Pilgrimage back to Bunyan

“Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

— CS Lewis, in his dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I’m finishing work on a “life story” project for a church group today, which has got me in an even more than usually reflective mood as I consider family history, personal debts, and the things that have made me who I am. Among these are the books that have most shaped me. Ages and ages ago, sometime early in grad school, I wrote a multi-part series of blog posts on precisely this topic. One of the most important early books I mentioned was Dangerous Journey, a lavishly illustrated adaptation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

This came to mind because just a few days ago Alan Jacobs wrote about teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress and the “great joy” it gives him—not only teaching it, but the mere fact that “so utterly bonkers a book was so omnipresent in English-language culture . . . for so long.” He goes on, in a strikingly incisive paragraph, to note how

One of the “tough” things about [The Pilgrim’s Progress] is the way [it] veer[s] from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. (The calls are coming from inside the house.) 

This captures both the strangeness and the power of Bunyan’s book, as I’ve lately been rediscovering.

I grew up with Pilgrim’s Progress as a load-bearing component of my imagination. My parents had Dangerous Journey at home and I pored over the incredible, grotesque, beautiful, frightening illustrations (by Alan Parry in a style reminiscent of Arthur Rackham) over and over again. My friends and I read a children’s version—with an excellent map—in school. Another time we acted out Christian and Faithful’s trial at Vanity Fair for a school music program. (I played Lord Hategood, the judge.) Occasionally during our church’s summer Bible school the nightly story would be a version of Pilgrim’s Progress in five short installments. I taught this version of it myself once shortly after graduating from college. There was even a two-part “Adventures in Odyssey” adaptation I listened to many times on cassette tape.

I knew Pilgrim’s Progress thoroughly without ever having read it cover to cover.* But you know what they say about familiarity.

Then, late in high school, I discovered Dante. I was on my first medieval literature kick and wanted all the epic poetry I could get ahold of. Dante’s Comedy struck me as both 1) a proper classic, the kind of thing a kid like me should be reading and 2) lurid enough to be interesting and entertaining. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—it blew my mind. I ended up reading Dante over and over again for several years straight, right through college, and Dante has been a profound influence on me ever since.

But discovering Dante also led me into an easy contempt for Bunyan. Dante, I thought, had fashioned a real allegory. Bunyan—in addition to his other faults, like his Calvinism**—seemed cloddish and simplistic by comparison. What were the ad hoc, making-it-up-as-I-go plot points and symbols of Pilgrim’s Progress worth when I had the masterful intricacies of the Comedy as an alternative?

It’s a typical fault of immaturity to set in opposition things that should really complement each other, but there I was, pooh-poohing Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m bothered even to remember this attitude. And yet, Pilgrim’s Progress stayed with me. And now I’m rediscovering it, having grown old enough to read it again.

Two things have helped rekindle my interest and reopen me to the story, which I freely acknowledged was fundamental to my imagination even when I was most disdainful of it. The first is John Buchan. Anyone who’s followed my John Buchan June readings will know that Pilgrim’s Progress was his favorite book, and that it informed and influenced everything in his fiction from his novels’ stern moralism, hardy sense of adventure, the fact that many of their plots are journeys, and even character names and motivations. Buchan’s love of Bunyan started to bring me back around, the same way a good friend might convince you to give one of their friends another chance despite having made an awkward introduction.

But more important has been revisiting Pilgrim’s Progress itself. A few years ago I broke out my parents’ copy of Dangerous Journey to look at with my own kids and, like me thirty-odd years before them, they found the pictures mesmerizing, horrifying, and impossibly intriguing. They wanted to know more, to find out what’s going on in the story behind these images. The pictures cry out for the story to be told.

And then, right now a year ago, I read Little Pilgrim’s Progress to them a few chapters at a time before bed. Little Pilgrim’s Progress is a children’s adaptation of Bunyan by Helen Taylor, first published in 1947, that abridges, simplifies, and somewhat softens some of the original. The edition I read was a new, large-format hardback illustrated by Joe Sutphin. In Sutphin’s pictures, the characters are all adorable anthropomorphic animals: Evangelist is an owl, Christian is a rabbit, Great Heart is a badger, Giant Despair is a genuinely terrifying hare, Apollyon—rendered “Self” by Taylor—is a wolf, and others are otters, squirrels, toads, dogs, and more. I was worried it would all be a little too cutesy, but I wanted to introduce this story to my kids and I was glad to find the pictures and the adaptation perfectly suited for their ages. It’s brilliantly done.

