much and earnest

Carson Holloway’s recent “What’s Really the Matter with Pop Music?” disappoints. He begins the essay (a Part 2 of 2) by rehearsing the ancient and intriguing claim that “the music itself” –the rhythm, tune, etc.,–and not lyrics, are the more influential element of songs, in moving the listener toward good or ill. I’d have really enjoyed hearing him out on this point, but the remainder of the essay builds to the more familiar argument that the modern practice of censorship (e.g., replacing potty words with beeps or honks) only lowers our standards of what counts as “good”; and that instead, we ought to listen to music that “encourage[s] our pursuit of the highest goods attainable”: “reason’s enjoyment of moral nobility and theoretical truth.”

When somebody is a little bit wrong–say, when a waiter puts nonfat milk in your espresso macchiato, instead of lowfat milk–it is often quite easy to explain to them how and why they are wrong. But if somebody is surpassingly wrong–say, when a waiter bites your nose instead of taking your order–you can often be so surprised that you are unable to say anything at all.

- Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Second), ch. 5

When reading an ancient text…we have to start somewhere, and in the end, I’m not sure that it matters much where. Should we begin with the contexts and assumptions of the ancient world and work our way towards the present situation? Should we begin with present forms of understanding and work our way back towards the ancient text’s lifeworld? Though we are accustomed to the idea that readers need to be governed by the right hermeneutic, in fact theory and method mean next to nothing in reading. [...W]e may not have as much choice [about the "tools we bring to the task of reading"] as we think we do anyway.

- Alan Jacobs, “The Genesis of Wisdom,” an essay on Leon Kass’s The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, originally in First Things, but reprinted in Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling (Eerdmans, 2004). My emphasis.

If we examine more closely our ordinary notion of reality, perhaps we should find that we do not consider real what actually happens but a certain manner of happening that is familiar to us.

- José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote (1914)

…he was just nine Years old when having got the play of Hamlet to read in his Father’s Kitchen, he read on very qu[i]etly till he came to the Ghost Scene, when he hurried up Stairs to the Shop Door that he might see folks about him. This Story he was not unwilling to tell as a Testimony to the Merits of Shakespear.

- Hester Lynch Piozzi, Dr Johnson by Mrs Thrale: The ‘Anecdotes’ of Mrs Piozzi in their Original Form (1786), ed. Richard Ingrams (London: Chatto & Windus; The Hogarth Press, 1984), 6-7.

But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world and exhibited only what he saw before him.

- Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works (1765). I take my text from W. K. Wimsatt’s Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1960)

The knowledge of ourselves no doubt ought to be most precious to us: and therein the Holy Scriptures, if not the only, are certainly the incomparable lantern in this fleshly darkness of ours. For (alas!) what is all knowledge, if in the end of this little and wearisome pilgrimage, Hell become our schoolmaster? They, therefore, are diligently to be read.

- from a letter to his friend Sir Edward Denny, dated 22 May 1580. Text  (modernized) taken from Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, which I’m reading.

1. Firefox. Goes without saying, I’m sure.
2. Gmail and Google Calendar. I’ve been a Gmail user since October of 2004. The first Gmail message I sent was work-related, to Stephen Hackett.
3. Adblock Plus (for ff3)
4. Dropbox. I currently have a free 2GB account, and plan to upgrade as I approach the limit.
5. foxmarks (assuming all goes well with this program, for which I signed up only recently).

Remember The Milk would be on this list, but I’m already paying for a Pro account. I’m not quite sure about WordPress, NuevaSync, and Google Reader–all of which I use daily, but aren’t quite essential.

I’d drop twitter and facebook in a heartbeat.

Nights and early mornings in the desert can get a bit chilly. This morning I left the kitchen in the middle of making breakfast:

Me: I’m going to put my shoes on – my feet are cold.

Noelle: Will you put some music on? My soul is cold.

So now we’re listening to an iPod Genius playlist, based on a Stacey Kent song.

It should be emphasized that the people of New Castile had additional, less orthodox methods for dealing with disaster. As that time lay professionals circulated through the Castilian countryside selling their services to individuals or communities to ward off disease, locusts, other insect pests, or hailstorms by magical methods. Known variously as necromancers, enpsalmers, or conjurors of clouds, they competed directly with the priests of the parishes…. One of their methods for dealing with locusts or vine pests was to hold them up for trial and excommunicate them….

The clergy had their own “legal” prayers and exorcisms to chase the clouds. After prohibiting “enchanters, fortune-tellers, bewitchers, magicians, and enpsalmers,” the Synodal Constitutions of Toledo of 1566 continue, “and for this reason we do not prohibit, but on the contrary we order and exhort all the clergy of this archdiocese who are responsible for souls: that decently and without scandal for those cases in the form that is in the manuals, they employ the exorcisms approved by the Church.”

