James E Hartley

Does Education Have an Aim?

“Education is a subject on which we all feel that we have something to say. We have all been educated, more or less; and we have, most of us, complaints to make about the defects of our own education; and we all like to blame our educators, or the system within which they were compelled to work, for our failure to educate ourselves.”

That comes near the outset of T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Aims of Education,” included in the posthumously published collection To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings.

The essay was originally a set of lectures Eliot gave in 1950-51 at the University of Chicago. What is striking about the discussion is how little has changed since then in thinking about the aims of education. Think of the enormous advances in other fields of knowledge, all of which have shaped the content of the individual classes in an educational system. In what fields, for example, would a textbook from 1950 still be useable in a college classroom? Yet despite those massive changes what we can call the Education Question is still unresolved.

What is an Education? Or as Eliot puts it in the first part of his essay “Can ‘Education’ be Defined?” As soon as you start to try to answer that question, you realize how many different ways we use the term. Which person is educated? The person who can read? The person who knows reading, writing and ‘rithmetic? The person who can read a newspaper? The person who knows algebra? Or calculus? The person who knows about Dante and Aquinas and Michelangelo? At what point can you say about yourself, “I am educated”?

Thinking through the question of definition is pretty interesting because it leads naturally into thinking about the aims of education. Eliot begins noting three quite distinct aims of education, however defined: training to earn a living, preparing for citizenship, the pursuit of perfection. The intriguing questions here is how those aims are related to one another and how they conflict with one another. It is a marvelous tangled mess.

The part that left me in deep reverie, however, comes at the midpoint of the essay, when Eliot describes the history of education:

We have already observed that the term “education” has become more difficult of definition as a result of social changes in the last three or four hundred years. We may distinguish four important phases. In the first, we were concerned only with the training of a small minority for certain learned professions. In the second, with the refinement of culture, we were concerned with the education of the gentleman, or of the honnête homme; and at the same time, with the supply of the rudiments of literacy to a humbler stratum of society. During the nineteenth century, the minds of educators were largely occupied with the problem of extending the benefits, or supposed benefits, of education as then understood, to an increasing number of the population. The problem was apparently simple: men still thought that they knew what education was—it was what a part of the community had been receiving; and so long as this education could be supplied to increasing numbers, educators felt that they were on the right road. But today we realize that we have come near enough to the end of expansion to be faced with a wholly new problem….In the nineteenth century, there seemed also to be only the problem of educating more of the members of society. But now we are at a stage at which we are not simply trying to educate more people—we are already committed to providing everybody with something called education. We are coming to the end of our educational frontier. Long ago we decided that everybody must be taught to read, write, and cipher; and so long as there were large numbers who could not read, write, or cipher, we did not need to look too closely into the question of what education meant.

A fascinating way to frame the question. We are still stuck in that fourth stage. Truly stuck. Once we have reached the point in a society where there is universal literacy and knowledge of basic mathematics and science, then what? The aims of education through 4^th grade are clear; there is relatively little debate about that any more. It is what comes after that where the questions loom large.

A student knows how to read; what do you have the student read? In a society with a cultural consensus on what things matter most, that is not a difficult question. But, what if there is no consensus? Who gets to decide what the student reads? Do we leave the matter up to “education experts”? But, in this case, what does it mean to have an expertise in education? Do the experts in educational theory automatically know the best aims for education? If you look at the content of a Master of Arts in Education program, you find a lot about technique, but very little about how to decide what content will make the best society.

Imagine we wanted to set up a program in which people will learn the best aim for the education in a country. Plato’s Republic had something like that. The Philosopher Kings decide. Can we agree on who should be our philosopher kings? Good luck even making a list of candidates for that job.

It doesn’t take long in ruminating about this to end up exactly where Eliot ended up at the close of his essay. “The Issue of Religion” cannot be avoided. We need a standard on which to evaluate different societal forms in order to decide on the best aims of education. A system of thought which provides an external standing place is a pretty good description of a religion. The religion is not a part of what we are examining when we think through the aims of education; the religion is the standard by which we evaluate those aims.

If this is right, then Eliot’s fourth stage of education is the most difficult even in a society in which there is a consensus about religion. Agreeing to teach a student to read is pretty simple compared to figuring out what educational content will prepare people to be good citizens or what careers an education should train people to do or what virtues will enable people to pursue perfection. In a society with a common religious foundation, those questions are hard, but they are at least potentially answerable.

