Forma Issue #15

YOUR GUIDE THROUGH THE GREAT BOOKS. OLD WESTERN CULTURE ROMANROADSPRESS.COM

Issue 15 Winter 2021

COLUMNS EDITORS’ LETTER

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I N T E RV I E WS POEMS AS PRAYERS: MALCOLM GUITE’S QUARANTINE QUATRAINS

30

by the Editors

Cultural Currency THE LIVES OF OTHERS

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76

by Heidi White

by Joshua Gibbs

F E AT U R E S

From the Classroom ONE PIECE OF ADVICE TO A FIRSTYEAR TEACHER (FROM A SECOND-YEAR TEACHER)

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HUMAN RIGHTS REVISITED

by David Hicks 46

OLIGARCHY OF ASSASSINS: CANCEL CULTURE AND THE GREAT BOOKS

by Jonathan Coleman

BOOK REVIEWS 12

by Missy Andrews

ISLAND OF THE ARTICULABLE: HOW MARILYNNE ROBINSON EXPLORES THE UNSAID

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A CHANGED VISION: DAYE PHILLIPO’S THUNDERHEAD

by Aaron Brown

by Valerie Abraham 14

SOWING MEMORY TO REAP HOPE: ROD DREHER’S LIVE NOT BY LIES

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by James Davenport

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OUR RESTLESS HEARTS: AGNES CALLARD’S ASPIRATION

by Sarah-Jane Bentley 68

by Anthony Barr 20

BEAUTY OF THE SECOND POWER: DIETRICH VON HILDEBRAND’S AESTHETICS

by James Matthew Wilson 25

DANTE: THE EVERYMAN OF MANY WAYS

by Sean Johnson

This magazine is published by the CiRCE Institute. Copyright CiRCE Institute 2020. For a digital version, and for additional content, please go to formajournal.com.

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THE CANNIBAL PEOPLE: INGRATITUDE & UNREST IN SHAKESPEARE’S CORIOLANUS

AN EXCELLENCE ALL YOUR OWN: AN EYE FOR BEAUTY AND THE BODY OF CHRIST

by Colleen Coleman

POETRY 42

MARYANN CORBETT

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ANN THOMAS

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MARY ROMERO

ABOUT The CiRCE Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3 THE organization that exists to promote and supPUBLISHER port classical education in the school and in

the home. We seek to identify the ancient principles of learning, to communicate them enthusiastically, and to apply them vigorously in today’s educational settings through curricula development, teacher training, events, an online academy, and a content-laden website.

Learn more at circeinstitute.com

2021-2021 ENROLLMENT OPENS JANUARY 15!

Featuring:

Editors' Letter n spite of trite media clichés, the troubles of 2020 are not really unprecedented. There have been other global pandemics, political upheavals, natural disasters, and ideological divides in the history of the world—and they shall all happen again. What pundits and retailers are really saying in such statements is that these times have been unprecedented for us, and in this, they are correct. In the West, we have so far been a shallow generation. But this year, the depths have been stirred. Here at FORMA we want to offer a means of contemplating the moment within the context of the tradition. But we are not interested in superficial platitudes or trendy dogmas. As always, we are committed to curating a robust, humane exploration of meaningful issues.

This Winter 2021 issue invites readers to engage in a collective vision for private and public virtue in the midst of a troubled season. After all, if we are plagued by common traumas, we are also ennobled by shared consolations. In this issue, you will find responses to contemporary topics such as cancel culture (from Missy Andrews), the work of Marilynne Robinson (from Aaron Brown), and human rights (by David Hicks). The issue also abounds with timeless contemplations of enduring relevance: poetry and prayer (from poet Malcolm Guite), Shakespeare’s bloody Coriolanus (from Sarah-Jane Bentley), and healing hospitality (from Joshua Gibbs).

And, as always, you will also find book reviews and poetry to challenge your minds and nourish your hearts.

In an uncertain season, there is much to inspire gratitude, including a vibrant community of thoughtful folks around the world living courageous, ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances. We at FORMA are encouraged by your presence and hope to refresh and revive your souls today.

Cheers,

I

The Editors

The Editorial Team Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute Editor-in-Chief: David Kern Managing Editor: Heidi White Art Director: Graeme Pitman Poetry Editor: Christine Perrin Associate Editors: Emily Andrews, Sean Johnson Senior Editors: Jamie Cain, Matt Bianco Contributing Editors: Ian Andrews, Noah Perrin Copy Editor: Emily Callihan

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Cultural Currency

“There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.”

—M. Gustave, The Grand Budapest Hotel

Part I: The Family Person With apologies to Gene Roddenberry, entertaining is actually the final frontier.

Modernity has made us all such private, inhospitable people. We no longer need to leave our homes, but neither do we want to.

We have lately given up on theaters, on restaurants, even on travel. A phone call, formerly a sign of prestige, now seems a crass intrusion. The business trip out of town—which, in a prior age, would require an airplane and a taxi, conversations with the concierge, reservations at a diner’s club—are now to be conducted with no formality, negligible decorum, and no more than a few minutes of planning.

During Zoom meetings, I prefer to turn my video off and listen in while I fold laundry, do the dishes, or cook dinner, which is to say I have become even more impatient and ill-mannered than before. I regularly confess the sin of rudeness. My face is now covered in public, which means I take a good deal of my privacy with me when I leave the home, for I am now free to mouth or whisper the profanities I could only think before. When we all gave up on shaking hands, we might have done the reasonable thing and reverted back to bowing, an elegant and deferential gesture that can be accomplished without physical contact (if that is actually important), but we instead adopted the elbow bump, a formal “greeting” which subtly communicates distrust and suspicion that our friends and colleagues are sick and dirty. That we never really considered the bow is not particularly surprising. The meaninglessness of the elbow

bump comes naturally to a people which no longer cares for people.

We still make plans with friends “for old dignity’s sake,” as James Joyce once put it, but we take little delight in fulfilling these plans, for we are glad when plans fall through and we have “the evening off.” We are far happier sharing photographs of our dinner, which will elicit jealousy, than actually sharing our dinner, which will bring boredom. When friends come over, we cannot scroll them away with our index fingers when they cease to interest us. Our attention spans have atrophied. We no longer have any incentive to find people interesting, or to figure out better questions to ask boring people that we might conjure intrigue from their rubbery souls. The moment something bores us, we escape.

The dangers of inviting someone into your home are threefold, then. First, they might be unclean, a fear brought on by the pandemic.

Second, they might be boring, a fear brought on by our addiction to smartphones. The third is really the most unsettling, though, and has always been a danger of hospitality, even before broadband and the pandemic.

When we invite people into our homes, they come to judge us.

The first thing we try to establish upon entering the homes of other people is whether they are normal or not. At the same time, there is no way to do this without simultaneously figuring out whether you are normal, for “normal” is typically a judgment we make after a broad survey which invariably involves ourselves, as well as others. While we often use the word to imply something is “narrow” FORMA / WINTER 2021 | 9

Cultural Currency

or “dull,” the concept of “normal” is shockingly broad.

Consider the great disparity between enchiladas, chicken coq a vin, bangers and mash, macaroni and cheese, beef bourguignon, club sandwiches, and Italian wedding soup, yet all these dishes would pass as perfectly normal were someone to serve them to you. Or, survey the ladies at church next Sunday and consider all the different kinds of women’s clothes that pass for “normal.” Similarly, “normal behavior” is a wide and forgiving concept that gives sanctuary to melancholic, sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic personalities. If a man became quickly irritated with his children making obnoxious noises, or if he was very patient with their racket, neither would strike me as abnormal. At the same time, we have far more experience with normal dishes and normal clothes than we do with normal families in their normal homes. Very few of us frequent other people’s homes for dinner—or, we may often visit a certain family for dinner, but we do not go to many other people’s homes. In the last six years, I have dined in fewer than ten family homes, and apart from pastors and priests, I suspect most people would report similar numbers. Thus, when it comes to determining what a “normal family” is, we have relatively little experience. In the generosity of our thoughts, we can imagine quite a bit about other families being normal, even if we do things differently: paper napkins or cloth, music or no music, tour or no tour for the guests, expensive wine or cheap, cigarette after dinner or no, all these habits seem like they might be well-appointed. At the same time, dining with others often means stretching our understanding of what “normal” means, because some grown men enjoy a glass of cold juice with their spaghetti and meatballs. I am not necessarily concluding such a thing falls within the range of “normal,” but many years ago, I did spend an entire meal at the home of someone I knew turning this issue in my mind.

It is one thing to say people are different at home than they are in public. In truth, people are far more strange in their homes than they are elsewhere.

In our homes, the local climate of “normal” takes over.

Each member of a family has his or her own distinct personality, but, taken all together, a family is an autonomous person all its own. Each member of the family borrows something from the family person, and yet the family person is distinct. To bring someone into your home is to introduce them to the family person—the fifth member of a family of four, the sixth member of a family of five—a being who cannot entirely be controlled or understood by any single member of the family. The family person is a zeitgeist particular to a single mailing address, a surname daemon, an organizing spirit which is somehow 10 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

beneath everything the family does, and thus invisible, but also over everything the family does, and thus obvious. Richly territorial, the family person never leaves the home, which means the only way of encountering other family persons is to enter the homes of other families.

Nonetheless, one catches oblique hints about every family’s person when an individual member speaks of their life at home, their holiday customs, and what kind of gifts the family buys for itself. The family person is a self-contained culture which is capable of determining what is normal unto itself, though it should not be confused with “house rules,” which are arbitrary laws designed for children by their parents so that order may prevail. But even mother and father are beholden to the family person, for children may appeal to longstanding determinations of the family person when arguing for various rights they have accrued through tradition.

I do not mean to paint the family person in a negative light, though calling it a “zeitgeist” and a “daemon” may sound ominous. In truth, most family persons are almost entirely predictable; however, it is simply the case that everyone believes some particular thing his family person does is normal when, in fact, it is absolutely not. Once, in my twenties, a friend asked me, “You mean your parents didn’t send the children out of the house on Sunday afternoon when they were going to . . . ?” I thought his question the ne plus ultra of weird, but he was entirely matter-of-fact.

Most of the time, the family person is less of a pagan god than a butler, perhaps like Mr. Carson in Downton Abbey or Tommy Lascelles in The Crown, both of whom are servants only in theory. In practice, they are authoritative compilers of convention. While such figures cannot be wholly controlled, they can be dressed in finery and instructed to put on a show for guests. Around the time I turned thirty-three, I realized that having the family person put on a show was not simply a hobby or a social obligation to be enjoyed from time to time. In fact, it is arguably the highest calling of civilization.

Part II: Formality Christians have written an awful lot over the last twenty years on the subject of hospitality, and much of what they have said is overtaxed with theological poetry that is so florid and so precious, I wonder if the writers actually enjoy having people over.

Thirty years ago, having people over was a pain in the neck. Sadly, it is no longer a pain in the neck, for “scruffy hospitality” has entered into the popular lexicon, and now, in addition to distressed jeans and antiqued furniture, many people think not vacuuming be-

Cultural Currency

fore guests come over a sign of genuine enlightenment.

Alas, one more casualty of the casual revolution. When I was a child, my mother would clean the bath before guests came, even though she pulled the shower curtain closed when she finished. As a teenager, I questioned my mother’s sanity over such habits, and asked if she expected the guests to peak behind the shower curtain when no one was looking, to which she always replied, “You never know.” As an adult, I appreciate my mother’s attention to detail. Of course, I am by no means disparaging the potluck, the backyard barbecue, or the post hoc invitation to “drop by for a drink,” all of which are quite informal, yet wonderfully cheer the spirit, prop up friendships, and promote communal bon homie. Such affairs need not be productions, which is to say they do not require us to scrub the tub.

And yet, for a middle-class or upper-class Christian family in a post-Christian society, putting on an evening for friends is the last remaining cultural heirloom we have from what was once called “polite society.” We have otherwise traded classical music for popular music, theater for television, business suits for tracksuits, funerals for celebratory slide shows, and we have more or less given up on dowries, tipping hats, a need for veils, holding doors, “sir” and “ma’am,” hardback books, thank you cards, and formal apologies—although, there yet remain a very few churchgoing people in the world who still invite friends over for dinner and “do it up right,” by which I mean there is nearly a bottle of wine reserved for each adult, the napkins are ironed, candles are lit, several courses are served, the food is plated, and three or four hours is set aside to enjoy it all.

During such evenings, the hosting family proposes a vision of civilization for their guests. We may not design worship services however we see fit, neither may any individual reframe the government according to his own prejudices, but we can choose how we serve our friends dinner, and there is no law which prohibits going all out.

While “civilization” is a notoriously tricky word to define, I like Donald Kagan’s simple definition that civilization exists wherever individuals are not self-sufficient.

When people must depend on one another, civilization has emerged. Of course, we depend on others in a variety of ways. I depend on my priest, but not for my income. I depend on my school, but not for penance. Obviously, a dinner invitation is a kind of gift, and if men did not have souls, giving gifts would simply be a slow form of suicide.

It may sound like a tautology, but I depend on my friends for their friendship, and putting on a dinner for friends is a way of ornamenting the friendship, beautifying it. There is some sense in which the duties a husband pays to his

wife are paid to all women, for while every marriage concerns individuals, marriage as a whole is an institution given for the care of mankind and womankind, which is why husbands and wives have roles. The husband plays the man, the wife plays the woman, the couple plays Christ and the church. Likewise, one cannot have friends over for dinner without making some sort of claim about what all human beings deserve and need. For the same reason we ought to call strangers “sir,” we ought to—from time to time—offer our friends the best we have.

I have come too close to theologizing hospitality, though, and before going too far down that road, I should say the best reason to have friends over for a long, elaborate dinner is this: if you commit your attention (and conversation) to someone else for an entire evening, and if you treat them well and refill their glass often (and if you clean the house before they arrive, perhaps as a way of preaching a sermon to yourself about human dignity), and if your purpose is to give your tired and weary friends rest from the vulgarity and misery of the City of Man, they will begin to reveal their hearts to you in new and profound ways. If you put on a show, and if the family person plays the valet, and if you treat your friends like visiting dignitaries, you will begin to see what people are made for. In vino veritas. Between sobriety and drunkenness is a dazzling, protean range of unguarded, honest emotions and opinions that cannot be coaxed out of a man apart from the safety which comes when he is honored. While these emotions and opinions are not “the real man,” as though the public persona were mere fakery, they are a real side of a man which will atrophy if it is not given occasions to breathe. In such a state, a man is neither an employer nor an employee, neither a Democrat nor a Republican, neither a Baptist nor a Catholic. He is free. On the sabbath, as in death, slaves and masters are equal.

When Christ was born, He was given gold, frankincense, and myrrh, not because of what He had accomplished, but because of what He was. Likewise, we clean our houses for our friends because we are their housekeepers. We take their coats because we are their maids.

We recommend the Saint-Émilion grand cru 2014 because we are the stewards of their cellars. You can make a lord of a man—change his very nature, even if just for the evening—if you’re willing to give your life over to him.

And what a thrill! How worth the expense! It is not every day one gets to dine with nobility.

Joshua Gibbs is the author of How to Be Unlucky, Something They Will Not Forget, and The 25th: New and Selected Christmas Essays.

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Book Review

d

Perhaps one of the most striking themes and motifs in Phillippo’s poetry is the recurrence of dialogue between past and present, as though the “cloud of witnesses” gone before us were rising up to give their commentary on our lives. The result of this commentary is a kind of antiphonal voice running through the collection, as Phillippo brings us first into her own world, and then invites the past to add its voice to that world, which in turn gives us a fresh perspective on an existence less bound by the present—or time of any kind. When so many are tempted to forget their history entirely, or patronizingly analyze it through their own modern predisposition, Phillippo turns history into a character with a mind of its own, reserved, but ready to address us with gravitas.

This antiphonal “historic” voice shines brightest in her extended images. Consider this epic simile woven into her poem “Decorating the Graves,” about visiting family graves and contemplating the reality of death in a pre-modern world:

. . . When the day closes its orange eye in cloud bank, it is best to let sleep

Such grief before antibiotics, before our time, a grief we never knew the way we never knew the heft of the black hand pump standing, top of the hill against the sky.

Never knew what it was to wrestle the iron handle up and down like a strong man’s arm.

Never knew priming the pump, waiting for water to splash out.

A Changed Vision

By Valerie Abraham aye Phillippo is unabashed by her unorthodox journey into academia and publishing, and it shows in the down-to-earth and fearless quality to her slim, moving volume of poems, Thunderhead. She writes about what she knows and loves, giving each poem a personal, even intimate, touch.

She invites the reader to see the glory and beauty of an “ordinary” life with the delight and love that she herself clearly has for that life. Her use of imagery and contrast recalls the vivid and startling scenes of T. S. Eliot, and her fondness for discrete Homeric similes turns a simple nature vignette into a more profound observation on the deeper nature of the world. This word painting is on full display in her poem “Open Window,” with a simile for sleep that shall stay with me as much as Shakespeare’s “sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.”

flow in like creekwater around stones, smooth the day’s sharp edges with a sound like chuckling, as if tomorrow can’t help but be better.

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Book Review

Any pedant can pontificate on what it must have been like to live in any age but our own, but here we catch the glint of Phillippo’s word-painting genius especially clearly: a concrete object, known to her and described to us, vividly drawn for us as a relic of the past that she is imagining, simultaneously anchored in what was and what is. This tangible conduit conjures the rest of the lost world she describes, where mothers grieved their babies and husbands buried wives lost in childbirth. Her poem moves us from what could easily remain, outside of poetry, an abstract historical observation into a viscerally-felt moment.

This voice of the past in turn informs the idea of place that Phillippo explores. To contemplate place, one realizes in reading these poems, one must also contemplate the demands of time and relationship. The reader finds himself irresistibly

invited into a world where threads of history are revealed in the peeling paint of an ancient door, fierce love is expressed in the unpretentious pulling of weeds, and “flyover” country is radiant with the grace of God in a thunderstorm.

Thunderhead is woven of the kind of poetry that will ruffle your indifference and leave you with changed vision.

Valerie Abraham grew up in France, fell in love with Idaho, and now resides in North Carolina with her husband, Matthew, and their two little boys plus one on the way. The kitchen is her main creative outlet, but she also loves illuminated manuscripts, tall mountains, and long conversations about the Great Books. You can find her podcasting at museandhearth.com.

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Book Review

Sowing Memory to Reap Hope

By James Davenport o has the circle closed? So is there indeed no way out? So the only thing left to do is wait inertly: What if something just happens by itself? But it will never come unstuck by itself, if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point. From lies.”

These words were penned by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “Live Not by Lies!” , an essay released on the day he was arrested by the KGB in 1974. In it, he claims that the only thing one can do to resist totalitarianism is to live by the light of truth and vow to never uphold a lie.

In his new book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, Rod Dreher gives a similar exhortation to our own age. The soft totalitarianism of “woke” ideology is coming, he insists, and we must deny its lies.

There is an implicit analogy at the core of Dreher’s book: “woke” or progressive ideology is to America as Soviet totalitarianism was to the Soviet bloc. “Woke” culture is totalitarian because it “aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality.” However, the way in which these two ideologies present themselves are different. Dreher calls woke ideology “soft totalitarianism” as opposed to the hard totalitarianism of Soviet Communism:

S

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This totalitarianism won’t look like the USSR’s.

It’s not establishing itself through “hard” means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft terms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic.

It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

This totalitarian threat will not break man down physically, but will rather seek to lull him into a pleasure state from which it can control him. Soft totalitarianism is more Huxley than Orwell. Dreher refers back to this analogy constantly and it helps to draw out the difference between therapeutic (or Soma-induced) totalitarianism and the harder Big Brother variety.

Just as Communist ideology exploited the lack of religion among many twentieth-century intellectuals, this new totalitarianism “appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression.”

It is able to do this because of our therapeutic culture.

Dreher appeals to Philip Rieff to show that man no longer lives according to transcendent moral principles but rather seeks to liberate the individual “to seek his own pleasures and to [manage] emergent anxieties.”

With the rise of Psychological Man came a new “watery spirituality which could accommodate anything.”

When religion slips away from a society, it is always replaced. Given the political, cultural, and social climate of our day, it makes sense that a soft, therapeutic, social justice-oriented totalitarianism would take its place rather than a hard totalitarianism.

Book Review

The most explicit example Dreher gives of soft totalitarianism is what he calls the “Cult of Social Justice” and its “Social Justice Warriors.” He writes, “In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. . . . This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia.” Campus culture has grown up, Dreher tells us, and in the same way that it took over campus without a fight, it is now taking over society. The force of woke social justice doctrine preys on the minds and hearts of those who lack grounding in faith and traditional institutions.

Dreher spends much of the book’s first one hundred pages explaining his analogy to the Soviet era, offering signs in our society that suggest the advance of totalitarianism. He draws out similarities between Soviet Russia and the United States and dedicates a portion of the first half to “Woke Capitalism.” “The story of surveillance capitalism begins in 2003,” Dreher writes, “when Google . . . patented a process to allow it to use the vast amount of data it gathered from individual searches in a new way.

