The Spirit of Understanding: English Literature in an Age of Confusion

By Margaret J. Howell

The winning contestants on University Challenge could not identify lines from one of the best-known English poems, Keats Ode to Autumn, and seemed unconcerned about their ignorance. This book provides an engaging retrospect for readers who have forgotten, or who have never had much chance to study, their own literature and history. In presenting a kind of cross-section of this abundant inheritance, it supplies ample selective quotes, and suggests an antidote to the strange sickness of modernity, which seems to have forgotten that memory is the mother of the muses. Literature, one of the bulwarks of defence against unwarranted authority, has been attacked, distorted, and eliminated from curricula because its traditional teachings, handed on for generations, oppose a determined modernist agenda. The age demands conformity ; the poets are independent. The traditional writings banished from shelves and the popular imagination educate the soul, inculcating such qualities as fortitude, one of the forgotten virtues. Criticism of and from the media, the self-appointed commentators who make up the narratives of the day, has been undertaken by analysts as diverse as Noam Chomsky and William Buckley. Some of their works are listed in the bibliography.
Myths and heroic tales that inform western literature and adjust our perspective come principally from the Greeks, especially from Homer, and from Vergil, who told the great tale of Troy that fulfilled the dreams of Rome. Homer delighted in the natural world, in beautifully made arms, cups, tapestries, all bathed in a pitiless light. The old Anglo Saxon poets who also wrote in the epic tradition felt particularly the mightiness of evil, the transience of life, and the power of the word to shape the world, and to hold themselves in remembrance. The Middle Ages achieved the greatest dream of all, uniting the mythical with the practical, painting great panoramas of life, meditating upon the unseen, and the Elizabethan age rediscovered heroism and the power of personality. After the free discourse and argument of the seventeenth century, with its resulting wars and fragmentation, a more cohesive nation emerged, one that came to believe in reason and mans own mind ; while the Romantic poets who followed show, sometimes disastrously, the wildness of individualism, of diversity apart from social integration and a common faith. The long Victorian afternoon and golden evening of the nineteenth century saw an expansion of these tendencies and a renewing of faith, but there has been no significant new development from the revolution and romanticism of a century earlier. Rather the movement has played itself out with post modernism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483659695

Margaret J. Howell

Margaret Howell was born in Exeter, Devonshire, and educated privately there. Afterwards she graduated from Indiana University, in Bloomington. During a very varied career, she has taught English at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia and was for twenty two years a popular teacher of English and History in Vancouver. Her special interests are English literature and the study of texts, including the Bible, the history and the writings of the English-speaking people, and also the history of the Arab peoples, particularly the current problems in the Holy Land. She was for sixteen years Book Editor for Middle East Perspective. She has published articles on various subjects, two pamphlets of poems, and two books, one on Byron’s plays, Byron Tonight, an entertaining account of the nineteenth century theatre; and a history of the Byron family, The House of Byron, with Violet W. Walker, late archivist of the City of Nottingham. The Spirit of Understanding was written in response to the removal of literature and history from curricula, a deletion which has caused confusion and poverty of spirit. She likes walking, painting in oils, and reading. She is a member of the Society of Authors.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Margaret J. Howell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 07/20/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

134512

Contents

Chapter 1   By Way Of Introduction

Chapter 2   In The Beginning

Chapter 3    Saturn’s Ring

Chapter 4   A Fair Field Full Of Folk

Chapter 5   The Gentle Mind

Chapter 6   Beloved Masters

Chapter 7   The Soul’s Eye

Chapter 8   Breaking The Shell

Chapter 9   A Luckless Apple

Chapter 10   The Valley Of Decision

Chapter 11   The Skill Of The Polisher

Chapter 12   Nature To Advantage

Chapter 13   Throwing Enchantment Over Passion

Chapter 14   The Inward Eye

Chapter 15   The Shaping Spirit

Chapter 16   A Tangled Yarn

Chapter 17   The Luminous Void

Chapter 18   Unfashioned Creatures

Chapter 19   Adam’s Dream

Chapter 20   Gusto

Chapter 21   Heads Of Brass

Chapter 22   The Quick And The Dead

Notes On Terms. Glossary

Some Notes On People (Biographical Sketches)

A Short List For Further Reading

Bibliography: The Spirit Of Understanding

Also by Margaret J. Howell

Byron Tonight: A Poet’s Plays on the Nineteenth Century Stage

The House of Byron (with Violet W. Walker)

The Seasons (poetry)

The Silence That Sings (poetry)

IN MEMORIAM

Rosalind W. Addison

A book that furnishes no quotation is in my judgement no book—

it is a plaything.

—Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1868)

CHAPTER 1

By Way of Introduction

The Ever-Present Past. The Mother of the Muses. Enjoyment of tradition. The Single Vision. The Queen of the Sciences. Levels of Understanding. Education as a business. Deconstruction. Professor Humpty Dumpty. The Elves leave Middle Earth. The Fortunate Isles. A world quite turned round. The quick and the dead. Giant Despair. The error of Dr. Faustus. A leap over the wall.

The foes of learning, and each gentle thought.

—Edmund Spenser

The growing expectation placed on schools and parents to boost pupils’ self-esteem is breeding a generation of narcissists, an expert has warned. Dr. Carol Craig said children were being over-praised and were developing an all about me mentality.

—Report from the BBC, 14 March 2009

It might take a violent supernatural intervention—a lightning bolt, perhaps—to persuade the modern barbarians who teach English in college to take any notice of English literature.

