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THE TEXT'S THE THING REFLECTIONS FROM THE HUMANITIES
JOHN NORTH
“Who is it who can tell me who I am?”
—King Lear
“God’s my life! . . . I have had a most rare vision.”
—Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Sir, why are you a Christian?” Kelly asked, standing an awkward six feet away from my desk. Two months from graduating at the top end of her computer science class, she was taking Shakespeare as an option. After eight weeks of lectures in the comfortable anonymity of a large class, she had come by this morning unannounced to ask a class-related question as a ploy to see if I was approachable enough for her to ask the one biggest, most real question from the depths of her private distress. Knowing that her father was Chinese and her mother Dutch, I vaguely wondered about her impassive expression. My next lecture was only twenty minutes away, but the urgency of this question had to be answered in the moment. “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15, KJV), says Peter. So as Kelly sat in sober silence I spoke of my lifelong need for daily forgiveness, of the compassion of the Savior of my soul, of his incarnation and resurrection and ascension on my behalf, of the Lord who is as infinitely minute in his love and awareness as he is great in his creating and sustaining of billions of stars, the “micro” as well as the “macro” Jesus Christ. Then I gave her that excellent book, 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated, by Professor Donald Knuth of Stanford,1whom some know as the father of computing in North America, and who in that little volume provides an explanation of every chapter 3 and verse 16 in the Bible, with accompanying illustrations by calligraphers from around the world. The volume focuses on John 3:16, which as Professor Knuth points out is the best-known verse in the Bible. I suggested she speak to the Lord herself in the quiet of her room, and left for class. The next day Kelly appeared at the door, her face now glowing with vitality and “the peace that passes understanding.” Why have you come to Christ, Kelly? Her reply: “Sir, I’m a bad girl.” Her final paper for that Shakespeare class closed with the directness of St. Paul, “He that believeth not is condemned already” (John 3:18, KJV).
Kelly had asked King Lear’s question, “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” Overcome with shame, she echoed Lear’s cry, “I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead.”2 And now here she was, like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (you may remember him as the egoistical tradesman who when lost in the forest at night had been found, cuddled, protected, and admired, ass of a man that he was, by Titania, Queen of the Air), proclaiming in awe, “God’s my life.” Many voices were telling Kelly who she was: she was caught between two cultures; she was a computer geek; and (most shrill voice of all) she was an immoral undergraduate woman. Voices she could no longer ignore or deny. Until at last she had heard the voice of the Lover of her soul, saying, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest . . . unto your souls. . . . There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Matt. 11:28–29; Rom. 8:1, KJV). Here was a voice telling her who she was, a voice she ached to hear, again in the language of Shakespeare, whose Titania, Queen of the Air, a thinly disguised Christ figure, says to Bottom: “I do love thee: therefore go with me, / . . . And I will purge thy mortal grossness so / That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.”3
“For proud and rebellious and self-sufficient man . . . to be brought to his knees and to his tears before the actual majesty and grace and power of Jesus Christ is the greatest event that can happen to any man. . . . And those who are engaged in mediating this event, the evangelists, are the supreme heralds of God,” says Charles Malik.4Our Lord so calls us all, and fits us as university professors spending our lives in communicating with young people at this critical stage in their lives, the time when they are separating from home, choosing a spouse and a profession, discovering their gifts, developing their worldview. They read our souls more eagerly than they read our minds. We in the Humanities have many resources for our fellows who are asking, as did King Lear, “Who am I?” Our students’ questions include: “What is worthy of devoting my life to? What am I worth, and to whom? Where is excitement and vitality and intensity of relationships to be found?” But most of all, “Where is a beloved who loves me?” Last year a student group asked of what my life consisted: “The same as yours, a passionate searching out of intimacy, beauty, and understanding, in that order. The extent to which I find each is in some curious way the extent of my knowing Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Communing with him I exclaim, in the words of Shakespeare’s character Bottom when his friends marvel at what has happened to him, ‘God’s my life! . . . I have had a most rare vision. . . . I am to discourse wonders. . . . I will tell you everything, right as it fell out.’”5
Over the years the most focused, boldness-requiring of the two tasks for me has been to win the souls of my students and colleagues for Jesus Christ. Years ago I remember walking to campus and being prompted to pray, “Lord, it has been a long time since I have spoken of Jesus to anyone here. . . .” At the same moment I saw half a block away an approaching student. As she came closer I recognized her from one of my classes. We met, stopped, and in ten minutes I recounted to her the ways of my Savior. We parted, I astonished at the responsiveness of the Holy Spirit. When hearts are won, the fullness of joy and depth of fellowship far exceeds that rising from any academic accomplishments.
