One of the defining events in my life was the discovery of Reformed theology. It was the summer of 1975 after my first year of college. I was sitting in a camping trailer near the Little Missouri River under a dim light reading Loraine Boettner’s book Studies in Theology. His chapters on the person of Christ and on the Trinity revolutionized my little world. As a Methodist, I had grown up reciting the Apostles’ Creed and singing the great Trinitarian and Christocentric hymns of Charles Wesley. The form of the Methodist service was still faithful even though the preaching had strayed from the evangelical emphasis of the Wesley’s. Boettner’s study was an incarnation of the worship experiences of my youth.
Boettner’s Studies in Theology led to a reading of his book The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. The Copernican revolution of my mind and life was in full swing. I began with a small stack of Reformed books, which grew and grew and started engulfing whole bookshelves and, in time, engulfed whole rooms. All this was taking place when the revival of Reformed literature was still building up. Now I cannot even keep up with all of the new books, reprints, journals, and Reformed publications.
Reformed books directed my Bible studies, crystallized my theology, formed my views of culture and politics, and gave a definite direction to my studies in history. And in that area—history—my college major—Reformed studies opened even more avenues. I did college research papers on such topics as “Calvinism in the Old South.” From Calvin to the Puritans to R.L. Dabney and Stonewall Jackson, I studied great Calvinists in history. Perceptive students in my classrooms would grin when I described some great thinker, such as John Witherspoon, and point out his influence on our history and then add, “He was, of course, a Calvinist.”
Now some thirty years after that initial discovery of Reformed theology, I would still no more deny or retreat from the great legacy of the Calvinistic tradition than I would cross from Arkansas into Tennessee denying the great Mississippi River. And yet we grow in grace and knowledge. Theologies and ideas that I pegged and understood back in the 1970s and 80s are now not so easily understood. Now that I know more than I did then, I know that I know less than I did then.
All of this leads me to say how richly I have been blessed over the past several years by reading… I am afraid to admit this…Catholics. By that word I do not mean as we are quick to point out to visitors when reciting the creeds that Catholic means universal. I mean that I have been richly blessed by reading Roman Catholics, papists, the sons and daughters of the…the…Church of Rome.
Loraine Boettner’s book on Roman Catholicism, read back in the 70s, nailed the case against the RC church. I probably would still agree with many of his points and still reference his book for some of the particular problems of that system. There are things about Catholicism that I find unattractive; there are things I find repulsive. Worse things could happen, but still I would dread ever hearing one of my children say in their adulthood that they are going to Rome—theologically.
Reading Catholics led me first to think “How amazing that this guy figured this out and said it so well, being that he is Catholic.” Then I began to think “What this Catholic says is true, so no doubt they are not totally wrong.” Then there was the day I saw a Catholic gentleman who had a car with a license tag that said “Jesus” (as opposed to Mary, St. Anne, or Pope John Paul II). Then there was the flood tide in Catholic books of references to Scripture, direct appeals to Christ, references to the saving grace of God, and so on. “But,” I would say, “When they use these terms, they do not mean what we mean.” At some point, I began to hope that G.K. Chesterton and Flannery O’Connor might actually be in heaven, in spite of their earthly church affiliation.
My patron saint (Oh no, I am beginning to think like a Catholic) should probably be the prodigal son’s brother. I left the Methodist Church because of its liberalism, and now I am irked when I see and hear of Methodists who are returning to the old paths. How much more so am I irked when I see God blessed Catholics. And lo and behold, two of the most revered and godly people of the late 20th century were Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul II. Then there are the political Catholics, like Justice Anthony Scalia and Sen. Rick Santorum. There are the political thinkers, like William F. Buckley and lots of other conservatives. There are the converts, like Malcolm Muggeridge and Caroline Gordon. And of course, there is J.R.R. Tolkien.
My Reformed and Presbyterian mentors did not help much. Once while listening to a taped discussion between R.J. Rushdoony and Otto Scott, they mentioned a book by Christopher Dawson, a Catholic and a historian. Little by little, I began accumulating books and articles by Dawson. Dawson’s work still has a profound effect on me.
A Presbyterian pastor once told me how much he loved Flannery O’Connor’s writings. I had a collection of her works that was largely unread. One afternoon while preparing for a power-nap, I propped up on a pillow and read “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” After that I shuddered every time I drove down a strange road or saw a man in a black hat. But this Presbyterian pastor recommended the story “Revelation.” It was love at first reading. Everything by Flannery O’Connor—stories, novels, essays, and letters—became consuming. She is, in my opinion, the greatest Christian short story writer of the 20th century and she was Catholic.
Matters only became worse when I taught a course that included Medieval literature and history. St. Augustine’s City of God was an epic experience. We Reformed people have long claimed Augustine as one of our own. We don’t claim Dante, but after reading The Divine Comedy, Dante claimed me. The portion of that poem that most affected me was The Purgatorio. In no way do I have any belief in such middle state for baptized believers: “This day thou shalt be with Me in paradise.” But the believers in Purgatorio sang psalms to God, suffered in proportion to their actual sins, and marched upward toward heaven. The picture Dante painted was beautiful, after I relegated the theological construct of Purgatory to a metaphor of sanctification. As is necessary in literature, one has to suspend disbelief to access literature as a mode of knowledge.
