Shakespeare

How little fades from earth when sink to rest
The hours and cares that move a great man’s breast!
Though naught of all we saw the grave may spare,
His life pervades the world’s impregnate air;
Though Shakespeare’s dust beneath our footsteps lies,
His spirit breathes amid his native skies;
With meaning won from him forever glows
Each air that England feels, and star it knows;
His whispered words from many a mother’s voice
Can make her sleeping child in dreams rejoice,
And gleams from spheres he first conjoined to earth
Are blent with rays of each new morning’s birth.
Amid the sights and tales of common things,
Leaf, flower, and bird, and wars, and deaths of kings,--
Of shore, and sea, and nature’s daily round,
Of life that tills, and tombs that load the ground,
His visions mingle, swell, command, pace by,
And haunt with living presence heart and eye;
And tones from him by other bosoms caught
Awaken flush and stir of mounting thought,
And the long sigh, and deep impassioned thrill,
Rouse custom’s trance, and spur the faltering will.
Above the goodly land, more his than ours
He sits supreme enthroned in skyey towers,
And sees the heroic brood of his creation
Teach larger life to his ennobled nation.
O shaping brain! O flashing fancy’s hues!
O boundless heart kept fresh by pity’s dews!
O wit humane and blithe! O sense sublime!
For each dim oracle of mantled time!
Transcendant form of man! in whom we read
Mankind’s whole tale of impulse, thought, and deed!
Amid the expanse of years, beholding thee,
We know how vast our world of life may be;
Wherein, perchance, with aims as pure as thine,
Small tasks and strength may be no less divine.

by John Sterling

A Commentary on Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485

The author of Shakespeare's Kings, John Julius Norwich, is terrible as an interpreter of Shakespeare's plays, but he is good in his narration of the historical events taking place during the lives of Shakespeare's kings. And since the number of Norwich's interpretations of the plays is minimal, the book can be labeled a good one (with a major reservation about this type of historical narration, which I will address later).

Starting with Edward III of England (Norwich claims that Edward III was also written by Shakespeare), Norwich takes us through the turbulent reigns of Richard II (deposed by the noble Bolingbroke, soon to be Henry IV), Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III.

Norwich writes a chapter about each king and then writes a chapter about how the king and the events taking place during his reign are portrayed by Shakespeare. What is remarkable, Norwich maintains, is Shakespeare's historical accuracy. He is not inaccurate in the essentials; what he does do is compress time, combining events that happened over hundreds of years into a shorter span.

If one is familiar with these plays, Norwich's literary interpretations can be quite irritating. For instance, he blithely asserts that Richard III is the best of the historical plays. Why? Any one of the plays – Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part 2, or Henry V is superior to the earlier Richard III. In addition, Norwich's confident statement that Hotspur is the noblest character in Henry IV Part 1 overlooks what Shakespeare is doing with Prince Hal. Hotspur has an excessively macho view of honor, a kind of death wish: "Die all, die merrily." Falstaff has an excessively cowardly view of honor: "Discretion is the better part of valor." Only Prince Hal maintains a balance between the doomsday mentality of Hotspur and the cynical cowardice of Falstaff.

But there are many good things about Norwich's history. For one thing, he supports the traditional view of Richard III against Yorkist revisionists such as Josephine Tey. His findings support the views of Thomas More and Shakespeare: Richard III was the murderer of Edward IV's two sons and a thoroughly evil man and ruler. Interestingly enough, Bolingbroke (Henry IV) emerges as the noblest of kings, and yet some would say (not me) that he is the one who started the War of the Roses when he usurped Richard II. I would assert that Richard started the conflict when he abandoned the Christian view of monarchy, which views the monarch as a caretaker for Christ, and adopted the Asiatic and despotic view of monarchy, wherein the king views the whole Kingdom as his personal possession. When Richard indiscriminately started confiscating the lands of his subjects, he in essence abdicated the crown. Bolingbroke had the heart and courage to force him to pay the consequences. Up Lancaster, down York!

The real danger of a book like this is that one can get the impression that Shakespeare's history plays are worth reading because his plays are "essentially" accurate. Not so! One should not read the Shakespeare history plays for mere history; they have an importance beyond history – they are metaphysical plays about men and women with immortal souls.

I had an excellent 'facts and figures' history teacher in college who claimed that any true student of history had to be an atheist. "Any objective view of history forces one to that conclusion," he said. And when reading Norwich's history, one can see what my teacher meant. All the political machinations, all the bloodshed, and for what? For nothing. The pageant of the English kings looks like a glorified demolition derby with no ultimate purpose. But when we read Shakespeare's plays we see a spiritual presence moving in history. Prince Hal might die young and Bolingbroke might never achieve a secure kingdom, but in Shakespeare's plays, father and son share a moment that lifts us out of mere historical time into another dimension, a spiritual one:

KING HENRY.
O my son,
God put it in thy mind to take it hence,
That thou mightst win the more thy father's love,
Pleading so wisely in excuse of it!
Come hither, Harry, sit thou by my bed;
And hear, I think, the very latest counsel
That ever I shall breathe. God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head:
To thee it shall descend with better quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation;
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth. It seem'd in me
But as an honour snatch'd with boisterous hand,
And I had many living to upbraid
My gain of it by their assistances;
Which daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed,
Wounding supposed peace: all these bold fears
Thou see'st with peril I have answered;
For all my reign hath been but as a scene
Acting that argument: and now my death
Changes the mode; for what in me was purchased,
Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort;
So thou the garland wear'st successively.
Yet, though thou stand'st more sure than I could do,
Thou art not firm enough, since griefs are green;
And all my friends, which thou must make thy friends,
Have but their stings and teeth newly ta'en out;
By whose fell working I was first advanced
And by whose power I well might lodge a fear
To be again displaced: which to avoid,
I cut them off; and had a purpose now
To lead out many to the Holy Land,
Lest rest and lying still might make them look
Too near unto my state. Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.
More would I, but my lungs are wasted so
That strength of speech is utterly denied me.
How I came by the crown, O God, forgive;
And grant it may with thee in true peace live!

