The Everlasting Man

This book is so good that choosing one passage to highlight is difficult. The statement below is all the more insightful in light of all that Chesterton has done in setting up as background a framework for understanding the pagan world and the pagan mindset, particularly where they had come to in the context of the Roman world into which Christ was born.

“It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It dared to look right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass. Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.” (182)

-GK Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

The Charlatan's Boy, by Jonathan Rogers

A couple weeks ago I finished a fantastic book. Below are my thoughts on it. Andrew Peterson, quoted on the back cover of The Charlatan’s Boy, calls it “A new kind of story. It’s C.S. Lewis and Mark Twain rolled into one.” This is certainly high praise for this new novel, but I think this at once hilarious and poignant tale lives up to it in significant ways. Rogers recalls Mark Twain in his ability to reveal profound insights through the mouths of characters speaking in their vernacular dialect the homespun wisdom of the American South. He reminds me of C.S Lewis by creating a fictional world, whose fantasy seems more real than the one we live in everyday. Rogers compellingly blends these two aspects of his setting, so that the story seems to take place both anywhere and nowhere, so that you feel initially confident that you know all about where it takes place, until you gradually discover how fantastic his world really is. The setting created by Rogers just sets the stage for the other qualities this novel displays. He masterfully weaves the themes of identity, honesty, and work into the story principally through the two main characters, Floyd, a charlatan that makes his living selling tickets to his lectures on “feechie folk,” and Grady, the orphan boy that he keeps to play the part of the “real live feechie.” The story compels you to think of the meaning of identity by presenting Grady, who has no identity apart from what Floyd tells him. Of course Floyd is a consistent liar, and Grady knows it, so he grows up with no identity beyond the showstage one he chooses to embrace as a “real live he-feechie.” When lack of interest forces them to abandon the feechie trade, and Floyd tells him that he is not a real feechie, Grady finds himself adrift in a world where he does not know his place or who he really is. As Grady contemplates the types of people he could be, you find that, though raised by a liar, he puts a high value on honesty, and though his life is all about perpetrating scams on the people of various villages they travel around to, he yearns for some kind of authenticity. One scene that by itself would make the book worth reading occurs when, after Floyd and Grady have taken up phrenology in their quest for the next big thing, Grady is approached by a man seeking to know the character of his daughter’s would-be husband. Grady, who has practiced reading people’s body language, can tell from one look that the suitor has no love for the girl and only wants her money. Though the young man tries to bribe him, Grady will not be swayed and gives him a “true” reading. He writes: “That feller figured that him and me was on the same side of this thing. I reckon I can see how he would make that mistake. He was a cheater and a fraud, and phrenologists is mostly cheaters and frauds, so that ought to put us on the same bank of the river. But if he thought I was going to help him ruin that gal’s life, he had another thing coming.” Grady’s desire for authenticity causes him to appreciate the work that he does for its own sake. While Floyd generally sees only each scam’s potential for pecuniary compensation, Grady considers himself a “perfessional” and rather than thinking of himself as ripping off people’s money, hopes to provide them with the best presentation around of a “genuine he-feechie.” When a new scheme from Floyd presents the opportunity to revive the feechie trade, Grady throws himself into the new project, but as events unfold finds that his life cannot go back to the way that it was. Unexpectedly, though, he finds that he does belong somewhere after all. I heartily enjoyed reading this book, was a little sad when it was over, and plan on reading it again sometime. I would recommend it to just about anyone. *I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group in exchange for this honest review.

He Knew Which Side He Was On

(Quoting himself) “‘Let us imagine a coming generation with such intrepidity of vision, with such a heroic penchant for the tremendous; let us imagine the bold stride of these dragon-slayers, the bold audacity with which they turn their back on all the weakling’s doctrines of optimism in order to ‘live resolutely’ in wholeness and fullness: would it not be necessary for the tragic man of such a culture, in view of his self-education for seriousness and terror, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort, to desire tragedy as his own proper Helen, and to exclaim with Faust:

Should not my longing overleap the distance
And draw the fairest form into existence?’

‘Would it not be necessary?’ –No, thrice no! O you young romantics: it would not be necessary! But it is highly probable that it well end that way, that you end that way—namely, ‘comforted,’ as it is written, in spite of all self-education for seriousness and terror, ‘comforted metaphysically’ –in sum, as romantics end, as Christians.