Paul Johnson is one of the greatest historians of our time, and he is one of them. His theology is a bit shaky, even for a Catholic, but a Christian worldview permeates much of his writing. Dr. Louise Cowan is one of the greatest literary critics of our time, and she is one of them. Joseph Pearce is an excellent literary biographer, and he is one of them. Peter Kreeft is one of the best teachers and writers on philosophy and logic in our world, and he is one of them.
Sunday mornings will not change for me. I want Reformed preaching, Reformed teaching, Reformed singing, and even Reformed oatmeal for Sabbath breakfast. No beads, no incense, no bells, no candles, and certainly no prayers to saints for this diehard Calvinist. But in my study, in my classroom, in my morning devotional reading, in my pursuit of history and literature, I find that the Road to Rome——as much as and in some ways more than the Road to Geneva—leads to some glorious heavenly vistas.
The preacher of Ecclesiastes tells us, "Of the making of many books, there is no end." To which we add, "Of the buying and reading of many books, there is no end."
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Random Quotes
RANDOM QUOTES GATHERED BY A SHEPHERD PREPARING TO FEED THE SHEEP
“He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus Christ as the Son of God is committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found in Christianity.”
James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World
“God sometimes sends me moments of complete serenity. It is in such moments that I have composed in my mind a profession of faith, in which everything is clear and holy. This profession of faith is very simple. This is what it is: to believe that there is nothing finer, deeper, more lovable, more reasonable, braver and more perfect than Christ; and, not only there is nothing, but, I tell myself with a jealous love, there cannot be anything. More than that: if anyone had told me that Christ is outside truth, and if it had really been established that truth is outside Christ, I should have preferred to stay with Christ rather than with truth.”
Fydor Dostoevsky
“But we are tethered to Hope that will promise anything without blushing,
And the flowing water of foreknowledge is far away beyond our reach.
Therefore neither ashore nor in the hollow ships will any praise
Be given to an act on which the doer does not stake his life.”
C.S. Lewis, Poems: “Pindar Sang”
“If Christianity should happen to be true, then it is quite impossible that those who know this truth and those who don’t should be equally well equipped for leading a good life. Knowledge of the facts must make a difference to one’s actions.”
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: “Man or Rabbit”
“He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus Christ as the Son of God is committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found in Christianity.”
James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World
“God sometimes sends me moments of complete serenity. It is in such moments that I have composed in my mind a profession of faith, in which everything is clear and holy. This profession of faith is very simple. This is what it is: to believe that there is nothing finer, deeper, more lovable, more reasonable, braver and more perfect than Christ; and, not only there is nothing, but, I tell myself with a jealous love, there cannot be anything. More than that: if anyone had told me that Christ is outside truth, and if it had really been established that truth is outside Christ, I should have preferred to stay with Christ rather than with truth.”
Fydor Dostoevsky
“But we are tethered to Hope that will promise anything without blushing,
And the flowing water of foreknowledge is far away beyond our reach.
Therefore neither ashore nor in the hollow ships will any praise
Be given to an act on which the doer does not stake his life.”
C.S. Lewis, Poems: “Pindar Sang”
“If Christianity should happen to be true, then it is quite impossible that those who know this truth and those who don’t should be equally well equipped for leading a good life. Knowledge of the facts must make a difference to one’s actions.”
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: “Man or Rabbit”
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Drunken Writers
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway both redefined American literature. Many aspiring writers sought to imitate their styles, especially Hemingway’s. Along with their defining stylistic influence, Fitzgerald and Hemingway shared a key trait with many 20th Century American writers.
Edgar A. Robinson, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Hart Crane, Eugene O’Neill, Ring Larder, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Robert Bencheley, James Thurber, John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, e.e. cummings, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Truman Capote, William Saroyan, Conrad Aiken, Jack Kerouac, James Agee, James Jones, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarell, Anne Sexton, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver all shared the same trait with Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
The common trait was alcoholism. The above list of names is a virtual “Who’s Who” among 20th century American writers. Literary critic Scott Donaldson examined this phenomenon of alcoholic writers in his book Hemingway versus Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship. Donaldson relied on a book called Alcohol and the Writer by Donald Goodwin for his research. Only bartenders had higher rates of alcoholism than writers, according to Goodwin.
What caused these writers to succumb to an epidemic of alcoholism? Is it the case that a bottle of Jack Daniels might help an aspiring writer more than a course in creative writing? Goodwin says, “Writing is a form of exhibitionism; alcohol lowers inhibitions and prompts exhibitionism in many people.” Certainly 20th century writers dropped social inhibitions in their writings. Hemingway’s parents were quite shocked at his early works. Fitzgerald revealed many marital tensions from his life in his fiction. Social, sexual, and moral boundaries were all erased by modern authors. There is no bit of shocking content in today’s movies, television, and fiction that was not previously explored by these writers.
Goodwin says, “Writing requires an interest in people; alcohol increases sociability and makes people more interesting.” Part of the dual nature of writers is that they must inhabit the lone world of the mind, but they must know the world of people. Certainly, strong drink has a social dimension whether it is in the context of barroom drinking, parties, or conversation with a friend.
“Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy,” Goodwin says. In one sense we distinguish between literature that is fantasy literature, such as Tolkien’s works, and literature that is realistic, like Hemingway. Yet all writing, even the most realistic, involves imagination or fantasizing.
