Life Is Not an Error

In fact, there is no way to "return to the faith of your childhood," not really, unless you've just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you'd been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life--which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived--or have denied the reality of your life.

To admit that there may be some psychological need informing your return to faith does not preclude or diminish the spiritual imperative, any more than acknowledging the chemical aspects of sexual attraction lessens the mystery of enduring human love. Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason, if only for a moment, lost its claim on you.

--Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (2013)

The Vocation of a Systematic Theologian

I took the pieces you threw away and put them togather by night and day. Washed by rain, dried by sun, a million pieces all in one.

—Howard Finster, Folk Artist (20th Century)

'To write for everyone or for no one'

When we consider the style of our times, we cannot help wondering about the reasons for its corruption. The modern artist is a solitary who writes for himself or for a public of which he has no precise notion. Linked to an epoch, he struggles to express its features; but this epoch is necessarily faceless. He does not know whom he is addressing, he does not imagine his reader. In the seventeenth century and the one following, the writer had in view a small circle whose requirements he knew, as well as its degree of finesse and acuity. Limited in his possibilities, he could not depart from the rules, real though unformulated, of taste. The censorship of the salons, more severe than that of today's critics, permitted the flowering of perfect and minor geniuses, constrained to elegance, to the miniature and the finite.

Taste is formed by the pressure the idle exert upon Letters, especially in epochs when society is refined enough to set the tone for literature. . . . The terrorism of taste has ceased, and with it the superstition of style. To bemoan the fact would be as ridiculous as it is ineffectual. Behind us lies a sufficiently solid tradition of vulgarity; art must adapt, must resign itself to it or be isolated in an absolutely subjective expression. To write for everyone or for no one—each man decides the matter for himself, according to his nature. Whatever choice we make, we are sure of no longer meeting on our way that old scarecrow, a failure of taste.

—E.M. Cioran, "Style as Risk," The Temptation to Exist (1956; trans. R. Howard 1968)

We Sin Alone

The poor human race dreams from century to century of breaking that solitude — but it's no use! The devil, who can do so many things, will never succeed in founding a Church, a Church that will put in common both the merits of hell and the sin of all. From now until the end of the world, the sinner will have to sin alone, always alone — for just as we die alone, so also do we sin alone. The devil, you see, is the friend who never stays with us to the end.

—Georges Bernanos, Monsieur Ouine (1943)

'He had better begin somewhat sooner.'

I mean this: When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,—these are his remedies. And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his consitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble. 

Yes, he [Glaucon] said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art of medicine thus far only. 

Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his life if he were deprived of his occupation? 

Quite true, he said. 

But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not say that he has any specially appointed work which he must perform, if he would live. 

He is generally supposed to have nothing do do. 

Then you never heard of the saying of Phocylides, that as soon as a man has a livelihood he should practise virtue? 

Nay, he said, I think that he had better begin somewhat sooner.

—Plato, The Republic, Book III (360 B.C.E.; trans. B. Jowett 1894)

Genius

But to find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of days with feelings as fresh, as if they the sprang forth at his own fiat—this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguishes genius from talent.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)

'a harmony thrust on an imperfect world'

Then I thought of the dead man, and how pale his face would be, and I said into the passing floes of mist:

"I'll say to Christy when next we argue about religion: 'Christy, beauty is all there is. It's the end. It's the only perfect thing there is. It is the perfection of the moon, Christy, a harmony thrust on an imperfect world. Everything comes from it—all our beliefs and faiths—all our dreams of a perfect world hereafter. So that if there were a square moon, Christy, you'd be talking about the corners of heaven. All life! Everything! In the perfect moon!'"

—Seán O'Faoláin, Bird Alone (1936)

'all things end by becoming me'

Morning after morning, when I saw her kneel among the communicants waiting for the communion, I, who knelt behind her, wanted to stroke her ankle in her shoe. Her curls under her father's old hat became the curls of all the women in the world; her waist was the waist of a statue; she was losing her identity for me already, merged into myself. But that is the misfortune of my nature, that all things end by becoming me until now, nothing exists that is not me.

—Seán O'Faoláin, Bird Alone (1936)

In silence, I understood, and I remembered

To keep you is no gain, to kill you is no loss. Under the rules of the Organization we were reduced to this dictum. How was I to live by such words? With so many carted away on the tiniest pretense, how could any child believe she would live beyond this day, this moment? How could she hope for tomorrow? In a world of senseless death, I didn't see the purpose, couldn't grasp the meaning. If this was our collective karma, then why was I still alive? If anything, I was as guilty as those who survived and as innocent as those who died. What name then can I give to the force that carried me on? With each life taken away, a part of it passed on to me. I didn't know its name. All I could grasp was the call to remember. Remember. I lived by this word.  

After that day at the rice fields, I no longer feared guns because I no longer feared death. The brigade leader continued to threaten me. But I never answered her. Instead, silence took root in my blood. I became deaf. I became mute. I thought only of the work in front of me. Standing in the paddy, I planted the rice shoots. When eating, I could only think of eating. In sleep, I thought of nothing else. Hunger made my body frail. Many times I was punished for being too lazy. Without rice, I lived on leaves and small animals found in the mud. The tiniest I would swallow at once. Sometimes I would be punished, though I could never know when. It was futile to worry, to think of tomorrow. The life I'd once known was gone, and with it, the people. There was nothing to say, no one left for me to speak of, so I chose not to speak.  

Still, I saw. Still, I heard. In silence, I understood, and I remembered.

--Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012)

'Such omniscience ... would extinguish its soul'

In science greater knowledge is always and indisputably good; it is by no means so throughout all human existence. We know it from art proper, where achievement and great factual knowledge, or taste, or intelligence, are in no way essential companions; if they were, our best artists would also be our most learned academics. We can know it by reducing the matter to the absurd, and imagining that God, or some Protean visitor from outer space, were at one fell swoop to grant us all knowledge. Such omniscience would be worse than the worst natural catastrophe, for our species as a whole; would extinguish its soul, lose it all pleasure and reason for living.

—John Fowles, The Tree (1979)