In fact, for me it has often followed the winning of minds. Over the years, to present the abundant Christian content of English literature in a matter-of-fact rather than in a coercive or defensive way has become almost routine. This is a winning of the minds. For instance, to put Jesus’ statement, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up. . . . And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (John 3:14; 12:32, KJV) in the context of the Hebrew Moses putting a serpent of brass on a pole (see Num. 21:9, KJV) and of the Greek caduceus (the common medical symbol) is quite straightforward. The linking of Christian, Hebrew, and Greek cultures both takes the sting out of the issue, and enriches our Lord’s assertion for the class. To observe that in Christianity as well as in Jewish, Hindu, and Greek cultures one of the strongest metaphors for knowing God is sexual “knowledge” brings light into their eyes and attentive physical stillness.
Only this past week, following the example set by Donald Knuth, who each year at term end invites his students to ask any question, within or beyond the course materials, I myself gave that same invitation one month into term, inviting them to ask in class, or in my office, or by e-mail, or by phone, day or night. So Carol, a fourth-year math student, dropped by my office yesterday afternoon and opened with, “Sir, how did you come to teach Shakespeare the way you do?” Earlier in the morning the Shakespeare class discussion had been about King Richard the Third, Clarence’s nightmare of drowning, finding himself in hell, and facing the accusations of his life of sinfulness. This nightmare is followed in the next scenes by Clarence’s prayer of confession and repentance, then his testimony of the forgiveness of “our dear Redeemer” to men sent to murder him. His testimony of the gospel of forgiveness is echoed by the dying King Edward IV in the opening scene of the next act. Carol affirmed, “Yes, sir, what you teach is simply the detail of the play, but others don’t teach that kind of thing.” She listened to my confession of Christ, then went off to work in the campus coffee shop, our discussion to be picked up next week.
Winning others’ souls can only follow the winning of my own. That monumental ongoing battle I fight on several fronts. One is my habitual congregational worship of Christ. Another is daily prayer and Scripture reading with my wife, the only certain way to deal with lurking resentments before sleeping (“Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” that astute traveling Roman Jew Paul urges in Eph. 4:26, KJV). Yet another is disciplined service, in teaching Christian formation classes at our church or in local hospital chaplaincy work. Spur-of-the-moment courage to respond to colleagues and students like Kelly and Carol is especially difficult. Every new occasion is an unexpected and momentary confrontation with hell, a leap into the void. That courage has increased when with a hungry heart I have searched out soul food in books like those of Paul Tournier, the Swiss psychiatrist, who tells of the healing of patients’ souls in his writings Escape from Loneliness, The Person Reborn, The Strong and the Weak, Guilt and Grace, A Place for You, and The Meaning of Persons; in commentaries and biblical expositions like those of Helmut Thielicke, the German pastor and theologian, writing How to Believe Again, Freedom of the Christian Man, I Believe: The Christian’s Creed, Between God and Satan, and Being a Christian When the Chips Are Down; in sociological analyses such as the French Jacques Ellul’s Violence, The Meaning of the City, Money and Power, and The New Demons; in handbooks such as the nterVarsity Press’s Hard Sayings of the Bible; or the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (“I am soft sift in an hourglass . . .”6).
For many years, one of my greatest consolations was knowing, as a result of reading Tournier’s case histories, that were the sufferings of life ever to become unbearable, for a thousand dollars I could go to Switzerland and pour out my grief to a Christian who would always listen, never condemn, always understand, always fellowship. To know that such a man lived and worshiped and cared, and where he could be found, as it turned out, was enough, so I never did have to make the journey. When he reached his nineties I had the privilege of meeting him, in Belfast, standing by his chair unable to speak a syllable, and hearing him say “Write, it will be easier.” I did, only needing to say “Thank you, Paul.” Could any of my students gain similar sustenance from me, Lord?
One of the most consoling ways of saving my soul, and yet also a discipline requiring me to bare this soul, is to establish regular Christian fellowship with a variety of individuals across campus. Several years ago a colleague from another department phoned at 1:00 a.m.: “John, sorry to bother you so late, but I know that sometimes you have unusual folk stay at your place. Could I stay with you overnight?” Sure. “Do you mind coming to pick me up?” Of course I’ll come, where? “At the jail. I have no money, no glasses, no wallet, only my shorts, shirt, tennis shoes, and only this one phone call.” I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.
