Fencing Bear at Prayer

"If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated.  But, as it is, a cultural life will not exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not.  To be ignorant and simple now --not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-- would be to throw down our weapons, and then betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.   Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.  The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. " Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past .  Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is...

AHA Session 267 Sunday, January 6, 2013, 11:00AM-1:00PM Roosevelt Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans) Today is the feast of the Epiphany, the manifestation or appearance of God.  Today Christians celebrate the revelation of the Son of the Most High in the person of Jesus Christ.  Traditionally, in the West, the day was marked by the story of the visit of the Magi; in the East, it is marked as the day on which Jesus was baptized in the Jordan by his cousin John.  Both were instances of revelation, of God's becoming present to the world, not mystically or spiritually, but actually, in the body of a baby born of a woman, in the body of a man anointed by the Holy Spirit and acknowledged by a voice from heaven as God's Son. So what?  What does this feast have to do with us, sitting here in this hotel conference room rather than in the pews of a church?  Is it appropriate to call our attention to the fact that in the Christian calendar, today is one of the holie...

It's huge.  It's ugly.  It's sitting there on my dining room table (where I'm writing), just waiting for me . I've done laundry (that was yesterday).  I've looked into upgrading my MacBook (still running OS X 10.5.8; I didn't even know there was an App Store for Macs until I tried to find iA Writer this morning for my MacBook, thinking, you know, that maybe having a different word processing program would help me get over this block).  I've upgraded my blog template and rearranged all the gadgets.  I've read various articles about the late medieval devotio moderna that my research assistant scanned for me.  I've tried taking the dog for a walk (tried, but failed--she is terrified of all the branches that came down in Monday's storm).  And I'm terrified.  Still. It's been almost two years since I wrote anything remotely resembling a research paper.  Sure, I did a plenary address last autumn for a conference on the Virgin Mary, bu...

Thanks to Luo , I am now feeling much more hopeful about "Fencing Bear at Prayer" as a project. Indeed, Luo has given me a wonderful way to conceptualize it: "What you're doing in this blog is more like what a 'real' medieval/monastic writer would do, perhaps? Writing is like wandering in a dark forest of words and thoughts. We dabble, linger, constantly get lost, but also run into the marvelous. I assumed that this blog, with its monologue and contemplation, was part of your academic project, in which the aesthetic and personal experience is an important subject?" To which I can only reply: "Yes! Yes! Yes! But..." But how much does the aesthetic and, even more to the point, personal experience belong in an academic project, if at all? This--I realized as I walked into campus with Joy this morning to mail in my passport application , pick up the gadgets that I ordered to go with my new toy , sort my emails and update my homepage --i...

I don't like the way I write. At least, not as much as I like the way some of my favorite authors--Barbara Newman, Elaine Scarry, Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien--do. Somehow the words just never come out the way I want them to; and yet, every time I try to write in some other way, it just seems fake, not my voice at all. I could try writing like my sister , more observationally, less argumentatively, which is not to say that she doesn't make arguments, just that she is not bound as I am to make apologies (like this one) for every claim that she makes. I wish that I could write more like my friend Barbara ; if you know her work, you will know why. She is so subtle and yet so profound in the problems that she sets; you think you are reading something simply about a particular text, and before you know it, the whole structure of medieval religious thinking has been turned inside out and laid bare. Scarry is another matter altogether: she is dense and difficult right from the...

I've been struggling more this past week thinking of things to blog about than I ever have in the (brief!) history of this blog. It's an important discipline, writing. You have to be willing to write even when you have nothing to say or, rather, feel like you have nothing to say, like doing your scales or rolling that yoga mat out or settling in for just a few minutes to say Morning Prayer even when you don't really want to. If you're not there, nothing can happen. Nor does it help to wait for the right mood. If you wait, the mood never comes; being there even when you aren't in the mood is the trick. But neither do I want this blog to become a stream of consciousness record of what I've been thinking. I'm not sure you're really interested nor do I think you really should be. Stream of consciousness is---as C.S. Lewis put it so well in his A Preface to Paradise Lost (at work, so I can't check the passage right now)--a fiction, an artifice hav...

