A Little Read

 

Je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, J’y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n’êtes plus mon ami.

So starts Tolstoy's War and Peace. Ironically in French, left that way in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.* Character Anna Pavlovna jumps right in complaining about Napoleon, who is going to attempt the invasion of Russia, and lose over 500,000 soldiers in that futile endeavor.

*a wonderful work of translation! Try to get the out-of-print hardback edition. Why would anyone want a book that is 1250 pages long as a paperback? Unless you didn't want to actually read it. Or like I was in 1989: much too broke to afford anything but. I still have that old book. It is two volumes now, having broken in half, with yellow pages flying when I take it off the shelf to look at my underlines.

Wisdom in the End

Look at the sort of world we live in.  Take off your rose-colored glasses, rub your eyes and look at it long and hard.  What do you see? You see life’s background set by aimlessly recurring cycles in nature. You see its shape fixed by times and circumstances over which we have no control. You see death coming to everyone sooner or later, but coming haphazard; its coming bears no relation to whether it is deserved. Humans die like beasts, good ones like bad, wise ones like fools. You see evil running rampant; the wicked prosper, the good don’t. Seeing all this, you realize that God’s ordering of events is inscrutable; much as you want to make it out, you cannot do so. The harder you try to understand the divine purpose in the ordinary providential course of events, the more obsessed and oppressed you grow with the apparent aimlessness of everything, and the more you are tempted to conclude that life really is as pointless as it looks. 

But once you conclude that there really is no rhyme or reason in things, what “profit”--value, gain, point, purpose-- can you find in any sort of constructive endeavor? If life is senseless, then it is valueless; and in that case, what use is it working to create things, to build a business, to make money, even to seek wisdom—for none of this can do you any obvious good; it will only make you an object of envy; you can’t take any of it with you; and what you leave behind will probably be mismanaged after you have gone. What point is there, then, in sweating and toiling at anything? Must not all our work be judged “vanity and a striving after wind”?—activity that we cannot justify as being either significant in itself or worthwhile to us?

It is to this pessimistic conclusion that optimistic expectations of finding the divine purpose of everything will ultimately lead you. The God who rules this world hides himself. Rarely does this world look as if a beneficent providence were running it. Rarely does it appear that there is a rational power behind it at all. Often what is worthless survives, while what is valuable perishes. Be realistic, face these facts; see life as it is. You will have no true wisdom till you do.

(This is the first part of J.I. Packer’s summary of the Bible book of Ecclesiastes as found in the book “Knowing God.”  It is a succinct summary of the problem described by Solomon in Ecclesiastes.  Packer goes on to describe the final portion of the book as well:)

But what, in that case, is wisdom?  The preacher has helped us to see what it is not; does he give us any guidance as to what it is?

Indeed he does, in outline at any rate. “Fear God and keep his commandments”; trust and obey him, reverence him, worship him, be humble before him, and never say more than you mean and will stand to when you pray to him; do good; remember that God will some day take account of you, so eschew, even in secret, things of which you will be ashamed when they come to light at God’s judgment. Live in the present, and enjoy it thoroughly; present pleasures are God’s good gifts. Though Ecclesiastes condemns flippancy, he clearly has no time for the superspirituality which is too proud or too pious ever to laugh and have fun. Seek grace to work hard at whatever life calls you to do, and enjoy your work as you do it. Leave to God its issues; let him measure its ultimate worth; your part is to use all the good sense and enterprise at your command in exploiting the opportunities that lie before you.

This is the way of wisdom. Clearly, it is just one facet of the life of faith. For what underlies and sustains it?  Why, the conviction that the inscrutable God of providence is the wise and gracious God of creation and redemption. We can be sure that the God who made this marvelously complex world order, and who compassed the great redemption from Egypt, and who later compassed the even greater redemption from sin and Satan, knows what he is doing, and “doeth all things well,” even if for the moment he hides his hand. We can trust him and rejoice in him, even when we cannot discern his path. Thus the preacher’s way of wisdom boils down to what was expressed by Richard Baxter:

Ye saints, who toil below,

Adore your heavenly King,

And onward as ye go

Some joyful anthem sing.

Take what He give,

And praise Him still

Through good and ill

Who ever lives.

From Knowing God, by J. I. Packer InterVarstiy Press 1973, 1993

Silence

The book Silence, by Shusaku Endo.