No! You ought to learn the art of this-worldly comfort first; you ought to learn to laugh, my young friends, if you are hell-bent on remaining pessimists. Then perhaps, as laughers, you may some day dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil—metaphysics in front.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at a Self-Criticism, from The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann

Although undoubtedly a wicked man, and arguably a mislead though brilliant classicist, I think Nietzsche can sometimes be quite helpful because he saw some distinctions so clearly and so unhesitatingly declared what he saw. He would have nothing to do with contemporary attempts to treat all religions the same. He would despise both the idea that all religions can be helpful in their own way, and the atheists' calls for the abandonment of all religion in favor of "objective" science. He saw clearly that man must worship something, and clearly too the chasm dividing Christianity from all other religions. Nothing could be more absurd than casting Christianity as essentially equivalent to the pagan religions of its historical context. He knew that we must either worship Jesus or Dionysus (his appellation of the Anti-Christ), and emphatically and enthusiastically chose Dionysus. Both his recognition of the difference and the results of his choice can provide insight.

The tragedy he refers is the genre of tragic plays coming out of classical Greece. Dionysus was the god of the Athenian dramatic festival, and his apparently irrational aesthetic character contrasted with the more ordered and logical one of Apollo. In the book Nietzsche gladly admits to the drunken and frenzied orgies of Dionysian worship, and I think we can see around us that not much has changed in how "young friends" embrace "this-worldly comfort." The real tragic truth is that when we abandon God and the distinction between good and evil that can only be rooted in His character, in favor of purely aesthetic values, we lose both goodness and beauty, because beauty, like truth and goddness, has no meaning apart from a transcendent God.

I cannot help but think of Coleridge when he mentions all true romantics ending up as Christians. I do not know a lot about his biography, but he does appear to have converted later in life. Coleridge died in 1834 and the The Birth of Tragedy was first published less than forty years later in 1872.

The Is No God and I Hate Him: Shelly's Enlightened Freedom

“It should come as no surprise that Shelly viewed Christianity as the enemy. The more Shelley became convinced that he was in possession of the secrets of nature, the more violent became his hatred of “unnatural” conventions like the family, the state, and religion. “Yet here I swear,’ Shelly wrote in a letter, ‘and as I break my oath may Infinite Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity!... Oh how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again.’ ‘Oh I burn with impatience for the moment of Xtianity’s dissolution,’ he continued, ‘it has injured me; I swear on the altar of perjured love to revenge myself on the hated cause of the effect which even now I can scarcely help deploring. –Indeed I think it is to the benefit of society to destroy the opinions which can annihilate the dearest of its ties… Let us hope that the wound which we inflict tho’ the dagger be concealed, will rankle in the heart of our adversary.’”

Michael E. Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, pg. 32

We're Not So Very Post-Anything When You Look At It That Way

“For her part, in creating Frankenstein out of the flotsam and jetsam of her years with Shelley and the ideas he attempted to forge into a coherent revolutionary system, Mary Shelley created the myth of our epoch—an epoch roughly coterminous with the Enlightenment. Indeed, one of the indications that the epoch is with us still is the fact that the Frankenstein story continues to be retold. And it will continue to be retold as long as the Enlightenment, with its penchant for manipulating humans according to the laws of ‘nature,’ continues to hold its sway.”

Michael E. Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, pg. 94

Hasn't Changed Much

“The iconography of horror is about as fixed as that of any genre. By comparison, Chinese literature looks positively innovative. There is Frankenstein, and there is Dracula, and then there are various combinations of the two: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Wolfman, and so on. Both icons made their appearance as literary tropes because of one event in Shelley’s life—and extended house party at the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva during the stormy summer of 1816. Frankenstein was modeled on Shelley by Shelley’s second wife; the Vampire was modeled on fellow poet Lord Byron by Byron’s physician John Polidori, who lived vampire-like for a while on Byron’s reputation and finally himself committed suicide.”

Michael E. Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, pg. 95

Starting Anew

Well, after approximately a year and a half I have decided to start posting again. I'm not sure if I can even say that, since I only made one post before that ineluctable trip to the land of the Afghans caused an extended interlude. Brittany helped me with a background design. I dedicate it to Archibald, the Fourth Earl of Argyle, who stood boldly up in support of John Knox when he was about to return to Scotland from Geneva, and whose name is now synonymous with those wonderful diamond-pattern socks.