PRINCE HENRY.
My gracious liege,
You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;
Then plain and right must my possession be:
Which I with more than with a common pain
'Gainst all the world will rightfully maintain.

And this is why Norwich's history is mere bagatelle compared to Shakespeare's history plays. That Norwich clearly doesn't understand the importance of Shakespeare's plays is indicated when he claims, toward the end of the book, that religion doesn't play a big part in Shakespeare's plays because Jesus Christ is not mentioned much. Unbelievable! Shakespeare is trying to write about reality. He sees a spiritual dimension in human beings that points toward Him, but he would be false to his profession if he had the characters walking around asking each other if they had been 'born again.' The reason Shakespeare's plays still resonate with us today is because he enables us to see reality clearly. We need vision more than a sermon. The former leads us to the living God, and the latter leads us to an idea about God.

Walter Scott followed in Shakespeare's footsteps. He writes about historical events but also supplies the spiritual undergirdings of the various events. And without those undergirdings, history is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing! And of course that is what the empiricist always concludes about European history – it signifies nothing. (As a matter of fact, that's why European history is only treated as a cautionary tale about the evils of being a white man.) But Shakespeare and Scott are divers. They go below the surface of European history and come to the surface again with a treasure that is of infinite value, the living God.

On Reading

I would like to, as a preface to this post, offer a disclaimer. I am against reading for the artsy, nose-in-the-air reason found in the misnamed, now defunct "Common Reader" catalog: "Only We, of the pure and beautiful class, can understand the joys of reading." Far better to be a non-reading, beer drinking attendee of hockey games than such a reader as the "Common Reader" tried to cultivate.

Having issued that disclaimer, let me hasten to add I do not believe a true integral education can be acquired without the voluminous reading of an enthusiast. No one can get an education from the minuscule amount of reading required by a university "education."

What follows is a discussion of some of the authors that have had a major impact, for good or ill, on me over the years.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dostoyevsky was the passion of my young manhood, as he has been the passion of so many young men since he first penned his Notes from the Underground and the five magnificent novels that followed. The great thing about Dostoyevsky is that he clears away all the rot and leaves one with a clear choice: Christ or the abyss. Konstantin Mochulsky captured the essence of Dostoyevsky's work when he said that Jesus Christ was the one great love of Dostoyevsky's life.

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky hurls his defiance at optimistic, Christless liberalism. He asserts man's free will against the 2+2=4 world of the rationalists. Better to live in a subterranean cellar of nihilism and despair than to adopt the soulless optimism of the new world order.

But Dostoyevsky does not leave us in the cellar. In Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, A Raw Youth, and especially The Brothers Karamazov, we go through an arduous pilgrimage that ends at the foot of the cross. And the Christ we see at the end of our journey is a European Christ. Father Zosima's Christianity has nothing to do with Russian Orthodoxy. When Dostoyevsky turned to Christ while in prison, it was not to the Christ of his Orthodox childhood that he turned but to the simple suffering servant of the Gospels. The love of the God-Man was burned into his soul.

Much has been made of Dostoyevsky's anti-Catholicism, but there is no antithesis between Dostoyevsky's Christ and the Christ of Christendom. Dostoyevsky's quarrel with Roman Catholicism was with its rationalism; it was against the smug Grand Inquisitors of scholasticism which he revolted, not the Christian faith itself.

Although I recently read The Brothers Karamazov to my children, I must confess that I seldom read Dostoyevsky any more. And that is not because I find him flawed, but because having come to a belief in the God-Man, I need more than a Dostoyevskian vision to sustain my belief in Him. Dostoyevsky spends too much time in the dark, subterranean cellars of nihilism and despair. One needs to take the subterranean cellars into one's account of existence, but too much time therein can make one forget about the other world of light. Dostoyevsky realizes this of course, but has only one hand on the windowsill of religious affirmation, while the rest of his body lives in the dark cellar. All of life cannot be a film noir where one infers the light because there must be an opposite of darkness. We need something more; we need to win before we lose. Amidst the tragedy of existence, there must be white moments when one climbs over the windowsill and sees the wonders of His love.

Dostoyevsky's work is not devoid of white moments. He would have understood what C. S. Lewis meant by the term, "surprised by joy." But I need more glimpses of what is beyond the windowsill than Dostoyevsky provides, which is why, in middle age, I read more Walter Scott than Dostoyevsky. Yet, I honor the great Russian and owe him a great debt. He is one of the giants of Christendom.

Miguel de Unamuno
Unamuno has much in common with Dostoyevsky. He also makes the choice clear: Christ or the abyss. But with Unamuno one gets less of a sense of a firm hand on the windowsill of religious faith; he has only one finger on it.

Yet his critique of scholasticism is invaluable, and his "tragic sense of life" must be the starting point for religious faith.

So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who is not penetrated with the feeling that he who orders men, men of flesh and bone, men who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be themselves and not others; men, in fine, who seek that which we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of men to the generation which follows, without having any feeling for the destiny of those who are sacrificed, without having any regard, not for their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves.

All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as regards the feelings and even morally imbecile. There have been instances.

These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say that it is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or to kick against the pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has had to be amputated that it does not help him at all to think about it. And we all lack something; only some of us feel the lack and others do not. Or they pretend not to feel the lack, and then they are hypocrites.

A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, "Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?" And the sage answered him, "Precisely for that reason—because it does not avail." It is manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the alleviation of distress; but the deep sense of Solon's reply to the impertinent questioner is plainly seen. And I am convinced that we should solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God. And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common. A miserere sung in common by a multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it. Yes, we must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.