The company’s data scientists had figured out how to utilize ‘data exhaust’… to predict the kind of advertising that would most appeal to individual users.” Big tech knows when you wake up, where you run, who you email, what you write, and everything you buy. According to Dreher, it is a hidden Big Brother—one we have learned to love and carry in our pockets.

Dreher frames his book in light of Fr. Kolaković, a Jesuit priest and anti-facist activist originally named Tomis Poglajen who fled from the Gestapo in Croatia and settled in Czechoslovakia. Having studied Communist totalitarianism and experienced the threat of Nazism, he set to the task of preparing Czechoslovakian Christians for persecution. In the end, Fr. Kolaković shepherded his flock through some of the worst persecution of Christtians in the twentieth-century.

Kolaković’s motto served to guide the dissidents: “See. Judge. Act. See meant to be awake to realities around you.

Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion then you are to act to resist evil.”

To teach the dissidents how to live this motto, Kolaković started small groups. They read Scripture, heard lectures on numerous topics, and built up an intellectual and spiritual community. Through this, these Christians were prepared when totalitarianism came. As a result, “though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his

people.”

Dreher also tells the story of a particularly inspiring family—“The Benda clan of Prague.” The Bendas are a Catholic family whose patriarch, Václav, was sent to prison for four years in 1979 because he fought for human rights. The Bendas were at the center of the underground Catholic Church and would be integral to the Charter 77 resistance movement. Not only did they keep their family and faith strong, they also aided those interrogated by the Státní bezpečnost, the communist-era secret police. Living near the headquarters, the Bendas hosted those on their way to and from interrogation, providing them with love, hospitality, advice, and encouragement.

The Bendas, like Fr. Kolaković, took a generational approach to resisting totalitarianism, consciously equipping the next generation to continue resisting. They nurtured the moral imaginations of their children by encouraging them to watch movies like the western classic High Noon and by reading books like The Lord of the Rings. Dreher mines the household culture of the Bendas to synthesize six practices that will help one resist totalitarianism and train children to do the same: • Model moral courage • Fill [Children’s] moral imagination with conceptions of the Good • Don’t be afraid to be weird in society’s eyes • Prepare to make great sacrifices for the greater good • Teach [your children] they are part of a wider movement • Practice hospitality and serve others Dreher proposes that we should learn from Soviet-era dissidents in our own resistance. In a sense, Dreher takes the humble position of Kolaković. He desires to show us a way forward so we might be like the Bendas and like Kolaković himself. His success in this is mixed.

Dreher collects chilling accounts of twentieth-century oppression and connects them believably to our current state through readable and thorough analysis. He also provides stories from which we can learn the imitable virtues of prudence and fortitude required for resistance.

But Dreher does not give enough emphasis to the need for institutions. He spends a great deal of time speaking about the importance of Christian small groups, but this is closely tied to his historical discussions of the small, dislocated bands of faithful Christians living under totalitarianism. They were making the best of what they had—which was little—but while our own cultural decline is still in earlier stages perhaps we should also look to broader local associations like rotary clubs, neighborFORMA / WINTER 2020 | 15

Book Review

hood community groups, and local parishes.

In Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, he writes about how as local associations wane the power of the state grows. In soft totalitarianism we see something similar: as local associations shrink and disappear, “woke” ideology grows in power. No matter where totalitarianism is imposed from, its power increases when local associations lose their importance. Dreher sees and notes this; however, his answer to the problem seems simply to be traditional Christianity. Indeed he writes, “If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you.” There is no doubt that Dreher’s conception of traditional Christianity contains some sense of an institutional Church; however, to fend off this soft totalitarianism we may also need institutions of a wider variety. America will require institutions that allow local communities and neighbors to band together. We must bolster our institutions and signal to the broader culture that there is another way. We can make the voice of reason heard on a larger scale because we are not powerless. Dreher’s neglect of these other institutions in his appeals to the reader suggests he either believes the institutional church can be a sufficient apparatus for these measures, or, more alarmingly, that things have gotten too bad for them to be viable remedies any longer. In the latter case—if indeed we can no longer use the foundations of our liberal republic, our legal system, and our local associations to keep this totalitarianism from taking control—Dreher’s warning and encouragement is all the more timely, less as a means of preventing a coming crisis than of weathering it.

Too many people today do not know the stories of the gulags. And so Dreher wrote this book—people must be reminded of the horrors of totalitarianism.

Many of the stories he tells are enough to make one set down the book and weep, and this emotional response is important because it prompts action. Even more importantly, we need these stories because they remind us of how people resisted, how they kept their faith and their sanity. Memory provides the impetus to keep what we cherish; it is also the seed by which even what is taken from us can be regained. It is the cultivation of memory that will allow us to live by truth and not by lies.

James Davenport is the Academic Program Officer for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and a graduate of the Templeton Honors College, where he studied politics, philosophy, and theology.

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Book Review

Our Restless Hearts

By Anthony Barr hat exactly is going on in Augustine’s famous prayer: “Give me chastity, but not yet”? Does Augustine want to be chaste or does he not?

The puzzle is this: in praying for chastity, Augustine sabotages his desire for sin, but in praying for a delay in that chastity, Augustine simultaneously sabotages his desire for holiness.

Are there two Augustines? How do we make sense of such a peculiar, and yet familiar, situation?

In her new book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, philosopher Agnes Callard explores this very question.

She opens her book by observing that “we can all think back to a time when we were substantially different people, value-wise, from the people we are now.” And she endeavors to answer this question: how is it exactly that we acquire new values? How is it that we can “slowly develop new priorities, concerns, and attachments” in a way that is “not structured by a single moment of intention or decision at its inception”?

Callard imagines us as aspirants. She argues that “the aspirant sees that she does not have the values that she would like to have, and therefore seeks to move herself toward a better valuational condition. She senses that there is more out there to value than she currently values, and she strives to come to see what she cannot yet get fully into view.” Callard explains that we act our way into new values: “We aspire by doing things, and the

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things we do change us.” This isn’t ambition or wish-fulfilment, which both require that we have a very concrete idea of what we want, based on what we currently value. Instead, aspiration is about having a fuzzy idea: we want something we don’t quite understand, and we move toward values that we only dimly perceive until we possess them. Augustine has some idea of what chastity will mean for him, and he perceives its goodness enough to feel compelled toward it (or rather her, Lady Continence). But because his understanding is too limited, he is not quite able to immediately apprehend, and therefore embrace, this virtue for himself. Hence, the tortured prayer of the aspiring saint.

Callard’s book is firmly situated within the discipline of philosophy, but, like all good philosophy, it opens itself up in many directions to the questions and insights of theology. I want to consider the theological ramifications, but I do so while deeply indebted to the rigorous philosophical work that makes such theological reflection possible.

Mothers and Vampires One of Callard’s main points is that aspirational growth is rarely immediate. Sometimes we know we want to acquire new values, as in the case of the person who says, “I don’t enjoy classical music, but I want to, and so I am enrolling in this course to that end.” But often we don’t realize that we are moving toward new values, as is the case when I dutifully pray for my enemies and realize one day that I no longer feel animosity toward them, but rather love.

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becoming a vampire and becoming a parent. Callard writes (not, I imagine, from personal experience) that “when I become a vampire, I first decide to be bitten, and then the bite transforms me.” Specifically, after being bitten, “I will find myself with typically vampiric thoughts, habits, and values: a love of spiders, excellent fashion sense, and cold indifference toward humans.” But becoming a parent is not like becoming a vampire, not least because typically “becoming a parent is neither something that just happens to you nor something you decide to have happen to you. It is something you do.” And beyond that, “it is not something that you can do in a moment: we spend a long time becoming mothers and fathers.”

As a related point, the process of becoming a mother begins in the interior life, deep within the heart’s most intimate decision-making processes. Callard notes that “someone who is considering whether or not to throw out the birth control pills began the process of coming to acquire the values, perspective, interests, and concerns of a mother long before [she gets pregnant].” Likewise, the Catholic tradition speaks of the “baptism by desire.” We recognize that the Spirit works within us quietly, gently, long before there is external evidence of our transformation. Salvation, then, is not like becoming a vampire; it is much more like becoming a mother. And so we watch Augustine journeying toward God, and we see him as “located on a path of rational access” (and ascent!), working his way “into a new point of view.” And all the while, he only possesses an “inchoate, anticipatory, and indirect grasp” of “some good” that he desperately desires to “know better.” Therefore, while this journey is sourced in faith and driven toward love, it is sustained by hope–the hope that the good is real, that it is knowable, that he will come to know it and be known by it.

Temptation and Sin Callard wants us to see that our values shape the phenomenological horizons of our world, structuring our attention, perception, desires, and choices. She writes that “the things I value delimit the shape of my practical rationality, in that my values determine what shows up for me as a reasonable thing to do.” And it’s not just that our values prompt our immediate actions and reactions; they also condition our deliberation and discernment. She notes that “when I value something . . . I approve of my own affective entanglement with it. Thus valuing seems to include both an affective component and a cognitive one.”

But there are of course many times when we do not approve of our own desires or the affective entanglements that entrap us. We can think here of Augustine, the sinful but aspiring saint, confessing his fragmented self, confessing his desire both for chastity and for sin. Callard writes 18 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

that the moral agent can in fact “feel alienated from her own assessment.” And indeed, another way to talk about being in a state of sin is to note that it undoes the integrity of the integrated self, leading to alienation from God, others, and ourselves.

The path to sin begins in temptation, which Callard writes about using the example of wanting a tasty cookie while dieting. In this example, there are two sets of competing values rooted in two different desires: on the one hand, the value of temperance (or perhaps continence) and the desire for health, and on the other hand, the value of pleasure and the desire for a specific cookie. In our deliberation, we might recognize both values/desires, saying something like, “While this cookie looks pleasing to the eye, I care more about keeping my diet for the sake of my health.” But of course, even though we do actually care about health, many times we find ourselves giving in to the temptation. And to be precise, when we yield to temptation, we are narrowing our horizons only to consider the immediate pleasure before us. Pope John Paul II defines concupiscence in this way, as a narrowing of vision, so that I only see you in the narrowest senses of sexual desire and so am motivated to act with you in ways that I would not if I had your full personhood in view.

And so, like St. Paul, we often find ourselves bemoaning our sorry state, in which we fail to do the good we want to do while doing the bad that we don’t want to do. “Wretched man,” cries St. Paul. “Give me chastity, but not yet,” echoes St. Augustine. Callard affirms that “it is frustrating to see that I, via my recalcitrant vision of the good, stand in the way of my attainment of the good.” But like St. Paul and St. Augustine, Callard does not believe this frustration needs to lead us to despair. She writes that “the fault lines that erupt in akratic action are at the same time the indications of my potential for growth.”

The Work of Perfection In the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Christ instructs us to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

It is disquieting, to say the least, that this is given to us as an imperative. We are not like those vampires, transformed in a bite. Rather, we have an aspirational state of perfection toward which we must journey.

Callard writes that “the aspirant does not end up with a new value in the way that one might end up with an ulcer or an inheritance.” Instead, the aspirant “orchestrates her value-acquisition, driving herself toward a different value-condition from the one she is in.” And Callard adds that “from this vantage point, aspiration emerges as a kind of work.” Callard writes that “in her repeated attempts to ‘get it right,’ attempts that must be performed without the benefit of knowing exactly what rightness consists in,” the

Book Review

moral agent gains experience that will become “second nature.”

I am reminded of Augustine’s words in a reflection on the Gospel of John in which he says, “He who created you without you will not justify you without you.” I think this is what it means for us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” I don’t mean to wade into the nuanced theological debates on free will, justification, and the like.

I mean this in a much more ecumenical sense: we make every effort to become conformed to the image of Christ through our emulation of Him, but we recognize that this process is sourced in grace, and that it is only through His “precious and very great promises” that we “become partakers of the divine nature.” It is again not my goal here to detail the contours of our actions or God’s grace, but only to say that I think Callard gives us helpful conceptual frameworks for understanding our own moral responsibility. And nevertheless, for all the needed talk of the individual’s moral responsibility, Callard also gracefully notes that “this is not to deny that the aspirant receives help.”

Perfection is often understood merely as sinlessness. But I think the Christian tradition offers a deeper understanding of perfection and imperfection, and again, Callard is really helpful on this point. She notes that “something can be imperfect in virtue of being undeveloped or immature, as distinct from wrong or bad or erroneous.” St. Athanasius among others believed that Adam and Eve, while sinless, were not yet fully perfected. Human perfection actually requires the incarnation; it requires God himself taking on our likeness and joining our nature to Himself in the person of Christ. The incarnation is thus a bridge, for it allows us to be united to God through the person of Christ. And therefore, perfection is not simply about moral responsibility or about aspiring to virtue. In fact, perfection is something far greater: aspiring toward deeper and deeper union with God. We are imperfect beings, and our understanding is often imperfect in ways that harm or hinder us. And sometimes instead of aspiring toward, we simply flail around, lacking even the preliminary insight of what we ought to aspire toward. Here, Callard mercifully notes that “flailing is not nothing.” I am reminded of the Holy Spirit, who knows that we do not know how we ought to pray, and who groans in intercession on our behalf. And I think also of St. Lucy, who intercedes for Dante while he is still lost in the deep wood.

Callard writes that “we cannot hold off from making use of our values until such a time as they are securely in our possession; for what happens in the meanwhile is also life.”

And while it is frustrating to be both sinner and aspiring saint, I think it is the gift of grace that the “meanwhile” of becoming is often a place of profound goodness, and that all the while, “we have a great high priest who can sympa-

thize with us in our weakness.”

Conclusion: Aspiring Toward the Infinite Good Philosopher Phillip Cary—my professor in college—wrote a richly consoling book offering Good News for Anxious Christians. He warns about the trap of infinite regression into ourselves. If our starting place for salvation is questions like, “Do I have enough faith?” or “Do I feel the presence?” or “Do I actually believe what I think I believe?” we can end up paralayzed by self-doubt and the inability to differentiate our truest self from possible self-deceptions. Cary observes that this kind of self-torment characterized much of Luther’s early years. After his liberation from this torment, Luther understood that the starting place can’t be our own interiority, it has to be the promises of Christ. “How do I know if I am saved?” asks Luther; well, I look to the promises that were made to me by Christ in my baptism, for that is where salvation is vouchsafed for me. Again, I mean this to be broadly ecumenical: this is not about debates over the efficacy of sacramental acts, for example. This is about where we direct our attention: either inward at ourselves or outward at God. God is infinite and infinitely good, and that means that in our aspiration, we never reach the bottom of His nature.

Callard writes of another philosopher, Talbot Brewer, and his work on what he calls “dialectical desire.” It is the nature of interpersonal love that it is a dialectic: I respond to your love with love and you respond to that love with love and I respond and you respond” and there is no cessation.

Callard writes that “Brewer traces the concept of dialectical desire to the descriptions of the desire for union with God in Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Aquinas (as well as later Christian mystics).” She notes that this results in an “infinitude borne of the impossibility of, e.g, ‘satiating one’s appetite for God’—an infinity “written into the nature of the activity.” While Callard, as a proper philosopher, notes that such theological inquiries are beyond the scope of her project, I find it fascinating that she sees herself as opening the door to that kind of inquiry.

In the end, Callard’s book is a stirring exploration of aspiration in our everyday lives. Aspiration is all about attention toward, growth toward. Therefore her project is inherently and inevitably teleological in nature, just as we ourselves are teleological in our human nature. For indeed we are created for one definitive and glorious purpose: everlasting union with God. As Augustine so memorably wrote, “Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”

Anthony Barr is a graduate of Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. He writes for Ethika Politika, University Bookman, and the CiRCE Institute.

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Book Review

Beauty of the Second Power

By James Matthew Wilson ate in life, the great German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand sat down to record his long reflections on aesthetics.

Just as Immanuel Kant proceeded from his critique of reason and truth to that of moral will and goodness before concluding with his Third Critique (that of perception and judgment), so von Hildebrand’s book came not only at the end of his career, but also rounded out and completed his philosophical vision. To that point, his work had been primarily dedicated to explaining how we, as persons, know the truth and will the good. Then, in a remarkably short span, he drafted these two volumes, books that play upon the ambiguity intrinsic to the neologism: “aesthetics.” Aesthetics may be a philosophy of perception, of how we receive and interpret phenomena; it may be, more narrowly, the philosophy of beauty; and, more narrowly still, the philosophy of the work of art, namely, the art of the beautiful.

Although these books are, strictly speaking, unfinished, von Hildebrand builds upon his whole career to give us a comprehensive account of aesthetics in all three of its acceptations. In volume I, he discusses the ways in

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which we perceive and judge beauty and other “aesthetic values,” while volume II is dedicated entirely to a philosophy of the work of art, one that gives us close investigations of each major art form, including architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, and music.

As the late Roger Scruton notes in his forward to volume II, von Hildebrand writes with such clarity, authority, and noble fluency, that one may at times forget one is reading a rather monumental philosophical treatise. One seems simply to have come upon the thorough and systematic notes of a connoisseur who has spent a lifetime contemplating works of art with precision. But, of course, one is reading both, for philosophy as von Hildebrand understands it really is nothing other than the reflections of a connoisseur of human experience. He writes not primarily with a dream of system-building, but of responding adequately to what we encounter in the phenomena of the world.

If the grace and specificity of observation tempts us to believe there is no system at all guiding his inquiry, however, we would be wrong. And indeed it is the subtle way in which von Hildebrand brings his philosophical system to completion in these volumes that accounts for the—very minor—difficulties the reader is likely to encounter in these pages and also for what I take to be their most enduring contribution. The books account for everything not holistically, as if all our experience of the arts must be reduced to a single commanding idea, but sensitively—that is, by observing what each and every

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phenomenon that comes to us says for and in itself. So precise is von Hildebrand in this sort of observation that one comes away from these volumes with a sense that all the arts have at last been seen as they really are: as their own personal, spiritual realities.

Von Hildebrand was one of the most distinguished of a generation of European philosophers who learned from the first phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy that the lay reader will most likely have encountered at least in some few of the gnomic pages of Martin Heidegger. At its most general, we may think of it as philosophy done in such a way that it sets aside the kinds of fundamental questions considered in the “methodical doubt” of Descartes and other modern philosophers, at least long enough to record what experience actually gives to us. Its currency and concern is first and foremost the phenomenon—the way in which reality presents itself to us.

Whereas Heidegger is perhaps best known for his critiques of the way in which human beings all too often hide from the authentic deliverances of experience, von Hildebrand may be best known for his careful study of the way in which we as persons—as embodied, spiritual beings receptive to and acting in the world—fulfill our personhood, our natures, by responding to what experience so richly and freely gives us. Heidegger has frequently been called a gnostic, for, in his work, it seems as if almost no one responds to the human condition authentically. Von Hildebrand was, in contrast, one of the leading Catholic minds of early twentieth-century Germany, and his work continues to be a cornerstone of the Christian personalism practiced by, among many, Pope John Paul II. In brief, he dared to think human beings might actually get things right now and again and live in a way pleasing to God. In von Hildebrand’s account of things, human beings encounter the world in terms of being, and indeed we can perceive diverse instances of merely “neutral beings” in themselves. But experience also gives to us the perception of “value” and “disvalue.” A value is any reality, or aspect of reality, that is important in itself, independent of our perceptions. As he portrays experience, it comes to us at once as saturated and yet oddly atomized, or at least disjointed. We perceive ontological values, moral values, intellectual values, and aesthetic values, as well as, when such is possible, their opposites. Values overlap on the same being, though some may be “thematic” while others are not, as we see in the simple example of eating a sandwich. When I eat it, the thematic value may be the taste, or its allaying my hunger, but its nutrition is also a real value, present but unthematized.

Because von Hildebrand seeks to record and respect the values we actually encounter, we do not always sense that they fit together into an intelligible order. His way of observing experience therefore manages to be capacious without becoming unified. It reminds me at times of the impressionists, who, in the effort to see the texture of reality genuinely, often slapped paint on with a palette knife or kept their individual brush strokes thickly visible on the canvas. To my mind, this technique has both advantages and disadvantages.

First, to a clear disadvantage: despite his faithful apprenticeship to the founders of phenomenology, especially Scheler, from whom he derived his theory of “value,” von Hildebrand is akin to Heidegger as an instance of what T.S. Eliot somewhat awkwardly called “the one-man philosophy.” By this, Eliot meant those cases in which a philosopher tries to build his system from scratch, individually, just as Descartes recommended in the opening pages of his Discourse on Method.

This may not sound extraordinary. Is it not, in fact, what constitutes much of modern philosophy, wherein Descartes gives birth to Cartesianism, Kant to Kantian idealism, and so on? And further, is it not the case that these particular schools really are meaningfully responding to and arguing with one another? The answer to both questions is, more or less, yes, but this is not the only or the best way in which to “do” philosophy.

Most of this modern “one-man” way of philosophical reflection occurred outside the Catholic tradition, even when, as in Descartes’s case, the philosopher was a Catholic. Within Catholic philosophy and theology there has been something a bit closer to a unified tradition, what the Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen referred to as thinking “der Vorzeit,” of and with the tradition dating back to classical antiquity. Kleutgen viewed this tradition as fulfilled in scholasticism, and in Saint Thomas Aquinas above all.

