Hey ya'll, I am gonna try to get back to posting a bit more regularly, and possibly even adding posts from my other blog to mix it up a bit...but that requires me having the time and inclination, so we shall see. Right now the semester is of with a running start, so I'm finding that I don't have a ton of spare time. I should be posting something at least once a week though...

John Donne: Why is love poetry dangerous? Can it be redeemed?

Donne’s pre-Christian love poetry is captivatingly beautiful. It captures some of the intensity of love, the beauty and power of love. His sacred poetry, however, while being beautiful, passionate and stirring, seems to lack the fire of his love poems. His sacred poems are beautiful and true, but they lack the laughter, the true to life absurdity of the human heart and of human love. His sacred poetry is dignified. While we can relate to his sacred poetry in a deep way, it is dealing with something other than humanity. There is something a bit foreign about loving God, whereas loving other people is loving something like us. Human love is comfortingly familiar, and loving and being loved by God seems a bit disorienting.

This tendency to prefer human love over loving, and being loved by, God, is dangerous. It is placing a lesser, albeit more well known, good over the greatest good. Yes, human love is familiar, and comfortable, but God is God. While his love is less comfortingly familiar, it is perfect, the ultimate good.

Love poetry, and especially excellent love poetry, is potentially dangerous because it tempts us to idolatry. It shows us the most beautiful aspects of the human heart, and unless it points us back to God, it tempts us to make love our highest good.

Non-Christian love poetry in particular is dangerous because poetry has the power to shape our emotions. It is a dangerous weapon, and used for ill it is deadly because of its power to shape our emotions without our conscious consent. If it not subject to God, it has the potential to corrupt its readers by shaping their emotions into something bad.

King Lear: Were the Deaths of King Lear and Cordelia Futile?

Because King Lear is killed by events that he himself set in motion, it can be argued that his death is futile. Cordelia’s death, as well, is arguably futile because although she dies to save Lear, he dies anyway. These arguments, however, fail to take into account that death is not the worst thing that can happen, and the implications of a character’s death do not end with the character themselves. If one takes the larger context into account, neither King Lear’s death nor Cordelia’s death are in vain.

Although Cordelia failed to save her father from death, she did save him from the power of her sisters, and from his disgrace. In the brief time before his death, he regains some of his honor, and is once more like a king. Cordelia, however, gave her life not only for her father, but for her country. Cordelia’s actions that led to her death saved England from the drawn out civil war that would likely have taken place as her sisters fought for the crown. Her actions also saved the kingdom of England from being ruled by one of her sisters. In this light, Cordelia’s death was far from futile.

In a similar way, Lear’s death also saved the kingdom of England. Lear was a fool, and although he regains some honor near the end of the play, he was a broken man. Such a man should not be king, lest he destroy the kingdom, and Lear starts off the play by doing. If Lear had survived, it would have been bad for England. Even if he was wiser from having seen the results of his folly, he was mentally unhinged because of the abuse that he suffered at the hands of his daughters. Because of his previous actions, it would have been questionable how much power he should have, and whether he should be obeyed as king. Quite likely, someone as cunning as Edmund would have seized the opportunity to take the crown, and England would be faced with revolt. It was much better that King Lear die in peace before he could cause any more damage.

As You Like It: Jacque or Rosalind?

In As You Like It, we are made to sympathize with three seemingly incompatible characters: Jacques, who is a raving cynic, Orlando, who is a raving idealist, and Rosalind, who is down to earth but not stuck there. Jacques is disgusted with the many characters who fall in love, and says that they have gone mad.

It is tempting to side with Jacques when he starts complaining about the madness of those in love. They are, after all, acting quite out of their wits. Things like hanging poems on trees, claiming that one girl can posses all the virtues and none of the vices of the most acclaimed women in mythology and history, pretending to be what they aren’t, and many other such oddities become commonplace when the characters fall in love. Jacques would have us believe that they have lost their senses, and ought to be whipped until they find them. He would have them prefer earth to heaven because the heaven that they have found is intangible.

Some would dub Jacques a realist for this preference of the tangible world. The proper title for such a man, however, is cynic. Humans are more than the carbon and water that their physical bodies consist of. As You Like It itself is evidence for the fact that humans have been given imaginations, minds, and emotions. Humans are also not solitary creatures. We need love.

Orlando, Rosalind, Touchstone, Celia and the others who happily fall in love are the happy ones. They have something that Jacques doesn’t have and doesn’t even want, love. He claims that the others are mad as he stubbornly chooses to be unhappy and ‘sane’. It would seem that he chooses what he thinks is reality over love.

The dichotomy that Jacques faces is not as real as he thinks it is. It is possible to be a realist and still be an idealist. He doesn’t have to choose between reality and love. Rosalind is well aware that women are not all that Orlando has been taught that they are, so she carefully works to instruct him in who she really is. She loves him, but she is also capable of dealing with reality. Jacque is less of a realist than Rosalind because she sees reality enough to understand that it is worth loving.

Confessions: Is Augustine right to condemn story?

In Confessions, Augustine talks about theatre and story, and argues that they do more damage than good. His first argument against theatre in particular and story in general is that it is stupid to want to sympathize with a character. We are not invited to help, but only to enjoy the pain. We are inflicting ourselves with pain that is not our own, and Augustine argues that it is pointless[1]. Seeing someone else’s pain, however, prompts us to look at our own lives, and helps us to see what causes such pain. It helps us to see where we need to change.

A second argument Augustine gives against stories is that when you sympathize with the characters you love them, and the stories that he was exposed to taught you to love the immoral characters, and to feel badly when they got their just desserts. The problem, however, is not with the idea of story itself. The problem was with those particular stories. Story is a powerful tool that affects us deeply. It changes the way we think and feel about things, often without our consent or knowledge. Stories that teach bad things are pernicious because without our conscious consent we are changed for the worse. Good stories, however, are helpful, because they train our emotions in a good way, and help us to change in a way that we cannot consciously change. They are a way to communicate the truth to people who would not otherwise listen.

Augustine was right to argue against the theatre of his day, and the stories that were told then, because they were pagan and used as the mind control tools of demons. With the advent of Christian stories, however, story has been redeemed. We now have a wealth of Christian stories with which to combat the old pagan stories.

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[1] Augustine Confessions III.ii(2)

In Confessions, Augustine talks about theatre and story, and argues that they do more damage than good. His first argument against theatre in particular and story in general is that it is stupid to want to sympathize with a character. We are not invited to help, but only to enjoy the pain. We are inflicting ourselves with pain that is not our own, and Augustine argues that it is pointless[1]. Seeing someone else’s pain, however, prompts us to look at our own lives, and helps us to see what causes such pain. It helps us to see where we need to change.

A second argument Augustine gives against stories is that when you sympathize with the characters you love them, and the stories that he was exposed to taught you to love the immoral characters, and to feel badly when they got their just desserts. The problem, however, is not with the idea of story itself. The problem was with those particular stories. Story is a powerful tool that affects us deeply. It changes the way we think and feel about things, often without our consent or knowledge. Stories that teach bad things are pernicious because without our conscious consent we are changed for the worse. Good stories, however, are helpful, because they train our emotions in a good way, and help us to change in a way that we cannot consciously change. They are a way to communicate the truth to people who would not otherwise listen.

Augustine was right to argue against the theatre of his day, and the stories that were told then, because they were pagan and used as the mind control tools of demons. With the advent of Christian stories, however, story has been redeemed. We now have a wealth of Christian stories with which to combat the old pagan stories.

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[1] Augustine Confessions III.ii(2)