A Hymn from a Poem?

There's a well-known hymn (And can it be that I should gain?, by Charles Wesley) with the following verse:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

It was written in 1738. Now compare this verse with a section of Alexander Pope's (1717) poem Eloisa to Abelard:

In these lone walls (their days eternal bound)
These moss-grown domes with spiry turrets crowned,
Where awful arches make a noonday night,
And dim windows shed a solemn light;
Thy eyes diffused a reconciling ray,
And gleams of glory brightened all the day.

The context is quite different - Eloisa is describing her convent with and without Peter Abelard being around, whereas Wesley is describing man's slavery to sin until God intervenes - but the language is remarkably similar!

Transitions from Medieval to Modern Thought

I read C. S. Lewis' book The Discarded Image some time ago and have found it very interesting and very useful ever since. For instance, I have recently read Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus, a couple of Shakespeare plays (with M!), I've been slowly working my way through Dante's Divine Comedy, and now I've been reading some poetry by Alexander Pope, including Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and selections from Cavlin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. In each of these, I have run across statements that I would not correctly understand if I had not read Lewis' book.

For instance, when Calvin makes his argument for the immortality of the soul, he explicitly relies on the science of his day - that the earth is fixed and the spheres of the moon, sun, planets, and fixed stars are concentrically arranged about the earth; that heaven is beyond the sphere of the fixed stars; that below the sphere of the moon all things are corrupted and mortal, whereas above the sphere of the moon there is perfection and unchanging; that there are a few basic elements which have their natural places in the universe, either in the earth (the element "earth"), or on top of the earth ("water"), or above that ("air"), or above that ("fire"). Finally, above all these things comes "spirit", which has its natural place in heaven with God. As I understand it, Calvin basically argues that conscience is a flight of the soul to the judgement seat of God. If the soul flies upward to God in the heavens, it must be of an incorruptible, immortal nature since all corruptible and mortal things remain closer to the earth.

Almost 200 years later, Pope declares basically the same thing: "As into air the purer spirits flow, /And separate from their kindred dregs below; / So flew the soul to its congenial place". He describes the flight of the soul to its natural ("congenial") place as a process of chemical distillation, in which the body is left behind much like a residue in a chemical reaction.

Pope also, in Windsor Forest, describing the paradisical British Empire at peace, claims that "For me the balm shall bleed, and amber flow, / The corral redden, and the ruby glow, / The pearly shell its lucid globe infold, / And Phoebus warm the ripening ore to gold." What I want to point out here is the last line. Whether in an alchemical sense or a mythical sense, the medievals associated various planets (and the sun and moon) with various minerals in the earth. The moon was associated with silver, Jupiter with tin (I think), and so on. The sun (Phoebus) was associated with gold. It was thought by some that the sun would turn ordinary metals into gold if the conditions were right. Pope didn't necessarily agree with this, but he is happy to use the then-well-known imagery.

Another example from Pope comes from the Essay on Criticism (it's actually a poem), when he states "In some fair body thus the informing soul / With spirits feeds, with vigor fills the whole, / Each motion guides, and every nerve sustains; / Itself unseen, but in the effects, remains." Here now is an example of medieval physiology. There is a soul which forms in ("informs", not meaning "to give information" in this case) and sustains the body. It was thought that only humans have a soul; rather, that there were three aspects of the soul, and only humans have all three. The lowest aspect which animals and plants have is called the vegetable soul. The second part was the sensitive soul. The third part was the rational soul. Since I still don't know enough about these on my own, I will simply quote Lewis:

"The powers of Vegetable Soul are nutrition, growth, and propagation. It alone is present in plants. Sensitive Soul, which we find in animals, has these powers but has sentience in addition. It thus includes and goes beyond Vegetable Soul, so that a beast can be said to have two levels of soul, Sensitive and Vegetable [...]. Rational Soul similarly includes Vegetable and Sensitive, and adds reason. [...] The Rational Soul is sometimes called simply 'Reason', and the Sensitive Soul simply 'Sensuality'. [...] All three kinds of soul are immaterial."

So Pope says that the soul "informs" the body, feeding it with "spirits" and "vigor", guiding each motion and sustaining each nerve. The body was thought to contain several fluids which acted on the body to make it move and sense (these might be what Pope has in mind when he speaks of "spirits" and "vigor", or he may be referring to the Vegetable and Sensitive Souls, or there could be some mixture of both). For example, the four "humors" of the human body were blood, choler, phlegm, and melancholy.

As interesting as all this is, I have been surprised to find so much of this Medieval way of talking in Pope. Why? Because Pope lived in the generation after Newton. Pope was 40 years younger than Newton, and of course Newton is a pivotal figure in the history of science and how we look at the world. Newton can be thought of as the major transition from Medieval science to modern science. And yet old habits die hard, it seems. It takes some time for the new understanding to sink in, and even longer for the old verbal habits to die out. For instance, by demonstrating that the moon orbits the earth by means of the same force of gravity that causes an apple to fall from a tree, and that the same gravity causes the planets to orbit the sun - by demonstrating these things, Newton essentially declared that the nature of things in the heavens and the earth are the same. This completely exploded the notion that corruption was beneath the sphere of the moon and perfection above it. (Actually, this change in thinking was already underway 100 years before Newton, when Galileo observed the heavenly bodies with his telescope.)

And yet Pope can still say "So flew the soul to its congenial place."

This is interesting by itself, but I have another point... Well, its more of a question, or a hypothesis, or a suspicion. I haven't read a lot of Kant, but what I have read leads me to think that perhaps it is worth thinking of him as a transitional figure - bridging the Medieval and Modern worlds of philosophy. Granted, Kant lived another generation after Pope, but still close enough in time to Newton that I think he must have been very familiar with the Medieval way of thinking, or at least talking. I'm curious to try reading Kant from this perspective - to see if it makes him any easier too understand. (So far, he's hard.)

Anyway, those are just some thoughts. :-)

A Musical String and a Joke

The credit for this one goes to Meredith:

Q: What would a pirate from Boston say?

A: (see below)

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There's a series of books being published that I like a lot. It's called the "Great Discovery Series" and is basically a collection of biographies about certain great discoveries in the history of science and the people who made them. The twist on that theme is that the authors of these books are often novelists by trade, so it makes for very good reading. Of course, in a series like this one of the books has to be about Einstein. I read it recently, and enjoyed it a lot. One of the things that the author talks about (in terms of modern developments in the search for a Theory of Everything) is strings and superstrings. These are multidimensional objects that obey a wave equation, just like electrons orbiting a nucleus, or sound being emitted from a speaker. Apparently one of the goals of string theory is to derive elementary particles from these strings in such a way that the different particles are strings vibrating at different frequencies and dimensions - or something like that (if one of my physicist friends reads this, they can set the record straight). :-} Under this scenario, the whole universe is a great symphony of vibrating strings combining in one great melody and harmony. It made me think of the medieval idea that the universe was singing and making music in praise of God. That's what we mean when we talk about "the music of the spheres" - the spheres in which the planets and stars were embedded were goverened by "Intelligences", angelic beings, who moved the spheres in circular (aka "harmonic") motion by their love toward and praise of God. Thus, the whole universe wall filled with beautiful music, if we could only hear it. And why can't we hear it? Because it's constantly going on in the background around us since before we are born, and our ears are very good at tuning out "background" sounds. Anyway, I thought it was a cool coming back around "full circle" (pardon pun), that now the major theory of elementary particles and gravitation is so "musical". We're back to a singing universe!

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Answer: "Aaaaahh!!!!"

;-)

A Couple Quick Thoughts

Wow, it has been a while since I last wrote anything! Here are a couple of thoughts that have come up today...

1) In Luke 12:54-56, Jesus says "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, 'A shower is coming.' And so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat,' and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" This seems to me to speak to the issue of science vs. faith. Jesus is clearly acknowledging that the natural world obeys the laws of nature - that there is order in it and that we can predict certain effects from certain causes, such as rain from a west wind, and heat from a south wind (in Judean geography, at any rate). But He rails against what seems like "scientific naturalism": the notion that a scientific understanding of the world is all there is, calling the crowds hypocrites for being able to "do science" while missing the crux of history - Jesus' incarnation, ministry, and approaching death and resurrection. I think it's just a little earlier in Luke that Jesus says "the Kingdom of God has come near to you", or something to that extent. One more quote to go with this thought: in George MacDonald's book Phantastes, one character says of her husband, "I must believe my senses, as he cannot believe beyond his." I don't remember the details of the context, but I distinctly rememer thinking of it in terms of "scientific naturalism" vs. the evidence for Christianity. I thought it fit well with this thought about "interpreting the appearances of earth and sky but failing to recognize the times".

2) In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul writes "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." It occured to me that there might be a connection between what Paul is writing regarding theology, and theories of biology - particularly relating to evolution. In some previous entries (either on this blog or my Xanga, I don't remember right now), I talked about the concept of an organ, or an organism. The idea (from Kant and his contemporaries) was that and organism was something like a self-contained thing. You couldn't make it simply from it's parts, but it generated itself. In this regard it is much like Chomsky's view of language as an organ. Organicity is something that evolution by natural selection does not do well at explaining, and even evolutionary theorists are quick to point this out (although without any diminution of their expectation that some other theory of naturalistic evolution will do the trick, if we can only figure out what it is). (Personally, I have a hard time seeing any feasible way around organicity.) Now when Paul says that anyone in Christ is a new creation, it makes me think of this issue of organisms. An organism must be created out-right (so far as I can see - although the jury is definitely still out). If I may stretch exegesis just a bit and apply the biological concept of an organism to Paul's teaching here, we could say that our spirituality is organic; and more than that, it is organically fallen. In order to be saved, our old organ must die, and a new organ - a redeemed organ - must be created in its place. We cannot "evolve" from spiritual fallenness to spiritual redemption on our own - that would be to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Instead, God must re-create us as an entirely new organism - a new creation. It is all of God by grace, not by works. All this begs the question, however, is this stretching exegesis too much? It may be intriguing (I think it is), but it is accurate? I wonder what the theories of biology were in Paul's time and in his location... Did the Romans, the Hellenists, the Jews believe that creatures evolved? Did they have some view of organicity? Is Paul himself drawing any parallels between the scientific thought of the day and the theological out-workings of God's salvation? I suppose Aristotle might be a good place to look for the first two questions. For the last question, I'm not sure how one would go about answering it...

That's all for now. Time to go to sleep!

An Evangelical Manifesto

This past Wednesday in Washington, D.C., a group of Evangelical leaders published a document called "An Evangelical Manifesto". The aims of the Manifesto are 1) to reclaim the term "Evangelical" from the (unjustified) negative connotations which have accrued to it in recent years, 2) to issue a call to reform and renewal within the Evangelical community itself, and 3) to reposition and affirm Evangelicalism in the public life. To read the Manifesto, visit the website of An Evangelical Manifesto.