Nothing but Growth

Shakespeare’s As You Like It begins with Orlando complaining about how his older brother, Oliver, has not fulfilled the responsibilities set upon him by their father. Orlando desires to be a (gentle)man for which he must receive an education. Orlando’s criticism toward Oliver discloses the frustration he bears for living no higher manner of life than an animal.

My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and \ report speaks goldenly of his profit: for my part,\ he keeps me rustically at home, or, to speak more \ properly, stays me here at home unkept; for call you \ that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that \ differs not from the stalling of an ox? . . . but I, his \ brother, gain nothing under him but growth;”

My \ father charged you in his will to give me good \ education: you have trained me like a peasant, \ obscuring and hiding from me all gentlemen-like \ qualities.”

In The Discarded Image C. S. Lewis discusses the medieval perception of existence understood within “four grades of terrestrial reality:” mere existence, growth, sensation, and reason. Mere existence is observed with objects such as rocks, growth with vegetation, sensation with animals, and reason with the human person. The powers associated with each grade vary and increase in progression toward reason. The first and lowest grade, mere existence, can only be said to exist and nothing more. It is, if you will, without a soul. The second grade adds to existence the powers of “nutrition, growth, and propagation.” Sensation assumes the lower powers and adds the power of sentience—conscious awareness. Reason adds to all of these the ability to perceive and understand, a quality on the earthly plane unique to Man.

Now Orlando’s objection to Oliver’s treatment is that the higher grade (or mode) of existence reserved for the natural man is being denied him. Oliver is suppressing Orlando by offering him nothing “but growth.” Orlando is no better than an animal, indeed, no better than a head of cabbage. This mode of existence rails against Orlando’s nature; it is not right, it is not just, it violates nature.

Orlando perceives education to elicit the “gentleman-like qualities” for which he yearns. Until that state, or mode of being, is achieved his soul remains restless.

I do not believe that education is understood in the same manner today. People (adults and children) more and more appear to settle contently with “nothing but growth.” Such contentment makes one a slave to environment.

So why do so many seek comfort in a choked life, a life only half lived, and nothing more?

Composition

Edgar Allan Poe describes, in an essay titled The Philosophy of Composition, the process he followed in composing The Raven, and how the actual writing of the poem began upon the penning of a certain stanza near the end of the poem:

Here then the poem may be said to have its beginning–at the end, where all works of art should begin . . .

Earlier in the essay Poe details how the denouement must first be fully elaborated in mind before the pen ever touches paper.

It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.

Poe then proceeds to enumerate eight steps of invention before penning the first lines of The Raven followed by two additional steps of composition.  He makes it very clear “that no one point in its [Raven] composition is referrible either to accident or intuition–that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”

A composition, according to Poe, must unfold with the end firmly fixed in view.  Everything in the composition must consistently and rightly conform to the point of destination.

I have been asked by students why they must work on their conclusion before the introduction during the process of writing an outline.  At first, this does not make sense to a student–especially if the student is of the mindset to accomplish a task in a linear, progressive, and mechanistic fashion.  That is, is it not, how the assembly line model works?

Yet the nature of rhetoric requires a determined amount of patience and humility to first see and understand a thing before faithfully attributing to it the words that will (must) rightly express it.  Haste is no bedfellow to good writing or speech.  Beginning with the end firmly in view grants the writer clarity of purpose, unity of thought, and order to expression.

 

Sackett

On just about any Louis L’Amour book you will find a caption that entitles L’Amour as “America’s Storyteller.”  Recently I picked up the first four novels of the Sackett stories and was reminded of the affect these books had on me 20 years ago when I first read them, and why L’Amour was such a great storyteller.

I read my first Louis L’Amour book at the age of 12 and by the time I was 16 I had read every one of his 100 plus books save the four Hopalong Cassidy novels, his poetry, and autobiography.  Before this I was not much of a reader, but ever since that four year period I have not ceased to expand my literary explorations — and library.  I believe that through his stories L’Amour taught me the love of literature and instilled within me a passion for learning.

Inside my paperback copy of Walking Drum is a biographical note that states,

On the afternoon of his death, June 10, 1988, Louis L’Amour was proofreading the complete manuscript of Education of a Wandering Man, an autobiographical book about his lifelong love of reading and learning.

Currently my 7th grade class is reading The Odyssey.  Following a number of their critical comments (perhaps complaints) concerning the value and importance of the story I shared these highlights from the first 4 Sackett novels that display L’Amour’s “love of reading and learning.”

