A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge.

If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

Christianity and Culture — T.S. Eliot page 50.

“One thing I noticed about Evangelicals is that they do not read. They do not read the Bible, they do not read the great Christian thinkers, they have never heard of Aquinas. If they’re Presbyterian, they’ve never read the founders of Presbyterianism. I do not understand that. As a Jew, that’s confusing to me. The commandment of study is so deep in Judaism that we immerse ourselves in study. God gave us a brain, aren’t we to use it in His service? When I walk into an Evangelical Christian’s home and see a total of 30 books, most of them best-sellers, I do not understand. I have bookcases of Christian books, and I’m a Jew. Why do I have more Christian books than 98 percent of the Christians in America? This is so bizarre to me.”

– Dennis Prager in an interview from The Door magazine.

Today, as I was driving back home, I turned down the side street that my apparent is located on. This side street is also adjacent to a city park, and a river, making it the hang out place for a large number of adolescents. One young man was walking back with an inner tube slung on his shoulders. As I was in an air conditioned car, and he was in the heat, I stopped so he could cross the street with out having to wait for me on the hot asphalt. I was angered when, with his jaw stuck out in the half sideways cocked expression that could only come from the self important arrogance of youth; he ambled along at a deliberately slow pace, half pretending that he did not seem me, all the while getting some small pleasure from the simple notion that he was in my way. I am sure many of my readers have experienced this before.

My annoyance quickly subsided however, as I began to see this small man for what he was: a man who wanted to rebel, but had nothing to rebel against. In a world saturated with post-modernity, where all is subjective at best, meaningless at worst and above all else with out order, he has nothing to lash out against. A society that has no great ideals can have no great rebels.

And yet there he was, a small man, panning for gold, but only finding Fool’s Gold. But when Fool’s Gold is all you get, you might as well keep it; at least shinny, and it if you have enough of it, the other fool’s you keep in your company will begin to think you are very rich.

“Studying the history of ethics is like growing up and entering a serious adult conversation that has been going on for a long time.”

–Peter Kreeft

I was reading a collection of small works by Lewis and found this comment:

AMIS: Have you read Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz?  Have you any comments on that?

LEWIS:  I thought i was pretty good.  I only read it once; mind you, a book’s no good to me until I’ve read it to or three times–I’m going to read it again.  It was a major work, certainly.

–Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories by C.S. Lewis.  Edited, with a Preface, by Walter Hooper.  Page 89.

Read my review here.

Some of you may be wondering why I chose the blog title that I did, A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge. The title deals with what I see as the Achilles’ heel of the Information Age: to much information.

There is a short story by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges called The Library of Babel. It is about a library so large that the librarians are in despair, ready to commit suicide because of all the information contained it in. Contained in this library, there are a seemingly endless number of rooms, and each room has shelves full of books. These books appear to have every possible permutation of characters that is conceivable. This means that most of the books in the library consist of nothing but gibberish. One book would have the character ‘a’ on every page. Another book would have the character ‘a’ on every page, with the exception of the last character, which would be a ‘b.’

The nature of the library means that every great work ever written is some where on a shelf, waiting to be found. The only problem is that all the books that have little value make the good books harder to find. Borges, himself a librarian, could keenly see the problem with having to much information. It paralyzes a person, all the bad books making him numb to the good books that are hidden some where in the pile. If this is not a good description of what the Internet is, then I probably am just out of touch with reality.

I have been reading some novels by Faulkner. I just finished The Sound and the Fury, and will be starting Light in August in a short time. Incidentally, I apparently started with his hardest to understand work first, and then will be going to the one that is known as his most accessible. The Sound and the Fury is not a very easy book to read. Faulkner makes liberal use of stream-of-consciousness in his writing. On top of this already complex style of telling a story, the first main character who is telling the story (Benjy) turns out to be mentally retarded. Try as I might, my small mind has a hard time understanding who Faulkner is try to say.

I have come to the conclusion that he is trying to tell us something important. Not so much because I have seen the flashes of light in his novels, but by comparison. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a story I am sure most of my readers are familiar with. It will be the vehicle for my comparison with Faulkner. After September 11th, many people knew that The Lord of the Rings had something important to say about the events that had transpired. Some people even thought that the movies were made as some sort of thinly veiled response to the then current world events. Of course they could not have been, the movies had been in production for awhile before September 11th. At any rate, they were working from a series of books that has over half a century old, and was writing with no knowledge of the terrorist attacks on the United States. This brings me to my first point, good literature deals with universals in human nature.

Point two, regarding literary criticism. N.T. Wright has said that much of the modern quest for the historical Jesus is nothing other than an excuse to do autobiography under the pretense of biography. I think Wright is on to something here, and I think it also applies to a large part of the field of literary criticism. Critics can pretend that they are writing a review, all the while saying more about what they want to say that what the author is saying.  Christians are probably more familiar with this concept in the distinction between exegesis and eisogesis.

So how does this relate to good literature? If you took, say The Hobbit, and looked at what literary critics are saying about it, you would probably be surprised at how many different ideas people are pulling out of this story. There are socialist interpretations of The Hobbit, where Smaug becomes a capitalist hoarding the wealth. Others have looked at the different races in the story and come to the conclusion that it deals with racial tensions. There are even Klingon (more commonly known as Feminist) interpretations of The Hobbit that see no story, only oppression.

My point being that any good piece of literature can be wrestled in the the service of some ideology because it deals with the issues that are at the core of what it means to be human. Think of the Bible. Some people think Jesus was a socialist, a communist, a capitalist, a feminist, a revolutionary, etc.

Now back to William Faulkner. I know he must be saying something important, if for no other reasons than, one I can relate to the problems his characters are dealing with, and two, my library has almost as much space dedicated to the criticism and interpretation of Faulkner as there is dedicated to Shakespeare.

Of course most of these interpretations are bunk. I doubt that Faulkner wore half as many masks as his critics claim he did. Most people who write great literature wear few, if any masks. That makes them more human, and able to speak to a wider audience. I do have a quote from a promising book however, that I plan on review at a later date.

“The usual method of avoiding coming to terms with Faulkner’s theological interests is to claim him as a humanist in such a way as to imply that humanism is a position unto itself, devoid of theological ties of presuppositions. Perhaps it is here that the greatest theological naiveté of much criticism lies.”

William Faulkner: Art in Theological Tension — John W. Hunt, page 17.

I just got my Internet connection back after having to move out of the house I was residing in for almost two years. As you can imagine most of my books are scattered across numerous (and rather heavy) boxes. I have started scanning some books again so I hope to have something posted by the end of the week.

My friends have their book store open again and I will start selling some Print on Demand books through them. The links will be in the store when I get them finished. After looking through my small but always growing library, I noticed that there are several books that are rather expensive. I have decided that these small gems would be the best candidates for reprinting. It will all be through the Veritas website and through Abebooks so users will not have to deal with Paypal any more. I have received numerous complains about Paypal but have been hard pressed to find a better solution until now.

In the mean time, if any body is looking decent copy of the pulpit commentary, they have a complete set at their store for sale you can purchase on Abebooks here. It is the 1950 Funk and Wagnalls reprint.