VIDEO: Daughter of Thy Son

I gave a talk at Wheaton College chapel this Monday (the traditional Feast of the Annunciation).  The contemporary art of Martin Creed, an obscure Byzantine church, Luther, Dante's Paradiso, T.S. Eliot, and - most compellingly - the provocative imagery of my Wheaton Art Department colleagues... all in one place!

Endless Knowing of the Victorian Origen

Ben Myers has a charming reflection on Origen as the consummate teacher and the eternal prospect of learning.  A similar case was built in the Victorian era by Thomas Cooper, a self-educated shoemaker, who had served a prison sentence for once sparking a workers' riot, and who rose to prominence in Victorian intellectual culture - even becoming a respected freethinking lecturer - before returning (as as a strangely high number of secular leaders did) to Christian faith.

Tim Larsen explains how Cooper was interested in everything:

He lectured on European political development and on injustice in Ireland.  He lectured on the life and genius of Milton, of Burns, of Shakespeare, of Byron, and others.  He gave a ten-lecture series on the history of Greece and seventeen lectures on the history or Rome.  He gave addresses on Cromwell and the Commonwealth, on the French Revolution, on George Washington.  He gave an eight-lecture series on Napoleon, and four on the duke of Wellington... He gave fifty-one lectures on the history of England.  He did a series on seven schools of painters: Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, French, and English.  He gave six addresses on Russian history.  He lectured on musicians, including Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven.  His lectures on discoverers and explores included Columbus, Newton, Cortez, and Pizarro.  He helped his hearers understand Mohammed and Swedenborg.  He lectured on slavery, on the national debt, on the age of chivalry, injustice in Poland, the gypsies, the conquests of Alexander the Great, on ancient Egypt...   the philosophy of Bacon and Locke.  His efforts to educate his hearers in a range of sciences included addresses on vegetation, astronomy, geology, and natural history.  This, moreover, is not even close to an exhaustive list of the specific subjects that he addressed.

Thomas Cooper

It was this catholicity of interests that initially led Cooper to the secular viewpoint, his youthful faith having been eroded by D.F. Strauss' Leben Jesu.  But it was also this catholicity that caused Cooper to think his way through Strauss, finally offering an answer, "counter[ing] well-reasoned skeptical criticism with well-reasoned believing criticism."  Unlike the surface responses of most Victorian Christians, Cooper actually gave Strauss' argument the respect of an honest and thorough response (which required mastery of original languages).  "Someone really interested in the latest thought in the field of modern biblical criticism," explains Larsen, "would have been better off going to hear Cooper at the London Hall of Science than an Oxbridge lecture."

Cooper continued his lecture circuit after his reconversion, often denying the flashier (and better paying) speaking venues to prioritize lower class audiences.  It is no wonder that his voracious appetite for learning caused him to offer an intellectual riff on the argument from desire.  As Cooper put it:

And do we not all know that the more we learn to know, the more we thirst to know?  It is only sheer ignorance that has no desire for knowledge... Is the wisdom of God so abortive as to make a being of boundless desires for knowledge, only at the end of a few years to put him out of existence? .. The Progressive Nature of Man - if I use the most circumspect language - is a strong presumptive argument for a Future Life for Man.

What Myers says of Origen could then equally apply to Cooper.  He "knew scripture and the mysteries of the faith better than anyone. But he knew that all the learning of this life is only preparation for the life to come."

The Enduring Age of Eliot

In a review of the latest publication of Eliot letters (1926-27), The New Republic offers the standard academic explanation for why interest in T.S. Eliot is (presumably) at low ebb:

Eliot’s criticism, with its probing of individual passages and its fixation on a specifically literary tradition, predominantly European and Christian, is out of key with current academic approaches based on such “contextual” categories as race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, post-colonialism and social class. Eliot’s poetry, with its learned footnotes that themselves require footnotes, reeks of the “elite.” Influential critics of poetry, including those who do not subscribe to the prevailing critical fashions, have not rallied to Eliot’s defense....  [Harold] Bloom (whose view of literature as a ruthless competition among individual writers closely resembles Eliot’s) has been dismissive of what he calls Eliot’s “churchwardenly” criticism.