--from The Tragic Sense of Life

Nicholas Berdyaev
I no longer read Berdyaev's works, but in my early twenties I was his devotee. His great virtue was his emphasis on God-Manhood. This sounds like a rather simple formulation, but Berdyaev emphasized that Christ was the only solution to the riddle of man. Scholasticism, Berdyaev asserted, almost made Christ unnecessary. For since we only intuit God because of our own humanity, it is not possible, Berdyaev maintained, to understand or know God except through Christ:

God is not an absolute monarch: God is a God Who suffers with the world and with man. He is crucified Love; He is the Liberator. The Liberator appears not as a power but as a Crucifixion. The Redeemer is the Liberator, and that not as settling accounts with God for crimes that have been committed. God reveals Himself as Humanity. Humanity is indeed the chief property of God, not almightiness, not omniscience and the rest, but humanity, freedom, love, sacrifice.

--from Slavery and Freedom

Berdyaev also refuted the whole modern European notion of objectivity. All metaphysical truth was subjective, Berdyaev claimed -- subjective in the sense that it was not rational as 2+2=4 is rational.

The spirit is always subjectivity and in this subjectivity transcension takes place. The objectivizing direction of consciousness leads into another sphere. Objectivization is an apparent attainment of the transcendent. It is precisely the objectivized transcendent which remains in the immanence of consciousness. The objectivizing consciousness remains in a closed circle of immanence, however much it affirms the objectivity of the transcendent, and precisely for this reason that it does affirm that objectivity of the transcendent. This is the clearest confirmation of the paradox that the objective is subjective and the subjective objective, if we make use of that out-of-date terminology.

The conception of the Absolute is the extreme limit of the objectivizing of abstract thought. In the Absolute there are not signs whatever of existence, no signs of life. The Absolute belongs not so much to religious revelation as to religious philosophy and theology. It is a product of thought. The abstract being which is in no way distinguished from non-being. You cannot pray to the Absolute. No dramatic meeting with it is possible. We call that the Absolute which has no relation to an other and has no need of an other. The Absolute is not a being, is not a personality, which always presupposes a going out from itself and a meeting with an other. The God of revelation, the God of the Bible is not the Absolute. In Him there is a dramatic life and movement, there is a relation to an other, to man, to the world. By the precepts of Aristotelian philosophy they have changed the God of the Bible into pure act, and excluded from Him all inward motion and every tragic principle. The Absolute cannot issue from itself and create the world.

-- Slavery and Freedom

I broke with Berdyaev over his contention, in which he differed with Dostoyevsky, that before the Fall, man was androgynous and would again return to androgyny. That interpretation of the Fall was offensive enough for me to leave Berdyaev behind, but I still respect his work. And I must admit that he and the other Russians, such as Vladimir Solovyov and Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn,have served me better than the "Roman Catholic authors."

Shakespeare
A Lutheran pastor once confided to me that he was a Christian because of William Shakespeare. He was an old man at the time, and I was a young man, and I soon lost touch with him. But if I could speak to him today, I would tell him that I too am a Christian because of William Shakespeare. And please consider your letters of complaint already written and read, those of you who want to tell me that Christians are made by the grace of God and not by any human agency. I would not deny that all grace comes from God, nor would that Lutheran pastor, but are there not human conduits of God's grace?

Do you recall what Philip said to Nathaniel after he, Philip, had seen Jesus? He said, "We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." And of course Nathaniel was underwhelmed, as we all would have been: "Can there be any good thing come out of Nazareth?"

Philip replied, "Come and see."

Philip was a wise man. He didn't try to dazzle Nathaniel with a long recitation of Biblical prophecies pertaining to the Messiah; he simply brought Nathaniel into Christ's presence. And that is what Shakespeare does. By playing Philip to our Nathaniel, he brings us into Christ's presence. He presents us with a most compelling portrait of the heart of Our Lord. Many fail to appreciate this portrait because they are holding on to only a partial faith.

What was the meaning of the Incarnation? Did Our Lord take flesh, dwell among us, suffer, die on the cross, and then rise from the dead, only to reveal to us a philosophical system? Why not simply come to one prophet in a vision? Or why not reveal, through signs and wonders, His recommended system, to a select band of sages who could then teach and disseminate the information to all God's people? Or better yet, why not just send everyone on earth a registered letter with everything spelled out?

No, none of those options could work. The key words, joined, are God-Manhood. To reveal only the divine elements of an esoteric system would not have revealed God's full nature. Nor would it have revealed to us our true natures. For in revealing to us that His divinity is linked to His humanity, He also reveals to us that our humanity, which we share with Him, is also connected to His divine life. We know now, after the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, that He "wilt not leave us in the dust"; we are not made to die.

From the moment the veil of the Temple was rent, all philosophical systems were forever subject to Him. Speculative thought must be channeled through hearts connected to His Sacred Heart, or it becomes mere bagatelle at best and satanic revolt at its worst. In this decadent period of post-Christian history, we find churchmen of every stamp and laity from every walk of life who hold on to an intellectual version of Christianity alone. "Study that catechism, read the Church documents, learn, learn, learn; get the facts about your faith," we hear from all corners. In stark contrast to the get-the-facts men is Gerard Manly Hopkins who grasped the essence of Christianity better than anyone, when he replied to the question, "How can I know God?" with the simple words, "Give alms."

That quite simple answer, "give alms," is the key to so much. It is an excess of humanity, a charitable overflowing of the heart, which brings us closest to Our Lord. The formalists in both the Protestant and the Catholic camps are always trying to get us to shun humanity in favor of philosophical systems, with a Christian flavor to be sure, but without Christ's humanity or our own.

Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice (which I choose here to represent his works as a whole) presents quite explicitly a vision of Our Lord that does full justice to His humanity without denying His divinity. Indeed, divine humanity is divine not because it is something other than human, but because it is more human.