It was the beginning of a rare intimacy with a fellow believer in marital difficulty, an intimacy that has enlarged to include his now teenage children, and has strengthened during the past six years rather than diminished. We share each other’s griefs and joys in a friendship that I could not have imagined between men of such different temperaments and interests. It all began that night of his humiliating phone call, when he heard a familiar voice saying what he had scarce dared hope for: “You are my friend, come home with me.” Earlier that evening he had heard other voices: his wife calling him a brute; the police mocking him and putting him needlessly on public display as a university professor who had kicked his wife; a court order telling him he could not return home.
I first took university classes seriously in my fourth year of undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia, reading S. T. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Until then I had been more caught up in my girlfriend, my part-time job, the struggles of separating from my family home and of discovering my own way in life. Then one day everything came together when I read Coleridge’s seminal poem in our Romantic Poetry class with Professor Craig Millar. In that poem Coleridge records his conversion from Unitarianism to Christ, in the persona of the mariner. You may remember the tale: the mariner had idly shot an albatross while on a voyage. Calamities followed, until, he records, “instead of the cross the Albatross about my neck was hung”7by his accusing shipmates. Both he and they recognized that he had been an unwitting participant in the crucifixion. He tells of finding relief from the anguish of his guilt only when, seeing sea-snakes (“slimy things that swam upon a slimy sea”) rear up so that flakes of phosphorescent light fell off them, “my kind saint took pity on me, and I blessed them unaware. / The selfsame moment I could pray; / And from my neck so free / The Albatross fell off, and sank / Like lead into the sea.”8 In other words, when he was enabled to see the beauty of Christ. The poem ends with lines so poignant they are worth repeating at length:
O Wedding Guest! This soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ’twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage feast, ’
Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!—
To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay!
Farewell, farewell! But this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best who loveth best,
All things both great and small,
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.9
I knew that the gospel records Jesus saying, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3:14, KJV); and even at twenty-one I knew the comfort and peace and renewal of Christian congregational worship. Suddenly here I was reading one of the great poets who had put into words my own life experience. That poem somehow validated my being. I asked an eager question, then another, and another in rapid succession—I, one of the many passive observers in class who never asked questions. In a moment I was hooked on English literature and have never turned back. The mariner put into words my own loneliness, my own route to peace, my own life of worship, and especially my own call to evangelism, of which I was then only vaguely aware. The mariner describes all of us as called to evangelize—a hermit, startled by the mariner’s manner, asks with intensity (as Kelly and others have since asked me):
“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say—
What manner of man art thou?”
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns;
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.10
During the intervening years I have become increasingly aware how precisely Coleridge’s voice describes my own inner state from day to day. I have discovered that most of the canon of English literature as well as many non-canonical works have been written by self-confessed Christians, men and women using this art form to glorify God in carrying out the two tasks of saving souls and minds. Wonderful that my profession has required me to instruct so many thousands of students in the works of Tennyson, Browning, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Herrick, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, e.e. Cummings—all these Christ-confessors. Even the despairing search of Franz Kafka (“The Hunger Artist,” The Trial, “Metamorphosis,” “The Country Doctor”) and Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape) provides parables of our souls’ longing for God.
Hearing the Voice of God among Many Voices
Walking down the hospital corridor late one evening, having been called to the bedside of a dying eighty-five-year-old, in his youth a World War II frogman in the Royal Navy, I passed a stretcher on which Mr. Fujikama was being wheeled into a private room. Hello, Mr. Fujikama. What are you doing here? “I have cancer of the spine, Mr. North. Serious. What are you doing here?”—all in his gentle Japanese accent, as he folded his hands and attempted a bow while lying flat on his back. Mr. Fujikama had been the high school math teacher as well as orchestra and choir leader of our three sons. Born and educated in Japan, he had come to Canada and spent his career teaching high school. With a marked accent, a rare gentleness of spirit, and always elegant manners, Mr. Fujikama had been one of our sons’ favorite teachers. I replied that I was a volunteer chaplain, that I found this spending of the evenings with the sick and dying to be a thought-provoking and peace-giving balance to my days spent with late adolescents in the fullness of their lives.