What I was not prepared for was the way Bunyan’s story, even filtered through an abridgement and fuzzy animals, would wreck me. I had to stop reading Little Pilgrim’s Progress several times—most especially as the characters approached the River of Death and their final, long-awaited but fearful entry into the Celestial City—because I couldn’t hold back my tears. The raw emotional and, as Jacobs notes, psychological power of Pilgrim’s Progress ambushed me. The fear, guilt, anxiety, doubt, grief, and—above all—hope were so real, so true to life in our fallen and wounded state, that the story cut deep. All the more so because I was so familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress that I was, ironically, unprepared to meet it again. I’m glad I did.

I’ve had a long history with Pilgrim’s Progress, a history I should cap by finally reading the whole thing. I think that will be a good post-Buchan summer project. Until then, check out Dangerous Journey and Taylor and Sutphin’s Little Pligrim’s Progress, especially if you have kids and you want something that will really shape their faith and imaginations.

* A lesson in just how literate people who don’t read a book can still be when they have a culture to support their knowledge and understanding of it, something I often think about with regard to medieval people.

** Thank you, I will not be taking questions at this time.

Grace and the Grinch

I’m home with a sick four-year old today, which means I’m also home with the Paw Patrol. This morning began with “The Pups Save Christmas,” an episode in which Santa crashes in Adventure Bay on Christmas Eve, losing his reindeer and scattering presents over a wide area. It’s up to Ryder and the pups to help Santa or “Christmas will be canceled.” Naturally they pull through.

There’s more to the episode than that, but I was struck for the first time by how many Christmas shows and movies center on a team of good characters helping Santa “save” Christmas. They have to work to make Christmas happen, otherwise there’s a real possibility that it won’t. “There won’t be a Christmas this year” is an oft-repeated foreboding in these stories.

By contrast, think of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a story the daring of which has been lost on us through sheer familiarity. The Grinch, not just a villain but a Satanic figure, does all he can to stop Christmas. He removes all of the Whos’ material means of joy, all the trappings of Christmas that characters in other stories work to save, and Christmas still happens. “It came without ribbons,” he says in outrage that turns to wonder. “It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags.”

“Paw Patrol” and other “save Christmas” stories show us the logic of magic or paganism—or, for that matter, computer programming, which is more like magic than devotees of either science care to admit. Certain conditions have to be met to get the desired result. If presents, then happiness. Mistakes or missing parts will crash the whole system. All of these stories have a lot to say about “Christmas spirit” and “believing” but this rhetoric is belied by the stories themselves, which always feature a desperate race to help Santa on his way.

What “The Grinch” shows us, on the other hand, is the logic of grace. It shows better than any other Christmas entertainment the pure gratuitous gift of Christmas, a gift that comes into the world through the goodness of someone else and that we have no control over. We can reject it, as the Grinch does at first, but we can neither make it happen nor stop it.

The nearest that that episode of “Paw Patrol” can get to grace is to assert that “Christmas is about helping others,” which is still making Christmas happen through your own best efforts. Again, compare the Grinch. Having put a lot of work into stopping Christmas and failed, he is transformed by it. You might even say converted. The grace given to the Whos extends even to him, and he returns the literal gifts that have proven, through grace, immaterial to them. Now that the presents and ornaments and roast beast don’t matter to him either, he has the grace to share them. Material blessing comes from joy and grace rather than the other way around, which is the Grinch’s starting assumption—and that of a lot of other Christmas stories in which mere mortals have to create the conditions for Christmas themselves.

This is the wonderful paradox of Christmas. The promise that Christmas will happen no matter what we do is a purer hope than any moralistic message about spending time together or helping others. Joy comes from grace, and that joy will produce everything else that makes Christmas meaningful—including helping others. We just have to let it transform us.