But, by this, “Thomism” is not understood as yet another philosophy of one man; it merely describes a tradition to which Aquinas gives particularly authoritative expression. One could call it, as I do, simply the broad “Christian Platonist,” or classical, tradition and still be referring to the same grand set of ideas and practices.

Von Hildebrand draws on this tradition and accepts many of its deliverances, but he also stands apart from it, and this leads to some odd details in his work. Let us consider one crucial example. As most famously articulated in book VII of S. Augustine’s Confessions, the broad Christian Platonist tradition names God as the Good Itself. All created things, insofar as they have being from God, are also good. Sin and evil are always depravations in being, holes torn in the cloth of reality that have a kind of negative reality only. They have no independent exisFORMA / WINTER 2021 | 21

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tence. As such, to be able to recognize an evil, which is an absence of being, implies that one would be able to identify its contrast, a good, which is a relative fullness of being. Furthermore, if one can recognize a fullness of being, then merely by encountering a being marred by evil, we are given some clue to what things should be, what they are called to become, if their being is to fulfill its purpose.

The existence of any one thing points us toward the total order of what things are and also what they are for.

We move from goods to the Good and back. For Augustine and the Christian Platonic tradition in general, this is something our intellect can and does do. It moves from beings to Being, from truths to the Truth, and from beauties to Beauty Itself. All things have their independent existences, but independence does not entail free-floating disconnections from the one source of all things that is God himself.

Von Hildebrand’s way of recording experience is more static and less cohesive. Some beings we perceive as having the value of goodness, but the disvalue of evil is no less real. In ethics, this suggests that one could choose good or evil, without, in the case of one’s choosing the latter, understanding this as a mere negation in one’s being. By this, I do not suggest that von Hildebrand’s ethical vision is amoral, but only that his theory of “value” does not provide the best available account of goodness as it is found in the being of things.

In his Aesthetics we find something similar. We encounter the value (or values) of beauty in things, but ugliness has an existential reality proper to itself, such that some beings have its “disvalue” adhering to them. His favorite example is the hippopotamus. When we see hippos, we do not say that their ungainly appearances are the result of a negation of their being. Rather, von Hildebrand argues, when we perceive the hippo, we recognize its “value,” or disvalue, as positive ugliness. One has to admit that this is an elegant solution to a problem most shrug off as just part of God’s rather weird sense of humor. But it can also lead us to perceive our experience as a very loose omnium gatherum that does not correspond to our understanding of the world holding together as one, founded and completed in God, and intelligible in terms of being, truth, goodness, and beauty. Von Hildebrand’s vision is rich in meanings but poor in purposes, and that is a definite weakness in comparison with the Christian Platonist tradition, which shows us that all meanings are fundamentally rooted in purposes.

Von Hildebrand expresses his antagonism to the Christian Platonist tradition early in the volume, where he attacks the aesthetic theory of the Catholic philosopher and neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain. In Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), Maritain mentions in passing 22 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

that the human experience of revulsion before ugliness is a consequence of our bodily existence and partial vision of things. Ugliness, that is, feels to us more positively existent or real than it actually is; God sees the depravity of ugliness, but does not experience it with “revulsion.”

Von Hildebrand’s vehemence against Maritain is outdone only by his failure to understand what Maritain actually says. Ugliness is absolutely real, he replies; God does not perceive less than we human beings do. But this is hardly Maritain’s point.

This incidental grouse against Maritain leads von Hildebrand to conclude, “What I call metaphysical beauty is certainly not identical with Maritains’ transcendental property of being.” This seemingly obscure distinction in fact drives home how far von Hildebrand thinks he has separated himself from the Christian Platonist tradition’s account of beauty.

And this is unfortunate for a very specific reason. Yes, if you asked a contemporary undergraduate, “What is beauty?” he very likely would tell you, “Everyone has his own definition of it.” But this is not actually the case. In the long Christian Platonist tradition, from Plato and Aristotle, on through Thomas Aquinas, Maritain, and up to our present day, as represented by such figures as Joseph Pieper, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Stratford Caldecott, and D.C. Schindler, there is a rich and sturdy consensus about what beauty is. They all say, more or less, that beauty is the capacity of existent form to disclose itself and to do so in terms of its own existence, in its relationship to other beings, and in relation to the creative intelligence of God himself. For this reason, beauty is neatly defined as splendor formae, the splendor of form. In this definition, we account for the complexity of beauty (the beautiful has form, or its own integrity, but also splendor, its irradiating and innumerable ratio relative to things beyond itself); we also account for its relation to truth, goodness, and being—all of which are rooted together in the classical idea of form, meaning the intelligible, active principle of a thing.

Von Hildebrand’s view of things does come close to this traditional consensus; indeed his understanding of beauty borrows from Plato, to speak of a radiance or splendor of some value. He is closer to Maritain than he is willing to admit. And yet, he tries to hold it all at arm’s length, and to his own cost in at least one respect: beauty, like all values, floats rather freely in his phenomenology, and so seems to communicate less to us than it actually does.

This complaint notwithstanding, as an original thinker, von Hildebrand achieves something compelling in these volumes. I will list three aspects of his thought with which everyone who wants to think about beauty must reckon.

Book Review

First, in his opening reflections, he demolishes all accounts of beauty that would render it “subjective.” The contemporary student who says “everyone has his own definition of beauty” really just means to say that, in his thoughtless account of things, he has concluded that there is no arguing over taste, and beauty seems to be something for which we have taste; beauty must, therefore, first, be just a “taste,” a subjective sensation, and, second, must be something about which we can have feelings and opinions but which does not amount to communicable knowledge.

Von Hildebrand shows that this relegation of beauty to the interior, subjective realm of unaccountable feeling does not hold. Even at the level of feeling—experience itself, that is, at its most intimate—we intuit feelings in ourselves but intuit beauty as adhering to an object perceived. We as a matter of course can tell the difference, within our own experience, between what is “in” us and what is “out there,” and every such experience tells us beauty is out there. To say otherwise is mere sophistry.

The Christian Platonist tradition tells us that beauty is a property of being—a position von Hildebrand, again, rejects (and to his cost). Just as being is an analogous concept, so that to be an idea, a sandwich, a hippo, or a human does not mean exactly the same thing in each instance, so also with beauty. There is intellectual beauty, moral beauty, sensible beauty, and (perhaps) so on. The tradition acknowledges these analogous realities and moves on to other things.

Von Hildebrand is in no such hurry. His second great contribution to aesthetics is to linger over the different kinds by which the value of beauty appears in experience.

Visible and audible things often appear intuitively (immediately) as beautiful. The blue of the sky is beautiful at its foundation; there’s no getting behind the phenomenon to justify it on terms other than itself. Non-sensible realities, such as ideas, moral actions, a well-achieved personality, and so on, can also have beauty adhere to them. This is what von Hildebrand (as opposed to Maritain) means by “metaphysical beauty.” Any beauty that appears as a radiance emerging from some other value, some other non-material reality, is called thus. Von Hildebrand gives us here a helpful account of why beauty is called, by Plato, the splendor of truth, and, as we said above, by the broader tradition as the splendor of form. Metaphysical beauty is a value that derives—is of—some other value.

To sensible and metaphysical beauty, von Hildebrand adds a third kind of beauty-value. Truly great instances of sensible or audible beauty—the Italian landscape, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Shakespeare’s King Lear—possess a beauty proper to their parts and to themselves, yes. But, when we encounter them, we sense a greater beauty, richer and more spiritual than that of the parts, and not mere-

ly the beauty of the whole. This von Hildebrand calls the “beauty of the second power.” This is the chief mystery of the beautiful. We can understand well enough why a moral action, which is in itself a spiritual reality, might irradiate also a spiritual beauty. We don’t need to explain why the sky is beautiful in itself; it just is.

But what is it that occurs when, listening to Bach, we have a sensation of transcendence, wherein the music seems to put us in contact with the whole orchestrated gravity, the seriousness and the substance of life? Why is it that works of art and nature seem to bear a mystery greater than themselves, as if something divine had come to rest upon the material and the created as upon a pedestal?

In exploring the beauty of the second power, von Hildebrand helpfully captures this elusive but universal experience and comes close to understanding it. I think that, fully to account for it, he would have to feed his observations back into the Christian Platonist aesthetics he attempts to bypass. He would, thereby, recognize that beauty is more than a “value” adhering to things; it is a property of being itself. It is the richness of perception rather than the unified theorization that marks his advance here.

Finally, von Hildebrand’s third achievement is one to which I will not even attempt to do justice but which I commend to the reader to take up and explore. In volume I, regarding natural beauty, and in volume II, as he takes up each form of fine art, von Hildebrand shows himself the true connoisseur—or rather, the son of a great sculptor that he actually was. His patient attempt to describe the particular features that inhere in each art form are not only brilliantly and minutely observed, they have also the quality of genuine philosophical perception. This sets them apart from previous, similar attempts—such as those of Burke or Lessing—which seem more summaries of the tastes of a period than disinterested perceptions. Here, we find the one definite benefit of forging a “one-man philosophy.” Von Hildebrand takes it upon himself to look at everything with eyes cleared of prejudice and receptive of the value there to give itself to us in experience.

James Matthew Wilson is an author, essayist, poet and critic. He is Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at Villanova University and the poetry editor at Modern Age Magazine.

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Book Review

Dante: The Everyman's Man of Many Ways

By Sean Johnson hough it is a truth obscured by the setting (and sheer number of dead people involved), Dante’s Comedy is not ultimately a poem about the afterlife—even Dante’s dead are some of the liveliest characters in literature. Two recent biographies (technically a biography and a necrography) honor the reality that Dante’s work is not just about living, but was and continues to be the common inheritance of the living.

The Inferno opens on a fictionalized Dante stumbling “midway through the journey of this life,” and the Paradiso concludes only days later, the pilgrim having died a number of symbolic deaths but never a bodily one. Yet life goes on for the poet and for the audience who stands to profit from an account of his mystical journey. Like a swinger of birches, Dante rises briefly to heaven but is gently set down again on Earth, “the right place for love.”

The only portion of the Comedy to transpire entirely upon the earth (rather than within or beyond it) is the Purgatorio, and it is, coincidentally, the only realm where man can do much changing for the better. The souls in hell have tragically calcified in their sin and become fixed

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like Satan in the ice; the souls in heaven have entirely embraced their virtue and become fixed like the heavenly spheres that do not deviate from their appointed course.

The souls on Mt. Purgatory instead mirror those a little lower down, in Dante’s own Italy and beyond—his fellow travelers on the journey of life. They are still mortifying sin and ordering loves, still striving, repenting, and being purified; it is the souls on earth who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the poet’s magnum opus. And because he left so much of himself in his Commedia, we thereby continue to be the beneficiaries of Dante’s self.

This reality is the surest defense—now that the poet has gone to his reward—for regularly disturbing his repose with book after book about the man and his work. After decades as a professor of Dante studies, John Took still experiences doubt over the propriety of his discipline. In the preface to his recent Dante, an intellectual biography of the poet, Took resignedly admits that “there is much to be said for leaving the great man in peace, he himself being far and away his own best expositor.” He immediately reverses tack though, these remarks coming in the first of nearly six hundred pages, invoking the similar ambivalence of an even greater critic. T. S. Eliot’s own seminal monograph on Dante opens with the deflating assertion that reading Dante “again and again” is superior to reading “modern books about his work and life and times, however good.” Eliot works quickly around to pardoning himself, arguing that writing about great men like Dante FORMA / WINTER 2021 | 25

Book Review

is in fact less presumptuous than writing of “smaller men. . . . The very vastness of the subject leaves a possibility that one may have something to say worth saying.” Took finds his marching orders in Eliot’s self-justification and, even a century later, succeeds in carving out a novel niche in the cathedral of Dante interpretation—eventually.

Dante is clearly the fruit of a career spent teaching the poet, and Took misses no stops on the grand tour through the divine Comedian’s life, thought, and intellectual influences. He mounts a painstaking discussion of each and every major writing—Vita nova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia (“On the Eloquence of the Vulgar Tongue”), the oft-overlooked Rime, the Commedia, the controversial Monarchia, the even-more-oft-overlooked Questio, and finally the Eclogues and the differently-controversial “Letter to Cangrande.” In preparation, he offers dizzying “Preliminary Considerations” on thirteenth-century Florentine politics, and they are not easily navigated.

Took is a gifted lecturer—watching him I am reminded of my own former teacher, Louise Cowan, who, long after ninety, could teach lucidly for hours without the aid of notes, drawling out lengthy passages of memorized poetry and offering analysis in a blend of insight and affection. Took, too, speaks with force and an air of comfortable mastery, dancing gracefully from thought to thought and spooling out stanza upon stanza of memorized terza rima with a verve that moves and mystifies. On paper, he is regrettably dense.

In the book, one frequently meets the kind of sentence that simulates the turning labyrinth of Inferno’s lower circles. These sentences are longer than seems decent and layered with so many clauses that it is possible to reach the period and no longer remember the subject. I offer just one (and not the most egregious) wending example: Feelings at home, however, and especially in Tuscany, were mixed; for if, say, Pisa was more than ever eager in its espousal of the project, putting up in advance sixty thousand golden florins with more to come upon delivery, Florence, already perturbed by the appearance in the city of an imperial envoy charged with bringing her round, was in two minds, her reluctance manifesting itself by way both of a refusal to send a goodwill delegation to Lausanne as a stopping-off point for the emperor-elect on his way to Italy and of the setting up of a Tuscan and Lombard league designed to frustrate the whole thing.

While these sentences are ubiquitous, they are occasionally interrupted by the more eloquent turn of phrase: “Florence, in short, was doing what Florence was so good 26 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

at, namely delivering herself despite herself to her undoing.”

This was a manuscript initially due to Princeton in 2014, probably in anticipation of the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth, and one wonders how much time editors have had with it between then and now. Nevertheless, there is plenty in the content to redeem the uneven prose.

Took’s first big score comes early, in the aforementioned preliminary considerations, with his reading of Augustine between the lines of the Comedy. Too often discussions of Dante’s influences reduce him to Thomistic philosophy in poetic form. Took measures Aquinas’s impact on the poet more carefully—“Aquinas, beloved of Dante as a matter not, certainly, of discipleship (for the differences here are as great as the similarities) but of admiration in respect of a superlative cast of mind”—while pointing to a singular significance in allusions and quotations from Augustine.

When Took sets passages cheek by jowl it is impossible not to hear the echoes of Augustine’s “I know not whence I came into this . . . dying life or living death . . . yet overcome with drowsiness” in Dante’s “I cannot say how I came to be here so full of sleep was I in the moment I forsook the true way.” Other examples are no less compelling. In the Convivio Took finds a nod to Augustine’s own artistic decision to place himself in the foreground of his Confessions as the likely inspiration for Dante becoming the main character of his equally confessional Comedy. The bishop of Hippo is notoriously absent from the Comedy, appearing only briefly in the Paradiso’s conclusion and never speaking. Yet Augustine’s influence, especially on the early cantos of Inferno, suggests he “subsists as a structure of consciousness, as the in-and-through-which of self-knowledge at its most profound and, often enough, its most painful.”

The Vita nova is often filed away as Dantean juvenilia, but Took also labors manfully to rehabilitate it as an early iteration of the Comedy’s mature outlook. In spite of the almost-comical swooning over a girl he never speaks to, Took contends, the Dante of the Vita nova already understands love to be “the principle of properly human being and becoming.” The work is a Commedia a minore (Comedy in miniature) already offering what Took perceptively marks out as the framework undergirding the Comedy: an account of the poet’s presence in the world under the aspect of captivity, of emancipation and of emergence—of, precisely, the infernal, the purgatorial and the paradisal.”

All told, Dante is too long, though stripping it back to only its best portions is unimaginable. A biography of any sort has to stand or fall as the treatment of a whole life.

I salivate at the thought of Took putting together a book of topical essays on Dante—something like Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments—brief, minutely-focused considerations of only those things that hold his attention and inspire his

Book Review

loves. Until then, Professor Took’s liveliest readings of the poet are shackled to a regrettable quantity of lifeless prose.

In a poetic reversal worthy of Dante, it is a book about the Comedian’s corpse that manages to bring him more consistently to life. The poet’s remains have enjoyed an after life of their own and in Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy, Guy Raffa recounts the unlikely odyssey of the revered bones from the day Dante surrendered them through the centuries of their disputed ownership, mysterious disappearances, and miraculous reappearances.

Most who have been teachers or students of the Comedy in the last decade will have encountered Danteworlds, the expansive, multimedia study guide and critical companion to the Comedy created by Raffa for the University of Texas at Austin. His knack for vivid Dantean exposition is on extensive display there, and no one who has spent time in Dante worlds will be surprised when this “graveyard history” grips them and refuses to let go. In fairness to Dante’s conventional biographers, Raffa can’t take all the credit.

He landed a haul of source material that boasts ghosts, bombs, papal controversy, two world wars, fascism, and several monastic intrigues that Umberto Eco would have been proud to dream up.

Raffa leads with a mystery. In 1865, the six hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth, the city of Ravenna planned to renovate the chapel housing Dante’s remains. The small mausoleum—containing little more than a memorial relief and a modest tomb of marble—stood in the same cramped complex as a Franciscan monastery and another, older chapel in disuse. Thinking to open up the space and make Dante’s final resting place more prominent, the city began labors to demolish portions of the other chapel. But the demolition stalled abruptly when a small crate of human remains was discovered bricked up in a wall. The worn crate bore the modest inscription: “Dantis ossa”—Dante’s bones.

Even before his death there were hints that Dante’s body would one day belong to the city of Ravenna in a more than conventional sense. After a career of political service and sacrifice for his native city, Florence, Dante suffered the fate of so many great Florentines throughout the ages: political betrayal and exile. A gifted statesman and renowned poet (even before his Comedy saw the light of day), Dante ultimately found an ardent welcome in Ravenna and gave himself wholeheartedly to the work of securing that city’s health and felicity. His commitment to this new alma mater was so great that he undertook an urgent diplomatic mission to Venice on her behalf in August of 1321. The region between Venice and Ravenna was mostly marshland and known to be a malaria hotspot in the summer months, but the poet made the trip anyway, hoping to head off a war

that Ravenna had little hope of winning. Dante contracted the disease on the return trip and died shortly thereafter, sacrificing his body as the last full measure of devotion to his adoptive city.

After Dante’s death Ravenna interred him as one of her own. At the time, the political wounds of his exile were still too fresh for Florence to have any interest in repatriating his remains, but it would not stop a number of prominent Florentines from making impassioned appeals to do just that. One can only guess how Dante, who came to style himself “Florentine by birth, not by disposition,” would have responded had such an offer been extended, but it was not.

These Florentine advocates for Dante’s posthumous return included Boccaccio, who would become Dante’s first biographer and, more significantly, grant his Comedy its “Divine” sobriquet. He reasoned that Florence should do right by one of her greatest sons, showing remorse over his ill treatment and symbolically welcoming him home. The city’s refusal further perplexed Boccaccio when he considered that the gesture would cost Florence no more than an apology—there was precious little chance of Ravenna handing over Dante’s treasured remains, even if asked.

The Florentine outlook changed as Dante’s original detractors began to die off, and when the city’s most prominent family—the House of Medici—gained control of the papacy in the sixteenth century, it appeared Ravenna would have no choice but to surrender her prized bones. Indeed, a Medici pope interfered in city politics to have several prominent officials temporarily detained in a neighboring city, clearing the way for a papal delegation that arrived in Ravenna with the sole purpose of acquiring the poet’s bones—and they didn’t plan on saying “please.” Even with the pope’s imprimatur upon their mission, the delegation opted to wait until night before forcing their way into the chapel housing Dante’s tomb in order to carry his remains back to Florence. Still, their raid came to naught. A historian and descendent of one of the delegates, Carlo Maria Nardi describes their discovery this way: The eagerly desired translation came to naught because when two deputies . . . arrived at the tomb, they found Dante neither in soul nor in body; and it being believed that he had in his lifetime, in body as well as in spirit, made the journey through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, so in death it must now be assumed that in body as well as in spirit he had been received and welcomed into one of those realms.

Nardi’s comments poke fun at the possible explanations FORMA / WINTER 2021 | 27

Book Review

the delegation devised to rationalize their failure, but, as Raffa emphasizes, they also point to the specialized vocabulary that attached itself to the Comedian and his remains—his relics. Within a century of his death Tuscans began to speak of “Saint Dante” with no shadow of irony.

Credible sources even chronicle miracles associated with the poet. Boccaccio records, via firsthand account, Jacopo Alighieri’s discovery of his father’s last work: the final thirteen cantos of Paradiso. Nearly a year after his death, the story goes, Dante appeared to his son in a dream, led him to a house he lived some of his last months in, and laid his hand on the wall before vanishing. Jacopo rushed to the place and found, at the exact spot Dante had touched in the dream, a decorative wall hanging that, when removed, disclosed a recess in the wall filled with mildewing pages in the poet’s own script—the culminating lines of what many had mourned as an incomplete work of genius. This discovery was the first “miracle” associated with the man who would come to be seen as the unofficial patron saint of Italy and whose relics would be guarded and venerated as fervently as if they belonged to an apostle.

