Are the Muppets funny again?

I sure hope this isn't a fluke.

Wow, Anthony Lane, that's harsh...

“Something similar happens when Vivian weeps on the subway, her grief endowed with a false intensity by the song ladled onto the soundtrack; do droning, off-key vocals and a picky guitar really make her less of a spoiled brat? Maybe that is what binds the inhabitants of the indie universe, here as elsewhere: they are like children, playing at adult life. Their bodies may have grown up, but their spirits, as shown in their tantrums and tiny attention spans, are still half formed, and I, for one, find it hard to summon much sympathy for their unimportant plights. Now and then, a director breaks through that carapace of immaturity and discovers a genuine ache of love in the sparring of boy-meets-girl, as Linklater, progressing from ‘Slacker,’ did with ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset.’”

-Anthony Lane, review of “In Search of a Midnight Kiss,” in the August 4th New Yorker

As much as I love indie culture, I've got to admit that Anthony Lane has a point. Indie “culture” is sub-culture: it can't really go from generation to generation. In that sense it can only be a stopping point, a rest from “real life.” Say what you will about Juno: Jason Bateman's old indie guy was sad to see.

Nevertheless, the review is a recommendation, and I might try to see the movie if it plays around here.

Roger Scruton on the limits of the libertarians

“There are those—Milton Friedman, for example, or Murray Rothbard—who have powerfully argued that a genuinely free market will ensure the good government of human communities, through the self-restraining impulse that comes naturally to us. But their arguments, however sophisticated, are addressed to Americans, who live among abundant resources, free from external threat, surrounded by opportunities and in communities where the volunteer spirit survives. And they do not confront the central question, which is how communities renew themselves, and how fundamental flaws in the human constitution, such as resentment, envy and sexual predation, are to be overcome by something so abstract and neutral as consumer sovereignty and free economic choice.”

This comes from an essay on the economic views of Wilhelm Röpke, father of social market economics. Scruton believes that the common error of Marxists and social democrats is the assumption that social problems are rooted in economic disparities. It's worth reading, I think. More thoughts later, perhaps.

“The Parable of the Flamingo”, or, “What's the point?”

Let's say that there are some people in your neighborhood who are extremely fixated on something that you find quite trivial. For example, it could be that they insist on sitting in the yard and staring at a pink flamingo they have placed there for hours on end. It doesn't really matter what they do; what matters is that you find it utterly incomprehensible. You tell all your friends about your ridiculous neighbors, and you have a good laugh about their flamingo shenanigans. Your neighbors sometimes overhear you, and get very angry.

One day, you tell them that you are thinking about stealing their favorite flamingo. They tell you that they are going to straight up flip out if you do so, because they love their flamingo deeply. Of course this only confirms what you already believe: that these neighbors are dangerously insane.

At this point, everyone else in the neighborhood sees what is going on. We know that you think the flamingo fixation is weird and stupid. We also know that your neighbors love the flamingo. We know that stealing the flamingo will make them extremely angry. The situation is all extremely clear to all parties involved.

So, why on earth would you steal the flamingo? What could you possibly think you are proving?

(Should I be so crass as to suggest that every angry or even curious visitor to your ad-ridden blog makes money for you?)

Peregrination #3

There is a hollow in Virginia where a small creek meanders over mossy roots and old smooth stones. The sunlight comes in cool through the poplars, and the rich soil is soft underfoot.

Poulos on Big Government and Virtue

James Poulos posted today at Doublethink on the subject of what we usually call big-government conservatism. He asks a provocative question, at least for conservatives: what if nobody really cares about fiscal responsibility as such? If we can sustain an age of abundance, if the doom-sayers are wrong at every turn, if we can match our ever-increasing debt with ever-increasing wealth, why worry? As he puts it, we're rich enough to afford the luxury of bad government.

The point of the piece is not that the arguments against corruption and inefficiency aren't valid arguments, but rather that they don't inspire the sort of emotional commitment that comes from taking action against injustice. I mean, on the face of things, justice sounds much more important than efficiency. And true justice, of course, really is much more important than efficiency.

