I would like to report myself a missing person…because I haven’t been to my blog in over a week! Honestly, Spring Break hit and I spent so much time sleeping and playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess that I couldn’t find time to post. But here I am, though with little of value to post…as of yet. Here’s what has been occupying my time:

• Midterms: The week before break I had three midterms in a row and a paper due, and right after break I had to turn in my short story for Creative Writing, so I was rather busy.
• Weddings: My sister, Laura, is getting married in 3 weeks! So we had her bachelorette party and I got fitted for my dress, and things have been kinda crazy.
• Websites: My boyfriend, Nick, has finally purchased a domain name and I’ve set him up on my account so he now has his own website: Phatcatholic.Com. It’s not actually fleshed out yet, but when it is, it will be awe-inspiring.

That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. I promise to post something of value as soon as I can.

THE UNICORN HUNTERS
By SANDRA MIESEL

They’re drawing a bead on unicorns and the imagination. Shots come from many directions, and some of the nastiest originate at the fringes of Fundamentalism.

Author and editor Jane Yolen, addressing the Society of Children’s Book Writers, deplored a rising tide of attacks on fantasy fiction. She observed that alarmists such as the widely-published Texe Marrs “insist that much of children’s literature–especially fantasy –is designed to encourage devil worship.”

Books, films, cartoon characters, games, and toys are denounced almost at random: Walt Disney fairy stories, the Smurfs, the Muppets, Dark Crystal (absurdly identified as a filmed version of The Lord of the Rings), the Care Bears, She-Ra and He-Man, the Star Wars trilogy, Rainbo Brite, The Secret Garden by Frances Hogsdon Burnett, Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe, and works by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Bruce Coville, and works by Jane Yolen herself.

Leading the charge are Texe Marrs’s Dark Secrets of the New Age, Mystery Mark of the New Age, and Ravaged by the New Age–plus Berit Kjos’s Your Child and the New Age and Joanna Michaelson’s Like Lambs to the Slaughter.

The critics are armed with malevolent misinformation. For instance, in Ravaged by the New Age Texe Marrs excoriates the children’s cartoon show My Little Pony because it depicts unicorns, “a potent symbol of the third eye and the Antichrist, the little horn. Also note the double zigzag (’SS’) near the pony’s tail. This represent the seig rune, the pagan symbol of Satan.” (The word is spelled Sieg and means in German “victory,” and sometimes a zigzag is just that: a wavy line.)

This attitude turns up in books which don’t directly touch on fantasy literature. Even Catholics suffer from it. The prologue to Randy England’s The Unicorn in the Sanctuary “proves” the unicorn evil by mere assertion: “This mythical animal has often been associated in literature with both Christ (wrongly) and with Lucifer. It is not the cute and gentle creature popularly portrayed . . . but a symbol of tearing and trampling, breaking and crushing.”

Wrongly associated with Christ? By whom? England doesn’t say. Although a ghastly demon unicorn cribbed from Henry Fuseli’s masterpiece “The Nightmare” appears on his cover, unicorns aren’t mentioned in the body of England’s text. Their image is exploited as an attention-grabber for a thinly-researched book decrying New Age infiltration of the Catholic Church.

Although the unicorn is the favorite quarry, any mythical creature is fair game. Marrs fulminates against L’Engle’s critically and commercially successful fantasies because their covers depict a Pegasus-unicorn (A Swiftly Tilting Planet), a rainbow and a centaur (A Wrinkle in Time), and what he describes as a bird-man covered with eyes (A Wind at the Door). In the last case Marrs seems curiously unacquainted with cherubim, Ezekiel’s fourth living creature, or the traditional symbol for John the Evangelist. The texts of L’Engle’s books go unexamined, yet she’s attainted with guilt by association for having worked at the avant garde Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Do these darts strike home? The public library of Fort Wayne, Indiana is reported to have issued a cautionary statement about L’Engle. Christian Book Distributors, a mail-order firm serving Evangelicals, finds its customers will buy other books by L’Engle, a devout Episcopalian, but not her fantasies. A few of its customers have questioned C. S. Lewis’s orthodoxy, presumably on the basis of attacks like Marrs’s.

These zealous anti-New Age critics argue that all pre-Christian and non-Christian symbols represent demonic evil and must be purged ruthlessly from Christian consciousness. It’s no accident that Michaelson scrupulously calls Easter “Resurrection Sunday.” (”Easter” has its etymological roots in the name of a pagan spring festival.)

