Archive for September, 2009

LXXVIII

Don September 10th, 2009

LXXVIII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

Cassandra was a character from Greek legend, a prophetess who carried the curse that she would always tell the truth but never be believed.  As what was once a Christian civilization slips back toward barbarism with seeming inevitability, one cannot help but identify with her.  What would she say if she were with us today?

 

 

 Epistle from the Limbo of the Righteous Pagans

(Cassandra Speaks)

 

 

We were very ignorant, but there were some things we knew.

We knew that life is a narrow Bridge of time,

That both ends lie beyond the sight of men,

And the fathomless abyss lies before, and behind, and beneath.

The rails on the Bridge are Morality and Custom,

And they are all that stand between us and Chaos.

Freedom is found only on the Bridge,

For there is no freedom in chaos and destruction.

We also tried to find the thing that you call freedom.

On the other side of the rails there is Nothing.

Would you also be free from earth, and sea, and sky?     

Would you walk without the earth beneath your feet,

Breathe without air, swim without water?

Breath apart from air is suffocation:

Such is freedom from morality and custom.

So I say to you, get married and have children,

And teach them that doing right is the only thing that matters,

But that all the right they do will be insufficient

To cover all the wrong.  This is why

The sacrificial blood must always flow.

We did not know from Whom it had to flow,

But the blood that splashed our altars was far wiser in its way

Than your sky-topping prayer-towers of glass and steel and concrete

Dedicated to the praise of perfectible Man.

Raise your children, then, and teach them,

Carefully and painfully,

By precept and example that freedom cannot be found

Elsewhere than in the man who does his duty,

Who is faithful unto death, though it be hard,

And then that even this is insufficient.

That was all the freedom we knew how to find.

I will not say that there is nothing better than this

(You perhaps have heard strange stories of a Hope we did not have),

But we tried also all the gods that you are looking to

And found them nothing, Nothing, dust

And ashes,

Dust and ashes.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

LXXVII

Don September 9th, 2009

LXXVII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”  

I think I must have been glad to be back in Northeast Georgia near the mountains, especially with Fall coming on.  (Those who have been paying attention to my complaints about the pitiful lack of Spring and Fall in the upper Midwest will recognize the deft use of understatement in that remark.)

 

 

 The Southern Appalachians:  Commentary, 1 Cor. 13:12 

The Southern Appalachians

In their Autumn glory dressed

Are all the beauty we can bear

Or in which we can rest.

 

The mighty hills of Heaven,

With their oppressive weight,

Would crush out spirits into dust

Seen in our present state.

 

But when they burst upon us

In sudden majesty,

We will be given souls to match

And purer eyes to see.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

Review: “Shadowlands”

Don September 8th, 2009

LIGHT ON SHADOWLANDS 

This review was published in The Lamp-Post 29:2 (Sum. 2005, pub. June, 2007): 18-20.

  

            One of the most significant movies of 1993 was “Shadowlands,” the story of the marriage of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman.  It is a wholesome family movie and a rich experience, with excellent performances by Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger as “Jack” Lewis and Joy.  Any new interest it stirs in Lewis and his writings will be all to the good; but viewers should remember that they are watching, not history, but historical drama.  They are not the same thing, and in this movie especially it is important to be aware of the difference.

            Historical drama always distorts history in the interest of simplicity and theme.  Characters are conflated and time is compressed (“Turning the accomplishment of years / Into an hourglass,” as Shakespeare put it) to make the presentation accessible to the audience.  This is unavoidable and is to be expected as part of the genre.  In “Shadowlands,” for example, Douglas Gresham’s brother David disappears altogether, and events that took place over eight years are compressed into what appears to be only one or two, as the ten-year-old Douglas who meets Lewis at the beginning appears to be the same age at the time of his mother’s death instead of being a young man in his teens.  None of this should bother us.  The real problem comes in the simplifications of the story for the sake of the movie’s theme, for they conspire to create a serious distortion of the man that C. S. Lewis actually was.

            “Shadowlands” is the story of a stuffy, self-assured, emotionally sheltered ivory-tower British intellectual who is “humanized” by his relationship with the brash young American divorcee who storms into his life.  It begins with Lewis lecturing church ladies groups on the meaning of pain, “God’s megaphone” to reach a deaf world, and ends with a chastened man who “no longer has any answers” after experiencing the pain of loss himself.  Some reviewers I have read show no knowledge that the movie depicts people who actually lived.  So far as that portrait of Lewis goes, they are ironically right.