Several days later as I was passing down the palliative care hallway, called to see another man in the last hours of a cancer death, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Mr. Fujikama had been moved to a room on this ward. So an hour later I stopped in. He lay very still, bed covers perfectly smoothed by his Caucasian wife, a woman who expressed her heartbreak by vigorously keeping everything immaculate. Asking him how he was, I was perplexed at his whispered “I have a mathematical problem.” What is the problem? “I won’t get in the gate. I may be an hour late, or fifteen minutes late, or three minutes late, but I won’t get in the gate.” Still puzzled. Why won’t you get in the gate? “He won’t let me,” returned the whisper. Mrs. Fujikama interrupted with the strident urgency of despair, “You’ll get in any gate there is!” Who won’t let you? The whisper was fading. “Why, Jesus! He’s the gatekeeper!” Ah. Now I recognized the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit. “I feel thy finger and find Thee,” G. M. Hopkins explains.11So as his wife bustled distractedly in another part of the large room, I told once again of the Savior of my soul, the man of Calvary who gave his life for me, the Man of Sorrows who is acquainted with grief, who sees each sparrow fall; of the forgiveness of the cross, the freedom and joy of resurrection (mine in the shadow and efficacy of Christ’s), the atonement that waits, even and especially for the dying thief. And of no more pain, no more tears, no more death. His Asian eyes held mine intensely, then he slept.
Next evening, walking again the same hallway and seeing him alone, I went in. The TV racketed away, his wife gone home for dinner. At my soft hello he opened his eyes. Scarcely able to speak and helpless to reach for the TV switch just at arm’s length, he nodded me to turn it off. His last whispered words, eyes again closed, lips scarcely moving, were, “Mathematical question solved. Thank you.” Again he slept. A few days later his dear Redeemer welcomed him, face to face.
As Charles Malik says, the university truly is one of the great institutions of the Western world: it produces the accountants, the lawyers, the business folk, the doctors, the engineers—and the high school teachers like Mr. Fujikama. As our eldest son later reminded me, Mr. Fujikama had taught the choir Handel’s Messiah every year, yet in all those years had not encountered that same Messiah himself. Throughout his university training in mathematics and music he had not stopped to listen to, perhaps was unable to hear, the voice of the Lord. Often the crises of adolescence alert our ears to the small soft voice of Christ, but only at that final crisis in the valley of the shadow of death did Mr. Fujikama seek and was found. He had known and loved Handel’s oratorio, he had taught hundreds of young people the voice of the Lord in the Scriptures that Handel set to music, but it took the intimacy of a compassionate fellow being, walking and talking with him in the valley of the shadow, for him to hear the voice of Jesus (“You will be my witnesses,” he tells us [Acts 1:8]) voicing forgiveness to him, inviting him to walk together on across the river.
In the Humanities our students hear many voices, all originating from the same Accuser: voices telling them that they are victims. Racial victims, women victims, colonial victims; victims of the moralists, victims of the government, victims of their family, victims of the university administration, financial victims, victims of logic, victims of the church. The same voices urge them to rebel: against the government, the men or the women, the family, marriage, business, religion, fashion. Students are encouraged to establish their identity as ones who accuse and fight—fight victimhood, fight the decadent west, fight the establishment. They are indoctrinated by what Robert Irwin in his book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents12 describes as the adversarial mentality so common among students and radical lecturers. The result is alienation and a self-righteous anger that corrodes the soul.
In accomplishing our two tasks, we are latter-day Elijahs sent as the prophet Malachi foretells in the final sentence of Hebrew Scripture, “before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: [to] turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I [the Lord] come and smite the earth with a curse” (Mal. 4:5–6, KJV). Appropriately, the New Testament begins by tracing back through history the son-father relationships from the birth of the Son of Man all the way back to Adam, the son of God. From that point on it describes the heart of our heavenly Father turning toward his children—“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. . . .” (John 3:16, KJV)—and the voice calling out from chapter to chapter to turn our hearts toward the Messiah, who lived, so loved us that “for the joy that was set before him” (Heb. 12:2, KJV) he accepted crucifixion so that we lost souls and distracted minds might find our way home to our heavenly Father. Calling, calling, calling. The New Testament then bears record of the thousands of hearts and minds that heard his voice and turned.