—Elizabeth Kantor

A GREAT POET SAID that dreams and books are each a world—and that books are a real world. This world, of literature and history, we are losing, and we must recover it if we are not to lose ourselves. Another great poet said that eternity is in love with the productions of time. Literature lives in the eternal now. Some philosophers have suggested that time is not lineal, that everything exists simultaneously, that we make our way through it, and that human experience merely appears consecutive. However that may be, authors dwell together. Reading a book re-creates it, makes it present ( memoria ). A troubled, sliding epoch that believes reality is one-dimensional and obvious, and time a straight line, has lost its way in the wild wood of the moment. Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, that is of art and learning, needs to return.

The myths and heroic tales that inform western literature generally come principally from the Greeks, especially from Homer some eight centuries before Christ, and later from the Latin Vergil (70-19 BC) who reworked the great tale of Troy that fulfilled the dreams of Rome. Homer loved nature, and delighted in beautifully crafted arms, cups, tapestries. His world is bathed in the glorious, pitiless light of the land of light. The old Anglo-Saxon poets of the British Isles express a darker but similarly tragic heroism. They felt the depressing vitality of evil, the transience of life, and the power of the word both to shape the world and to hold themselves in remembrance. The Middle Ages (about 800-1500) united the mythical with the practical, and the Elizabethans rediscovered heroism and the power of personality. The free discourse and argument of the seventeenth century, with its resulting wars and fragmentation, saw a more stable nation emerge, one that came to believe in reason and man’s own mind; while the Romantic poets who followed show, sometimes disastrously, the wildness of individualism, of diversity apart from social cohesion and a common faith. The long Victorian afternoon and golden evening of the nineteenth century saw both the expansion of these tendencies and a renewing of faith, but there has been no significant new development from the revolution and romanticism of a century earlier. Rather the movement has played itself out with post-modernism. Unfortunately not only the classical world, until recently a basis of curriculum in western schools, but also the more immediate past and its wisdom, have been vanishing, dismissed as irrelevant, just when they are critically needed.

This book attempts to give a retrospective, an anthology, and to be a guide through recently forgotten territory. Criticism from the media and the journalists, those self-appointed and all-pervasive commentators who create the atmosphere and make up the narratives of the present day, has been undertaken by analysts as diverse as Noam Chomsky and William Buckley. Some of their works, tackling the problems from varied viewpoints, are listed in the bibliography and should be read. A short reading list appears at the end because a single book can cover only a few selective writings and survey only part of the historical landscape. It presents a kind of cross section as an introduction to the subject.

First comes a short review of the particularly modern problems: anxiety, confusion, collapse, loss of memory. Then we hear the voices which teach, changing us, correcting our malaise. From the Anglo-Saxons, facing fate, to the rich mediaeval tapestry and the kindly enclining that brings everything to its appointed place. And then the gentle mind, the healthy allegory. Then the master’s art, which fashions a world, making a good thing from a dubious one. Then the rationalism of philosophers who polished and perfected, and the shaping spirit of imagination confronting the great moral crisis—the Romanticism which still lingers. Of course most of the story has to be left out. As the ancient writers used to say, if everything were told the world itself could not hold the books that would be written.

A very great English lexographer and biographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, said that the chief glory of any people lies in its authors, and most of his predecessors would have agreed with him. The wits of the machine age seem to think that the chief glory of the people resides in technology. Reading becomes particularly crucial in a mechanical and technological epoch, however, because a real world that withstands for a while the assaults of time and chance and tyranny threatens the controllers who have arisen in the new dispensation which began some two centuries ago with the development of engines and steam power. Students in this unique era in the history of the human race tend to develop unevenly, becoming brilliant at mathematics, expert at computers, technically proficient, but philosophically artless, often knowing little of their own literature, and indifferent to authority. In school they are too often thrown back upon their own experience, reading only writers that are relevant. Ignorance of the past becomes very dangerous when technocrats, bureaucrats and autocrats rule. Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and George Orwell in 1984 are classic exponents of the consequences of such malformation. Both these novels describe the terrific power of applied science and, in their different ways, the attack on memory. People are drugged with soma to achieve synthetic happiness, or they are dropped down memory holes.

When the Roman poet, Martial, said: They live doubly who also enjoy the past, he was defining the pleasures of memory. And memory (Mnemosyne) is the mother of the muses: Calliope, their leader (epic poetry); Urania (astronomy), Polyhymnia (sacred songs), Erato (love poetry), Terpsichore (dance and song), Melpomene (tragedy), Thalia (comedy), and Euterpe (lyric poetry). This list from ancient times could not be issued today by any college of education as curriculum. Note that epic poetry takes priority and that science is but slenderly represented, by Urania.

A famous teacher from a former time used to say, "Let us never be amousia, without the muses". That has been happening, and these muses are not being exiled only in fiction. The English Literature being abandoned by educational institutions fulfilled for a while the role formerly taken by classical studies. It is not the only royal road, the only noble tradition, but it is a civilising influence, making for independence, happiness, and moral autonomy. It establishes a standard of comparison, and helps in criticising the present (a discipline rarely undertaken, perhaps because sneering at the past—at the Victorians, in particular—has become fashionable). And such study is a good, whether or not a job or financial returns result from it.

The poets teach. The Anglo Saxons teach endurance; the mediaeval writers, love for the highest when we see it; the Elizabethans model courage and energetic defence of the right; the Jacobeans of the seventeenth century, contemplation and steadiness amid confusion; the eighteenth century emphasises reason and balance and a pride in polished craft; and the nineteenth recognised the shaping imagination as an instrument for self-understanding and emotional depth. All of these offer genuine enjoyment.

Enjoyment means, in one sense, to take pleasure in, and in another sense to have the use of something. Books are a source of both: they delight, they shape the soul. They also impart tradition (Latin, tradere, what is handed on). Ironically, though, literature, until very recently an elite privilege, has become almost universally available in developed countries and basic literacy widespread at the very same time that serious readers have declined in proportion, especially among the young, even among the educated. The book demands solitude, quiet, concentration, thought; and these are graces, like night and silence, which the modern world does its best to spoil. Reading is intensely individual, and the age fears solitude and encourages the madness of the crowd. Readers participate and imagine, and mass media promote passivity and conformity. No two people ever understand a book in exactly the same way, and private opinions are dangerous. Tyrants like to burn books.