But mercy is above this sceptred sway,--
It is enthroned in the hearts of Kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;

Yes, God is not something completely alien to us, who can only be conjured up by great magicians and wise men. We are separated from Him, not by our humanity, but by our lack of humanity. Shylock is legally in the right if the Incarnation never took place, but he is terribly wrong if it did. Because if the Incarnation really happened, we are assured that to be in full union with Christ we must be more passionate, more humane, more merciful, and more charitable. Shylock's scale, no matter how mathematically precise, will never be correct.

I find it quite heartening to see that Shakespeare still survives and has a certain popularity. And I'm not referring to his inclusion on college syllabi; his plays are not living, breathing things to academics. No, I'm talking about a survival among readers and theatergoers who still have some spark of soul left in them. It is amazing in this Gnostic age that one still sees audiences that can be moved by the Gentle Bard.

And whereas it is quite true that we can all get to heaven without reading Shakespeare, it is also equally true that we cannot get to heaven without going there through, with, and in, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, whose inner life has been so carefully drawn for us by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare provides the proofs. He does not, like Dante, build the reader a cathedral; but he supplies the passion that gives one the desire to enter a cathedral. His vision is deeper than the theologians and the theological poets.

There is an old folk tale with many variations that best depicts the Shakespearean vision. A beggar appears at the cottage of an old man. Though close to starving himself, the old man invites the beggar to share a humble meal. During the course of the meal, the old man feels as if he is on fire, not with a fire that singes, but with a fire that gives him joy and contentment. The beggar finishes his meal and departs. The old man ponders and wonders about the beggar. That night as he kneels to pray, he realizes why he felt himself to be on fire: the beggar was Our Lord. Through humanity comes the Triune God.

I do not overstate the extent of the spiritual crisis we face. Few people believe we even face a spiritual crisis, and the ones who do, recommend more study and more Gnosticism as the solution. Let me suggest a different response.

When I was a schoolboy, my class once took a trip to a local museum. In this museum was a huge man-made heart through which you could walk and observe all the heart's inner workings. Neither I nor my classmates really cared to know about the inner workings of the heart, but we were very interested in the adventure of talking a walk through a mysterious cave. And if you ignored all the left ventricle and right ventricle nonsense, you could believe that you were going through a mysterious cave.

Well, let's turn that artificial heart into a real human heart. And let's allow the Gnostic to wander with Virgil off into outer space. We shall take Shakespeare's hand as he leads us through this giant human heart. We will go through numerous passages, down deep staircases, and finally, after a journey worthy of Jules Verne's imagination, we will arrive at the heart's center. And, lo and behold! At the center of this human heart we will find another heart. This heart has a wound in it, and it is surrounded by thorns, surmounted by a flame consuming a cross. +

__________________________________

The magic of Shakespeare is that the words he penned four hundred years ago still send tingles and shivers through the spine, so that even in translation they thrill people in countries that were unheard of in the England of his time. Though any more searching literary appraisal than this would be beyond the essentially historical approach of this book, the biggest disservice anyone can do to Shakespeare is to be so dazzled by his works as to argue that they could not have been written by anyone so ordinary as a Stratford-upon-Avon-born actor. The very essence of Shakespeare was his humanity: that he was neither a blue-blooded nobleman nor a university trained academic, but a humbly born player who wanted to give his calling the sort of material that could really make it soar, to reach every level of society. Where he was different from his contemporaries is that he felt with and for others in all their faults and frailties. In Julius Caesar Shakespeare has Julius say of Cassius, 'He is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men', and he could hardly have coined a more appropriate description of himself.

-- Ian Wilson in Shakespeare: The Evidence

The Romance of Christianity

The great shift from a romantic view of the Christian faith, the most notable exponent of which was St. Paul, to a more classical or philosophical view of the faith was a fateful turning point for Western man. It seemed like such a slight change during the Middle Ages, but the desolation that has come about because of the shift is a tragedy of epic proportions.

The Classicist usually starts from a general premise, takes a panoramic view of humanity, and then forces the individuals seen in his panoramic view to fit into his general premise. Milton, who sets out to justify the ways of God to man, is a perfect example of the classical approach. Milton’s is a very ambitious, general premise, but he fails to prove it, and instead makes Satan seem sympathetic. The reason he fails is because he doesn’t work from the particular to the general as a Romantic would.

Dostoyevsky, the Romantic, sets out to tell a personal tale of the Brothers Karamazov, and in doing so builds up a much more effective case for the ways of God. He does so by not attempting to rationalize the mystery of evil and suffering. In the climactic scene between the atheistic Ivan Karamazov and the believing Alyosha Karamazov, it is not the syllogism which Alyosha uses to confront Ivan’s atheism; it is the humanity of Christ that he brings into the lists. In Dostoyevsky’s original manuscript this was not the case; he had Alyosha give a reasoned rebuttal to Ivan’s atheism. But with his magnificent intuitive sense of the essence of Christianity, Dostoyevsky changed his first draft and had Alyosha stand by the God-Man alone, while Ivan stood by his well-reasoned, impassioned refutation of Christianity.

In my judgment, it has been one of the great errors of Christian apologists over the last three centuries that they have not avoided the trap that Dostoyevsky did avoid. They have followed the path of Milton and attempted to justify the ways of God to man by way of the syllogism. It hasn’t worked. It never will. The impassioned atheist will always defeat the Classicist. Only the Romantic’s loins are sufficiently girded to do battle with the Ivan Karamazovs of the world. The Classicists fail because they insist on regarding the Christian Faith as something that can be explained by charts and diagrams. Ronald Knox sensed there was something wrong with this type of apolgetic and hoped for a better one.