“Writing requires self confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is a lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes,” says Goodwin. All of the characteristics of writers that are aided by alcohol help explain this correlation between writing and alcoholism.
Other writers have added even more to the probable causes. Malcolm Cowley said that alcohol both depresses the nervous tension common to writers and stimulates the creative process. Southern novelist Walker Percy said alcohol helps the writer through ‘reentry’ after the exaltation of writing. “What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of The Sound and the Fury?” Percy asks. “Get drunk for a week.”
Perhaps even more perceptive is the comment of poet David Hall, “There seems to be an assumption, widely held and all but declared, that it is natural to want to destroy yourself.” This self-destruction forms a large portion of the autobiographies of many writers.
I recently had the occasion to reread Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. I had read both works in high school and had once reread Gatsby, but had generally stayed away from these works. During the spring, I taught these two authors in the context of American history and literature. As a picture of the despair and nihilistic courage of 20th century man after World War I, Hemingway’s portrayal of Frederick Henry’s doomed romance was brilliant. One of my students referred to it as a fairy tale turned bad. As a picture of the surface glitter and inner hollowness of the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald’s story of Jay Gatsby is likewise brilliant.
Paul Johnson refers to the time when these books appeared as “fertile in American literature generally.” He says, “The novels of the period included Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920), John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay (1926), Upton Sinclair’s Boston (1928), and in 1929, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. That is, by any standard, a brilliant decade.”
The lives of Hemingway and Fitzgerald carry out all of the philosophical and literary themes of their work. Hemingway had three marriages that ended in divorce, and his own life was characterized by numerous adulteries, drunkenness, fights, and breakups with friends, and finally suicide. Fitzgerald embarrassed himself and his friends constantly by his drunken and outlandish behavior. After several years in New York and France in which the Fitzgerald’s lived to party, they returned to America. Zelda Fitzgerald spent quite a few years in sanatoriums, while Scott’s writing career crashed. His last work, The Last Tycoon, like his life itself, was unfinished when he died while yet in his early 40s. He really never grew up and never fulfilled the early promises.
I also recently reread and taught through William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished. Faulkner was a contemporary with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but was in a different league. Fitzgerald and Hemingway found their literary compasses in post-war Paris, gathering with the intellectual and artistic elite who gathered in the literary salons and the apartment of Gertrude Stein. Faulkner had occasion to travel in Europe, but he found his bearings and literary world in Mississippi. Southern culture and history formed the basis for his creation of Yoknapatawpha County, which was home for his novels and stories.
Yet Faulkner’s life and marriage was a mess. He didn’t just get drunk for a week after finishing The Sound and the Fury. Whether homebrew or fine wines, Faulkner guzzled at the bottle as often as he neglected traditional grammar and syntax. Still he too was brilliant and many of his writings are among the best of the century. As Donaldson says in answering the question about the best American writers of the 20th century, “The three apparent winners in the American literary competition…are William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, in no particular order beyond this alphabetical one.”
In one sense, we all wish to overlook “a fault.” Sure, these guys and others were alcoholics, but they wrote such good stuff. The question is not just about literature. “Art for art’s sake” is a painfully deficient slogan. Art is to imitate something of life and is to be a mode of knowledge about life. Literature has been called history without footnotes. I think it is also philosophy without abstractions and theology without Bible references.
Literature, whether viewed as something we write or something we read, is a necessary component of life, but a poor god. Literary persons needed fellowship and they needed something sacramental. They needed the “reentry” Walker Percy referred to. In the case of these Twentieth Century writers, their stories were, almost without exception, tragic stories of despair. Hemingway’s heroes were cheated out of life. Frederick Henry’s lover Catherine died and Santiago’s great fish was eaten by sharks. Fitzgerald repeatedly told the story of the young man aspiring to wealth and the love of a beautiful woman, who usually is wealthy. Jay Gatsby lost any chance to acquire Daisy and lost his life as well. While Bayard Sartoris, in Faulkner’s Unvanquished, rises to a level of knightly greatness, his family—like so many in the Faulkner canon—is ruined in the sequel, titled Sartoris.
The mean, the dirty, the ugly always triumphs in realistic literature. These works resonate with us because they are a megaphone to the reality of sin in this world. A Jack London character says, “Life is a mess…. The big eat the little that they may continue to move; the strong eat the weak that they retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all.” Dreiser said, “We suffer for our temperaments, which we did not make, and for our weaknesses and lacks, which are no part of our willing and doing.” And Hemingway’s character Frederick Henry philosophizes about life, saying, “You did not know what it was all about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.” Fitzgerald ends The Great Gatsby with the melancholy reflection, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Whether one’s field of vision is the evening report of world news or the darkened journey into the individual soul, the despair and depravity so prevalent in modern literature is attested to as being all too true. So whether the tale is told by alcoholic or depressed idiot or both, the sound and fury signified little good or hopeful. But these modern writers disconnected the megaphone after delivering the bad news and before completing the message. Redemption is just as real as sin.
One writer who stands noticeably apart from the prophets of despair and devastating effects of alcohol was Flannery O’Connor. She was realistic and modern in her writings. She focused on the grotesque in Southern life as a mirror for the grotesqueness of the sinful heart. She described her philosophy as follows: “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and that what I see in the world I see in relation to that.”