Tradition lives in many forms. The book is one. The teacher is another. Once these two, the book and the teacher, are rendered obsolete, or discounted, the succeeding generation cannot enjoy (have the use of, or take pleasure in) its tradition. When the American poet and critic T. S. Eliot said that tradition cannot be inherited but must be obtained by great labour, he meant that it is not natural, like brown hair or blue eyes, but has to be passed on deliberately by authority and acquired through conscious effort. It demands practice. Any break in that continuity may, in a single generation, eliminate what is handed on, but there will not be any innocuous empty space remaining. The many causes of widespread resentment, anger, and depression that have become such obvious features of prosperous societies have been identified in books and discussions innumerable. Despite material progress and standards of health and comfort which would strike past generations as incredible, the western countries which once constituted Christendom seem to be wandering in the wilderness. Old relationships on every hand are breaking up just when people need help and lack inner resources.

With the erosion of traditional wisdom, much of it conveyed through poetic literature, a reductionist science, claiming to account for everything, and even aggressively promulgating its unbelief, has been on the march. Dealing as it does with the observable, what can be counted, measured, repeated in experiment, the powerful realm of science is also necessarily limited; but a popular idea of this discipline has invaded the realms of philosophy, poetry, and faith, ignoring the obvious fact that the observable world leaves out the invisible inner life. The resulting outlook reduces everything to objects, or chemicals, or even mathematical formulae. No escape from the inevitable dreariness and despair is possible because the scientist, as scientist, cannot assume the role of the magus who conjures up meaning to fill the void. Science by itself cannot tackle the problems posed by philosophy or theology. And these are the great questions. The elevation of reason and the development of the machine, which falls like an iron barrier across the nineteenth century, are partly the causes of a disorientation which separates man from an environment with which, originally, he felt himself to be one.

In a former time the old archaic consciousness perceived time, space, and being differently. The observer was part of the observed. At the opposite extreme, the acutely conscious beholder dominating the centre cannot know the unselfconscious sense of belonging, the security of interdependence enjoyed by our ancestors. The dispassionate observation of objects separates things out; reality appears fragmentary and manipulation of objects the only achievement. We murder to dissect.

The loneliness, the being cut off, which has become such a malaise of modern times, results from the perception which a great nineteenth-century poet and thinker, William Blake (1757-1827), aptly called the single vision or Newton’s sleep, in an allusion to the famous mathematician Isaac Newton (1643-1727). The real, if pursued to its core, disappears, just as an oil painting, viewed very closely, dissolves into lines and dots and patches. The basic reality of the single vision so necessary to scientific observation may be taken as ultimate truth and extended to all experience whatsoever. This has also been called reductionism, the diminishing of everything to chemistry. Seen through such optics, the human being becomes a lucky or unlucky combination of chemicals.

Blake did not describe the difficulty just like that, but he understood the problem.

With the severing of objective knowledge from the inward desires of the heart, Theology, formerly the Queen of the Sciences, has lost her throne, and the humanising studies that once formed the core curriculum—languages, literature, the arts, music—have been reduced or abandoned even as powerful materialistic ideologies threaten the human enterprise and the planet itself. Poetry, the expression of man’s highest aspirations, withers into novelty, tedium, and prose. Prose, broken up into lines arranged on a page, masquerades as free verse and many writers lack the training in metrics or rhetoric that makes for the perfect freedom to write the real thing. Indeed, as Neil Postman pointed out in his popular analysis, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), all serious pursuits, even education, religion and news, become mere diversions.

A corresponding split in the personality, the heart at war with the head, characterises the increasingly neurotic behaviour of individuals and whole nations. That is, they are consumed by wishes and impulses, often contradictory, which they cannot reconcile. Nothing seems vital, but the age-old anxieties remain. Divisions appear everywhere in wealthy societies, which, notwithstanding all their talk of democracy and individualism and rights, become at the same time ever more rigid, controlled, and centralised. And the past recedes into a fog.

Although the situation has seldom been more acute, it is no novel difficulty. The Elizabethan poet, Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), wrote: It is but the clouds gathered about our own judgement that makes us think all other ages wrapped up in mists, and the great distance betwixt us, that causes us to imagine men so far off, to be so little in respect of ourselves.

In the schools, which should be corrective, the new authorities run education like a business. The Headmaster or Headmistress has become the CEO, the staff are the employees, students and parents are the shareholders or stakeholders who must be pleased and propitiated with the product. Increasingly, however, that desired commodity has not been a wiser, disciplined, well-trained character, a sound mind in a sound body, but marks, resumés, and glowing letters of introduction to universities and careers. Schools that have become servants of commercial enterprise are expected to train people for the labour market and to help them gain qualifications that will produce a good living. High grades and impressive credentials, not wisdom, understanding, or skill, have become the aim. In acquiring their inflated rewards, the young have been frequently flattered and caressed, indulged and overpraised. Lacking conviction beyond the need to train students for the marketplace and to keep the clientele happy, powerful administrators far from the teacher and the student undermine legitimate authority. Some advocates, for example the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Edinburgh, have even urged that teachers should never raise their voices to children. Under heavy pressure themselves to succeed by gaining high marks, many students know just how to take advantage of such advice.

The craze for bringing technology into the classroom, the obvious result of educating for the market place, has further estranged students from their mentors and altered their relation.

