The Christian Mind

There is, no longer, a Christian mind.

It is a commonplace that the mind of modern man has been secularized.  For instance, it has been deprived of any orientation towards the supernatural.  Tragic as this fact is, it would not be so desperately tragic had the Christian mind held out against the secular drift.  But, unfortunately, the Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history.  It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century church.  One cannot characterize it without having recourse to language which will sound hysterical and melodramatic.

There is, no longer, a Christian mind.  There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality.  As a moral being, the modern Christian subscribes to a code other than that of the non-Christian.  As a member of the church, he undertakes obligations and observations ignored by the non-Christian.  As a spiritual being, in prayer and meditation, he strives to cultivate a dimension of life unexplored by the non-Christian.  But, as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.  He accepts religion – its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture.  But, he rejects the religious view of life, the view which sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems – social, political, cultural – to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God’s supremacy and earth’s transitoriness, in terms of heaven and hell.

From: The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? by Harry Blamires (London: S.P.C.K., 1963), pp. 3-4.

Harry Blamires (born in 1916) is a British literary critic, educator, and author.  At 96 (this year), he is retired.

 

A Word of Warning

How do we know when a religous life suffers from an overbalance of purely intellectual activity?  What kind of life and personality does it produce?  It is a life in which plenty of time is spent in reading about religion, or talking about religion, arguing in discussion groups, or following current religious controversies, but in which there is a gross neglect of prayer, meditation, sacraments, self-discipline, and good works.  It is important to note that the temptations of intellectualized Christianity, pernicious as they are, assail men and women of all classes and at different levels of intelligence, but are, perhaps, most dangerous to the men and women who are engaged professionally in intellectual occupations.

Thus, it is possible for the scholarly theologian, immersed in his latest piece of research, or preoccupied with his latest book, to destroy his own religious life at the very time he is concentrating on religious issues.  It is, indeed, a grave and tragic possibility, yet it is so ironical and so grotesque as to be almost comic.  “I’ll spend another hour on this chapter tonight.  I can miss my prayers and meditation for once.  After all, this is a religious book that I’m writing.”  It is, indeed, a religious book, and the chapter he is working on is headed, “The Life of Prayer.”  A priest may say, “I can’t possibly see Mr. Jones this week.  Every minute is taken, and I’ve just got to finish my article for Theology.  I’m sorry if he’s in a bad way, but a promise is a promise and I’ve got to stick to it.”  Mr. Jones is left without attention, but the article, titled “Contemporary Demands of Charity,” is turned out on time.

From: The Offering of Man by Harry Blamires (New York: Morehouse-Barlow Co., 1960), pp. 44-45.

 

The Puritan Era Ends (Culture Shift)

It is easy to oversimplify in defining the character of the Restoration period because the comedies of the age stamp, in our minds, the picture of a frivolous society ready to trivialize human relationships, to treat love and marriage flippantly, and to show scant regard for the vitures of hard work, sobriety, and unselfishness.  Indeed, the public that supported the London theater was a very different public from the seemingly mixed cross-section of the populace who attended the Globe Theater in Shakespeare’s day.  The Restoration theater provided amusement for a leisured and dissolute society taking its cue from a dissolute court.  Puritans, naturally, shunned it.  The respectable Londoners who earned their livings by honest trade or craft could scarcely be expected to throng to see themselves made butts of upper-class mockery.  The court of Charles II certainly contained more than its fair share of cynical libertines who made a mockery of virtue and assumed all its advocates to be hypocrites.  This was the public which relished the antics of Horner in Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) when he passed himself off as a eunuch in order to gain admission to feminine circles and seduce women under the noses of their husbands and guardians.  But, The Country Wife was, certainly, not representative of the spirit of the kingdom as a whole.  Milton’s Paradise Lost was published in 1667 and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678.  The civil struggle may have been settled, politically, in favor of the monarchy and the Church of England – and against the Puritans – but the moral and theological struggle continued in literary productivity and in commentary upon it.