William Butler Yeats recognized the modern crisis early on, saying, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Wars, genocide, the emptiness of materialism, the evils of totalitarianism, and modern philosophies, combined with “all of the miseries of this life, to death itself” were enough and more to drive any sane person to drink, even to excess. But the alcohol was as poor a savior as literature itself. Flannery O’Connor certainly knew of despair, pain, and misery both from her wide readings and from personal experience with illness. In short, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others succumbed to alcoholism because they rejected Christ. But O’Connor’s faith gave her a focal point beyond the final period in her writings and a focal point greater than the buzz from a bottle. O’Connor’s triumph in life mirrors her triumph in art.
Edgar A. Robinson, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Hart Crane, Eugene O’Neill, Ring Larder, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Robert Bencheley, James Thurber, John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, e.e. cummings, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Truman Capote, William Saroyan, Conrad Aiken, Jack Kerouac, James Agee, James Jones, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarell, Anne Sexton, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver all shared the same trait with Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
The common trait was alcoholism. The above list of names is a virtual “Who’s Who” among 20th century American writers. Literary critic Scott Donaldson examined this phenomenon of alcoholic writers in his book Hemingway versus Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship. Donaldson relied on a book called Alcohol and the Writer by Donald Goodwin for his research. Only bartenders had higher rates of alcoholism than writers, according to Goodwin.
What caused these writers to succumb to an epidemic of alcoholism? Is it the case that a bottle of Jack Daniels might help an aspiring writer more than a course in creative writing? Goodwin says, “Writing is a form of exhibitionism; alcohol lowers inhibitions and prompts exhibitionism in many people.” Certainly 20th century writers dropped social inhibitions in their writings. Hemingway’s parents were quite shocked at his early works. Fitzgerald revealed many marital tensions from his life in his fiction. Social, sexual, and moral boundaries were all erased by modern authors. There is no bit of shocking content in today’s movies, television, and fiction that was not previously explored by these writers.
Goodwin says, “Writing requires an interest in people; alcohol increases sociability and makes people more interesting.” Part of the dual nature of writers is that they must inhabit the lone world of the mind, but they must know the world of people. Certainly, strong drink has a social dimension whether it is in the context of barroom drinking, parties, or conversation with a friend.
“Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy,” Goodwin says. In one sense we distinguish between literature that is fantasy literature, such as Tolkien’s works, and literature that is realistic, like Hemingway. Yet all writing, even the most realistic, involves imagination or fantasizing.
“Writing requires self confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is a lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes,” says Goodwin. All of the characteristics of writers that are aided by alcohol help explain this correlation between writing and alcoholism.
Other writers have added even more to the probable causes. Malcolm Cowley said that alcohol both depresses the nervous tension common to writers and stimulates the creative process. Southern novelist Walker Percy said alcohol helps the writer through ‘reentry’ after the exaltation of writing. “What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of The Sound and the Fury?” Percy asks. “Get drunk for a week.”
Perhaps even more perceptive is the comment of poet David Hall, “There seems to be an assumption, widely held and all but declared, that it is natural to want to destroy yourself.” This self-destruction forms a large portion of the autobiographies of many writers.
I recently had the occasion to reread Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. I had read both works in high school and had once reread Gatsby, but had generally stayed away from these works. During the spring, I taught these two authors in the context of American history and literature. As a picture of the despair and nihilistic courage of 20th century man after World War I, Hemingway’s portrayal of Frederick Henry’s doomed romance was brilliant. One of my students referred to it as a fairy tale turned bad. As a picture of the surface glitter and inner hollowness of the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald’s story of Jay Gatsby is likewise brilliant.
Paul Johnson refers to the time when these books appeared as “fertile in American literature generally.” He says, “The novels of the period included Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920), John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay (1926), Upton Sinclair’s Boston (1928), and in 1929, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. That is, by any standard, a brilliant decade.”
The lives of Hemingway and Fitzgerald carry out all of the philosophical and literary themes of their work. Hemingway had three marriages that ended in divorce, and his own life was characterized by numerous adulteries, drunkenness, fights, and breakups with friends, and finally suicide. Fitzgerald embarrassed himself and his friends constantly by his drunken and outlandish behavior. After several years in New York and France in which the Fitzgerald’s lived to party, they returned to America. Zelda Fitzgerald spent quite a few years in sanatoriums, while Scott’s writing career crashed. His last work, The Last Tycoon, like his life itself, was unfinished when he died while yet in his early 40s. He really never grew up and never fulfilled the early promises.
I also recently reread and taught through William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished. Faulkner was a contemporary with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but was in a different league. Fitzgerald and Hemingway found their literary compasses in post-war Paris, gathering with the intellectual and artistic elite who gathered in the literary salons and the apartment of Gertrude Stein. Faulkner had occasion to travel in Europe, but he found his bearings and literary world in Mississippi. Southern culture and history formed the basis for his creation of Yoknapatawpha County, which was home for his novels and stories.
Yet Faulkner’s life and marriage was a mess. He didn’t just get drunk for a week after finishing The Sound and the Fury. Whether homebrew or fine wines, Faulkner guzzled at the bottle as often as he neglected traditional grammar and syntax. Still he too was brilliant and many of his writings are among the best of the century. As Donaldson says in answering the question about the best American writers of the 20th century, “The three apparent winners in the American literary competition…are William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, in no particular order beyond this alphabetical one.”