Indeed, it was reverence for the bones that moved several Franciscan monks to steal them before the pope could carry them away to Florence. Dante’s chapel abuts a Franciscan monastery and his tomb rests against a wall shared by both buildings. Cut stone on three sides, the tomb’s fourth side was hidden from view and made of brick and plaster like the wall it adjoined. Upon learning of the papal delegation’s mission, enterprising monks accessed the tomb in secret by unbricking a portion of their own wall and emptying the tomb without setting foot in the locked chapel. The brothers saw Dante’s great affinity for Francis (there are even unconfirmed hints that he was himself a third-order Franciscan) as adequate grounds for taking custody of his remains. Because there was no telling when the bones would be safe again, Dantis ossa became the secret possession of the monastery, secreted from hiding place to hiding place on the premises and handed on from abbot to abbot until, at some indeterminable point, they were forgotten.

The secret location of the disinterred poet went unknown until that fortuitous demolition project began in 1865, and Dante’s reemergence could not have been more timely. Italy was humming with talk of national unification and could not have asked for a better icon to rally around than one of the earliest advocates for a unified Italy, “the most Italian Italian who has ever existed.” As region after region adopted the poet as a common hero and symbol, older inter-city rivalries gave way to a sense of common possession: Dante still reposed in Ravenna, but now he belonged to a nation.

The happy ending was short-lived, however, and the 28 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

Comedian’s bones were disturbed once more. When World War II broke out, Ravenna endured the double threat of Nazi looting and Allied bombing. To protect Dante’s remnants from both, they removed them from the tomb the bones had only recently returned to, encased them in a box of half-inch steel, buried that box in a hole eleven feet deep, poured a sizeable layer of concrete over top, buried a decoy corpse above that, and finally placed a conical concrete mound above the whole mess.

Of course, it worked. The treasures of Ravenna did not come through the war entirely unscathed, but their most beloved immigrant did, and when peace came Dante was finally returned to a place of honor in a marked grave worthy of his legacy.

Perhaps, though, the earlier saga of Dante’s bones was the more fitting fate. In death as in life, Dante’s body trod the path of the exile. To this day the man’s remains have not returned to the place of his birth (except for an envelope of bone dust which the Florentines promptly lost and never recovered) and have spent as much time out of a proper grave as they have spent in one. Raffa may not be as bold as Harold Bloom—who is?—but he has laid the groundwork for making, and comes close to actually uttering, a rather Bloomean claim about his subject. Dante invented Italy, sure, but Raffa closes the curtain with the bigger suggestion that Dante has done what Bloom claimed for Shakespeare: invented a new way of being in the world. He has at least given new expression to the oldest way of being in the world—the life of exile.

It is as an icon of the exile and the pilgrim that the world beyond Italy has come to identify with Dante. His life and his language made him first the poet of Florence or Ravenna and then the poet of Italy; his lifetime of glimpsing paradise through chinks in an unscalable wall has made him the poet of humanity. “Dante’s was indeed a journeying humanity,” Took observes, “a humanity jealous in respect of everything gathered up and taken to heart along the way but nonetheless a venturing humanity.” The path of the faithful so often leads outside the city gates; the Son of Man has no place to lay his head; God calls his people to himself in the wilderness. Dante, in life as in death, is the poet appointed to be our guide along the way. “For rather like those coming down from Jerusalem to Emmaus in the evening hour, we too have witnessed a strange and marvellous thing,” and Dante comes beside to talk it all over again and again.

Sean Johnson teaches humanities at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. He is an editor at FORMA.

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Interview

It is easy to rhapsodize when speaking of Malcolm Guite. An English poet, priest, singer-songwriter, and author of several volumes of poetry, scholarship, and spiritual contemplation, Guite is that rare poet who writes intensely while living joyfully. In a literary landscape populated by subversive themes and free verse, Guite remains a jubilant composer of accessible formalist poetry with both intensely human and deeply spiritual themes. Although an academic by training, Guite is no elitist. He writes “from the church and for the church,” making his poetry readily available to all on his blog. During the troubled months of the international pandemic, Malcolm Guite has been living simply with his wife in their small village in the English countryside, where he has written a series of poetic contemplations on the sorrows and the joys of life in lockdown. I spoke with him about God, life, poetry, and pandemics.

§ This has been quite an intense year worldwide. It’s an international season of collective trauma. What have you noticed about the world as you have experienced 2020?

I've certainly found that poetry—both reading and writing it—has come into its own in this crisis. Suddenly we have the time and the focus for it. It speaks into the depths in this crisis; asking fundamental questions about the shape of our lives, about when all our plans and dreams are suddenly cast aside. We have to exist in the moment and think, who am I and why should I be this way? We need the best resources available, and certainly the imaginative arts and the deep resources of faith are there to help us.

How has this season of widespread crisis impacted you as a poet?

The very early days of our lockdown weren’t gradual, but very sudden. One March day, the prime minister said, “Everybody stay at home.” Suddenly everything stopped. Gradually we became aware that the skies were clearer. There were no jet trails; the air was purer.

The constant sound of traffic on nearby roads, which fringed and shadowed any attempted silence, was gone.

The silence was suddenly there like a very deep gift.

You heard the bird song much more. You felt a kind of kindred kindliness towards your neighbors because we were all going through the same sort of thing. So certainly the very things that are the conditions for writing poetry were suddenly much more present and available.

The first part of the lockdown, particularly with this sort of rewilding and return of nature felt really quite like a gift. But of course, alongside that there was a gradual awareness of the tragic side of everything that was going on. Even in our small village, one became aware of people who had fallen ill or people who knew people who had fallen ill. Then, for those who were suffering, there was the dreadful isolation from their loved ones; you couldn’t visit or touch. That kind of sorrow needed to find a poetic expression.

How have you developed that poetic expression during the days of lockdown?

One of the first things that I found myself doing was rereading various old favorite poems. One of those was the lovely little translation of a medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam. There’s a translation made in the nineteenth century by Fitzgerald which has reflections on mortality, but also on the grace and beauty of the present moment. It has a kind of romantic element to it as well. There’s a lovely bit where the poet addresses his beloved. They’re in a little garden all by themselves on the edge of the wilderness and he suddenly realizes he doesn’t need anything else. There’s a famous verse and it goes: Here with a Flask of Wine beneath the Bough, A Loaf of Bread, a Book of Verse — and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness — And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

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Interview

I was rereading this, which is written in these beautiful quatrain forms; four lines chiming on just one rhyme on the unrhymed line. I felt drawn to write my own kind of quarantine quatrains—to reply across the centuries to this poet. I’ve just published it with a fine artist doing illustrations. We are offering a limited edition to raise money for the care workers’ charity here. I wrote it in seven parts and as the crisis deepened it became like a journal.

What aspects of lockdown did you contemplate in the Quarantine Quatrains?

I started with this celebration of nature and gradually moved into what it was like to have Zoom meetings. I’ll share one or two verses from the different sections that will give you a sense of my own journey as a poet through those early parts of lockdown. Here are the opening three verses. The original poem, the Rubaiyat begins: AWAKE! For Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: And lo! The Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light I echoed that opening line. This is what I wrote for the beginning of lockdown.

1 Awake to what was once a busy day When you would rush and hurry on your way Snatch at your breakfast, start the grim commute But time and tide have turned another way.

2 For now, like you, the day is yawning wide And all its old events are set aside It opens gently for you, takes its time And holds for you -whatever you decide.

3 This morning’s light is brighter than it seems Your room is raftered with its golden beams The bowl of night was richly filled with sleep And dawn’s left hand is holding all your dreams After a couple of other sections, I talk about the strangeness of Zoom. On the one hand we feel deeply isolated without it and yet at the same time it teases you. You feel like your friends are there but they’re not quite. You open your heart to the possibilities of this deeper exchange and in the end it’s only a screen. Here’s a few little verses about

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Zoom that might resonate with your readers.

13 Some days I am diverted by a call: The soft computer chime that summons all To show a face to faces that we meet Mirages, empty mirrors on the wall.

14 Alas that all the friends we ever knew Whose lives were fragrant and whose touch was true Can only meet us on some little screen Then zoom away with scarcely an adieu.

The section finishes with the hope and promise that one day we’ll break bread and share wine together. I began with the celebration of the return of nature, but as the crisis progressed, the poem changed.

How so?

Every evening my wife and I would listen to the radio. Every evening they told us the number of people who were dying—and the number kept growing. We had friends who were nurses. One was a nurse in a COVID-19 intensive care ward. She was utterly worn out and yet, again and again, kept giving of herself. So I ended the poem with a more somber tone. It invites us to discover how faith meets this crisis. This is the final section—section seven of Quarantine Quatrains: 35 At close of day I hear the gentle rain Whilst experts on the radio explain Mind-numbing numbers, rising by the day, Cyphers of unimaginable pain 36 Each evening they announce the deadly toll And patient voices calmly call the roll I hear the numbers, cannot know the names Behind each number, mind and heart and soul 37 Behind each number one beloved face A light in life whom no-one can replace, Leaves on this world a signature, a trace, A gleaning and a memory of grace 38 All loved and loving, carried to the grave

Interview

The ones whom every effort could not save Amongst them all those carers whose strong love Bought life for others with the lives they gave.

39 The sun sets and I find myself in prayer Lifting aloft the sorrow that we share Feeling for words of hope amidst despair I voice my vespers through the quiet air: 40 O Christ who suffers with us, hold us close, Deep in the secret garden of the rose, Raise over us the banner of your love And raise us up beyond our last repose.

In this poem I hear this contrast of life and death: the paradox that they exist in the same space and that we feel them intensely at the same time, both the sorrow and the joy. I also hear the cradling of formal elements—the cadence and the iambs. The contrast and the paradox in the poem are held by the form.

The form is very dear to me. One of the things that is distinct about the kind of poetry I write is that it is a bit of a rebellion against the free verse that’s fashionable in modern poetry. But I love the music and sound of it.

Perhaps the best way to explain my feel for rhythm and rhyme and the musical pattern of sound is if I tell you a story. I once had the great pleasure and honor of interviewing the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney when he won the Wilfred Owen Memorial Prize. Of course, Wilfred Owen was a great war poet. Giving Heaney that prize was a way of acknowledging that in his patient and steadfast witness to the eternal verities in the midst of the Irish troubles he too, in his own way, had been a war poet. So of course we talked about the poetry of Wilfred Owen. I asked Heaney about the way he read Owen. I started to recite Wilfred Owen’s extraordinary “Anthem for Doomed Youth”— “what passing-bells for those who die as cattle.”

Heaney’s eyes lit up and he took it up with his own voice.

He recited [those lines] by memory: What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons.

And then he stopped to look at me and he said, “It’s the music that makes that both poignant and bearable—the

music as it speaks into atrocity.” And he said, “I think of the musical elements in a poem—the assonance, the meter, the rhyme, all play with sound as being a bit like the joists under a floorboard or the springing under a dance floor that you don’t see it at first, but it’s there holding the weight and sustaining the step.” As he looked at me he just suddenly came out of nowhere with this great line: “And I think the greater the weight of grief a line of poetry is asked to bear, the more musically must it be under sprung the joists beneath it must be. There has to be a beauty to sustain the grief.” I thought it was just such a beautiful image. I learned a lot from that conversation with Heaney. It confirmed my view that I should continue to care about meter and rhyme, to use form, and to find in the form a way of both sustaining and honoring the subject of the verse.

You also have conversations in the Quarantine Quatrains that reply across the centuries to Omar Khayyam, T.S. Eliot, and others.

A number of poetic allusions all the way through. I’ve got one where I have a conversation with Yeats, a poet whom I love. I was thinking about Yeats’ famous poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Yeats is talking about his home. He’s in London and he’s “treading the pavements grey,” but always in his heart, he hears the water lapping. “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” So I wrote one of my Quarantine Quatrains about being in my garden on a Sunday morning, feeling the sense of Sabbath rest, but in absolute stillness.

At that time we were seeing pictures in the news of Piccadilly Circus and Marble Arch and all these empty London streets. So I entered into a conversation.

25 From Marble Arch and all along The Mall Only the pigeons still stand sentinel And all the streets that thronged with rush and fret Are soaked in silence almost magical.

26 No needs to find the Isle of Innisfree, Or seek with Brendan Islands in the sea For now the town and countryside alike Partake the Sabbath rest of Galilee 27 And all that smudge of noise, the muffled roar Of distant rush hour traffic is no more The ‘roadway and the pavement grey’ both keep A greater silence in the deep hearts core.

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Interview

That’s lovely. I resonate with how the Quarantine Quatrains engage with shared suffering throughout the world. We have an opportunity right now as individuals and as an international community to participate in shared suffering and to bear it on behalf of others.

If you think about it, there could not be a more vivid demonstration of the truth that although we’re all individuals and separate we are one humanity. We’re all physically connected. If you think about it, since the virus is spread by touch and breath, there is a chain of physical human touch and connection unbroken which actually binds us together.

Now, sadly, in terms of COVID, that touch is actually a chain of illness and suffering, but there’s absolutely no reason why there shouldn’t be a similar chain of love and redemption. We are not so separate from one another, as we once thought. No country is isolated from another and no individual is really isolated from their community.

We have to see this revelation of the commonness of our humanity, which has come to us in a shadowed form, and we have to readdress it and speak light, a common light, a shared light, back into the shadow.

Then what is intended for evil becomes redeemed through a different way of seeing it. It is an illumination of grace.

That is what redemption is. Redemption is taking something bent, twisted, awry, and making it good again. Restoring it. It’s not about zapping and eliminating something. It’s about setting something back again in the place and order that it needs to be.

How can those of us who have felt lost under the shadow experience that illuminating redemption?

There’s certainly a lot for us to learn. I’ve found that I often reread passages that I have known and loved but have lain fallow in my mind. I’ve been reading a lot of the poet John Donne, both the poetry and the prose meditations.

He wrote a little book which was effectively his own sort of pandemic journal called Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, which he wrote when the plague came to London in the early seventeenth century. He was a parish priest at that point and stayed in London rather than going off to the countryside as some people did. That is where the famous passage that everybody quotes comes from: “Therefore, send not to know / For whom the bell tolls, / It tolls for thee.” It tolls for every man. He says: “any man’s death

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diminishes me, / Because I am involved in mankind.” Everybody quotes that famous petrarch: “No man is an island, / Entire of itself, /Each is a piece of the continent” but they don’t quite have the end of it. The end of it is a wonderful new image: the image of a book. To paraphrase, he says that when a person dies a page is not torn out of a bound volume of the book of life, but is wrought out of the book of our life here. Each page is translated into a better language so that that same page may be open forever as we will always be open forever to one another in that library, where every book lies open. Of course, he is referring to heaven. It’s a wonderful idea that we are somehow bound together in a volume. Death is a kind of translation so that everything we are is not lost, but reexpressed in an eternal language.

That’s the language of the church—the translation of the saints. Your poetry often reflects on the liturgical life of the church. What has it been like in the pandemic to be disconnected from the church? How have you maintained that connection?

That has been a great challenge for all of us. I’ve often felt that although it’s wonderful to have virtual meetings, I feel very strongly that the physical presence of one with another and of our Lord with us through the sacrament of communion is essential. I haven’t changed my mind about that, but I also recognize that in extremis we have to honor and love one another by not spreading a disease. So we had to close down our churches.

As a priest I could have celebrated communion at home with and for my family. I did consider that, but in the end I thought it was part of solidarity with the church to wait with everybody else. I found that music became a huge resource. We gathered beautiful music and poetry together to enrich the liturgy in as many ways as we could.

But really I was waiting for that moment of return. We’ve been able to return for a bit, although, sadly, I think we may be going into another fairly strict lockdown. Return may have just been an interlude.

What has been the hardest part of separation from the church?

For me, the real focus was Easter. I could not imagine an Easter without communion. Again, I found that I had to ask the question, where is Christ?

The only way I could answer was with poetry. I wrote a poem called “Easter 2020.” When I put this poem out on my blog, it was the single most read and downloaded piece

And where is Jesus, this strange Easter day?

Not lost in our locked churches, anymore Than he was sealed in that dark sepulchre.

The locks are loosed; the stone is rolled away, And he is up and risen, long before, Alive, at large, and making his strong way Into the world he gave his life to save, No need to seek him in his empty grave.

Image credit: Lancia E. Smith

I’ve ever written. We’ve obviously tapped a cord. In fact, later on the New Testament scholar and theologian N.T. Wright produced a very good short book of theological reflections on the COVID crisis, and, with my permission, he quoted the whole of my poem in the book. I wrote it on Holy Saturday, anticipating Easter day. I wrote so late on Holy Saturday that it was practically the dawn of Easter day. I just kept asking this question, where is Jesus? So here’s the poem:

He might have been a wafer in the hands Of priests this day, or music from the lips Of red-robed choristers, instead he slips Away from church, shakes off our linen bands To don his apron with a nurse: he grips And lifts a stretcher, soothes with gentle hands The frail flesh of the dying, gives them hope, Breathes with the breathless, lends them strength to cope.

On Thursday we applauded, for he came And served us in a thousand names and faces Mopping our sickroom floors and catching traces Of that corona which was death to him: Good Friday happened in a thousand places Where Jesus held the helpless, died with them That they might share his Easter in their need, Now they are risen with him, risen indeed.

I am so moved by your poetic record of this international crisis. That’s one of the functions of poetry over the centuries. As we suffer and engage in the mysteries of being human there’s somebody keeping a record of those paradoxes and contradictions and creating beauty out of them so that in the darkness, we can see threads of light Think about Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and other poets taking on the immense crisis of the First World War. They found a way to speak of the pity of war, but also just the sheer humanity of those who gave their lives.

There were poets there and there needed to be poets there. Of course, it is the same with a writer like Heaney in the course of the Irish troubles. When the Good Friday

peace agreement was signed, politicians and journalists were quoting Seamus Heaney’s poetry. It is extraordinary how it spoke to them, and the same is true of a poet like Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Lithuanian and Nobel Prize winner, who wrote his poetry in exile. We always need poets in crisis.

What have you experienced in terms of writing in this season versus writing in more settled times? Does it feel different to you? Does it have a different kind of weight?

There’s always a time when you’re writing, when suddenly it becomes intense and necessary to write. The combination of an emptier diary and a sense of shared crisis made the concentration of writing easier. As you mentioned, a lot of my writing responds to the liturgical year; it is a kind of conversation with either the liturgy or the texts of Scripture.

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Interview

One of the things that I found in the pattern of the Daily Prayers within the Church of England is that the core of morning and evening prayer is the Psalms. You say two or three psalms at each of those offices and eventually, over the course of a month or so, you work your way through the Psalter. I suddenly found those psalms coming alive for me in the crisis. De Profundis: “out of the deep I have called to you, Lord hear my voice.”

There’s so much in the Psalms about people being fearful for their lives, about the sense of having been abandoned, about yearning for God to come back and to reassure; and then also wonderful moments of reassurance and depth of praise and the sense of things being transfigured. All of them have got this tremendous sense of being rooted in something more than the passing of events in your world.

The Psalms are the poetry book of the Bible embedded in the heart of the Scriptures.

So after I’d finished the Quarantine Quatrains I found myself writing a series of personal poetic responses to the book of Psalms. That project occupied the rest of my lockdown. It wasn’t a monumental task. It felt like a spiritual necessity. It felt like needing to breathe while you’re swimming or running. Every psalm was a new breath in, and every poem was a breath out. It became a completely natural pattern to my life. I’ve just completed a sequence of 150 poems. Really, it's just a kind of prayer journal. As I wrote it, I found that more and more of the psalms were speaking into the crisis for me.

It has long been a deeply held sense in my soul that poetry and prayer are nearly the same thing.

They are two sides of the same coin. Seamus Heaney has been cropping up a lot in this conversation, but he’s one of the great poets. He has a sequence called “Station Island” which he wrote at one of the worst points of the Irish troubles—poems that gradually move their way towards hope.

There’s a bit in one of these poems where he remembers having been to confession.

The father confessor spoke about the need “to salvage everything, to re-envisage / the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift / mistakenly abased . . . / ‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance / translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’” In the poem he goes on to give you the translation of John of the Cross’ “although it is the night.”

What a wonderful thing for a priest to say in spiritual counsel to a poet. Read poems as prayers. When I read that poem, I’d been a follower of Seamus Heaney since I’d discovered him as a teenager in the seventies. But in the mid eighties, that poem struck me with the force of revelation.

Up till then I hadn’t quite realized my priestly vocation yet, but I had my church life sort of in one hand and my poetic 36 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

life in the other. They weren’t in sync. They weren’t quite speaking to each other. Reading that poem of Heaney’s, suddenly I opened up the communication doors, as it were, between those sides of my life, with fruitful results.

“Read poems as prayers.” How does somebody put such a great weight of truth into four words? I suppose that’s the poet’s vocation.

There’s a wonderful poem by George Herbert, which is simply called “Prayer.” In that poem, he offers a series of phrases, each of which, if you meditate on it, is a prayer.