Other developments had driven this trend for some time, particularly America’s space race with the Soviet Union and the fears of nuclear war. For many years before that, however, the humanities had been in retreat. The surviving vernacular literature which remained as the major humanising influence in schools and universities was replaced by social studies, media studies, communications, career and personal planning or the helpfully woolly values clarification. And as the classic metaphors—that the teacher is like a mother bird teaching fledglings to fly, or like a gardener pruning plants that they may grow properly, or like a wise parent—have given way to the terminology of the market place and the assembly line, political manipulation has attempted more.

Inclusive language, which deliberately vitiates vocabulary and blurs thought, has been promulgated to make some thoughts impossible. Gender, one of the buzz-words wrongly used in place of sex, is mechanical not biological. Gender denotes masculine and feminine in grammar, the case and relationship of nouns. Sex denotes biological function and relationship. This unpopular reality is denied in the vocabulary of innovators who think society as well as language is a construct, to be shaped, or wrecked, at their own arbitrary pleasure.

The suffix—man, gender-neutral in Old English and Anglo-Saxon, means person. A prefix denotes sex: male = waepman; a female = wifman. From these we get businessman, chairman, craftsman, fireman, fisherman, postman, policeman, shipman, workman, meaning someone in a denoted task or profession. The fanciful notion that man excludes woman, is being imposed by threats, however, especially in schools and universities. A student may be told that his marks will be reduced by ten per cent if he departs from inclusive language in his compositions. We have very thorough ways of dealing with intransigents in these times.

Words do alter their meaning over time, of course. Dictionaries and glossaries are essential for the reader of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Especially Shakespeare. Words that look familiar in him may be deceptive: let means to hinder or stop; prevent means to go before; knave means boy as well as rascal—its gradual shift over six centuries perhaps tells us something about the behaviour of boys. Person was generally pejorative. There’s a person at the door to see you never meant a lady or a gentleman.

Most such shifts take centuries, however. The movement to change, or forbid, or eliminate words intends to undermine thought. (George Orwell’s essay, The Politics of the English Language, has become another classic on this subject.) The calculated assault on language blocks ideas. Its movers intend that it shall. Formlessness, the blurring of any distinctions, helps controllers conceal their purposes under jargon words like diversity, equality, justice, democracy, even-handedness, and tolerance. Men and women become persons; actors and actresses become male and female actors; the singular pronouns which denote gender are replaced by the plural, to the frequent confusion of meaning. More curiously, although man seems to be banned, together with the masculine pronouns, master is not: a reviewer from the Montreal Gazette calls Baroness James a master of the English language. To call her mistress of the English tongue would be sexist and suggestive, presumably.

Robert Hart calls "‘Inclusive language’ nothing but an ideology, based upon the false notion that ‘Man’, adam, anthropos, homo, has lost any meaning inclusive of the entire human race, rendering it and all related words—him, his or he—exclusive. He points out for an example the distortion in a recent translation of the New Testament of the promise of salvation given to each individual in the Gospel of John 6 : 40 (I will raise him up on the last day). Because there is no substitute for him the Lord is misquoted as saying, I will raise them up on the last day. The promise appears to be made to a group. And another instance is the loss, in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, of the fathers (rendered parents) in Malachi 4 : 6 : And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, just when paternity is in crisis.

The crowning absurdity, deconstruction, abolishes the word itself, an exercise that ends in seeing through everything. To render the world invisible and the word unintelligible is to strike everyone blind and dumb. Language as a construction can indeed be wrecked; it can be pulverised and then reassembled to mean anything the demolition team want it to mean. The fragments fly out and away into the void. The Chair of Deconstruction is held by Professor Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice that when he used words they meant whatever he wanted them to mean. Deconstruction carries on very much in the envious spirit of heartier destroyers who in recent times have attacked palpable targets like the Raphael Cartoon in the National Gallery and the PiPta in the Vatican.

The disease of language also manifests itself in, among other solecisms, weak sentences, acquiescence in gender issues, and other fashionable, feeble clichés, and the repetition of vague terms like focus, person, communicator, relevance, inappropriate, etc. A satirical buzz-phrase generator (below) has long been distributed to writing classes and now circulates on the Internet.

Choose a word from each column and construct your own baffle-gab. And lest this seem exaggerated, consider that a recent pilot course has introduced ableism, ageism, anthropocentrism, consumerism, cultural imperialism, extremism, feminism, fundamentalism, heterosexism, humanism, racism, sexism and speciesism into a new Grade 12 Social Studies programme.

The decline of reading has of course accompanied the attack upon the word itself, an assault launched from the universities by professors whose very vocation it is to proclaim what they are, in fact, extirpating. Like many intellectual movements, deconstruction may seem esoteric, or even funny, but it has been fatally corrupting. David Lehman, in Signs of the Times, his capable history of this amazingly pretentious movement, has pointed out that it everywhere takes apart what it calls hierarchical systems and treats the structures of thought like bricks and mortar, to be demolished. He makes the uncomfortably accurate observation that deconstruction’s academic appeal depends largely on its novelty and on the opportunities it provides for commenting on literature. It flourishes like the ivy because the livelihood of the university teacher depends, absurdly, not on excellent teaching, but on publication. Academic periodicals exist to support this need. Truly, of the making of many books there is no end, and such study is a weariness of the spirit.

The pressure on academics to publish became particularly acute because the New Criticism (popular from the 1930s to the 1970s) had run its course, and because universities had expanded during that time and hired their faculty. Jobs and grants suddenly ran out; hope turned to panic. Professors had to perform, and the consequence for their already impoverished pupils was to further a pretentious system and force them into it. With the word, the past itself was to be deconstructed.