(Note: These 4 novels are set in the 17th century prior to and during the first formalized colonization of America.  Barnabas Sackett was the first to come across the Atlantic from England to settle along the base of the Appalachian Mountains in the region of North Carolina.)

Sackett’s Land

“I think . . . I feel some lonely battle was fought here, and fought well, and men died for what they believed, perhaps surrounded in this place.  Someday men may come with more knowledge than we and they will put the parts together.  And out of it will come a story of heroes.”

“You believe in heroes?” Corvino looked at him thoughtfully.

“I cannot believe in anything else.  A man needs heroes.  He needs to believe in strength, nobility and courage.  Otherwise we become sheep to be herded to the slaughterhouse of death.  I believe this.  I am a soldier.  I try to fight for the right cause.  Sometimes it is hard to know.

“But I do not sit back and sneer in cowardice at those with the courage to fight.  The blood  of good men makes the earth rich, as it is here.  When I die sword in hand, I hope someone lives to sing of it.  I live my life so that when death comes I may die well.  I ask no more.”

To the Far Blue Mountains

 “My father finished his life,” I continued, “and made a better foothold for me.  And I in my time shall do the same for my sons.  Yet it is honor I wish for them, honor and pride of person, not wealth.  Nor do I wish for titles, or a place near a Queen or a King, for pride of title or family is an empty thing, like dry leaves that blow in the cold winds of autumn.”

…What books then?  They must be few, for the luggage of books is no easy thing when they must be carried in canoes, packs, and upon one’s back. 

Each book must be one worth rereading many times, each a book that has much to say, that can lend meaning to a life, help in decisions, comfort one during moments of loneliness.  One needed a chance to listen to the words of other men who had lived their lives, to share with them trials and troubles by day and by night in home or in the markets of cities. …

…”Do you turst this man?”

“Aye,” I said, after a moment of thought, “although he has the name of one gifted at conniving.  Yet we have things in common, I think.”

“What manner of things?”

“Ideas, Tom.  We have shared large ideas together, Peter and I.  There is no greater time than for young men to sit together and shape large ideas into rounded, beautiful things.  I do not know if our thoughts were great thoughts, but we believed them so.  We talked of Plato, of Cathay and Marco Polo, of Roman gods and Greek heroes, of Ulysses and Jason.”

The Warrior’s Path

“To make a country we need all kinds.  He is a thoughtful man, and such are needed.  He reads, he thinks.  Too many of us are so busied with living that we do not.”

I gestured about us.  “A man must think, but he has not enough to nudge his thinking.  From morn ’till night we are busy with finding game, hunting food, cutting fuel, shaping wood for houses.  Ours is too busy a world, and there is no time for considering.”

“I know . . . even father.  There are days when he has not the time to touch a book.  There is no market where one can go and buy what is needed.  It must be hunted, gathered, or made with the hands.”

“And at night,” I added, “a man is too tired.  I fall asleep over my books, but we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.  Shaping a country is not all done with the hands but with the mind as well.”

Jubal Sackett

“He look much at small packet.”  He shaped a rectangle with his fingers.  “Many leaves sewn at the back.  The leaves have small signs on them.  He looks at them and sometimes he smiles or speaks from them.  I ask what it is and he say this is book and it speaks to him.

“I listen, no hear it speak.”

“The signs in this book spoke to him,” I said.  “When you look at a trail in the morning, it speaks to you of who passed in the night.  It was so with him.”

“Ah?  It could be so.”  He looked at me.  “You have book?”

“At my home there were many books,” I said, “and I miss them very much.”  I tapped my head.  “Many books up here.  Like you remember old trails, I remember books.  Often I think of what the books have said to me.”

“What do books say?”

“Many things, in many ways.  You sit by the knees of your old men and hear their tales of warpath and hunt.  In our books we have made signs that tell such stories, not only of our grandfathers but of their grandfathers.

“We put upon leaves the stories of our great men, and of wars, but the best books are those that repeat the wisdom of our grandfathers.” . . .

. . . “Sakim, my old teacher, told me that some wise men in India and China believed the stars were suns like ours and that somewhere out there were other worlds.  Who knows if this is true or not?  But do you think men will be content to wonder?  Someday they will find a way to the stars and an answer to their questions.”

She looked at me with wonderment.  “You talk strangely.  Why are you not content with this?”

“It is man’s nature, Itchakomi, to wonder, and thank all the gods for it.  It is through wonder that we come to know.”

Particles

I have recently picked up H. D. F. Kitto’s The Greeks and read this interesting insight into the nature and differences between the Greek and Latin languages.  Speaking of the Greeks, Kitto notes that:

When they descended from the northern mountains they brought no art with them, but they did bring a language, and in the Greek language — in its very structure — are to be found that clarity and control, that command of structure, which we see preeminently in Classical Greek art and miss in the earlier.

