Donald Sheehan & Edith Wyschogrod on Shakespeare & Henry James

This will likely be a short post, largely because I don’t have that much to say on the subject right now, but I’d still like to get it out there for my own benefit at least.

Recently, Xenia Sheehan very kindly had Paraclete Press send me a review copy of The Grace of Incorruption: The Selected Essays of Donald Sheehan on Orthodox Faith & Poetics, a collection of essays by her late husband, Donald, a former professor of English at Dartmouth and director of The Frost Place in New Hampshire. I was thrilled to receive it, having already perused the contents in a pdf she e-mailed me a few months back, but felt a little uncertain of what order I wanted to read it in. To make a long story short, I found myself very soon going to Part One, chapter 6, ‘The Way of Beauty & Stillness: Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale’. [1] It is a truly enlightening essay throughout, and I was excited by Sheehan’s handling, signalled in the title itself, of Archimandrite Vasileios’s lovely bibliaki, Beauty & Hesychia in Athonite Life, as well as the reading of the Bard’s play that is the essay’s raison d’être.

What I wanted to focus on here, however, is a very specific aspect of Sheehan’s perceptive mediation of a dialogue between Winter’s Tale and J.D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey. He describes the plot of WT in some detail, focusing intently on Paulina’s revelation of the living Hermione to her husband, Leontes, who has believed her dead for 16 years. Sheehan notes that this revelation is a response to, but also, by cultivating a spirit of stillness through beauty, further productive of Leontes’s repentance for his destructive jealousy. He then suggests that the image of ‘the Fat Lady’ that their older brother Seymour has inculcated in Franny and Zooey has taught Franny a similar wisdom born of beauty and stillness:

This wisdom is above all iconic, for it reveals to the beholder--both to Franny and to Leontes--the way of beauty and stillness.

In both Salinger and Shakespeare, this way opens through death: the [feigned] death of Hermione and the [actual] death of Seymour. For in both, death becomes the way in which both Hermione and Seymour can become iconic, and in so doing, they can become for Leontes and Franny the transforming experience of the boundary, that place between the worlds that simultaneously separates and reconciles. As Father Vasileios puts it: ‘To die, to be buried, to depart’ so as ‘to give another the ability to love life’ (Beauty, 9). Here is the light of beauty and stillness that shines in late Shakespeare and Salinger. [2]

This passage immediately recalled for me a book I spent a bit of time with in college--Edith Wyschogrod’s Saints & Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (which I have already blogged about briefly here). In chapter two, ‘Saintly Influence’, ‘Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove is treated as hagiographic fiction that illustrates the influence of altruistic action on moral self-interpretation and practice.’ [3] The ‘saint’ of the piece, on Wyschogrod’s reading, [4]  is Millie Theale, a young American heiress suffering from a terminal illness who discovers that the poor Englishman (Merton Densher) she loves is secretly engaged to someone else (Kate Croy) and is only pursuing her in the hopes of getting her money after she dies. Although this plan is conceived by Kate, Densher is induced to persist in the courtship of Millie until his conscience drives him to confess. Already Millie’s kindness and innocence have been operating upon him, and she selflessly encourages him to pursue his true love, Kate. But when she dies, Millie leaves the scheming couple a large bequest to help them get married, despite knowing full well how they had tried to deceive her. While remaining firm in her intent to accept the money, Kate astutely observes, ‘She gave up her life that you might understand her’, and ‘She died for you that you might understand her. From that hour you did.’ [5]

In Wyschogrod’s words, it is here, ‘when the interplay of cynical reason and saintly generosity becomes transparent’, that ‘Densher’s transfiguration occurs’. [6] He renounces the bequest and refuses to marry his calculating fiancee unless she renounces it too. ‘...Millie’s moral practice is now (somehow) repeated in Densher’s life. He has learned a new moral gesture.’ [7] One is tempted to say that whereas for Kate, the ‘wings of the dove’ were Millie’s bequest itself, enabling her and Densher to ‘fly and be at rest’ in their worldly life, for Densher the ‘wings’ were her forgiveness and generosity made manifest in her death by the request, which enable his soul to fly from the mercenary ends he has pursued and ‘be at rest’ inwardly. To use Sheehan’s words, Millie becomes iconic, thereby opening to Densher the way of beauty and stillness. Fr Vasileios’s words, quoted by Sheehan, certainly seem to apply to Millie’s decision:

To die, to be buried, to depart. . . . And yet to have lived and died in such a way that your presence, discretely and from a distance as if a fragrance from someone absent, can give others the possibility to breathe divine fragrance! To grant someone else the possibility of living, of being invigorated, of having the nausea dispelled; to give another the ability to love life, to acquire self-confidence and stand on his own two feet, so that from within him there arises spontaneously a ‘Glory to Thee, O God!’. [8]

Never having read The Wings of the Dove, or Franny & Zooey for that matter, I can’t develop the connections much further without ending up on thin ice, but even this much looks to me like an interesting parallel.

[1] Donald Sheehan, The Grace of Incorruption: The Selected Essays of Donald Sheehan on Orthodox Faith & Poetics, ed. Xenia Sheehan (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2015), pp. 75-86.

[2] Ibid., p. 85.

[3] Edith Wyschogrod, Saints & Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1990), p. 33.

[4] It should be noted that Wyschogrod is well aware that her ‘saint’ is not a traditional one. One reason she notes inter alia: ‘In Jewish and Christian saintly narratives, power ultimately derives from transcendence and is channeled through saintly practice. By contrast, in a novel reflecting its nineteenth-century capitalist provenance, power is derived from wealth’ (ibid., p. 45).

[5] Qtd. in ibid., pp. 46 & 48.

[6] Ibid., p. 46.

[7] Ibid., p. 48.