The Restoration age was not a period weak in artistic or scientific achievement.  It was in 1666 that a falling apple focused Isaac Newton’s attention on the fact of gravitation.  In the 1660s, Sir Christopher Wren was designing the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford and, by 1675, he began directing the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral.  In 1667, the Earl of Clarendon went abroad to work on his massive historical masterpiece The History of the Rebellion, which was published posthumously in 1702-1704.  In 1677, Henry Purcell, at the age of eighteen, was appointed “Composer in Ordinary” at the Chapel Royal.  Not that these were publicly calm decades in all respects.  The Great Plague of London in 1665, the Dutch War and the Fire of London in 1666, the Titus Oates plot in 1678, the murder of Archbishop Sharp by Scottish Covenanters in 1679, and James II’s brief reign from 1685-1688 provided a turbulent prelude to the establishment of the more tolerant and settled regime of William and Mary.  William was the son of Charles I’s daughter, Mary, and Mary was the daughter of James II.  The Bill of Rights of 1689 not only settled the question of succession to the throne but, also, protected the liberties of the subjects.

One of the effects of the succession of William and Mary was to put an end to the ascendancy of the royal court as the place where the fashions were set, where the arts were fostered, and where public positions and reputations were to be obtained.  The court became the place where royalty lived in comparative privacy, at a distance from its subjects.  People now had to turn to ministers, members of Parliament, and the landed aristocracy in search of patronage.

From: A History of Literary Criticism by Harry Blamires (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 103-104.

 

Blamires on Augustine

We may take St. Augustine (354-430) as representative of the historical development which was to push literary criticism out of the domain of intellectual life for several centuries.  Born in North Africa, Augustine was brought up by a devoutly Christian mother, St. Monica, but lost whatever faith he imbibed from her when he went to the university at Carthage.  For many years, he embraced Manicheeism but, as a professor at Milan, he was greatly influenced by the preaching of St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan and, after a severe internal struggle, was converted, at the age of 32, to become one of the profoundest theological scholars of the Christian Church.

The fact that Augustine’s intellectual development was a progress from Manicheeism to Christianity gives him an almost symbolic status in relation to our present enquiry.  The Manichees solved the intellectual problem posed by the power of evil in the world by postulating a divided supernatural authority.  Good and evil reigned as equal opponents.  There was unceasing cosmic conflict between the powers of light and the powers of darkness.  It was against such a pessimistic dualism that Plotinus reacted in formulating the doctrine which projected evil in terms of negation of the ultimate reality.  St. Augustine was the thinker who, above all, brought this kind of reasoning to bear on the Christian account of the human situation since the Fall.

Augustine wrote at a time when civilization was in a state of decay and collapse.  The new Christian church was at war with paganism.  Questions of aesthetic theory could but arise as footnotes to the immense program of Christianizing Western Europe.  The old literature was inextricably tied up with the old polytheism, with the discreditable doings of unrighteous gods.  Dramatists and poets, Augustine argued in The City of God, attribute vicious behavior to gods “to the end that there might be sufficient authority, derived, as it were, from heaven and earth, for men to commit all filthiness by.”  The wickedness of gods implicitly authorized human wickedness.  Their vices gave the spectators and readers “imitable example.”  It was small wonder that Augustine cited, with approval, Plato’s exclusion of poets from the well-governed city.  His grounds are like Plato’s: the question of moral influence.  For crimes will no longer be crimes, he declares in his Confessions, when “whoso commits them might seem to imitate not abandoned men, but the celestial gods.”  Pagan literature was, thus, sharply distinguished from the one literature necessary to the Christian, the Scriptures.  In the first four books of his De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine lays down the procedure for proper interpretation of the Bible.  Exploring how a text might be dealt with is, of course, the one route by which the Fathers trespassed into the field of literary criticism.

Augustine was no philistine.  He was acutely sensitive to the power of imaginative literature to perturb and enthral.  He describes, in his Confessions, how Virgil moved him to “weep for dead Dido because she killed herself for love.”  But he has learned to question such emotion as totally misdirected.  What can be more wretched than a man “weeping the death of Dido for love to Aeneas, but weeping not his own death for want of love to Thee, O God.”  Later, he tells us how stage plays carried him away “full of images of my miseries, and of fuel to my fire.”  It is sheer wastefulness of grief over the fictional that he stresses.  That is what we mean when we say that the birth of the Christian era so transformed the sense of proportion that there was scarcely room for the luxury of aesthetics.  Everything, but everything, became a moral and, therefore, a theological issue.

