A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge.

Everybody has a world view. Doctors, teachers, firemen, Christians, Muslims, scientists and authors. People who do not know they have a world view possess one as much as people who can clearly articulate theirs. Even people who deny they have a world view, or even that is is possible for man to have a world view, are promoting a world view.

Simply stated, a world view is the mental grid work we use to make sense of the world around us. Everything, seen and unseen, immanent and transcendent, is filtered through our world view. It happens so often and naturally that we are unaware of it for the most part.

Input is not the only thing that is filtered through our world view, our actions and thoughts are also a result of our world view. When I think to myself, “I should apologize to Jim because I hurt his feelings last week,” I have just made a statement about a moral or ethical component of my world view. My world view dictates that when one is wronged by another party, the offending party should apologize to clear things up.

Of course the issue goes much deeper than this, as we can continue asking questions here: What constitutes an offense? Why am I morally obligated to apologize? What if the offended party does not want to hear my apology? What if I just thought that Jim was offended, but he really was not? When I apologize am I “doing the right thing,” or do I am doing it because “I feel bad about it.” If some one wrongs me, do I expect an apology from them also? etc. So far we have only asked questions regarding the Ethical aspect of our world view, but are there other aspects to a world view?

The late Belgian philosopher Leo Apostel created a seven point model to help us categorize different parts of our world view.

1. Ontology. The nature of Being, What is reality?
2. Explanation. The rules and law governing the Cosmos.
3. Futurology. In Christian terms this would be Eschatology, the End Times. How things will play out when we reach the end of time.
4. Ethics. What is good and right conduct for man?
5. Methodology. What are the acceptable methods to get things done in our world view. (Francis A. Schaeffer wrote a whole book about this called How Should We Then Live?)
6. Epistemology. The study of Knowledge, or how we know what we know.
7. Etiology. The study of Causality, or the reason things are the way they are.

Every statement, action or thought, that you or anybody else in the universe says, does or thinks will be connected to one of the above categories (and more than likely several). As you can see with our previous example of the transgression and apology with Jim, all seven of these come into play, either directly or indirectly.

As I originally stated, all authors have a world view. This world view shapes everything they write, it colors all of their perceptions, and even if they admit it or not, can be seen in everything they write. Some authors “just” write never thinking about their world view. Others set out to write with the intention of convincing others that their world view is correct, or at least worthy of merit and further investigation. Next time we will look at two of the methods that authors use to communicate their world view.

I finished reading Greene’s The Power and the Glory a about a week and a half ago.  I must say that I am very impressed with the book.  If I were to sum up the book quickly I would say: The Donatist controversy in a modern setting.  Or possibly: St. Augustine speaking through Greene and schooling the modern world on the real meaning of Grace.

The Donatists were heretics who had a foot hold in the North Africa Churches of the fourth and fifth centuries.  The believed that sacraments performed by lapsed or heretical clergy were invalid.  They also held that the spiritual authority of those clergy were no longer binding either.

While this may sound good at first to our flesh, who is always looking for some merit, some filthy form of uprightness, a moments consideration shows this line of doctrine to be unsound.  We you baptized by a Bishop who recanted his faith under the persecutions?  Your baptism was not really a baptism.  Even if that Bishop later repented.  Which brings us to another point, repentance.  They did not have a very high view of repentance.  Lapse after you were baptized?  No more grace for you.  Married by a clergy man who has an earnest but misguided view of the Incarnation?  You marriage is no longer valid.  That means you have been fornicating, and if you are already a baptized Christian… well, that is bad and no more grace for you.  Took the Lord’s Supper from an unworthy elder?  Then it really was not the Lord’s Supper, just some bread and wine.

It is also a convenient doctrine for those who do not like the authority of the Church.  Do not like the minister’s sermon?  He is an unworthy minister, his spiritual authority is no longer binding.  We do not have to listen to him.