. . . it is the nature of Greek to express with extreme accuracy not only the relation between ideas, but also shades of meaning and emotion.

. . . It is the nature of the Greek language to be exact, subtle, and clear.

. . . That is to say, both languages have a markedly architectural quality.  But there is a significant difference between them.  The Romans seem to have achieved the periodic style by sheer determination and courage: the Greeks were born with it.  Not only has Greek many more ways of slipping in a subordinate clause . . . but also Greek is well stocked with little words, conjunctions that hunt in couples or in packs, whose sole function is to make the structure clear.  They act, as it were, as signposts.  (emphasis mine)

 As I teach composition and read several student essays — and even reflect upon my own writing — I see an abundance of these “little words,” words that some grammarians refer to as particles.  Too many particles in a sentence, paragraph, or composition can take on the grammatical function of “space fillers,” and in doing so, detract the attention owed to the concrete embodiment of ideas formed in nouns and verbs.  What I appreciate from Kitto’s comments, and at the same time challenged with is the acute precision of words in the Greek language in accordance with their function and relation.

The use of a particle is not haphazard, or even casually administered.  A particle must be purposefully written and/or spoken.  It is a “signpost” iluminating form in its service to order.

Teaching

In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates discusses with Phaedrus the nature of good writing and good speech. 

Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore he who would be an orator has to learn the differences of human souls–they are so many and of such a nature, and from them come the differences between man and man.  Having proceeded thus far in his analysis, he will next divide speeches into their different classes:–”Such and such persons,” he will say, “are affected by this or that kind of speech in this or that way,” and he will tell you why.

The true rhetorician knows the natures of each human soul he addresses as they vary from person to person.  Only as the rhetorician knows the particular nature of a person is he capable of rightly fitting the correct speech to this person. 

It is the duty of a teacher to know the soul of each student in order that he or she might speak rightly to the student.  If I desire to teach my class and move their souls toward the good I must come to know the individual nature of each student so that I might rightly speak to each.

Orderly arrangement must follow a clear perception of the things to be arranged.  Knowledge of human nature as a whole is not enough; we must know the person we desire to educate just as we must know the substance of what we desire to teach.  Then are we able to fit the two together in a blessed union.

Affirming Truth

The following is an excerpt from the commencement speech I delivered on June 11, 2009 for The Geneva School of Manhattan.  The complete speech will be posted with my other essays.

***

A boy at the age of eight discovers a bundle of money lying on the floor while his mother pays for the food at the counter.  Does he take the money, or does he turn it in to the grocery clerk?

Truth has the ability to fuse thought and action.  Like wisdom, it stands watch inviting our submission and conformity to its defined course.  Assured passage requires our willful decision to submit and affirm truth.

But whoa, whoa, whoa – the modern immediately pulls back and recalls Pilate’s question with no regard to Pilate’s intention.

“What is truth?”

The modern’s intention is not to question the substance of truth, but to question the existence or even nature of truth.

“What kind of truth and whose truth are you prescribing?” they ask.

As this unwillingness to affirm truth expands the modern retracts by shaping new models of truth fashioned for the individual.  Those willing to preserve an externally prescribed truth that equally applies to all persons understand that they serve truth, truth does not serve them.

From the beginning mankind has sought to unfold the order of nature as the definitive pattern from which to construct first a society and secondly the human person.  Ancient societies preceding the Greek and Roman civilizations projected mythical stories that disclosed the order of the cosmos.  These stories established the authoritative pattern that a populus strived to copy in the constitution of a true and just society.  The city became a miniature copy of the cosmic order of the universe, and was appropriately venerated as a “cosmic center.”

In these ancient societies the king and the priest protected and preserved the divine order of the universe through the administration of a sound society.  It was the classical cultures of Greece and Rome that dedicated their attention to realizing the cosmic order within the human person.  A true man or woman embodied the cosmic order within his or her self.

The beliefs of ancient civilization reveal that mankind understood the existence of order as an inherent quality of the natural or created universe, and that they were to copy this order as a pattern for a just society and for human beingness.

The Greeks had a term for the single unifying principle that held all things together – they called it the logos.  For the Greeks, the logos represented an idea, a principle.  Roughly five hundred years later a small selected band of Jewish commoners came to behold the logos in human flesh.  When John began his gospel with the words, “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God…and the logos became flesh and dwelt among us” he made a profound statement bearing the weight of the heavens.  From within the tradition of the Jewish faith Christianity proclaimed the message of “Christ in you.”  This message complemented the Hebrew tradition of the temple and the tabernacle before it, receding all the way back to the pattern of creation unveiled in the opening chapters of Genesis.  The apostle Paul even goes on to rhetorically ask in 1 Corinthians 6 “do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?”