So the best remaining argument, Poulos tells us, is that we are on a path to destruction: that our experts, managers, and wizards will someday run out of tricks and will no longer be able to mend the whole messy machine. But we trust our experts, and we're too busy to determine whether or not that trust is well-founded. The few remaining doubters (e.g. traditionalist conservatives) can't do much besides live a virtuous life as best they know how.

At least, that's what I got from the article.

It is a strange time to be making arguments based on the USA's ability to afford things, as some pretty dire signals seem to be coming out of Wall Street right now. But the (mainstream) reactions I've heard so far seem to confirm Poulos's point. Can we fix this with a few regulations? Can we change the tax rules and get rid of the problem? Can we simply replace our “bad” goods with better, greener goods and go on just as we have before?

But if it becomes obvious that we can't afford bad government—and this prediction is being made on the left and on the right—maybe then we'll hear some different questions.

Grace and Greatness

“You're mistaken,” I said. “I wasn't thinking about monomachy—or dying either.”

In my ear, too softly, I think, even for Hildegrin to hear, Dorcas said, “Yes, you were. Your face was full of beauty, of a kind of nobility. When the world is horrible, then thoughts are high, full of grace and greatness.”

I looked at her, thinking she was mocking me, but she was not.

“The world is filled half with evil and half with good. We can tilt it forward so that more good runs into our minds, or back, so that more runs into this.” A movement of her eyes took in all the lake. “But the quantities are the same, we change only their proportion here or there.”

-Gene Wolfe. The Shadow of the Torturer: Volume One of the Book of the New Sun. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. (211-212)

Peregrination #2

On the high rocky ridge, far above the tree-line, looking for the first time down the western slope of the great mountain. The jagged risings and fallings of the Sierra Nevada range flow off into the horizon. I have nearly reached the summit, where we will rest while the marmots play among the boulders.

Wednesday Poem: Luke Havergal

“Luke Havergal” caught the attention of Teddy Roosevelt, who, impressed by its evocative imagery and mournful rhythm, promptly gave its author a government job as a small sinecure.

Luke Havergal
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Luke flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen, she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that's in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No; there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Butter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this—
To tell you this.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall.
Go, for the winds are tearing them away,—
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

Mental Peregrination #1

A cliff overlooking a rocky beach, with the salt wind blowing against me as I watch the groups of sea-birds: now floating, now diving through to the calm side of a cresting wave.

Theological Aesthetics: Beautiful ≥ Good ≥ True

“Indeed, God's affirmations of the goodness of his creation in the first chapter of Genesis can be taken as indicating first and foremost an aesthetic evaluation rather than a simply moral one; it is only with sin that the goodness of creation must be conceptually separated into solitary transcendental categories, and only with sin that creation is seen to possess a distinct ethical axis. One might almost say that the separable category of the moral is an intrusion upon the aesthetic joy that is the upwelling source of creaturely existence, as is a separate category of truth once the paradisal experience of divine love in the blameless beauty of creation is lost.”

-David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 2003. (253)

In this section, Hart often draws on Augustine, with whom I (as a Protestant) am more familiar than I am with Hart's other sources. And Augustine's story of love, delight, and ordered desire does seem to be a wonderful paradigm for approaching theological aesthetics. The perfect Christian “morality” would be to love as God loves, and truth would be to see things through that love, undistorted.

(“When the last days come, we will see visions more vivid than sunsets and brighter than stars. We will recognize each other, and see ourselves for the first time, the way we really are.” - John Darnielle)

More Dark Knight

A Baylor professor, Thomas Hibbs, discusses the moral vision of the new Batman film at the First Things website:

“Dark quests for redemption, whether religious or secular, abound in contemporary culture. As Nolan’s films indicate, these quest films owe a great debt to classic film noir. Classic noir takes aim at some of the treasured assumptions and promises of modernity. In noir, the modern world, embodied in an urban setting, is hardly the world of light, happiness, and peace that utopian thinkers of the Enlightenment foretold. Modernity is about human beings exercising control over nature and thus taking control of their destinies; in our modern technological project, knowledge and power are one. The postmodern turn in noir is about the loss of control, the absence of intelligibility, and the threat of powerlessness. But the quest has something pre-modern about it—a sense of human limitations, of the dependence of human beings on one another and on events not in their control. In this world, the outcome of the quest is tenuous and uncertain.”