From: A History of Literary Criticism by Harry Blamires (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 28-30.

 

Secularized Thinking

A civilization which has secularized all its thinking presupposes that man has no supernatural affiliation.  It assumes that, in so far as things go wrong with him, in so far as he falls short of achieving what is desirable and worthwhile, that is not a matter of failure in obligation or obedience to supernatural authority.  Its government, its forward planning, its educational system for the most part proceed on the assumption that what is wrong, human purpose and ingenuity can put right.  We write “for the most part” because there are, obviously, here and there in the system, individual Christians working with other ends and other priorities at the back of their minds even though they may not always be able to bring them to bear directly and effectively on their professional activities.  Such cases notwithstanding, a civilization which has robbed its intents and ideals of supernatural orientation and has desacralized not only its public thought-life, but also, to a large extent, its private love life and family life, must, inevitably, lose all sense of man’s fallen condition.  For it loses all awareness of transcendent standards and values in relation to which human purpose and endeavour fall short.  Therefore, it persists in making prescriptions for ameliorating human life and human welfare on the basis of a closed human universe whose inhabitants need no external aid.

From: Recovering the Christian Mind: Meeting the Challenge of Secularism by Harry Blamires (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988), pp. 62-63.

 

On the “Christian Mind”

Were there a living Christian mind, the sense of the hard, factual objectivity of Christian doctrine would be widespread, and people would no more find themselves defending, individually and in isolation, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth than they would find themselves defending, individually and in isolation, the second law of thermodynamics.  It is only within an essentially secular field of discourse that individual Christians can find themselves illogically called upon to defend their attachment to particular doctrines as though they had personally devised or chosen these doctrines on the basis of private predilection.  It is only within a liberal secularist society, dominated by the it’s-all-a-matter-of-opinion code, that a street corner orator or a knocker upon your door can assume it appropriate to pin upon you, as an individual Christian, the demand to defend this or that doctrine as though it were your personal possession – to explain your individual attachment to it as clearly and particularly as you would explain why you chose this wall paper or that piece of furniture.

By allowing the Christian mind to be destroyed, we have imposed an intolerable burden upon ourselves as individual Christians.  It is not surprising that so many shift the burden from their shoulders.  We have accepted secularism’s challenge to fight on secularist ground, before a secular audience, and according to the secularist book of rules.  Having done so, we look around in dismay at the discovery that our followers are few, our predicament misunderstood, our cause misrepresented.  Hastily, we try to plug the gap by pouring out more and more sermons and books of instruction “explaining” our cause, but doctored to the secularist mentality.  It is high time to shift our ground.

From: The Christian Mind by Harry Blamires (New York: The Seabury Press, 1963), pp. 110-111.

 

On the Crucifixion

In self-sacrifice, in laying down his life for another’s well-being, man surpasses God in goodness and love, the creature surpasses the Creator.  That is the absurdity that stares David in the face.  And, he cannot accept that a God who excels man so vastly in every other respect will be inferior to man in this most testing matter of all.  So, David’s singing culminates in a prophetic vision of the future Christ.

The logic of this conclusion is forceful.  Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.  There have been men and women, in all ages, who have devoted themselves to others at great personal cost and have sacrificed their lives for others.  If there were nothing on God’s part fully to match this capacity for the ultimate in acts of love and suffering, then, indeed, man could justly be said to be, in some respects and on some occasions, better than God.  The creature would have the edge on the Creator.

This train of thought seems to point to the logical necessity for the crucifixion.  But, it is not followed here as an argument to prove anything.  Rather, it is a reflection on the crucifixion; just one attempt to ponder its mystery and to relate it understandably to our own human experience.  We recognize the powerful logic binding together the most heroic self-sacrifices of loving men and women with the great redemptive work of their Maker.  When we speak of God’s power and wonder and beauty, we have sunsets and symphonies to point to.  When we speak of God’s illimitable love, our minds turn to Christ on the cross.  And there is something inside us which knows that nothing less would serve.

From: On Christian Truth by Harry Blamires (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1983), p. 88.