In one sense, we all wish to overlook “a fault.” Sure, these guys and others were alcoholics, but they wrote such good stuff. The question is not just about literature. “Art for art’s sake” is a painfully deficient slogan. Art is to imitate something of life and is to be a mode of knowledge about life. Literature has been called history without footnotes. I think it is also philosophy without abstractions and theology without Bible references.
Literature, whether viewed as something we write or something we read, is a necessary component of life, but a poor god. Literary persons needed fellowship and they needed something sacramental. They needed the “reentry” Walker Percy referred to. In the case of these Twentieth Century writers, their stories were, almost without exception, tragic stories of despair. Hemingway’s heroes were cheated out of life. Frederick Henry’s lover Catherine died and Santiago’s great fish was eaten by sharks. Fitzgerald repeatedly told the story of the young man aspiring to wealth and the love of a beautiful woman, who usually is wealthy. Jay Gatsby lost any chance to acquire Daisy and lost his life as well. While Bayard Sartoris, in Faulkner’s Unvanquished, rises to a level of knightly greatness, his family—like so many in the Faulkner canon—is ruined in the sequel, titled Sartoris.
The mean, the dirty, the ugly always triumphs in realistic literature. These works resonate with us because they are a megaphone to the reality of sin in this world. A Jack London character says, “Life is a mess…. The big eat the little that they may continue to move; the strong eat the weak that they retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all.” Dreiser said, “We suffer for our temperaments, which we did not make, and for our weaknesses and lacks, which are no part of our willing and doing.” And Hemingway’s character Frederick Henry philosophizes about life, saying, “You did not know what it was all about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.” Fitzgerald ends The Great Gatsby with the melancholy reflection, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Whether one’s field of vision is the evening report of world news or the darkened journey into the individual soul, the despair and depravity so prevalent in modern literature is attested to as being all too true. So whether the tale is told by alcoholic or depressed idiot or both, the sound and fury signified little good or hopeful. But these modern writers disconnected the megaphone after delivering the bad news and before completing the message. Redemption is just as real as sin.
One writer who stands noticeably apart from the prophets of despair and devastating effects of alcohol was Flannery O’Connor. She was realistic and modern in her writings. She focused on the grotesque in Southern life as a mirror for the grotesqueness of the sinful heart. She described her philosophy as follows: “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and that what I see in the world I see in relation to that.”
William Butler Yeats recognized the modern crisis early on, saying, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Wars, genocide, the emptiness of materialism, the evils of totalitarianism, and modern philosophies, combined with “all of the miseries of this life, to death itself” were enough and more to drive any sane person to drink, even to excess. But the alcohol was as poor a savior as literature itself. Flannery O’Connor certainly knew of despair, pain, and misery both from her wide readings and from personal experience with illness. In short, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others succumbed to alcoholism because they rejected Christ. But O’Connor’s faith gave her a focal point beyond the final period in her writings and a focal point greater than the buzz from a bottle. O’Connor’s triumph in life mirrors her triumph in art.
Friday, July 01, 2005
1776 and Washington’s Crossing
On January 1 of 1777, Robert Morris wrote to George Washington, “The year 1776 is over. I am heartily glad of it and hope you nor America will ever be plagued with such another.” History has a way of recasting difficulties as triumphs. It is a perspective that only makes sense if there is a transcendence beyond the moment. We live in an age that too often assumes that the pronouncements of the evening news or the findings of the latest poll are the final judgment of truth and reality. Robert Morris showed both a recognition of the miseries of 1776 and the expectation that both America and George Washington would go on to better things.
We celebrate the year 1776. We remember one event of that year—the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The year of 1776 was filled with a number of great events from the War for Independence, including the siege of Boston, the capture and removal of the guns from Fort Ticonderoga, defeat of the American raid on Canada, the defense and loss of New York City, the retreat across New Jersey, and Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton.
That year began with the focus on the siege and subsequent evacuation of Boston. This was an American victory of sorts. Boston carried lots of psychological weight for the Patriot cause. The British army was basically bottlenecked there. The British capture of Breed’s Hill (the battle better known Bunker’s Hill) was a tactical victory for the crown’s cause. But this victory was quite costly in the lives taken to acquire that height. It gave the American army a sense of satisfaction at having extracted such a price for real estate. From the British viewpoint, it interjected a sense of caution in General Howe, causing him to refrain from further efforts to break out of Boston.
This caution was heightened when the Americans occupied Dorchester Heights, overlooking Boston proper, and trained the newly acquired field guns on the British positions. For the British, evacuating Boston was simply a change of tactical emphasis. The British army and navy continued to amass strength in both numbers and resolve. The wiser course of action was to shift military operations—after a short interlude—to New York. From there the British could use both land and sea to better direct the war efforts toward New England to the north and toward the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
The struggle for New York tilted the balance of events strongly in favor of the British. Basically, General Washington was outfought, outthought, and outmanned. The capture of Long Island and later the capture of Fort Washington and even later the miserable retreat across New Jersey should have ended a short chapter in English colonial rule over North America. Washington and Jefferson and others should have been relegated to footnote status and obscurity, as well as infamy.