A Wretched Hot Day

Some of the days down here, the heat smothers the sweating people, pushes them down with heavy sunlight, paints them with a soggy shine, saps their spirits, makes everything flat and distant.

Today was that sort of day: the sort of day where a long walk can only make things worse. But naps still help.

Joseph Bottum on religion and the American experiment

“Think of the American experiment as a three-legged stool, its stability found in each leg's relation to the other legs. Democracy grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always leans toward vulgarity and short-sightedness. Capitalism gives us other freedoms and outlets for ambition, but it, too, always threatens to topple over, eroding the virtues it needed for its own flourishing. Meanwhile, religion provides meaning and narrative, a channel for the hunger of human beings to reach beyond the vanities of the world, but it tilts, in turn, toward hegemony and conformity.”

So says Joseph Bottum in “The Death of Protestant America,” a very nice essay that you can find in the current issue of First Things. I'll post one or two other sections that jumped out at me later in the week, but you should read the whole thing now, for the total effect of a Bottum essay is always more than the sum of its parts: he usually writes as if he's composing music rather than mere nonfiction prose.

If I can indulge in a bit of clumsy paraphrasing, Bottum warns that the democracy tends toward demagoguery, capitalism toward amoral individualism, and religion toward ideology, yet when these things can be properly balanced, the hold against each other in a more or less uneasy equilibrium.

Bottum goes on to argue that the special feature of mainline American Protestantism was its combination of countless theological divisions with a nearly univocal set moral teaching. They could never agree on the precise nature of God's relation to man, but they all agreed on how men (and women) should relate to each other. Out of this agreement sprang a rich vocabulary of moral appreciation for and criticism of the American experiment: the Christian civil religion. Yet by 1975 the mainline churches were irrevocably in decline. The strangest part is that they were complicit in their own expulsion from the public square.

Questions: Is Bottum right in his characterization of democracy? Could Evangelicals or Catholics (or Evangelicals and Catholics Together) conceivably step into the role of the old mainline churches? How can a political regime be seen as legitimate without a theological grounding?

Why so serious?

All your friends have probably told you already: The Dark Knight is everything you hoped it would be. Big and flashy, dark and epic. And, as you've no doubt heard: the Joker will not be soon forgotten. Although I wonder if it might be a tad difficult for those who don't know the mythos to sort out on the first viewing.

Also, Matthew Milliner has a good nice little point about The Dark Knight and No Country for Old Men. (See the Batman movie first if you really don't want to know any spoilers, even minor ones. Although if you care that much about spoilers, you would have seen it by now anyway.)

For other secret nerds...

Normally, I'd keep this to myself, but I hear it's only free through the end of Sunday.



At the beginning, it's bad-campy. Then it's good-campy. If you liked Firefly, you should like this too.

So it's definitely going to look like Watchmen...

...but will it really be Watchmen? The original is so good; it's just hard to get my hopes up for a two-hour version of something that should be at least a miniseries, or maybe should just stay as it is.

Neuhaus on Pluralism

“One enters the democratic arena, then, as a moral actor. This must be insisted upon against those who view compromise as the antithesis of moral behavior. It must also be insisted upon against those who claim that moral judgment must be set aside before entering the public square. The first error is more common among Christians and others of high moral purpose. The second error is implicit, and sometimes explicit, in pervasive attitudes about ours being a secular society. In this second error, people are thought of as anonymous, deracinated ciphers seeking their own interests and striking a deal where it is in their interest to accommodate their interests to the interests of others. In this view, the assertion of a moral claim is an intrusion upon public space, a violation of the democratic rules. . . .

“. . . The conflict in American public life today, then, is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate. By divesting ourselves of authoritative moral referents that are external to ourselves, such as religion proposes, we have acquiesced in the judgment that there is no moral appeal beyond the individualistic pursuit of interests.”

-Richard John Neuhaus. The Naked Public Square. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 1984. (125-6)

A few observations:

1. The Naked Public Square really is a remarkable book. It was a genuine attempt to start a conversation about religion and political philosophy, and so Neuhaus was at his most diplomatic in almost every passage. (Have you ever seen the inclusive she in the pages of First Things? Because it's in the book.) But one also gets the feeling that too few people were interested in the project, and that the moment for compromise passed on by.

