Austin Hall Library

The Importance of Subtlety

The older I get the more I appreciate the skill and ingenuity it takes to express an opinion or principle with subtlety--that is, the quality of expressing one's meaning with diplomacy, fine distinction and finesse, and without tactlessness or coarseness.

I thought of this recently when I was reminded of C.S. Lewis's contention in God in the Dock: "What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent."

Lewis makes a good point. What is needed are more subjects analyzed and developed through the lenses of a classic Christian worldview, not more books about this or that Christian doctrine.

On another entirely unrelated note, C.S. Lewis thought that there may be books in heaven. He would, of course, know by now, but we remain somewhat in the dark on that question. In God in the Dock Lewis pondered this question in typical fashion and concluded that our personal library in heaven would contain only the books we gave away or lent on earth. He contemplated the idea that just as the wounds of the martyrs turned into marks of beauty, in heaven so will have the borrower's thumb marks turned into beautiful illuminated capitals or exquisite marginal woodcuts. His view was that only what we give up can become truly ours. He said, in fact, in Mere Christianity, "Aim at heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither."

I may have missed Lewis's point in all this, but I have for some time been in the process of expanding my library just in case, in the hope that the old adage "you can't take it with you" might be wrong in the one instance.

For the Contrarion-Minded

Following up on my last post, I have another short list titled Five Books That Will Change the Way You Live. Slightly edgy in spots, these books are occasionally difficult to read--not because they are complex in structure, or present complex ideas (they aren't and don't). It is because some of the ideas presented will make one squirm a bit with the impression that they are correct and that to embrace those ideas will not be easy.

The list is as follows:

1. Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver
2. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays by Wendell Berry
3. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry by Wendell Berry
4. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher
5. Happy Are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom by Thomas Dubay 

Alternative Worlds

The words of Fr. James Schall in The Sum Total of Human Happiness hit home to me yesterday as I, in preparation for a task, read a trial transcript of a case on human cloning.

Schall wrote: "All error, and, yes, all sin, I think, arises from our suspecting that what is true might demand our living this truth. Therefore, we avert our attention from the truth in order that we may continue to live as we want. We cannot live this way, of course, when our minds do not support truth so we necessarily erect another, an alternative world for ourselves that prevents us from acknowledging the world that is. All error, as Aristotle implied, can explain itself, give reasons for itself, but only provided that it be allowed the privilege of not telling the whole truth which it suspects but does not admit."

It seems sensible to believe in Schall's "alternative world" theory when reading of the creation of human embryos (human beings at the one-cell stage of human development--like a "toddler" who is a human being at the "toddler" stage of human development) by scientists for the express purpose of harvesting their stem cells, resulting in the embryos' destruction (technically known as somatic cell nuclear transfer). One simply cannot do that without erecting an alternative world in one's mind where what obviously is, is reinterpreted as something it obviously is not, but makes sufficiently opaque the whole truth, for reasons known only to the interpreter.

Common Sense and Scientism

G.K. Chesterton, known  as "The Apostle of Common Sense," has a delightful account of how he discovered sanity in the first chapter of his Autobiography, appropriately titled, "Hearsay Evidence."

Chiding modern scientism, Chesterton candidly admits to having no scientific proof of his own first appearance on earth. Rather, he confesses, he must rely entirely on "mere authority and tradition of the elders," which does, however quite illogically, to be sure, leave him with the "firm opinion" that he was "born on the 29th of May 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington."

Chesterton had nothing against science (properly understood), but he was hinting that the view that only scientific claims are meaningful is self-annihilating and demonstrably false at the level of common sense. Scientism's view that the methods of the natural sciences should be applied to all subject matters is simply silly--but it, along with philosophical materialism, is one of the prevailing presuppositions of the day. 

Chesterton on Tradition and the Sacramentality of the World

In contrast to the modern concept of tradition, G.K. Chesterton wrote: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. . . . [T]radition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father." Here is my previous post on this subject a number of months ago.

On the sacramentality of the world and the gnostic tendency to look upon the world with contempt, Chesterton wrote: "A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. . . . My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. . . . The world is not a lodging-house in Brighton, which we are to leave because we are miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more."

Worldview: "We're Not Pigs and We're Not Angels"

Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins is set in a post-catastrophe America, when the world seems to be coming apart at the cultural seams. The protagonist Dr. Tom More, a hard drinking psychiatrist and lapsed Catholic, has invented a "stethoscope of the soul" that diagnoses and helps treat the inner demons of people. More himself, clinically depressed, is not without his own demons.

The book is somewhat of a black comedy (poking fun at just about every group of people prominent in the aftermath of the 60s) and the product of an impressively creative mind. For example, the protagonist is named after sixteenth-century martyr St. Thomas More, who said "the times are never so bad that a good man can't live in them."

It is Dr. Tom More's ultimate response to the world that has had me thinking for the last couple of days. It is the fundamental nature of the created order and the human being's correct understanding of it for some sense of sanity and rootedness that Percy is addressing when a bewildered Dr. Tom More, in a lucid moment from his hospital bed after a suicide attempt, cries out:

Dear God, I see it now, why can't I see it at other times, that it is you I love in the beauty of the world and in all the lovely girls and dear good friends, and it is pilgrims we are, wayfarers on a journey, and not pigs, nor angels.

In this very brief but intensely coherent exclamation Dr. More affirms the created order, marred though it is, and sees creation as not merely good but the foundation of God's whole gracious plan for his people. We are not pigs and we are not angels. We are human beings and the beauty we see around us in the order of the planet, as well as in the faces of people, witnesses to a meaningful reality and plan beyond us. The world is meaning-full, not meaningless; it is grace-full, and not graceless. When trying to make sense of the world, or gain a proper worldview, one should not begin by looking up, but by looking around.