What I am concerned with is our apolgetics, and that great work of apologetic, some day to be written, which shall suggest to the reader that in approaching Christian theology he is approaching something that is alive, not a series of diagrams. The hardest part of the author’s task as I see it, will be to introduce some human element into natural theology; to prove that God is, and what God is, not merely with the effect of intellectual satisfaction, but with a glow of assent that springs from the whole being; ‘did not our hearts burn within us when he talked to us by the way?’

Why can’t the Classicist and the charts-and-diagrams theologian be effective? Because they try to go too far with reason alone. They see divinity only in man’s rationality but not in the divine intuitions and those “white moments” that bring us to the foot of the Cross. And by trying to go too far with reason alone, they overreach themselves. They give false answers, like Job’s comforters, to questions about evil and suffering that are best left to the Alyoshas and St. Francises of Assisi of the world.

I vividly recall a public debate I witnessed as a twenty-year-old college student. The debate was between an Ivan Karamazov-styled atheist and a Thomist. I was quite prepared to side with the Thomist, because I was a very reluctant agnostic at the time, but I had to admit at the end of the debate that the Thomist had not made a very good case for God. By relying solely on the Thomistic proofs for God’s existence, he left the more human side of the argument to the atheist. When the Thomist took the panoramic, philosophic view of Ivan Karamozov’s seven-year-old girl being beaten with a knotted rope, he left me and most of the audience with a decidedly hostile opinion of religious faith. “Apparently,” I thought, “there is a type of atheism that is purer and cleaner than some people’s religion.” It was some years later before I saw a different side of God, through the good offices of Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare.

Richard Weaver, steeped in the classics as he was, might seem like an odd man to call forth in defense of Romanticism. But Weaver condemned only the Romanticism of Shelley and Keats, not genuine Romanticism. Any man who says that “Sentiment is anterior to reason,” is very much in line with Romanticism. Weaver goes on to say, “Surmounting all is an intuitive feeling about the immanent nature of reality, and this is the sanction to which both ideas and beliefs are ultimately referred for verification.”

The mistake of the Classicist is not that he classifies; he commits his grave error when he classifies without regard for the initial intuitive feeling which surmounts all of reality. By leaving out that intuitive feeling, the Classicist goes forever around in a circle unconnected to reality, leading nowhere.

There is an epiphany, much like the one experienced by St. Paul, at the heart of all our intuitions. It is the task of the dramatic poets, by their vision, and the saints, by their example, to help us to realize that in the deep recesses of our soul there is a passionate ardent lover who calls us by name.

The classical theologian tells us that such romantic intuitions are pure nominalism: “What you are saying is that nothing is true unless a particular individual feels it to be true.”

No; what I am saying is that if we strip away the artificially contrived rationalizations and the false passions (as distinct from the true), we are ready to respond to the revealed truth of the God-Man. If, on the other hand, we make reason independent from revelation, asserting only reason can prove the truths of revelation, and if we make nature separate from grace, then we have pure reason forever looking at material nature, with no room for the particular human being or the particular God-Man who should be at the center of creation. I see in the Classicists’ separation of nature from grace, and reason from revealed truth, the source of white-hating Christianity and atheism.

Was Karl Adam incorrect when he placed such great emphasis on the false path taken by Western man when the separation of nature from grace occurred? I think not.

Our thought is now divorced from the totality of being, from the wealth of all the possibilities, since it has isolated itself from the creative thought of God. Too little attention has been paid to what Étienne Gilson, in his great book, La Philosophie de S. Bonaventure, has told us about the literally passionate hostility shown by that brilliant Franciscan towards the Aristotelian epistemology taken over by SS. Albert and Thomas Aquinas. At that time in the fight against the Platonist-Augustinian illumination theory, which referred every ultimate and absolute certainty to an inflowing of divine light, and thus linked in the most intimate union created and divine knowledge, human perception was thrown on its own resources, and consequently knowledge and faith, the natural and supernatural, were neatly separated, and it was then that the primary conditions were created in which a world, which was more and more rapidly breaking loose from the primacy of faith, could emancipate all human thought from the creative thought of God. Men artificially mapped out a particular field of reality and called it Nature. They thus awakened and encouraged the evil illusions that the other reality, that of the supernatural, of God, had been brought into apposition with it from without, and that it was a more or less secondary reality. Nature was secularized by being released – from the epistemological standpoint – from its actual union with the supernatural, and the fiction was favoured that Nature was a thing per se capable of complete explanation independently of any outside factor. Thus we have all become secularized in our thought and we have schemata in our hands, or rather in our minds, which do not lead to the Divine, to Christ, but away from him.

– The Son of God

Let me place the dramatic poet, William Shakespeare, and the saint, Francis of Assisi, at the forefront to drive home the case for the romantic vision.

Shakespeare has survived even in these post-Christian times as no other great poet of Europe has. The late Alan Bloom, certainly not infallible but in this instance quite profound, says this about Shakespeare:

[Shakespeare] is the only classical author who remains popular. [Ed: Bloom obviously uses the word ‘classical’ to indicate an older, traditional poet, and not in the sense in which I use it.] The critical termites are massed and eating away at the foundations, trying to topple him. Whether they will succeed will be a test of his robustness... But it is still true today that all over the world the titles of Shakespeare’s plays have a meaning that speaks to common consciousness. Hamlet, Lear, Othello all call forth images in the minds of all classes of men across national boundaries. Perhaps the understanding of, or even acquaintance with, Shakespeare’s plays is rather thin, but no one reacts with boredom or the sense that he stands only for bookish edification. This is why the theater is so lively in England and they keep producing such wonderful actors there. Racine and Molière in France, Lessing and Goethe in German, and Dante and Petrarch in Italy have no vitality in the eyes of ordinary young persons. They are dead, merely culture. No normal young person would prefer spending time with one of these great writers to going to a concert of the latest rock group. Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.