Professor Allan Bloom, in one of the most important books ever written about such problems, The Closing of the American Mind, observed that his American students believed in only two things: relativism and equality. He identified their isolation, their separation from the past, a past which they thought was crazy. They feared intolerance as the only sin, and embraced tolerance as a virtue, the only virtue. He commented on the flat souls of sophisticated students unable to imagine books as companions. When asked about the writers or the thinkers who had shaped them, they were puzzled and silent. The qualities he observed in European students, who were informed by their books and whose reading shaped their ambitions and their experience, have also been undermined, and his portrait of them may no longer be so true; but Russia, long cut off from the west, still views the world through the lens provided by literature, which gives Russians substantial experience of their culture and themselves.

Some trends go back quite a long way and some may easily be identified. In the shorter term, it seems clear that after World War II, which was the outcome of at least two centuries of political and philosophical upheaval, the survivors in the western world naturally decided to enjoy themselves after their near-escape. They had supped full of horrors and were determined to revel. They delighted in material comforts and they loved luxuries. These included having children, and in indulging them. Children were spoiled because exercising proper parental authority is tricky, time-consuming, expensive, and demanding. Thus there arose a generation which had known neither war nor deprivation, which had been imperfectly educated, which lacked philosophical and theological counsel, which had not been properly loved, nor properly disciplined, by its parents, and which was used to getting what it thought it wanted. Of course there were numerous exceptions, but the dominating tendencies became only too apparent when this group got to university and then into the positions of power. They would not serve the world; the world had to change for them. They were dreadfully practical. University degrees should guarantee large incomes. Everyone who desired a degree should get one. Science was in the ascendant. The curriculum had to be changed, to become scientific. Since 1990 some two hundred small liberal arts colleges have closed in the United States. The number of degrees in the humanities has halved since the 1960s. As Peter Kreeft has put it, the elves are leaving Middle Earth and heading for the Matrix.

The contemplation of beauty, which Plato (429-347 BC) taught was the path to the divine, has been rendered incomprehensible. Students certainly react when they can get at it, like the girl who appeared during the Halloween revels in an eighteenth-century dress, most beautifully wrought in purple cloth, with pearls, that she had made herself. She kept exclaiming: I feel so wonderful in this! I feel so wonderful in this! I feel like myself! I am real. If only I had lived in that age and could wear this ALL THE TIME!

Now another of Professor Bloom’s cogent arguments concerned the absolute necessity of responding to the bona fide needs of students and in a wonderful passage he re-states the tasks of educators everywhere: No real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice. The vision of what that nature is may be clouded, the teacher may be more or less limited, but his activity is solicited by something beyond him that at the same time provides him with a standard for judging his students’ capacity and achievement. Moreover there is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech. The soul… may at the outset of education require extrinsic rewards and punishments to motivate its activity; but in the end that activity is its own reward and is self-sufficient.

Some teachers have understandably given up trying to carry out such ideals. Dr. Peter Jones, a classicist who once lectured at the University of Newcastle, spoke for many when he wrote (in The Spectator, 13 September 1997, pp. 21-22): "The result was that, since we were now to be regarded as businesses, our ‘practices’ and ‘output’ had to be checked, monitored, controlled, evaluated and subjected to ‘market forces’. Enter the inquisition. Exit, slowly, loyalty. Further, since it was now the government that was determining our procedures, power in universities began to shift away from the people doing the teaching and researching to the administrators, who were charged with putting more and more government diktats into effect. Enter, then, the administration supremos, bent at every turn on fulfilling government requirements at whatever cost and in the teeth of whatever advice from their more intelligent administrative colleagues, let alone us struggling workers; and the exciting new breed of para-academic, the quality management teams, with nothing to contribute to university life but a new, inane vocabulary of business-speak, their fantasy worlds built on their fantasy language, the object of derision among both academics and the more intelligent businessmen… . I have nothing but admiration for my colleagues, those older ones trying to stem the tide, the younger ones trying to build a career, against all the odds. Nor is Newcastle University different from any other in the absurdities foisted upon it. But I can hardly wait to get back to those evil days when going to work did not bring another avalanche of illiterate drivel from quality controllers, bossy demands from administrators to describe the business skills inherent in teaching The Iliad, or classes the size of a Nuremberg rally—and endless contortions to ensure that those palpably unfitted for serious university work are kept in the system."

Professor Jones captures the predicament when he says that power shifted from teachers to administrators and that similar absurdities were visited on every other university!

Pedantic realism insisting on efficiency banishes allegory and poetry, of course, and regards the heroic literature of classics departments as merely superfluous. It is an outlook which has been some time in forming. Mary Shelley, writing for the London Magazine, stated long ago (March 1824): "What a different earth do we inhabit from that on which our forefathers dwelt! The antediluvian world [i.e. before the flood], strode over by mammoths, preyed upon by the megatherion, and peopled by the offspring of the Sons of God, is a better type of the earth of Homer, Herodotus, and Plato, than the hedged-in cornfields and measured hills of the present day. The globe was then encircled by a wall which paled in the bodies of men, whilst their feathered thoughts soared over the boundary; it had a brink, and in the deep profound which it overhung, men’s imaginations, eagle-winged, dived and flew, and brought home strange tales to their believing auditors. Deep caverns harboured giants; cloud-like birds cast their shadows upon the plains; while far out at sea lay islands of bliss, the fair paradise of Atlantis or El Dorado sparkling with untold jewels. Where are they now? The Fortunate Isles have lost the glory that spread a halo round them; for who deems himself nearer to the golden age, because he touches at the Canaries on his voyage to India? Our only riddle is the rise of the Niger; the interior of New Holland, our only terra incognita; and our sole mare incognitum, the north-west passage. But these are tame wonders, lions in leash… . What have we left to dream about?"

