Mark Sebanc. Tolkien: Lover of the Logos

From the Spring 1993 issue: Mark Sebanc, JRR Tolkien: Lover of the Logos (pdf).

From the text:

Tolkien’s is an exquisitely proleptic art that takes a pagan, pre-Christian universe and suffuses it discreetly with a sacramental holiness stemming implicitly from what Balthasar makes bold to call a Christian form. . . . . Like a colossus, Tolkien bestrides the abyss which separates the ancient and medieval worldviews from that of modern man, who has utterly lost sight of the Christ form as the primary means of access to the noumenal world. The power of the Word has been repudiated, and all around us now we see only its debased and slatternly distortions, hideous and mass-produced, like Tolkien’s Orcs. Tolkien’s art restores the incarnational, Christo-logical inclination of language. . . .  (full text).

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Paul Claudel. Religion and the Artist: Introduction to a Poem on Dante

Paul Claudel. Religion and the Artist: Introduction to a Poem on Dante. Communio 22, no. 2 (1995): 357-367 RT.

From the text:

Love, for Dante, is a full and integral love, the desire for the absolute good which was sparked in his heart by the innocent glance of a maiden. Fr. Lacordaire explains that there are not two different loves. Indeed, God’s love calls upon the same faculties in us as that of other creatures; it draws on that feeling we have that we are not complete alone, that the supreme good that will fulfill us is something beyond us, a person. But God alone is this reality, of which creatures are only an image – I say image, and not phantom, because the creature has its own personal beauty and its proper existence. The removal of this image, this betrothed, began Dante’s exile; and it is she who, outside the walls of an ungrateful homeland, invited him to the realm of the living.

Dante did not resign himself to separation from his beloved, and his work is nothing but an immense effort of the intelligence and imagination to reunite this world of trials, where he prepares himself, this world of effects which, seen from where we stand, seems the domain of chance and incomprehensible mechanisms, with the world of causes and final ends. His is a gigantic work of engineering to rejoin, to unify, the two parts of creation, to fasten them into one indestructible expression, and thus to achieve a hint of that vision of justice which another great poet says belongs to God alone.

And because the whole of the Divine Comedy finally resumes itself in the encounter between Dante and Beatrice, in the reciprocal effort of two souls separated by death in which each works to bring himself to the other in the solidarity of this world that each has endured, it is this essential encounter that I have tried in turn, after so many other readers, to imagine and to paint; it is this dialogue between two souls and two worlds which forms the subject of the poem to which these lines serve as introduction.

Dante speaks a verse inspired by the drudgery of this base and banal life, ultimately so foreign to the best nature in each of us. He too experienced the same exile that we do – one could say he is the paradigm of the exiled soul, banished from a world in which no part was large enough to hold him. Because he could not remake that world, Dante undertook to judge it and bring it onto the plane of justice to which Dona Bice had invited him. . . . (Full text).

Thomas Prufer on Brideshead Revisted

From the archives:

Thomas Prufer. The Death of Charm and the Advent of Grace. Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted. (1983). From the text:

Brideshead Revisited has been criticized for being lush, ornamental and sentimental in style,  on the one hand, and, on the other hand, for theological harshness. It could be said that the book oscillates between a surface romanticism and an intrusive eschatology or even that it falls apart into these two extremes. Has the earlier Waugh,  taut and funny, given way to a combination of gluttony and bigotry?

My concern is to make the case that this criticism is a distortion. It misses the heart of Waugh’s achievement: to have made a work in which the integrities of both art and faith are respected in their interaction. Indeed, they are respected precisely because of their interaction. The richness of the style and the stringency of the theology interact and thus intensify each other.  Full text (pdf)

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis on Chaucer

The year 2000 marked the 600th anniversary of Chaucer’s death. The Winter, 2000 Communio published a short text in his honor by Erasmo Leiva, which we would like to present again now, ten years later.  Here is the article (pdf), and here is the link to the Winter 2000 issue. From the text:

Whenever I read the Canterbury Tales for any length of time, I afterwards feel a slight ache in the facial muscles: I realize that the entire time I have been either smiling or laughing. Both the smile and the laughter derive from Chaucer’s skill at evoking wit, that wonderfully ambiguous word that connotes both “wisdom” and “cleverness” and that is such a perfect example of the unity of the highest and the lowest in the medieval outlook. In what other cultural era would a Christian poet have dared to construct with utter mirth and boundless freedom of soul the dazzling analogy that opens the Tales?  . . .