Jesus urges us to voice his gospel throughout the world (Mark 16:15); and he has recently brought the world onto our campuses: every religion, every race, every tongue. We just need to “preach the gospel” here in our own backyard, with the authority of a professorship and the guiding hand of his Holy Spirit. To do so without abusing our authority in a secular institution requires only the winsomeness of our own broken hearts, together with a holy boldness to confess Christ when students come asking. And asking they do certainly come—although it took me a while to recognize the ever-varying form of the question. Sometimes it is quite blunt, like Kelly’s “Sir, why are you a Christian?” or last year Mark’s astonishing request as he caught up with me after class and said, “Sir, may I have coffee with you, as you have offered us all today, to make up for the missed class?” Yes of course. Anything in particular on your mind? “Well, sir (Mark is in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve), I know all about Jesus of course. But I don’t know how to be sure that he is in my heart.” Shock! When had I ever spoken in class about that? “Well, sir, you haven’t directly. But I have taken four of your courses by now, you know. . . .” That evening after two hours in a Williams Coffee Pub, Mark plying me with questions, I asked if he wanted to respond to the voice of Jesus right then, eyes wide open looking soberly at each other, following me phrase after phrase. He smartly responded “Yes, sir!” In the eighteen months since that night, watching the growth in faith of this young military man, I have wondered about the mid-sixties couple who sat literally at our elbows on the fixed adjoining seats of the little “foursome” table, prolonging their coffee in complete silence for two hours. Why did the Holy Spirit seat them beside Mark and myself? Were they joining the battle in prayer? Perhaps angels unaware? Or had they never yet heard the voice of the master themselves? Suppose I will have to wait until “that day” when “I shall know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12, KJV). Other times the question is indirect, or even silent. Stacy is now in the fourth week of the third course she has taken with me—two of them last term. She sits at eye level in a small rising amphitheatre, just to the right of my normal line of vision, in other words, where she can most watch without being watched. Three hours a week she leans forward, motionless, intense with unvoiced questions. Holy Spirit, show me the moment and the answer, for Stacy’s sake, and for Christ’s.
The president of one of our most acclaimed Canadian universities, himself an English professor and formerly a clergyman, two years ago observed to me, “The Humanities have lost their way in the past two decades.” He is not alone in his opinion, for as I write, an e-mail arrives announcing a Symposium on the Humanities: Finding a Place in Changing Times at Columbia University. The same e-mail announces The Fifth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities at the American University of Paris. Students seem to be arriving at the same conclusion, voting with their feet by walking away from the humanities so that across North America humanities student registrations drop markedly. Senior undergraduate and graduate students remark to me that they are moving away from English studies because the literature classroom is so heavily politicized, so technology-focused, and because postmodernism and critical theory are so dismissive of the text for its own sake on its own terms that they cannot study literature itself. In other words, our young people are sick of our sickness. Worse, critical theory, with the nihilism and cynicism that Charles Malik denounces so clearly, tells them that every philosophical and religious position is culturally determined, having no ultimate validity. As Christian Terry Eagleton has recently announced in a dramatic late-career about-face,
Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness.13
We have silenced the voices that would speak peace to their souls and wisdom to their minds. As Kafka says in “A Hunger Artist,” they find themselves on a hunger strike because the abundant food is not to their taste.14Or to change the metaphor, we find ourselves like Elijah, straining our ears in whirlwind, earthquake, and fire, listening for the voice of God, but not hearing it because that voice is a “still small voice.” Let the Scripture speak:
Behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:11–12, KJV) The “canonical” texts within the humanities are rife with the “voice of God” speaking to the “angst of man”—and so often our job is simply to lead students to these texts and allow God’s pursuing voice to speak to their hearts.
The Text’s the Thing
What is to be done? Emulate Hamlet, who, when confounded by the rottenness of his society, concluded: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”15Art, and in our case literature, is a powerful voice calling lost souls and minds. So let us return to the text for the text’s sake, letting it speak in its own voice, rather than imposing on it the voice of our convictions. The value of reading old books is to discover, ponder, and assess perspectives outside our current ones, perspectives on which our society was built, or perhaps which it abandoned long ago, but not to look upon books first of all as evidence to bolster preconceptions. Christian professors might feel vulnerable at this point lest they be accused of reading books that endorse their Christian views. The simple answer is that for writers such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton—and on and on, through Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Christina Rossetti up to T. S. Eliot and Margaret Avison (the much-medaled living Canadian poetess), life and faith in Christ is the presupposition of their work. To read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and find him juxtaposing the guillotine of the French Revolution with the cross of Christ is not to impose our values on him, it is to understand his. In contrast, at a conference several years ago a young Vassar PhD graduate read a paper in Victorian literature in which she claimed that Dickens is a misogynist, her evidence being that he caricatures women. When in the question period I pointed out that Dickens’s device of caricature is common among serial fiction writers, that he used it with all his characters, and that in his novels women come off neither better nor worse than other groups, many in the audience hissed and the chairwoman scolded that questions not assertions were required in the “question” period. A female colleague beside me whispered, “They all know you are right, of course. That is why they hiss.”
