This post doesn’t have a ‘point’ to it, it’s just something I’ve been poking at bit by bit for a while as a sort of backward look on my literary sympathies. Perhaps it will be of interest to someone besides me.
Over the past few years, and I know this experience is not close to being uniquely my own, I’ve slowly compiled a loose sort of list of writers who, though they seem to me quite disparate, make a common appeal to my literary sensibility. Who figures on this list? There’s a small group of American novelists from the first half of the 20th century (Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, some others), St Augustine in the Confessions, Dante of course, parts of Dostoevsky, and certain theologians, most especially (from the shamefully meager pieces of his corpus that I’ve read) Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Chasing the ghost of an insight, I’ll start with perhaps a unifying thread. Each of these writers aims to discuss something that for them is not fully known, not understood so much as glimpsed, but nonetheless deeply loved. This pursuit strikes me as very Platonic. Plato’s Good is a light-giving and life-giving sun, granting “truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower.” And man does not start out near to the object of his love—perhaps a child does, if Wordsworth’s Ode is to be believed, but I’ll say it comes out the same. The good to be pursued is a generous good but set far past the reach of human striving. Like the man in the cave we receive it in an extremely mediated form but, stumbling up from the darkness, long to attain true sight. But the reality of the human position is that no one will reach such clarity, no matter how powerfully they are drawn. There are perhaps three archetypal responses to this position, embodied in various ways by many of these writers and the characters they create.
The more worldly of them—one might think of F Scott Fitzgerald or, strange pairing, Nietzsche, his madman mournfully crying out “How have we done this?”—strike one as having rather given up on knowing that which they love. They must remain comfortless, as Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine. The waters of disillusion leave a deposit in their souls, a cynicism that hollows out their hopes into a bitter kind of resignation. It’s almost tolerable, can certainly be lived with- “But—oh, Rosalind! … it’s all a poor substitute at best.” From My Antonia and All the King’s Men, respectively, Cather’s Jim Burden and Robert Penn Warren’s Jack Burden1 are yet two more figures written in this mold. Creatures of unfulfilled longing and existential loss, they subsist already in their own lifetimes within the “disconsolate, immovable now” in which “absolutely nothing more can be contemplated or done” that Balthasar considered to be the only shade of eternity’s dignity which might conceivably be imparted to Hell. (To step outrageously beyond my depth, it seems to me that this is also much the same measure of eternity afforded by Nietzsche’s eternal return, but even in such the God-mourner would rejoice.)
Others who have similarly given up on knowing the object of their love may instead take up a position not unlike Dante’s Cato, standing forever at the foot of Purgatory, pointing others up that seven-storied mountain they themselves cannot ascend. Here perhaps is Kierkegaard, at least in respect to faith, looking in awe upon Abraham, the man he knows he will not be. He is convinced that God is love, finding in that phrase “a pristine lyrical validity” that affects him on a level epistemically prior to his rationality. But he does not have faith. In his own words he lacks the courage for it, just as well we might say he’s too fixated on the unbridgeable gap to see his way across it.
But the last, the best, are those who remain steadfast in seeking the always unrealized object of their love. Augustine confesses his life in a stream of humble prayer that ascends by steady entreaty to repose in the divine. His opening lines are a prayer for illumination, “to know which is the first movement toward Thee,” that continues uninterrupted through all that follows. But the critically important thing is that they don’t stop short in false triumph. I’m only going to beat up on one offender in this regard, and that’s John Milton2. It’s precisely in such humility that the Commedia far outshines the affected grandeur of Paradise Lost. The two works are undeniably similar in the grandeur of their purpose and scope, but the effect each has on my could not be more dissimilar from the other. While Milton’s imperiously omniscient narrator assays in coldly definite terms to make known the things that are hidden and “justify the ways of God to man,” it is the humility of Dante Pilgrim that rescues Dante Poet from Milton’s fall. Milton leans on Satan’s pride to make his epic sing, whereas Dante Pilgrim is willing not to know, and so refuses to grant any redeeming heroism to self-imprisoning pride.
Dante’s journey is one of ongoing illumination, and I think the thing I’m finally trying to get to here is itself some simile of light. Light is, relatedly, a central theme of the Gospel of John, Dostoevsky’s favorite gospel. In John 3:19 the sins that cause one to shrink from God’s light receive no other punishment than the very act of shrinking. The condemnation that falls on those who have loved darkness is none other than the fact of that disordered love (here the Augustinian parallels are manifold).
“Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” … “Lord, you know that I love you.” Agape and philia, talking past each other, until the luminous down-coming of chapter 1 verse 14 finds new expression in chapter 21 verse 17.
And surely this is the promise that Dante and Augustine and Jay Gatsby and Jean-Marie Latour and all the rest of them are depending on, that in some culminating moment their motion will be reciprocated, they’ll be met. Perhaps in a moment like that depicted in the painting that heads this post.
This has been your quarterly report from the ‘Jacob is still thinking about books he read in high school’ department. One of these days I may get around to writing about something new.
Is the similarity of the names (not to mention character arcs) Warren’s tribute to Cather? It’s probably a stretch but I choose to read All the King’s Men with a supposition that it is.
One quotation from Fear and Trembling I, perhaps uncharitably, think apropos of Milton- “a poet buys his power of words to utter all the grim secrets of others at the cost of a little secret he himself cannot utter, and a poet is not an apostle, he casts devils out only by the power of the devil.”
Looking for the Luminous Good
I'm going to do something completely uncharacteristic and quote Joseph Smith:
"This is good doctrine. It tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you."
Does 'it tastes good' work as a descriptor / unifier of these various works? It seems to me, at least, that it should. You understand intuitively that these works are good but are struggling to articulate why.