Leaving aside the literary critics, who do not appreciate Shakespeare on any deep level, let us ask ourselves why Shakespeare still moves us. They key, I think, lies in the phrase most often used to describe him: “The Gentle Bard.” We sense on some deep, often unconscious level of our being, that Shakespeare knows all our faults, all of our blackest sins, and yet he sees something redeemable in us. Shakespeare, Chesterton once remarked regarding King Lear, is optimistic about human nature even when he is being pessimistic. Yes, redeemable, worthy of mercy; this is the view of man we get from Shakespeare. We do not get proofs based on the nature of pure essences, we see proofs based on the nature of man. Such creatures as Cordelia, Edgar, and (dare we say it?) ourselves were not made for death.

St. Francis embodied in his person the romantic vision of Shakespeare. His faith was uniquely his own subjective faith, and yet it was grounded in the objective fact of revealed religion. His personal intuitions did not separate him from God, they brought him to God. He did not run away from men when he ran to God, he carried them with him and allowed them to see, through him, the face of the living God. And, just as the vision of Shakespeare prompts us to call him the Gentle Bard, so does the magnificence of St. Francis inspire us to think of gentleness and peace, not the peace of pacifism or the peace of unbelief and ecumenism, but the peace that passeth all knowledge.

‘Tis the Time’s Plague

I am against the Bill Kristol-George Bush war for reasons I have stated often enough. And call me irresponsible, I do not subscribe to the “It was wrong to start with, but now we must not leave,” philosophy. Shedding more Iraqi blood and sacrificing more American blood will not magically make wrong right. Besides, we have a real enemy on our border that has declared war on the United States. Why not, if you’re going to ask soldiers to risk their lives, ask them to risk their lives in defense of their homeland, instead of corporate American’s bragging rights in the Middle East?

Although against the current war, I am not, like the late John Paul II and the Quakers, a pacifist. I do believe there are times when a Christian must kill. But I am in disagreement with the modern, post-Christian justifications for the shedding of blood. The moderns, such as George Bush, believe as Robespierre believed, that if blood is shed in the name of democracy and liberty, the men who shed that blood are absolved from all guilt. I’ll go further. They believe that they have performed a holy act and are beyond the ken of mortal men who do not have the courage or vision to perform such sanctified massacres.

Well, ‘tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind. There is currently no Christian organization in existence that wants to give genuine guidance on the important question: When should a Christian kill? The Catholics are Quakers, the Protestants are all over the board, and Catholic traditionalists take the Muslim view of war – kill them all.

Nor are the old Catholic catechisms any help in deciding the difficult question of when a Christian should kill, because they all assume conditions which no longer exist – a sound Church and a moral government – and hence, prohibit an individual taking arms against the state or involving himself in acts of private retribution. But in the absence of Christian government, following the old catechisms, which are based on Aquinas, means there can be no counter-revolutions and no justice against those who prey on the innocent, such as state-sanctioned abortion doctors and black murderers.

As always, it is the Christian poets to whom we can turn for guidance. Hamlet is faced with a situation analogous to that facing a modern European and the modern European America. Hamlet has only an abstracted faith with which to face a situation that calls for a real faith. He must face what Miguel de Unamuno called the agony of Christianity: he must either become human by following the way of the cross or forever remain in the rank of the Gnostics, who would play upon man as if he were a musical instrument.

Hamlet. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and
there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think that I am easier to be play’d on that a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

And later, Hamlet, having made his declaration to the world, “This is I, Hamlet, the Dane,” shows us that it doesn’t matter whether the augurers are right in their predictions. A Christian doesn’t heed them. His duty is determined by what’s in his blood and his heart, and he must do his duty in spite of dungeon, fire, sword, and augury. Therein lies the great Christianity of Hamlet. And as a Christian, Hamlet fights and kills because the treacherous sword of the Gnostics is “unbated and evenom’d” with that which kills not only the body but the soul as well.

We should note that Shakespeare presents the conflict as it is really played out in modern life. Claudius has the Catholic Faith, if mere adherence to outward forms counts as having the Faith. But the Christian hero, having stripped the false layers of Gnostic skin from his own soul, recognizes the evil beneath Claudius’ pious exterior. The Poloniuses of the world who have settled for a false view of existence do not have the ability to recognize evil; hence, they side with men who are evil but who have achieved success in the Darwinian jungle, for that is the only objective standard they have. And when there is no longer a hero who can recognize evil and fight it, we have a situation analogous to present day America and Europe.

The English author P. C. Wren is anti-modern because he takes the concept of the hero seriously. His heroes are not anti-heroes. Wren often places his heroes in situations where an evil person is able to wreak havoc because conventional society has lost the ability to identify evil. In Beggars’ Horses, Captain Bartholomew Hazelrigg is faced with a dilemma that would force the computer-trained brains of modern, moral theologians to combust. A thoroughly evil woman has murdered, maimed and destroyed a great number of men who have gotten in the way of her evil designs. Yet conventional society regards the woman as the paragon of virtue. Only Hazelrigg knows what she is and what she is still capable of doing if she is not stopped. He arranges to meet the woman on the moor one day and quickly ends her career in crime.

In The Man the Devil Didn’t Want, also by Wren, the hero of the novel is faced, like Hazelrigg, with a villainous antagonist whose villainy has not been recognized by conventional society. He is a murderer and a blackmailer. The hero of the novel forces the villain into the Foreign Legion and then takes him into the desert.

“Yrotavál,” said I, you attempted to murder me yesterday. Silence! You are doing something worse than murder to my brother. You have driven him to insanity, perhaps suicide. You actually did murder Corporal Bjelavitch and Sergeant Paggallini, and by your own account you have murdered other men. Any Court of Law before which you were tried would convict you and sentence you to death. I am now going to take the Law into my own hands. I sentence you to death.”

“It is murder!” shouted Yrotavál, as I drew my revolver from its holster.

“Silence! Stand back!” And I leveled my revolver at his face. “Murder or not, I’m going to kill you—as you tried to kill me.”