Elizabeth Kantor concurs in her recent The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature16 that English Department students are too often required to read books for evidence to grind axes: postcolonial axes, feminist axes, postmodernist axes, queer theory axes, cultural theory axes, axes, axes. Students need to learn to value the text for the issues it raises and for its artistic methods. For example, to read Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew as fodder for the feminist cause is to wrench it out of its context, to proudly mock perhaps the greatest dramatist in the history of civilization, and to shut ourselves off from a comprehension of human nature, which, while some might disagree with it, encompasses and distinguishes between Israelite and Gentile authority, which is to say protective and abusive authority, as clearly set out by our Savior himself (Matt. 20:25). The quality of Kate’s submission to Petruchio in this uproariously funny farce is profoundly Christian, a submission not to be feared by any woman, and wholly within the best of Christian tradition in its glorification of femininity and the empowerment of wives.
To teach the works of anti-Christian or non-Christian literature in a dispassionate manner, describing its artistic excellence while pointing out contrasts with the literature of Christians—that is to say, by identifying the variety of voices speaking through literature—is not only academically responsible, but is to present “the whole truth” in respect of our responsibility to inform our classes. Such literature might be that of the Greeks, of the Theatre of the Absurd writers, caustic Matthew Arnolds, or atheistic John Stuart Mills. The excellence of these non-Christians is to be wholeheartedly affirmed, whether or not we identify their limitations. To those who argue that the professor’s task is to give purely objective presentations without revealing their own biases, I answer first that such a view is naïve, for students delight in quickly recognizing our biases; second, that across the university, both outside and within the humanities, various theories are presented, with the favored ones clearly stated and defended; and third that students itch to hear our own perspectives. Moreover, great educators throughout history have worn their hearts on their sleeve, as it were; and to present an even-handed treatment of various perspectives is to provide a corrective for the current axe-grinding atmosphere, an air-freshener of sorts. Believing that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, competent professors who serve him can affirm with humility that an academically and professionally responsible presentation of any work in the humanities can illuminate that Way, Truth, and Life, even where such a presentation never explicitly mentions Jesus Christ. With the atheist John Stuart Mill we can affirm our faith that truth exists, that mankind can recognize it and will respond as it is clearly presented, that open debate is a primary means of such recognition, and that open debate will raise our hold on truth from superstition to vital comprehension.17So we need not fear letting every voice be heard.
But, adds Dr. Kantor, the simple stark facts are that most great literary writers were explicitly Christian.18Are we to avoid the Christian convictions of these greats by omitting their Christian writings? Eliot’s postconversion poetry and essays? Browning’s delineation between hypocritical and true Christians? e. e. Cummings’s conversion poem, “i thank you God for most this amazing day”? Tennyson’s invocation of Jesus Christ in the opening lines of In Memoriam, which is probably the poem most widely acclaimed within the lifetime of its author in the entire history of English literature, rapidly translated into nine languages? His opening prayer, read and acclaimed by millions of his contemporaries, begins:
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith,
and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we can not prove. . . .
Of all the works of literature which record of the salvation of its author’s soul and mind, this is surely one of the greatest, by the greatest poet of his century. It is all too rarely taught.
This past year when I told a graduate seminar that they were to read the prose writings of John Ruskin without looking at a single secondary source, and to come back each week with half a dozen pages of summary and response, the class confessed to being panic-stricken, and one abruptly withdrew for that single reason. How can one expect otherwise? The critical theory that they are all required to master sneers that every text is unreliable; that only the theorist’s assertions are valid; that the student’s task is to master and echo the opinions of theorists, not to hold opinions of their own, unless such opinions are echoes of the theorists’, and, in a remarkably self-contradictory claim, that there is no absolute truth.
The text’s the thing, not only in English but also in religious studies, history, the ancient and modern languages, and so on. Students taking my course in Literature and the Bible have often said, “Sir, in the Religious Studies program we could only find courses on various views about the Bible; we could find none in which we could read and study the Bible itself.” In the History Department one device separating fathers and sons has been to abandon pre-twentieth-century history, which includes the history of Christianity. So in many universities it is possible to obtain a BA in history without having taken any courses prior to 1850; in some universities, prior to 1950. In other words, to separate the fathers from the children, the children from the fathers. How appropriate that the New Testament begins with two genealogies, family histories of fathers and sons from Joseph backward and forward to Adam. How better to begin the record of the Messiah turning the hearts of our heavenly Father to his children and his children to their heavenly Father. So we can begin countering the Accuser by returning to a study of the last two thousand years and earlier, which will include the entire history of Christ in the church and the church in the world.