Several factors prevented this denouement from coming to a completion. First, Washington began conducting his most often practiced and successful military maneuver—a retreat. This is not as simple as it sounds. A retreat puts an army in a spread out, vulnerable situation. Communications, supplies, and ability to respond to an attack are all hindered. In terms of morale, it can be even more devastating: Only losers retreat. Yet Washington’s retreat from Long Island was successful. A second factor that made it successful was beyond Washington’s control.
David McCullough writes, “Incredibly, yet again, circumstances—fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often—intervened. Just at daybreak a heavy fog settled over the whole of Brooklyn, concealing everything no less than had the night. It was a fog so thick, remembered a soldier, that one ‘could scarcely discern a man at six yards distance.’”
Nine thousand American soldiers escaped across the river during the night and during the morning fog without the loss of a single life. After the troops were safely delivered, the fog lifted, revealing the enemy presence on the shore left behind. Throughout the war, the weather did not always so favor the Patriot cause, but from a historical perspective, we can nudge McCullough’s speculation toward certainty: This was the Providential hand of God.
God uses means and God uses men. George Washington was one such man used of God. Washington’s personal faith and doctrine are disputable. He has been alternately described as an evangelical Christian believer and as a Deist. He was certainly a theist and a man of conviction about God’s governance of the universe and moral order. His theological restraint may have been an indication of a lack of personal faith in Christ or it may have been a characteristic of the times. Even today, many political leaders are guarded in their use of religious language. Whatever the status of Washington’s soul, he was certainly gifted by God and used by God in the events of 1776.
Washington is an amazing case study in the category of leaders. He excelled and ultimately succeeded both as a military and political leader. Because of this, he exceeds such men of greater battlefield gifts as Napoleon, Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant, and Hannibal. Washington never lacked personal bravery and devotion to the cause. But as a military tactician, as a strategist, as an on-the-battlefield commander, Washington’s abilities seemed limited. He lost far more battles than he won; he retreated more than he advanced; he commanded men who more closely resembled rabble than armies; his military background and training were limited; and even some of his victories seem more like random lottery winnings than calculated strategic military calculations.
His greatest gift was perseverance. He said, “Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.” He was helped by having some very capable commanders serving under him. These included men like Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox. Likewise he was hindered by a few who fancied themselves his superiors and who did not hesitate to convey such sentiments. One in particular was General Charles Lee. As Washington retreated across New Jersey, Lee insubordinately moseyed along on his own with his contingent of soldiers. He was content to let circumstances destroy Washington and advance his own career.
Here the British stepped in and, in effect, won the war for America: They captured Lee at a tavern. Washington’s response was careful and guarded, but inwardly he must have been delighted. The British were thrilled at any rate, for they ranked General Lee above Washington in their estimation.
Washington held an army together that lacking almost every ingredient of a successful military unit. It is said that an army moves on its stomach, yet the Continental army was malnourished and constantly in need of food. Pay was sporadic; the homeplaces were often nearby and as luring as the sirens of ancient myth; the cause seemed lost; and the middle colonies were increasingly coming under the sway and flags of the British army. On paper, Washington’s army numbered around 18,000 or a little more than half that of the British. But those numbers belied the true situation. Desertions and illness claimed many of the soldiers. In reality, Washington retreated across the Delaware River with only about 3,000 men. And many of these were nearing the end of their enlistments.
On the south shores of the Delaware River, the Patriot cause survived thanks to Washington’s command and initiative. From here he launched his famous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night, leading to his attack on the Hessian command stationed at Trenton. The crossing was slow, dangerous, miserably cold, and risky. Two of the columns that were to participate in the attack were turned back by delays and weather. The march to Trenton was likewise slow and miserably cold. The attack began sometime after daybreak rather than before as Washington had hoped for. The resulting victory was much greater than he had imagined.
In this short battle, Washington’s troops killed twenty-one enemy soldiers, wounded ninety more, and captured approximately nine hundred more. On the American side, the actual casualties in battle were four wounded and none killed. From this initial victory, Washington went on to conduct a spirited defense against a British counterattack. Once again, Washington showed his skill in retreating from the battlefield in the night, leaving the British poised against mere vacated campfires. But rather than simply retreating from battle, he swung his army north of Trenton where he surprised another British unit at Princeton, winning another victory and netting an additional three hundred prisoners. Only then did Washington take his victorious army back across the Delaware River.
In this particular campaign, Washington dominated the enemy in a manner worthy of such military greats as Hannibal or Stonewall Jackson. Up to this point, his success had consisted of avoiding total defeat and somehow holding his ragged troops together through thin and thinner. But in this case, Washington’s offensive kept his army moving swiftly as a sword, keeping the British forces unbalanced at a time when the war was all but won by the British.
The winter of the American soldiers’ discontent turned into the means of victory for the American cause. David Hackett Fischer writes, “Americans have known many dark days, from the starving times in the early settlements to the attack on the World Trade Center. These were the testing times and the pivotal moments of our history. It was that way in 1776, after the decision for independence and the military disasters in New York. In early December, British commanders believed that they were very close to ending the rebellion, and American leaders feared that they may be right. Then came a reversal of fortune, and three months later the mood changed on both sides. By the spring of 1777, many British officers had concluded that they could never win the war. At the same time, Americans recovered from their despair and were confident that they would not be defeated. That double transformation was truly a turning point in the war.”
