My moleskine notebook is coming to an end. Moleskine has no presence in this country other than to make an anniversary notebook for the cultural center downtown. So I have the option to renew my notebooking in a notebook with a red cover. I don’t mind the red cover and I like the colombianess of having one with the stamp of the Center for Economic Culture. But it is ruled, not full of squares. It is expensivish too: 30,000 COPs.

While looking in what is one of the biggest book stores I’ve seen here (the Center of Economic Culture which is part of the great Central Bank complex which nowadays pays the bill for my students) I noticed a nice little paperback anthology of T.S. Eliot: Spanish and English on facing pages.

So I resolved my dilemma. Got the Eliot, and have temporarily (perhaps permanently, we’ll see) decided the next notebook is going to be a 300 COP one with a picture of Machu Pichu on it. It has squares rather than lines, even if it does have margins.

Vamos pues, tu y yo,
Cuando la tarde contra el cielo se tiende
Como un anestesiado sobre una mesa.

Lo que pudo haber sido y fue
Dan a sólo un fin, que es siempre presente.

Here is a clever article by a linguist. It is about language death and considers whether it is good or not.

I’m all for it.

Calvinism is a complex system, but if it does not come with verities so clear and fundamental they can be uttered without reservations or caveats, then it is hard to say it has been clearly grasped. Considering some of the Calvinists I’ve met (I’m a Calvinist myself), I wonder if their desire for something deeper and richer has not led them into regions they are not prepared to handle as well as those regions deserve—and require. Scripture, when it addresses something, doesn’t say everything on that subject there is to say. Theology does because it is the nature of theology to do so, to be comprehensive. It seems there is some difficulty in determining what minimum can be said in preaching. Preaching is difficult because it aims at exposition and also aims to be doctrinal: it can result in a tangle.

One of the things this sense of confusion produces is the need felt always to say everything there is to say about everything: it is tedious to do so, cumbrous, and leads to endless discussions. I wonder sometimes if some don’t have the notion of the forlorn country singer whose refrain was “Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” They don’t often have the confidence to speak with boldness and clarity, and I doubt whether people can be effectively instructed by that sort of approach. You can’t move beyond the basics unless you can be clear and confident of them.

In this respect, the need here appears to me great. Compared with the USA the level of learning and order in the churches is low. The level of learning is low because even though they have a great deal of right information, it exists without a great deal of clarity. You have the sense they have spider webs of doctrine in their heads, confusions and tangles of right beliefs badly ordered. It is hard to operate without clarity. It is hard to understand the parts without an idea of the whole.

The solution is hinted at when we understand that doctrines have various levels of importance: this suggests that theology has an organized system. It has an organic system which is coherent, and it coheres by arranging doctrines according to a particular way. Knowing this helps us to select what is more important in what we are saying; knowing, for example, that at the heart of Christian theology is the gospel helps us to begin understanding the relationship of one doctrine to another. We realize that the most important relationship of any doctrine is its relationship to the gospel. Doctrines are interdependent, which is one of the reasons that theology tries to say everything, but their interdependence is not the most important thing about them: they are important because they are true, and they are interdependent because some truths are more necessary for some thing than others.

To select what is more important to what we are saying, or to stick to what is important in what Scripture is saying while bringing it home to hearers—taking into consideration their circumstances—requires that we move beyond the basics: that we assume them. But what if we can’t assume them?

The basics are things that can stand alone because their relationship to the whole is so obvious, and I sometimes wonder if Calvinists believe in basics. It may be we are confused about the whole, the form of theology. But I think the trouble is not that we don’t believe there are basics, but that we don’t understand how it works because we view doctrine as mere information. Without quality, without an affective weight to that information, it is hard to distinguish the importance between doctrines. Here they are very fond of the translated works of A.W. Pink. He has a book on the attributes of God I’ve tried to read. I don’t get very far because I’ve read A.W. Tozer on the attributes of God and the difference is clear. They fear A.W. Tozer because of his notions of free will in one chapter, but that, it seems to me, can be easily countered: the argument is bad. They fear Tozer because he has unreliable information and turn to Pink, but Pink is only information without any of the affective qualities that Tozer draws on so well. Tozer appeals to the imagination and causes you to admire, to desire, to long for, to feel the awe and reverence due the being he describes. His very title is much less factual and much more accurate: not The Attributes of God but The Knowledge of the Holy. More poetic, and with a sense of the form of theology, pointing clearly to end for which it exists.