As late as 1400, even after the devastation of the Great Plague of 1348, Chaucer still believes that, despite all the deformations in human beings, human nature is one and good and overflowing with possibilities. Human existence is unified and comprehensible. Much can be forgiven because human beings are ultimately not the masters of their own destiny. At each step they are faced with their own fallibility and corruptibility. It is God who is responsible for the intrinsic goodness of human nature, and not the individual who finds himself already to be a human being when first becoming aware of himself. The creature cannot be responsible for the whole, either the individual for his own life or mankind itself for all of society. But the mercy of God permeates both the individual and the world of nature and society, and this frees us up to enjoy, to laugh, to learn and to repent.

Also by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis:  The Anointed Imagination: The Character of Catholic Literature in the Twentieth Century (pdf, 1991) | The Catechetical Role of the Liturgy and the Quality of Liturgical Texts: The Current ICEL Translation (pdf, 1993).

Wendell Berry in Washington, DC

Local Communio editors and readers had the chance to hear Wendell Berry speak on the economy, farming, and his book, The Memory of Old Jack, last week in Arlington, Virginia. We’ve been gratified by the response to Berry’s article in our Money Issue:  “Inverting the Economic Order,” and would like to make his earlier article, Life is a Miracle (pdf, 2000) available here as well.

Here is a link to the Arlington County website, where you can read about the evening’s activities and watch the video of the discussion.

Peguy: I have often reproached our subscribers that there aren’t enough of them.

The current issue on Money opens with D.C. Schindler‘s question, in dialogue with Socrates, What is the meaning of Money? The discussion continues with Giorgio Buccellati on monotheism, slavery, archeology, and human value; Thomas Storck on Usury (is it still a sin?); Wendell Berry on the economy and community; Mark Shiffman on the polis and the family; Nathan Schlueter on Berry, Dante, and the community of the family; and finally, Charles Péguy on “Money.” In this selection from Péguy’s 1913 essay “L’Argent,” the French author addresses the initial question of the value of money by separating it  from power and politics and returning it to the measure of daily bread:

Why mix questions of money and questions of governance. Would it be to honor questions of money, by mixing them with questions of governance. But money is highly honorable, we can’t say it enough. When it is the price and the money of one’s daily bread. Money is more honorable than governance, for one can’t live without money, and one can live very well without exercising governance.

The essay “On Money” was an introduction in turn to a particular issue of the journal Péguy edited, Cahiers de la Quinzaine, and happens to include a few remarks about the journal itself and its readership. Since these remarks may be of interest to Communio’s readership as well, here they are for you to enjoy. The entire article is well worth reading: the issue can be ordered here.

I must do this justice to our subscribers who in this governance of liberty have remained admirably faithful to us. It’s an honor to them. And to us. I have often reproached our subscribers that there aren’t enough of them. And this year I reproach them at least as much as ever. But I confess that it’s a reproach that is aimed all the same a little more at those who aren’t there than at those who are. Those who are have understood perfectly, I want to say that they knew in advance just as well as ourselves the mores of genuine liberty.

A journal is only alive if, each time an issue is published, it displeases a good fifth of its subscribers. Justice consists only in that it shouldn’t always be the same people who are in this fifth. Otherwise, I want to say that when one sets out not to displease anyone, one falls into the system of these enormous journals that lose millions, or that earn them by saying nothing. Or rather, in order to say nothing.

Our subscribers have understood perfectly, we must give them this honor. Just as much as we, they have a taste, a respect for liberty. They showed us this in their beautiful fidelity of fifteen years. There are, just as much as ever, not enough of them. But the ones that are with us, remain.

This hard method, this unique system of recruitment, does not at all reveal a common abasement founded on an incessant exchange of mutual concessions that is passed incessantly from one to the other. Rather this is how, little by little, our cahiers were formed as a place shared by all who don’t cheat. Here we are Catholics who don’t cheat; Protestants who don’t cheat; Jews who don’t cheat; freethinkers who don’t cheat. That’s why we are so few Catholics; so few Protestants; so few Jews; so few freethinkers. And in all, so few people. . . . A certainty of instinct, a certainty of race, the only instinct they have, which can only be compared with the profound certainty with which the mediocre recognize and support the mediocre. But at bottom isn’t it the same. And aren’t they the same. If only we honest people were faithful to honesty like the mediocre were faithful to mediocrity.

Balthasar on Claudel

New in our online archive: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Afterword to The Satin Slipper. (1999) (pdf)

Related articles:

D.C. Schindler. Why We Need Paul Claudel (2007)
Holger Zaborowski. Loving the World and More Than the World: Tragedy and Transcendence in Paul Claudel’s The Satin Slipper (2005)