This is emphatically not the traditional Catholic position. From the beginning, the Church has borrowed or “baptized” alien imagery for its own use. Hostility toward the fantastic bespeaks wider disagreement with basic Catholic attitudes toward works of culture.

A case in point: The much-maligned unicorn, which came to Western attention around 400 B.C. as a curiosity among Indian fauna, turns up in the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the King James, and the Douay translations of Scripture in contexts that connote glory, majesty, power, strength, and untamed freedom.

By A.D. 200, Tertullian called the unicorn a symbol of Christ. Ambrose, Jerome, and Basil agreed. The late-antiquity bestiary known as Physiologus popularized an elaborate allegory in which a unicorn tamed by a maiden stood for the Incarnation. This became the basic–and universal–medieval notion of the unicorn, justifying its appearance in every form of religious art.

The unicorn also acquired positive secular meanings, including chaste love and faithful marriage. (It plays this role in Petrarch’s Triumph of Chastity.) It was a heraldic motif, appearing on the national arms and coins of Scotland. The royal throne of Denmark was made of “unicorn horns” (actually narwhal tusks). The same material was used for ceremonial cups because the unicorn’s horn was believed to neutralize poison.

In more recent centuries alchemists made the unicorn represent “spirit.” It’s hard to see why this minority opinion renders the unicorn evil. If it does, why don’t the critics denounce the stag and the lion, which stand for “soul” and “body” in the same occult system?

As for other fabulous beings, Jerome’s Life of St. Paul the First Hermit includes a friendly centaur and a God-fearing satyr. Dante’s Divine Comedy shows a griffin drawing the triumphant chariot of the Church. The monster-slaying Bellerophon mounted on Pegasus was an early Christian symbol of Christ’s victory over Satan.

Dragons adore the Christ Child in a fourteenth-century French treatise, The Life of Our Blessed Savior Jesus Christ. The infant Jesus blesses them for honoring the divine command “Praise the Lord from the Earth ye dragons” (Ps. 148:7). Mermaids, giants, sphinxes, chimeras, and other fabulous creatures from pagan myth and folklore have decorated churches and other vehicles of religious art.

And let’s not forget the four creatures which traditionally have represented the four Evangelists: a winged man (Matthew), a lion (Mark), an ox (Luke), and an eagle (John).

If the unicorn hunters know any of this, they aren’t saying. Not only are they ignorant of such artistic basics, but they’re deficient in understanding how symbols mean. They assume each sign has a simple and unchangeable meaning which carries power in and of itself.

Some symbols are purely arbitrary: In a computer program such as the one used to compose this magazine, a dollar sign can indicate where a footnote is to appear. Other symbols have a more direct connection with the meanings they evoke: Water suggests cleansing, refreshment, fertility. Symbols are culturally conditioned and change with time. A swastika didn’t mean the same thing to an Aztec or an ancient Celt as it did to a Nazi–or as it does today to a Buddhist.

Since they wear such blinkers, it’s no wonder vigilantes attack fantasy haphazardly. Books by Marrs, Michaelson, and others make no effort to survey a representative sample of children’s literature, past or present. If books featuring magic and mysticism are always and everywhere evil, how can we permit children to touch stories by that atheistic, anti-Catholic Freemason and Nobel laureate Rudyard Kip-ling? Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies are stuffed with Eastern thought and paganism. And how about medieval romances, popular ballads, fairy tales, The Arabian Nights? Should impressionable high schoolers be exposed to Chaucer, Macbeth, or The Faerie Queen?

The ambivalence is evident in Berit Kjos. He’s willing to admit a nostalgia for traditional fairy tales, yet he condemns The Secret Garden for calling the protagonist’s cure “magic.” His seeing a dark design in Bunnicula, a comedy about a bunny which “vampirizes” vegetables, shows that Kjos’s capacity to interpret literature is not the only thing that is defective–so is his sense of humor.

Marrs’s paranoid, but profitable, jumble of misinformation deserves no serious attention. (He’s an ex-Air Force officer who’s built a prominent career as an evangelist trumpeting the bizarre allegation that all New Agers are part of a conscious, Satan-directed conspiracy bent on exterminating every Christian on Earth by the year 2004.)