What happens, however, when a society does not have a common religion? How do we decide on the best aims of education when we no longer share the same fundamental beliefs about what makes a good society?

The educational wars we see today fit so easily into this framework it is hard to see them in any other way. Think of all the candidates for the structure of public education today, and it is easy to see that this is a religious war being conducted under a different name. We have the Religion of America the Beautiful vs the Religion of Environmentalism vs the Religion of the Woke vs the Religion of Self-Esteem. All of these and more are vying for control of the curriculum.

Is there a way out? Is there a way to craft an educational system and the content of that education which bypasses this problem of warring religions? I can’t think of one. Indeed, the longer I think about it, the more I realize that it is hard to come up with any aim of education for the literate student which does not immediately further the aim of one of the those warring religions. The curriculum wars are the ideological equivalent of the Reformation wars, with, let us hope, a lot less blood.

What happens if we cannot agree on the aims of education? Look around.

Places To Go

Some books merit a second life. 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know by Terry Glaspey is one of those books. The original edition was published by Baker Books in 2015. Moody Press recently reissued it with even more pictures than the original.

The concept of the book is simple. Glaspey picked 75 Great Works of Art and wrote up a description of the item and a biography of the artist. Four or five pages per masterpiece. The genres included are visual artwork, music, literature, and film.

The first thing you notice is, of course, the table of contents and which 75 works made the cut. The most noticeable thing is what is not in this list. There is no theology, biography, or devotional classics. Indeed, the most surprising thing is that if you made a list of the things you would expect to show up in a Reddit forum on things every Christian should read, it would look nothing like this list.

Instead Glaspey’s list is quite intriguing. While I could come up with a short list of works Glaspey doesn’t have which I would have put onto my own list of 75 masterpieces every Christian should know, I can’t point to anything on Glaspey’s list which is lacking enough merit to be in the conversation. (Wodehouse is the most painful omission; every Christian should read Wodehouse to learn more about the joy of life. So should every non-Christian, for that matter.) This isn’t the definitive list of 75 masterpieces, but it would be fair to say that you won’t go wrong if you started with this 75.

The real danger in a book like this is that once you get past having fun looking at the table of contents, it is all downhill. The genuinely pleasant surprise in this book is that the book gets even better once you get to the Book Proper. You can read this book straight through or you can pick it up in an idle moment and read a few pages a random, or you could grab it when you want to think about a new topic or are looking for a book or movie recommendation. It doesn’t really matter how you read or use this book, you won’t be disappointed.

The intriguing thing about the items in this book is that they are not all narrowly Christian devotional works. These are not all things for sale at your local Christian Bookstore. The artists are not even all conventional devout Christians. There is a host of flawed individuals and people who struggled mightily with Faith. But, in every case the art itself has something transcendent about it, something that causes it to rise up to being something it which any Christian would benefit from spending time.

Glaspey hints at the general idea of his selections in many places. Here he is in the middle of discussing George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and other fairy tales:

They are meat to show us truths that do not easily reduce to rational explanations and provoke a more intuitive response from the reader. There are layers of meanings at work here, all of them valid: physical, spiritual, mythical, and psychological. Each of these layers interpenetrate and illuminate each other, which is why these stories are not so much meant to illustrate theological truths as to help us find our way into a different way of experiencing these truths.

Just so. That description would apply equally well to Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison or Frank Capra’s It’s Wonderful Life or Makoto Fujimura’s The Four Holy Gospels (all of which are included in this volume). These are not works akin to verse by verse commentaries or the stereotypical study guide to the Bible. These are not works akin to the self-help books The Christian Way to Deal with Problem X. These are all masterpieces, works designed for rumination. Glaspey points to the work, gives just enough background to make you want to take up the work, and then set you off to discover whatever you will discover.

For the works I know well, Glaspey is a sure guide. He is not afraid to include works that really push the margins of conventional Christian thought, and for that alone, I have enormous respect for what he has done. Taking just some literary works: Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, O’Connor’s Collected Stories,Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Dickinson’s Complete Poems—none of those are things which would be on a standard list of Christian Masterpieces, but Glaspey is right that they all belong on a list of Masterpieces a Christian should know.

It would be easy to just go on listing insights I picked up here and there, works with which I now want to spend some time and get to know or to know better, things that suddenly look different. But, I’ll close with the thing that I found most stunning.