[8] Archimandrite Vaseileios, Beauty & Hesychia in Athonite Life, tr. Constantine Kokenes (Montreal: Alexander, 1996), p. 11.

'The Fellowship of Suffering': More Comments on the Iliad

Despite the harsh conclusions of my last post on Homer (here), there are a couple of passages that point toward a kind of redemption. To begin with, the second long passage from C.S. Lewis contains an ellipsis. For reasons of space I omitted his quotation of another simile, this one from Odyssey 8.521-31: 

That was the song the famous harper sang
but great Odysseus melted into tears,
running down from his eyes to wet his cheeks...
as a woman weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband,
a man who fell in battle, fighting for town and townsmen,
trying to beat the day of doom from home and children.
Seeing the man go down, dying, gasping for breath,
she clings for dear life, screams and shrills—
but the victors, just behind her,
digging spear-butts into her back and shoulders,
drag her off in bondage, yoked to hard labor, pain,
and the most heartbreaking torment wastes her cheeks.
So from Odysseus’ eyes ran tears of heartbreak now. [1] 

Now Lewis calls this a ‘mere simile’, [2] and in an interesting paper devoted to the subject of similes, he seems to explain ‘mere similitude’ a bit by arguing that Homer’s ‘long-tailed similes’ typically have little to do, literally or poetically, with what they illustrate: 

I question whether the vignettes of early Greek life which it so often admits into homeric poetry are introduced on any very conscious principle of emotional echo or emotional contrast to the business in hand. It sounds much more as if a poet were interested in the vignette for its own sake. [3] 

But I can’t help but think that we would be remiss if we didn’t see the Odyssean simile above as something more than a vignette meant simply to give us a very vivid idea of what a ‘man of sorrows’ Odysseus really was. In a brilliant introduction to his edition and commentary on Book 24 of the Iliad, C.W. Macleod notes: 

The simile brings out the workings of pity in Odysseus’ mind: he weeps like a woman whose husband has died in defence of his city and who is taken into captivity—she is, in effect, Andromache—because it is as if her suffering has through the poet’s [Demodocus’s] art become his own....So the song which was to glorify the hero is felt by the hero himself as a moving record of the pain and sorrow he helped to cause. [4] 

The episode is thus a supreme illustration of what Macleod, quoting Gorgias’s Helen, tells us is one of the chief purposes if not the chief purpose of poetry—the arousal of pity: ‘A fearful frisson, a tearful pity, a longing for lamentation enter the hearers of poetry; and as words tell of the fortune and misfortune of other lives and other people, the heart feels a feeling of its own.’ [5] 

The Iliad is of course very largely devoid of pity. Macleod points out that several times throughout the poem, ‘a supplication is either made or attempted on the battle-field’, but it ‘is always rejected or cut short, and the suppliant despatched to his death’. [6] But ironically, another passage quoted by Lewis points us toward the ultimate display of pity in that poem, which is also, perhaps, the poem’s ultimate significance: 

‘And here I sit in Troy,’ says Achilles to Priam, ‘afflicting you and your children.’ [7] 

At the beginning of Book 24, the gods are angry at Achilles, for they have ‘in bliss [makares theoi] looked down and pitied [eleaireskon] Priam’s son’, but as Apollo says, ‘That man without a shred of decency in his heart.../his temper can never bend and change—.../.../Achilles has lost all pity [eleon]!’ [8] The slaughter that Achilles inflicts on the Trojan army in the wake of Patroclus’s death, his defeat of Hector, and his treatment of Hector’s corpse would all seem to support Apollo’s judgement. Indeed, Louis Markos recounts one of the events of Book 21 as follows: ‘Rejecting Lykaon’s right as a suppliant and loosing himself from any sense of shame or fear of nemesis, Achilles kills the Trojan in cold blood and tosses his body into the rivers.’ [9] This is par for the course. 

But Apollo, as it turns out, is wrong. Zeus has decreed that Hector’s body is to be returned, Thetis carries the message to her son, and Achilles replies, ‘The man who brings the ransom can take away the body, / if Olympian Zeus himself insists in all earnest.’ [10] Markos notes: 

It is significant, I believe, that when Thetis tells Achilles to stop [grieving and return the body], he immediately agrees. One feels that Achilles has wanted to stop, has yearned to put an end to his self-destructive grieving, but no one has had the courage—or the love—to risk the wrath that might be unleashed. [11] 

Is there a still a hint of reluctance here though? Is Achilles merely acquiescing because he has been commanded by Zeus? Markos wonders whether ‘wrath will seize him again and lead him to kill the defenseless Priam’. [12] If so, by the time he utters the line Lewis has quoted, there has been a real change. Priam himself has come to him, and ‘prayed his heart out to Achilles:’ 

‘Remember your own father, great godlike Achilles—

as old as I am, past the threshold of deadly old age!

...

Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right,

remember your own father! I deserve more pity...

I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before—

I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.’ [13] 

These words, of course, do their work. Immediately, we read: 

Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire
to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand
he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and feel throughout the house.
Then, when brilliant Achilles had had his fill of tears
and the longing for it had left his mind and body,
he rose from his seat, raised the old man by the hand
and filled with pity now for his gray head and gray beard,
he spoke out winging words, flying straight to the heart:
‘Poor man, how much you’ve borne—pain to break the spirit!
...
Come, please, sit down on this chair here...
Let us put our griefs to rest in our own hearts,
rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning.
What good’s to be won from tears that chill the spirit?’ [14] 