Poor scholarship also undercuts the credibility of England (who relies heavily on the writings of the virulently anti-Catholic and sensationalism-rich Dave Hunt) and Michaelson’s complaints about New Age infiltration in schools and churches. Michaelson doesn’t cite Marrs yet copies his choice of targets, arguments, references, and even mistakes (for instance, calling the Egyptian sun-god Ra a goddess).

Her complaint about unicorns coyly alludes to “decidedly impure and unvirginal activities,” misrepresenting data from her source, Man, Myth and Magic, a popular but scarcely authoritative encyclopedia of the occult. Without justification or explanation, she prefers obscure uses of the unicorn and other symbols to their popular, public ones.

The unicorn hunters like to argue through inference and association, as when Michaelson speculates about the deep Hermetic learning of “kidvid” script writers or claims that the “shockingly violent and occultic role-playing game” Dungeons and Dragons is supposedly “based on Tolkien’s famous ‘Ring Trilogy,’ and has adopted a similar theme and feel.”

Michaelson apparently uses either the closest book or the one that gives the slant she wants. It’s difficult to image what possessed her to follow Marrs and base her treatment of Mesopotamian religion on Alexander Hislop’s anti-Catholic diatribe The Two Babylons or the Papal Worship (1853) or its recent rehash, Ralph Woodrow’s Babylon Mystery Religion (1966).

Hislop maintains that ancient Babylonian religion revolved around the worship of Nimrod and Semiramis and is perpetuated in Catholicism. Woodrow adds inane discussions of Mithraism.

In their relentless pursuit of the unicorn, the critics tend to take definitions or information from New Age sources at face value. They cite the New Age best-seller The Way of the Shaman by Michael Harner, but not the standard academic survey, Shamanism by Mircea Eliade. Or they quote The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets without correcting for its radical feminist agenda. They seem to be unacquainted with basic handbooks of myth and folklore.

Content is all that counts–nevercontext. Any book that so much as mentions magic is suspect, even those by Christian fantasists Lewis and Tolkien. (It’s probably just as well the critics don’t seem to have heard of Lewis and Tolkien’s far more mystical colleague Charles Williams.)

Marrs accuses Lewis of “weaving truth and untruth,” foolishly identifying him as a specialist in “New Age metaphysical fiction.” Lewis’s work as a scholar and Christian apologist goes unmentioned. Marrs calls The Lord of the Rings “demonically energized.” Never mind that all the witches in Narnia are evil (the only “good magic” there is divine) and that the wizards of Middle Earth are a kind of incarnate angel.

Michaelson is gentler but suggests that a friendly faun in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe betrays Lewis’s “lifelong fascination with the occult.” She cites The Satanic Bible, of all things, as proof that a faun is equivalent to Pan, “an alter-ego of Satan himself.” (This cliche, usually argued not by Fundamentalists but by neo-pagans, is utterly false.) Why didn’t Michaelson check what Lewis himself says about fantasy creatures in his literary study The Discarded Image?

The stalwart unicorn hunters are curiously feeble in cultural knowledge, seemingly unaware of the classics of the Christian past. What would they make of the fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was edited and translated by Tolkien? Since the hero of the poem is an Arthurian knight whose emblem is the pentacle and who learns a lesson in virtue from a denizen of Faerie, is the work Satanic?

These misguided attacks on the fantastic reveal a fear of the imagination, especially the visual imagination. Marrs is so radically iconoclastic that he warns against pictures of biblical scenes, even in the mind.

He would banish the cross itself from Christian churches and objects to representations of it within a circle as being a Satanic/New Age symbol of limiting Christ’s power. (In fact, the enclosed cross in the form of the chi-rho is one of the most primitive Christian emblems.) It requires no acute mind to determine what Marrs and many of his fellow hunters think of Catholic statuary and symbolism.

Behind all this is a fear of human creativity, perhaps even a dread of human nature that inverts the New Age’s exaggerated confidence in human nature. Satisfied they have all important answers, the unicorn hunters don’t want Christians asking, “What if?”

They don’t want them, in Tolkien’s words, “sub-creating” a secondary world of fantasy for “recovery, escape, and consolation.” They can’t see that fantasies such as The Lord of the Rings don’t need an explicit Christian message to point readers toward goodness–and toward God.

by Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

At the foot of the Cross on Calvary
Three soldiers sat and diced,
And one of them was the Devil
And he won the Robe of Christ.

When the Devil comes in his proper form
To the chamber where I dwell,
I know him and make the Sign of the Cross
Which drives him back to Hell.