Philosophy: “The Enclosing Cage of Reason”
Peter Kreeft may well be right when he observes in chapter 4 that English and History are the most corrupt departments in the Humanities. They are the two disciplines in which the most dramatic reactions against Christ have multiplied. But for professor of Philosophy Charles Malik, writing in The Wonder of Being, Philosophy too is barren. Listen:
The fact that philosophical systems historically knock each other out was clearly seen by Kant and Hegel, who nevertheless were themselves sucked into the immanent process of the history of philosophy and could not liberate themselves into genuine transcendence. They simply succeeded in depositing themselves as links in the endless chain of thought. . . . [But they kick] against the enclosing cage of reason. These men are not to be taken very seriously. . . . What an incredible jolt your whole being undergoes when you come to the Bible or attend the Divine Liturgy or have an intimate personal chat with a friend after reading or lecturing on the sublimest philosophy—that of Plato or Aristotle or Kant or Hegel! The philosophers are worth nothing so far as being and existence are concerned compared to one passage from the word of God—a Psalm or a chapter from Paul or the Gospels—or to a genuine moment of living and free communication with a friend. This existential jolt is the most terrible experience I know in my life. Supposing you really know what David or Paul or Jesus Christ is talking about so far as your own living-dying existence is concerned—how can you then take any of the philosophers seriously?19
Yet even in Philosophy, the discipline in which Charles Malik flourished at Harvard and Freiburg before moving into international politics, the voice of Jesus calls, for “Christ plays in ten thousand places” (again in Hopkins’s words).20
Here is Jacqueline, a young colleague of mine. Growing up in a non-practicing Roman Catholic French Canadian family, she developed an interest in drama and began her own troupe. At Laval University she took a philosophy course, and was introduced by a Christian professor to Thomas Aquinas. This young Québécois, as we say in Canada, soon followed the footprints of Aquinas right into the kingdom of Heaven. Good-bye Drama, Hello Philosophy. She flourished, completed a Princeton post-doc, accepted an assistant professorship, and was straight-way asked to co-teach a course on female genital mutilation south of the Sahara. Wide-eyed and wrinkle-browed, Jacqueline exclaims in her fascinating FrenchCanadian accent (I chuckle to hear her students using philosophical terms with a French accent!), “I never imagined a professor of medieval philosophy would be expected to lecture on such a thing!” She wrestles on other fronts too:
Philosophy Academics often assume that in order to establish his conclusions, the Christian philosopher necessarily relies on principles that come from his religion, and that therefore, they do not have purely scientific worth outside of theology. This is exactly why many specialists in Ancient Greek philosophy refuse to consult Aquinas. They act as if his faith invalidated his natural, rational capacity, whereas it is precisely the opposite that happens. Christian philosophers and intellectuals in general can be helped in their natural endeavors by the fact that they have faith, insofar as it gives them more stable and ordered lives, more hope and more courage, and insofar as grace might sometimes operate to give their intellect some supplementary light to understand difficult things better. But as far as they clearly keep in mind that they must always explain things in terms of causes that they have grasped with their natural reason and based on the evidence—with or without the help of God, as long as their explanations of things is natural, the work they accomplish is as solid as the work of non-Christians (if not better).
I suppose that the difficulty is particularly acute for the Christian philosopher, more than for the Christian chemist or physicist or even the Christian historian or sociologist, because of the proximity of the objects of theology and of philosophy, and because of the fact it is part of the philosophical endeavor to reflect about the first causes of the universe. I suppose also that the situation is in part due to the fact that nowadays many faculty members and students have never even heard about the possibility of conducting a natural reflection about God, let alone experienced it. Certainly, Christian philosophers would profit from making the distinction between the two kinds of theology, natural and revealed, better known and to give examples of conclusions about God that can be reached naturally. Then people would at least be aware of the possibility for a Christian philosopher to think about the great questions of origins in terms of causes and concepts which are also accessible to a non-Christian.
Charles Malik’s comment on this eleventh-century philosopher is: “St. Thomas Aquinas faced head on this question of the seeming contradiction between God’s goodness and omnipotence as ‘proving’ that God does not exist, and showed, basing himself on Augustine, that ‘part of the infinite goodness of God (is) that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.’”21
Hello, Jacqueline. How might students discover Christ in a philosophy classroom?