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, the 1964 jazz album. I started listening to this album a decade or so ago. It is truly an amazing bit of music. Sets a wonderful mood; truly meditative and a bit hypnotic. I liked it. But, I was shocked to see it in a list of 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know. The only vocals in it are a brief point where the musicians all start chanting “A Love Supreme” for a bit; it blends in nicely with the rest of the music, but it isn’t a really big part of the album. So, what is this album doing on this list? As Glaspey describes the album, he starts talking about a poem John Coltrane wrote and put in the liner notes on the album cover. Aha! I listened to the electronic version of the album; I had never seen the album cover. But, then came the real shock The Fourth Movement of A Love Supreme is filled with a haunting saxophone. The saxophone part maps perfectly onto the poem. Coltrane was literally playing the words of the poem on the saxophone. You can find the part on YouTube with words being shown as the saxophone plays. It is extraordinary. The album went from good to transcendent. How transcendent?…well, it became the music I put on while driving to church on Easter.

(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)

The Miner Prophets

Emile Zola used to be more widely known than he is today. Indeed, the place he is most likely to be referenced these days is a passing mention of his famous essay “J’accuse” about the Dreyfus Affair, but then again few people remember the Dreyfus Affair anymore.

Indeed, was Zola pro or anti-Dreyfus?

And what century are we even talking about?

Such is the fickle nature of fame. In the late 19^th century, he was one of the most well-known novelists in the world. In addition to multiple other books, he wrote a series of twenty (yes, 20!) loosely connected novels in an attempt to detail every aspect of French life. He was the sort of novelist who treated the form as something on the border of fiction and journalism; the details are real but the story is fictional.

I first learned of Zola decades ago when reading Tom Wolfe. Wolfe loved Zola. It’s not hard to see why: Wolfe fancied himself a modern day incarnation. From an article in The Guardian:

He is “proud,” he says, “that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not—and was not interested in—telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.”

I spent some time trying to figure out which Wolfe essay it was that I read that prompted me to get a copy of Zola’s Germinal decades ago. I have no idea—he wrote about Zola in lots of places. But, the best description of the book is in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” a 1989 Harper’s Magazine article.

In 1884 Zola went down into the mines at Anzin to do the documentation for what was to become the novel Germinal. Posing as a secretary for a member of the French Chamber of Deputies, he descended into the pits wearing his city clothes, his frock coat, high stiff collar, and high stiff hat (this appeals to me for reasons I won’t delay you with), and carrying a notebook and pen. One day Zola and the miners who were serving as his guides were 150 feet below the ground when Zola noticed an enormous workhorse, a Percheron, pulling a sled piled with coal through a tunnel. Zola asked, “How do you get that animal in and out of the mine every day?” At first the miners thought he was joking. Then they realized he was serious, and one of them said, “Mr. Zola, don’t you understand? That horse comes down here once, when he’s a colt, barely more than a foal, and still able to fit into the buckets that bring us down here. That horse grows up down here. He grows blind down here after a year or two, from the lack of light. He hauls coal down here until he can’t haul it anymore, and then he dies down here, and his bones are buried down here.” When Zola transfers this revelation from the pages of his documentation notebook to the pages of Germinal, it makes the hair on your arms stand on end. You realize, without the need of amplification, that the horse is the miners themselves, who descend below the face of the earth as children and dig coal down in the pit until they can dig no more and then are buried, often literally, down there.

Wolfe isn’t exaggerating at all. This is a novel about miners, and I think it would be impossible to read the book and not viscerally feel what it would be like to be a miner in the late 19^th century in France. It is not hard to figure out why there are no theme parks replicating the experience.

The story in the novel revolves around whether the miners should organize a strike in an attempt to get better payment. The novel clearly sympathizers with the miners; indeed, it would be hard not to sympathize with the miners. The owners and managers are surprisingly cartoonish when compared to the miners. The novel would have been a lot stronger if the wealthy had as much depth as the poor, but that would have blunted the impact. Maybe the other 19 novels in the larger series have more detailed portrayals of that class; it is fascinating to think of a 20 part story and this is just the part that delves into the lives of the miners.

Now I know that you, Dear Reader, are wondering why you should care about a novel about 19^th century miners. The answer is in the title of the book. When the French Revolutionaries were busy making all the world new, one of the things they did was create a new calendar—obviously a new political order needs a new set of names for the months! Germinal was the first month in Spring, when things, you know, germinate.