And when he comes like a friendly man
And puts his hand in mine,
The fervour in his voice is not
From love or joy or wine.

And when he comes like a woman,
With lovely, smiling eyes,
Black dreams float over his golden head
Like a swarm of carrion flies.

Now many a million tortured souls
In his red halls there be:
Why does he spend his subtle craft
In hunting after me?

Kings, queens and crested warriors
Whose memory rings through time,
These are his prey, and what to him
Is this poor man of rhyme,

That he, with such laborious skill,
Should change from role to role,
Should daily act so many a part
To get my little soul?

Oh, he can be the forest,
And he can be the sun,
Or a buttercup, or an hour of rest
When the weary day is done.

I saw him through a thousand veils,
And has not this sufficed?
Now, must I look on the Devil robed
In the radiant Robe of Christ?

He comes, and his face is sad and mild,
With thorns his head is crowned;
There are great bleeding wounds in his feet,
And in each hand a wound.

How can I tell, who am a fool,
If this be Christ or no?
Those bleeding hands outstretched to me!
Those eyes that love me so!

I see the Robe — I look — I hope –
I fear — but there is one
Who will direct my troubled mind;
Christ’s Mother knows her Son.

O Mother of Good Counsel, lend
Intelligence to me!
Encompass me with wisdom,
Thou Tower of Ivory!

“This is the Man of Lies,” she says,
“Disguised with fearful art:
He has the wounded hands and feet,
But not the wounded heart.”

Beside the Cross on Calvary
She watched them as they diced.
She saw the Devil join the game
And win the Robe of Christ.

Joyce Kilmer, The Robe of Christ, in Regis Martin, Garlands of Grace: An Anthology of Great Christian Poetry, (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2001) 90-92.

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”

- Flannery O’Connor

Speaking of quotes, if anyone has a great quote they’d like to see in the sidebar, send them to me (mooreeffocblog at gmail dot com). I’ll add them to the database, provided they’re appropriate and pertinent.

I’ll try to post something more substantial soon.

Nick (Phatcatholic Apologetics) showed this article to me a few days ago. It’s mostly about O’Connor’s hometown in the Bible Belt (it is written for the Travel section of the NY Times) but there are a few references to O’Connor’s Catholicism and it’s reflections in her work. I won’t post it in it’s entirety (because it’s four pages long) but here are some interesting tidbits from the article:

In Search of Flannery O’Connor
by LAWRENCE DOWNES

Somewhere outside Toomsboro is where, in O’Connor’s best-known short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a family has a car accident and a tiresome old grandmother has an epiphany. The fog of petty selfishness that has shrouded her life clears when she feels a sudden spasm of kindness for a stranger, a brooding prison escapee who calls himself the Misfit.

Of course, that’s also the moment that he shoots her in the chest, but in O’Connor’s world, where good and evil are as real as a spreading puddle of blood, it amounts to a happy ending. The grandmother is touched by grace at the last possible moment, and she dies smiling.

“She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

O’Connor’s short stories and novels are set in a rural South where people know their places, mind their manners and do horrible things to one another. It’s a place that somehow hovers outside of time, where both the New Deal and the New Testament feel like recent history. It’s soaked in violence and humor, in sin and in God. He may have fled the modern world, but in O’Connor’s he sticks around, in the sun hanging over the tree line, in the trees and farm beasts, and in the characters who roost in the memory like gargoyles. It’s a land haunted by Christ — not your friendly hug-me Jesus, but a ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of the mind, pursuing the unwilling.

O’Connor’s characters shimmer between heaven and hell, acting out allegorical dramas of sin and redemption. There’s Hazel Motes, the sunken-eyed Army veteran who tries to reject God by preaching “the Church of Christ Without Christ, where the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” Hulga Hopewell, the deluded intellectual who loses her wooden leg to a thieving Bible salesman she had assumed was as dumb as a stump. The pious Mrs. Turpin, whose heart pours out thank-yous to Jesus for not having made her black or white trash or ugly. Mrs. Freeman, the universal busybody: “Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings.”

O’Connor was a misfit herself, as a Roman Catholic in the Bible Belt, a religiously devout ironist writing for nonbelievers. She liked to gently mock the redneckedness of her surroundings. “When in Rome,” she once wrote, “do as you done in Milledgeville.”