2. Halden's post today at Inhabitatio Dei called into question the entire idea of “translating” the Christian message into public language. His post is worth reading. I'm not sure that it is a direct contradiction: Neuhaus is speaking of practical compromise in a spirit of humility, not necessarily casting the Christian message in secular terminology. Or is that the secret point of natural law?

3. That Christians cannot simply set aside their identity for the sake of liberalism and the state is perhaps one of the reasons cultural theorists such as Zizek and Eagleton are turning their attention to theology. Tell me if I'm wrong on this.

4. Many liberalisms and all libertarianism come down to “the individualistic pursuit of interest,” and that is why we should at least carefully reexamine the republican strains of American political thought. Not the GOP, of course: rather, the Founders' ideas of republican virtue. Sandel goes into this at length, and I'll try to cover it briefly tomorrow.

Wednesday Poem: Work Without Hope

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a fascinating man to read about; he always seems drawn to darkness yet struggles towards the light. Much of his life was a struggle to complete ambitious literary projects even while suffering from depression and opium addiction. And as you would expect, Coleridge can plumb depths of darkness and fevered imagery that I've never come across in, say, Wordsworth or Keats. But here's a somewhat calmer one, though it does touch on futility and struggle.

Work Without Hope
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair--
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--
And winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

Liberalism, Equality, and Prudence

By John McGowan's definition, I am not a full liberal. He says of the founders:

“By calling the founders ‘liberal,’ I mean to direct attention to their suspicion of concentrated governmental power, their fierce attachment to liberty, and their emergent commitment to equality. Their ‘republicanism’ was both antidemocratic and not yet full liberalism to the extent that they resisted full social, political, and economic equality and that they focused on the ‘general welfare’ and not the prosperity of isolated individuals as government's responsibility.”

-John McGowan. American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007.

The first reason to be suspicious of equality is prudentially conservative. Not all change is good, and plans can go awry in unexpected ways. But this is to say nothing insightful: all endeavors need both dreamers and planners. It is not difficult to combine this prudential conservatism with a commitment to the liberal democratic project: Amitai Etzioni's communitarianism seems to me to do just that, in that it cares deeply for the integrity both of communities and of the individuals that compose them.

But McGowan sees conservatism not as a tactical disagreement over how to safely move towards egalitarianism, but as an elevation of other ends over equality. And looking back over the conservative movement even in my lifetime, I would be foolish to deny that some very illiberal views have worn the guise of prudential conservatism while in the public square. Contemporary movement conservatism should always remember and be ashamed of its affinity for segregation; to their credit, major figures such as Buckley and Falwell were deeply repentant later in life.

But is inclusion perhaps a better paradigm than equality? There is a type of social conservatism espoused by Richard John Neuhaus which argues that the greatest achievements of liberalism involved expanding the circle of inclusion: these expansions usually did tend increase equality, but they are also capable of embracing those who are irreducible different: the mentally handicapped, the very old, the unborn. (Neuhaus's opponents might see the inclusion argument as a veil drawn over real oppression.)

And now I speak as a Christian: over the last two thousand years, Christians have slowly—sometimes very slowly—unfolded the logic of Genesis 1:27 (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”), Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you all one in Christ Jesus”), and other verses. Now, I am no theologian, but it seems to me that the American experiment showed the world new things about the imago dei and human equality. Of course, it was an notably flawed demonstration, considering the evils of slavery and the racism that has persisted far too long after it and the shamefully dishonest and violent treatment of so many groups of Native American, but we can be glad that the United States was at least in some ways pressed to deliver what it had promised.