Even locust trials, although generally condemned by theologians, were not entirely unacceptable. One trial was held as late as 1650 in the Hieronymite monastery of Santa María de Párraces, near Segovia…. [T]he judge who pronounced the excommunication on the grasshoppers was Our Lady Saint Mary, “constant advocate of men, particularly those in anguish and need,” speaking through her lieutenant, the prior of the monastery. Her sentence, after consultation with her advisors Saint Jerome, Saint Francis, Saint Lawrence, and Saint Michael the Archangel, was that the insects would automatically fall under excommunication if they did not leave the territory. The trial was held after all other remedies over the space of two years had failed….

- William Christian, Local Religion in 16C Spain, ch. 2

“Abusus non tollit usum,” which I just ran across in a FT review of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory. According to Merriam-Webster, the phrase translates “abuse does not take away use.” Need to remember that one.

Henry VII was not an extravagant monarch–he was thought, if anything, to be something of a skinflint–but the magnificent late Gothic chapel he ordered built at Westminster was, according to one architectural historian, “the largest and certainly the most expensive structure ever built for funerary purposes.” Three monks of Westminster were to serve as chantry priests, perpetually praying for Henry’s soul, and these constant suffrages were to be supplemented by anniversary masses in an impressive number of cathedral, conventual, and university churches. But even these extraordinary efforts to hasten his soul through Purgatory were not enough for a king who evidently thought he might be facing a long prison sentence in the afterlife…. Finally, he saw to it that immediately after his death ten thousand masses would be said for the remission of his sins and the good of his soul. Ten thousand masses.

- Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, ch. 1

I first encountered the work of René Girard about a year ago, while studying the Gospel of Matthew. First Things recently interviewed him. Here are a few things he says:

I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.

The religion of the Incarnation should be an anthropology as well as a theology. Incarnation means man and God together. Theology is pure God and is built on schemes that completely neglect what we call Incarnation in Christianity.

…religion is a very concrete phenomenon that means to prevent people from killing each other completely.

Here’s the full interview.

Ceremony keeps up all things; it’s like a penny glasse to a rich spirit or some excellent water; without it the water were spilt; the spirit lost.

- one John Selden, 17C English polymath, also qtd in Maltby, ch. 1

The countrey parson preacheth constantly; the pulpit is his joy and his throne…and with particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich – ‘This is for you, and this is for you’; for particulars ever touch and awake more than generalls….

- George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, qtd. in Maltby’s Prayer Book and People, ch. 1

…liturgy is an expression of a community’s beliefs, as well as a shaper of them.

- Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, Introduction

Here’s a snip:

LOPEZ: What is “real freedom” and should Americans worry about its future when voting?

FR. WILLIAMS: “Real freedom” is more than the absence of external constraints on our choices. It involves an accomplishment, a conquest of ourselves that allows us to govern our own actions. There is a slavery that we impose on ourselves from the inside, when we don’t have the upper hand over our impulses, passions and inclinations. As has been said, “a man has as many masters as he has vices.”

You and I may be “free” to climb Mount Everest, in that no one will stop us. But we are only truly free to do so if we have trained enough to be able to make the climb.

What applies to the individual applies to the nation as well. A virtuous nation is a free nation, since its people are able to discern good and evil, and have the willpower to choose the good. A nation where vice is celebrated, and virtue is scorned, can have no claim to true freedom.

- from “A Matter of Conscience,” an NRO interview with Fr. Thomas D. Williams

The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. [...] The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as “good” as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son of God to “become flesh and dwell among us.”

- The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, ch. 9

I’m trying to make myself study modernity (and post-modernity), in order to overcome the backwards chronological snobbery to which I have been subject for some time. As an undergraduate, I told myself I’d be happy to get lost in old books, old ideas, old debates. I think I’ve found two good reasons to turn over a new leaf:

1. To acquire the ability to critically examine others’ and one’s own philosophical principles.
2. To be more attuned to my students.

What others can you think of?

Learning matters because the world matters – the world both as material object and as the accumulated network of human institutions. For a Christian, the most important reason for exercising the life of the mind is the implicit acknowledgment that things do not exist on their own. This acknowledgment is a specifically Christian presupposition; its denial characterizes much of the scholarship that shapes our lives so decisively. When we study something, we are of course learning about that thing. But even more, we are learning about the One who made that thing.

- Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, ch. 2

In my youth group days, I was taught a mnemonic for ordering my prayers. “ACTS” stood for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication, a kind of chronological guide for praying to God respectfully.