And finally, from the end of the article:

Standing beside huge mounds of white chalky dirt, surrounded by deep treads left in the red clay by earth-moving machinery, I watched as a sentence from one of my favorite stories, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” slowly unfolded, as if for me alone:

“The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.”

By the road’s edge I spied an unusual-looking vine. It was passion flower, with purple blossoms that look like a crown of thorns, and the nails for Christ’s hands and feet. I picked a bunch of strands, with their immature fruit, like little green boiled eggs, and got back onto the road to Milledgeville, under a blackening sky, to put them in some water.

Surprising topic for a NY Times article, and I was pleasantly surprised with how they handled it. I was introduced to Flannery O’Connor only recently, through last semester’s Studies in Fiction class (which I loved, by the way), and have liked everything I have read of hers so far.

If anyone has any suggestions for other writers I could talk about, feel free to email me (my address is near the bottom of the sidebar) or leave a comment.

I was priveliged on Sunday to be able to see the new independent film Bella. It won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival this past fall, which makes it an Oscar contender by default (Life is Beautiful won it, as did American Beauty).

Aside from the specifics, when I saw this movie I was most literally blown away. Not only is it an amazing message, but it’s an all around beautiful film. I was impressed by every aspect of the movie, and yes, I cried. It needs to be seen.

 Here’s the brief description FUS gave on the school website:

Bella tells the story of a fallen international soccer star (Eduardo Verastegui) who reaches out to a young waitress (Tammy Blanchard) facing a life-changing decision. As their lives are turned upside down, both characters find that the healing power of family helps redeem their pasts and gives hope for the future.

So my mission from now until this film is released in the theaters is to promote this movie like crazy, and I encourage anyone reading this to do the same, even if you haven’t seen it. You will want to, and that can’t happen unless this movie shows in as many theaters as possible.

So, here’s how you can do it:

1. Help “Bella” online by giving “Bella” high scores on the online films sites like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and iVillage.
2. Promote “Bella” Online by linking to their MySpace or Facebook websites and joining or creating “Bella” websites, blogs, and message boards.
3. Hand out “Bella Commitment Tickets” - Print and hand out 500 Commitment tickets to encourage people to promote films that can have a positive impact on the world by buying 2 tickets to see “Bella” on Opening Night.
4. Encourage and organize groups to go to “Bella” - Organize a large group to go see “Bella” on Opening Weekend.
5. Post “Bella” materials in high traffic areas in your city (posters, etc.)
6. Send a press kit to your local press and write letters to national press encouraging them to give “Bella” coverage.
7. Join the “Bella” volunteer team - Work as a part time volunteer helping “Bella” from now through Opening Weekend.

If this movie is allowed to enter as many theaters as possible, it will change lives, I guaruntee it. I’ll be keeping up on the where and when of Opening Weekend so we can organize a massive exodus to the nearest movie theaters. For now, check out the trailer and other information about the film at BellatheMovie.Com.

My sister, Kathryn of Something Like This, has been getting involved with a movement called LibriVox where volunteers read sections from (or whole) books in the public domain (meaning their copyright licenses have expired - e.g. Count of Monte Cristo, Poems by Robert Frost, etc.) Here’s an excerpt from their site:

Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

Anyone can volunteer to read something. It’s an interesting idea, I think, and Kathryn has been reading several chapters and excerpts for them. I thought it would be cool to put them up here too. Here are a few of the things she’s read, and you can go to her site to listen to the rest of them:

• Romantic Poetry Collection 001
  To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet
• The Lilac Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, Editor
  The False Prince and the True
  The Hoodie-Crow
• Legend Land volumes 1 & 2
  The Women Soldiers of Fishguard

Enjoy!

Taken from Phatcatholic Apologetics:

Adam Janke, a friend of mine and webmaster of Catechetics Online, is hoping to form an online group to read and discuss Balthasar’s great “Trilogy” of theological works on God and man. Here are the details:

We are now forming a group which will read and discuss the “Trilogy” (16 volumes) of the man who has been considered the greatest theologian since Karl Barth and the premier theologian of the 20th century. Since most of us are busy our reading plan will cover either 4 or 5 years. It will be conducted over the Internet on either a dedicated forum just for this purpose or through an email group. If you know anyone that might be interested in this reading group, please pass the word along and have them email me. We are hoping to get together at least 10 people who are interested in the reading group, and at least a couple of people who are familiar with Balthasar’s thought and can help guide us. We want to start sometime in the next month. For more information on what we will be reading, I have included a summary of each book:

Part I: The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics
Probably the most important sustained piece of theological writing to appear since Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, von Balthasar’s work restores aesthetics and contemplation to their rightful place in Christian theology. Armed with a remarkable knowledge of the theological and metaphysical traditions as well as of Western letters, von Balthasar shows how the Biblical vision of the divine glory, revealed in the crucified and risen Christ and reflected in the great theologies of the Christian tradition, fulfills and transcends the perception of Being in Western Metaphysics.

