of the Devil because nothing in him resists the Devil.  There’s not much use to distinguish between them” (HB 367).  Though Shiftlet feels hurt at the old woman’s accusation, and though he feels a growing bitterness and depression about his marriage and abandonment of his wife, still he is a devil.  He doesn’t struggle to resist his own sin.

The Devil Bedeviled

After leaving his wife in the diner, Shiftlet gets lonely.  The narrator tells us that there were times when he “preferred not to be alone” (155).  He also felt that a man with a car “had a responsibility to others” and therefore kept his eye out for hitchhikers.  This is heavily ironic, since he wasn’t alone until he abandoned his wife (whom he says is a hitchhiker).

Eventually, Shiftlet finds a hitchhiker, a young man who is obviously running away from home–from his sweet mother, Shiftlet assumes.  This causes Shiftlet to begin talking about his own mother and how he abandoned her.  His regret strains his voice and clouds his eyes with tears–but his language blurs with the words the boy at the restaurant used to describe the idiot wife.  Shiftlet’s remorse at abandoning his mother connects with his remorse at abandoning his wife.

At this moment of confession, the hitchhiker turns to him in anger, insults his mother and leaps out of the car with his suitcase.  Shiftlet is stunned.  He feels “that the rottenness of the world is about to engulf him” (156)–the abandoner has been abandoned in his moment of need.  This pain of rejection causes him to cry out “Oh Lord!  Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!” (156).  This is the moment of Grace, the moment when the devil feels the pain of his own devilry, when the sinner sees the true horror of his sin.

Grace Rejected

But unlike the Grandmother or Bevel, Mr. Shiftlet rejects this Grace.  The devil realizes that if the Lord answered his prayer, it would wash him from the face of the earth as well.  As the storm breaks in the story’s last paragraph, Mr. Shiftlet steps on the gas and races the “galloping shower into Mobile” (156).  This odd adjective for a rain storm calls to mind a horseman of the Apocalypse, a rider bringing divine judgment.  Shiftlet indeed sees the storm this way and flees for his life from the avenging rain that would wash him clean.

Like all of O’Connor’s stories, there are many more things to discuss, particularly the interactions between Shiftlet and the old woman (both are con artists), Shiftlet’s lack of satisfaction with “the law” (he hasn’t tried Grace), the repeated discussions of not knowing a man’s heart, etc.

Next Up: “A Stroke of Good Fortune”

Sources:

• The Habit of Being (HB)–Flannery O’Connor’s letters
• The Complete Stories (CS)–All citations from the story are from this edition.