As Macleod observes, ‘Priam’s speech makes Achilles think of his own father and so enables him to feel pity for the Trojan father too.’ [15] Indeed, the line that Lewis quotes above—24.542, a line which taken out of context might suggest a particularly unfeeling Achilles—is uttered as the captain of the Myrmidons is reproaching himself for not being a more devoted to son to his own father: ‘...I give the man no care as he grows old / since here I sit in Troy....’ [16] Elaborating on this in a series of comparisons between the new Achilles and his character and actions earlier in the poem, Macleod notes that Peleus’s son now ‘associates the suffering he causes Priam and his sons with his failure to care for his father’s old age’, and ‘he is moved by the harm he does to his enemies’. ‘In short, ambition, vindictiveness and resentment all give way to pity.’ [17] 

What this pity means is revealed by the whole of Achilles’ speech. It is not only an emotion, but an insight: because he sees that suffering is unavoidable and common to all men, he can keep back, not without a struggle, his own pride, rage and grief. [18] 

Macleod notes that in Book 23, Priam actually ‘becomes a new kind of kero who shows endurance (24.505-6) and evokes wonder (480-4) not merely by facing death but by humbling himself and curbing his hatred before his greatest enemy.’ [19] By refusing to perpetuate the cycle of violence, he is able to end it and bring about reconciliation in what Markos calls ‘the fellowship of suffering’: 

What makes it so difficult to be a human being, so difficult to be a mortal in a world of mortals, is not so much that we will die ourselves but that we will lose the ones we love. In their shared mourning, the two men weep for different people, yet ultimately it is the same grief: the grief of the survivor who must continue to live in a world that has lost much of its light and hope. Even Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, sharing with his good friends Mary and Martha in the fellowship of suffering. ‘For we have not,’ the author of Hebrews tells us, ‘an high priest [Christ] which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin’ (Hebrews 4:15). [20] 

Thus, the war poem par excellence, the epic whose lesson is ‘that on this earth we must enact hell’, ends on an unexpected note of pity and redemption. Witnessing the mutual grief of Priam and Achilles, the spectacle of the old man embracing the killer of his son, the killer recognising the likeness of his enemy’s father to his own father, the reader’s heart feels acutely that ‘feeling of its own’, that ‘fearful frisson’ of which Gorgias spoke. Surely in the experience of compassion, in the thrill of something very close to forgiveness, we have a glimpse as in a dream of the coming of the compassionate One who will forgive us all. 

[1] Robert Fagles, tr., The Iliad, by Homer (NY: Penguin, 1990), p. 208. 

[2] C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (NY: Galaxy, 1965), p. 30. 

[3] C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1998), p. 65. 

[4] C.W. Macleod, ed., Iliad Book XXIV (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1995), pp. 4-5. 

[5] Qtd. in ibid., p. 5. 

[6] Ibid., pp. 15-6. 

[7] Qtd. in Lewis, Preface, p. 31; the line is Iliad 24.542, and is found on p. 606 of Fagles’s translation (who renders it ‘since here I sit in Troy, far from my fatherland, / a grief to you, a grief to all your children...’) and p. 77 of Macleod’s edition. 

[8] Fagles, p. 589; translating lines 23, 40-1, 44. 

[9] Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2007), p. 72. 

[10] Fagles, p. 593; ll. 139-40. 

[11] Markos, p. 76. 

[12] Ibid., p. 76. 

[13] Fagles, pp. 604-5. 

[14] Ibid., p. 605. 

[15] Macleod, p. 26. 

[16] Fagles, p. 606. 

[17] Ibid., pp. 26, 27. 

[18] Ibid., p. 27. 

[19] Ibid., 22. 

[20] Markos, p. 77.

Enacting Hell: Comments on the Iliad

I am ashamed to admit it, but there was a time that I was not interested in Homer. Fortunately, at some point during that time, I came across the following passage in Dame Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon—a passage that, as far as I can remember, was the first thing to awaken that interest. Speaking of a little girl socking away some cakes in order to preserve ‘the grand classical emotions’, West’s husband says:

Exactly similar movements must have been made a million million million times since the world began, yet the thrust of her arm seemed absolutely fresh. Well, it is so in the Iliad. When one reads of a man drawing a bow or raising a shield it is as if the dew of the world’s morning lay undisturbed on what he did. The primal stuff of humanity is very attractive. [1]

Whether I would have seen it there or not if I had not read these words in West, the ‘dew of the world’s morning’ was certainly there when finally the magnitude of my own folly was revealed to me in a blinding flash and I did read the Iliad through at last. Furthermore, something of this sense that we are coming into contact with the ‘primal stuff of humanity’ is present in some memorable words on the Iliad from two of my favourite 20^th-c. English writers: GKC and CSL. Nevertheless, their perspective on the poem is a bit darker than what we see in West’s reference. Take for instance Chesterton’s application of what one might call his typical ‘defamiliarisation’ technique [2] to a description of the Iliad in The Everlasting Man:

Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. [3] A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die. [4]

Lewis delves more deeply into the actual language and themes of the poem, and in doing so, seems to me to justify Chesterton’s final judgement as quoted above. First, Lewis begins with the diction:

The actual operation of the Homeric diction is remarkable. The unchanging recurrence of his wine-dark sea, his rosy-fingered dawn, his ships launched into the holy brine, his Poseidon shaker of earth, produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but elsewhere ill represented in literature....The permanence, the indifference, the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is, always enters into our experience and plays no small part in that pressure of reality which is one of the difference between life and imagined life. But in Homer the pressure is there. The sonorous syllables in which he has stereotyped the sea, the gods, the morning, or the mountains, make it appear that we are dealing not with poetry about the things, but almost with the things themselves. [5]

Already there is that sense of the repetition of timeless actions, not merely as a Romanticised dewyness, but as a ‘heartrending...fact’, a sense that Lewis develops further—‘Homeric pathos strikes hard precisely because it seems unintended and inevitable like the pathos of real life. It comes from the clash between human emotions and the large, indifferent background which the conventional epithets represent.’ [6] But then the emotional effect of all of this is described in positively infernal terms:

Much has been talked of the melancholy of Virgil; but an inch beneath the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. ‘Hell’ was the word Goethe used of it. It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. It comes out casually, in similes.