But as said passage momentarily concedes, there is reason to think that Eliot's legacy is more present than is frequently presumed.  What reeks of the "elite" today is not an admiration for Eliot's poetry, but its carefully curated academic disdain.

Harold Bloom recollected that as a young student he had been “virtually enslaved” by Eliot’s “preferences and prejudices.”  If Eliot had dethroned the Romantic poets, Bloom reinstated them, even reading Eliot as the Romantic he claimed not to be. And where Eliot had stated the importance of influence in his famous early essay, Bloom upended this benign proposal in The Anxiety of Influence, offering six patterns for how literary influence functions almost perversely.  “Poetry is the enchantment of incest, disciplined by resistance to that enchantment,” claimed Bloom, adding a sinister tint to a process hitherto deemed positive.

But reading The Anxiety of Influence today with full knowledge of Bloom’s career is to be faced with an irony.  The sixth form of negative influence he describes is termed apophrades, or “return of the dead,” evoking the unlucky days in Athens when the dead inhabited the houses where they once lived.  Having sought to avoid the influence of his precursor, the later poet – Bloom tells us - now seems as if the one he sought to avoid inhabits him.  “It seems to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.”  Curiously enough, Bloom’s relation to Eliot is a fitting example of apophrades.

How can we read Bloom as anything but an extension of Eliot’s critical legacy through the literary heyday of deconstruction?  Faced with assaults on the literary tradition, Bloom responded with a furious defense:

Without the Canon, we cease to think.  You may idealize endlessly about replacing aesthetic standards with ethnocentric and gender considerations, and your social aims may indeed be admirable.  Yet only strength can join itself to strength, as Nietzsche perpetually testified.

Bloom, furthermore, made a sharp turn to what he termed religious criticism, even if he did so as a “Gnostic Jew,” loyally opposed to his Jewish tradition.  Beyond celebrating the KJV, he even went on to dispassionately advise an Augustinian revival amongst traditional Protestants and Catholics.  Bloom’s critical style also clearly echoed Eliot.  “Over time,” writes Sam Tannenhaus, Bloom’s “notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics."  Eliot, according to Bloom, “remained a Whitmanian poet, despite all his evasions of Whitman.”   And so has Bloom remained Eliotic despite his evasions of Eliot.

But if Eliot’s understanding of influence is correct – which is advantage not anxiety – this is no condemnation of Bloom.  “If we approach a poet without this prejudice [toward unexamined originality]," wrote Eliot, "we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”  So yes, Eliot persists, and one reason his legacy is continually denigrated might be because his detractor's sense a threat, as the subtle perpetuation of Eliot's legacy would make it easy to revive.  (Hence the tired appeals to accusations from Julius's now dated book instead of bothering to take account of nearly two decades of conversation on the matter since Julius, a common note of which is serious attention to faith).

While there have been obvious critical gains (and losses) since the high water mark of Eliot adulation half a century ago, his legacy has been perpetuated by critics like Bloom, has lately inspired a new journal, Fare Forward, and new waves of artistic production, the Qu4rtets project.  It would be easy to overplay this evidence, but also to underestimate it.  Call it, if you like, apophrades - return of the dead.


QU4RTETS from Pilar Timpane on Vimeo.

Brutal Unity Hangover Cure

I'm serially cheating on millinerd again (with these last four posts at First Thoughts).

Also, my review of Ephraim Radner's 500-page act of penance is in this month's Books & Culture (and can be read here).  So far as I know, the only way to recover from reading the book (which presses Christian complicity in Rwandan genocide, among other things) is by watching this.  Fifty times.

And even that won't do it really.

Update: Come to think of it, perhaps my colleague David Hooker's latest project, covered in this week's Chicago Trib, is the perfect encapsulation of and response to Radner, with Hooker emphasizing "...the Christian message that God loves us in spite of our sins."