A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge.

As I was walking along the river this afternoon, I was surprised to hear an owl hooting in the grove my path went through. “Beware the Ides of March,” was the line my mind recollected, and this phrase started a line of thought that might be worth exploring out in more detail.

The line is from the play Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. One of the many bad omens that proceeded the Ides of March was the Owl, a creature of the night, showing itself under the midday sun.

“And yesterday, the bird of night did sit
Even at noonday, upon the market place,
Hooting and shrieking.”

Now it is easy for us to dismiss the idea of an omen as superstition. But I think that is to our detriment if we do. What does my owl along the river, and Caesar’s owl in the market place have in common? For one, they were active during the day. This seems unusual because owls are normally nocturnal creatures. Most people never see an owl in their life. Mostly because owls like to sleep deep in a brushy patch or high in a tree. In the foliage their feathers provide camouflage, so unless you happen to see a yellow eye staring at you, or catch a glimpse of what had looked like the nub of a dead limb shifting weight, your average person will probably pass by an owl and not take any notice.

This unusualness is the discrepancy that serves as the omen. Everyday occurrences are not omens. No one ever thought a bee on a flower or a fish in a river was an omen. The are normal occurrences, and as such, represent the natural order of creation. For something to be an omen, it must be unusual, or at least perceived by the culture as something unusual, worthy of notice and explanation.

This lead me to the idea that superstitions may have something important behind them. Not so much as something that needs to be heeded, but something that can tell us about a culture. At some level, it looks to me like superstitions are the popular interpretation of a cultures cosmology or world view by the common man.

If you have a cosmology that emphasizes the battle between order and chaos, as most pre-modern cultures do, (i.e. the ancient pagan, Jewish and early Christian,) then we have a frame working to view the owl in the daylight through. As God’s (or the gods’ or a Pagan culture), order in the universe dictates that the owl inhabits the darkness, the owl in the light shows that chaos is afoot. In a Christian worldview we would call this chaos sin, as sin is rebellion against God and as a result rebellion against His order, and this leads to disorder.

Now, your average man (ancient or modern) could probably not articulate a coherent world view to explain the order and chaos in the universe. But this does not mean that he is ignorant of the existence and effects of order and chaos in the surrounding world. Instead of being articulated in philosophical treaties, the grid work that is used is perhaps more inductive. He sees a break in the order of creation, and understanding that evil abhors order, interprets the discrepancy as an omen, the sign that evil is on the move. In that way, superstitions are a folk cosmology, a layman’s interpretation of his cultures cosmological gridwork.

“I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are very wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: ‘Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden.”
—Augustine of Hippo

Like we said, the history of Canada is so dull. It’s all just murder, mayhem and massacres.
Fortunately, Canada’s academic historians and well-intentioned educators have picked up the ball. Who needs heroes and exiles and great campaigns for justice? Boooorr-ing! Why should Canadians know who their leaders were? Why should they be familiar with the key battles and major turning points? That’s so outdated.
Instead, we now have “social history.” Which of course isn’t really history at all. Regular history is about cause and effect. Social history is about endless details and accumulated minutiae. It isn’t so much history as it is “historical sociology.” Hint: If you see the words “working-class conditions” or “an examination of gender roles,” you are reading social history (i.e., sociology). And boy oh boy, kids today can’t get enough of it! “Forget John A. Macdonald and the conquest of a continent,” they cry. “We want to know more about the social conditions of eighteenth-century textile workers!”
Canadian history is no longer about “people” (as in, individuals). It is about “peoples.” Note the telltale use of the plural. Whenever you see the word “peoples” in a title, you know you are in for some excellent, rip-roaring, social-demographic, ethnically sensitive, gender-correct sociological studies! So, get yourself a blanket and a big ol’ pillow and settle yourself down for a nice long snooze.

–How To Be A Canadian by Will Ferguson and Ian Ferguson, page 18.

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.”

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.