 

John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”

No doubt, all evil-doing creatures inhabit imaginary worlds.  Perhaps it is only on the basis of a falsely conceived self inhabiting a falsely posited personal environment that evil can be plotted and executed.  Certainly, Beelzebub is, at first, quick to enter the imaginary world fabricated by his former superior.  He, too, reflects backward on the campaign which “endanger’d Heav’ns perpetual King” ([Book I, Line] 131): and the phrase is self-contradictory since, if God is the perpetual king, then He was certainly not endangered and, if He was truly endangered, then the perpetuity of His kingship cannot be assured.  Then, he speaks of having “put to proof” God’s “high Supremacy” (132); but, granted the supremacy, there is nothing to test, and the pseudo-question whether God’s supremacy is upheld “by strength, or Chance, or Fate” (133) represents a further excursion into illogicality.  If supremacy is upheld by something else, then it is not supremacy…

Paradise Lost is a much more cheerful poem than it has frequently been represented to be.  The foundations of the whole structure of evil, through which the human race becomes infected, are shown here to be so shaky and insubstantial that the mind savours a kind of laughter in contemplating the irony.  And on such foundations are to be constructed all those pseudo-heroic posturings whereby the non-motivated, self-manufactured protagonist pursues his self-contradictory adventures in parodic emulation of the truly purposeful epic heroes of Homer and Virgil.  If there is a devastating epic parody in English literature, it is not represented by the journeyings of Joyce’s Bloom around Dublin, but by the empty enterprise of Milton’s Satan.  Of course, he himself would be the hero.

From: John Milton’s Creation: A Guide Through “Paradise Lost” by Harry Blamires (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1971), pp. 9, 10-11.

 

John Milton’s “Paradise Regained”

Paradise Regained is a remarkably superfluous poem in view of the vision of human redemption and the endless ages of new Heaven and new Earth prefigured at the conclusion of Paradise Lost.  It concentrates on the temptation of Christ by Satan, which is not, in fact, capable of bearing the weight of a central significance shifted from the events of the Passion.  The static interchange of dialogue is not inspired.  It is difficult to understand Milton’s lapse from the poetic level sustained elsewhere.  One inevitably feels, on reading, that the magnificent flow of Paradise Lost, to which Milton’s muse had geared itself, just had to be allowed to run out.

From: A Short History of English Literature by Harry Blamires (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1974), p. 155.

 

On Thomas Traherne

There is the same theme of childhood insight and innocence in the poetry of Thomas Traherne (1637-1674), a parish priest and, later, a household chaplain, whose prose work Centuries of Meditations is full of Christian joy in creation and in the love of God.  There is an infectious freshness and urgency in his work.  “Shall Dumpish Melancholy Spoil My Joy?,” he begins his ode On Christmas Day, a paen of unclouded praise.  But the same urgency runs through Solitude, a poem vastly different in tone, in which he laments the absence in the world around him, and even in the Church’s rites, of that “Eden fair,” that “Soul of Holy Joy” which he is vainly seeking to ease his mind.  The poems in praise of infancy, however, like The Rapture and The Salutation, represent the more constant mood of delight and wonder.  That the child is “a Stranger here” means that he meets strange things, sees strange glories, finds strange treasures “in this fair World.”  And, strangest of all, is the fact that “they mine should be who Nothing was.”  It is difficult not to like the man who wrote thus.  More so than [Henry] Vaughan’s, Traherne’s raptures are earthed in wonder at things as they are.  Correspondingly, his style has a clarity and sturdiness that compels the reader from stanza to stanza.  If it is true that there is nothing in Traherne to match Vaughan’s finest lines, we must remember that there is not a lot in Vaughan to match Vaughan’s finest lines.  Traherne’s style is reliable.

From: A Short History of English Literature by Harry Blamires (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1974), p. 121.

Despite the fact that he was a fairly prolific writer, Traherne vitually disappeared from literary history at his death in 1674.  The reason he is known and read today is that almost all of his works were accidentally discovered at a bookstall in London early in the 1890s.  They were saved from being thrown out by a quick-thinking poetry lover who recognized some of the poetry as Traherne’s.  And so, the 17th century poet was published for the first time only in the 20th century!  C. S. Lewis once wrote that Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations was some of the most sublime prose writing he had ever read.  Lewis was less impressed with Traherne’s poetry.