            This false impression of Lewis is created, not merely by simplifications, but by blatant historical inaccuracies as well.  The ivory tower in which the early Lewis is sheltered is created partly by omission.  We never see the avid hiker who enjoyed nature with gusto (a figure prominent in Lewis’s diary) until after the marriage.  Joy accuses Lewis of being surrounded by intellectual inferiors so that he “never loses” the debates he relishes.  Yet the friends who were his intellectual peers—people like J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Dorothy L. Sayers—are conspicuous by their absence in the film.  Lewis did not always see eye to eye with these friends (who were much more important parts of his life than the colleagues portrayed).  His long friendship with the anthroposophist Barfield was jokingly referred to by them as “the great war.”  But there are plain falsehoods as well as omissions.  When the movie-Lewis takes Joy to see the Mayday celebration at the Magdalen Tower, he admits to her that he had never been before; he just never saw the point.  But the real Lewis had been—on May 1, 1926, according to his diary—and apparently enjoyed it.

            The most serious distortion of history comes at the end of the film, when a chastened Lewis seems to repudiate faith in general and the now seemingly glib pronouncements of The Problem of Pain in particular, saying that he no longer has answers—only life.  It is as if the scriptwriters had read only the first half of A Grief Observed, which records Lewis’s real struggles in accepting Joy’s death from cancer, and not finished the book.  Some distortion of history is inevitable in the transition from the real world to the stage or screen, but this distortion is inexcusable, for it reverses the real meaning of everything that happened.

A Grief Observed ends not with the repudiation of The Problem of Pain but with a reaffirmation of its content that adds to it the depth of a faith that has now been severely tested.  Here’s how the book ends:  “She said, not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’  She smiled, but not at me.  Poi si tornio all’ eternal fonatana (‘So she turned to the eternal fountain’).”  The last words are a quotation from Dante’s Paradiso, the moment when Beatrice turns from the task of helping Dante to the vision of God back to re-absorption in the contemplation of that vision herself.  Such was Lewis’s final conclusion about the meaning of his wife’s death.  Joy’s last words were, “I am at peace with God.”  The real Lewis died that way too, on the day President Kennedy was shot.

I am glad that I have seen “Shadowlands,” and I recommend that you see it too.  It contains some of the truth about the Lewises’ relationship; it wonderfully helps us to visualize the setting and the culture in context of which these things occurred; and the portrait of Lewis’s brother, Warren, is delightfully true to life, judging from Warren’s own published journals.  But we must see it, not as reality, but as an often distorted interpretation of reality. 

For the reality, the following are indispensable.  Primary sources:  C. S. Kilby, ed., Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren H. Lewis (Ballantine, 1982); C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Macmillan, 1940—source of the early lectures in the movie); C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Seabury, 1961); Warren H. Lewis, ed., The Letters of C. S. Lewis (Harcourt Brace, 1966); Douglas Gresham, Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis (MacMillan, 1988); and Walter Hooper, ed., All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-27 (Harcourt Brace, 1991).  Secondary sources:  Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (Harcourt Brace, 1974); George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Crossway, 1994)—but not A. N. Wilson’s biography, exploded as tendentious fiction by eyewitness Douglas Gresham.

Let us hope that the movie-renting public will be intrigued enough to discover the real Lewis, who, in Aslan’s Country now as he did in life before, probably finds all this attention a source of great amusement.

  Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Editor of The Lamp-Post and Professor of English and Director of the School of Arts and Sciences at Toccoa Falls College in the hills of NE Georgia  His most recent books include Mere Humanity: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006), Credo: Meditations on the Nicene Creed (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2007), and The Devil’s Dictionary of the Christian Faith (Chalice, 2008).

LXXVI

Don September 5th, 2009

LXXVI Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

That year I had the privilege of preaching the funeral for a good friend’s grandmother.  It was my first funeral to officiate, a solemn and memorable occasion in any event, but made more so by the memory of the lady’s vibrant personality and by the topography of Northeast Georgia.