Volume I - Seeing The Form
The work opens with a critical review of developments in Protestant and Catholic Theology since the Reformation which have led to the steady neglect of aesthetics in Christian theology. From here, von Balthasar turns to the central theme of the volume: the question of theological knowledge. He re-examines the nature of Christian believing (here he draws widely on such theological figures as Anselm, Pascal, and Newman) which gives due place to the particular kind of ‘knowing’ which develops within the personal relationship of the believer to the God mediated through the revelation-form of Jesus Christ.

Volume II - Clerical Styles
What von Balthasar offers here is a typology of the relationship between beauty and revelation which shows that there neither has been nor could be any truly great and historically fruitful theology which was not expressly conceived and born under the constellation of beauty and grace. This volume specifically offers a series of studies of representative figures from the earlier period of Christian theology - Irenaeus, Augustine, Denys, Anselm and Bonaventure.

Volume III - Lay Styles
This volume specifically offers a series of representative figures from the later period of Christian theology - Dante, John of the Cross, Pascal, Hamann, Soloviev, Hopkins and Peguy.

Volume IV - The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity
This fourth volume considers the metaphysical tradition of the contemplation of Being. He provides major studies of Homer, the Greek Tragedians, Plato and Plotinus and the development of this tradition in the Middle Ages. He then explores the analogy between the metaphysical vision of Being and the Christian vision of the divine glory of the Trinity.

Volume V - The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age
This volume presents a series of studies of representative mystics, theologians, philosophers and poets and explores the three main streams of metaphysics which have developed since the catastrophe of Nominalism. the way of self-abandonment to the divine glory is traced through figures like Ekhart, Julian of Norwich, Ignatius, de Sales; the attempt to relocate theology and beauty through figures like Nicholas of Cusa, Holderlin, Goethe, Heidegger; the metaphysics of spirit through Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Idealists. The strengths and weaknesses of these ways are relentlessly exposed. This volume ends with the search for the Christian contribution to metaphysics.

Volume VI - Theology: The Old Covenant
This volume initiates von Balthasar’s study of the biblical vision and understanding of God’s glory. Starting with the theophanies of the Patriarchal period, it shows how such glory is most fully expressed in the graciousness of the Covenant relationship between God and Israel. But the breaking of that relationship by Israel means that in the later books of the Old testament, the divine glory is seen in God’s willingness to bear with his people in the dark side of their history. There is no final version of God’s glory in the Old Testament. In the 500 years before Christ the Covenant relation is more idea than reality. The vision of the transcendent glory of God which is developed in the later writings, is only fragmentary. It will find its strange and unexpected fulfillment in the new Covenant.

Volume VII - Theology: The New Covenant
In this final volume of part one, von Balthasar reflects on the New Testament vision of God’s revelation of his glory in Christ. This divine ‘appearing’ is grounded in the self-emptying of the eternal logos in the incarnation, cross and descent into hell. Christ is the man who represents God and is also God; he is a symbol of the world and is also the world. He dies, but in dying rises into the eternal life of God. It is in Christ’s incarnation and resurrection that the Christian vision is truly expressed and the joining of God and the world in the new and eternal covenant is realized.

Part II: Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory
Here it is “the good” which provides the key. Here being as splendid, to be contemplated (beauty) now appears as the goal of our striving (the good). Von Balthasar maintains that it is in the theatre that “man attempts a kind of transcendence endeavoring both to observe and to judge his own truth, in virtue of a transformation…by which he tries to gain clarity about himself”. Von Balthasar sees the phenomenon of theatre, the sheer fact that there is such a thing as structured performance, as a virtually untapped source of fruitfulness for theological reflection. His aim will be “to show how theology underlies it all, how all the elements of the drama can be rendered fruitful for theology.”

Volume I - Prolegomena
In this volume von Balthasar shows how many of the trends of modern theology point to an understanding of human and cosmic reality as divine drama. He will then consider objections to such theological dramatic theory and also the relationship between the Church and the theatre. This volume assembles the materials and the themes that will make it possible in subsequent volumes to develop this theological dramatic theory.