Now, ask this: if there is a novel with the title Germinal that is part of a massive project detailing all the assorted parts of French society, which profession is that novel about? Farming, right? Isn’t that obvious? So, now you pick up this novel which is obviously going to be about farmers, and you slowly realize there ae no farmers here. Just miners.

What is going on? Zola is a clever one. You find out in the last paragraph of the book:

And beneath his feet, the deep blows, those obstinate blows of the pick, continued. The mates were all there; he heard them following him at every stride. Was not that Maheude beneath the beetroots, with bent back and hoarse respiration accompanying the rumble of the ventilator? To left, to right, farther on, he seemed to recognize others beneath the wheatfields, the hedges, the young trees. Now the April sun, in the open sky, was shining in his glory, and warming the pregnant earth. From its fertile flanks life was leaping out, buds were bursting into green leaves, and the fields were quivering with the growth of the grass. On every side seeds were swelling, stretching out, cracking the plain, filled by the need of heat and light. An overflow of sap was mixed with whispering voices, the sound of the germs expanding in a great kiss. Again and again, more and more distinctly, as though they were approaching the soil, the mates were hammering. In the fiery rays of the sun on this youthful morning the country seemed full of that sound. Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth. (Ellis translation)

A rather chilling image. Here are these miners, buried away out of sight and out of mind, but they are there, everywhere beneath your feet, waiting to burst forth one day. Maybe you ought to think about those miners. Maybe you ought to think about the work they are doing. Maybe you ought to think about the fact that without coal, the entire society will shut down.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to realize that Zola is right. These were horrific working conditions. Of course the workers didn’t have to go down into the mines. They could always have just starved to death. But, even still, even the slightest degree of humanity makes you think that the mangers and owners could have done at least a little bit better. (This is where, however, the fact that all the managers and owners are such cartoon figures does not help the novel.)

But, on the other hand, it is well worth noting that the job of mining is a lot different now than it was in the late 19^th century. All too often people act as if nothing has changed in the last 150 years. Economic growth is an amazing thing.

There is the central problem, the problem Zola wants you to realize. You actually don’t think much about the actual working conditions and the actual lives of actual people outside your immediate orbit. You have lots of caricatures in your mind. Zola’s project was to fix that; Zola was there to say, “this is how it actually is.” To do that meant going down into those mines, actually going down into the dark and seeing what was there. You want to know what mining is like today? You want to know what it is like to work in a modern factory? Someone needs to go there, notebook in hand, and find the stories equivalent to the horses who spend their whole lives living underground.

A Tale of Reading About Handmaids

Sometimes, you just have to ignore the hype. A book comes out and all the Beautiful People talk about how much they love it, but when you read why they love it, you think the book must just be awful, so you never read it. Then 35 years later you pick it up and discover not only is it a decent book, but all the hype about it was just wrong.

Example: The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

When the book was published in 1986, it was widely and very loudly praised as a giant hit piece on the religious right. As I learned back then, this was a description of what the world would become if those Christians who voted for Reagan got their way. Indeed, it was prophecy. Women were about to become second class citizens; powerful Men would have slaves called Handmaids on which they could indulge their wildest sexual fantasies. Clearly this is what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and even Reagan really wanted.

I thought that was ridiculous, so I was never even tempted to read the book.

Then the book got a new lease of life when Hulu put out a miniseries which showed what was going to happen when Trump was elected. Curious how it morphed from Pat Robertson’s mid-1980s dream society to Donald Trump’s mid-2010s dream society, but of course the Beautiful People hated both and their view of the enemy has obviously not changed at all in the last three decades. I was still not tempted to read the book.

Then one of my rather bookish, really thoughtful former students told me that the book was actually worth reading; she has been a rather reliable guide to date, so I figured “Why Not?” and I tossed it on the reading list for one of my reading groups.

Verdict: It was actually not a bad book. I have no idea how all those people who thought it was the dream world of the religious right got that insane idea. The ruling group in this tiny little section of a country is battling Baptists and Quakers outside their borders, so it is really hard to see how this can be spun as a Southern Baptist fantasy world when Atwood herself has the Baptists out there as an enemy of this state.

Moreover, the Handmaids are not sexual toys at all but a desperate attempt to generate children in a society where some apocalypse has occurred and sterility has become the norm. Yes, the society is not some egalitarian paradise, and yes there is good reason for you not to want to live in this society, but it is hard to sell this society as some Christian Male Fantasy—all the men are miserable in this society too.