CS Lewis, 60 and 125 years later

Last week I was too busy critiquing Napoleon to note the 60th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis here—one more thing to hold against Napoleon—though I did manage to slip through an Instagram memorial. Fortunately, today is Lewis’s 125th birthday, so in the spirit of commemoration and appreciation here are a few good things I read from others to mark sixty years since his passing.

CS Lewis (1898-1963)

At her Substack Further Up, Bethel McGrew has an excellent reflection on her own lifelong connection to Lewis and the way the endless quoting of his work risks simplifying him into a generator of therapeutic fortune cookie messages:

Lewis is much-quoted, for good reason: He is prolifically quotable. (There are also a few famously misattributed quotes, like “You are a soul, you have a body,” which no doubt would have annoyed him greatly.) And yet, there’s a paradoxical sense in which his quotability almost risks watering down his true value as a thinker. There’s a temptation to see Lewis as a one-stop “Christian answer man,” the super-Christian who always had the perfect eloquent solution to every Christian’s hard problems. To be sure, he came closer than most Christian writers to providing a sense-making framework for hard problems. But even he wouldn’t claim to have “solved” them. Indeed, his very strength as a writer was that his work swung free of top-down systematic theologies which claim to provide comprehensively satisfying theological answers.

She continues with a particularly poignant example from A Grief Observed. I recommend the whole post.

At Miller’s Book Review, another outstanding Substack, Joel Miller considers Lewis’s humor in the years just before his death, when failing health should have robbed him of his joy:

Sayer says that Lewis “never lost his sense of humor.” Indeed, he was famously good natured, even amid dire circumstances. On July 15, 1963, he suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma. Friends feared the worst; some came and prayed; a priest gave the sacrament of extreme unction. Amazingly, an hour after the sacrament, Lewis awoke, revived, and asked for a cup of tea.

True to form, he found a joke in it. “I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma,” he wrote Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun with whom he frequently corresponded. “Ought one honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.”

Miller also reflects on his own experience of reading and rereading Lewis. Like Miller, I came to Narnia late, well after many of Lewis’s other books, and I have also read and reread Lewis’s work many times. As Miller notes, though Lewis did not expect his work to be remembered, it’s a safe bet that readers like him and myself will continue to find and appreciate Lewis’s work.

At World magazine, Samuel D James has a good short essay on Lewis as a prophet:

Precisely because Lewis knew that the claims of Christianity were all-encompassing, he recognized that no civilization that abandoned it could function. This was not because Lewis desired some kind of baptized Anglo-Saxon ethnonationalist state (born in Belfast, Lewis never forgot the high cost of religious intolerance), but because modern man’s alternatives were quite literally inhumane. Lewis saw from afar, with striking prescience, that humans had no choice but to retreat from personhood if they wanted to escape the implications of Christian revelation.

At The Critic, Rhys Laverty elaborates more deeply on the same theme:

At the close of the Second World War, Lewis was one of a number of Christian intellectuals (alongside Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot) who had begun to consider what world the Allied powers would now make for themselves. Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself — a process made possible through the ideological capture of education.

Laverty invokes not only The Abolition of Man, as James does, but Lewis’s dramatization of those ideas in the final novel of The Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, in which the elite of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) pursue genuinely diabolical technological progress and control:

With N.I.C.E, Lewis anticipated our contemporary technocracy. “Progress” is our unquestionable sacred cow, and its faithful handmaiden is technology. Whether we are tearing up areas of ancient natural beauty in order to build infrastructure supposedly intended to help protect the environment, prescribing new cross-sex hormones and surgery to enable greater self-realisation, or developing artificial wombs which we unconvincingly insist will only ever be used for the care of premature infants, there is now no technological innovation that we will deny ourselves today if it supposedly contributes to the nebulous “future good of humanity”.

It is only Green Book education which makes N.I.C.E possible. If truth, goodness, beauty, and so on are merely relative then there is nothing to rein in man’s “conquest of nature”. His scruples are mere hang-ups to be educated out. He will be driven by pure reason or pure appetite, with no sentiment to regulate their respective metrics of efficiency or pleasure. 