Volume II - Dramatis Personae: Man in God
Where the first volume surveyed the great world dramatists to gather concepts and ideas to apply to the real stage, which is the universe God has made and entered into himself as an actor. This volume describes the actors, the dramatis personae. This is his theological anthropology concerning man, his freedom and destiny in light of the biblical revelation. Von Balthasar is concerned here with the dramatic character of existence as a whole, approaching the topic through a consideration of the various conditions and situations of mankind as a drama that involves both the Creator and his creature.

Volume III - Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ
This is considered the most central book of the entire trilogy. It contains von Balthasar’s synthetic treatment of the central mysteries of the Catholic Faith: Christ, Mary, the Church, man and the Trinity.

Volume IV - The Action
Von Balthasar now turns to the action of the divine drama itself. Here we find his soteriology, where time, freedom, history, power, sin, conflict are seen in the light of the Cross, the culmination of the action and passion of God and man. “Here we discern the unity of ‘glory’ and the ‘dramatic’. God’s glory, as it appears in the world- supremely in Christ- is not something static that could be observed by a neutral investigator. It manifests itself only through the personal involvement whereby God himself comes forth to do battle and is both victor and vanquished. If this glory is to come within our range at all, an analogous initiative is called for on our part. Revelation is a battlefield. Those who do battle on it can only be believers and theologians, provided they have equipped themselves with the whole armor of God.”

Volume V - The Last Act
This volume is trinitarian, focusing on the mystery of God. He draws heavily on scripture and many passages from the works of the mystic Adrienne von Spyer. Some of the topics covered include “A Christian Eschatology”, “The World is from the Trinity”, “Earth Moves Heavenward”, “The Final Act: A Trinitarian Drama.”

Part III: Theo-Logic
Theo-logic is the crowning part of the great trilogy of the masterwork of von Balthasar. Theo-logic is a variation in theology, is being about not so much what man says about God, but what God speaks about himself. Balthasar does not address the truth about God until he first reflects on the beauty of God (The Glory of the Lord). Then he follows with his reflections on the great drama of our salvation and the goodness and mercy of the God who saves us (Theo-Drama). Now, in this work, he is ready to reflect on the truth that God reveals about himself, which is not something abstract or theoretical, but rather concrete and mysterious richness of God’s being as a personal and loving God.

Volume I - The Truth of the World

Explored in this volume are the topics:

• Truth as Nature
• Truth as Freedom
• Truth as Mystery
• Truth as Participation

Volume II - The Truth of God

Topics include:

• Divine and Human Logic
• The Possibility of Christology
• Logos and Logic in God
• Kata-logical Aspects
• The Word Was Made Flesh

Volume III - The Spirit of Truth

Topics Include:

• The Holy Spirit as Person
• The Father’s Two Hands
• The Role of the Spirit in the Work of Salvation
• The Spirit and the Church
• Spirit and World
• Upward and Onward to the Father!

Epilogue
A summary of the whole series divided into the following aptly named sections: Forecourt, Threshold, and Cathedral.

Adam also provided the following short bio on Balthasar:

About Hans Urs von Balthasar
Born in Lucerne in 1905, after studying at the universities of Vienna, Berlin and Zurich von Balthasar completed a Ph.d. at Zurich in 1929 and continued his theological and philosophical studies in Munich, Lyon and Basel. He has won several academic prizes and has been awarded honorary doctorates at Edinburgh, Munster and Fribourg universities and the Catholic University of America. A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, he was also a Foreign Associate of the Institut de France. He died in July, 1988

If you are interested in joining this group, email Adam at:

• adam4jmj at gmail dot com

I’d join it myself if I had the time, but my boyfriend Nick will be doing it so I’ll end up hearing about it all anyway. It’s going to be sweet, nonetheless.

You’ve probably noticed the new addition to the top of the sidebar - The Prayer for the Enlightenment of Saint John. It is to this saint that I have decided to dedicate my blog, for a few reasons, the foremost of which being that he is the patron saint of authors, bookbinders, booksellers, publishers, printers, theologians, typesetters, and writers, among other things. He’s also my favorite Gospel writer.