As when the smoke ascends to the sky from a city afar

Set in an isle, which foes have compassed round in war,

And all day long they struggle as hateful Ares birds. (IL. XVIII, 207.)

...

Notice how different this is from the sack of Troy in Aeneid II. This is a mere simile—the sort of thing that happens every day. [7]

Finally, Lewis punches us in the gut with a reference to a telling line from Book XII and the use of the full quote from Goethe, before reminding us of what we love about Homer after all:

Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all the more tragic because there hangs over the heroic world a certain futility. ‘And here I sit in Troy,’ says Achilles to Priam, ‘afflicting you and your children.’ Not ‘protecting Greece’, not even ‘winning glory’, not called by any vocation to afflict Priam, but just doing it because that is the way things come about....Perhaps this was in Goethe’s mind when he said, ‘The lesson of the Iliad  is that on this earth we must enact Hell.’ [8] Only the style—the unwearying, unmoved, angelic speech of Homer—makes it endurable. Without that the Iliad would be a poem beside which the grimmest modern realism is child’s play. [9]

I have mused upon these ideas for some years now, and have found them to be more and more true, not simply as statements about Homer, but as a way of speaking about the fallen world. The deep pain we experience when, for instance, we are grieving after a death or simply the loss of a friend, seems to be mocked by the ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, by the interminable cycles of life around us. I cannot help but think of this every time I read the opening words of ‘The Waste Land’—‘April is the cruelest month’. [10] But it is really no less true of bad weather or darker months. However much the falling rain or snow may seem to mirror the pain inside of us, we soon realise that as Lewis says ‘the world is what it is’. Nature has no sympathy for us. It is thus that the Muse sings, ‘But when the tenth Dawn brought light to the mortal world / they carried gallant Hector forth, weeping tears’. [11] The Dawn brings light, but the Trojans are weeping. It will not be the last time that they do so.

[1] Dame Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (NY: Viking, 1943), p. 1044.

[2] A technique which for him is of course very different in intent and effect than it is for Tolstoy.

[3] GKC appears to have the matter of the name not quite straight. Stephen Scully quotes Carl Blegen—‘Troy was perhaps originally the more general name, applying to the countryside—the Troad—while Ilios more specifically designated the actual city. In the Homeric poems, however, this distinction is not maintained, and either name is used without prejudice to mean the city.’ Furthermore, according to Scully himself, ‘The neuter Ilion occurs only once in Homer (Il. 15.70-71), leading Aristarchus to consider it a later interpolation.’ See Stephen Scully, Homer & the Sacred City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1994), p. 7.

[4] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (SF: Ignatius, 2008), pp. 79-80.

[5] C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (NY: Oxford, ), p. 23.

[6] Ibid., p. 24.

[7] Ibid., p. 30.

[8] The line is from Goethe’s notebook for 1860, and was famously quoted by Matthew Arnold in his essay On Translating Homer.

[9] Lewis, p. 31.

[10] T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays, 1909-1950 (NY: Harcourt, 1971), p. 37. I actually felt that I simply hadn’t yet quoted enough authors remembered for their first two initials + surname.

[11] Il. 922-3; Robert Fagles, tr., The Iliad, by Homer (NY: Penguin, 1990), p. 614.

'Always Keep Ithaca in Your Mind'

A wonderful old Greek lady in our parish fell asleep in the Lord on Friday. I had known Vasiliki Mitrovgenis since I first became Orthodox, when she and her son attended the Greek parish in town, and we joined the local ROCOR parish at the same time. When we were talking about her passing, my daughter said, ‘I’m gonna miss that old lady who used to sit in the back of the church and smile at me.’

At the funeral today, I discovered the following poem—with which I was not previously familiar—printed on the back of the program:

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road may be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.
Læstrygonians and Cycopes,
angry Poseidon—do not fear them,
for such things you will never encounter on your way
if your thought remains lofty, if a noble
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Læstrygonians and Cyclopes,
fierce Poseidon you will not encounter,
if you do not harbor them within your soul,
if your soul does not raise them up before you.

Pray that the road may be long.
May the summer mornings be many
when with intense pleasure and joy
you will enter harbors seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician market place,
and buy good merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and pleasurable perfumes of every kind
abundant pleasurable perfumes, as many as you can;
travel to Egyptian cities
to learn endlessly from the learned.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
Arriving there is your ultimate purpose.
But do not hurry the journey in the least.
Better that it last for many years,
and that finally you anchor at your island old,
blessed with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to give you riches.

Ithaca gave you the splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must have understood already what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)
Trans. Theofanis G. Stavrou

After the funeral, when I asked Mrs Mitrovgenis’s son, Reader Demetrios, whether he had chosen this poem, he said, ‘No, mom picked that herself. In fact, she arranged almost everything herself. After she passed away, I wrote an obituary, but it turned out she’d already written one.’

Αιωνία η μνήμη!

Bl Theophylact Rears His Head, Twice

Yes, readers, my wife has been much occupied of late, and it has afforded me a few more opportunities to make use of her computer for blogging purposes. As I chanced to come across a couple of interesting things yesterday which were linked together in a Logismoic manner, I thought a post appropriate.

First of all, while watching my children play outside I was passing the time by looking through my book of the poems of Edward Taylor—The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U, 1974)—about which I posted here. Included as an appendix is a catalogue of Taylor’s library, deemed uncommonly large for ‘such a remote settlement as Westfield’ and including some unusual items for that time and place (p. 201). Among these is one that caught my eye and led in part to this post:

15 Theophilact upon the Evangelists fol: 7s.
THEOPHYLACTUS, archbishop of Achrida. In quator Evangelia enarrationes. Cologne, 1532, and later translations. fo. BM.