 

The North Georgia Mountains and Kate Merritt Maxwell

  

You can feel them rising underneath the ground

Before you see them rising in the air.

It think it is because they’re gathering strength

For the great push that brings them into view,

Their bent backs all hunched up against the sky.

The earth has backbones there, and when you stand

Upon it you can feel them.  Just don’t ask

What sense reveals it, for there is no answer

Except the changing rhythms of the blood.

 

I think the blood must somehow feel the call

Of all the springs that rise up with the mountains

Just to spill themselves in endless laughter

Helter-skelter down the rocky stream beds

So water, wind, and stone can sing together

To an attentive audience of pine trees.

We are allowed to overhear the music:

It always seems to be reminding us

Of something in ourselves we have no name for

And easily forget down in the flatlands.

I will not say the voices in the streams

Are singing to us, but we overhear them

And dare not say they do not sing to Someone.

And though we are not Someone, we are someone,

Which may be why we are allowed to listen

And, in not understanding, understand.

 

I knew a lady in Cornelia who

Is buried within sight of where the mountains

First poke their faces over the horizon.

For when I traveled north to preach the funeral,

I didn’t know the mountains could be seen there;

But in the church as I stood by the coffin

And saw the silent men and weeping women

And spoke of Sin and Death and Resurrection,

From far away I felt their roots beneath me,

Which somehow gave me strength to carry on;

Then later at the burial site, I saw them.

 

That day I did not drive on to the mountains,

Though I have visited them often since

And someday will go there and not return.

When that day comes, I’m sure that I will meet her,

And when I do I think she will be singing.

I will sing the wind, and she the water,

And there will be Someone to sing the rock

(Of ages, cleft for me will be the tune).

            In that singing will the Song be clearer

Than we had ever heard it here before,

And we surely understand it better,

And in that understanding, understand.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

LXXV

Don September 4th, 2009

LXXV 

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

 

Having already fallen in love with the form and become intrigued with its possibilities, (surely not all already explored!) for modern verse, I was enraptured in my studies of Medieval and Renaissance literature by what I was learning about the history of the Sonnet.  I was also becoming intrigued with the possibilities of using a form to explain or expound that form itself—something I would try many times with the Sonnet and other forms too.  Was I volunteering for the job called for at the end?  You bet.

 SONNET XXVI: THE SONNET 

In Petrarch’s soul there bloomed a song whose name

Was Laura; so with laurel wreath the Muse

Crowned song and singer, and to us the fame

Of both comes down in lines we cannot use.

But Wyatt and Surrey heard them from afar

                                      And with bold, though perhaps yet unsure, hands,

                                      They plucked the laurel, careful not to mar

                                      Its form, and planted it in their own lands.

In that richer soil it grew full green,

                                       Tended by husbandmen of highest skill

                                       Who coaxed it into blossoms yet unseen.

                                       It withers now, but could yet flourish still

Were but one gardener left to carry on

                                       The work of Sidney, Spenser, Milton, Donne.

Donald T. Williams, Phd

LXXIV

Don September 3rd, 2009

LXXIV 

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

 

Narrative poetry has all but disappeared from the modern world.  The closest thing we have to it is the dramatic monolog, done to perfection by Robert Browning.  It seems a sneaky place to start in reintroducing what was once an honored genre. 

 

SOLILOQUY

 

 

I was never before a man of many words.

What I had to say could be expressed

In curses mumbled at the wayward herds

Or loudly shouted at the boys from town.

The buyers of mutton might just be addressed

Not much more civilly, as up and down

We haggled over whether I wold die

Of hunger or live yet another year.

The sky at night was simply the night sky,

A thing to be ignored.  I knew to fear

Then only hunger and the hungry wolf.

 

I’ve learned a lot since those days of both fear

And hunger, and had more of both than ever.

There was no moon that night, and yet the stars

Shone with a light the like of which I’d never

Seen before.  Not since I was a child

Had I taken notice of the way their light

On a clear, frosty night, out in the wild,

Can fill you up with hunger–no, with fright–

Well, something else that’s both, and yet is neither.

They’d seemed then like a thousand eyes, whose sight

Could see clean through a man and leave no secrets.

Their piercing gaze had never bored as deep

As it did on that night.  They seemed so near!