Science, in the search for accurate results, must ignore the transcendent qualities of the Fortunate Isles; it necessarily treats phenomena as independent of any consciousness or mind. The unintended consequence for popular thought has been so to limit perception that talk of heaven and earth, the human condition, and the concept of a moral cosmos, appears frivolous or fantastical. In the old world view, mentioned above, things become real when they are named. Hence the ancient and theological thought that God’s Word creates the world; but Newton’s sleep blots out the word (Logos) and splits the observer from the observed. We sleep, but have nothing to dream about. The world ceases to be a garment, which is what it was like for the ancients, and turns into a disparate collection of objects to be studied apart from the observer. The title of a very popular book, Man for Himself, confirms the end-state of this line of thought.

In displacing theology, science, or rather its practical application, technology, becomes more and more its own end, leaving a great abyss, and eventually it threatens man himself. Good and evil, right and wrong, vanish. The resulting hunger for values, lacking traditional nourishment, had satiated itself with some crazy meat by the end of the twentieth century. The philosophers until very recent times judged conduct by firm standards and identified good and evil; such words have long fallen under the interdict, to be supplanted by a corrupted vocabulary which replaces right and wrong with misguided, undesirable, and inappropriate. An accompanying displacement has been the decidedly odd tendency to repent of and apologise for the sins of others. Government ministers apologise for slavery, for oppression of Indians, and even the Pope apologises for the Crusades. We seem to think we can be forgiven for, and even to forgive, the sins of others, a privilege formerly restricted to the Son of God.

Everywhere in what once was Christendom the studies which provide a bulwark against totalitarianism, propaganda, bureaucracy, and the dominance of the state, are being eliminated. In my own academy, close reading of the Bible and the New Testament was gradually given up for something called World Religions; Bible readings, prayers, and hymns were dropped from the regular assemblies; Latin was abandoned and Computer Studies substituted for it because that was student choice; modern foreign languages were not carried on right up to graduation; and English Literature, which has been fighting a rear-guard action for years all through the western world, was reduced to a single elective course. History, which has long disappeared under the rubric of social studies, is taught hardly at all, an alarming lack in an age which regards as sacrosanct the right of everyone to vote in political elections.

Furthermore, the new authorities seemed unaware that they had to set the example, that their own bearing and discipline determined the atmosphere and spoke more decisively than their uplifted voices and meandering memoranda. They encouraged the students to argue with the teachers, to do all their work on computers, to watch films instead of concentrating on text, and to spend much time on projects and outside activities. The bearing and dignity, the gravitas and the family feeling inherited from the long English public school tradition, disappeared. So did the mystical unity achieved by means of uniforms, assemblies, solemn words, customs, and offices and organisations that allowed each to feel his part in something larger than himself. The uniform, that defining livery of membership, was ever more carelessly worn and correctness in dress increasingly ignored. The custom and ceremony, which the poet Yeats identified as progenitors of innocence and beauty, had been largely effaced.

In a self-seeking, isolating culture, few have been read to even as children. Instead, children at the most sensitive stages of their development are subjected to vivid images which replace the life-enhancing tales, the tradition of nursery rhyme handed down through generations, the songs and the stories and the games known for millennia. Wide and independent book-learning is essential, at a later stage, but many people today have no reading life. Some subsist, if they read at all, on a diet of junk best-sellers and current fiction. When classics are mentioned, pupils can usually say that they have seen the film, if there is one, but even the realms of The Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, the major poets, have become terra incognita. Shakespeare seems to have survived in part in schools, but he is shorn of his context (history is irrelevant to our shining modern arrangements). Some of my senior students, an intelligent, lively group, were untroubled by the incongruities of Twelfth Night in nineteenth-century costume, because it was all the same to them. The characters were merely wearing old clothes. The past has become a strange, dim, theme park where oddly dressed shadows flicker about, gibbering like the souls in the old Greek Hades; in the foreground flames the fast-moving present with all its technological clap-trap and trendy talk and obsessive preoccupation with the self. This strange world of rapid movement and shifting perspective is, oddly enough, held at the same time to be permanent and absolute and to take precedence over anything that has gone before.

With language becoming increasingly inarticulate, and even clever scholars reduced to a few hundred words and stock clichés, writers like Chaucer (1343-1400), with his huge vocabulary and condensed expression, to say nothing of his middle English tongue, is just too difficult. Indeed, works formerly read with ease by ten-year-olds are now judged demanding even for university students. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, once a stock staple with thirteen-year-olds studying the French revolution, was taken out of the system altogether, as too challenging. A further irony is the inability even of some university professors and university scholars, themselves, to write properly crafted sentences, to use the apostrophe, and to employ the subjunctive. At the same time they underestimate the young in weakening the curriculum. An alarming trend has been the rewriting of Shakespeare’s plays in modern English or to fit a political or social agenda.

In a morally empty cosmos, families and schools cannot educate the young. The family influence stops at the front door, if it reaches that far, given the invasion of the home via television, the internet, and the mobile phone. T. S. Eliot, writing to The Times in 1950 of anxieties in America about the effect of television programmes, any programmes, no matter how good, had been among the first to understand that this medium was unlike any other and that the justifications for it—citing wonderful dramas leading children to the classics—were self-interested excuses to get the thing into the living-room.

Furthermore, the reduction of content in schools and the narrowing of life to materialism and entertainment has been accompanied by other even more powerful tendencies. Before western cultures regressed to the preliterate, precocious immaturity of the television tribe, children matured gradually, through the word, through instruction, through discipline imparted by adults. The teenage peer group, that substitute for family and affection, has become like the tribal clan, moving about in crowds, living to itself, developing its own rituals, and dependent on the approval of friends and of its own authorities, including certain orchestrators who control the airwaves. (Mediaeval thinkers who held that demons inhabit the air may have been on to something.)