Setting aside all the hype, it is a nice dystopian novel, sort of like a poor man’s 1984 or Brave New World. Perfect beach book if you are looking for something to while away a few hours.

Can the book be taken more seriously? There are a few places where it makes nods in the direction of being something Great, but after your think about it for a bit, it falls short.

First, the story is of a rather improbable coup. The improbable part isn’t a failing for a work of fiction, but it is silly that people took the book seriously as prophecy. Stripped to its essence, the fundamental structure of this society is simply a development of the Division of Labor. It is thus much closer to Brave New World than to 1984—it raises a lot of the same questions as Brave New World in that respect. But, Brave New World is more chilling and thought-provoking in having the Division of Labor be imposed at birth through laboratory manipulation. Handmaid’s Tale gets the Division of Labor in more conventional totalitarian ways: Someone (it is never really clear who) lines people up and give them jobs, like a Giant Sorting Hat: you will be a Commander, you will be a chauffeur, you will be a sterile wife, you will be a cook, you will be impregnated and bear a child.

If the book wants to make a claim to being something really great, it has to be something about the argument of the book, not the structure of the society itself. That is where I also get a bit stuck. Some men don’t think women are equals? Some men think of women primarily as prostitutes or mothers? Hardly earth-shattering. But, what else is there?

My former student was fascinated by the appendix where we discover that the text was a bunch of tapes they found in a locker somewhere. The idea of this being tapes and the historians don’t really know what order the tapes go could have been great. But, if you rearrange the episodes of the novel, the fundamental story is totally unaffected. (There is also not really all that much leeway in rearranging the tapes. Jezebel’s has to come after the visits to the Commander’s office, for example; Nick has to come after the doctor’s office and Jezebel’s; and so on.) Moreover, according to the appendix, there were 30 tapes. That does not correspond to the number of chapters or sections. This just compounds my problem with thinking about the book through the lens of the appendix. To be interesting, there would have to be some way of rearranging the material that changed the way the story would be interpreted. I just can’t find a new interpretation. Arranging it all chronologically, for example, would change the reading experience, but not really the story.

The fact that it is tapes also creates a bit of havoc with the verb tenses. The narrator uses present tense to describe events as they are happening and past tense to talk about her previous life. But, there was no way she could have been making the tapes in real time if she is accurately describing the society. It is weird if she makes the tapes using present tense after the end of the novel. So either we have an unreliable narrator making the tapes in real time or we have some sort of insane person making the tapes later on. This again, could have been really interesting, but I can’t see any way to make these theories generate new ideas.

Like I said, I didn’t think the book was bad; but the structural problems are real. My reading group discussion on the book was fascinating. Most of the students enjoyed reading the book, but nobody thought it made a serious or realistic argument. The most sympathetic reading of the argument is that old white women might like it. (Ouch!…students can be cruel…) I got zero traction trying to talk about the implications of the appendix. Nobody cared about the tenses. I tried, I really did. But, in the end, they thought it was just a silly bit of overblown rhetoric about the threat to women. They enjoyed it; a few of them thought it was one of the most enjoyable books they have read. But none of them sounded like all those people praising it to the skies back in 1986. (The times, they are a-changin…)

The biggest question the book raises for me is where to shelve it. The fiction in my library is separated into two sections based on whether the book has literary merit. This book is truly on the edge of whether it belongs between Matthew Arnold and W.H. Auden, or over on the non-alphabetized shelves with Agatha Christie and George Martin.

When Honor is at Stake

Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake.

Think about Hamlet’s observation there for a moment. To be great is to quarrel over nothing when honor is at stake. Is honor that important? Does Greatness hinge on honor?

James Bowman’s Honor: A History is one of those remarkable books which make you notice the world in a new light. I read it shortly after it was published in 2006; I just reread it with a reading group. Once you see the argument, it all seems so obvious that understanding the modern age requires understanding the nature and history of honor.

First, what is honor? “At its simplest, honor is the good opinion of the people who matter to us, and who matter because we regard them as a society of equals who have the power to judge our behavior.” You have an honor group, a set of people in front of whom you would never want to act dishonorably. One of the remarkable things about honor is that even as the notion of honor has collapsed in the West, its vestigial remains are still there, influencing how you act.