The temple portrayed a physical blueprint that mirrored the divine pattern of the created universe.   It stood as a symbol of Jewish identity and marked the parameters of Jewish society so that the shape of the human soul reflected the form of an ordered society interchangeably woven together through the functional and structural design of the temple.  Biblically, the true human person incorporated the order of nature in accordance to the design of the creator.

Theory and Practice

Theory often sounds nice and can wear a certain mark of perfection, but sometimes falls far short of the aims it aspires to realize. 

I remember a good friend of mine that I grew up with talking with a MIT engineer whom he had never met.  Maren is a master of common sense and all things practical.  He is also 6′2″ and around 280 – 300 lbs.  Maren and I grew up together in the foothills of northern CA, and I watched as he would chase rattle snakes and pull them out of their holes by the tale — crazy!  We also took shop together in high school and he can build pretty much anything out of wood or metal.

Maren explained to this engineer how they can build things that look perfect on paper, but almost completely useless once manufactured.  As he held up his hands he asked, “How am I supposed to replace a part this big (making a gesture with his hands) through a hole no bigger than my finger?  Genius.”

Theory equally applies to politics.  Political rhetoric contains equally as little substance as the theories and ideologies it upholds.  I have found the words of G. K. Chesterton alarmingly perceptive when he writes in “What’s Wrong With the World” that progress must be built on principle not precedent, but the problem with moderns is that they continue to promote a form of progress entirely built on precedent.  This is what Darwin has gifted us, by which I mean the notion of adaptation.  When principle are forsaken, the eternal is lost and the hope for true progress unrealizable.

I found this article about the general public’s recent judgment concerning socialistic ideologies no longer practical in Europe interesting.  The headline on the Drudge Report read, “USA moves left, EU goes right.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090608/ap_on_re_eu/european_elections

Shaping Character

In chapter 3 of Louis L’Amour’s The Walking Drum Kerbouchard ponders that,

Appearances count for little, and I knew I must shape the character of the man I wished to be into something of worth.

 This sets the stage for the rest of the book.  Near the end of the book chapter 46 begins this way:

It has seemed to me that each year one should pause to take stock of himself, to ask: where am I going?  What am I becoming?  What do I wish to do and become? 

Most people whom I encountered were without purpose, people who had given themselves no goal.  The first goal need not be the final one, for a sailing ship sails first by one wind, then another.  The point is that it is always going somewhere, proceeding toward a final destination. 

Until now my task had been to find if my father was alive, and if so where, and then how to free him from slavery.

These were but temporary goals.  What was it I wanted?  Where was I going?  What had I done to achieve it? . . .

. . . Yesterday I arrived hungry and in rags; today I was the confidant of kings; so can a man’s fortune change.

Yet power, riches, and the friendship of kings are but transitory things.  Riches are a claim to distinction for those who have no other right to it.  Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves, and often the ancestor from whom they claim descent is one they would not allow in the house if they met him today. . . .

. . . Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be.  Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate.  Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow.  The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.

That last paragraph is worth reflection.  But notice the relation it bears with the first quote from the beginning of the book.  Who or what is “shaping the character” of men, women, and children today?

Each day I witness a culture that increasingly relies upon others for personal fulfillment and progress.  People today ideed have goals, but many set the responsibilty of reaching those goals upon the wealthy and/or the government.  This sort of reliance is not a simple matter of trust; it is the offering of one’s life.  The one who shapes the soul has the power to enslave the will.  Such external reliances come with a risk.  As the many grow more and more dependent upon those above them they become less and less capable of standing on their own two feet. 

We are still asking the questions, “What is it that I want?” “Where am I going?”  The question not asked is, “What have I done to achieve it?”  Instead we ask, “What will you do to get it for me?”

Order of Being

 

The dualism between body and spirit has a long history of division and conflict.  I have always baulked at the idea of a dualistic universe and at any attempt to elevate one side over the other.  In particular, much of what I encounter sets spirit over the body upon a hierarchical ladder that reaches into the realm of reality.  What happens is that the non-material is associated with what is real and the material with what is less real, or the opposition is expressed in terms of what is good and what is evil, or true and false.

 

Some of the problems this leads to are:

1. Escapism – abandoning this world for the next.
2. An inordinate reliance upon reason.
3. Utilitarianism – value transfers from being to efficiency.