Hi John. I enjoyed lunch with [your wife] Roberta today. I think she’s lovely. First, as to how a student reading philosophy might encounter God, there are certainly a few ways. (One could not directly encounter Christ, since he is not an object of philosophy, although the road to such an encounter might be prepared). Philosophy might be favorable, as would be other life situations in which one makes a sincere effort to know the truth and to be true. Second, I would definitely advise going straight to Aquinas. Third, it seems to me there are two ways for a teacher to direct someone toward Christ; either you refer to your personal life and experience as a human being—some teachers of mine did do that with me and it had its effect; it certainly impressed me a lot as a student that all the people I thought were intelligent and brilliant happened to be such ardent believers; or, as I explained before, he might present the student with the possibility of a reflection about God on purely natural grounds.
So in Philosophy too, the text’s the thing in the winning of mind and souls. Jacqueline faces adversity in the classroom, commonly from young men who attack her presentation of the Christian stance of such as Aquinas and one of his most articulate twentieth-century expositors, the German philosopher Josef Pieper. T. S. Eliot, in his introduction to Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture, prophesied that Pieper would bring philosophy back to the layman. Now half a century later, Eliot’s prophesy has come true, Pieper having written dozens of books and having been translated into many languages. Yet Jacqueline has a devoted majority of students who thrive under her instruction. Significantly, the objectors quiet down once the class moves back to pre-Christian philosophy.
Conclusion
And so it goes for each of the humanities disciplines. Lear’s cry, “Who will tell me who I am?” is an echo of Moses’ query to the Lord, “Who are you?” (cf. Ex. 3:13–14) and of Jesus’ question to Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter’s answer, “The Christ of God” (Luke 9:20) came after Peter had been a follower for many months, and after Peter had heard Jesus’ voice telling him who he himself was: Cephas, a rock. Here is the backdrop for that ancient Christian tradition of baptism, or “Christening” and the giving of a “Christian” name. Peter’s experience is echoed by the demoniac, who begins with “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” To the demoniac Jesus answers, “What is your name?” The reply, “We are many” (Mark 5:6–10), comes from the legion of demons tormenting this man who has been rejected everywhere, and has become a self-tormenter. This same Jesus disposes of the many demonic voices, so that the man is found clean, clothed, in his right mind, and at peace. As a consequence, Jesus is asked to vacate the territory by those who prefer the demonic voices (see Mark 5:11–17). It is still the case in our universities. But let you and me pray together,
I do not hide your righteousness in my heart;
I speak of your faithfulness and salvation.
I do not conceal your love and your truth
from the great assembly. Psalm 40:10
Discussion Questions
1. What are the “canonical” texts within your discipline? How is God’s voice manifest within these texts? How is the human condition manifest within these texts?
2. What are some of the loudest voices, or messages, communicated to students in your discipline?
3. What are some of the ways you sustain your walk with God so that you are “prepared to give an account” of your faith?
4. Who are the Christian intellectuals within your discipline—past and contemporary?
5. How is your discipline affected by postmodernism?
6. Do you agree with Malik that nothing in philosophy, or your own discipline, compares in being or experience to the Word of God or an intimate connection with a friend? If so, how could this insight affect your teaching and interaction with students and colleagues?
7. How did you first hear the voice of God in your life?
8. How do you now “hear” the voice of God? How can you help your students hear God’s voice over all the competing voices?
1. Donald Knuth, 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (Madison, WI: AR Editions, 1990).
2. King Lear, ed. Russell Fraser (New York: The New American Library, 1963), 4.7.46–48. References are to act, scene, and line.
3. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 3.1.147–52. References are to act, scene, and line.
4. See pages 58–59 in chapter 2.
5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.1.147–52.
6. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 27.
7. S. T. Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London, Oxford University Press, 1960), part 2, lines 141–42, p. 191.
8. Ibid., part 2, lines 288–91, p. 198.
9. Ibid., part 2, lines 597–617, p. 208–9.
10. Ibid., part 2, lines 576–590, p. 208.
11. Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” 51.
12. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (New York: Overlook Press, 2006).
13. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 101–2.
14. Nahum N. Glarzer, ed., Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 277.
15. Hamlet, ed. R. C. Bald (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1946), 2.2.590. References are to act, scene, and line.
16. Elizabeth Kantor, The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006), 50.
17. In On Liberty, Mill presents this now classical argument in defense of freedom of speech. See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. David Spitz (New York: Norton, 1975).
18. Kantor, Politically Incorrect Guide, 5.
19. Charles Malik,The Wonder of Being (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1974), 34–35.
20. G. M. Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 90.
21. Malik,Wonder of Being, 27.