Don Williams’ Blog

Don October 16th, 2009

XC 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.” 

            What is it about the stars that fascinates us so?  (If you have not felt the fascination, you have been cheated of a great mystery by light pollution.)  One partial answer may appear below.

 The Contribution of Lesser Lights : Sonnet XXIX  

For a while he could almost count them as they came

                                                Like scouts, but then the whole vast army stepped

                                                At once into the sky and into flame.

                                                Like a poem he could not understand, they kept

A vigil in his spirit while he slept

                                                And swift were vanishing when he awoke.

                                                But the more garish light of day that swept

                                                Them from the sky sept no soul’s darkness, spoke

No lightning lines, no secrets could uncloak.

                                                Oh, it shone bright and clear, there was no doubt,

                                                And glanced gold fire from off the dull-leaved oak.

                                                But though man has it in him to blot out

The sun, these lesser lights still often find

                                                The chinks in the dark armor of his mind. 

Donald T. Williams, PhD

• Poetry
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Don October 14th, 2009

LXXXIX 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.” 

            If you think Nature is mysterious, you should try to raise a human being.  If you think human beings are simply continuous with Nature, not uniquely created in the image of God, you either haven’t raised one or weren’t paying attention.  I was raising one while studying linguistics at the same time, which forced me and enabled me to pay attention in certain very fruitful ways.

The Poet to his Daughter at Eighteen Months

What a mystery, my little friend,

You are, what an enigma to me now!

Not all your forty words can tell me how

The least thing in this world appears to you.

And yet, the snatches that I apprehend:

A magic landscape now springs into view,

Now fades into the mist, and springs anew,

But leaves not one clear image in the end.

Oh, there will come a day when you can grope

About for metaphors that can let me

See through your eyes, and find them too, I hope.

But then, alas, the vision will not be

This bright one that I long so now to see.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

• Poetry
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Don October 12th, 2009

I will spend next week lecturing for SUMMIT Ministries at their Snow Wolf Lodge site near Pagosa Springs, Colorado. 

My week of lectures in a nutshell: Theology is the Queen of the Sciences and Philology is her Handmaid in Chief. (Philosophy is on the staff, but Philology is in charge.)

You can’t do Theology properly at all without knowing Lit. Why? Three reasons.

First, Methodology: Theology is the exposition of a Text, and you can’t learn to do that from Theologians, especially those trained in German Rationalist Criticism. You can’t learn it from the Modern and Postmodern Litcrits either, but only from classical Philologist Dinosaurs like Lewis and Tolkien.

Second reason: Context. The Greek and Roman classics were the lit read by the (Gentile) people for whom the NT was written. You can’t fully hear it the way it was meant to be heard without knowing the classics as well as the OT.

Third reason: Content. The Bible has the answers, but only from the great classics of Lit can you learn to ask the questions well.  Only from the great classics of Lit. will you gain sympathetic insight into the human condition Theology addresses.

(For the etymologically challenged: Philology is phileo plus logos, the love of words.  More specifically, it refers to an older approach to literature, especially literature studied in its original languages.) 

Philosophy is important, but I think Philology in its most humane sense has been even more neglected, with even more deleterious consequences.  Just pick up any systematic theology text and try to read it.  I rest my case.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

• Theology
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Don October 10th, 2009

This review was published in Trinity Journal NS 26:2 (Fall 2005): 352-3.

Mark Eddy Smith.  Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings.  Downers Grove:  InterVarsity Pr., 2002. 141 pages, $12.00, pbk.; Matthew Dickerson.  Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings.  Grand Rapids:  Brazos Pr., 2003. 234 pages, $15.00, pbk.

            Evangelical Christian publishers, always looking for ways to exploit current cultural phenomena, are currently falling over themselves to spew out books related to two recent movies:  Mel Gibson’s cinematic passion play and Peter Jackson’s version of Tolkien’s LOTR.  The two books on Tolkien reviewed here show that the people who write for them bear a striking resemblance to a certain little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead.  When they are good they are very, very good, and when they are bad . . . well, you know.  (Disclaimer:  I am one of these disreputable writers, with a book on the treatment of the human condition in various Inklings-related authors coming out from Broadman & Holman in February, 2006.  You will have to wait until then to determine which of the two modes of curly-headed urchin behavior I will exhibit.)