“You can’t prove…” began Yrotavál, his voice high and hoarse.

“No, I can’t. Though I know it; and you know it. But I am not killing you for that. I…”

“It is murder! Murder…” screamed Yrotavál. “You talk about me being a murderer and…”

“Murder or execution, Yrotavál, I’m going to kill you now… Even if it brings me down to your level. I have warned you. I have tried to stop you. You’ve been blackmailing my brother again…”

“It’s a lie. It’s a lie. I haven’t written a word since…”

“That’s enough. I know that you have. It was you who persuaded him to sham blindness and you’ve blackmailed him ever since.”

“It’s a lie. He began it. He asked me to sham deaf and dumb and…”

“You yourself admitted that it was your idea. You yourself admitted blackmailing him and…”

“I stopped. I stopped when you…”

“About turn!” I roared, and, so strong was the habit of years, the force of mechanical instinct, that Yrotavál almost instantly obeyed.

Should I bid him kneel? Should I bid him pray?

Yrotavál kneel! Yrotavál pray! I thought of Luke. I thought of Rosanne—and pulled the trigger.

With a convulsive jerk and jump he fell forward. Placing the muzzle of my revolver to his ear, I shot him again.

With the entrenching tools I made a shallow grave, thrust his body into it, shoveled the earth and gravel back into the hole, and covered the place with large loose stones.

I was cool, nay cold, collected in mind and calm in spirit.

Having finished my task, I marched back to the poste, taking with me the light pick and shovel.

On the way, I visited the sentry-groups posted to guard the passage of the water-fatigue party to the stream.

“Did you hear a shot?” I asked Corporal Mallen, the American tough guy and Bad Man, for whom I had much admiration and a high regard.

“Sure, Sergeant,” he said. “Two.”

“Legionaire Yrotavál has been shot,” I informed him.

Corporal Mallen appeared to bear the bad news bravely.

“Isn’t that just too bad!” he said.

As I
turned away and he saluted, a smile flickered for an instant across his grim
face.

--from The Man the Devil Didn’t Want by P. C. Wren

In reading both accounts of the killing of a human being, my heart soared. Why? The obvious answer would be that I am a heartless, bloodthirsty brut. Well, the reader is entitled to his opinion, but that is not really the reason. My heart soared within me because Wren depicts so well the type of Christianity I believe in. I believe that charity demands sometimes that we must kill. And we cannot hide behind catechisms or social conventions to excuse us from our duty. It sickens me to see the old fairy tales being written without the traditional destruction of the villain at the end. This robs the tale of its Christian content. Evil is real, the devil is the source of it, and human beings, of their own free will, do his bidding. Such individuals must be confronted and in some cases, killed. Charity demands it. Such, I believe, is the express command of our Christian Faith. I will have no part of a Christianity that denies that central charitable tenet.

Out of the Depths Have I Cried to Thee

Some years ago I had a relative who, almost overnight, went from a healthy, vigorous woman to a bedridden, sickly one. She remained that way for two years with no hope of recovery. But at the two-year mark of her illness, her doctor discovered that he had misdiagnosed her illness and subsequently changed his treatment to something more fitting for the disease which he now believed she had. And, miracle of miracles, my relative made a complete recovery.

It is apparent to me that the seemingly sick-beyond-recovery West has also been misdiagnosed. The patient is supposed to be sick from a lack of rationality, when in reality, he is sick from an excess of rationality. And it is to the neglected poetic voice of the West that we must turn, not to that of the philosophers, scientists, and theologians, if we ever want to see a healthy, vigorous West again.

The disembodied-brain heresy of the Greeks can best be described as the Olympian heresy. The Greek philosophers placed reason on Mt. Olympus in place of the old gods and studied, probed and dissected man from their Olympian height. Plato saw man as a walking universal, as part of the spiritual force of life from whence we all come. But Plato’s universal is not a personal force; it is not a God to whom we can speak to, as the Hebrews spoke to the living God:

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in His word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning. Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all its iniquities.

Aristotle, unlike Plato, looked at the particular man, but not in a Christian, personal way. He looked at man as a specimen to be dissected and studied, not as a whole, unique personality.

The greatest poet of antiquity, Sophocles, stated that it was better never to have been born than to exist in the closed, meaningless world of the philosophers. And the folk of the Roman Empire rejected the Olympian religion of the philosophers for the more personal mystery religions. Yet it was to the Olympian religion that the Church fathers and the medievals turned when they chose to present the one true God to the folk. Yet the folk have always resisted the Greco-Roman paradigms. In every Christian age, save the latter 20th century, the folk have steadfastly resisted the Churchmen’s attempts to make Christ’s Church into Mt. Olympus.

The struggle has been a dramatic one. And the drama must continue. It is not time to bring down the curtain on Europe. The poets, speaking for the folk, have spoken with one voice about the sickness of the West. Their diagnosis is quite different from that of the philosophers, the scientists and the theologians. Let us hear their voices.

Shakespeare. Most of the poetic depictions of the disembodied mind come from the 19th century and early 20th century poets because they were the first to face it directly and unabated. But Shakespeare, with a remarkable prescience, was the first poet to square off against the heresy of the disembodied brain when he pitted Hamlet against Claudius. Both men are geniuses, but one, Claudius, put his intellect at the service of his satanic desire for power while keeping those virtues of the heart, such as faith, hope, and charity, isolated from and subordinate to his intellect.

At the beginning of the play, Hamlet is in an abstracted state of mind that could lead him to become, like Claudius, a disembodied brain at the service of Satan. But Hamlet has that within which passeth show; he resists the temptation to become a purely intellectual being. Instead he begins a quest toward integrality. All around him are abstracted caricatures of human beings, trying to make him view life as they view it, a game in which one must manipulate human beings as one would chess pieces. Hamlet perseveres. And it is at Ophelia’s grave when he realizes he loves, that the real Hamlet, the integral, heroic Hamlet, comes to the forefront: “It is I, Hamlet, the Dane.” He never looks back nor fails in his duty after that.