That the consequences have been devastating for traditional culture and for the institutions upon which our lives and affections have been fastened for centuries, has long been only too obvious. The computers Mr. Blair was keen to bring into every British classroom, are, like television, icy and isolating, and convert their users into receivers. They make many wonderful short-cuts possible and, put to their right use, they save much labour; but they are just as likely to blunt the moral sense, to diminish the ability to cope with life, to vitiate the imagination, and to teach destruction and violence. They do this because they fragment. They disconnect cause from effect, and action from consequence.

Peter Hitchens, a journalist who made his own study of the moral collapse in Britain, observed that a concomitant social trend, the loss of parental control, is a far deeper danger than the mere destruction of the idea of right and wrong sexual conduct, catastrophic though this is. It has snapped some of the most important of the invisible chains which keep our society from satisfying its passions without restraint.

Here is another critic, on another continent. Thomas Millar, child psychiatrist, who deals in his book The Omnipotent Child with the practical consequences of the above disorders, quotes the Russian-American Professor Pitirim Sorokin’s delineation of the four-hundred year decline of our culture, in which values are relative and eventually become devoid of universal recognition and authority, conscience disappears, contracts are no longer binding, power, force, and fraud lead to war, revolution, and brutality; freedom gives way to unbridled licence; the family disintegrates—any profound difference between socially sanctioned marriage and illicit sex relationship will disappear—suicide, mental illness and crime increase, and the sensate culture declines into bankruptcy and destruction.

Millennia ago, Plato observed similar problems when he identified four imperfect societies and described the character or personality produced by each. Of democracy, which he ranked just above tyranny, he wrote that the spirit of liberty went to extremes, that the very animals caught the infection. Parents feared their children, who showed no respect for their parents. Everyone was on an equal footing. The parent and the child changed places; the schoolmasters flattered their students; the young argued with their elders and the old tried to imitate the young. People became super-sensitive, resenting any control or authority as tyranny and ended by ignoring all laws, whether written or unwritten. Plato saw that democratic man lacked discipline and order, that one day he is enjoying music and women and wine, the next exercising in the gym on a water diet.

The beloved English essayist, Joseph Addison, wrote in The Spectator (6 October 1711): The Obedience of Children to their Parents is the Basis of all Government, and set forth as the measure of that Obedience which we owe to those whom Providence hath placed over us. An excellent biography of Addison’s contemporary, Daniel Defoe, lies on my writing table: its author remarks that the seventeenth century actually believed the family to be a microcosm and the basis of sound society. Such self-evident truths are really just relics of the past, apparently. And the great questions of life must as a result become inexplicable, or cannot even be asked. How, one might wonder, does Portia in The Merchant of Venice know that the Prince of Morocco and her other suitors will keep their word never to seek woman in the way of marriage? Why does Jane Eyre not elope with Mr. Rochester, leaving his mad wife growling in the attic? And what, in heaven’s name, is all that fuss about Lydia running off with Mr. Wickham (in Pride and Prejudice) without troubling to marry him? Such heroes and heroines face ethical dilemmas that have been made to seem remote or quaint to cynical readers who regard nothing as a big deal.

This relegation of the most commonplace and life-giving truths to distant epochs that are made to seem alien is all the more debilitating for being tacit. The assumptions re-appear in student essays, which sometimes state, for example, that people believed in love in Elizabethan times, that telling the truth was important to them, that hard work was a virtue, as if these were strange idiosyncrasies characteristic of a curiously eccentric age and as outmoded as doublets and farthingales. It has become a cliché that the past is another (and presumably inaccessible) country and that they do things differently there (so it can have nothing to do with us, right?)

So far from liberating the spirit and permitting untrammelled freedom, such trends have disordered the understanding. The emphasis on individualism produces desolation and confusion. The right to happiness ends in resentment, unless people know themselves and what they really want. Time-saving devices create more rush and worry and work. Everyone has the right to sexual satisfaction, which even in perverse forms has become fashionable and seems really to be regarded as the prime good; yet at the same time even a casual gesture or admiring word can land a man in court for harassment. Nursery rhymes have to be amended to avoid damaging the sensitive psyche of children who watch violent videos in solitude. The well-named brothers Grimm are banned or rewritten, and Humpty Dumpty has to be mended again after that fatal mishap at the wall; but soft pornography streams through living rooms to be seen even by the very young. The crazy inversions and contradictions have become commonplace. The examples go on and on; they are everywhere; the lists write themselves.

No consensus, no connection, links the community from head to foot. Instead, there has been an upending. Decisions of anonymous bureaucrats and special interest groups are too often implemented before any protest can begin. Protests, petitions, letters to the editor and so on are allowed because they are largely ineffective, a mere flailing of whirling words. Democracy, which was supposed, naively enough, to be the rule of the people, turns out to be the rule of elected or unelected dictators who answer to lobbyists and pressure groups. During the seventeenth century, when social and political upheavals exiled the king, disordered the state, and ushered confusion in, a popular ditty satirically sang the changes: All this world is quite turned round.

The wealthy societies that are clearly floundering, the institutions that are failing, have their energetic defenders. One symptom of this is the patronising attitude that permeates even academic biographies. Contempt for any enduring value accompanies self-centredness manifested in professorial works which comment condescendingly and not seldom contemptuously on a period or personality, and even insert the writer himself, with his dreams about his subject. Such a style reverses the proper order of biography, which should be transparent, allowing the reader to meet the subject in unimpeded clarity.

The quick is God-flame, in everything. And the dead is dead, wrote D. H. Lawrence, the controversial novelist. He meant the novel, which cannot exist without being quick. And what was quickness? It seems to consist in an odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness. The man in the novel, he thought, must have a relatedness to all other things in the novel.

A most illuminating illustration comes in a wonderful and little-known book by Max Picard, The Flight from God. He juxtaposes a passage from James Joyce, in which everything in the depressing modern city passes on, and no one is anything, with a quotation from the seventeenth-century poet, Thomas Traherne: The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things… . Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places.