Turning to Blessed Theophylact for help with a difficult Gospel passage in preparing a sermon, on the edge of what was at the time the American wilderness, little could Taylor have known that almost three hundred years later a Protestant convert to Orthodox Christianity on this continent would produce the first English translation of this very commentary!

The second piece of the post appeared in my e-mail box rather late yesterday evening. Notifying me of a Facebook message from Fr Mark Christian (OCA-Baton Rouge), who has now definitely earned his ‘scene cred’ amongst us emerging ‘Orthodox neo-Trads’, it read:

Just noticed the Ochlophobe's endorsement of your posts on toll-houses. They were quite helpful—thank you!

I was intrigued during last week's sermon prep by an observation made by Blessed Theophylact on the parable of the foolish rich man in Luke 12:16ff. At the end, the voice of God speaks to the rich man saying, ‘Fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee’ (or so we read in many English translations). Theophylact, ostensibly reading in Greek (well before there were any English translations), notes this rendering: ‘Fool, this night they shall require thy soul of thee.’

Commenting on the mysterious ‘they’, the saintly expositor notes the following:

Notice also the words, they will require. Like some stern imperial officers demanding tribute, the fearsome angels will ask for your soul, and you will not want to give it because you love this life and claim the things of this life as your own. But they do not demand the soul of a righteous man, because he himself commits his soul into the hands of the God and Father of spirits, and he does so with joy and gladness, not in the least bit grieved that he is handing over his soul to God. For him the body is a light burden, easily shed. But the sinner has made his soul fleshy, something in substance like the body and like the earth, rendering it difficult to separate from the body. This is why the soul must be demanded of him, the same way that harsh tax collectors treat debtors who refuse to pay what is due. See that the Lord did not say, ‘I shall require thy soul of thee’, but, they shall require. For the souls of the righteous are already in te hands of God. Truly it is at night when the soul of such a sinner is demanded of him. It is night for this sinner who is darkened by the love of wealth, and into whom the light of divine knowledge cannot penetrate, and death overtakes him. Thus he who lays up treasure for himself is called foolish: he never stops drawing up plans and dies in the midst of them. But if he had been laying up treasure for the poor and for God, it would not have been so. Let us strive, therefore, to be rich toward God, that is, to trust in God, to have Him as our wealth and the treasury of wealth, and not to speak of my goods but of ‘the good things of God’. If they are God’s, then let us not deprive God of His own goods. This is what it means to be rich toward God: to trust that even if I empty myself and give everything away, I will not lack the necessities. God is my treasury of good things, and I open and take from that treasury what I need.

The passage Fr Mark quotes can be found in The Explanation by Bl Theophylact, Archbishop of Ochrid and Bulgaria, of the Holy Gospel According to St Luke, trans. Fr Christopher Stade, Vol. III of Bl Theophylact’s Explanation of the New Testament (House Springs, MO: Chrysostom, 1997), p. 148.

Concerning the verse Bl Theophylact comments on, I took the liberty of consulting a few of my Bibles (I don’t have many!). In my critical Greek NT, I see that there are no alternate readings for the present active indicative plural ἀπαιτοῦσιν. In my interlinear NT, I see ἀπαιτοῦσιν rendered ‘they require’, with the KJV rendering in the parallel column dreadfully exposed for the change in mood (and consequently, number!—why isn’t Wayne Grudem up in arms about this?) that it is: ‘thy soul shall be required of thee’. The RSV has ‘your soul is required of you’, the apparently materialist NRSV ‘your life is being demanded of you’, the NKJV (the NT trans. duplicated uncritically in the OSB of course, and, in the case of Lk 12:20, with no acknowledgement of the actual meaning of the original or reference to Bl Theophylact’s interpretation) ‘your soul will be required of you’, and the ESV is identical to the RSV.

Of all the translations sitting on my shelf, the only one I found that matched the grammar of the Greek was The Orthodox New Testament, Vol. 1, trans. Holy Apostles Convent (Buena Vista, CO: Holy Apostles Convent, 1999), p. 254, where at last I read ‘they demand thy soul from thee’. After this, I naturally half-expected to see Bl Theophylact in the endnotes (p. 341, n. 261), but instead I found only St Basil, who in his Homily 6, ‘I Will Tear Down My Barns’, refers to the verse in this way: ‘Those who seek the soul were at hand, and this man was conversing with his soul about food! That very night his own soul would be required of him, and all the while he was imagining he would be enjoying his possessions for years to come’ (St Basil the Great, On Social Justice, trans. Fr Paul Schroeder [Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2009], p. 62).

The lesson to be learned, from the Edward Taylor library as well as Fr Mark’s contribution to materials (here and here) on the passage of the soul, is that Bl Theophylact turns up in the most unexpected places.

The Passage of the Soul in Modern Theologians

Continued from this post.

In his illuminating essay, ‘Our Warfare is Not Against Flesh and Blood: On the Question of the “Toll-Houses”’ (Selected Essays [Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1996], pp. 232-41), the great Jordanville theologian and product of the pre-Revolutionary Kiev Theological Academy, Fr Michael Pomazansky, quotes a passage from St John Chrysostom’s Homily 2, ‘On Remembering the Dead’:

If, in setting out for any foreign country or city we are in need of guides, then how much shall we need helpers and guides in order to pass unhindered past the elders, the powers, the governors of the air, the persecutors, the chief
collectors! For this reason, the soul, flying away from the body, often ascends and descends, fears and trembles. The awareness of sins always torments us, all the more at that hour when we shall have to be conducted to those trials and that frightful judgement place. (pp. 236-7)

More recently, one of the most well-known authors on the subject of these aerial demons is St Ignatius (Brianchaninov). Concerning St Ignatius, Met. Kallistos (Ware) writes (Foreword, On the Prayer of Jesus, trans. Archim. Lazarus [Moore] [Boston: New Seeds, 2006], p. xvi):

St Ignatius Brianchaninov was a prolific author, and the standard edition of his collected works, published at St Petersburg in 1885-1886, runs to five substantial volumes. Most of his writings are concerned with the monastic life, but he also wrote on the state of the soul after death, upholding the traditional Orthodox teaching on the twenty ‘toll-houses’.