I commend all four of these essays to y’all. They’re good celebrations of a worthy life and a worthy mind, and have gotten me wanting to reread pretty much all of my Lewis shelf. Which might take a while.

Let me conclude with a brief personal reflection of my own. Growing up in the environment I did, I don’t remember ever not knowing about Lewis. He was a byword for intelligent Christian thought, something that stood out to me among the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere of fundamentalism. My earliest accidental exposure was probably the BBC Narnia films. I recall catching a long stretch of The Silver Chair on PBS at my grandparents’ house one morning. As dated as those adaptations are now, it scared me. But it also riveted me, and stayed with me. Indeed, The Silver Chair may still be my favorite of the Narnia books.

But it was a long time before I actually read anything by CS Lewis. My parents got me a set of his non-fiction books at our church bookstore when I was in high school. I started The Great Divorce one night and something about the Grey Town and the bus ride into the unknown disturbed me so much that I put it away. That nightmare quality again. But when I tried the book one sleepy Sunday afternoon in college—my way prepared by Dante, whom I discovered my senior year of high school—I read the entire thing in one sitting. It’s still among my favorite Lewis books.

From there it was on to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and liked it but returned to the non-fiction, devouring Lewis’s essays on any topic. After college I read The Space Trilogy—all three in one week, if I remember correctly—and delved into his scholarly work: An Experiment in Criticism and, crucially, The Discarded Image. I also read as much about Lewis as I read by him, and dug into the works that Lewis loved only to discover new loves of my own, most notably GK Chesterton.

Only with the birth of my children did I seriously return to Narnia, and now I genuinely love them. My kids do, too. They’ll be yet another generation entertained and blessed by Lewis’s work.

He is one of the few authors who has grown with me for so long—guiding me, enlightening me, introducing me to great literature, telling me entertaining and meaningful stories of his own, and deepening both my understanding and my faith. Where the fictional Lewis of The Great Divorce meets George MacDonald as his heavenly guide, the Virgil to his Dante, Lewis could well play that role for me.

On this, his 125th birthday, just over a week from the 60th anniversary of his death, I am more grateful than ever for CS Lewis. RIP.

The Four Reformers

On my commute over the last week I’ve been listening to the audiobook edition of The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, a series of lectures by Russell Kirk presented in the early 1980s. The themes are decline and decadence, and the topics range across the loss of humane letters, the ideological capture of government and educational institutions, and reasons for hope. It’s good, and Kirk brings plenty of still-pertinent insight, even if his selected examples are often dated. Criticism of “Dallas” seems quaint when you know what the blood-drenched fleshpots of American culture in 2023 are like. Call it the Neil Postman problem.

In one of the final lectures, Kirk quotes a story by Robert Louis Stevenson from a book I’d never heard of: “The Four Reformers,” from Fables, an 1896 collection of twenty very short, pointed stories. Here’s the story in its entirety:

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

By “reformer” Stevenson means the radical activist agents of societal change, of which there were plenty in his age and ours. The more radical the reform, the more radical the means of its implementation—especially when humans get in the way, as they do.

If I’ve run across this somewhere before I’ve forgotten it, but the final line must surely be the inspiration for the title of CS Lewis’s masterwork The Abolition of Man. Lewis, who was born four years after Stevenson’s untimely death, lived to see many such reformers put their plans into action, as well as the results.

Julian the Apostate: cage-stage pagan

From Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor, by Philip Freeman, a concise and insightful passage that I want to file away for teaching Western Civ.

Of Julian’s attempts to use his imperial power to reform and reinvigorate paganism and to craft a “universal paganism he hoped would defeat Christianity”—a paganism filtered through his highly symbolic philosophical interpretations that would be applicable everywhere, a rather condescending vision of “the common people of every village” in “childlike innocence” offering “an occasional pigeon to their local gods and pray[ing] for gentle rain and health . . . while philosophers and intellectuals would seek the higher mysteries of the Good”—Freeman writes:

But [Julian’s] austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed.

