Preaching to the Post-Literate

"It is the worst of both worlds: ignorance of ignorance, what you get when people assume that religion is a pack of fables, easy to get a hold on and easy to dismiss."

From Crisis

By Anthony Esolen, PhD

Learned ignorance of the truth may just be that impenetrable final state of the reprobate mind spoken of in Scripture.

Recently, I had occasion to pull down from the shelves a copy of John Donne’s collected poetry, republished in 2012 by a major press, with a new introduction and notes. I was going to discuss one of the stanzas in Donne’s “La Corona,” a crown-poem, as the last line of each of the seven stanzas becomes the first line of the next, with the last line of all repeating the first. It is one of Donne’s sacred poems, proceeding through the life of Christ, from the Annunciation to the Ascension.

The sixth stanza is labeled Resurrection, and the editor assumes that her readers will need to be advised on the meaning of the term: “Christ died and was buried, and on the third day afterwards he rose again and ascended into heaven. In doing so, he defeated death and gave everlasting life to his followers.” It reminded me of the time I heard a local newscaster say, on Easter Sunday, that it was the day when Christians celebrate Christ’s rising into Heaven. It appears the editor was unaware of Christ’s forty days of appearing to His disciples, in the glorified flesh.

There were other howlers, too. Here are the poem’s final lines:

O strong Ram, which hast battered heaven for me,
Mild Lamb, which with Thy blood hast marked the path,
Bright Torch, which shin’st that I the way may see,
O with Thy own blood quench Thy own just wrath,
And if Thy Holy Spirit my muse did raise,
Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.

Donne is punning on the word ram, which refers both to the animal and to a battering ram to break open the shut gates of Heaven. English ram thus does the same double work as Latin aries. Any Christian who understands the interpretive art of typology, seeing the Old Testament as providing signs and shadows of the New—anyone who has, for example, looked at the letter to the Hebrews, will understand what Donne has in mind. Isaac was not to be sacrificed on Mount Moriah under the knife of his father, Abraham: the ram caught in the thicket nearby was. Isaac is a type of Christ, but the ram is, too, and more powerfully so.  

For the ram foreshadows the lamb to be sacrificed at Passover, whose blood, sprinkled on the posts and the lintel of the Hebrew houses, would cause the destroying angel to spare their first-born. But Christ now is our Passover, and our atonement too. He is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”

We enter into theological reflection here, and into the ancient tradition of portraying that Lamb of God in Christian iconography. See Van Eyck’s painting in the Ghent Altarpiece, where the Christ-lamb, standing on an altar, bleeds from the heart into a chalice, while angels and saints look on in adoration. About all this, the editor appears to be slipshod or ignorant. Of the Lamb, she says only, “A common symbol of Christ.” Of the Ram, she says, with remarkable obtuseness, “Christ is identified with Aries, the astrological sign that marks the return of spring.”

I am not picking rotten cherries here. Still with the same one poem, we find these paradoxical lines from Donne, referring to Christ:

Salvation to all that will is nigh;
That all, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison in thy womb.

No note is provided for “all,” referring to God and his omnipresence. No note is provided for Christ’s bearing all men’s sins. Instead, the editor simply says, “Christ was born to die on the cross to save man from original sin.” That’s it? We believe that baptism washes away the guilt of original sin, and yes, the death and Resurrection of Christ make it possible for us to be baptized in His blood. But Christ died on the Cross to save us from all our sins, both Adam’s original sin and all those we have committed in our own right. 

Of the startling metaphor comparing Mary’s womb to a prison, the editor has nothing to say, nor about how Donne concentrates all time, and even eternity before time began to be, into the moment of conception:

Ere by the spheres time was created, thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy Son and Brother,
Whom thou conceiv’st, conceived.

In that womb, Donne says, Christ, the “All,” can take no sin, “nor thou give.” The editor explains that “Christ was conceived without sin.” But Donne’s point is, of course, that Mary was without sin, immaculate.

There’s plenty more, but I won’t beat the dead horse. When I go to Frank J. Warnke’s edition of Donne’s works, published by Modern Library (1967), I note that Warnke assumes that his readers do not need to be told that Jesus was found conversing with the teachers in the Temple when he was 12 years old, and other such matters of common knowledge. The glosses are fewer, but they are more scholarly, and they take for granted that college students are not ignoramuses. 

The 2012 edition glosses plenty of religious terms and images, and it often gets them badly wrong. It is the worst of both worlds: ignorance of ignorance, what you get when people assume that religion is a pack of fables, easy to get a hold on and easy to dismiss.

Such people are harder to evangelize than were the pagans of old. I am reminded of what Bede says about the illiterate cowherd Caedmon, taken into the monastery at Whitby when the abbess Hilda and her advisors saw he had been graced by God with a gift of poetic invention. They would read to Caedmon an account from Scripture or from the lives of the saints, and then, says Bede, Caedmon, “keeping in mind all he heard, and like a clean animal chewing the cud, converted it into song most sweet, and when he sang it to them he made his teachers in turn into his hearers.” The wonder was on both sides. 

It seems that Caedmon had been a nominal Christian who knew little about his faith. Thus, what he was taught opened out to him a universe of meaning, a well of truth and power; and when he transformed the stories and the teachings into poetry, his own teachers received from him the wonder of truth adorned with art and therefore inviting their own reconsideration and contemplation.

But what do you do with people who live amid the rubble of a culture, a scrap of painting here, a garbled Bible verse there, a holiday no longer holy, a Christmas carol whose words are a puzzle, and a junk pit of historical nonsense taught in school and on television and from the flotsam of social media? How do you persuade the editor of John Donne’s poetry that she doesn’t know a thing about the Christian faith that animated him? 

Everyone can tell a church building by its shape, but few people outside of the congregation (and not everybody inside) have any clear idea what a church is. We must unteach falsehood and confusion before we can teach the truth, but to do it, we must persuade people of their ignorance. And people do not like to hear about that.

Such work falls first to our priests and their teachers in the seminaries. Those who enter a Catholic church should feel that they are entering more deeply into the life of the mind. They may be entering it for the first time. Good feeling is not enough. Sentimentality is worse. We need to furnish the intellect, recovering treasures of knowledge. I will have more to say about this soon.