            I chose these two books to represent two poles you will find in Evangelical writers on Tolkien and Lewis:  the evangelistically pragmatic and the evangelically profound.  The one kind can cause even their Evangelical cohorts to roll their eyes, and the other can help even people who do not share their Christian faith to read Tolkien with better understanding and greater sympathy.

            Smith represents the first group.  At least his title is not inaccurate.  One gets the impression that he is not so much interested in LOTR as he is in the spiritual themes he can find there.  LOTR is basically a convenient excuse to do Sunday-School lessons.  Fortunately there are no serious misinterpretations of Tolkien generated in the process, but the exercise of making explicit the various moral platitudes that are embodied by his vision, while not illegitimate in itself, stays on the surface of the story and runs the risk of trivializing those very moral lessons.  Those who buy Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues will be hiring a (very ordinary) personal coach to help them with exercises they could do more profitably on their own.

            Dickerson represents the second group.  Virtue was of course important to Tolkien; but Following Gandalf will in the long run teach you much more about virtue than its rival discussed above, because it wants to understand the story and the issues it raises.  Dickerson begins by wrestling with one of the common criticisms we hear from Tolkien’s detractors:  that LOTR glorifies war and violence.  So he carefully looks at the battles, at how they are described, at how the heroes respond to them and participate in them and feel about it afterward. 

In the process of his careful reading of these passages, Dickerson not only shatters the criticism but notices a significant pattern.  Gandalf, Frodo, Elrond, Aragorn, Faramir, and Galadriel all chose what looks like certain military defeat rather than submit to various moral defeats that appear to be the path to victory.  They do this even when the military defeat they are apparently accepting is total and devastating.  Saruman, Boromir, and Denethor enact the opposite choices.  The grand irony, indeed the eucatastrophe, is that this very preference of military defeat to moral defeat, no matter what the cost, turns out to be the key to ultimate victory.  Yet the people making these choices do not know in advance that it will be so; that is not the reason for their choice.  All they have at best is what Gandalf ruefully admits to be “a fool’s hope.”  Why do they make these choices?  How does one make such choices?  How are they rooted in Tolkien’s biblical world view?  Such are the questions to which this study is naturally led.

Wrestling with such questions as they are raised and answered by details of plot and texture of passage, Dickerson shows a profound understanding of what literature is and therefore of how it should be studied.  He is too accepting of the movie’s dilutions of Tolkien’s themes and bends over a little bit too far backward to avoid calling LOTR a “Christian myth” simpliciter, perhaps.  But this book’s virtues far outweigh its flaws.  Those who share Tolkien’s Christian commitment will have added reasons to appreciate this study, but any one who wants to understand Tolkien’s work better will read it profitably.  I hope somebody says that about my book when it comes out!

Note:  “my book” is Mere Humanity: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (Nashville: Broadman, 2006).

 Reviewed by Donald T. Williams, Toccoa Falls College       

• Art/Aesthetics , Inklings
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Don October 8th, 2009

LXXXVIII 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.” 

            It is now 1979-80.  I have finished my course work for the PhD and am serving as Temporary Lecturer in English at the University of Georgia while doing the research for my dissertation on the influence of the English Reformers on Edmund Spenser in Book V of the Fairie Queene.  So perhaps it is not surprising that the first poem of that year was a long narrative in Spenserian Stanza, “The True History of the Holy Graal.”  It is far too long for a blog entry, but I assure you it is very good.  The next poem continued one of the prominent themes of the previous year.

TIMES IN THE APPALACHIAN HIGH COUNTRY

There is a time for walking and breathing hard

From the work of pushing ancient mountains down

Until they stand beneath your weary feet.

There is the time for stopping to wipe the fog

From off your glasses so you can see more fog,

The dim walls on your left, and on your right

The sun-bright moving shadows of the mist.