That poem gives you twenty-six new ways of understanding your prayer life. The poem begins: Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age, God’s breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth The poem is full of dense phrases and images, like “Heaven in ordinary” or “the soul’s blood.” It finishes with the words “something understood.” Prayer is all of those things.

The book of poems that I published last year is called After Prayer. In that book I meditated on that one sonnet of George Herbert’s. I wrote a sequence of twenty-seven sonnets on one after the other of his phrases and images. I wrote whole poems out of each because the images are so rich.

How can we find Quarantine Quatrains and the other books you have mentioned today?

While I was working on Quarantine Quatrains, I was collaborating on another project with a very fine English artist called Roger Wagner. He did a series of very beautiful miniatures—lovely painted illustrations for each section.

We produced a little limited edition signed set of them. All the profits, in entirety, go to the care workers’ charity. We printed six hundred, but they may have mostly gone. But if you can’t find a copy of the book, I posted the entirety of the Quarantine Quatrains on my blog. You can find them there as well.

What about the Psalms project?

The Psalms book will come out soon. I have been live blogging my journey through the Psalms. I’ve been gradually posting those. So again, if people go on my blog and in the little search box, if they just put the word “Psalm” they’ll find them all and they can read them in any order. In those, I give a little prose introduction. Obviously there are so

many different, beautiful translations of the Psalms, but as an Anglican, I use the 1660 Book of Common Prayer.

I have a happy arrangement with my publisher. Since I am writing from within the church and for the church, I want my poems to be freely available to my fellow Christians for their personal prayer life and for their liturgy, if they want to use it. All I ask is that people acknowledge where it came from. You don’t need to write to Canterbury Press to ask for permission. Canterbury Press also allows me to post on my blog, even though they’ll be gathered into a book. We believe that in the end, people don’t want to read poems on a screen, however slick the tablet may be. There’s nothing like having an actual book in your hand. I offer my poetry on trust, in the hope that eventually people will have enjoyed enough of the poems on the web that they might like to buy the book.

Thank you. You are always extravagantly generous with your work and it has blessed and permeated the church here in America, as well.

That amazes me. I still can’t get over the fact that I write these poems and I read them to my wife or to my friends. And after I’ve typed them into a computer in the corner of my little room in my little village I suddenly find that I have friends in America. I find that astonishing. I’m not a super high tech person, but I’m able to blog and I think there’s a real blessing in that. I know there are deadly, shadowed sides to the internet, but I do feel there’s also a kind of gift that we can give each other.

Heidi White teaches at St. Hild School in Colorado Springs.

She is a regular contributor at The Close Reads Podcast Network, the host of the FORMA podcast, and the Managing Editor of FORMA Journal.

WANT TO WRITE FOR FORMA? Visit formajournal.com or email formamag@circeinstitute.com to submit original essays, reviews, and poetry. We are always looking for thoughtful writing about books, teaching, poetry, the arts, history, and more. If your bliss intersects with contemporary culture and classical thought, then follow it. We will do the rest.

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It would be hard to argue with the observation that within the lifetime of many of those reading this, American society has transitioned from being vaguely theocratic to explicitly secular.

This isn’t to say that there wasn’t from the beginning an explicit commitment to non-sectarian values or that many Americans may not still practice their religious beliefs or regard their country as “Christian.”

But for certain, as many have observed, references to God, biblical terms and injunctions, prayers, religious instruction, and all that—the courts have interpreted the Constitution to mean that none of these have any place in the public square. Religious belief, to the extent citizens wish to embrace it, must be practiced in private and should in no way influence the laws of the State or interfere with the rights of others to act in ways that may give offense to believers or ridicule specifically Christian sensibilities.

This is not to say that there was ever any intention, except perhaps in Puritan New England, to form a Theocracy, a state in which priests rule in the name of God, or that the State would mandate belief in a god.

On the contrary, most of those fleeing to America wanted nothing to with religious establishments and the persecution that often attended them. But they were by-and-large a religious people, many of them fervent in their beliefs, and they derived and defended from Scripture the laws they wrote and the norms they lived by. So when Jefferson, no Christian himself, penned the Declaration of Independence on behalf of the Founders, it was natural and in no way controversial to root the claim that “all men are created equal” and endowed “with certain unalienable Rights” in the intention of “their Creator.” Not, it is important for the purposes of this essay to note, in the will of the people.

He then famously proceeds to enumerate these equal rights as “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

It is this divine sourcing of America’s laws and norms that I have in mind when I describe our society as once “vaguely theocratic.”

This theocratic consensus appeared to serve the country quite well for the first two centuries after its birth. It was of course a perennial challenge to live up to its creed, and doing so sometimes entailed violent conflict, but the arch defenders of the creed, whether a Lincoln in the nineteenth century or a King in the twentieth, never shied from making that defense in

religious terms and reminding Americans of the religious roots of their national creed. But that consensus began to fragment in the 1960s as the influencers of public opinion—intellectuals, academics, popular entertainers, filmmakers, and political activists—began questioning religious belief and satirizing believers as bigots and hypocrites. It was during this period that the courts began to play a leading role in exorcising religion from the public square and reframing the concept of rights. It was no longer the Creator who endowed us with “certain unalienable Rights,” but the Courts that decided—often in the absence of legislation, although presuming to represent the will of the people rather than the intention of the framers of the Constitution— what might qualify as a “human right.”

Many court decisions contributed to this subtle yet profound shift. Roe v. Wade is the one often cited, since it touched on an issue that pitted an ancient Judeo-Christian taboo against a modern secular demand, namely, the prohibition against killing a human life in the womb and a woman’s freedom to choose whether or not to give birth. Abortion and infanticide were common and accepted practices in the ancient world, and we know from our earliest sources that Christians firmly rejected these practices. Some sociologists and historians have cited this refusal to abort their fetuses as one reason for the highly improbable growth of this outlawed and persecuted Jewish sect. But any mention of a Creator, of the “unalienable Right” to “Life” of the human within the womb, or of the religious sensibilities of millions of American citizens is significantly absent from the court’s decision. Instead, the court denies the “personhood” of the fetus and declares a “right of privacy” to the mother. It also attempts to make a scientific argument for when the “viable life” of the fetus begins. I am not here to argue either for the woman’s right to choose or the fetus’ right to live, but merely wish to point out the elements of the shift to a secular belief system as the true source of what we now call “human rights.” These rights, far from being unalienable or deriving from a Creator, are now decided by the vote of a Court in a somewhat democratic process and are subject to arguments deemed “scientific” and in no way religious.

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Communist countries have contributed to this shift. The end of the Cold War meant the end of the supposed fight against “godless Communism” and removed the religious rhetoric that attended the struggle against Marxist regimes. The embrace of multiculturalism required a deliberate and at times painstaking removal of those symbols, traditions, and practices that appeared to give American culture a Judeo-Christian flavor and favor this flavor over any other (except, of course, the absence of religion). And for different reasons, the sudden influx of immigrants from officially Muslem and atheistic countries underscored the potential conflicts that might arise by allowing religious diversity into the public square. Both these groups entered America from countries with hostile views toward Judeo-Christian beliefs and believers as well as with political, legal, and educational systems heavily invested in promoting and enforcing either Islam or atheism. Clearly, if we were to avoid problems arising from these new groups of citizens, we must distance ourselves from anything smacking of religion.

Finally, enough has already been written about the sexual revolution coming out of the sixties and its devastating effects on institutions like the family, the school, and the church—as well as on the physical health of the nation’s citizens. The sexual revolution explicitly and effectively advanced its agenda by attacking the religious taboos that traditionally governed sexual behavior, further distancing society from the idea that “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” are “unalienable Rights” endowed by a Creator who has offered guidance as to how those Rights should be exercised and enjoyed. This revolution, perhaps more than anything else (as we saw in Roe v. Wade where Liberty trumps Life and the right to privacy is enshrined), contributed to the shift. The State no longer has a say in anything that happens between consenting adults, regardless of the burden this may place upon the State. It’s as if the lessons of tragedy no longer apply to the human race.

Private sexual acts no longer have public consequences, or if they do, the public ought to accept and ameliorate the consequences of these acts over which it has no say or control. This is simply the price of liberty and the “right to privacy.”

As a consequence of this shift, American society now faces extraordinary and growing challenges. Some of these are merely pragmatic and measurable. How much of our “coming apart” is due to the shift? Can secular society find a way of healing the sense of alienation felt by many Christians? Can it pay for the “rights” it is handing out along with the conflicts and contradictions attending them?

How long can it borrow against the future in order to provide the services and support that the institutions it is destroying once provided for nothing? How long will bull markets and cutting-edge technologies blind secularists 40 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

to the natural family’s breakup and dysfunction, the pandemic of depression and addiction, the worsening trend of failing health and schools, the signs of social unrest and inequality, and the general loss of consensus concerning any of the problems that plague society? Will our secular society’s reliance on science and material resources enable it to solve these problems, all of which have statistically grown apace with the shift?

But even these tough problems, as real and pressing as they are, may be a distraction from the insoluble contradictions underlying the shift. Two immediately come to mind: First, if human rights derive from the State, they are by definition no longer unalienable. What the State gives, the State can take away. Is this what the fans of our secular society really want? There are and have always been three forms of state: tyranny or monarchy; oligarchy; and democracy—and variations on each, some good, some bad.

Rule by the One, by the Few, or by the Many. In our country, we say we favor democracy, although our Founders feared it, and it’s pretty obvious that we function most of the time like an oligarchy, granting the privilege of ruling to the wealthier and better educated among us. But when it comes to deciding on our rights in a secular state, it doesn’t really matter. An oligarchy, as we have seen with the courts, is more likely to create rights than is something closer to a democracy, like a state or federal legislature.

Much closer for sure than the cumbersome process for granting rights spelled out in the Constitution.

Other than the problem of making rights “temporary” and subject to the desires of a small or large group of citizens, this method of establishing rights, as we have seen, politicizes everything and, as Socrates warned in his critique of democracy, makes what is right or just or true less important than who can make the best argument or garner the most votes. How ironic that having spent the last century in conflict with Marxist regimes, we have now adopted our former enemies’ Marxist view of history! We even talk like they did about “being on the right side of history” and viewing our kulturkampf as taking the form of a class struggle amongst identity groups. We are now beset by vocal, angry, often disruptive and threatening identity groups on all sides, claiming to be victimized in some way or other and demanding reparations, redress, or rights by “acting out,” marching on Washington, occupying state capitols, lobbying congressmen and women, attacking their foes on social media, defacing and tearing down statues, self-righteously rewriting history, spreading lies and fake news, etc. Do we really want to live in a world where right and wrong are decided by a show of hands or a street mob? As Nietzsche perhaps gleefully observed 150 years ago, now that God is dead, everything is permissible.

Only the State makes the rules, sets the boundaries, writes the moral code. No wonder the Third Reich loved Ni-

Human inequality is what appears obvious and is, for that matter, a fundamental assumption of modern science and natural selection, although “survival of the fittest” is no longer deemed a politically correct way of describing a process of variation, inheritance, selection, and eons that guarantees a “progressive” outcome.

etzsche. One won’t find many admirers of the Third Reich among today’s fans of secular society, I suppose, but those same fans are building their edifice of “human rights” on the same shifting sands.

Second, the other contradiction that seems to me insoluble is this: in secular/Marxist society, science replaces Scripture as the basis for belief and the exclusive source of wisdom and moral judgment. If it is research-based, if it is data-driven, if it has been measured and tested, preferably in a laboratory under perfect conditions, we’re apt to believe it. Otherwise, the jury is still out. Never mind that science itself is continually revising its theories and predictions and that its application in the so-called social sciences has proven spectacularly speculative and unreliable while spawning theories that reliably support the predilections of their sponsors. All that aside, consider that one of the most fundamental observations of science flatly contradicts secular society’s bedrock assertion that all men and women are equal. After all, what proof is there—other than the concept of a God and Father of all Mankind—that we are all equal? There is no proof— just a seemingly arbitrary assertion that must be accepted or enforced. Without this religious belief, it is hard to find any evidence of human equality. Human inequality is what appears obvious and is, for that matter, a fundamental assumption of modern science and natural selection, although “survival of the fittest” is no longer deemed a politically correct way of describing a process of variation, inheritance, selection, and eons that guarantees a “progressive” outcome.

As the Italian political philosopher Joseph Mazzini pointed out long ago, “Certainly rights exist; but where the rights of an individual come into conflict with those of another, how can we hope to reconcile and harmonize them, without appealing to something superior to all rights?” (The Duties of Man, 11). He describes the situation in the nineteenth-century Italian peninsula in a manner that applies with equal force to the twenty-first-century West even without the accelerator of mass migration: Liberty of belief destroyed all community of faith.

Liberty of education produced moral anarchy. Men without a common tie, without unity of religious belief and of aim, and whose sole vocation was en-

joyment, sought every one his own road, not heeding if in pursuing it they were trampling upon the heads of their brothers—brothers in name and enemies in fact. To this we are come today, thanks to the theory of rights. (Ibid.)

The new theory of human rights affirms secular man’s rejection of absolutes and his belief in the impermanence and relativity of all things. After all, isn’t the universe constantly expanding and everything in it constantly changing—from the tiniest subatomic particles to the largest collapsing stars? From this general observation, we move without hesitation, being fully indoctrinated with the scientific worldview, from the descriptive to the prescriptive.

We embrace the Heraclitian flux, accepting the impermanence of all things, asserting the “progressive” creed and the novel theory of deracinated human rights, and rejecting norms and absolutes of any kind. We are, after all, enlightened men and women. We now know the world wasn’t created in 4004 BC and the earth is not the center of the universe. We are, as Pico declared in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, “the molder and maker” of ourselves, and now that God is dead, “everything is permissible.”

Unfortunately, many new problems now arise. One of these, as the statistical evidence indicates, is that only a small percentage of people, usually dubbed the “educated elite,” appear to be able to ride this Heraclitian wave. The rest drown in its turbulence. But this too might have had some scientific justification as a form of “survival of the fittest” if the elite were indeed re-producing themselves, but their enjoyment of an affluent lifestyle and their advanced social theories appear to be interfering with our species' biological imperatives. But I forgot: there are no imperatives! Yet again we have another example of why the social sciences fail and why the observations of science, panta rei, can make poor social, political, and personal prescriptions. The parable about “a man who built his house on the sand” comes to mind.

David Hicks is an author, translator, and former headmaster of Darlington School. He is the author of Norms and Nobility and The Lawgivers: The Parallel Lives of Numa Pompilius and Lycurgus of Sparta as Told by Plutarch.

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Poetry Maryann Corbett

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English in 1981, with a specialization in medieval literature and linguistics. She expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law.

She is the author of five books of poetry and is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Her work is widely published in journals on both sides of the Atlantic and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry 2018.

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VOTIVE OFFERING “ . . . By donating your hair you can help a cancer patient to be healed.”

A sacrifice, I thought: donate my hair.

To placate her dark gods, a plait of my hair.

A way of stretching toward her over miles— toward retching, scars, steel plate beneath dry hair.

The slow growth. The weeks of time spent hanging, flyaway, split. The strung-out state of my hair.

Long distances of talk. We curl around the knotty problem. I can’t yet braid my hair.

A year, while wisps of cirrus slough from the sky.

Then everything cut short. Too late, my hair— How thin, how worthless it looks, in its elastic in the limp plastic bag where I laid my hair.

The gods of healing never learned my name.

Pointless to give it now. I hate my hair.

Previously published in Poetry Salzburg.

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Poetry Ann Thomas

Ann Thomas lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with her husband and five children.

Her writing has appeared in Dappled Things, Image Journal, and a number of other online and print publications.

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WALKING WEST IN OLD ST. JOHN’S CEMETERY This isn’t a poem, It’s my memorized map of Block 3: From Oakland's edge to Horseshoe Drive, Recorded graves orient me.

First stretch from Hotka through Donahue Grave one near our gate north to twenty two.

Morrison four six, Wineke two five In between, babies who didn’t survive.

Frisbee four seven, sixty eight Cermak.

Eighty eight Kirk, seventy six Slezak.

Trio of Donovans in one O’three, One nineteen Mr. Barney McCarthy.

One four five Hogans, Svatos one two one.

One seven one Wendling, one four six Smith: Aaron.

One eighty one only Loughman and White, Neighboring block now weaves into my sight.

Farrell one ninety eight, solitary.

Two two one Bauer Joseph, Anna, Mary.

Two two five: Jakub Cipera's family, Ending the row at two three eight: Loney.

Two fifty three McCune, we’re almost done.

Finally O’Connor in two forty one.

Records long lost or not kept for this space.

We look but can’t find them, in any case.

Here I witch for graves, here I dowse for bones, Finger script shallow on white marble stones.

Hot dusk among monuments knocked askew, Toppled, broken, lost; memorizing you.

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W

hen Israel’s King David opines in Psalm 2, “Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing?” he might just as easily have been referencing the social unrest we see in US cities of today as the sociopolitical tensions of the ancient world. While today’s cities burn, so do social media platforms, calling out anyone, living or dead, that offends the current cultural zeitgeist. Statues of Confederate generals like Stonewall Jackson have been pulled down in Southern states. Iconic films such as Gone with the Wind have been removed from streaming services.

Historic branding icons such as Aunt Jemima and Land O’ Lakes have been retired. All this has been done in the name of “wokeness,” the new and imperative social virtue.

Neither has the Western canon evaded censure. Most ironically, shots have been fired at Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, the 1961 Pulitzer Prize–winning clarion call to human equality and empathy. Public schools in Florida and Wisconsin canceled theatrical dramatizations of Lee’s classic novel this spring, citing as reason the novel’s textual instances of historical racial slurs.

Likewise, “civilized society,” which humorist Mark Twain scorns in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, validates his cynicism as it ignorantly censures his satiric novel of Reconstruction-era racism in an effort to protest modern instances of the same. One can almost see Twain’s eye roll.

This current social mood, known as “Cancel Culture,” denotes a hostility that no longer reasons for redress but rather moves with mob mentality toward the scent of blood in mindless feeding frenzies. The term “Cancel Culture,” coined in the 2010s, refers to the fashionable system of collectively shunning organizations, persons, or artistic works deemed socially offensive or politically incorrect by the vocal majority. “Cancel,” as it’s used here, stems from 1990s rap slang for murder. Cancel Culture employs group shaming as a tactic to call out and eradicate offending public figures and their works from the marketplace of ideas and economics. Participants, who defend their actions as a means of public redress, seek to obliterate the reputation, the livelihood, the contributions, even the memory of those with whom they differ.

Although the term may be relatively new, the substance of Cancel Culture is as old as civilization. Remember Hatshepsut, that ancient Egyptian regent who commissioned the great architectural wonders of Karnak and Deir el Bahri? No worries; neither did anyone else until 48 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

the work of nineteenth-century Egyptologists restored her historical place in the lineage of the pharaohs. Their sleuthing suggests that, as a result of political ambition, Hatshepsut subjugated her stepson, the rightful Pharaoh Thutmose III, in order to wear the double crown herself.

Yet, when Thutmose came to power at her death, he took his revenge with an act of damnatio memoriae, a condemnation of memory that attempted to obliterate all evidence of her reign from the historical documents and monuments of the period. By his decree, her cartouche was rubbed out of stone monuments. Her statues were walled off in Karnak temple. Her name was removed from the official register of pharaohs. Since Egyptian theology taught that the ka, or spirit, survived in images, the obliteration of these monuments must be construed not only as an act of vandalism, but also one of murderous revenge. Thutmose sought not only to set the record straight and make clear the injustice his stepmother did to him, but to effectively erase her from Egypt’s historical narrative.

The impulse to silence political and social enemies was a common feature of the ancient world. In fact, the fifth-century BC Roman government elected censors to the task. Their job was to protect the Roman ideal by legally banning all that was deemed dangerous to the public. This impulse likewise led to the historic trial and tragic execution of Socrates in fourth-century BC Greece. When he questioned the logic of polytheism, Socrates was tried for impiety to the gods and the corruption of Athens’ youths. A jury of peers silenced him with the most extreme form of censorship: death.

The major difference between these historical incidents of censorship and the current emergence of Cancel Culture is that the state, rather than the general public, enacted the bans. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of speech and the press, protects Americans from such government censorship. It seems that legislators recognized the importance of dissenting voices in a democratic republic. Tyrants censor. Democracies discuss. But twenty-first-century Cancel Culture didn’t get the memo. In the absence of legal censorship, cancelers try the accused in the court of public opinion, which bears great resemblance to the vicious tribunals of the French Revolution.

The year 2019 saw a backlash against this mob brutality, which argued that the quickness to judge and shame others amounted to “virtue signaling,” the calculated public announcement of a sanctioned position. This activity works on the assumption that members of a mob evade its censure; individuals band-wagon to publicly project their own “wokeness” and avoid falling afoul of

If Cancel Culture prevails in silencing the great authors and their works, in deleting the repository that houses our heritage, in a single generation we would lose map and mirrors, the perspective of the greatest voices of Western civilization.

the majority. Sometimes this takes the shape of a boycott. Think of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s boycott of Goya canned foods after the CEO of the company spoke in support of President Trump last July. Think too of high school senior Briones Bedell’s subsequent criticism of Trader Joe’s branding of ethnic foods like “Trader Giotto’s,” “Trader Ming’s,” and “Arabian Joe.” Virtue signaling was quickly exploited by corporate America as a manipulative marketing strategy, which likewise explains the spate of rebranding that emerged in the wake of the recent racial protests. Companies like Land O’Lakes and Aunt Jemima suddenly jettisoned historic graphics associated with their labels to align with the cancelers on hot button social issues and curry favor with the masses. Their aim, of course, was to increase revenue—and to avoid being canceled themselves by the next vocal teen with an iPhone and a Twitter account.