In its original form in the West (and in the form in which it still exists in much of the world), honor meant bravery for men and chastity for women. (Even in our post-honor world, men are insulted if called a wimp and women are insulted if called sexually promiscuous, which given the way we normally talk about displays of strength and the idea of chastity is rather remarkable.) In an honor culture, if you insult me, I am honor bound to reply, in a forceful and violent manner. The failure to reply to an insult is dishonorable; my peers would think I am a wimp. The basic features of honor have some effects on other character traits: “A man who is brave in battle and willing to fight for his honor will also, it is generally assumed, keep his word and behave generously to his subordinates and inferiors.”

Honor cultures are the norm in human history. What happened in the West? The first step in the demise of honor came with the spread of Christianity. “Turn the other cheek” is not exactly the same as “punch back harder.”

Where honor was local, Christianity was universal; where honor was elitist, Christianity was catholic and inclusive; where honor was warlike, Christianity was pacifist; where honor treated women only as property, Christianity treated them as human beings, if not yet as the equals of men. Though the two traditions continued to exist side by side for centuries, rarely (we should say, perhaps, too rarely) interfering with each other, honor could hardly fail to be influenced by the existence of Christianity in such close proximity.

The uneasy coexistence of an honor culture and a Christian culture fell apart in the early 20^th century. Bowman traces the collapse to three things which hit simultaneously. Trench warfare in World War I made it the first war in which there was little honor to be found in battle. The rise of psychotherapy changed the focus of attention from external acts to internal states of mind. Feminism undermined the idea of separate honor codes for men and women. The honor culture could not survive, but that does not mean the notion of honor evaporated. Instead, honor went underground and has cropped up in all sorts of was.

Consider warfare. The collapse of the public acknowledgement of honor as a motive has had two dramatic effects on the ways that wars are conducted since World War 1. First, the explanation of why a country is going to war can no longer be that honor is at stake. Instead, the justification for going war must be framed as a moral crusade:

This idea of war-making as a matter of morality rather than honor had the effect of raising the bar for the justification of any future war. Henceforth, it was already beginning to be plain, it would be necessary to paint all enemies as Hitlers or would-be Hitlers. The state of affairs later helped to create the sense of betrayal and deception that grew up during the rhetorical battles over the Vietnam War

Hitler, the communist threat, weapons of mass destruction—in none of these cases was it acceptable to simply state that the nation has been insulted and will now punch back even harder.

The conduct of war has also been altered. As Douglas MacArthur, one of the last great generals from the age in which honor was paramount, once said, a nation at war has three options: “Either pursue it to victory; to surrender to the enemy and end it on his terms; or what I would think is the worst of all choices—to go on indefinitely and indefinitely, neither to win or lose, in that stalemate; because what we are doing is sacrificing thousands of men while we are doing it.”

We have obviously decided to take that third route. We simply do not talk about military victory anymore. Imagine a President who said simply, “Our goal is to utterly crush our opponents on the battlefield.” Nothing else. Just that. No nation building or spreading democracy or ending injustice. Our goal is to win the war. Period.

An interesting way to see the effect of this collapse of honor on the modern mind is nicely illustrated in an anecdote Bowman tells in which I think he misses the point.

When I was a teacher, I once asked my pupils to choose a hero of theirs to talk about in class. One boy insisted on taking Captain James Kirk of the Starship Enterprise as his only confessed hero—as a protest, I took it, against the idea that there could be, or perhaps should be, any heroism at all in the real world. Heroes were becoming by definition fantasy figures.

Now obviously I don’t know what motivated the student being described, but I do know my own mind. My childhood hero was also Captain Kirk, but not because I thought heroes were fantasy figures. Bowman’s book explains my Kirk fascination perfectly. In the 1970s when I was growing up in California, nobody celebrated honor. If asked for a real life hero, I could not have named a soul; I never learned the idea of a hero. Then I started watching Star Trek and here was this guy who embodied bravery and fearlessness and cleverness and did all these amazing things with an omnipresent smirk. Where else in my life did I see people like that? Is it any wonder he was my hero? Rightly to be great is to find quarrel in a straw when honor is at stake. My childhood self admired honor even though I was never told that such a thing existed.

Where does the collapse of honor leave us? On this, Bowman’s book, I am sad to say, does not give a lot of room for optimism. Residual honor is not going away, but the lack of a language in which to talk about honor does not make it obvious how we can rebuild a culture in which honor is channeled in productive ways.

Yea, Faith Without a Hope

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.