This is one of the hardest things to impress upon a group of students when teaching ancient Greek and Roman religion. Even the non-religious among people today are so deeply influenced by the last fumes of the Abrahamic faiths that they struggle to conceive of a “religion” with no scriptures, no ethical content, and no standard “beliefs” to speak of. Alternately, often simultaneously, they struggle to conceive of ancient paganism as having any practices either. To them paganism is a set of myths, which they’ve probably gotten third-hand from Percy Jackson anyway.

I’ve commonly heard of religious converts, especially within Christianity to different doctrinal camps and especially to Calvinism, described as going through a “cage stage”—i.e. a period when they would be better off locked in a cage until they can calm down—in which they are rabidly, irrationally, monomaniacally obsessed with studying and sharing their new theological framework. Certainly Freeman’s description of Julian seeking “to lay out in sometimes tedious intellectual terms the philosophical foundations behind his religious reforms” sounds like some of the Calvinists I’ve known.

As a convert from Christianity back to paganism via the urbane schools of Hellenistic philosophy, he seems to have come to the imperial purple in his own sort of cage stage—from which he never returned.

The Dancing Floor

John Buchan June continues with an eerie slow-burn thriller that anticipated some of the themes and terrors of Witch Wood. The novel is the third Sir Edward Leithen adventure, The Dancing Floor.

Written after but taking place chronologically before Leithen’s poaching lark in John Macnab, Leithen narrates this novel in the first-person, as a series of wide-ranging reminiscences. In the first half, Leithen introduces the reader to Vernon Milburne, a young man of noble family and every advantage who is nonetheless pensive and withdrawn, a haunted man. As Leithen gets to know him, he learns that Vernon has been terrorized annually by a nightmare. Once a year, on precisely the same night, he dreams of someone or something approaching his bedroom though a long series of interconnecting rooms in the family home. Every year it comes one room closer. When the person, or presence, or creature finally reaches his bedroom, Vernon believes, he will come into some terrible destiny. All he can do is wait.

Interwoven with Leithen’s narrative of his friendship with Vernon is how the two of them met Koré Arabin. Beautiful, popular, and rich, Koré is also the only daughter of a legendarily depraved eccentric, an Aleister Crowley type who moved to Plakos, a remote island in the Aegean, where he could research and experiment with the occult and practice his sexual debaucheries with utter liberty. He also, it is darkly hinted, preyed upon the local Greek islanders. But he is dead, and Koré, his only heir, is now the mistress of his house and the most powerful person on the island.

So Koré arrives in England already the subject of salacious rumor. And her personality does not help. When she meets Leithen and Vernon she is brusque, forward, and aggressive. Leithen finds her off-putting. Vernon is offended and deliberately avoids her. But as Leithen almost accidentally gets to know her—and even falls in love with her—she reveals that there is much more to her than her dark family history. Abrupt and ill-mannered owing to her remote and strange upbringing, she nevertheless rejects her family’s occultism and is concerned to help the people of Plakos. Far from using her position to indulge, as her father and ancestors did, she embraces the responsibility she was born into and hopes to make amends.

But Leithen is not sure this is possible. Through various means and sources, the well-connected Leithen learns that the people of Plakos, particularly those in the village nearest Koré’s house, have not forgotten her father’s evil. And following a hard winter and bad harvest, the dimly remembered pagan rites of their ancestors have resurfaced. These entail nighttime footraces, a symbolic marriage, and human sacrifice, all played out on the broad plain near Koré’s house known as the Dancing Floor. Leithen suspects—accurately, is it turns out—that the selected female victim of the sacrifice will be Koré.

In the second half of the novel, Leithen assembles a team and journeys to Plakos, aiming to intervene personally and either evacuate or protect Koré. But the locals are more suspicious and hostile than even he expected. Armed men guard Koré’s house and every movement Leithen and his friends make is watched and followed by a mob. Only the tenacious Orthodox priest, damning the locals’ apostasy, offers Leithen aid. But Leithen cannot save Koré by holing up in the village church.

Finally, as the locals capture and imprison or scare off Leithen’s men, as Leithen explores the island by night and wonders what he can possibly hope to do, and as the night of the sacrifices on the Dancing Floor approaches, he detects that he is not the only person creeping around the island by night. Is he being stalked? Or is there someone else on the island with dark and secret purposes?