It is part of the dilemma of these Calvinists I speak of that to say a work appeals to the imagination and is more poetic gives one’s argument no traction with them. Insensible to these things, they minimize matters of the realm of desire and imagination. But this is the realm of quality: what gives weight and ballast the basics require—and deserve. There can be no proper arrangement based on quantity, on the inadequate notion of objectivity (which means quantifiable, in a reduced system that has dismissed the opposite: subjectivity; and I think it is the result of using inadequate terms). The solution is to put the ballast of imagination into the hull of the basic facts so that the mast may rise tall above, the rigging be properly be arranged, and the sails can fill with wind. A sailing vessel has very many ropes, elaborations and complications, but there is an order and arrangement to them that keeps them from making a spider web—at least to those initiated in the mysteries of sailing: who know the system and can assume the basics.

I think the solution is to teach believers the affective weight of basic doctrines, so that on these can be built strong, compelling arguments of advanced doctrine and theology.

Christopher Hitchens reflects a little on his debates with the religious. He has his poor moments. His problem, to compare with the article below on Rand, is the same as hers: reason is not enough, and he doesn’t appear to have something to love.

Asterix & Obelix are not quite Tintin, but I enjoyed them too when I was young.

The life and views of Ayn Rand. Somehow, the statement that she had a glare that would wilt a cactus explains a lot, to me, about the novel I attempted and never finished.

Hirsch & Education, an overview of his life and works so far.

McDonald’s has to pull out of Iceland.

Reading a historian whose research has been good and who has command of the facts but is lacking in judgment one realizes how little there is of truth in this world.

One realizes again that people who are diligent and have a reputation are involved in errors. In the case of the historian, his historiography is tendentious because he fails to seek to understand the situation of all of his subjects from within. It is very hard to do, because that is the point where historiography rises to its highest level of humanism, not to mention that sometimes the research has to be exhaustive to achieve that sort of insight, and sometimes the historian has to admit that what he wants to attain is no longer possible with some subjects: a hard admission for a careful researcher to make. In this case, however, not an impossible matter.

I live in a society where many people have given up on truth. Part of it is the culture of Catholicism which emphasizes hierarchy often to the neglect of personal responsibility, and in which authority and responsibility float above the average person in a privileged realm. But part of it is a culture of cynicism born of pervasive mendacity. The historian I have been reading has an ax to grind against the protestant cult of avarice and the Calvinist neglect and outright oppression of the poor (it is worth considering to what extent he has a point, though it is clear by reading his work that his judgments are not well-formed). And perhaps I am reacting too much against it, but I keep contrasting the Protestant cultures I’ve known with the Catholic ones and I think that Catholicism tends to encourage moral laxness, and this moral laxness, seen in a general indifference toward lying and dishonesty, or one might say a relativising of minor sin, has made many cynical about the truth: those who lie, like those who throw trash in the street, are condemned to live under those conditions: the squalor of their own trash, the confusion and poison of their own lies.

What this unfortunately narrow minded (in the sense that he seems never to have questioned the premises of modernity: the inevitability of change, the relative insignificance of tradition, the determinism of natural processes along with the paradoxical and stubborn insistence on the freedom of man’s will, etc.) historian does is to assert things he does not know, dragging his work into the realm of conjecture. He must if he refuses to judge rightly, and he will as long as he refuses to understand historical figures with whom he does not agree, and as long as he fails to understand the situations in which these figures acted as these figures must have perceived their situation. In other words, his consciousness is limited and blinkered by his foredrawn conclusions. One realizes how repugnant to a Catholic a figure like Calvin must be; to me it has seemed that Calvin’s character was of the more repellent sort—from his writing which I can’t stand. But a historian’s task is to understand how things appeared to that man regardless of his character: even Hitler has to be understood from his own viewpoint (the historiographer must demonstrate what consciousness Hitler had of his situation and how action flowed out of that) if we are to understand what happened during WWII.