So Christians can affirm equality, but only insofar as it reflects this expanding logic of the image of God stamped on human beings. We cannot make ourselves into something that we are not.

~~~~~

This attempt at a longer series on a single theme is new to me. How do you think it is going so far?

Just a little bit more Tolkien

As Frodo and Sam make their way through the barren landscape of Mordor:

“The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”

-J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Return of the King

“That horror, that betrayal, would not let you go.”

For those who are young and pro-life: has there been another political speech such as this in our lifetimes? I dearly hope that Fr. Neuhaus is allowed at some point to proclaim this message to a the nation.

For those who are pro-choice: please don't try to start the argument right now.

Demagoguery

A conservative publisher sort-of-but-not-really apologizes for publishing awful polemics Oh well. At least you get an idea of the sheer gall that it takes to publish a “serious work of intellectual history” with a title like Liberal Fascism. Oh, how I wish mainstream conservatives had some modicum of taste. Then again, if they did, they could hardly survive in the mainstream.

Thoughts on Liberalism, Scattered Like Dust in the Wind

Last winter, I read Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent (a substantial part of it, I think, on the fourteen hour train ride from Charlotte to New York City), and I found that its explanation of the contemporary crisis of liberalism both illuminated what vague intuitions I already had and pointed me in the direction of new thoughts and sources, which is exactly what a book of this sort should do. At any rate, here is Sandel's early description of liberalism:

“The political philosophy by which we live is a certain version of liberal political theory. Its central idea is that government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse. Since people disagree about the best way to live, government should not affirm in law any particular version of the good life. Instead, it should provide a framework of rights that respects persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own values and ends. Since this liberalism asserts the priority of fair procedures over particular ends, the public life it informs might be called the procedural republic.”

-Michael J. Sandel. Democracy's Discontent. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1996. (4)

I want to return to what Sandel pits against the procedural republic later in the week. But for now I want to stick with liberalism. But the key point to notice from Sandel's description is the emphasis on government neutrality.

I've been reading through Richard John Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square, which is essentially an extended reflection on the rise of the Religious Right as a backlash against the attempt to remove ultimate values from the realm of public discourse. It is interesting that Neuhaus, in 1984, saw Marxism-Leninism as the system most likely to replace liberal democracy were the public square to be fully cleansed of transcendent references. The world has certainly changed since then. The American people, bourgeois as we are, rarely have the stomach for a sustained national moral discourse. Moral discourse, of course, is much easier among a group with homogeneous beliefs, and as liberal democracy's circles of inclusion expanded, things only got more difficult. (N.B.: these expansions are worth the sacrifice.)

But there are several possible overarching values for liberalism that are non-Marxist, non-religious, and ostensibly neutral. A libertarian, natural-rights standard for freedom is one, and equality is another. In fact, John McGowan, with whom I took a wonderful literature class in the spring of 2005, identifies equality as the essential feature of modern liberalism and defines conservatism as any opposition to full equality:

“Equality is the most complicated and contested of the primary liberal values—and I locate liberalism's other components in relation to its commitment to equality. . . . Conservatism is best characterized by its indifference or outright hostility to equality.”

-John McGowan. American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007.

Although McGowan does have a few kind words to spare for prudential conservatism later on in the book, equality ends up being the benchmark. And I can respect that, although I have little trouble imagining situations in which an absolute commitment to equality is wrongly applied to a situation where inequality is real—Harrison Bergeron, anyone? But of course, that's not what liberalism is about. We are speaking of equality between persons. But is that the only relevant value? And what of libertarian liberalism?

More tomorrow, I suppose.

The Technocratic Republic

John Courtney Murray, writing in the 1960's and quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in The Naked Public Square (1984):

And if this country is to be overthrown from within or from without, I would suggest that it will not be overthrown by Communism. It will be overthrown because it will have made an impossible experiment. It will have undertaken to establish a technological order of most marvelous intricacy, which will have been constructed and will operate without relations to true political ends: and this technological order will hang, as it were, suspended over a moral confusion; and this moral confusion will itself be suspended over a spiritual vacuum. This would be the real danger resulting from a type of fallacious, fictitious, fragile unity that could be created among us.

I've been trying to come up with ways to express some of the more pressing political problems of our time: the ones that should be what a major election season is all about. Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the vacuous analysis of strategy, personality, and public appeal that passes for political discourse these days.