This story of America’s struggle for independence and its triumphs in the face of incredible adversities should never grow dull or dim in the American mind. Our school children should be taught this story repeatedly. Adults need the story as much as children. The ever-present prophets of defeat and ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ (to use the late Spiro Agnew’s only memorable phrase) can best be countered by recalling our own history. Whether coming from the morally hollowed-out eastern liberal establishment, the cynical and anti-American wings of the media, or even from overly pessimistic conservatives and defeat-oriented Christians, we need to be rescued from such by the perspective of history the year 1776 gives us.
David McCullough’s new book 1776 and David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing overlap in their coverage of the glorious days of our country’s beginnings. Both books are excellent and well-written accounts of those times. Both writers have previous works that are related to these topics. McCullough’s biography of John Adams is a landmark example of excellent historical writing and of a great, though somewhat overshadowed, Founding Father. Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride gives a fuller account of a story that goes beyond Longfellow’s poem. He also aptly deals with the greater issues and events, political and theological, which led to the war.
Christian influences in the war are highlighted in both McCullough’s and Fischer’s recent works. For example, Fischer points out that “the hard core of the Revolutionary movement in New Jersey consisted of English speaking Calvinists.” He goes on to reference a comment by Lutheran minister Nicholas Collins who said, “By God there will never be any peace till the Whigs and Presbyterians are cut off.” McCullough cites the British General James Grant as saying, “If a good bleeding can bring those Bible-faced Yankees to their senses, the fever of independency should soon abate.” No doubt General Grant recognized the connection between the theology found in the Continental Army and the issue of independence.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress, and a physician who set up a field hospital for the American army, spoke quite brilliantly when he said, “Our republics cannot exist long in prosperity. We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed.” The history of our country bears out the truth of Rush’s statement. Times like 1776 or September 11, 2001 demonstrate that depressed times and events make for the most glorious history and successes of our republic. The glory and success, of course, have to be seen from a historical perspective.
We celebrate the year 1776. We remember one event of that year—the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The year of 1776 was filled with a number of great events from the War for Independence, including the siege of Boston, the capture and removal of the guns from Fort Ticonderoga, defeat of the American raid on Canada, the defense and loss of New York City, the retreat across New Jersey, and Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton.
That year began with the focus on the siege and subsequent evacuation of Boston. This was an American victory of sorts. Boston carried lots of psychological weight for the Patriot cause. The British army was basically bottlenecked there. The British capture of Breed’s Hill (the battle better known Bunker’s Hill) was a tactical victory for the crown’s cause. But this victory was quite costly in the lives taken to acquire that height. It gave the American army a sense of satisfaction at having extracted such a price for real estate. From the British viewpoint, it interjected a sense of caution in General Howe, causing him to refrain from further efforts to break out of Boston.
This caution was heightened when the Americans occupied Dorchester Heights, overlooking Boston proper, and trained the newly acquired field guns on the British positions. For the British, evacuating Boston was simply a change of tactical emphasis. The British army and navy continued to amass strength in both numbers and resolve. The wiser course of action was to shift military operations—after a short interlude—to New York. From there the British could use both land and sea to better direct the war efforts toward New England to the north and toward the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
The struggle for New York tilted the balance of events strongly in favor of the British. Basically, General Washington was outfought, outthought, and outmanned. The capture of Long Island and later the capture of Fort Washington and even later the miserable retreat across New Jersey should have ended a short chapter in English colonial rule over North America. Washington and Jefferson and others should have been relegated to footnote status and obscurity, as well as infamy.
Several factors prevented this denouement from coming to a completion. First, Washington began conducting his most often practiced and successful military maneuver—a retreat. This is not as simple as it sounds. A retreat puts an army in a spread out, vulnerable situation. Communications, supplies, and ability to respond to an attack are all hindered. In terms of morale, it can be even more devastating: Only losers retreat. Yet Washington’s retreat from Long Island was successful. A second factor that made it successful was beyond Washington’s control.
David McCullough writes, “Incredibly, yet again, circumstances—fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often—intervened. Just at daybreak a heavy fog settled over the whole of Brooklyn, concealing everything no less than had the night. It was a fog so thick, remembered a soldier, that one ‘could scarcely discern a man at six yards distance.’”
Nine thousand American soldiers escaped across the river during the night and during the morning fog without the loss of a single life. After the troops were safely delivered, the fog lifted, revealing the enemy presence on the shore left behind. Throughout the war, the weather did not always so favor the Patriot cause, but from a historical perspective, we can nudge McCullough’s speculation toward certainty: This was the Providential hand of God.
God uses means and God uses men. George Washington was one such man used of God. Washington’s personal faith and doctrine are disputable. He has been alternately described as an evangelical Christian believer and as a Deist. He was certainly a theist and a man of conviction about God’s governance of the universe and moral order. His theological restraint may have been an indication of a lack of personal faith in Christ or it may have been a characteristic of the times. Even today, many political leaders are guarded in their use of religious language. Whatever the status of Washington’s soul, he was certainly gifted by God and used by God in the events of 1776.
Washington is an amazing case study in the category of leaders. He excelled and ultimately succeeded both as a military and political leader. Because of this, he exceeds such men of greater battlefield gifts as Napoleon, Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant, and Hannibal. Washington never lacked personal bravery and devotion to the cause. But as a military tactician, as a strategist, as an on-the-battlefield commander, Washington’s abilities seemed limited. He lost far more battles than he won; he retreated more than he advanced; he commanded men who more closely resembled rabble than armies; his military background and training were limited; and even some of his victories seem more like random lottery winnings than calculated strategic military calculations.