This history of Cancel Culture again begs King David’s question: “Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing?” What is it in a man that makes a mob? What is the essence of Cancel Culture?

Although he wouldn’t have known to use the term, the great bard William Shakespeare depicts the essence of Cancel Culture as hypocrisy in his tragedy Julius Caesar.

The drama depicts a group of Roman senators who, true to the spirit of censorship, assassinate the play’s ambitious namesake in what proves a futile attempt to preserve Rome’s republic. Shakespeare’s rendering of this fascinating political history pivots on a curious spectral visitation.

The ghost of Caesar haunts the earnest Brutus, Caesar’s one-time friend turned lead assassin, the night before the historic Battle of Philippi. Brutus confronts the spirit with questions: Ha! Who comes here?

I think it is the weakness of mine eyes that shapes this monstrous apparition.

It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?

Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil, That mak’st my blood cold, and my hair to stare?

Speak to me what thou art. (IV.iii.275–80) Brutus finds the specter and its intentions ambiguous; is it a god, an angel, a devil? The question itself suggests this is no common haunting. Could the visitation prove hieratic? Any confrontation with the spirit world causes men to tremble, but the intentions of spirits vary. While devils subvert truth, gods and angels speak it.

“Who comes here?” With ominous irony, the answer returns, clarifying the specter’s intentions and fingering the root of Brutus’s fear: “Thy evil spirit, Brutus” (IV. iii.282). Rather than simply identifying himself, the ghost of Caesar enlarges his answer, continuing his office as friend to Brutus by holding up for him a mirror. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Prov. 27:6). Rather than prevaricate, the spirit offers a metaphorical reply that invites contemplation. His conscience touched, Brutus is primed to recognize the spirit of tyranny that animated Caesar in himself and the other conspirators. Furthermore, the oligarchy of assassins is not alone in its possession; Marc Antony and Octavius too prove to be its hosts.

The spirit of the age is ubiquitous; it exploits the spirit of men. Disillusioned, the earnest Brutus turns his knife on himself, addressing the spirit that baits and eludes him: “Caesar, now be still, I kill’d not thee with half so good a will” (V.v.50–51). Sadly, even this self-conscious effort to establish Rome’s virtue fails. Society reflects the men that compose it.

Shakespeare’s trenchant insight regarding the fallen nature of men suggests the futility of the Cancel Culture movement. In an attempt to create a virtuous society by canceling the unrighteous, cancelers fail to recognize the same spirit in themselves. “As it is written, no man is righteous, not one” (Rom. 3:10). The essence of Cancel Culture is sanctimony. As the image of Caesar before Brutus exposes this self-righteousness, a survey of man and his FORMA / WINTER 2021 | 49

works functions similarly.

Like the ghost of Caesar, the Great Books function as a hall of mirrors reflecting multifaceted man. Some, like the novels of Harper Lee and Mark Twain, depict man’s proclivity to racism. Others portray different forms of egocentrism. Most feature the flawed nature of men that would be gods, but live like devils. The Western canon provides a bird’s eye view of the ongoing conversation regarding the nature of man and his society, offering a map and highlighting significant landmarks to suggest an emerging narrative. When men stand before the mirror, some flinch— some flee. Cancel Culture attempts to break the glass.

If Cancel Culture prevails in silencing the great authors and their works, in deleting the repository that houses our heritage, in a single generation we would lose map and mirrors, the perspective of the greatest voices of Western civilization. Without this map, the modern traveler would be left to stumble around in ideological confusion, unaware of the mountainous landmarks, the narrow paths, or the pits they skirt. Of still greater loss, the magic mirrors of the Great Books would be shattered. No longer would readers have the opportunity to glimpse themselves in the authors and their characters, those flawed and bifurcated images of grandeur and misery, dignity and debasement, that reflect all men.

Supporters of Cancel Culture will argue that the movement does not mean to eliminate every work, but only the base works of sinners. Yet what might be lost by discarding the works of marred men? Slave holder Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence would have to go, for starters, and with it, ironically, the ideas of the “self-evident” truths of equality that spark the ire of current cancelers. The Bible too would be jettisoned, since it reports slavery among the patriarchs, and with it would go the explanation, substance, and satisfaction of the sacrifice that Cancel Culture demands. Shakespeare would be banned for his unkind racial depiction of the Jewish people in his Merchant of Venice, and with it would go his imaginative discussion of the condemning law and the atoning gospel. Honestly, the whole literary canon would have to be jettisoned, since it was written by and about fallen men and women. Where would the cancelations stop?

Remember the furor over the recent posthumous publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman? Readers from the Cancel Culture movement argued its depiction of Atticus as a racist requires the cancelation of Lee’s better-known work, To Kill a Mockingbird, a work that heralded racial equality and the end of racial segregation. Really, this is one of the big questions Lee implies in Watchman: do we treat a man according to the worst thing he has ever done, or the best? This question hinges upon another: how do you hope to be remembered? The public holds men accountable for their worst decisions and deeds. The fear of 50 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

this judgment keeps some silent all their lives. What voices might be lost because of the self-righteousness of internet mobs? Who might we cancel in our attempt to justify ourselves?

Watchman’s protagonist Jean Louise Finch, affectionately called Scout, nearly cancels her father, and with him the culture he represents—the South to which she is heir: Dear goodness, the things I learned. I did not want my world disturbed, but I wanted to crush the man who’s trying to preserve it for me. I wanted to stamp out all the people like him. I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re nose heavy, too much of them and we’re tail heavy—it’s a matter of balance. I can’t beat him, and I can’t join him— . . . she stepped aside to let him pass. She followed him to the car and watched him get laboriously into the front seat. As she welcomed him silently to the human race, the stab of discovery made her tremble a little. Somebody walked over my grave, she thought.

Scout comes of age when she accepts her father, which identification involves a little bit of death. Antagonism toward such identification and the self-sacrifice it requires is at the heart of Cancel Culture and the virtue signaling it begets.

The need for societies and individuals to purify themselves is as old as society itself. The God of the Old Testament validated this need when He commanded Aaron, high priest of the Israelites, to place his hands ritualistically upon the head of a goat, transferring the sins of the people onto the head of the animal before ejecting it from the camp. In this way, the Israelites were separated from their sins by the scapegoat (Lev. 16:21–22). Scapegoating shifts the sins of the individual and the society onto another. Cancel Culture re-dresses this scapegoat in pagan garb.

Whereas the Levitical scapegoat prefigured the definitive Divine Atonement, the pagan scapegoat figures the systemic violence of human sacrifice.

Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” describes such a system. The story is set in a small, pious community during a harvest festival, which culminates in a lottery of sorts. Much excitement is generated by the festivities. The protagonist herself is buoyed up by the spirit of the event until her own name is drawn in the lottery and the town turns upon her: Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old

Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

If we continue the practice of Cancel Culture, we shouldn’t be surprised if we eventually find ourselves the target. “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone” (John 8:7).

John Milton warns of the dangers of such measures in Areopagitica, his treatise against the censorship of books: “Unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book destroys reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.”

Milton anticipated Cancel Culture and summed up its true murderous activity. In so doing, he anticipates the real question: what is a human being? The Great Books, in all their variety and nuance, supply the only honest answer: a mixed bag.

Once again, novelist Harper Lee gives us a vision, a method for “manning” the mob. It comes in the shape of a child, naively inserting herself between a mob and its victims. They have come in disguise to do their violent deeds, but she spots a friend in their midst: “Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin’ along?” (153). With perfect authenticity, she continues to remind the silent and somewhat shrinking figure of the multiplicity of relationships they share. Should her daddy’s pro-bono work on his entailment fail to awaken his recognition, their mutual interest in her schoolmate, his son Walter, must serve: “Mr. Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me after all” (153).

In the light of this dawning connection, Mr. Cunningham slowly comes to himself. He remembers his place in the community—his place as Walter’s father. He is called up by the child: “Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders. ‘I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,’ he said. Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. ‘Let’s clear out,’ he called. ‘Let’s get going, boys.’ As they had come, in ones and twos the men shuffled back to their ramshackle cars. Doors slammed, engines coughed, and they were gone” (154). When the members of the mob are recognized, they remember themselves. They recall the web of interconnectedness that joins one to another, and in the process of this recollection, they are humanized. Whereas the mob condemns from the perceived security of its anonymity and size, a man stands and falls by his own deeds. “The heart knows its own bitterness and no stranger can share its joy” (Prov.

14:10). The individual knows his humanity. The world condemns man even as man condemns himself.

Thank God that He does not judge in like fashion: “For I will forgive their iniquities and remember their sins no more” (Heb. 8:12). It’s interesting to note that the Lord effected this benevolent forgetfulness by a different type of Cancel Culture. Instead of canceling man for his sins— his deplorable failures to keep the law—He canceled the handwriting that was against man: “He forgave us all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross! And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col. 2:13–14). Not as the world gives does God give to us. Rather than cancel man, God canceled His Son, the true Scapegoat foreshadowed by the Levitical ritual. To those who would come to Him, He promises absolution. But some will not.

Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing? David proclaims the answer: “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed” (Ps. 2:2).

In the heart of every man is the desire to be God, to set himself up as Law and Judge, to justify and establish himself by the works of his own hands. Yet God brooks no contenders: He alone is the Lord. And so men rage and resist the worship of the true God as they seek to enthrone themselves. They cancel and call out and curse, scapegoating their neighbors to justify themselves, while the better Scapegoat remains. His blood alone atones for sin.

While Cancel Culture destroys community, oppressing through violence and fear, the forgiveness of Christ creates fellowship. Rather than erasing sinners through a damnatio memoriae, Jesus expunges sin and writes our names in His book of life. Instead of humiliating those He calls out, He made a spectacle of their accuser. Instead of exile, He brings adoption. Instead of hatred, He offers love. When the truth of this gospel becomes personal, the mirrors of the Great Books cease to terrorize. Gazing into their magic glass, we discover representative images of ourselves and our neighbors. Beneath their defects and in spite of them, we recognize a family resemblance, each and all sons of Adam and sons of God. In our likeness and God’s love, we find a present grace for one another, the ability to live at peace with the sinful tensions within and without us. Far from the “madding crowd” of Cancel Culture, the humble dwell in peace, honoring the image wherever it’s found, finding even in its defects the hope of redemption.

Missy Andrews is co-director of the Center for Literary Education and a homeschooling mother of six. Her books include Teaching the Classics: A Socratic Method for Literary Education, Wild Bells: A Literary Advent, and My Divine Comedy: A Mother’s Homeschooling Journey.

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I

t is hard to quantify Marilynne Robinson’s stature at this stage in her career. By a writer’s standard, she has done it all—won the Pulitzer, been a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and taught at the famed University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop that shaped some of the greatest writers of the past century, from Flannery O’Connor to Wallace Stegner and Raymond Carver. The list of contemporary writers influenced by Robinson during her time at Iowa (she is now professor emerita) is immense: Lan Samantha Chang, Peter Orner, and Paul Harding, to name a few. She has been interviewed by a president, won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and become a nationally known writer who comments on everything from nuclear energy to Puritan theology to life during a pandemic. When Marilynne Robinson speaks, we listen.

While her speeches and essays can be far ranging in scope, her fiction—what she is best known for—is surprisingly focused. All but one of her now five novels explore the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa (with the exception being her first and most enigmatic novel Housekeeping, set in Idaho and published in 1980). These Iowa novels center around an ailing Congregationalist minister, John Ames, whose sharp interior life is spent pondering the deepest questions that faith, love, and death evoke, questions that often come at the expense of his interpersonal life, where fear and jealousy threaten to derail his relationships. Each novel of the Gilead “trilogy” (now a quartet with the recent publication of Jack) is told from the perspective of a different character. Gilead is an epistolary novel written from the perspective of Ames; Home focuses on Glory, the daughter of Ames’s best friend and fellow minister, Rev. Boughton; and Lila focuses on its title character, who arrives in Ames’s small town, falls in love with him, and gives the elderly minister a second chance at life. Only Gilead is written in the first person, but you would hardly notice any distance caused by the limited third person point of view in the other novels—such is the love and intimacy with which Robinson writes her novels.

What is it about Robinson’s fiction, whose storylines seem so quintessentially and nostalgically American, that has cemented her place as one of the greatest living novelists of the last forty years? Her approach to fiction is best captured in her own words. Her essay “Imagination and 54 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

Community,” published in the essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books, describes the care and attention with which she approaches her characters: “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.” She loves the recovered sex worker and the small-town minister, the prodigal son and the old men whose minds reveal racial prejudice and judgment. When we read her characters, we see ourselves—our doubts, our messes, and our potential for goodness beyond our inner natures.

Each of these novels asks profound questions with deep spiritual and epistemological significance. Gilead explores notions of legacy and redemption—how an old man surprised by love in his twilight years can also possess the ability to condemn or redeem another man of whom he is jealous, all while mourning his own impending death and the years he will miss with his son. Home is an exercise in prodigal love and longing, the extent of a father’s love for his troubled child. Lila is a meditation on shame and possibility—the fear, risk, and reward of becoming known.

Chronologically, the Iowa novels overlap, though each book begins and ends at different moments. Gilead and Home especially coincide so closely that they famously provide different perspectives on the same scenes. The ability to turn over an idea through several different lenses, to provide a kind of “polyphonic” (or multi-voiced) take on a single theological question is an understated talent of Robinson’s.

Much scholarship has been written on the “front porch predestination scene” in which the characters contemplate predestination and redemption. It’s a conversation seemingly all of us have had at different points in our lives—are some people beyond all hope? The subtext of the conversation is that Jack, the prodigal son, who poses the question “Are there people who are simply born evil, live evil lives, and then go to hell?” does not believe the Christian message, though he was raised by a minister (Boughton) and named after a minister (Ames). Jack’s hidden shame stems from a feeling of difference and the guilt of being an unbeliever in a town of believers. He is haunted by alcoholism and the ways he has abandoned the women he has known, the belief system of his father, and even his own son. As Glory notes in Home, Jack hides his “loneliness .‌. . making his estrangement literal, visible.” We can certainly

Her teaching, just like her essays, reveals a searching mind that is alive and eager, that knows no disciplinary limits in an educational space where borders are often too quickly drawn.

read this conversation as a conversation on salvation and Calvinism, to be sure, but more importantly we can read this as one of many pleas from Jack to reach out beyond his veil of shame and find some kind of identification from the people who have known him all his life.

In The Soul of Shame, therapist Curt Thompson writes that “we all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us, and that we remain in this mode of searching for the rest of our lives.” What makes Jack such an appealing character—appealing enough to be the title character of Robinson’s new novel—is that we see ourselves in Jack’s hardness and in his brokenness. He longs to be known by those he loves, for his doubts to be recognized and identified with by people like his father’s friend, John Ames. It is this resonance he desires that causes him to form a bond with Ames’s younger wife Lila because they are both prodigals, both humans crawling out of the shells of their pasts. It is this bond that causes Ames to be suspicious and jealous, but it is also a bond that, in Gilead, shows Ames that he must be forgiving and gracious.

Depending on which side of the prodigal son story you may find yourself on, you may see yourself as the self-righteous “older brother,” smug in his or her own belief; the gracious father longing for reconciliation; or the younger brother crawling back towards home for rescue and relief.

All of Marilynne Robinson’s characters circle around these three archetypes. And usually she turns the question towards the reader.

Reception and Legacy Alex Engebretson argues that there are “two types of Marilynne Robinson readers: Housekeeping people and Gilead people.” If Robinson’s later Iowa works are centered around shame and grace and questions of religious conviction, her first novel, Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Hemingway award in 1980, is a very different novel on human nature, a work that Engebretson describes as having an “almost nihilistic” worldview.

But in Housekeeping we see the dawn of Robinson’s spiritual concerns that always have and always will be filtered through the local and particular. Her debut novel has arguably the strongest and lushest portrayal of place, the gothic and mysterious Fingerbone, Idaho. It is here where “though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smoothes our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.” Robinson articulates here, as the poet Christian Wiman explores in his essay “Varieties of Quiet,” “not only the sense of absence . . . permeating every spiritual aspect of my life, but also . . . to bestow upon it an energy and agency, a prayerful and indefinable promise.” A harbinger for her work on grace and belonging in the future, Housekeeping silently provides hope in the promise that “the world will be made whole.” It is a debut of charged absence that was not answered for twenty-four years until Gilead was published in 2004.

I would offer a third kind of reader to the pair that Engebretson presents: those who find Robinson in her numerous prose collections—from the Death of Adam to recent books like The Givenness of Things and What Are We Doing Here? In her essays, you’ll find a different stylist, though the same searching mind. Here we truly see the “cloud of witnesses” in whose company Robinson frequents—from Puritan theologians to European philosophers to the American literary figure who is her clearest influence, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Though her essays can at times be meandering and dense, her nonfiction writing is always concerned with the possibilities of community and the harms of ideology that divide us. If her fiction knits together an imaginary community, her prose fights against the “imagined competitor” that we struggle with collectively as an American nation and as individual selves (What Are We Doing Here?). Her political insight is both timeless and timely—“Contemporary America is full of fear . . . fear is not a Christian habit of mind” (“Fear”) and “This country is in a state of bewilderment that cries out for good history” (“What Is Freedom of Conscience?”). In a time of such division in our nation, FORMA / WINTER 2021 | 55

Robinson’s essays provide wisdom and direction that we should return to regularly.

The hope in the human spirit that Marilynne Robinson channels by way of Emerson is perhaps the greatest sign of the transcendental tradition she seeks to operate within.

But there are other influences that readers can certainly discover in her work. You can find the sharp perception into characters’ minds and flaws that you would find in Flannery O’Connor. You can see the understatement that was trademarked by the likes of Hemingway. You can find the brooding, contemplative darkness of Faulkner, who I would argue is a clear literary ancestor in both content and form. We may even stretch back toward Nathaniel Hawthorne, and though Robinson herself describes this canonical author as “creepy,” the same issues of salvation and doubt run through Robinson’s work as it did Hawthorne’s.

I would argue, however, that Robinson’s closest literary kindred spirit is Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved should be read alongside Robinson’s Home. Beloved, while an example of magical realism and much more genre-bending than any of Robinson’s work, is a domestic story haunted at its core by the racism that Robinson merely alludes to, that which happens in the distance until it drives up to the curb in Iowa. (I say this without having read Jack, where race apparently figures heavily). For Toni Morrison, however, the comforts of home can never be fully realized because no matter where one retreats and escapes, the trauma of slavery and racism will reach you.

These novels are two sides of the same coin—they contemplate American domestic identity but through two different racial lenses. What concerns Robinson’s characters may be more of a luxury to Morrison’s when matters of survival and existence are more pressing and immediate.

Still, the spiritual similarities in their characters are real and fascinating to think about.

It is also helpful to think of Robinson’s polymath legacy alongside other intellectual figures outside the literary realm. Filmmaker Terrence Malick, for example, is a kindred spirit, whose exploration of “the way of nature and of grace” in his tour de force 2012 film The Tree of Life provides another complimentary piece to Robinson’s larger project. You’ll find echoes of Robinson in other icons as well—from the interdisciplinary concerns of French philosopher Simone Weil to the political and communal convictions of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and even the introspective incisiveness of St. Augustine in his Confessions.

Her teaching, while often not nearly as discussed as her prose, is equally ambitious and sweeping. Former students like Drew Bratcher have described Robinson as a prodigiously talented lecturer:

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In the classroom . . . [her] intellectual powers were on full display, she spoke in long, coruscating sentences whose turns and trajectories were polished and unpredictable. She quoted Tyndale and the day’s Times. She read from Jonah, referenced Augustine, Dickinson, Heisenberg, Locke. She was up on cosmology, phenomenology, history, and linguistics.

Her teaching, just like her essays, reveals a searching mind that is alive and eager, that knows no disciplinary limits in an educational space where borders are often too quickly drawn.

Critics of Robinson have pushed back against the spiritual elements of Robinson’s stories, citing either that she is not religious or Calvinist enough to be championed as a contemporary patron saint of such labels. Jessica Hooten Wilson, writing for Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal, examines how Robinson often ignores the salvific work of the cross for a more inclusive and universal goodness found in human beings.

For Wilson, Robinson’s theology is “free . . . found everywhere, and in everything,” but it “ignores the problem of evil.” Citing John Ames’s forgiveness of Jack, Wilson traces how Ames moves too quickly beyond Jack’s past and his questionable motives. There is no true path of confession for Jack. Wilson and others have brought up legitimate concerns around Robinson’s theology: that though she is a self-proclaimed Calvinist, she says little about salvation and sin. However, it is hard to approach fiction and expect systematic theology, and I would argue that what we find in Robinson’s fiction is perhaps more true to the gray, murky matters of life. Is grace’s core message not inherently about forgetfulness, forgiveness, possibility? Robinson shows us that human interaction is less transactional and more organic, vacillating between our vices and our virtues. We are human, Robinson gently and regularly reminds us.

