Alan Jacobs

I end my new essay on “the mythical method” with a section on the great Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, and if you’d like to know more about him, I wrote a post for you.

I have an essay in the new issue of Harper’s called “Yesterday’s Men: The Death of the Mythical Method.” It traces the interest in myth and myth-making from Giambattista Vico to George Lucas, tries to explain why myth has ceased to be an appealing and useful category to our intelligentsia, and asks whether there might be a case for restoring it to a place in our conceptual toolbox. 

I do think such a case can be made, and while I do not in this essay make that case in any formal way, I conclude by pointing to the example of Wole Soyinka, who (I’ve been saying this for decades) just may be our greatest living writer. If you don’t know anything about Soyinka, here’s an introductory essay I wrote about him more than twenty years ago. 

I’d love to make a few converts to Soyinka. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend two of the plays in the first volume of his Collected Plays: The Strong Breed and The Swamp Dwellers. Then move on to his greatest play, and one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, Death and the King’s Horseman. 

Soyinka has also written several volumes of memoirs, the best of which are the first two: Aké: The Years of Childhood and Ìsarà: A Voyage around “Essay” — “Essay” being the nickname of Soyinka’s father, S. A. Soyinka. The former is still in print and easy to find; the latter has been ignored, which is a great shame. They are wonderfully rich, evocative, and perceptive accounts of childhood, and a window into a certain class of Nigerian Christians around the time of the Second World War. (The passages in Aké about the widespread fear that Hitler would invade Nigeria are very funny. In fact, you will find yourself smiling often as you read these memoirs.) 

The next level of difficulty would be his more ambitious plays (A Dance of the Forests and — I discuss this one in my essay — his Yoruba/Christian/Greek version of Euripides’s Bacchae), and then his remarkable novel The Interpreters. 

Also, here are some photographs of the Soyinka family I put up for one of my classes and have yet to annotate. The third photo is of the formidable Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, whose women’s march for tax relief is the climactic scene of Aké — she was a pioneering Nigerian feminist and activist, Soyinka’s great-aunt, and the mother of the great Fela Kuti. Which means the one of the greatest African singer-songwriters and one of the greatest living writers are cousins. 

Finally, here are some photos I took in 1991 when I visited the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in the heart of Yorubaland. 

My Harper’s essay on the rise and fall of the “mythical method” is now live!

I wrote about Thomas of London.

The inchoate and incomplete “theology of the city” that I wrote about last week has always, is my mind, been connected to London as strongly as to Jerusalem and Babylon and Rome. Here’s a new entry in my longstanding if intermittent series about the great city on the Thames. 

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He is known to us by another name, and linked in our minds with the city in which he was murdered, but throughout much of his adult life he would have been known as Thomas of London. Thomas, because he was born, probably in the year 1118, on the the feast-day of St. Thomas the Apostle, December 21; and London because he was born in that city, on the street called Cheapside. His father had come to England from Rouen, in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest; his mother was from Caen. Later stories that Thomas was Anglo-Saxon are wholly untrue. He was, as his shrewdest biographer says, “perhaps the first of England’s great men to be essentially and professedly a Londoner.”

“Cheapside” is derived from Old English words meaning “marketplace,” and we know what people would have brought to sell at the market by the nearby street names: Bread Street, Milk Street, Poultry, Honey Lane. When Thomas was born the place was more of an open area in the growing town than what anyone today would call a street, but it was a major thoroughfare, and when the Kings of England made royal progress from the Tower of London at the eastern end of the city to the Palace of Westminster, arcing along the great bend in the River Thames, they always passed along Cheapside.

Just to the west of his birthplace Thomas would have seen, rising above the rest of the town, London’s greatest work in progress: St. Paul’s Cathedral. Construction had begun in 1087, after a great fire destroyed its predecessor and indeed much of the city — a story that would be repeated in 1666, leading to the building of yet another St. Paul’s, the great domed one that we know today. Scholars believe that the church Thomas saw going up, which is usually called Old St. Paul’s, was already the fourth church to be built on that site, which makes one wonder why the people of London didn’t give up and try elsewhere. But the site was both an intrinsically good one — situated on a small hill overlooking the Thames — and one hallowed by sanctity, for St. Erkenwald, a Bishop of London who died in 693, was buried there, and many pilgrims visited his grave to seek his intercession.

Later in life, when Thomas had become a great man, indeed the greatest churchman in England, he had learned clerks who worked for him, and one of them — William Fitzstephen, who was present at his murder — wrote a biography of Thomas that he prefaced with an account of the city in which Thomas was born. London was William’s native city too, and he took great pride in it and believed that its character explains a good deal about Thomas. London was the place of Thomas’s “rising,” as Canterbury was of his “setting.” William’s Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londoniae — Description of the Most Noble City of London — ranges widely over the customs and practices of the city: for instance, we learn of a magnificent riverside restaurant that not only created lavish feasts but prepared takeaway meals for customers in a hurry. We learn also about commerce, sports and games, green meadows, wells of sweet water, and places of learning.