That is T. S. Eliot in “East Coker.” The trio of faith, hope, and love is straight out of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church. The oddity or intriguing thing about the way Eliot uses that trio is the idea of having one without the others. With no hope and no love, how does faith persist?

G. K. Chesterton’s epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse is a marvelous illustration of the idea in Eliot’s poem. Indeed, once I saw this, I pulled the annotated Eliot off my shelf, fully expecting to see this ballad listed among the sources for “East Coker;” but Chesterton was not mentioned at all. (Oddly, neither was 1 Corinthians.) Did Eliot read Chesterton? I have no idea, but it sure seems like he would have.

The Ballad of the White Horse tells the tale of the 9^th century Saxon King Alfred who beats back the Danish Vikings occupying England. The great battle took place at Ethandune, where a large chalk horse is carved into a nearby hill, hence the White Horse. Alfred’s accomplishments earned him the sobriquet Alfred the Great. This poem was obviously Chesterton’s attempt to write a modern day Iliad. If you like tales of great warriors on both sides of a battle slaying each other while making grand speeches, then you’ll like this poem.

But as fun as it is to read verse describing how a great sword was hurled through the air to strike an opponent over the eye, that wasn’t the part that caused me to spend time in deep reverie. The story opens with Alfred wandering through a wood musing upon the Vikings occupying the land when he suddenly encounters the Virgin Mary.

“Mother of God,” the wanderer said,
“I am but a common king,
Nor will I ask what saints may ask,
To see a secret thing.

“The gates of heaven are fearful gates,
Worse than the gates of hell;
Not I would break the splendours barred,
Or seek to know the thing they guard,
Which is too good to tell.

“But for this earth most pitiful,
This little land I know,
If that which is forever is,
Or if our hearts shall break with bliss,
Seeing the stranger go?

A promising beginning to a tale. If you ran into the Virgin Mary one day, you might well ask if Dante described heaven accurately or something like that. But, Alfred just wants to know if the Vikings will be forever occupying the land (“if that which is forever is”) or if they will one day leave.

With the aid of hindsight, we know what answer Mary should have given; obviously the Vikings leave and we know that Alfred plays a big role in their departure. So, Mary’s reply is a bit shocking:

“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

“Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?”

Joy without cause I get. But faith without a hope? If you know you will lose, if you have no hope of winning, how do you maintain faith? What does it look like to have faith with no hope? Faith in what exactly?

The shape of faith without hope becomes clear as the story unfolds. Alfred has no hope of beating back the Vikings, but that does not stop him from gathering the chiefs of the land. He then finds his way into the Danish camp pretending to be a wandering minstrel. On his way out of camp, he taunts them thus:

“That though we scatter and though we fly
And you hang over us like the sky
You are more tired of victory,
Than we are tired of shame.

“That though you hunt the Christian man
Like a hare in the hill-side,
The hare has still more heart to run
Than you have heart to ride.

“That though all lances split on you,
All swords be heaved in vain,
We have more lust again to lose
Than you to win again.

That is exactly what faith without hope looks like. Tired of shame; heart to keep running; lust to lose again. Alfred keeps going not because he has a hope of winning the war. Alfred keeps going because he has total faith that this is what he is supposed to do. He does it knowing the sky will grow darker yet and the sea will rise ever higher. He will lose. Then lose again. And the lust to lose one more time will not diminish.

That is faith. Pure unadulterated faith.

Wise he had been before defeat,
And wise before success;
Wise in both hours, and ignorant,
Knowing neither more nor less.

We often think of a test of faith as a time when hope flickers yet we maintain our hope because we have faith. Faith, in other words, is often described as a hope-generating mechanism. Times are tough, but have faith, they will get better. That phrasing though blurs the distinction between faith and hope. Instead: times are tough, but have faith even though they will not get better. That is the real test of faith. Keep going even though you will lose because you have faith that this is exactly what you are supposed to do.

With the constant tales of victory over long odds, we build a culture of hope. Hope is a good thing; it is a theological virtue. Faith can aid in the building of hope; hope can strengthen faith. It is an easy thing to imagine hope without faith. To maintain hope when faith is dead is hard, but we encourage people to do so nonetheless. Flipping the order is equally important. To truly learn the nature of faith, it must be contemplated in the absence of hope. Sometimes in life, faith needs to be practiced in the absence of hope.

Faith, hope, and love. When all else fades, these three remain. They are all in the waiting, in the stillness, in the quiet whispers of God.