The kind of Calvin that Robinson appeals to is not the austere judge of Geneva steeped in issues of eternal salvation. Instead, Robinson channels the Calvin we find in Book III of the Institutes, in which he implores us to not “reflect on the wickedness of men but to look to the image of God in them, an image which, covering and obliterating their faults . . . should allure us to love and embrace them.”

Ironically, Calvinist love here is inclusive rather than predestined; and similarly Robinson’s love for the Puritans is not steeped in the legalism the world seems to remember the Puritans by, not the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”–type of Puritanism but rather something more akin to Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections.

Only a great writer can inhabit as many spaces as Mar-

ilynne Robinson does and still appeal to as many readers as she manages to, secular and religious alike. In her far-reaching creative intellect, Robinson reminds us that “we are unthinkable without our communities.” When I think of Robinson’s corpus, I think of the line from Housekeeping: “What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” In an age of fragmentation and division, we would all do well to meditate on one of America’s greatest thinkers and the values she champions.

Aaron Brown is the author of Acacia Road, winner of the 2016 Gerald Cable Book Award (Silverfish Review Press). He has published work in Image, World Literature Today, Sojourners, Waxwing, and Transition, among others. Brown grew up in Chad and now lives in Texas, where he is an assistant professor of English at LeTourneau University.

Bibliography Bratcher, Drew. “Reading Moby-Dick with Marilynne Robinson.” Gospel Coalition, May 1, 2018.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John Thomas Macneil, translated by Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox, 2016.

Engebretson, Alex. “Marilynne Robinson’s Singular Vision.”

The Millions, Nov 24, 2014.

Milota, Megan. “Seeking Being in Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Gilead’ and ‘Home.’ ” Amerikastudien / American Studies, 61.1 (2016) 33–51.

Wilson, Jessica H. “Pushing Back against Marilynne Robinson’s Theology.” Church Life Journal, May 13, 2019.

Wiman, Christian. “Varieties of Quiet.” In My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2013.

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Schools

DISCOVER CHRIST THROUGH

ANCIENT MYTHS

“God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mystical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spiritually, withhold our imaginative welcome.”

—C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact”

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MythMadeFact.com

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W

hat are the consequences when a society displays a chronic lack of gratitude?

This is one of the defining questions that Shakespeare explores in his late tragedy, Coriolanus. Using the context of the early Roman Republic, fraught with civil disobedience and violent clashes with its neighbors, Shakespeare dramatizes the political tensions of his own Jacobean London. It was an accepted moral truth in the Renaissance that ingratitude was a reprehensible vice, a breach of duty, and socially destructive. And literary critics have often studied the way ingratitude is the dynamic force that accelerates Shakespeare’s tragedies to their denouement. Nahum Tate’s version of the play, published in the late seventeenth century, was even called The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth.

Coriolanus tells the story of one noble family, that of Roman general Caius Martius (who later wins the title Coriolanus). Taken from Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Shakespeare’s play begins by dramatizing the friction between the famished citizens and the compassionless general, Martius, during the early years of the Roman Republic. Despite his rejection of the Roman people, his body bears several wounds from the many conflicts in which he has fought on behalf of his country. His great military successes against Rome’s enemies, the Volscians, have given him political status which his mother and a family friend named Menenius are quick to monopolize.

Proving himself incapable of the tact, reticence, and malleability required for statesmanship in this new republic, he is soon banished from Rome by the very voters who elected him, even before he puts on the title of consul. His mother, Volumnia, is in the end the only Roman able to negotiate with the exiled Martius, who has joined forces with Rome’s nemesis, Aufidius, intent on violent revenge. On her knees, Volumnia persuades her son not to attack Rome and he concedes, knowing full well that the peace treaty he will help frame will cost him his life.

This is a play that depicts self-gratification (a form of selfishness) posing as gratitude (a form of altruism).

Characters in the play give thanks, praise, and honor with the expectation of some greater return. And at the heart of the drama, Volumnia, Martius’ mother, manipulates her son with praise and flattery in order

to gain renown and political power in the city. Martius ungratefully seeks to deny his mother any claim on his prowess as a man and success as a warrior. He attempts to ‘‘stand as if a man were the author of himself and knew no other kin’’, denouncing all bonds of family, friendship, and military camaraderie. Further, he expresses with vitriol his ingratitude towards Rome, his mother-city, despising the people who comprise it.

Rome’s citizens show their mutual ingratitude by using their newly bestowed political influence to banish Martius, the loyal warrior who defended them from their enemies. The patricians—the noble elites who rule the city—also betray Martius, forgetting their debt of gratitude to him for his service in the wars (they have crowned him with the oaken garland three times!), and fail to prevent his banishment. Lastly, the Volscian military leader Aufidius, Martius’ nemesis-turned-ally, is ungrateful to Martius for “sell[ing] the blood and labour / of [their] great action” by “making a treaty where there was a yielding” with Rome, even though Martius wins the Volscians spoils and concessions from Rome without hazarding any of their own men.

Thus, Shakespeare shows us Rome (and in some sense London), destabilized by ingratitude.

The play’s central relationship is between Volumnia, who is Rome personified, and Martius Caius who represents Rome’s warrior sons. Their relationship reveals the destructive effects of the manipulative use of thanks and praise. Although Martius Caius rejects flattery as injurious when addressing his peers, claiming after the battle of Corioli that “my mother, / who has a charter to extol her blood, / when she does praise me, grieves me,” he seeks his mother’s praise in the private sphere of the maternal bond. And Volumnia is hardly subtle: My praises made thee first a soldier, So, to have my praise for this Perform a part thou hast not done before.

The warrior who publicly presents himself as autonomous is surprisingly compliant to this manipulation in private. His rugged individualism is a fantasy that the play strips from him.

Martius later says that he finds praise embarrassing.

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the gift of one-tenth of the spoils, although rightfully his, awarded to him by Cominius. In curmudgeonly fashion he rejects the vocal praise afforded to him by the Roman army: Martius: I have some wounds upon me and they smart To hear themselves remembered.

Cominius: Should they not, Well might they fester ’gainst ingratitude, And tent themselves with death. [. . .]

Martius: You shout me forth In acclamations hyperbolical; As if I loved my little should be dieted In praises sauced with lies.

Cominius: Too modest are you; More cruel to your good report than grateful To us that give you truly.

Here, Martius’ excessive humility looks a lot like pride.

This is for two reasons. Firstly, he rejects the praises offered, rather than receiving them with gratitude: Martius is too proud to take a compliment. Secondly, in boasting about the paucity of his efforts, he insists upon his superiority. Later, when Cominius is lauding Martius by giving his martial curriculum vitae to the senate in the first move to make him consul, he retreats: I had rather have one scratch my head in the sun Than idly sit to hear my nothings monstered.

Rather than accept the public recognition that is his due, Martius scoffs at it. By discrediting his military achievements as “nothings,” he undermines the valiant actions of his peers.

Nevertheless, Martius’ refusal to enter into a mercantile exchange of gratitude could be seen as a virtuous aspect of his character. Martius at times proceeds as if he is indebted to no one, and as if his actions are performed with no expectation of reciprocity. Neither of these are true. The play exposes his need for praise and his realization that he owes everything to his mother and her “womb that brought [him] into this world,” as she reminds him in their final meeting in the last act of the play. He concedes his attempt at radical individualism, “to stand as if a man were author of himself, and knew no other kin.” He is bound to repay what he owes his mother-city, which is

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no less than his life. He is as dependent on Rome as the plebeians are, for without Rome he has neither status nor purpose. As Menenius’ parable reveals: a plebeian may be as far from Martius as the toe is from the head, yet both are of the same body, consumed by the same stomach.

These debts of gratitude are metaphorically presented by Shakespeare as hunger. Images of a city that eats itself are at work from the outset. Starvation, surfeit, and death are presented alongside one another in the opening moments of the play: the plebeians grow lean while the patricians allegedly glut themselves on a “musty superfluity” of grain. But is there any grain in the coffers of Rome? This question remains a mystery at the heart of the play, concealing Shakespeare’s political sympathies.

In their uncertainty, the plebians resolve to “revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes” in a pointed image that likens the diminished bodies of the plebs to the very weapon they plan to use to attack their leaders. Already we see a city eating itself, even before Martius arrives to undermine their rebellion. He says: You cry against the noble senate, who, under the gods, keep you in awe, which else would feed on one another.

This image of cannibalism brings to mind the fratricidal foundations of the city—one wolf-cub man killing another—the genesis of the dog-eat-dog culture of Rome. So not only does Shakespeare expose Rome’s violent underpinnings, but he also shows England as superior to the inspirational classical civilizations emulated in the Renaissance, suggesting that England’s civility has eclipsed this ancient barbarity.

Strengthening the comparison between the two civilizations, Shakespeare opens Coriolanus with food riots, events with which his audience would have been intimately familiar. In 1607–8 a series of poor harvests and rocketing food prices had brought peasants to the streets of Northern English cities in protest. In response, the Crown denied that famine existed and continued to reclaim arable land used for subsistence farming for pasture in the large estates of the landed gentry. Meanwhile, the king’s right of ‘‘purveyance’’ or commandeering food and supplies for the royal household, was increasing conflict between King James I and the House of Commons. This procurement had escalated to unprecedented levels. Accusations made against James were the same accusations of irresponsible stewardship raised by the plebeians about the patricians in the opening scene of the play: They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses

A society is only as noble as its common objects of love, often represented by its rulers. When the model is good, a city is healthy, but when evil, it devolves into a vicious cycle of envy and self-destruction.

crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us.

James, always keen to identify his regime with imperial Rome, loathed his parliamentary critics in the House of Commons with the same vehemence as Coriolanus loathes the tribunes. Shakespeare conceals his own political views but one cannot help but wonder if he’s making a keen political statement here.

During the openign scene, Menenius attempts to ease the political tension between the senate and the plebeians by performing some demagoguery on the subject of food.

He describes Rome as a mutinous body, with the patricians as the stomach sustaining it: That I receive the general food at first, Which you do live upon; and fit it is, Because I am the store-house and the shop Of the whole body: [. . .]

Though all at once cannot See what I do deliver out to each, Yet I can make my audit up, that all From me do back receive the flour of all, And leave me but the bran.

Menenius suggests that the patricians have been self-sacrificial, petitioning the plebeians to be grateful to them for food—the implication being that the food is acquired independently by the rulers. However, as the play progresses, it becomes clear that the “general food” to which Menenius refers is sown, reaped, and harvested by the Roman citizens themselves. The patricians are dependent on the manual labor of the “trades in Rome” and are

feeding the citizens on the citizens’ produce while keeping a portion for themselves. The hungry citizens, too famished to work more, beat their plowshares into swords and threaten to attack their leaders. Human society, always corrupted by ingratitude, fails to be self-sustaining, instead becoming self-consuming.

Martius, likewise, contributes to the conflict by repaying ingratitude with violence. That his first word in the play is “thanks” proves to be deeply ironic, Martius is not a Renaissance man, not a man for all seasons: he is a warrior. In his first arrival on stage he says he will quell the rebellion by making mincemeat of the people: Would the nobility lay aside their ruth, And let me use my sword, I’d make a quarry With thousands of these quartered slaves as high As I could pitch my lance.

The unrest in Rome is compounded by the fact that while the citizens and patricians seek to devour one another with violence, “the present wars devour” Martius.

Martius’ insatiable appetite for war and disdain for dependence (which would include gratitude ) was nurtured

by Volumnia. In a shocking image of feeding, she likens her son to Hector, telling Martius’ wife, Virigilia, The breasts of Hecuba When she did suckle Hector looked not lovelier Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood At Grecian sword contemning.

Shakepeare’s metaphor posits that Roman warriors (presumably like Grecian ones before them) were weaned abruptly from milk to blood, the Roman matron, who represents Rome itself, exclusively nourishes the valor of her sons with her own body, further compounding the metaphor of the self-consuming body: “Thy valiantness was mine, thou sucks’t it from me.”

This is a troubling statement, as Volumnia conveys that Hecuba suckling Hector or Volumnia breastfeeding FORMA / WINTER 2021 | 63

Coriolanus is a play that speaks to our current cultural moment: ingratitude abounds.

Martius was no act of gratuitous giving. In Rome’s all-consuming state, there is no creator-creature distinction.

Volumnia expects repayment for every drop. It is no wonder that Martius has trouble accepting that the plebeians were given corn gratis. The roots of Martius’ ingratitude are apparent—he hates the dependence gratitude creates, so much so that he comes close to destroying Rome (and his mother with it) altogether, preferring to be “a kind of nothing, titleless, till he had forg’d himself a name of the fire of burning Rome” to escape the burden of his identity.

Nietschze’s observations of motherhood in Human All Too Human are pertinent to the monstrous Volumnia; she loves herself in her son more than she loves the son himself. Once banished, this is what Martius seeks to efface.

Volumnia is always aware of her own dependence on the security Martius provides. Devastated by his banishment, she claims Martius back at the first opportunity, stating: “Thou art my warrior, I holp to frame thee.” She never relinquishes her maternal bond.

When Martius Caius appears on stage in the thick of battle against the Volscians, he is smeared so heavily in his own blood that the soldiers think he has been flayed.

The resemblance to Volumnia’s image of Hector is obvious. Standing for mother Rome, Volumnia’s cannibalistic appetite is keen when she rejoices at the news of her son being butchered in the wars. She cannot wait to serve him up: “there will be large cicatrices to show the people!” she gloats. The cumulative total of Martius’ wounds for Rome is twenty-seven, making him a convincing candidate for the role of consul who is both the leader of the Roman army and a member of the senate: His wounds are visible proof to the people of his undying service to Rome. Never mind that Martius has no desire to become embroiled in state politics. There is a sharp irony here as Martius himself was responsible for expelling Tarquin the Proud, the last Roman king, and making it possible for this new order to be ushered in.

In light of this, Shakespeare shows the full weight of Aufidius’ astute political observation: So our virtues 64 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

Lie in the interpretation of the time, And power, unto itself most commendable, Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair T’extol what it hath done.

Martius never sits in that throne of power before he meets his death. The tribunes manipulate the voters so that, instead of expressing their thanks to the newly named Coriolanus for his recent deeds in the Volscian wars, they ungratefully banish him. His historic virtues are forgotten by the time. The ingratitude of the people develops Rome’s monstrous identity, as a Roman citizen in the play admits: Ingratitude is monstrous, and for the multitude to be ingrateful, were to make a monster of the multitude: of the which we being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members.

Menenius voices his fears at the banishment of the thrice-honored Martius, and finally makes an accurate prophecy: Now the God’s forbid that our renowned Rome, whose gratitude Towards her deserved children is enroll’d In Jove’s own book, like an unnatural dam Should now eat up her own.

The imagery of cannibalistic consumption reaches its zenith in Volumnia herself. Playing on the words ‘‘kin’’ and ‘‘unkind’’, Shakespeare shows that the consequences of ingratitude go against the ordained natural order. The image of Volumnia’s anorexic cannibalism prefigures the end of the play. Menenius encounters her outside the capitol, berating the tribunes for the banishment of her son.

Ungratefully, she rejects Menenius’ invitation to supper and asserts: “Anger’s my meat, I sup upon myself / And so shall starve with feeding.” Similarly, Martius undergoes a monstrous transformation by his ingratitude from man to dragon. When he leaves Rome, he makes the comparison

himself. “I go alone, / Like to a hungry dragon, that his fen / makes fear’d and talk’d of more than seen.”

Cominius observes that the Volscians follow him “with no less confidence / than boys pursuing summer butterflies.” In this telling metaphor, the audience is reminded of Martius’ own son at the outset of the play who, in Valeria’s words, “ran after a gilded butterfly” and in the end “set his teeth and tore it.” Later, Menenius draws the parallel between the dragon and the butterfly: There is differency between a grub and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub. This CORIOLANUS is grown from man to dragon: he has wings; he’s more than a creeping thing.

The analogy is clear: Martius will be “mammocked”, a word meaning “ripped to shreds,” reminiscent of Martius’ last words to the Volscian conspirators—“cut me to pieces.”

Leaving behind the famine of Rome, Martius arrives in Antium where the nobility of the Volscian state are feasting at Aufidius’ house. Already the contrast with Rome is apparent: this is a place of plenty and the mood is somewhat relaxed. Martius makes a telling observation which foreshadows that he will never participate in the Volscian feast either. He says, arriving under cover of darkness at Aufidius’ kitchen: “This feast smells well / but I appear not like a guest.” Martius states his campaign of vengeance to Aufidius, again employing imagery relating to feeding by promising to “pour war into the bowels of ungrateful Rome,” glutting the “thankless” patricians on a meal of his own devising that they will not be able to stomach.

Ironically, it is Martius himself who is the meal. His intangible nature, name, identity, and existence are consumed by Rome but his physical body is butchered like meat by the Volscians. The belly in Menenius’ parable smiles gravely. This is shown particularly gruesomely at the ending of Fiennes’ film adaptation of the play, with his body thrown into a pick-up truck, as if being brought back from the abattoir. The portentous image Martius’ himself employed to warn the patricians earlier in the play is tragically fulfilled: the crows peck at the eagle of Rome.

In all of this, Coriolanus is a play that speaks to our current cultural moment: ingratitude abounds. At the end of act 3, at the news of his banishment, Martius curses the people according to their deserts: Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!

Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes, Fan you into despair! Have the power still To banish your defenders; till at length Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,

Making not reservation of yourselves, Still your own foes, deliver you as most Abated captives to some nation That won you without blows!

He could well be describing the populace of any Western city today. We are witnessing the banishment of our defenders. We live in a time of abundance and yet there is a poor appetite for the feast. Fearful populations fail to discern the truth from the proliferation of rumours sold as news, the state behaves as if it is sovereign, the people embrace their enslavement to it looking to the state for salvation, and, to paraphrase Aufidius’ words, our time has reinterpreted what was formerly considered virtuous. The personification of the plebeians as Hydra (a many-headed beast) is also apt. In a rare moment of self-awareness, one citizen admits to another that as a voting body, they are unable to agree or to hold steadfastly to a position: Not that our heads are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald, but that our wits are so diversely coloured: and truly I think if all our wits were to issue out of one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south, and their consent of one direct way should be at once to all the points o’ the compass.

This character’s lines describe the fragmented nature of today’s identity politics. Democracies falter in the face of secular individual sovereignty, and in the midst of this confusion, one cannot help but share in Martius’ yearning for the clarity of good leadership: My soul aches To know, when two authorities are up, Neither supreme, how soon confusion May enter ’twixt the gap of both and take The one by the other.

So at length how will this ignorance, which finds not till it feels, deliver? Many of us are often as ungrateful as Martius, as full of contempt for our Western cultural heritage, —which is our mother—and as determined to destroy it even at the cost of a total loss of identity. Thus, twenty-first-century society mirrors the play’s corrupted cost-benefit economy of gratitude.

Peter Leithart, in his essay ‘‘City of In-Gratia: Roman Ingratitude in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,’’ views the play in the light of the Thomist three-part cost-benefit calculation of gratitude as detailed by Aquinas in the Summa Theologica. The first part is to recognize the favor received, the second is to express one’s appreciation, and the third is to

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repay the favor at a suitable place and time according to one’s means. And since what is last in the order of generation is first in the order of destruction, it follows that the first degree of ingratitude is when a man fails to repay a favor, the second when he declines to notice or indicate that he has received a favor, while the third and supreme degree is when a man fails to recognize the reception of a favor, whether by intention or forgetfulness. Moreover, since opposite affirmation includes negation, it follows that it belongs to the first degree of ingratitude to return evil for good, to the second to find fault with a favor received, and to the third to esteem kindness as though it were unkindness.

Coriolanus lays bare Rome’s failures in living up to ancient (and Renaissance) expectations of the public duty of gratitude. Leithart concludes that Rome is constitutionally ungrateful. She fails to establish an economy of gratitude, instead demanding self-sacrifice. Revealing the theological implications of the play, Leithart posits that in dramatizing its negation, Shakespeare gestures towards St. Augustine’s City of God, the realm of genuine gratitude—full of grace—as the only viable alternative.

In the City of God, the New Jerusalem, those with Christ’s name on their foreheads will feast on the sacrificial lamb, eating the body of Christ, the bread of life. In the agonistic city of Cain, people feed on one another.

The Bible illustrates self-gratification in the gospel of John. The multitudes followed Jesus from Tiberias to Capernaum after He fed the five thousand with five barley loaves and two fishes, where He rebuked them.

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.” (John 6:26–27).

The Lord Jesus Christ will never fail to supply all our needs. He commands us to give thanks. We are not to be like the people at Capernaum, pursuing our beastly anxieties about our lives, “what we will eat or what we will drink, and about our bodies, what we will put on.” These things will be added, but as well as giving thanks for these things, which are a great blessing, we ought to also give thanks to Him who gives us all things. As the Eucharistic prayers remind us: It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times and in all places give thanks unto thee, O Lord, holy Father, almighty, everlasting God, through Jesus Christ thine only Son our Lord.