Much of what I would like to talk about comes down to a reconsideration of the “true political ends” of which John Courtney Murray speaks, and the process by which the government has been turned and continues to be turned into a utilitarian system of distribution and management. We try to go about the business of making people happy and safe while neglecting the moral confusion and spiritual vacuum that lies underneath the grand machine, eroding its supports.

Unfortunately, I no longer have my trusty New York interlocutors to help me sharpen the dull edges of my thinking. But I'll see what I can do on my own.

On my voice mail

From my friend Mark, in the spirit of the previous post:

Q. Why shouldn't you attack the bull in the antique store?

A. Because it's a value-bull (“valuable”)!

A non-math joke?

Q. Why shouldn't you punch the cat that is always lying around the window of the cute little sandwich shop?

A. Because that would be cruel. But the real question is whether it is cruel or merciful to use the wrong punchline here.

Wednesday Poem: Every Riven Thing

Last week I definitely forgot to post a poem. This week, I'm hardly going to do better: I'm just posting a link. I found this on The Fire and The Rose the other week, and I liked it very much. It's by a poet who is not dead, so I'm breaking tradition already. His name is Christian Wiman, and I know almost nothing about him except that some of his work is beautiful. Read “Every Riven Thing” and “This Mind of Dying” on a page at the Harvard Divinity School website, and then pretend that you read them here.

“God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.”

Confluences

"Sin, violence, cruelty, egoism, and despair are the discords that disrupt the surface, but always as privation, a failure of love; they are no part of being's deep music, but only shrill alarms and barren phrasings, apostasies from music altogether. Evil, for all its ineradicable ubiquity, is always originally an absence, a shadow, a false reply, and all violence falls within the interval of a harmony not taken up, within which the true form of being is forgotten, misconstrued, distorted, and belied. This is not to imagine being as a music without disonnances, but as one without ultimate discords for the soul that turns its motion toward God's all-embracing eternal order of love, seeking to recover the theme of this love and articulate it anew forever."

-David Bently Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. (207-8)

I'm halfway through The Lord of The Rings trilogy now. Perhaps I should have simply declared a Tolkien week; but I'll do what I can to keep the discussion of hobbits to a minimum from this point on.

When I read the passage quoted above, I thought immediately of the creation myth Tolkien devised from The Silmarillion. The creator, Iluvatar, begins with a song and asks his angels to sing with him. One angel, Melkor, tries to create his own theme, and, for a time, seems to succeed. But then the creator introduces yet another theme:

"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of Iluvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.

[...]

"Then Iluvatar spoke, and he said, 'Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Iluvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of themes more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.'"

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion. 2nd edition. ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. (16-17)

The key observation is that evil and violence are not strictly necessary in either telling, nor can they overcome the original and fundamental theme from which they are derived and which they can only corrupt.

Something the movies didn't capture

“The grey figure of the Man, Aragorn son of Arathorn, was tall, and stern as stone, his hand upon the hilt of his sword; he looked as if some king out of the mists of the sea had stepped upon the shores of lesser men.”

-J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Two Towers

Was Viggo Mortensen ever this archetypical? I don't think so.

And I'm off...

To the nation's capital to celebrate Independence Day with good friends.

Metaphysical interruption

Perhaps there are really only a few things one can believe about the nature of the universe.

It could be fundamentally knowable, with all meaning intrinsic to itself: a rational system that needs no exterior. It could be that the creatures within it can understand everything in time, or it might be that there are limits on their ability to understand, in which case it would be hard to say that such a closed universe is “knowable” since there is no being capable of knowing it.

What is more likely is that much of the universe is rational, but that there are boundaries beyond which we cannot pass. We can believe that what lies beyond is indifferent and chaotic, or we can believe that it is hateful, or we can believe that it is love.

Finally, one could accept that nothing is knowable, and all we see is illusion.

Have I left anything out?

A book review as lovely as a tree

It is always a pleasure to read Alan Jacobs, and never more than when his topic is something a little bit off the beaten path. Today, his review of some books about trees came up at Books & Culture, and I think it's worth checking out, as it meanders from Garrison Keillor to J.R.R. Tolkien to Gerard Manley Hopkins to flying squirrels.

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The posts have gotten shorter because I've been spending my spare time on The Lord of the Rings, and I doubt that anyone wants status reports on Frodo &co. As for The Beauty of the Infinite, I'm in the section on the Trinity, and I'll post any money quotes I find that don't contain extensive quotations in Greek, French, or German. But as soon as I finish these books, I'll be moving on to more Alasdair MacIntyre and possibly some history, so expect the dry spell to end in a few weeks.