In a footnote on this passage about what he calls ‘the traditional Orthodox teaching’, Met. Kallistos adds:

For a good discussion of St Ignatius’s teaching of this subject, see Fr Seraphim (Rose), The Soul After Death: Contemporary ‘After-Death’ Experiences in the Light of the Orthodox Teaching on the Afterlife, 5th ed. (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1995), pp. 64-87, 250-52. As Fr Seraphim rightly observes, and as St Ignatius also believed, Patristic references to the ‘toll-houses’ are not to be interpreted in a crudely materialistic sense; proper allowance has to be made for the use of symbolic language. (pp. 142-3, n. 10)

Of course, despite this recommendation from one of the most respected of Orthodox bishops and theologians, there are still Orthodox who consider the toll-houses, and specifically Fr Seraphim’s presentation of this patristic teaching, ‘nonsense’ (see for example, the comment thread here). Others, while not going that far, find Fr Seraphim’s book a bit too dark and frightening, though of course, Fr Pomazansky observes, ‘If one is to complain of the frightening character of the pictures of the toll-houses—are there not many such pictures in the New Testament scriptures and in the words of the Lord Himself? Are we not frightened by the very simplest question: How camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? (Mt 22:12)’ (p. 239).

Still, for such people, Hieromonk Alexander (Golitzin) has enthusiastically recommended (though not without a few rather minor criticisms), the book Life After Death, by the popular Greek theologian, Met. Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos, trans. Esther Williams (Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1998). In his review in Divine Ascent: A Journal of Orthodox Faith, Vol. 1, Nos. 3/4 (The Entry into Jerusalem 1999), pp. 139-43 (published under the editorship of now Met. Jonah of the OCA), Fr Alexander writes:

In the last section, we are provided with, among other things, a valuable treatment of the demonic ‘tollbooths’ to which I referred above. The Metropolitan is inclined to take his widespread patristic image a little less literally than the works I complained about [including Fr Seraphim’s]. He sees it rather as an image, taken from the world of late antiquity, where tax-men functioned in effect as state-sanctioned Mafiosi, and a ‘tollhouse’ or tax station served as a natural image of unjust oppression (pp. 62 ff.). This is not to say that he accords the image no reality whatever, but that he is careful to not its symbolic force. It served to point toward, not describe, the trial that awaits the soul immediately upon dying, particularly if it enters death unprepared and without sufficient repentance. (pp. 141-2)

In light of the fact that, as Met. Kallistos notes, Fr Seraphim too acknowledges the non-literal nature of the ‘toll-house’ imagery (‘It is obvious to all but the youngest children that the name of “toll-house” is not to be taken literally’, qtd. in Hieromonk Damascene (Christensen), Father Seraphim Rose: His Life & Works [Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2003], p. 897), one wonders if Fr Alexander (as much as I love him!) may not have read Fr Seraphim’s book recently enough to have an entirely accurate impression of it. The sense one gets from his opening paragraph on p. 139 is that Fr Alexander is recollecting a 30-plus-year-old reading, one that took place before his own views were so strongly influenced by the life and teaching of the Holy Mountain.

At any rate, Fr Alexander urges us to read Met. Hierotheos’s book, ‘and be introduced to the sober, wholesome, and finally glorious teaching of the saints’ (p. 143). Following this advice, we see that His Eminence writes, concerning ‘the taxing of souls’:

We find this topic in the whole biblico-patristic tradition and it corresponds to a reality which we need to look at in order to prepare ourselves for the dreadful hour of death. What follows is written not in order to arouse anxiety, but to prompt repentance, which has joy as its result. For he who has the gift of the Holy Spirit and is united with Christ avoids the terrible presence and activity of the customs demons.

According to the teaching of the Fathers of the Church, the soul at its departure from the body, as well as when it is preparing to leave, senses the presence of the demons who are called customs demons, and is possessed with fear because of having to pass through customs. (p. 62)

Later, as if responding specifically to some of the more ridiculous criticisms of Fr Seraphim’s book, Met. Hierotheos writes:

Of course there are some who maintain that such notions as customs houses and aerial spirits have come into Christianity from Gnostic theories and pagan myths which prevailed during that period.

There is no doubt that such views can be found in many Gnostic texts, in pagan ideas which are found in Egyptian and Chaldean myths. However it must be emphasised that many Fathers adopted the teaching about the customs houses, but they cleared it of idolatrous and Gnostic frames of reference and placed it in the ecclesiastical atmosphere. . . .

. . .

. . . It is true that ancient traditions and heretical views spoke of ‘rulers of the astral sphere’, about ‘gates of an astral journey’, about ‘aerial spirits’, and so forth. We find several of these phrases in the Bible and in patristic texts. As we have mentioned in this chapter, many Fathers of the Church speak of customs houses and aerial spirits, but they have given them different content and different meaning. (pp. 77-8)

Of course, although Fr Alexander writes that Met. Hierotheos’s book ‘bears the marks of a man schooled in the ascetic and mystical tradition of the Church and someone who is an active pastor of souls’ (p. 140), His Eminence is, after all, only a popular theologian. Yet, perhaps the greatest Saint of the twentieth century, St John (Maximovitch) the Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco, has also decisively upheld the teaching on the toll-houses. In a homily entitled ‘Life After Death’ (or here), St John writes:

At this time (the third day [after death]), it [the soul] passes through legions of evil spirits which obstruct its path and accuse it of various sins, to which they themselves had tempted it. According to various revelations there are twenty such obstacles, the so-called ‘toll-houses’, at each of which one or another form of sin is tested; after passing through one the soul comes upon the next one, and only after successfully passing through all of them can the soul continue its path without being immediately cast into gehenna.