On why content matters and why I am not writing a book about prayer as a "human" phenomenon, but rather as a culturally specific art. Lewis is talking here about the problem of reading Milton: "How are these gulfs between the ages to be dealt with by the student of poetry? A method often recommended may be called the method of The Unchanging Human Heart. According to this method the things which separate one age from another are superficial. Just as, if we stripped the armour off a medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an anatomy identical with our own, so, it is held, if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurean philosophy, and from all who have it their religion [my emphasis--FB], we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate. "I held this theory myself for many years [me, too--FB], but I have now abandoned it. I contin...

For all those worried about whether The Speech we just heard was simply Rhetoric, some thoughts by another master speaker about the art of using words. Lewis is here talking primarily about Poetry, but what he says about Rhetoric seems worth bearing in mind today: "I do not think (and no great civilization has ever thought) that the art of the rhetorician is necessarily vile. It is in itself noble, though of course, like most arts, it can be wickedly used. I do not think that Rhetoric and Poetry are distinguished by manipulation of an audience in the one and, in the other, a pure self expression, regarded as its own end, and indifferent to any audience. Both these arts, in my opinion, definitely aim at doing something to an audience. And both do it by using language to control what already exists in our minds. The differentia of Rhetoric is that it wishes to produce in our minds some practical resolve (to condemn Warren Hastings or to declare war on Philip) and it does this ...

I stayed home from work today. I meant to go into my office after I voted, but when I got home from the polling station, I just couldn't get myself to pack up and get on my bike. Excuses, excuses. This morning I woke to the sound of helicopters hovering over our neighborhood. Obama's polling station (an elementary school) is right across the street and the news vans were already in place at 7am to catch his participation in our electoral process. My polling station was right around the corner at the high school (go figure, we live in a densely populated neighborhood). The line wasn't too long; it only took an hour to get to the booth. But by the time I finished, I knew my concentration was shot. So, instead of spending the day working on my chart of liturgical Uses for the Little Office of the Virgin, I've been reading Alan Jacobs' intellectual biography of C.S. Lewis. Oh, my goodness, did C.S. Lewis write a lot of books! After The Pilgrim's Regress , w...

Fencing Bear 2018, with the book that I was starting on the summer I wrote this blog post It is difficult to describe how heart-constricting this question is for a scholar at my university. It is, in a word, the single most damning thing that someone can impute of another's work, suggesting at a stroke not only that one's material is uninteresting, but, even worse, that it is insignificant, irrelevant to the Big Questions that Real Scholars should be asking themselves. Having struggled for eight years to transform my dissertation ("narrowly" focused on the way in which the Song of Songs was used in praise of the Virgin Mary for the better part of seven hundred years) into a Big Book (physically, at least; almost 700 pages) on the origins of the early and high medieval European devotion to the Virgin Mary and her son Christ, I had thought myself at long last immune to this question. Naively, as it turns out. There I was this spring at a reception for some of...

Fencing changes your brain. Okay, I don't have neurological proof for this (yet), but I do know that since I have been fencing, it is difficult not to see my everyday interactions off the strip in terms of fencing. I would be tempted to call these "lessons for daily life" if that did not seem to imply that one could somehow take these observations and "apply" them without having to fence. I see what I see because I am fencing. Friends who do not fence are often mystified by what I am talking about. For example, fencers talk about "keeping distance". Now, I am by no means sure that even yet I know what this means, at least in the sense of being able to do it, but one of the things that I think it means is the sensation one has of pushing or being pushed. One fencer is moving in a way that forces the other to respond. Visually, at least to those who do not know how to keep distance, this can simply look like one fencer moving forward while the ...