“TAWG” was another mnemonic device we were taught: “time alone with God.” On youth group trips, after listening to a message, or singing in a worship service, we were given a sheet of paper listing both of these mnemonics (TAWG along the top, ACTS along the side), and instructed to find a quiet, private place to read several specific passages of Scripture, answer a few questions about them, and pray. Since most of these trips were campouts, I had little trouble finding a secluded flat rock or fallen tree on which to plant myself to read, pray, and write.

I kept up with this scheme of prayer throughout high school, and still return to it sometimes, when praying spontaneously. But in the last five years or so, in the course of considering Christian history and the Church from non-evangelical perspectives, and drawing back from the individualism inherent in evangelicalism, I’ve come to doubt its reasonableness–especially TAWG. What would it mean, to be alone with God? Since human life is necessarily communal, is it even possible to be alone? Is it possible to isolate the inner core of a person from the influences of others (people, circumstances, God Himself)? Can entering an empty room empty my consciousness of the lives, thoughts, influences of others? On the contrary, even when I am alone, my self-consideration employs concepts and questions that I did not originate.**

Yesterday I found a fine expression of this idea in some of my academic reading. On the advice of my faculty advisor at UA, I’ve picked up Dom Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy (1945). He writes as follows in the Introduction:

The most isolated christian–say a celtic anchorite (the nearest equivalent to a christian Robinson Crusoe)-in so far as he is specifically christian, does not come to God like the pagan mystic; as the alone to the Alone. Even if he does not use a traditional formula like the Lord’s prayer or the ‘Glory be to the Father,’ he prays within a whole framework of christian ideas received from others. When his prayer is most spontaneous and from his own heart, the belief according to which he prays, the general type of his prayer and much-probably most-of his actual phrasing are still largely drawn from what he has learned from others-his teachers, christian services he has attended in the past, his mother, his bible, many different sources. Ultimately it all comes to him, even the use of his bible, from the tradition of prayer evolved in the worshipping church.

**A similar question has arisen for me in consideration of the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, and the role translation plays in understanding the Bible (or any text, for that matter). The interpretation of Scipture is a complicated task, involving a number of different ‘translations’: from one language to another, from the page to one’s mind, from sensible signs (e.g., letters, words, sentences) to what they signify, etc. Those who undertake the task of interpretation can only do so because they have been taught, by others, how to navigate these choppy waters. One must know, for starters, the alphabet, the language in which the text is written, a host of cultural and historical facts, and an innumerable set of ideas, both true and false. And how may they understand without a teacher? Strictly speaking, there can be no understanding, for humans, apart from community. Even the principle of sola scriptura involves more agents than the reader and the Spirit.

How every fool can play upon the word!

- Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 3.5.37

After arguing that ceremonies and symbols are more than merely indicative–that in both the sacred and the secular realms, they do more than express ‘the way things are,’ and actually change the way things are–Leithart supplies a set of propositions that he means to prove with his book:

“Baptism” is baptism. When the New Testament writers use the word “baptism,” they normally mean the water rite of entry into the church.

The “body of Christ” is the body of Christ. When the New Testament writers call the church the “body of Christ,” they mean the visible or historical church is the body of Christ.

Apostasy happens.

He gives a chapter each to these ideas. In the chapter on baptism, he considers Romans 6, 1 Corinthians 12:13 and 15:29, Galatians 3:27-29, Ephesians 4, and Colossians 2. He also gives a powerful few sentences to 1 Peter 3, but does not spend much time on it, presumably because he thinks it one of the more obvious references to water baptism. By stacking up these passages, and arguing that their authors had the rite of water baptism in mind when writing them, he shows that baptism (by the sacrifice of the Son, the grace of the Father, and the work of the Spirit) is a powerful symbolic act: that, in other words, Christ’s command in Matthew 28 that the Apostles “baptize” is actually an explanation of how they are to “make disciples” (following up baptism with instruction, of course). The main point of the chapter is that water baptism unites a person to Christ. Read, for example, the following passage from St. Paul (Col. 2:1-15), keeping in mind Leithart’s first proposition:

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ.

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.

“In” baptism, writes the Apostle, we are “buried” and “raised” with Christ. The raising part, at least, also happens “through faith” in the God who raised Christ from death. Leithart sees the immediately following sentence as unpacking this process: “And you, who were dead…God made alive…having forgiven us all our trespasses.” It is as if he said, Through baptism you have been given the circumcision of Christ [that is, his death]: you were once uncircumcised, but now you are circumcised; you were once dead, but now you live; you were once guilty, but now you are forgiven. Baptism makes Christ’s death and new life our own.