 

The problem I have always had regarding dualistic frameworks has been the notion that they represent an hierarchy of being.  What happens if the hierarchy is understood rather in terms of order?

 

I was reminded of this after reviewing Iranaeus’ beliefs concerning subordination among the persons of the Trinity in his defense against the Gnostics.  He argues that the subordination of persons is not in terms of being, but in terms of doing the will of the Father.  This does not limit the being of the Son or of the Spirit, but rather expresses the ways God is fully present in the creation.  Subordination does not limit the being of God, but rather unveils the fullness of God.

 

If we view the relation between the senses and the soul in this light a different image emerges.  The senses are not in any way less than the mind or soul.  They are not less real, less good, less true.  They are precisely what they are – the senses.  They are however, subordinate. 

 

I believe without a doubt that the universe is sustained by order.  The material world is governed by immaterial “laws.”  I do not see how the material governs the immaterial, except in the case of miracles.  In the same way, the human person consists of parts that can be termed as material (body, senses) and immaterial (soul, mind, will).  Human beingness is ordered in such a way that mirrors that of the creation, and, I would argue, that of the Triune Creator.  The soul ought to govern the body, not the body the soul.  This has nothing to do with degrees of beingness, but everything to do with the order of being.

 

 

Thoughts on the Trinity

Some modern misconceptions of the Trinity include:

 

1.  The plea of ignorance, or, the Trinity is a mystery that cannot be understood so it becomes a dogma to be professed by Christians.  The significance of this is that it discloses a belief that the Trinity bears little practical importance.  Rather, the Christian is to give more attention to the work of Christ on the cross.  Western culture has rooted much of its constitution in a theology of redemption without much thought to one of creation.  The history of Western civilization has continually fluctuated between the poles of law and liberty.

 

2.  Pantheism – conceptions of God that are too closely wedded with the creation.  When inadequate space is given between the creator and the creation then theories concerning the being of God are grafted into the being of the creation.  But the greater risk moves in the other direction.  Creation divinized constructs a creator in its own eyes.  In both constructs neither the creator nor the creation have legitimate freedom of being; one becomes the extension of the other and thereby limited and controlled.

 

3.  Immanency – the unknowable (and thus, impersonal) or spiritualized God.  This is perhaps the most dominate perception of the Trinity.  The persons of the Trinity are not understood in relation, but according to their individual tasks (this easily slips into modalism).  The unity of God is not perceived in the communion of the many, but rather, the historic search for the unity of God has looked to God’s oneness as that which underlies the economy of persons.  Consider how most people will attempt to defend the Trinity by showing how the Sod is God, how the Spirit is God, and how the Father is God.  The search reaches for the core attributes that stand for the single divine substance – that which makes God, God.  The “substance” of God resides in certain eternal qualities (or attributes) that are prior to the economy of the divine persons.  The being of God rests in a pre-revelatory state, and is consequently unknowable and spiritualized.  One result is an impersonal creator who has established an impersonal creation.  Augustine made the attempt to reach back into the divine immanency through the mind since the mind, human reason, was perceived to be a carrier of the imago dei.  God could only be known through the individual mind.  Ontology is grounded for Augustine not with persons (in-relation), but in mind.  Knowledge is rooted outside of persons-in-relation accessible rather through the individual mind, which consequently questions materiality.  The Trinitarian analogy used by Augustine was memory, understanding, and will.  The inner structure of the human mind reveals the inner being of God.  Thus, the human mind is perceived as the image of the being of God.  Is it any wonder that Western civilization and Christianity has given so much stock to reason, the individual, and the spiritual life?  Thus my suspicion and caution directed toward Augustine (and the Platonic influences that he embraced) and toward “a rationalism that claims too much for the intellect” (C. E. Gunton).

 

Colin E. Gunton stated that the doctrine of the Trinity was “a quest for ontology.”  He aptly confessed that “it is only through an understanding of the kind of being that God is that we can come to learn what kind of beings we are and what kind of world we inhabit,” and that “everything looks – and, indeed, is – different in the light of the Trinity.”

 

The immediate practical implications of the Trinity are seen in Gunton’s statement about how an understanding of the Trinity informs an understanding of the nature of man and the nature of the world.  Creation bears the ontological mark of its Creator.  Other practical suggestions that emerge from humanity and creation would include stewardship, relation, otherness, freedom, personhood, and ethics.  In light of the company Christian classical education keeps with the classical world I believe it is vitally important that we seriously consider how the Triune Creator shapes and forms all reality.   “Everything looks – and, indeed, is – different in the light of the Trinity.”