But William also wishes that we should know how pious a city London was, how “blessed in Christ’s religion.” Though we now believe that no more than 20,000 people lived there, William says that the city boasted thirteen major churches and 126 smaller ones. The major ones were monastic foundations of one kind or another, the smaller ones parish churches. It was this atmosphere of piety, William believes, that nourished the boy who would one day become St. Thomas Becket, St. Thomas of Canterbury. By the time Thomas was ten years old, William says, the boy already radiated holiness. At that age Thomas was sent for his schooling across the river to Merton Priory — situated in what is now a part of the metropolis but then was in the countryside, well beyond what William would have thought of as the boundaries of London — and when Thomas’s father Gilbert came to visit him there he found the prior, Robert, prostrating himself before the boy. When Gilbert expressed horror at this reversal of proper roles, the prior replied, “I know what I am doing. This boy will be a great man before the Lord.”

A likely story, one might be pardoned for thinking. And even at that time there were many in England who doubted that London could such an incubator of holiness. Richard of Devizes, a monk from Winchester and a contemporary of William’s, wrote bluntly: “If you do not wish to dwell with evildoers, do not live in London.” For him, and for many outside the capital, the city was already known as a place of all kinds of sin, but especially of naked avarice. And if one revisits William’s Descriptio with this in mind, one might notice that he spends more time describing the commerce and sports and games than the churches. He is never anything less than admiring of the worldly greatness of his native city. It was that particular greatness to which Thomas of London was a natural heir; but in the end he chose a different inheritance.

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When Thomas was a very small boy, another Londoner had a vision. We do not know much with certainty about this man, not even his name. He is usually called Rahere or Raherius. He was clearly associated in some way with the court of King Henry I: in the fragmentary and confused records that have come down to us, he is sometimes referred to merely as a courtier, sometimes as Henry’s herald, though most often as the King’s jester. But in a document from 1115 his name is listed as one of the canons of (that is, priests attached to) St. Paul’s Cathedral. The taking of holy orders is not necessarily incompatible with playing the fool in a king’s court, especially in a period when kings had wide latitude to make gifts to their favorites; but the stories about Rahere do make for a curious amalgamation.

In any event, Rahere’s story now takes a turn: When he was on pilgrimage to Rome he fell ill, and when he was near death St. Bartholomew appeared before him and pledged to spare his life, but only on the condition that Rahere return to London and build a hospital. (In some versions of the story, Rahere in his vision is attacked by a terrifying monster, which the saint drives away.) Upon his return Rahere got busy. With royal and episcopal approval, he acquired a site next to the great livestock market of Smithfield, about half a mile north-west of Cheapside, and began, in 1123, to build both a church and a hospital, both named for the saint who has rescued him from death. He became the prior of the church, a position he held until his death in 1144; and there he is buried.

Thanks to the Great Fire of London in 1665 and the general depredations of time, nothing remains of the Cheapside of Thomas Becket, but some of what Rahere built remains to be seen. The site stands just at the northwestern edge of the City of London, which is why the Fire, which started in Pudding Lane in the eastern part of the city and near the river, never reached it; and when Henry VIII chose to re-found the hospital after he had dissolved England’s monasteries, it became formally known as the “House of the Poore in West Smithfield in the suburbs of the City of London of Henry VIII’s Foundation.” The original hospital and its several chapels are long gone — though a late-medieval replacement for one those chapels remains as the church of St. Bartholomew the Less — so the chief embodiment of Rahere’s great project is the church known as St. Bartholomew the Great, or, more familiarly, Great St. Bart’s.

The visitor, or worshipper, today enters the church by passing along a walkway that is almost a tunnel — an urban version of a holloway, an old path sunk below the surrounding ground and overgrown by vegetation. For the city has been built up, level by level, in the nine hundred years since Rahere’s workmen laid the foundation for the church, and the surrounding streets run six fit or more above the entrance. Opening the doors, you find yourself in a tiny area, a dark wooden partition blocking any view. But you may well smell incense. And then you walk through one of the little interior doors and and ancient walls rise up around you, the heavy thick Norman stonework, the rounded arches, the windows that seem small if you have been in Gothic or new-Gothic churches recently. Around you is great mass, and a sense of the numinous, as though prayers that have risen up from this place for nearly a millennium have lest behind some invisible, yet palpable, residue.