Of course, I will just mention that the most detailed and systematic traditional account of the toll-houses is that in the Life of St Basil the New, who died in 944, according to St Nicholas (Velimirović) in the Prologue (The Prologue from Ochrid, Vol. 1, trans. Mother Maria [Birmingham: Lazarica, 1986], p. 331). St Nicholas writes, ‘The elder Theodora was his novice, the same Theodora who appeared after her death to Gregory, another of Basil’s novices, and described to him the twenty toll-houses through which every soul must pass’ (p. 331). I will not post from it here, since, as the ROCOR Synod points out, ‘no one can dogmatically establish the existence of the toll-houses precisely in accordance with the form described in the dream (of Gregory recounted in the life) of Basil the New’, but one can read the story as it appears in Eternal Mysteries Beyond the Grave by Archimandrite Panteleimon of Jordanville here (there is a whole book in Russian on this here).

In conclusion, Fr Pomazansky cites the statement of Met. Macarius of Moscow:

Concerning all the sensual, earthly images by which the Particular Judgement is presented in the form of the toll-houses, although in their fundamental idea they are completely true, still they should be accepted in the way that the angel instructed St Macarius of Alexandria, being only the weakest means of depicting heavenly things. (qtd. p. 238)

But Fr Pomazansky’s translator immediately adds in a footnote:

However, Met. Macarius does speak quite in detail on the subject of the toll-houses, devoting ten pages of his second volume to it (pp. 528-538), and giving extensive quotes from Ss Cyril of Alexandria, Ephraim the Syrian, Athanasius the Great, Macarius the Great, John Chrysostom, Maximus the Confessor, and a number of other sources, including many texts from the Divine service books, and concluding that ‘such an uninterrupted, constant, and universal usage in the Church on the teaching of the toll-houses, especially among the teachers of the fourth century, indisputably testifies that it was handed down to them from the teachers of the preceding centuries and is founded on apostolic tradition’ (p. 535). (pp. 238-9, n. 2)

The Passage of the Soul in a Few Patristic Sources

In a post on the Holy Passion-bearers Boris and Gleb some time ago, I quoted an interesting prayer uttered by St Boris before his murder, a prayer that has come down to us in the so-called ‘Lesson on the Life and Murder of the Blessed Passion-Sufferers Boris and Gleb’ (The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’, trans. Paul Hollingsworth [Cambridge, MA: Harvard U, 1992], pp. 3-32), which Paul Hollingsworth dates between 1075 and 1085 (p. xxxv). According to the ‘Lesson’, St Boris prays:

My Lord, Jesus Christ, hear me this hour and vouchsafe me to share of the company of Thy saints. For, O Lord, even as once this day Zechariah was slaughtered before Thine altar, so now also am I slaughtered before Thee, O Lord. O Lord, Lord, remember not my former transgressions, but save my soul, so that the deceitful counsel of my adversaries may not block its way, and let Thy bright angels receive it. Because, O Lord, Thou art my Savior, do Thou forgive them that do these things, for Thou art the true God, and to Thee is glory forever. Amen. (p. 16)

Now, in an ordinary martyrdom, where those who put the Martyr to death often tried to persuade him to make some sacrifice to the pagan gods in order to spare his life, one might read the words ‘that the deceitful counsel of my adversaries may not block its way’ and think that they referred to the pagan questioners, blocking the way of the Martyr’s soul with their temptations. In the context of this story, however, the killers are determined on murdering St Boris no matter what he does or says, and the only voices calling for him to save himself are his own friends and retainers, who argue that he should fight for his life. Furthermore, when we note the petition which immediately follows this one in the prayer, ‘let Thy bright angels receive it’, it seems to me that there can be little doubt that when he refers to ‘my adversaries’ St Boris means the demons, and when he asks that they ‘may not block its way’, he is referring to possible attempts to hinder the passage of his soul to heaven.

Of course, there should be no surprise that he would ask such a thing. The writings of the Fathers and the Lives of the Saints are filled with references to such attempts by demons to hinder souls, and the opposing attempts by the angels of God to assist them. Merely in order to demonstrate that this is so, I would like to quote just a few of them.

First of all, as one example of this teaching, the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad in its decision to forbid a certain former deacon from lecturing on the subject has classically cited Ode IV, troparia 4 of the canon chanted at the departing of the soul from the body—‘The prince of the air, the oppressor, the tyrant who standeth on the dread paths, the relentless accountant thereof, do thou vouchsafe me who am departing from the earth to pass [O Theotokos].’ Similarly, in the Prayer to the Most-Holy Theotokos from Compline, St Paul of the Evergetis Monastery (11th c.) refers in passing to this teaching when he begs the Theotokos ‘in the hour of my departure, to care for my wretched soul and drive far from it the dark countenances of evil demons’ (A Prayer Book for Orthodox Christians, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery [Boston: HTM, 1995], p. 26).

Furthermore, St Paul gathered several quite substantial passages from hagiographic and patristic writings on this subject in his 11th-c. collection, The Evergetinos, under Hypothesis X, ‘The soul, after its departure from the body, undergoes testing in the air by evil spirits which encounter it and attempt to impede its ascent’ (The Evergetinos: A Complete Text, Vol. 1, trans. Archbishop Chrysostomos, et al. [Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2008], p. 85). First among the passages under this Hypothesis is one from the Life of St Anthony by St Athanasius the Great (pp. 85-6), which can be found on pp. 78-9 of Robert Cregg’s translation (The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Cregg [Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1980]). St Athanasius writes:

. . . While he was standing there, he looked on himself, as though he had left his body, and his soul was taken into the air by several beings. After this, he saw a number of fearful and ugly creatures standing in front of him in the air, trying to keep him from passsing.