Without Christ, one cannot fully know what to be grateful for or to whom. Thanksgiving is the fulfillment of God’s command. Only through Christ himself are we able to give thanks; not of ourselves. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” exclaims Paul in Romans 7:25.

Andrew Kern observes that thankfulness is an attitude of receptivity and belief while complaining and ingratitude are attitudes of unbelief. Unbelief consumes; faithful gratitude replenishes. Gratitude, in the form of right worship, restores us to our identity as image bearers of the living God. I conclude with an image from George Herbert, a rector in the Church of England, a poet, and a near contemporary of Shakespeare’s. The first poem of the section called ‘‘The Church’’ in his collection The Temple is ‘‘The Altar’’ and it is a hieroglyph in the shape of an altar. The poem reminds the reader that gratitude flows out of humility.

A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant reares, Made of a heart, and cemented with teares: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workmans tool hath touch’d the same.

A H E A RT alone Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow’r doth cut.

Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy Name; That, if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease.

O let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine, And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine.

Herbert uses the typological image that we are altars of stone unhewn by human hands, upon which we offer the sacrifice of thanks and praise. Our purpose as creatures is to be grateful to God, to glorify him forever with our praises. This is the new covenant anti-type of the Old Testament bloody sacrifice. The priest of the old temple feasted on the animal sacrifice. In the new covenant temples in our hearts, we feast on Jesus Christ, the bread of life, and we will never hunger.

Sarah-Jane Bentley teaches English at Eton College. She is a regular contributor to the Close Reads Podcast Network.

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T

he tires of my car crunched their way up the length of the gravel driveway and I pulled up to what I thought was surely the wrong address. There was no garden in sight, let alone a farm. No fastidiously neat rows. No tall, rusty siloes. No open space, only a dense tree line. There was a red barn, but it was collapsing. There was an average, blue house with an equally average front yard: grass, gravel, and a sturdy-enough mailbox.

Shortly after I pulled up, the owner of the blue house walked down the gravel drive and gave me a warm welcome. He explained to me that he worked full-time in the automotive industry and spent his free time building beehives, raising animals, planting trees, harvesting fruit, and growing mushrooms. He led me back to the garage which also served as his workshop. Like his land, his workshop lacked signs of conventional farming. As did the lack of neat rows and open space, the tone and atmosphere of the workshop struck me. A dozen baskets hung from one of the rafters. Bicycles hung from another. To the right stood a large wooden table where he laid out customers’ orders, drew designs for chicken coops and beehives, and enjoyed a cool drink. More than anything this looked like a place for note-taking, drawing, designing, studying, tinkering—a place for doing a day’s work and then enjoying the fruits of that day’s work. It looked like a place for learning.

From this workshop, I had my first glimpse of the land which the blue house and dense tree line had initially hid-

den from view. Ten acres of fecund land stretched out behind the house in the shape of a rectangle. A dense hedge, made up of oak, poplar, cherry, pine, and pecan trees, bordered the rectangular plot. Within this hedge grew a “garden,” of a kind. I hesitate to call it a garden because it was so unlike the gardens in my suburban neighborhood.

Compared to a typical suburban garden, this one looked very wild, untrimmed, and without any apparent order.

This was a field with at least eight different grasses; their spikelets reached to the height of my shoulder. Brightly-colored wildflowers and various kinds of trees grew among these grasses. The chickens, pigs, and goats were free to roam throughout the field. Wildlife flourished.

Bees pollinated the purplish-pink thistle flowers. Monarch butterflies fluttered around the milkweed. Grasshoppers chirped and sprang up out of grass. Here and there tufts of grass were gently bowed over where deer had rested. Unlike the simple swooshing sound heard when the wind blows across a hay field, the music of this garden was polyphonic and unspeakably beautiful. The variation in the shapes of the leaves, the heights of the plants, the kinds of wildlife, and the strength of the wind made the harmony possible. A narrow, sinuous path where the grass had been mowed was the only way to walk through the forest-field.

For six hours, the hobby-farmer gave me a tour. Almost every time he spoke to me he pointed-out a symFORMA / WINTER 2021 | 69

biotic relationship between a specific creature and plant, or another natural element of the land. He noted that the border of trees around the property acted as a windbreak for the garden and as a barricade against the harmful chemicals used by his neighbors on their large-scale industrial farms. These trees provided the shade mushrooms needed to grow; they provided shelter for the many birds that fed on the insects in the field and the fruit on the trees. In turn, the mushrooms helped break down rotting matter into valuable nutrients for the plants, and the birds helped plant more trees in the field when they dropped the fruit seeds they had eaten. He pointed out how the trees scattered throughout the field provided nitrogen for the soil which fed the lush grass. In turn, the grasses sheltered insects and fed the chickens and the goats. On and on, he identified the relationships inherent in this ecosystem, and he expressed great delight in the harmony of the place, where everything had what it needed to thrive and in return gave back what something else needed to thrive as well.

I was overwhelmed by the great beauty and fecundity that was present in this place where everything was doing, and was allowed to do, exactly what it was made to do.

This place was wild, but not chaotic. Its order was a harmony that came from the excellence of each of its parts, and the excellence of each creature and plant contributed to the excellence of the whole. The excellence of the forest-field was dependent on the excellence of each leaf and each insect; the excellence of leaf and insect were dependent on the excellence of everything else within that space.

In addition to the beauty and fecundity of such a wild place, I was also struck by the vast and intimate knowledge this hobby-farmer had of his land. Because his way of relating to his land was so different from the ways of a conventional farmer, I struggled to find a word for the role he was fulfilling. “Owner” connotes detachment and management, but this man had an intimate knowledge of all the goings-on in his forest-field and his disposition was one of satisfaction, wonder, and reverence. “Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light, love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing,” says Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This man loved all of God’s creation and each separate thing within it.

Meanwhile the word “farmer” conjured images of cleared spaces, neatly tilled rows, large ploughs and tractors, and the commercial market, but this man was more interested in making sure everything could function as it was made to than he was in profit and production. Yet, his forest-field was astonishingly fruitful.

It occurred to me that he was an artist. When a painter

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works on his canvas, he must keep his eye on the specific subject and corner of the canvas he is working on, but he must also keep an eye on how that specific subject or corner relates to the whole.

He was also a gardener. As he was walking me through his forest-field, I was taken back to the story of creation in Genesis—not only because this land was, like Eden, a place of paradisiacal order and beauty, but because, like Eden, it was also a place for delight and praise. One common reading of Genesis draws a connection between the reality of the imago Dei and the way that God sees the goodness of his creation. Man is made in the image and likeness of God. We are told that at the end of each day of creating, God looked upon his creation and “it was very good.” One of the ways that man can reflect God in the world is by imitating his activity of delight and praise. In For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann claims that our ability to praise the good is the ability that more than any other distinguishes us from the rest of the created world: In the Bible to bless God is not a “religious” or “cultic” act, but the very way of life. God blessed the world, blessed man, blessed the seventh day . . . and this means that He filled all that exists with His love and goodness, made all “very good.” So the only natural (and not “supernatural”) reaction of man, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, is to bless God in return, to thank Him, to see the world as God sees it and–in this act of gratitude and adoration–to know, name and possess the world. All rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other creatures have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God . . . “Homo sapiens,” “homo faber,” … yes, but, first of all, “homo adorans.”

To admire and praise goodness is part of our primordial vocation. The forest-field felt like Eden because its gardener was acting as homo adorans. He was filled with delight and gratitude and praise for each beautiful thing that lived in his garden. His habitual exercise of delight, gratitude, and praise made his garden a place of abundant life. In the suburban neighborhood where I lived, thistle was a prickly, pesky weed, to be pulled out as soon as it started to grow. But in this field, it was the plant whose purplish-pink flowers beautifully complemented the golden spikelets of the tall timothy grass and allowed the bees to gather enough nectar to survive the winter in their hive; and so, the thistle grew.

As I drove back to my neighborhood that afternoon, I pondered what it would mean to translate this gardener’s

the variation of talent and personality within a community are not only compatible with the unity and flourishing of that community, but they actually make the unity and flourishing possible.

vision of beauty into the context of a human community.

Every human community, like every ecosystem, is a complex web of unique beings and symbiotic relationships.

What would it look like to move about my neighborhood, my town, my city, my church with such an eye for beauty? What does it take to habitually recognize the beauty of each human being around me? What does it demand of my heart, my mind, my disposition? What would it do to a community if all its members had the same kind of vision?

What would happen if we all adopted delight and praise as a way of life? Would it also, as it did in the garden, lead to abundance?

I realized that St. Paul has exactly this kind of vision when he likens the Christian community to a body. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul writes: For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member, but many.

Paul begins his metaphor by collapsing distinctions. He points out that people with different identities—Jew and Greek, slave and free—have been transformed into one body, one entity, through Christ. But, right after he collapses these distinctions to emphasize the unity of Christ’s followers, Paul makes a surprising turn. He points out that as the body is made up of different parts, the unified community is made up of different individuals, and he emphasizes the importance of the distinctions, the differences, within the community. He asks, “If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?”

As if to clarify for anyone who would mistake the oneness of the community for the sameness of the individuals within it, Paul suggests that our unity does not mean we are all now the same. We are all parts of the body of Christ, but within this body, within this community, we have different roles. Just as a body without a functioning ear is unable to fully be what it was made to be, so too a community without the excellence of one of its members is unable to fully be what it was made to be. So, the variation of talent and personality within a community are not only compatible with the unity and flourishing of that community, but they actually make the unity and flourishing possible.

The excellence of the whole is dependent upon the excellence of each individual part. Therefore, to a degree, the excellence of each part is also dependent on the excellence of the other parts. Like the gardener who recognized the beauty of each element in his garden and the symbiosis between all the elements, Paul recognizes the beauty and interdependence of each human being within a community.

If we interpret Paul’s image in terms of our unique personalities and talents and functions, this means that each of us has something very particular and valuable to contribute to the families, schools, neighborhoods, churches, towns, and cities of which we are a part. Just as a garden needs the insects and the plants, the body needs the ears and the eyes. Just as the body needs the ears and the eyes, our communities need the artist as well as the runner, the writer as well as the singer, the quieter and the more outspoken, the energetic and the mellow. Just as the ear cannot do what the eye does and the eye cannot do what the ear does, each one of us has some role which only we can fulfill. You can give to your neighbor, your sister, your child, and your colleague something which no one else can give them. Your neighbor, your sister, your child, and your colleague have something to give you which only they can

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give. Each one of us can say with the psalmist, “I praise you God, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Each person we encounter is unique and irreplaceable and so we can also say, “I praise you God, for they are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Paul’s words are at once consoling and challenging. It is consoling to know that you have something to offer the world that only you can offer and that you are needed by those around you in some very particular way. You have an excellence all your own. The person next to you has an excellence all their own. It is challenging to know that if we relinquish our role in the community, we deprive the community; if another member of our community relinquishes their role, we are deprived. Paul’s words are also challenging because of the temptation to envy which exists whenever we encounter the excellence and beauty of another. Paul writes: If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body.

Why would the foot and the ear say such things? Perhaps because they look with envy at the beauty and excellence of the hand and the eye and, forgetting their own role and excellence within the body, despair that that beauty and excellence is not theirs. Just as it would be unthinkable, however, for the foot to say to the hand, “Hand, because I am not you and cannot lift up a cup of coffee, or paint a landscape, or throw a baseball like you, I do not have a role in this body,” it would unthinkable for us to say, “Because I cannot draw, run, write, sing, speak (you can fill in the blank for yourself) like so-and-so, I have no role here.” Paul is showing us the folly of such thoughts because, as he then points out, regardless of what we think of our role and our capacities, we are still part of the community and we still have a unique role to fulfill. These are words of tough love. At the end of his analogy, Paul says, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” This is true as an ideal; a community that is functioning as a community rejoices together and suffers together. We have to make sure that upon the rejoicing of those around us, we resist the temptation to envy and do in fact rejoice for them and with them. It requires humility to remember one’s place within a community, to accept that this place is a limited one, and to admit that you cannot do the excellent thing that this other person is doing.

Encouragement is also a fitting antidote for envy. A 72 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

paraphrase of Hebrews 3:13, from Morning Prayer, reads, “Encourage one another daily, while it is still today.” What would be the effect if all of us, in all the many communities of which we are a part, continually encouraged the excellence of those around us? This activity of delight and praise, in the absence of envy and despair, would cultivate a paradisiacal order and joy. This is something St. Anselm beautifully describes at the end of his Proslogion, where he considers what it will mean to possess the fullness of joy in the world to come. He explains that in the world to come, we will experience a multiplication of delight because we will be able to love the good of others as we love the good for ourselves: Surely if another whom you loved in every way as yourself, had that same bliss, your joy would be double, for you would rejoice no less for him than for yourself. And if two or three or many more had this same blessedness, you would rejoice for each of them as much as you do for yourself, if you loved each one as yourself. So in that perfection of charity . . . , where no one loves another any less than he loves himself, they will all rejoice for each other as they do for themselves.

In the life to come, we will be able to see others and perfectly delight in their joy. We will not have shortcomings that lead us to despair or envy. We will have our excellence and they will have theirs; we will delight in their excellence and they will delight in ours. The kind of vision, this ability to see the good in the creature before us and sing praise for that goodness, will be perfected.

The gardener’s way of moving through the natural world with an eye for beauty elucidated the brilliance of Paul’s metaphor for me. You have an excellence that is all your own, as does every person you encounter. To remember this and act accordingly, delighting in one’s own excellence and delighting in the excellence of others, is to begin the practice of perfect charity and so to cultivate a community of abundant life.

Colleen Coleman completed her undergraduate studies in English and Latin at Hillsdale College. She taught middle school and high school students for the past three years at Trinity at River Ridge in Minnesota. She currently teaches classes online at Scholé Academy. She has an active interest in permaculture farming and exploring the ways ecosystems work together to enhance communities. When not teaching, she enjoys playing the violin, running, reading, and cooking.

Poetry Mary Romero

Mary Romero’s work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Christianity and Literature, and Crux, among others, and her chapbook Philoxenia was the recipient of the Luci Shaw prize. Mary lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she works as an Anglican deacon for the Mission Chattanooga and as a teacher, writer, and mother of two lovely hooligans.

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Poetry Mary Romero

WHAT WE NO LONGER KNOW Stooping to pluck a flecked wildflower, nameless to me as yet (which is my own fault, as such abundance is a fact, a gift) I furrow, feeling the deficit of all the names I cannot fathom, never having known. And more – to fully fathom: sound its depths, or sound with lips, or encompass what the arms can hold, or – the way this bee, miraculously holding itself aloft with too-small wings (how? how?) peruses the inner sanctum of these petals, and when pleased and a wee bit tipsy (hence, perhaps, the bumble?) rises, gold-dusted and delighted with its knowledge, the body of which we have mostly forgotten.

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Poetry Mary Romero

WHEN IN JUNE THE LILIES HAVE THEIR DAY Daylilies, to be precise, spreading their petals for a morning and an afternoon, usher in this season of saffron noses from our sinking into the blooms, the little hairs on my daughter’s upper lip catching the pollen, staining her skin for longer than a lily lives; and still, careless of being seen, we breathe them in: a little lemon, but softer – a spray of something sweet – like honeysuckle – but less heady. A touch come-hither – willing us to bend, tempting noses to nuzzle deep, detect a whisper in that small den of scent, as if the flower craves this crush; as if a life as brief as this should never go untouched.

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From the Classroom

One Piece of Advice to a First-Year Teacher (from a Second-Year Teacher) // by Jonathan Coleman

J

ust over a year ago, I began my post as a humanities teacher at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. I was twenty-three years old and a recent college graduate. In reflecting upon my first year, I learned that, while there are numerous helpful books and articles that exist on classical pedagogy, there are simply some things that can’t be learned until the teacher steps in front of students for the first time. The adage rings true: “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” Classical education is the tail, and the dozens of teenagers that you stand before daily, with whom you plead to live a good life, are the cat.

This is because teaching and learning is not only an intellectual experience, but an incarnational one, requiring both body and soul. My one piece of advice, then, to a teacher embarking on her first year, would be to develop a realistic understanding of what it means to be human.

This begins with developing an anthropology that is both biblical and classical. My life was changed to this end when I read Jamie Smith’s You Are What You Love in college. For the first time, I began to understand myself 76 | WINTER 2021 / FORMA

as more than a “brain on a stick.” Humans are rational, but humans are first and foremost lovers and worshipers. Smith asserts that many modern Christians have reduced discipleship to knowing the right doctrine, and sanctification to “thinking” the right things. Christian educational institutions have been especially guilty of believing that by robotically providing the right input (facts about God) we can expect the right output (Christlikeness).

In a passage that I have my eighth graders recite daily, St. Peter contends with this truncated view of humanity by arguing that sanctification requires not only knowledge of God, but an increasing amount of virtue, self-control, steadfastness, brotherly affection, and love.

The assumption underlying the “increase” is that you will be formed as you do them. He also states that you confirm your election by “practicing” these qualities (2 Pet. 1).

The ancient and medieval worlds understood that we are also formed through perception and imitation. It is fitting that the psalmist’s “one request” is to “gaze” upon the Lord (Ps 27). We become like what we behold. Our

From the Classroom

perception and subsequent practices give rise to a far more visceral, intuitive morality then mere ideology can produce.

If, therefore, our bodies and our bodily senses matter in spiritual formation, then “learning” is not merely limited to the lecture outline on the board but by what your students perceive in the world around them. Dostoyevsky did not say that intellect will save the world, but beauty. You are “teaching” your students even when you are not teaching them.

The physical world in which your own students find their Being—the friends they speak with, the art they consume, and the teacher on whom they fix their eyes—is as important as the knowledge entering their minds. If Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message” is correct, then knowing that your own Being in the student’s world has formative power should significantly shape your relationship with your students. It is not knowledge of beautiful things that ultimately inspires, but subjectively experiencing the Beautiful. A teacher who exudes humility and extends grace offers a more compelling lesson in godliness than a teacher simply telling students they should be humble and gracious.

Here is some encouragement: I would wager that you were hired by your school for who you are—your character and maturity—more than for what you know—your credentials and experience. I doubt your school would hire an immoral Ph.D. in classics. This is because our schools exist for the acquisition of virtue, and virtue is acquired not solely through subject matter expertise, but through repeatedly beholding and practicing that which is transcendent and heavenly. There is no tension here: you should be qualified to teach your subject, but it is more important to see your students as human beings who, as Christ said, will become like their teacher. Therefore, the best lesson you will teach the whole year may not come through your flawless recall of the Ontological Argument, but through asking your class for forgiveness for your particularly bitter attitude on a hard day. To teach students virtue, you must be a student of virtue.

To convince your students to love others, you must love your students.

Your role as an educator is not that of a public intellectual who is paid to write, speak, and then retire to the ivory tower. Get to know all your students personally. Find out what they enjoy and what they are afraid of. Go to games and concerts. Better yet, coach a team. Let your students see you actively participating in your school’s communal liturgy and hymn-singing every day. Close your eyes during prayer, and enthusiastically support the house system.

Lecture to your students in engaging ways but be neither kitsch nor too technical. You are communicating with neither infants nor doctoral students. In other words, talk to students like you would adults. Address behavioral issues in a way that displays justice but neither puts down the student nor allows him to minimize his transgression. Test your stu-

dents in ways that force them to contemplate virtue: do not allow them to write whatever they want, but do not merely assess their ability to recall trivia either (see my colleague Joshua Gibbs’ book Something They Will Not Forget).

Lastly, know your anthropology. As a teacher, you are not a robot or a “brain on a stick” either. You are a human with professional, social, and spiritual dimensions and obligations. You will have bad days. You will try your best to compartmentalize, but sometimes it will be difficult. Be upfront about the fact that it hurts your pride when you are slighted by a student. The best advice I have heard on this is from my upper school dean, Robyn Burlew, who says that your cup must be filled by something other than your school-related work. If your sense of self-worth is found in the degree to which your students respect you and the level of effort they give, you will be left empty.

Teaching can be an isolating vocation. It is a unique job in that while your colleagues are adults, you spend about 90 percent of your day as the only adult in the room. It is a delightful job, but it cannot be your life. You will receive angry emails from parents. You will have a student roll her eyes at you at the length of the essay you assign. If you are younger, you will have a teenager in a class attempt to assert his or her dominance in the room. It is imperative that you develop a protocol for navigating these situations and that you establish authority in your classroom. But please, learn how to fill your cup with other things. Look to your friends, your hobbies, your church, and ultimately the Lord. Before you can teach virtue to other humans, you must know that you are one: you are body and soul, you learn by practice and imitation, and you were created to behold beautiful things.

Jonathan Coleman is a humanities teacher at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. He studied philosophy and religion at James Madison University.

WANT TO WRITE FOR FORMA? Visit formajournal.com or email formamag@circeinstitute.com to submit original essays, reviews, and poetry. We are always looking for thoughtful writing about books, teaching, poetry, the arts, history, and more. If your bliss intersects with contemporary culture and classical thought, then follow it. We will do the rest.

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