I was impressed when my historian quoted Perry Miller: it is a sign that he has done his research into Calvinism, Puritans, and the Protestant ethic of New England and America. I realized before he quoted Will Durant, but the quotation confirmed it, that his work was in the tradition of tendentious historians.

But back to the truth: it is sometimes almost enough to make one despair. To find it one must search, and one must be diligent, and—perhaps most difficult—one must acknowledge how little of it one has, and how frequently one has been involved in one of the many errors that cloud and distort the truth. There is very little of truth in this world, but we avoid cynicism by understanding that it exists. Then we understand it is precious, and we seek it. We sell what we have to get it because once bought, we never want to sell it again. When Scripture tells us to buy the truth and sell it not, it is saying something about the value of things and about the nature of value: truth is the quality of most fundamental value. We should built up great reserves of it and treasure it.

It helps us to judge the writings and the friends we have, doesn’t it? We esteem them according to their reliability: to the measure in which truth is to be found in them undistorted. We esteem them according to the beauty of them, and the goodness of them, but what are these without the permanent substance of truth to hold them firm?

I wrote a two part essay on the trip to Guatavita. The first part (lake) was published here. The second one (town) is here.

My neighbors are evangelicals of the charismatic persuasion, if such there are, and the sounds coming from there a few nights back were unmistakably those of the Peter Jackson opus. I remembered it: the comfortableness of movies, the easiness with which they come, the pleasure of having it all delivered like pizza in a box. I have been comfortable watching them and very pleased. One could give oneself over to those things after the struggle of life . . . but that would be soft and these things tend to encroach. I avoid them because I believe they are insidious. One could give oneself over to those temptations of ease and comfortableness, luxury of a sort, but it would come with a deterioration.

We need a better determination. We need the pauses of rest, but rest of a better sort, and after fighting against the first temptations to return when first I quit, I have found a greater, better world without the meliorations of what is more popular.

There are better things, things of refinement, of true insight, of permanent and not ephemeral value. Things made with intelligence and true feeling, not a shabby counterfeit. Why is it they are harder? I could sit with the totality of Peter Jackson’s opus, absorbing absorbing, but instead the claim is that the starkness of a book is better? It seems cold comfort.

It is in part because by the imagination we participate in the fulness of the book in a way the movie cannot stimulate because it provides all the images, all the sounds, many of the feelings and all but the smells. But it is for a better, or perhaps a more precise reason: reality is invisible, intangible. The real comforts, the real splendors of nobility, justice, compassion, kingship, heroism, perseverance, all these are qualities that are a part of reality and weigh more than all the flickering shadows of the world. The movies do not gesture at those things the way the books do. These things in books are alive to the trained reader, to the good reader who is competent and enjoys by intelligence and practice and right feeling. That is why art is an abstraction in a sense: the book is not the reality but a modem connecting you to the reality.

Perhaps not the best metaphor, the modem one, but one my mind keeps turning to. Reality is not cybernetic, but like the cybernetic world, it is invisible to us and must be mediated by connections, modems and computers. Or think of a symphony such as the third of Brahms. If you go to see you do not go to see, you go to hear, and the things you appreciate are bound up in the tangibilities of sound, but are beyond the tangibilities of sound. If all you do is hear, you are not listening.

So the book, the painting, the sculpture, the song. Each using a limited medium and richer because true art transcends its medium by humbly accepting the medium’s physical constraints. It is a truth of the true world that art functions by humbling itself to be exalted. And I don’t think that movies do.

That is why the Christian resists the temptations of this world, the temptation that calls him to rest in itself and its immediate but limited enjoyments without the invisible surrounding. They are banalities unable to provide meaning. No wonder the new-age gurus find movies so convenient and spin out of them false verities, make a web of error to counterfeit true mystery. The terminal, unspiritual productions of popular culture are shadow, an idol beckoning ingeniously, not the thing signified but only an empty signifier. Effects, special effects, and what a thrill; but how much more?

It all came back today when somebody in the neighborhood turned up the banal music of the radio. Insidious, I thought. And empty.

Modern popular culture is too immediate, too terminal, not sufficiently the artifice of art which mediates invisible depths, solid joys and lasting pleasures. Turn it off; and get away.