Of course the Church, lead in all Truth by the Holy Spirit, saw this doctrine to be the error that it was and condemned it.   Then after it was condemned it was fought against and the dirty lie was stamped out as an organized doctrinal system until some modern Churchmen, to ’spiritual’ to be bothered by history and sound teaching, resurrected it in some Pentecostal and Fundamentalist circles.

At any rate, Christ’s Bride saw that the Biblical principals were that God created the offices of the Church, man did not.  We could not create them, we can not reshape them, we will never be able to abolish them.  They are what they are.  We do not have men who are fit for the offices.  We are all unfit to serve in these offices.  They are only imposed upon us by a loving God.  And even then those He chooses for His offices in the Church are not always the men that we would choose.   In this way we see that the power is not in the man but in the office, because the office belongs to God and not to the one holding the office.

This is the frame work that Greene tells his story in.  It works well with his two main characters: a whiskey priest who is very aware of his own sinfulness and a morally upright and ethical atheist who enforces the stringent laws against the Church.

I have been reading The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. I usually take books to work so I can read on break and lunch. Needless to say I have been able to get a number of interesting conversations out of it. Mostly because people confuse it with another novel (novel series really) called The Work and the Glory by Gerald N. Lund.

Lund is a Mormon author. Living in Idaho, many people are aware of Mormons, if not from a Mormon background themselves. Most people seem to assume that you are a Mormon, too. As The Power and the Glory has a lot of hard grace it the story line, it makes a great spring board. While Greene may not have been a good Christian, his stories have none of the fuzzy, greasy, feel good grace that slither off the pages of popular Christian novels. One of the main themes in The Power and the Glory is, “You did not choose me, I chose you.” Something our legalistic flesh needs to hear.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but am about three quarters of the way through. Unless Greene really decides to screw up the ending, I can whole heartedly recommend this book with out feeling like a sleaze bag.

I was first introduced to The Water-Babies by a small quote in Bernard Heuvelmans On the Track of Unknown Animals. It was in grade school I decided to check The Water-Babies out from the library. I did not get very far in the book the first time I read it. I am reading it again a second time and now realize that part of the problem the first time around was I missed the humor in the book.

Take this portion:

“And next he [Tom] had a fright; for, as he scrambled up a sandy brow—whirr-poof-poof-cock-cock-kick—something went off in his face, with a most horrid noise. He thought the ground had blown up, and the end of the world come.

And when he opened his eyes (for he shut them very tight) it was only an old cock-grouse, who had been washing himself in sand, like an Arab, for want of water; and who, when Tom had all but trodden on him, jumped up with a noise like the express train, leaving his wife and children to shift for themselves, like an old coward, and went off, screaming “Cur-ru-u-uck, cur-ru-u-uck—murder, thieves, fire—cur-u-uck-cock-kick—the end of the world is come—kick-kick-cock-kick.” He was always fancying that the end of the world was come, when anything happened which was farther off than the end of his own nose. But the end of the world was not come, any more than the twelfth of August was; though the old grouse-cock was quite certain of it.

So the old grouse came back to his wife and family an hour afterwards, and said solemnly, “Cock-cock-kick; my dears, the end of the world is not quite come; but I assure you it is coming the day after to-morrow—cock.” But his wife had heard that so often that she knew all about it, and a little more. And, besides, she was the mother of a family, and had seven little poults to wash and feed every day; and that made her very practical, and a little sharp-tempered; so all she answered was: “Kick-kick-kick—go and catch spiders, go and catch spiders—kick.”

I think the authors who are caught up in the whole End Times literature market need to take a look at that passage. There are certain authors how have been predicting the end of the world in the next few years for several decades. I know one man who never got married because he read The Late Great Planet Earth back in the day. He thought it would be wrong to bring children into the world so close to the tribulation. I guess he never read that no man shall know the hour.

In someways it is very sad, this man forsake the first commandment that God gave us because he thought he was doing the work of the Lord by not marrying and having children. Zeal never brings clarity, that is why you must have your ideas thought out before you come to a situation where you are forced to show your hand.

On a humorous note, think about this passage:

“Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.”

“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.

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.