An engaging style.  A well-rounded descriptive flavor.  Deep character development.  A pathos rarely probed, the likes of Dostoyevsky.  A challenging but respectful approach to religious themes.  I highly recommend this book, the best fiction I have read in a long time.

"in time of persecution the strong are burned in the flames and drowned in the sea; but the weak...lead a vagabond life in the mountains.  As for you (I now spoke to myself) which category do you belong to?"

More about Endo here.

Powerful Ideas, Powerful Artists, Bad Choices

I just finished reading “Growth of the Soil” by Knut Hamsun. My sister, who is always giving me books to read, insisted I read this one she then leant to me. She made me promise that I would not look up or read anything about the author until I was finished reading the book, so as to not spoil the reading. So of course I suspected that he held some sort of political viewpoint or moral stance that she knew I would be against.

The book is wonderfully written. Unique in capturing you and transporting you into the woods with the Norwegian settlers, working the soil and entwining their lives with nature and each other, a great capturing of the complexities of persons, society, and the wilderness. A truly thoughtful and enjoyable read, thanks sis.

It did not take me long to suspect that Mr. Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer. The story suggested the correct time frame. Norway was essentially taken over by Germany. And some essential elements of a National Socialist idealist are in the author’s thoughts:
-glorification of hard work
-honoring the simple, hard worker, especially the Aryan
-that morals are only means to adapt to society and to the world, not transcendent laws of God. Thus morals are relative and up to question.
-that human life, like morals, has little inherent value. Only what people make of themselves counts
-that there is a conspiracy of oppression to be found in Western capitalism, organized by the Jews, supported by England and America, which draws people away from their true meaning—hard work and a pure, natural life (this was only really found in the last chapter so blatantly)

In these days, in my circles, it is easy to gloss over the temptations to Nazi thinking. We view the Nazi’s as some sort of sub-human, like Orcs from Lord of the Rings, that would stand out so obviously in their moral deprivation that no one in their right mind would follow them. But in reality, some of the seeds of National Socialism are in those ideas of Hamsun, not dissimilar to many a thinker and writer today: truth is relative, morals are relative and tools rather than guides, “mother earth” is the wise teacher and guide, the “big economies” of the world are conspiring to suppress the rest, and globalize us all into idiocy and dehumanize us.

Ever since Adam and Eve, Lucifer has tempted men and women with the worship of the things, the seeking of the things, rather than of God. In this case, it is the worship of man, especially in his wonderful complexity, and his youthful, energetic connection with a life of connection with and working of the land. A wonderful thing it is, when man and beast work and produce the crops. And oh so “natural” and certainly common for man, to worship the crop, the cow, the sun. To sacrifice even to those things on which he depends. New and strange really, is the message that there is a God bigger than—and in a way separate from--the man-nature relationship. Foreign, opposite, is the notion that God wishes us to worship God, and not the wonderful things and wonderful people that He creates and provides.

Knut Hamsun Link
Wikipedia on Hamsun
"Growth of the Soil" Link

Magical Science

In the book “Eragon,” and its sequels, the young author has a scientific explanation of the “magic” wielded by the Elves and by the hero. Possibly this makes it more palatable for the young reader to explore “super-powers,” as they have an explanation. The same of other recent movies and books. Midi-chlorians explain the “force” of Star Wars that only a few years previously depended on its mystery. But pity the generation that requires an explanation for magic! The people who cannot step out in faith because everything must be explained. The glory and the genius of the person is the ability to jump out ahead of the explanation. To live with ambiguity and doubt and still succeed. To bring the thing under the telescope and microscope of the scientific measurement is at the same time to discover a whole new realm of unexplained possibilities.

The more scientific we become, the more spiritual we must become. There is a tendency to bring everything to the foot of science, as if science is a king or a god. Many would claim that science is their god. Or as said in Nacho Libre “I don’t believe in God, I believe in science.” We take the wrong approach when we give up faith as science expands, or we give up science to keep our faith. No, our problem is two-fold: not enough faith, and not enough science. For it is only the man of faith who has the freedom to explore a question with no prejudgments. And it is only the woman of science who has the freedom to trust a God who is not trapped in a tree, in the wind, in the crops, in fertility, but who escapes her and calls to her at the same time. Who defies definition. Who is the Creator and Sustainer. Who is truly a God.