His greatest gift was perseverance. He said, “Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.” He was helped by having some very capable commanders serving under him. These included men like Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox. Likewise he was hindered by a few who fancied themselves his superiors and who did not hesitate to convey such sentiments. One in particular was General Charles Lee. As Washington retreated across New Jersey, Lee insubordinately moseyed along on his own with his contingent of soldiers. He was content to let circumstances destroy Washington and advance his own career.
Here the British stepped in and, in effect, won the war for America: They captured Lee at a tavern. Washington’s response was careful and guarded, but inwardly he must have been delighted. The British were thrilled at any rate, for they ranked General Lee above Washington in their estimation.
Washington held an army together that lacking almost every ingredient of a successful military unit. It is said that an army moves on its stomach, yet the Continental army was malnourished and constantly in need of food. Pay was sporadic; the homeplaces were often nearby and as luring as the sirens of ancient myth; the cause seemed lost; and the middle colonies were increasingly coming under the sway and flags of the British army. On paper, Washington’s army numbered around 18,000 or a little more than half that of the British. But those numbers belied the true situation. Desertions and illness claimed many of the soldiers. In reality, Washington retreated across the Delaware River with only about 3,000 men. And many of these were nearing the end of their enlistments.
On the south shores of the Delaware River, the Patriot cause survived thanks to Washington’s command and initiative. From here he launched his famous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night, leading to his attack on the Hessian command stationed at Trenton. The crossing was slow, dangerous, miserably cold, and risky. Two of the columns that were to participate in the attack were turned back by delays and weather. The march to Trenton was likewise slow and miserably cold. The attack began sometime after daybreak rather than before as Washington had hoped for. The resulting victory was much greater than he had imagined.
In this short battle, Washington’s troops killed twenty-one enemy soldiers, wounded ninety more, and captured approximately nine hundred more. On the American side, the actual casualties in battle were four wounded and none killed. From this initial victory, Washington went on to conduct a spirited defense against a British counterattack. Once again, Washington showed his skill in retreating from the battlefield in the night, leaving the British poised against mere vacated campfires. But rather than simply retreating from battle, he swung his army north of Trenton where he surprised another British unit at Princeton, winning another victory and netting an additional three hundred prisoners. Only then did Washington take his victorious army back across the Delaware River.
In this particular campaign, Washington dominated the enemy in a manner worthy of such military greats as Hannibal or Stonewall Jackson. Up to this point, his success had consisted of avoiding total defeat and somehow holding his ragged troops together through thin and thinner. But in this case, Washington’s offensive kept his army moving swiftly as a sword, keeping the British forces unbalanced at a time when the war was all but won by the British.
The winter of the American soldiers’ discontent turned into the means of victory for the American cause. David Hackett Fischer writes, “Americans have known many dark days, from the starving times in the early settlements to the attack on the World Trade Center. These were the testing times and the pivotal moments of our history. It was that way in 1776, after the decision for independence and the military disasters in New York. In early December, British commanders believed that they were very close to ending the rebellion, and American leaders feared that they may be right. Then came a reversal of fortune, and three months later the mood changed on both sides. By the spring of 1777, many British officers had concluded that they could never win the war. At the same time, Americans recovered from their despair and were confident that they would not be defeated. That double transformation was truly a turning point in the war.”
This story of America’s struggle for independence and its triumphs in the face of incredible adversities should never grow dull or dim in the American mind. Our school children should be taught this story repeatedly. Adults need the story as much as children. The ever-present prophets of defeat and ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ (to use the late Spiro Agnew’s only memorable phrase) can best be countered by recalling our own history. Whether coming from the morally hollowed-out eastern liberal establishment, the cynical and anti-American wings of the media, or even from overly pessimistic conservatives and defeat-oriented Christians, we need to be rescued from such by the perspective of history the year 1776 gives us.
David McCullough’s new book 1776 and David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing overlap in their coverage of the glorious days of our country’s beginnings. Both books are excellent and well-written accounts of those times. Both writers have previous works that are related to these topics. McCullough’s biography of John Adams is a landmark example of excellent historical writing and of a great, though somewhat overshadowed, Founding Father. Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride gives a fuller account of a story that goes beyond Longfellow’s poem. He also aptly deals with the greater issues and events, political and theological, which led to the war.
Christian influences in the war are highlighted in both McCullough’s and Fischer’s recent works. For example, Fischer points out that “the hard core of the Revolutionary movement in New Jersey consisted of English speaking Calvinists.” He goes on to reference a comment by Lutheran minister Nicholas Collins who said, “By God there will never be any peace till the Whigs and Presbyterians are cut off.” McCullough cites the British General James Grant as saying, “If a good bleeding can bring those Bible-faced Yankees to their senses, the fever of independency should soon abate.” No doubt General Grant recognized the connection between the theology found in the Continental Army and the issue of independence.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress, and a physician who set up a field hospital for the American army, spoke quite brilliantly when he said, “Our republics cannot exist long in prosperity. We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed.” The history of our country bears out the truth of Rush’s statement. Times like 1776 or September 11, 2001 demonstrate that depressed times and events make for the most glorious history and successes of our republic. The glory and success, of course, have to be seen from a historical perspective.
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