Our house of custom, ceremony, and language has been falling into ruin. To survive this desperate crisis of being and to build back requires courage and a humility that can direct the will and the energy aright. Perhaps the very emptiness and desperation of the new order of conspicuous consumption and spiritual vacuity described by the writers quoted above, and by many other social critics, will impel such a return eventually, on the principle of the ancient maxim: give up what you have that you may receive. After all, the victims of the declining culture are now very numerous.

Society is responsible for character, as Plato knew, and as Aristotle (384-322 BC) his famous pupil, stressed. If we follow Plato’s method and attempt to characterise western societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, do we not have to recognise some ugly symptoms produced by mechanism, consumerism, and secularism, driven by greed with ugly energy? The emotional complaints—emptiness, meaninglessness, vague depression, disillusionment about relationships, a loss of values, yearning for personal fulfilment, a longing for spirituality—

suggest a massive passing of power, a failure in courage.

In The End of Education Neil Postman identified the unsatisfying gods of Consumerism, Utility, Technology, and Multiculturalism, and advanced five alternative narratives: The Spaceship Earth, The Fallen Angel, the American Experiment, The Law of Diversity, and the World Makers, corresponding to the ecological movement, the sin of pride in science, the need for open-ended free public discourse and argument, the strength in difference, and the power of the word to shape the world. These are variations on very old themes.

Our students, and all of us, for that matter, deserve to be told that we already have the answers in our tradition, that it is profoundly relevant, and indeed that we cannot be human without that legacy. The false assumption, that past thinkers cannot help us with unique problems of the present, blocks the way to recovery. The idea that our problems are peculiar to ourselves and soluble, if at all, by new methods, that no writer of the past can answer them, does very conveniently refuse the authority of the ages, rendering it impotent.

In his desire to abandon philosophy and gain practical power by leaguing himself with the disarming evil one, Dr. Faustus, in the old play by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), was among the moderns. He had forgotten that becoming, being, and inhabiting a world, must precede thinking and reading and action. He had avoided with sharp, neurotic revulsion the knowledge that the world begins not with man, but with the creative Word. He wanted to stop the very planets in their courses even as devils dragged him down to Hell.

The Queen of the Sciences may have lost her throne, but the human task remains: to refashion the world, just as the writer turns lines to make them his own. For centuries nearly everyone assumed that what the senses apprehended was a manifestation, real in itself, but contingent. Life could neither explain itself nor be comprehended by reason alone but sprang from something beyond it. The single vision, however, drains the world of emotional or psychological or spiritual significance. Giant Despair goes into Education and shuts his students up in Doubting Castle. Recovery requires a leap over the wall.

CHAPTER 2

In the Beginning

Dr. Faustus asks a question. The unbearable Word. Creation accounts in Genesis. Allegorical interpretations. Evolution and catastrophe. Participation. The principle of Hell. The science of understanding. The companionship of books.

The first aspect of the double vision that we have to become aware of is the distinction between the natural and the human environment. There is the natural environment which is simply there, and is, in mythological language, our mother. And there is the human environment, the world we are trying to build out of the natural one.

—Northrop Frye, The Double Vision.

We are living in that split second between the disappearance of God and the disappearance of His image in the human mirror. The image is the life of our souls, our consciences. That is what our present ‘culture war’ is about.

—Peter Kreeft, Ecumenical Jihad.

The real problem at this moment of our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.

—Pope Benedict XVI

W HEN FAUSTUS ASKS, Now tell me who made the world?, the suave devil merely responds I will not, and urges him to think of hell. That is because Mephistopheles cannot acknowledge any author of his own being. Such an admission must be fatal to the radically self-sufficient, who insist on their absolute independence, who pretend that they are not creatures. (A creature = any created thing; a creature is contingent, dependent, did not make itself, and does not explain itself.) Like Satan in a famous epic poem, of whom more later, they prefer reigning in their own hell to serving in heaven.

A very ancient narrative declares that creation sprang from God’s Word, the word that the gentlemanly fiend Mephistopheles could not bear to hear. The Old Testament Biblical account, which comes down through the English-speaking tradition in the stately words of the King James Bible, depends on at least two sources. The first, perhaps by a priestly author and certainly the most recent, used to be familiar as household words:

Genesis I.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Genesis II.

1. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

2. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

3. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested.

The second creation account (Genesis 2 : 4 - 3 : 24) depicts the Lord God (elohim) making man from the dust, and giving this first man (Adam) a help mate; it narrates his eventual fall through temptation by a serpent (no mention of the devil).

Who wrote these tales, and how did they reach us in this form? What does the story tell us now? One of these questions arises from the other in modern days, when it has come to be widely believed that nothing in an old book can really be true. Can a crude concept of God creating mankind like a child moulding clay possibly persuade anyone familiar with scientific data? The creation account in Chapter 2 of Genesis does talk like that: God makes the male just as Zeus, in the Greek myth, ordered the Titan, Prometheus, to shape man from the red earth of Panopus near Delphi; and then Zeus breathed life into man. New readers are surprised, however, by the subtlety and sophistication of the first creation account, quoted above, by a writer sometimes labelled P by scholars, especially that he uses no anthropomorphic language.

But how to take seriously a sequence that provides light before the creation of the sun?

The writer, the mysterious P, made use of the cosmology available to him. This first creation narrative, one of the most familiar stories of Christendom, contradicts both (1) the materialistic view of a mechanical but absurd universe, leached of meaning, and (2) the pagan belief in the world itself as divine, a pervasive idea in that writer’s day. An archetype, or model, it depicts a deliberate, ascending order, narrated as a Parable. The Word creates the world and later is embodied in the world (John 1: 14). A common misinterpretation, fostered by the sceptical French philosopher, Voltaire (1694-1778), holds that the author