I told myself it was just lack of sleep,

That they could not be really getting closer.

But as I tried to explain that to the sheep,

The endless blackness which is seen to lie

Between the stars to keep them separate

Was in a moment squeezed out of the sky,

And I was knocked flat on m y face by light

That thundered like the sea–or by a choir

Of voices that shone brighter than the sun,

And burnt me to the bone with searing fire.

 

I’d always joked that when Messiah came

I’d ask him what he meant to do about

The price of sheep.  If that was not his game,

I’d know he was a Christ of no concern

To me.  But I was in no way prepared

For angels, with their messages that burn

Behind them after they are gone, and drive

You down the dark, deserted roads at night

To see a baby lying in the hay.

Still less was I prepared for such a sight

As that was.  Yes, he had to do with sheep

Alright (the Lamb of God the prophets called him!),

And with their price.  The one he paid was steep:

It was himself, and I purchased the sheep.

Of course, I didn’t find that out ‘til later.

That night I only knew I was afraid,

And hungry for I knew not what.  But listen!

I’ve seen forty summers bloom and fade

Since then, and I would rather know that fear

Than all the ease that Caesar now enjoys

In his bright palace.  Soon–perhaps this year–

I go to join my fathers, hungry still

With an eternal hunger.  But the bread

I found that night in Bethlehem will fill

Me then as earthly meat has not.  I am

Invited to the Supper of the Lamb!

Donald T. Williams, PhD

Review: Ryken

Don September 2nd, 2009

Leland Ryken, The Word of God in English: Criteria of Excellence in Bible Translation.  Wheaton:  Crossway, 2002, 336 pp., pb., $16.00.   This is a book that every reader, teacher, or preacher of the English Bible needs to read.  Leland Ryken, chair of the English department at Wheaton and a prolific writer on both literary and biblical topics, challenges the direction in which Eugene Nida’s “dynamic equivalence” theory of translation has taken modern translations, charging that they have robbed God’s revealed Word of much of its power and authority.  Ryken argues that one cannot take a book written for intelligent adults and limit it to a sixth-grade reading level without misrepresenting its content and its very nature.  He demonstrates the strong tendency of many modern translations to substitute abstractions for the concrete imagery of the original text, to substitute explanations for the figurative language of the original text, and to eliminate the technical theological vocabulary which the original authors of the text chose to use.  Thus they offer their helpless English readers a text that has been predigested, a text that has already been preemptively interpreted for them without their awareness or consent. 

Dynamic equivalence begins from the truth that idioms differ from one language to the next, so that a “literal” translation does not always make sense.  Therefore one tries to find the structure in the receptor language that would have an equivalent effect to the one used in the original text.  Such an approach is, at least at points, unavoidable.  But Ryken shows that, when combined with the anti-intellectualism and evangelistic pragmatism of contemporary Evangelicalism, this theory has been the excuse for a confusing and bland array of renderings that give us a very different Bible from the one God actually inspired, which was a concrete text full of poetry and mystery and not bashful about making demands upon its readers.  He raises the question how Evangelicals can continue to hold to plenary verbal inspiration as opposed to “thought” inspiration, and yet tolerate an array of translations that do not feel obligated to convey anything more than what their scholars take to be the “thoughts” of the biblical writers, ignoring the forms by which the writers chose to convey those thoughts.  This, he convincingly argues, robs the text of its power and beauty and robs its readers of the opportunity to interpret it for themselves. 

Of Ryken’s many excellent books, this one may be the best, presenting passionate and lucid argument on a topic whose importance cannot be overemphasized.  He supports his contentions with an array of quotations comparing “essentially literal” translations such as KJV, RSV, NASB, and ESV with their dynamic equivalent counterparts such as LB, NLT, CEV, NIV, and TNIV.  The unity and faithfulness of the one tradition versus the variety and sometimes even capriciousness of the other becomes starkly apparent in cumulative effect, lending credence to Ryken’s claim that dynamic equivalence as actually practiced by contemporary versions has “destabilized the text” as well as confused translation with interpretation.  If Ryken is right, the translation we use for preaching and teaching is not a matter of indifference, for it will have a great influence on how and what we teach.  All who care about the Word and who want to read it accurately will want to wrestle with this book.   Donald T. Williams, Toccoa Falls College

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