The most overlooked scene (overlooked by Christians) in all of literature is Hamlet’s defiance of augury. It doesn’t matter if we, by use of our intellectual powers divorced from their proper subservience to the virtues of the heart, can alter our material future for the better or avert death. It is to those wellsprings of humanity in our hearts, connected to His sacred heart, that our loyalty must be directed in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword. “We defy augury.” With those words, Hamlet speaks for European man and gives us the cure for all the West’s ills.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, among others, is one writer who has placed opposition to the modernist-Gnostic heresy at the heart of his work. His single-mindedness on that topic – it is the central theme of most of his short stories and his major novels – has earned him many sneers from literary critics who suffer from the disease he criticizes. Hawthorne’s insights are so profound that one suspects he had many a personal struggle against the disembodied-brain temptation himself.

In much of the 19th century criticism of the disembodied brain, we start out in a scientist’s laboratory. Not satisfied with the ordinary Wind in the Willows type of life, the simple life of the plowed field and the evening lingerings, the scientific man of the laboratory must create a whole new world of which he, the man of science, is in control. The new world is always supposed to be for the good of the simple moles who are imprisoned in their ordinary, plowed fields, but the simple moles invariably end up annihilated.

Hawthorne’s story, “The Birthmark,” begins with an introduction to a man of science:

In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of faith in man's ultimate control over Nature. He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by intertwining itself with his love of science, and uniting the strength of the latter to his own.

Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.

The trouble was that the man of science’s beautiful wife had a birthmark which Aylmer believed tainted her whole face with the mark of “earthly imperfection.” In order to cure this imperfection, Aylmer… I think you can guess the rest. Of course, his wife dies, a victim of the Utopian aspirations of Aylmer’s disembodied brain:

Yet, had Alymer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.

In Hawthorne's works, a disembodied mind is always the focus of evil, such as Rappacini in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter, or Ethan Brand in the story of the same name. And Hawthorne is right. What was a small but growing minority in his time has become 'The People' in our own time. The folk have become intellectualized; they are all disembodied brains. No matter where one turns, he meets an Aylmer or a Rappaccini.

P. C. Wren. I think P. C. Wren is one of the great authors of the West, and yet I’m sure he would not appear on any of the literary critics “top ten” lists. That is because literary critics tend to be Gnostics, and P. C. Wren’s works are decidedly anti-Gnostic.

In The Disappearance of General Jason, P. C. Wren is at his anti-Gnostic best. The hero, Colonel Carthew, goes in search of his old friend, General Jason, who has been missing for a long while. The search ends on a small island country inhabited by a people of Portuguese descent but who are independent from Portugal. They guard their isolation jealously, and it was the misfortune of General Jason that he inadvertently violated their privacy.

The island-nation has a queen, but the real ruler is a scientist named Dom Perez de Norhona. De Norhona has developed the ability to isolate a man’s brain from his body; by controlling a certain section of the brain, through hypnosis and surgery, he can make the body of the man do what he, de Norhona, commands. And he has turned General Jason into a dog. Carthew, quite justifiably, accuses de Norhona of murdering General Jason.

“You don’t regard it as a form of murder? The most terrible form of all – soul-murder.”

“No, why should I? Where’s the murder? The whole point is that I did not kill the patient in attempting to perform the experiment. You cannot have a murder without a corpse, can you? And as to murdering souls, I am not scientifically interested in souls. I’m only concerned with minds and bodies.”

Do we not see in de Norhona’s cerebral operation the end result of the Aristotleian-Thomistic separation of reason from grace? I do. For me, de Norhona is St. Thomas. Just as St. Thomas dissects man for the greater good (or so he thought), so does de Norhona.

It seemed to Carthew that de Norhona was a living intelligence, an intelligence almost freed from the hampering restriction and misguidance of emotion; a man whose mind was neither cruel nor kind, but almost purely scientific.

And yet he was human enough in his fanatical patriotism.

Carthew entertained for him curious and contradictory feelings of murderous hatred, fear, considerable respect and almost unwilling liking. So inevitably fair and just himself, Carthew had to admit that de Norhona had done nothing to Jason as Jason, an honest and honourable gentleman who had come to make certain right and proper proposals and suggestions of a commercial nature. Quite obviously de Norhona had used for his great experiment a man whom he believed to be a deadly enemy of his country, inasmuch as he was the first of an invading army, insupportable, detestable and loathsome in the eyes of people to whom independence was the very breath of life and the very religion of their soul.

One feels like screaming with Carthew, “What about the soul?” The Greek-Catholic-disembodied-brain heresy leaves a man without the essence of his humanity, his soul, for the soul is part of the body, not separate from it. A disembodied brain has no soul.

John Buchan. Written in 1916, the novel The Power-House pits a perennial Buchan everyman hero, Leithen, against Mr. Andrew Lumley, a capitalist powerhouse, a brain detached from everything human. At first meeting, Leithen dislikes Lumley. When he tries to find a reason for his dislike, he decides that Lumley is just too “Olympian.” And as he comes to know him better, he realizes that Lumley also is satanic: “Do you know what it is to deal with pure intelligence, a brain stripped of every shred of humanity? It is like being in the company of a snake.”

Lumley’s credo, which he delivers near the end of the novel, is the modern credo, spawned by Satan and nurtured by the Greek philosophers and their Catholic lackeys:

“I am a sceptic about most things,” he said, “but, believe me, I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.”

It is time for Western man to forswear that false God. The drama is not over. The disembodied brains must wait till the last scene of the last act is played out. For it is always, as St. Paul assures us, in the last scene or at the last trump, if you will, that the Hero turns the tables on the villain.