News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This summer, I recorded a set of lectures on Wendell Berry for ClassicalU. Those have now been packaged and released as a course: Wendell Berry’s Virtues of Renewal: Teaching the Forms that Sustain Life and Community.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Grimsby, bureaucracy, and Brave New World.
- David Bannon narrates Joan of Arc's remarkable life, one full of sorrow, triumph, and mystery: "Skeptical simplifications of Joan’s life are not entirely convincing. She did not seek power, wealth, or fame. 'I ask for no final reward,' she tells critics in her own time, 'other than the salvation of my soul.' A close examination of the historical record provides more evidence of the miraculous than the pathological."
- Ryan Holston clarifies his argument in Tradition and the Deliberative Turn, in which he seeks the possibility of "free choice within reasonable limits, which I believe makes the value of community and its deliberative fruits still possible, even within the reality of the fractured and deracinated world in which we are living."
- Jesse Russell reviews James Matthew Wilson's new book of poetry: "In Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, James Matthew Wilson shows that the seeds of a rebirth of civilization are to be planted and nurtured in the soil of everyday life."
- Davin Heckman enjoins the slow work of reformation and responsible dependence: "Like the very young and the very old among us, we must forget the learned delusion of independence that revolution prefers and accept the radical dependence of the human condition."
- Liv Ross reviews Ashley Lande’s The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ: "I think many people of a certain age can relate to Ashley’s early story of a VBS-style introduction to God—earnest, even sweet, but ultimately incomplete. Her story begins with a need, and a proffered answer that doesn’t seem to fill it."
I've been re-reading sections of Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, and I was struck by his discussion of Auden's political musings in 1944. Here's Auden from a review of Charles Norris Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine:
Our period is not so unlike the age of Augustine: the planned society, caesarism of thugs or bureaucracies, paideia, scientia, religious persecution, are all with us. Nor is there even lacking the possibility of a new Constantinism; letters have already begun to appear in the press, recommending religious instruction in schools as a cure for juvenile delinquency; Mr. Cochrane’s terrifying description of the “Christian” empire under Theodosius should discourage such hopes of using Christianity as a spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city.
And here is Jacobs summing up the tensions that Auden wrestled with in those years:
We have already seen in our look at "New Year Letter" that for Auden both nationalism and romatnic individualism had failed, and had thrown us back on the formation of local communities of understanding; but he had also suggested that the sustaining of such communities is impossible in the absence of religious belief: thus the poem's great concluding prayer. So far, his thinking might be seen as an echo of Maritain's, or that of Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins. But Cochrane's book had taught him that such a program of Christian social renewal has its own dangers and temptations--and its own characteristic illusions. For it is a massive misunderstanding of the claims of Christianity to see it as "spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city," as a means to an end, that end being social cohesion and perhaps even victory against totalitarianism. This is to re-enact the Constantinian error, which was to "profess and practice a religious of success": now Christianity becomes once again a "talisman," not for Romanitas but for the successor of Romanitas, liberal Western democracy. Meet the new Caesar, same as the old Caesar.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro