What Katrina found for $11 at the Hennepin County Library sale:

From the Heavy Clasixx of Western Spirituality, Francis and Clare: The Complete Works.

The Vintage Mencken.

Herons. A picture book for children. I have mystical experiences when I glimpse herons.

Offenbach, Les Contes D’Hoffmann. 3CD’s. With Franciso Araiza. I have Il Barbieri with him as the count. I went to hear him once in the Sala Nezahualcoyotl at the U of Mexico. Herrera de la Fuente conducting, and Renata Scotto for variety. Good times even though Renata was through singing.

Mozart, The Early Symphonies Vol 1. 6 CD’s. Neville Marriner, etc.

Anonymous 4, A Star in the East & Miracles of Santiago. 2 CD’s. I’ve had these CD’s in my home very frequently.

And from the Magnus Liber Organi, The Age of Cathedrals. Theatre of Voices, Paul Hillier. I checked this out several months ago. I must have been the only one!

I’m not sure if Deborah got what she was after, but this was worth noting.

To understand entertainment as illegitimate has far reaching implications. With so much reading to do, with so much music to hear, with so many walks to be taken, with so many bookstores to be frequented, with so many stories to be written, with so much to contemplate and regard, it is not an unwelcome realization.

What I learn from hearing Tozer preach is that most of the things most spend their time on are not the things he spends his time on. Even in preaching through Revelation he is not concerned with mapping out the end times. He wants to speak about what is freqently lost. Preaching in Hebrews, he spent a lot of time talking about angelology because nobody talks about angels in protestant circles. But he does it because he has a sense of what matters. He had the education which consists in the ability to understand what the right questions are. To what did he owe his education?

What is this glory? The holy seraphim say that the whole earth is full of the glory of the Lord. The holy prophet Habakuk prophesies a time when the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. What is the difference? What creates a consciousness of the glory of the Lord? What constitutes an earth so full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord?

Tolkien wrote a short story called “Leaf by Niggle.” It is a wonderful story about the purpose of our existence and it reminds me of Lewises observation regarding the meaning of the name written on a stone and known by no other which Jesus promises in Rev 2.17. In the story, Niggle, who is “the sort of painter who can pain leaves better than trees,” gets on from painting leaves to a whole tree and from there to the country seen through the leaves and the branches. But then he dies and goes to purgatory for a few centuries. When he is well enough to proceed onward he finds himself before the tree he painted and in the incomplete country he had imagined. His work is now to complete this country, not with paint and canvas but actually. It is a wonderful picture of the greater reality of heaven. And it is a wonderful picture of how much creativity is a part of the meaning for our existence. Think of the answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism and ask yourself what does it actually mean to bring glory to God and enjoy him forever?

Tolkien also has an essay on “Fairy Stories” that sets forth some of his ideas on sub-creation as distinguished from creation which belongs to God alone. He insists that our creativity must not be a boundless and ungoverned making up. He shows that there is a set of rules, or a type of order, that must always accompany our sub-creating. We know this if we think about unsuccessful attempts. How do stories fail? or music? or art? Who doesn’t know of bad music, poor paintings or lousy books? Why do they fail? I think that they fail means there is a standard, a natural law. There are built in rules, there is a natural order that governs things so that we know if a story is a good one or a bad one, if a piece of music is excellent or pretty lousy. We are not free to create at random.

Freedom is rather when we find our place in that order, when we understand the order well enough and to such an extent that we can use it properly, obediently, and well. The act of sub-creation is done in humility, understanding the order created by the Creator, and possessing that understanding which comes through delight in what our Father has made. The stone mason has to have a love for stone, the carpenter a love for wood, the storyteller a love for language, for stories, for the medium of his work. And this love is the proper way of knowing. We must delight ourselves in them to know them, and then the knowing and delighting can grow.

The great poet Isaiah, that holy prophet of old saw the glory! And he knew it, for he was able to convey it on to us. I think the connection between the glory which is present and the glory that we know is by way of creativity. It is by delighting in our Father’s works that we come to appreciate the glory better. So when I see the holy prophet Habakuk saying that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory, I do not think he means simply that the earth will be populated by believers. I do not think he means the earth will be marked by the bodies of saved people at regular intervals. There has to be a deeper delighting that grows through greater familiarity. I think he means the earth will have and share a culture in which all men appreciate and communicate the glory through their living in the society of one another. The filling of the earth with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord is its filling up with great music and great poetry, great cathedrals and great restaurants, great human activities that stretch and grow our capacities to enter all the time more deeply into the wonders of the rich and wonderful creation of our Father. And I remember Niggle, and my imagination fails.

I think the holy prophet Habakuk tells us that the trouble now is a want of sense, and it is that which makes us poor. Isaiah saw that glory and spake concerning Him. St. John beheld his glory, and was transported with revelations of the world to come.

I think that above all one has the responsibility to be occupied with things that are worthwhile, not with things that are not. If the propagation of fundamentalism is not worthwhile, then one has the responsibility to pursue other things.

Here I am, a fundamentalist, hoping that when everybody is through with the word they’ll still let me have it. I don’t know if they’ll get through with it anytime soon though. It seems that still those who want to do battle royal for the fundamentals of Christianity have a hard time avoiding it whether they like it or not, whether they are separatists or not.

Is what sets the present attack on Christianity apart from those of the past secularism? I can’t think what else it would be. The others were heretics of another sort. Can the defense of orthodoxy against secularism ever be anything other than fundamentalism? It seems the term is applied whether the defenders wish it or not. I think the term is used for many things, but what other term is used to describe those who claim orthodoxy against secularism? Or more apt? As for having the term all to myself, perhaps that is more of a claiming of myself for the term. Will the onslaught of secularism cease in my lifetime?

The thing I like about Dostoevsky is that he has a keen eye for the ridiculous. He is fully as able as Tolstoy to put a story together in such a way that the pacing of the discoveries are in nothing inferior. And Dostoevsky has not the sentimentality (or near sentimentality) of Tolstoy. Both have a clear grasp of the details. It is just that Dostoevsky has a free and rambunctious spirit loving to insert and even build whole episodes on the humorous antics of comical characters as Henry Fielding does. I laughed through the whole bit after the murder leading up to the arrest of Dmitri and the subsequent interrogation.

I wonder if the whole thing (I am not done yet) is about the smallness of these Karamazov’s, Alexander’s smallness being the best sort, the smallness that leaves him open to illation after the death of his spiritual guide, as he emerges from the place where the vigil is held. I am not sure that I would call Ivan small, but there is a grotesque pettiness to the large and brutal fellow. Perhaps there is a smallness of sensibility revealed in the bit about the grand inquisitor.

The thing I like about Tolstoy is his ability to make every bit of what he includes count. I would that he had a greater eye for comedy and for the smaller and more absurd of his characters. When he tries to go too high, as in the wedding, I think he becomes sentimental if not simply fatuous. I wonder if he should have tried to gesture. But I cannot fault his deft display of motives. To think that he wrote such lengthy works with so little waste!

I think both books try to deal with the illative sense. Tolstoy brings Levin to it through a long, dry way. Dostoevsky is showing us what it looks like in Alexander’s life after the worst excesses of his egregious father and the devastating bit on the grand inquisitor. I think the incident for Alexander at the vigil, and for Levin at his wedding are parallel incidents. Alexander understands by illation, and Levin becomes slightly more vulnerable or open to illation. It is something that comes by way of suffering for both. That is not foreign to what I know of the Orthodoxy way of thinking.

What is most glorious is that these authors should deal with illation. It requires the apophatic attitude. It is a logical consequence of it, the only way to know that remains. Everything that is otherwise known is really unknown. But that which bears upon it the sense of a cosmic mystery is what they most surely grasp and makes all the knowable known surely. It is just that their characters have to be cut and cracked for the pressing urgency of the truth to get in. It is in this way that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy explain to me what Vladimir Lossky means when he says that understanding is in search of faith.

I have been listening to Tolstoy this week at work, Anna Karenina. He is a great writer, and his novels are not short but rather prodigious in their length. And yet I have found none of it superfluous. Everything is a necessary part of what he is doing, at least from my vantage, half-way through Anna Karenina. There are many books I have read which include a wealth of detail superfluously. But Tolstoy includes what he does because it is part of the story. He takes as long as it takes to tell his story so that every episode, each vignette, all of it is done with a clear purpose. He knows how to tell the story, how to put together the parts in the right order; and when he is done, I marvel and I despair.

I think this is not unlike historiography. The historian must seek to tell the story by putting it together correctly and without superfluous details. The difference is that the historian does not have the difficulty of creating the circumstances and situations. The historian must discover them. And while the historian may err in including more than should be included, he also runs the risk of excluding any bit of the circumstances that make up a situation.

Both literature and historiography depend upon the knowledge of people. Exploring their motives and circumstances so that the situation, as it appears to the agent or agents coming together to make the story, is the task of the historian and the writer of good literature. This skill of being able to put together the story in the right way is a high one and requires cultivation. And I think the higher art of the two is that of the man who creates literature. For I think it requires greater abilities for the sub-creation of a story—since so much must be taken into account—than it does to discover a story. Tolstoy, I understand, labored long and hard making sure all his characters had a history and were as real as possible. He was like Tolkien in his concern to have a real world. This world both of them loved, the world of good stories, is the one created by God. Tolstoy and Tolkien help us to take greater joy in our Father’s works. And this is also the work of the historian.