I have visited Great St. Bart’s many times, but when I think of it I always recall the time I attended Evensong when a visiting Russian choir sang music from Rachmaninoff’s Vespers. The somber and gorgeous music, which though composed in the twentieth century is shaped by ancient forms and tones of Russian music and prayer, seemed uncannily congruent with the dim and forbidding beauty of the old church. I was almost surprised when I looked around me to see people in modern clothing rather than robed and cowled monks.

Meanwhile, just a few feet away, the work of Barts (as the hospital is now generally called) went on, its multifarious electrical machinery humming, its practitioners generally oblivious not only to the worship going on in the church but to the curious and wonderful fact that that worship and their own labors on behalf of the sick arose from a single impulse, a single obedience, on the part of a man who once had found himself far from home and close to death and helpless in the face of his own suffering. The call of those who served in that hospital at its founding was “to wait upon the sick with diligence and care in all gentleness,” as the call of the monks was to pray for all who suffered in this life, and in the next too, if their place in the next life was Purgatory.

And we should remember too the goings-on a few feet on the other side of the church from Barts, in the great Victorian edifice of Smithfield Market, where the lorries come and go all day and most of the night, where the gods of commerce receive their proper worship as they did when William FitzStephen looked upon his city with such admiration. But this was also once a place of execution too; and also nearby was the site of Bartholomew Fair, that “school of vice which has initiated more youth into the habits of villainy than Newgate itself” (so the Newgate Calendar said). All the world’s wisdom and folly in a few square yards, with an ancient and beautiful church in the middle of it.

Paramount Pictures studio, back in the day 

Wondertooneel der Nature

Nina Jordan, Untitled, Flooded Home V, 2021

I gave a couple of chatbots a list of movies with dates and asked them to organize the list in chronological order. Gemini could do it, ChatGPT 4o could not (though it said it did). For all these bots the failure points are quite different.

Well, the Euros were shaping up to be a great tournament until England took the pitch. That was dire — hypercautious, unimaginative, and low-energy. But since they eked out a win, I’m sure Southgate will give us more of the same. ⚽️

Ted Gioia:

Ortega y Gasset’s entire essay [on “The Dehumanization of Art”] is brilliant, and should be required reading in college humanities programs — it’s more relevant now than ever before…. But instead it’s almost never read. Instead, grad students are assigned Walter Benjamin’s essay from 1935 on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” — which embraced mass production as a “progressive” way to provide “visual and emotional enjoyment” in an “intimate” manner to millions of people. I have sympathy for Benjamin, but he was betrayed by the mass producers — much as we are getting betrayed by today’s tech overlords of creative ‘content’.

A great post by Mr. Gioia, and consistent with my recent comment that a Ruskinian account of contemporary culture must begin by attending to beauty. And we might begin that endeavor by considering Aphorism 19 from Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture: “All beauty is founded on the laws of natural forms.” 

Zach Rausch: “This is the challenge of our time: How do we balance the desire to give kids individual freedom and new digital technologies with our desire to give them a stable, tight-knit community?” But what if we can’t? What if we have to choose?

Why I’m gonna read Moonbound again.

Why am I shooting film again, after so many years? In part because of what Craig Mod says here:

We have access to such abundance — a billion photos, infinite video at our fingertips, the ability to fill our closets with clothes for a hundred bucks, a near-zero-cost amusement bonanza straight to the grave — that the move to “scarcity” mediums like vinyl or cassettes (!!) or film or obsessing over 70mm IMAX prints does make sense (in a cockamamied way). Sixty years ago, jazz kissa owners saw an “arbitrage opportunity” in music, in record ownership. Today that opportunity is lost. Today we have all the music we could want all the time. Ten thousand YouTube channels to explain each album. Transcriptions of every instrument. So what do we do? We arbitrage attention by hunting for records of albums on Spotify to put on our shelves. We load a clunky (mostly) light-tight box with celluloid and pretend like every shot is our last. These are ostensibly pointless acts (“Just tell Siri to play the album, just use your phone to take the photo!”) but in reality they’re goofy forms of prayer for us godless folk, prayer for honing attention, for cultivating intimacy, for looking a little more closely in a world beset by distraction, seductive distraction.

Around a month ago, I mentioned that I had just read and really enjoyed Robin Sloan’s novel Moonbound. And that’s true! But what I didn’t say at the time is that I definitely didn’t get the most out of my reading experience, didn’t have full concentration as I read. And I know why. It was because of one page near the beginning of the galley I read, a page with three words on it: 

As I read, I kept looking back at that page, as though hoping that the words would dissolve and be replaced by the promised cartography. Because when I am reading a work of fiction there are few things I love more than a map. 

I think I would have missed the map even if I hadn’t been told that there would be one, but to know that a map was being made but I did not have it was agonizing. Thus my inconsistent attentiveness. 

