“The secret of good cursing lies in cadence, emphasis, and and antiphony. The basic themes are always the same. Conscious striving after variety is not to be encouraged, because it takes your mind off your cursing.“ – A. J. Liebling
I’m old enough to remember when I could say “Hey Siri, play [X]” and get the song I asked for.
Christian Spirituality: categories
The Great Texts program here at Baylor, where I teach about half my classes, begins its course of study with a series of periods: Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Twentieth Century. Then it diverges into genres, themes, and topics. I’ve just concluded teaching Great Texts in Christian Spirituality — for the third time — and while that’s a very interesting and enjoyable course for me to teach, it’s quite a challenge to design. There are so many texts to choose from that (I tell my class) I could probably teach it five times with five completely different sets of texts and do equal justice to the theme.
And, of course, it’s very difficult simply to define the topic. What is Christian spirituality, for heaven’s sake? I always start with this: Christian spirituality is the application of Christian theology to the challenge of living — and then we work through various other definitions as the term goes on. But the boundaries between spirituality and theology never can become precise, and indeed, some key Christian thinkers would deny the distinction. As Jaroslav Pelikan has noted,
It was in the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon that Maximus Confessor attained his historic importance, both for the history of spirituality and for the history of dogma (a distinction that he would not have accepted since, as every one of these treatises makes abundantly clear, there was for him no spirituality apart from dogma, and no dogma apart from spirituality).
Anyway: when I’m choosing texts, I’m careful to (a) cover the historical ground as best I can and (b) draw upon the three major streams of Christian writing on spirituality: Roman, Orthodox, Protestant. But over my three times teaching the course, I’ve come to think that certain other distinctions are important to acknowledge as well. I think especially of three axes:
- apophatic ↔ kataphatic
- individual ↔ communal
- encounter ↔ obedience
That is, any given Christian writer might emphasize the apophatic — what cannot be said about God and the experience of God — or the kataphatic — what can and must be said; might emphasize the individual or the communal and ecclesial aspects of the Christian life; might see the Christian life primarily in terms of an encounter with God or obedience to God. And you can sort Christian writers or texts accordingly. For instance:
- Julian of Norwich: apophatic/individual/encounter
- The Imitation of Christ: kataphatic/individual/obedience
- Eliot’s Four Quartets: apophatic/individual/encounter
- C. S. Lewis’s sermons and talks: kataphatic/communal/encounter
These classifications are arguable, of course! Also of course: they can’t be strictly distinguished from one another, for example, one’s obedience to God may have a great impact on one’s ability to have a genuine encounter with God. But as indicators of tendencies, as guides to emphasis, I think the categories are useful.
Some figures are difficult to classify: Maximus tends to cover all the possibilities, which is perhaps key to his uniquely powerful place in the whole tradition. (His Centuries are very much about communal life and obedience within that life, but he also wants to demonstrate the ways that an obedient life can lead to an encounter with the Divine that cannot easily be put into words.) But trying to place writers or books in this scheme has, in my experience, been a great way to generate conversation about them. Maybe some of you will find it useful.
intrinsic values
In his poem “Little Gidding,” written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in England’s Civil War, in the 17th century, now “are folded in a single party.” The same already seems true of Vendler and Perloff. Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendler’s own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.) Both Vendler and Perloff, by contrast, rejected the idea that poetry had to earn its place in the curriculum, or in the culture at large, by being “relevant.” Nor did it have to be defended on the grounds that it makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.
Rather, they believed that studying poetry was valuable in and of itself.
I like this essay, but I’m mentioning it here because Kirsch makes use of a common phrase that has always puzzled me: “valuable in and of itself.” Variants: “intrinsically valuable” and “valuable for its own sake.” I have never known what that means — or even could mean. Because: if you ask people to say more about valuing something for its own sake, they end up saying that it gives them pleasure or delights them or fascinates them. But to pursue something because it delights or fascinates you is not pursuing it for its own sake — it’s pursuing it for the sake of the delight or fascination.
When people say that something is “valuable in and of itself,” I think what they mean is simply that it has no economic or social value — note Kirsch’s contrast between intrinsic value and something valued because it “makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.” Someone might say that when we say some artifact or experience is intrinsically valuable we’re saying that it does not have any instrumental value — but isn’t a song that delights me instrumental to that delight? And isn’t that okay?
So I think that when we describe something as having intrinsic value, what we really mean is that the value it provides is higher than or nobler than any furthering of crassly economic or social ambitions. We’re indirectly and somewhat sloppily appealing to a hierarchy of goods. And maybe — especially in the context of debates about liberal education, which is at least partly the context of Kirsch’s essay — we should be more explicit about that, and conscious of what our hierarchy is and why we affirm it.
Apple may just have created the most tone-deaf advertisement in the history of advertising. I think I’m gonna go outside and smash my iPad with a trumpet.
Most alarmingly, kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to stop reading for fun. It’s called the “Decline by 9,” and it’s reaching a crisis point for publishers and educators. According to research by the children’s publishers Scholastic, at age 8, 57 percent of kids say they read books for fun most days; at age 9, only 35 percent do. This trend started before the pandemic, experts say, but the pandemic accelerated things. “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how disruptive the pandemic was on middle grade readers,” one industry analyst told Publishers Weekly. And everyone I talked to agreed that the sudden drop-off in reading for fun is happening at a crucial age—the very age when, according to publishing lore, lifetime readers are made. “If you can keep them interested in books at that age, it will foster an interest in books the rest of their life,” said Brenna Connor, an industry analyst at Circana, the market research company that runs Bookscan. “If you don’t, they don’t want to read books as an adult.”
Obviously this is bad news, but let’s remember the context: Do kids do anything for fun these days? They’re not allowed to play, only to have “supervised leisure activities.” Everything is grinding and striving and measured performance. Are they even given enough time alone to make reading possible? If kids go from school to music lessons to the sport of the season, or to various after-school programs, and they’re given phones to occupy their every free instant, of course they won’t read. But then, in such cases not-reading isn’t the worst of their problems.
R.I.P. Steve Albini — a wonder of a recording engineer who had a simple and clear and unshakable commitment to what he thought recorded music should sound like: a live performance. Human beings playing their instruments and singing, in the earth’s atmosphere, surrounded by a built environment.