In the spirit of my boyfriend, Nick Hardesty of Phatcatholic Apologetics, here’s a bunch of information on Mooreeffoc’s new patron saint:

• Goffine’s Devout Instructions
• Catholic Online
• Catholic Information Network
• Lives of the Saints
• Catholic Encyclopedia
• Acts of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian

I, Amy Manocchia, through the grace of God and the intercession of Saint John the Evangelist, dedicate this blog and it’s mission to the guidance of the most beloved Apostle, patron of writers and theologians.

Prayer to Saint John the Evangelist
O Glorious Saint John,
you were so loved by Jesus
that you merited to rest your head upon his breast,
and to be left in his place as a son to Mary.
Obtain for us an ardent love for Jesus and Mary.
Let me be united with them now on earth and forever after in heaven.
Amen.

PETER J. LEITHART

To call Jane Austen a public theologian is counterintuitive for two reasons: she does not seem much interested in things public, and she does not seem much interested in things theological.

With regard to the second point, Austen’s novels rarely deal openly with theological themes or issues, and even her private letters — the ones that survived her sister’s destruction — seldom speak of religious subjects. She was a lifelong member of the Church of England and her father and two brothers were Anglican ministers. By all accounts she was a Christian, yet she displays a high Anglican reticence about religious experience, and a similarly Anglican disinterest in the niceties of theological debate.

On the first point, Austen’s novels seem to be relentlessly concerned with private life, concerned with “three or four families in a country town,” as she put it in one famous letter. This is all the more remarkable when we consider the events of her lifetime. Though living through a period that witnessed the birth of an independent United States, the French Revolution and the Terror, the Napoleonic wars and the rise of revolutionary romanticism, the evangelical revivals and the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, she focuses on a few middling gentry families in rural England. Touches of the wider world sometimes impinge on Austen’s peaceful outposts — Wickham, a soldier, plays a prominent role in Pride and Prejudice, there are passing references to the British colonies and the slave trade in Mansfield Park, and the British navy’s preservation of England in the Napoleonic Wars is duly noted in Persuasion. For the most part, though, her characters go about their farming and their business, their follies and especially their romances, their dances and their games of backgammon and whist, as if nothing has changed. Soldiers and sailors, when they appear, are always on leave.

Well-read as she and her family were, it is impossible that Austen was ignorant of the transformations taking place around her. She read poetry and novels, including those from the Romantic period, and she knew the literature of her time well enough to parody it. We know too that her family was directly affected by a number of these events. Two of her brothers fought Napoleon as members of the British navy. Philadelphia Austen, Jane’s aunt, had a daughter named Eliza who married a Frenchman, Jean Capot, Comte de Feuillide. The unfortunate Capot was guillotined during the Terror, and his widow Eliza later married Jane’s brother Henry to become Jane’s sister-in-law. Her favorite brother, Henry, was a clergyman of evangelical stripe, and several letters show that Jane herself knew something of evangelicalism (she did not like it much, though her attitudes apparently shifted during her lifetime). Jane herself toyed with the idea of writing a biography of Napoleon.

Yet, to reiterate, this wider world has almost no role in Austen’s novels. I wish to maintain, however, that despite her apparent indifference to both theology and the public realm, she can be read as a public theologian.

What most interests Austen about Christianity is precisely its public and institutional dimension, its role as a national “teacher” of morals. Hence her recurring attention to the clergy. Two of her clerical characters, Mr. Collins (of Pride and Prejudice) and Mr. Elton (of Emma), are insensitive morons, and she has no toleration for the kind of hypocritical pomposity that they represent. Nor, in Mansfield Park, does she have much use for the vacuous religiosity of Dr. Grant, who is a pastor only in name and not in fact. This hardly means that she is anticlerical; some of the most severe satire of the clergy in church history has come from devout Christians incensed at the abuses of their leaders. Like them, Austen attacks false clergy not to destroy clergy; she attacks false clergy to defend the true.

On the other side, several of her heroes are ordained or soon to be so. Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility is a nonentity in this regard, and one fears that Henry Tilney of Northanger Abbey is too detached and ironic to be much of a pastor, though he provides both intellectual and moral training for the heroine, Catherine Morland. The last of the clerical heroes, Edmund Bertram, is far and away the best model, and the issue of the public role of the Church takes on a great deal of importance in Mansfield Park. Still, the fact is that in half of Austen’s finished novels the hero is a clergyman, and two of the other novels have important clerical characters. (The only novel in which clergy play virtually no role is Persuasion, though even there Charles Hayter is destined for the cloth.)

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