But today, this very afternoon, my very own hardcover copy of the book arrived, and when I opened it up I saw this: 

Ah. Ah yes. I will now be re-reading Moonbound, and this time I’ll get the full and proper experience. 

Shooting on film — with a Nikon F100 — for the first time in many years. The natural bokeh is great, and the texture, but wow am I out of practice. I need to re-learn setting exposure and even proper focusing. (Also: there are so many varieties of film to choose from now!)

Here’s a long post, with many links, explaining how I’ve sorta-kinda-in-a-way written a book in blog posts.

My earlier posts in this series (which began by reading Genesis but has since expanded) are: 

• Orientation to the topic 
• On fertility 
• The country and the city 
• An outline of the Pentateuch 
• Character 

The Pentateuch concludes with the death of Moses and the arrival of the children of Israel at the doorstep of the Promised Land. As in the next books (Joshua and Judges) they consolidate their position, we’re moving, as I noted in an earlier post, from a world of nomadic pastoralists to a world of city dwellers — or, anyway, a world in which the embodiment of the Israelite identity is a city, Jerusalem, conceived first as the residence of the King and only later as the center of the cult of Yahweh. 

This change raises certain questions about the theology and ethics of building, especially building a city, and as it happens I wrote a series of posts about that some years ago on my old Text Patterns blog: 

• Building 
• Building 2 
• Building 3: practices of making 
• Building 4: creative fidelity 
• Building 5: cunning works 
• Building 6: diaspora 

The invocation of the Diaspora leads to a reflection on the city that in Scripture opposes Jerusalem: Babylon. Here are the entries in my Encyclopedia Babylonica:

• Welcome 
• Belshazzar 
• Daniel 
• Babylon System 
• Hiatus 

I stopped writing then because I was confused about a number of things. But I am now seeing certain connections. The series on building (which focused on the Davidic era) and the series on Babylon (which focused on the era that ended the Davidic line) are, properly speaking, elements in a larger theology of the city, which I explored by writing about Augustine’s City of God: 

• The City and the City 
• Archetype and Antithesis 
• Hypothesis 
• Secondary Epic 
• Political Theology 
• City and Church 
• A Digression on Longtermism 
• Causes 
• A Digression on Reading 
• Parallels 
• Ends and Means 
• The City of God Coming Down 
• Last Things

(There’s some overlap to these series because they were written independently of one another and sometimes in forgetfulness.) And I have many other posts and essays that seem to be on unrelated subjects but may not be. For instance, Ruskin — my admiration for whom I recently reaffirmed — begins The Stones of Venice by claiming that three cities associated with the mastery of the sea stand above all others: Tyre, Venice, and London. His theology of art and architecture is also a theology of the city, meant for Londoners, as the successors to the Venetians, to heed. There’s even a strange passage early in Stones in which Ruskin claims that all three of Noah’s sons founded cultures that contributed to the rise of architecture, thereby reconnecting the theme of the City to the book of Genesis.

Related: there is a long and powerful tradition of writing about London as the city, the paradigmatic or exemplary city, the city as a “condensed symbol,” to return to a theme from my last post: this is what Blake does repeatedly, and Dickens, and H. G. Wells, especially in Tono-Bungay. There are some powerful connections between Tono-Bungay and Little Dorrit that I want to explore in a future post. 

It’s strange that I have written a book’s worth of reflections on all this stuff. But what does this non-book say? Heck, what do I even mean by “all this stuff”? 

I think these concerns arose in my mind because (a) I was, and still am, frustrated by the ongoing dominance of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, a book that still establishes the categories for thinking about how Christians live in “the world”; and (b) I felt that a richer, deeper picture is offered, however obliquely, in the poetry and prose of W. H. Auden in the decade following the end of the Second World War. (It’s noteworthy, I think, that Auden’s work is contemporaneous with Niebuhr’s: that WW2 prompted full-scale reconsiderations of the ideal character of culture and society is what my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 is all about.) Auden, instead of writing about “culture,” writes about “the city,” and that reformulation strikes me as especially resonant and full of promise, especially given the prominence of the Jerusalem/Babylon opposition in the Bible. 

Now, Auden writes about these matters in The Shield of Achilles, which I have edited — but he writes about them more extensively in his previous book Nones, which I may also edit. Even if I don’t get the chance to make a critical edition of that collection, I’m going to be re-reading it, and maybe after I do I’ll have a better idea of how to put all these thoughts, which have obviously been occupying my mind for quite some time, into better order. 

But whether I should try to turn all this into an actual book? I have my doubts about that. For one thing, few if any publishers would be interested in publishing something that is largely available online for free. For another — and this actually may be more important — do all these thoughts really belong in a book, between covers, with a beginning an ending? Some projects ought not to be closed and completed; some projects ought to be ramifying and exploratory. I suspect this is one such project. I may have more to say about that in future posts.