There is the time when unexpectedly

The wind whips ’round a corner, and the fog

Cowers before it, breaks its ranks, and runs,

Falls back, regroups, and thus becomes a cloud,

Leaving the sun unchallenged in its claim

To rule the island peaks.  There is a time

For stopping to drink from the last spring that runs

Before there is no mountain left to gather

The moisture from the sky and send it down

To fill the running stream-beds far below.

There is the time you say, “This is the top.”

But you will say that several times before

There’s finally nowhere left to go but down.

But it seems false to say there is a time

For standing all alone upon the peak,

Not under, now, so much as in the sky.

It makes no difference that your watch-hand still

Moves like it always has.  If this is time,

It is a time that’s like no other time.

The watch ticks on, but leaves us far behind,

Which is why we catch up to it with a jerk

And barely can get back to camp by nightfall.

Is it because they’ve seen so much of time

That they can almost lift us out of it–

Does it grow thinner, flowing o’er their backs          

The way the wind does, so there’s less of it

To shield us from the blazing depths of heaven–

Have they seen something through it that we haven’t?

The mountains will remain when we have gone

Back down beneath the clouds, but we will take

Our glimpses of the mystery back with us

To prod us into poems or metaphysics,

Or merely silent thinking by the fire.

Meanwhile, the stones are silent in the starlight

Until there is a time we can return.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

• Poetry
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Don October 7th, 2009

LXXXVII 

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.”

            Sometimes in life there is nothing to be done but write poetry.  What other response to this experience could there be?

 Mountain Memory 

The Mountains do not sleep when the sun goes down.

I have been nose to nose with a spotted skunk

Who came to eat the granola I had spilled

At supper, and then decided to find out

What kind of creature was a sleeping bag

And ask it why it slept when all the other

More sensible animals were up foraging,

And what was it doing in his back yard anyway?

He learned to his surprise it was a skin

For an even stranger creature called a man.

(Just what he would have done had he found out

It was detachable, I dared not ask him.)

What shone more brightly, his eyes or his sleek coat?

I mustn’t frighten him, but ought I let

Him stay this close?  And what choice did I have?

In his own way, no doubt, he asked himself

Much the same questions about me, though likely

He was less impressed than I was by the awesome

Beauty of the creature he had met

And less torn between joy and apprehension

And much more sure of just what he would do

If the other varmint should look too aggressive.

For a time we stared and asked our silent questions,

Then some noise startled him and he was gone.

It seemed that we had made a goodly trade:

A few crumbs of granola for a night

Of wonder and delight, and each of us

Was sure he had the best end of the bargain.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

• Poetry
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Don October 6th, 2009

LXXXVI 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.” 

            The dog was a beagle named Snoopie, and she was not actually present, the night (on the Appalachian Trail) being a conflation of more than one actual night.  That is why art is better than life!

 A Metaphor Glimpsed 

The dog shifted in its sleep and sighed

As the fire shifted and popped in its downward slide

To entropy and ash.  The man awoke

Just long enough to see, through sparks and smoke,

Successive layers of leaves and burning stars.

He thought of lightning bugs in Mason jars,

Captured (to be set free again, not to keep)

In years long past, and then went back to sleep,

Wondering if sparks were starlight that the wood

Had caught and now set free again for good.

The leaves were whispering—were they saying, “Yes”?

The smoke knew, but, reluctant to confess,

Maintained its silence and left the man to guess.

Donald T. Williams, PhD       

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Don October 1st, 2009

A correspondent on a philosophy forum that I frequent notes accurately that “many people on this board agree that certain aspects of Christianity require faith, and faith alone, since our human mind cannot grasp it.”

I am not one of those people. The phrase “faith alone” applies strictly to soteriology (how we are saved), not to epistemology (what and how we know). That is, we are justified by faith in Christ alone, not by faith plus works or human merit. But there is nothing that we believe by faith alone, i.e., by faith divorced from experience, reason, and evidence. People who say they do are simply too unaware of their own mental processes to realize that their experience and their personality are contributing tons to what they believe and why.

I personally try to believe in true things for good reasons in so far as I can. Whether I succeed or fail, faith and reason are working hand in hand at every point of the process.

 It’s all in Augustine, it’s all in Augustine.  What do they teach in those schools?

• Apologetics , Theology
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