Chesterton and Macdonald
I’m not sure I would have liked Chesterton, the person. But I sure do like his writing. I found this little piece he wrote about George Macdonald. Now George is someone I truly believe would be great to pal around with. At least I think so.
Carlyle could never have said anything so subtle and simple as MacDonald’s saying that God is easy to please and hard to satisfy. Carlyle was too obviously occupied with insisting that God was hard to satisfy; just as some optimists are doubtless too much occupied with insisting that He is easy to please. In other words, MacDonald had made for himself a sort of spiritual environment, a space and transparency of mystical light, which was quite exceptional in his national and denominational environment. He said things that were like the Cavalier mystics, like the Catholic saints, sometimes perhaps like the Platonists or the Swedenborgians, but not in the least like the Calvinists, even as Calvinism remained in a man like Carlyle. And when he comes to be more carefully studied as a mystic, as I think he will be when people discover the possibility of collecting jewels scattered in a rather irregular setting, it will be found, I fancy, that he stands for a rather important turning-point in the history of Christendom, as representing the particular Christian nation of the Scots. As Protestants speak of the morning stars of the Reformation, we may be allowed to note such names here and there as morning stars of the Reunion.
The Bible through literary eyes
I remember a joke that my recently retired colleague Jacob Needleman once said about a cutting edge new course that was being developed: “The Bible as Religious Text”!
Well, here’s the opposite. A very nice presentation by Robert Alter (UC Berkeley) on the Bible Through Literary Eyes.
The inner lives of biblical characters
The old joke goes that a new course was being offered in a university religion department: “The Bible of Religious Document”. A “new” course because of the more typical “Bible as literature” classes. James Wood thinks biblical characters lack inner lives. Tod Linafelt thinks otherwise in this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
It is hard to deny that in many respects the Bible is the most unliterary work of literature that we have. Saint Augustine, already in the late fourth century AD, confessed that biblical style exhibits “the lowest of language” and had seemed to him, before his conversion, “unworthy of comparison with the dignity of Cicero.” It is easy to see what he means. Biblical narrative especially (things are different with biblical poetry) tends to work with a very limited vocabulary and consistently avoids metaphors and other sorts of figurative language, evincing a drastically stripped-down manner of storytelling that can seem the very antithesis of style.
Then, readers have not traditionally gone to the Bible in search of literary artfulness but rather for its religious value — that is, as a source of theology (What can we learn about God?) or of ethics (What can we learn about morality?). For Augustine, as for so many religious readers after him, the Bible’s theological truths and ethical teachings won out over its literary art or lack thereof.
Linafelt goes on to state that:
What makes Wood’s mischaracterization of biblical narrative so disappointing is the opportunity that is lost, the opportunity to have one of our best and most subtle analysts of fictional narrative go to work on our most ancient example of fictional narrative. For whatever else the Bible is or contains — scripture, ethics, history, lyric poetry — it also represents a genuine precursor to the modern novel.
Jane Smiley, in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf, 2005), gives this basic definition: “A novel is a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” One may nuance the definition, but that is a pretty common one. And classical biblical narrative brings together all those elements, probably for the first time in literary history. Indeed, the Bible contains, in the books of Genesis and Samuel, what is very likely the earliest ever extended prose narratives, presenting protagonists who develop and change over the course of a lifetime and who, contra Wood, demonstrate a genuine sense of a past that impinges on their present.