Leithart’s reading of Romans 6 also focuses, naturally, on baptism as a link between ourselves and Christ’s death/resurrection. He sees the 1 Cor. 12, Gal. 3, and Eph. 4 passages as teaching that baptism links us to Christ’s body, and therefore also to one another. It is the task of his next chapter to describe precisely what “Christ’s body” means in these and other passages.

The birth of our son, and our decision to join Tates Creek Presbyterian Church (PCA), has naturally led us to ponder infant baptism. According to our church’s teaching, infant baptism is a biblically- and historically-rooted practice, whereas “believer’s baptism” first garnered a substantial following during the Reformation era. It should not surprise those who know me that I’ve taken this opportunity to buy several books.

We started with a pamphlet written by our pastor, entitled What Christian Parents Should Know About Infant Baptism. At 30 pages, we’d read it through (aloud) in two hours. And we remained unconvinced–but that’s no slight to our pastor, since this pamphlet was written to Presbyterians who already accepted the practice. It’s not a polemical book.

I then read the more robust To A Thousand Generations by Douglas Wilson. The back cover of the book makes a startling claim (at least to me, with my non-denominational background):

In a doctrinal matter of this importance, the standards of evidence are high. In arguing for biblical infant baptism, it is not sufficient for us to say that infant baptism is merely consistent with the Scriptures, or that a biblical case can be made for it. In order for us to be satisfied that we are being biblical Christians, we must be content with nothing less than a clear biblical case requiring infant baptism.

I may have more to say about Wilson’s book later, but here I want to focus on another book that Wilson’s book led me to: The Baptized Body (Canon Press, 2007) by Peter Leithart. Leithart, according to his blog, is a father of ten, a Presbyterian pastor (CREC), a college literature prof, an author of multiple books, and a contributor to Touchstone and First Things. In short, he’s the kind of fellow I’m prone, a priori, to admire (and, in some respects, emulate).

Leithart’s book is more about the nature and effects of baptism than infant baptism. But this is not a problem, for one thing I’ve learned in the course of my reading is that one’s theology of infant baptism depends on one’s theology of baptism. The species is secondary to the genus.

I’m not going to attempt a book review. I just want to make notes on several of the significant passages and ideas in The Baptized Body.

In his first chapter, Leithart responds to the Baptist objection that a mere ceremony, such as baptism, cannot possibly have a real spiritual effect on the participant(s), such as the baptized. He begins by voicing the objection:

Sprinkling a few drops of water, especially on an infant, can’t change who he really is. It might affect him in some “external” and “legal” ways, but it cannot touch his core identity. To be blunt, if Abdul is a rank unregenerate unbeliever a moment before baptism, he is still a rank unregenerate unbeliever a moment after baptism. Abdul is still Abdul, even if he’s wet. To suggest otherwise is to transform the sacrament into superstition.

But if this is so, asks Leithart, why does St. Paul say that “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death” (Rom. 6:3)? The problem lies not in Paul, but in the Baptist objection. Or rather, an assumption underlying the objection. Whence the imagined barrier between the spiritual and the physical dimensions of the human person? Not divine revelation, says Leithart. As evidence, he cites several passages from the Psalms, in which the “soul” of the speaker is said to be satisfied and distressed by physical elements/events (e.g., Ps. 42:1, 107:9). He continues:

The point is not that there is no distinction between “inner” and “outer.” There is…. But there is no impermeable membrane between my inner life and my outer life. My inner thoughts and desires come to outer expression, but by the same token what happens to me on the outside affects my inner man. Inner and outer are two dimensions of one united human life.

(Leithart doesn’t make this point, but it appears to me that if such an “impermeable membrane” did exist, then many of the actions we commit with our ‘outsides,’ or bodies, could not be considered righteous or unrighteous – or, more precisely, God would have no good reason to judge our souls for actions committed by our bodies. This sounds like one strain of an old dualistic heresy. Back to Leithart.)

Given this biblical anthropology, we can see how external events, like baptism, might affect the person as a whole. A non-priest becomes a priest through the rite of ordination, a single man becomes a husband through a wedding ceremony, a private citizen gains public authority by inauguration. These new identities are new identities: The ordained is a priest, the man a husband, the citizen a President. We would not say that there is some non-priest lurking under the skin, or the President is only “externally” President. Why should we say there is some “unbaptized” self inside the baptized?

But at what time a man may be sayde to have attayned so farre foorth the the use of reason, as sufficeth to make him capable of those lawes, whereby he is then bound to guide his actions; this is a great deale more easie for common sense to discerne, then for any man by skill or learning to determine: even as it is not in Philosophers, who best knowe the nature both of fire and of golde, to teach what degree of the one will serve to purifie the other, so well as the artisan, who doth this by fire, discerneth by sense when the fire hath that degree of heat which sufficeth for his purpose.

- Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, 1.6.5