Those who were guiding his soul began to wrangle with these frightening creatures, who were asking for an account of the soul which they were accompanying and whether it was responsible to them for some debt. . . .

. . .

He was stunned when he reflected on how many temptations we must combat and what trials one must endure to pass by the air-borne demons. And he thought that this must be the meaning of the words of the Apostle Paul: ‘According to the prince of the power of the air’ (Eph. 2:2).

For this power alone belongs to the Enemy of our souls, that is, to war against us and try to impede those souls ascending into Heaven. (Evergetinos, p. 85)

St Paul also includes another passage from St Athanasius relating a vision St Anthony had of many other souls being similarly confronted by demons in the air (p. 86; p. 80 in Cregg). He then has a story from the Gerontikon (the Sayings of the Desert Fathers) about two monks who see, ‘The Angels of God coming to fetch me and my brother and to lead us into Heaven. As we were going up, we were met by hostile powers, countless in number and of fearful form. Though they bothered us a great deal, they nonetheless had no success against us’ (p. 87). This is followed by a passage from St Isaiah the Solitary, where he writes, ‘. . . [W]hen the soul of man departs from the body, the Angels go along with it. However, all of the powers of darkness then hasten to meet it and seek to take hold of it, thereby to examine it carefully and learn whether or not it was engaged in any of their own works’ (p. 87). Finally, it is interesting to note that the last passage included by St Paul (on pp. 88-9) is the one saying associated with Abba Theophilus the Archbishop where he seems to be teaching rather than learning something (Theophilus 4). I shall quote the key lines from Benedicta Ward’s translation, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1984), p. 81:

What fear, what trembling, what uneasiness will there be for us when our soul is separated from the body. Then indeed the force and strength of the adverse powers come against us, the rulers of darkness, those who command the world of evil, the principalities, the powers, the spirits of evil. They accuse our souls as in a lawsuit, bringing before it all the sins it has committed, whether deliberately or through ignorance, from its youth until the time when it has been taken away. . . . On the other hand, the divine powers stand on the opposite side, and they present the good deeds of the soul.

Τo turn to a source not included in the Evergetinos, St Macarius the Great, in perfect agreement with all of the foregoing, teaches in Homily 43.9 (St Macarius, The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter, trans. Fr George A. Maloney [NY: Paulist, 1992], p. 222):

Like the tax collectors who sit along the narrow streets and snatch at the passers-by and extort from them, so also the demons watch carefully and grab hold of souls. And when they pass out of the body, if they are not completely purified, they are not permitted to go up into the mansions of Heaven there to meet their Master. For they are driven down by the demons of the air. But if, while they still live in the flesh, they shall, because of their hard toil and much struggle, obtain from the Lord on high grace, they, along with those who through virtuous living are at rest, shall go to the Lord, as he promised.

Continued here.

'The Light of a Thousand Suns'—Hiroshima Day

In the last post I quoted the second canon at Matins for the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration:

The visible sun was eclipsed by the rays of Thy divinity, when it saw Thee transfigured on Mount Tabor, O my Jesus. Glory to Thy power, O Lord.

This teaching about the revelation of Christ’s glory outshining the sun, and the Gospel references to the ‘cloud’ overshadowing the disciples, remind me sadly of another event remembered on 6 August—according to the New Calendar—the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. At the Trinity nuclear test, a stunned Robert Oppenheimer is said to have recalled a verse from the Bhagavad-Gita, in stanza 12 of ‘The Eleventh Teaching’ (The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War, trans. Barbara Stoler Miller [NY: Bantam, 1986], p. 99):

If the light of a thousand suns
were to rise in the sky at once,
it would be like the light
of that great spirit.

And moments later Oppenheimer also thought of the earlier words of Krishna, ‘I am death the destroyer of all’ (10th Teaching, stanza 34—Bhagavad-Gita, p. 94). Indeed, according to Robert Jungk’s book about the Manhattan Project, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (San Diego: Harvest, 1970), all of those present—even the irreligious, who were the majority—‘recounted their experiences in words derived from the linguistic fields of myth and theology’ (Jungk, p. 201). Jungk quotes General Farrell:

The whole country was lighted by a searing light with an intensity many times that of the midday sun. . . . Thirty seconds after the explosion came, first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized. (Jungk, p. 201)

Perhaps foreseeing this, Edward Teller had responded just 12 days earlier to calls among the scientists to petition the government to avoid military use of nuclear technology by writing, ‘I have no hope of clearing my conscience. The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls’ (see the whole letter here).

It is apropos that this terrible destructive force unleashed by man is compared directly to the manifestation of the demonic god Krishna, at the sight of whom Arjuna’s hair ‘bristled on his flesh’ (Bhagavad-Gita, p. 99). Evil, destructive energy, whether man-made or arising directly from hell, is the antithesis of that Light which, according to Elder Sophrony, ‘softly enveloped me and gently invaded my heart, in some curious fashion making me feel compassionate and loving towards people who treated me harshly’ (Archimandrite Sophrony [Sakharov], We Shall See Him as He Is, trans. Rosemary Edmonds [Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006], p. 184).

Let us prayerfully remember the 140,000 dead of Hiroshima, consumed by this terrible force, ‘burnt by the sun’.

Addendum: I would like to add the following passage from the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien in which he comments to his son Christopher on the atomic bombs.

102 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien 9 August 1945

The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men’s hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope ‘this will ensure peace’. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we’re in God’s hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders. (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981], p. 116.)