Like a flower, which draws its
existence and life sustaining energy from the nutritious soil in which it is
planted, I believe that any value, principle or ideal has its root in, and
draws life from, a particular worldview. I mean to say that the soil of a worldview
is what holds and sustains any value that a person may posses. Worldviews ought
to be exposed and tested, we should evaluate the presuppositions that produce
and sustain our values. What follows is a reflection on a worldview, a
particular set of core truths that, as I understand them, produce the many
principles that flow through history. I don’t mean to eisegetically impose my
worldview on to or into the examined texts, but to speculate on the ribbon that
I believe runs through history and which, even in the midst of varying and
sometimes exclusive worldviews, holds and nourishes what principles I consider
to be valuable. I am someone who believes in the necessary and objective existence
of an infinite, singular, personal and creating God and who furthermore
believes that humanity is made in the image of that God and has received the
words of God that they may know how to live obediently to the laws of God; laws
which are his by right of his sovereign kingship. This has massive implications
on what is valuable and virtuous, and how those values and virtues are
mediated. I value deeply such principles and ideals as honor, propriety, piety,
honesty, love, infinity and creativity, particularly because I believe they are
aspects of God’s attributes, that are necessarily pleasing to him and are given
to us as part of the imago dei.
From
the 14th century, Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight is a fitting text to begin with not merely for its medieval
period, but for its journey. Sir Gawain is set from the beginning to examining
himself, and to testing his moral mettle. Gawain lives in a world of very
particular behavior shaping codes and values. This is the heart and height of
Arthurian chivalry, and while chivalric code, and its expression through
history, is certainly cultural, it has its morality from a distinctively
Judeo-Christian worldview. These ideas of Christian virtue and knightly
chivalry can be seen in the pentangle of Gawain’s shield, they are friendship,
generosity, chastity, courtesy, and piety; called the five knightly virtues. It
is against these virtues, these pledged truths, the honest profession of which
is challenged by the Green Knight in the quiting game, that Gawain and the
readers are measured. Gawain must prove that his words and walk are in sync.
While how to model them is another challenge, it is my profession that these
values should be modeled because they are inherently good and to be desired,
and are an expression of what I believe to be true and good. What is
interesting to me however, is the critique of Arthur’s court offered by the
Green Knight. His purpose is to expose their hypocrisy, and demonstrate to them
their fallibility and finitude. This is something true about men and women,
that they are finite and imperfect, and yet are prone to think of themselves as
justified for what others see as their imperfections and to bask in
immortality. While Sir Gawain affirms
certain core values like honor and bravery and propriety, it also exposes what
lies beneath the framework of how we interact with those values, and that is
our own human imperfection. This is not to be taken fatalistically, as licensed
antinomianism, but as a prod, which urges us into consistency as an effect of
our self-evaluation.
This failure, and deep-seated
corruption that prohibits us from the perfection of our virtues, and yet spurs
us on to strive for perfection is also seen in our relationships. The
conversation, began inbetween the characters of Christopher Marlowe and Sir
Walter Raleigh in The Passionate Shepherd
to his Love, and The Nymph’s Reply to
the Shepherd demonstrates some of these elements, and exposes something I
consider to be ideal. The Shepherd bids his love to come and live with him in a
functional paradise. In this world, the elements and nature are subject to
their love, and the corruption of our world is tamed and fitted to the human
experience. Violence is never offered to the lovers in this world, but all is theirs
to possess. At first, one is prompted to say, “yes!” “Of course she will, for
who wouldn’t?” But the world to which the Shepherd draws his love is not our
world, and here “fair lined slippers” come at a cost. The sun does not always
shine, and we must work to stay alive. This is the nature of the Nymph’s reply.
She exposes the naivety of the shepherd’s call, by demonstrating to him that the
world is not as he intimates. There is a disconnect between what is ideal and
what is actual. The immediate evidence of this is the effect that time has on
creation. While this like Sir Gawain,
reveals to us the nature of our creaturely existence, and urges us to stop
pretending, it also holds up an ideal. There is a longing in the human heart
for the infinite and timeless and for the sweetness of everlasting love. Rather
than denying reality and living only in fantasy, or continual pessimism, we
should be urged forward by our failures and drawn by our ideals. Ideals and
unhindered virtues that, in the Christian worldview that generates them, are
attainable through the completed redemption.
It is with this available
redemption that John Donne fills his words in a Hymn to God the Father. Donne exposes the corruption that would
keep him and us from the perfection of such virtues as those explored in Sir Gawain, he admits his fear of
mortality, and affirms the doctrine that there is something to be done about
it. What I find particularly interesting
in this prayer, given this subject, is that he affirms the doctrine of original
sin taught in Christianity and thereby the biblical principle of federal
headship when he says, “Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,/Which is my
sin, though it were done before?” (628). This principle is what gives me hope
in value and virtue and in which all value and virtue find their source. For
apart from being united federally to Christ, and being severed from our
corruption given to us by Adam, what is left is fatalism and pessimism. Without
the principle of redemption, and specifically reconciliation, our hope is in
vain. This is the point of 1st Corinthians 15:12-20 in which Paul says, “If in
Christ we have hope in this life only, ( if Christ had not been raised from the
dead, and thereby if our redemption was not real and complete) then we of all
people are most to be pitied.”
I want to end by explaining an
idea I find in Alexander Pope’s An Essay
on Criticism, particularly in part one of that work. The idea is this, as
David Cody of Hartwick College puts it so well, that,
“Only God, the infinite intellect,
the purely rational being, can appreciate the harmony of the universe, but the
intelligent and educated critic can appreciate poetic harmonies which echo
those in nature.”[1]
Pope in his poetic essay develops a compromise between
various thoughts on how poetry should be written and evaluated. He draws unity
between the rules of poetry that are handed down to us from those like
Aristotle, and the rules found in nature. The point is that critics of
literature can evaluate literature using rules without necessarily denying the
irrational qualities found in nature. True art, as Cody says, “imitates Nature, and Nature tolerates
and indeed encourages felicitous irregularities which are in reality.” It is the
existence these “irregularities” that we encounter in life and criticism but
which have an apparent harmony that only God can fathom, that I am drawing out
of Pope’s essay. I mean here to further demonstrate that there is value in
harmony because there is in fact a harmony. Though we live and work and love in
the dissonance, there is value in striving for the harmony that nature’s
irregularities can point to.
What I have been exploring is
that the values and principles of a Christian worldview are set against what we
experience in nature. As mortals we move toward death at every moment, and must
fight pointedly to avoid it, we are surrounded not by true virtue and safety
but by vice and violence, and we are magnetized to it. These principles I think
are displayed in the works of literature though the centuries, of which these
here are but samples. And literature across the cannon bears witness to the
depth and intricacy of principle and value, and reveals the depth of our
ultimate need for redemption and reconciliation.
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