The Dancing Floor, like Sir Edward Leithen’s debut in The Power-House, is a seemingly rambling personal narrative that slowly lays the groundwork for the tight, complex, and exciting events of the climax. (I’d encourage the reader beginning this novel to stick with it even if it seems to be going nowhere; the first half is Buchan setting the pieces on his chessboard.) But unlike that earlier adventure, The Dancing Floor relies far less on coincidence. It is, if anything, a character-driven thriller—a true oddity but a successful one.

It is successful in no small part thanks to the characters. Despite his infatuation and emotional vulnerability early in this novel, Leithen is his solid and reliable self, a steady professional who won’t back down from a task no matter what the hardships or risks once he has determined that it is the right thing to do. Vernon offers an intriguing departure, a moodier and more phlegmatic character than is typical for a Buchan story. Vernon has good reasons to be so, having spent much of his life as an orphan tormented by nightmares in a vast lonely house, but overcoming this, embracing his inheritance, and stepping into the role he was born to play—going from passively awaiting fate to actively pursuing it—gives him a compelling arc.

That arc also makes Vernon an interesting mirror of Koré, who is inarguably the best character in the book. With her strange and terrible background, her struggle to fit in, and a core of goodness that she is determined to act upon, she is a beautiful woman not only because of her looks but because of her character. She proves a challenge to Vernon, and an important and necessary one.

The other aspect of The Dancing Floor that makes it so successful as an adventure is its atmosphere. With its dream-haunted young men in empty houses, its lonely and desolate woods and cliffs, its dark pagan rites recounted in obscure old manuscripts, its hero creeping through dark landscapes filled with inscrutable and violent enemies, its mob of justifiably angry peasants, and the same peasants’ unjustifiable human sacrifice by firelight under the moon, The Dancing Floor is steeped in the gothic. Even beyond my personal taste—and I am an absolute sucker for gothic atmosphere—the foreboding and gloom, which even the indomitable Leithen struggles to overcome, pervades the novel and gives it weight. I relished it.

Buchan wrote The Dancing Floor the year before Witch Wood. Pagan survivals—relict human sacrifice, nighttime revels, and “elaborate cultural and religious transactions with death” as David Bentley Hart has described them—were very much on his mind. Some critics have suggested the influence of the (now utterly debunked) theories of Margaret Murray. That may be. But it certainly reflects Buchan’s recognition of the fragility of civilization. A bad harvest, a harsh winter, and a truly wicked foreign interloper in the big house on the hill is all it takes to drive people back into blood sacrifice, into the smoke and ash and the shrieking of burnt offerings.

But more importantly, this evil is only a background against which virtue and goodness can be glimpsed more sharply. Koré and Vernon, in complementary ways, demonstrate this. As in Witch Wood, true goodness in the face of evil takes two. And the redoubtable Leithen is our witness.

Having read them so close together, I can’t help but compare The Dancing Floor to Witch Wood. The latter is far better. But as an exercise in the some of the same themes, on a smaller, contemporary scale and structured as a thriller, The Dancing Floor is a gripping, moody, and unusual thriller, and another good entry in Sir Edward Leithen’s adventures.

Witch Wood

Last year I decided to reclaim my birth month by dedicating it to John Buchan, one of the great adventure novelists of the 20th century. Starting with one of Buchan’s first, A Lost Lady of Old Years, and ending with his last, Sick Heart River, I read eight of his novels and wrote about them here. I’m glad to say there’s still plenty more Buchan to read, and so John Buchan June returns today with one of his finest mid-career historical dramas, a novel Buchan himself regarded as his best, Witch Wood.

Though set in the Scottish Borders in 1644, Witch Wood begins with a present-day prologue. The narrator relates the legend of the young minister of Woodilee, a quiet rural parish in the Scottish Borders, who was abducted from a lonely spot in the forest by a fairy—or perhaps “the Deil,” the Devil—one night and never seen again.

The minister, it seems, was David Sempill, a young man fresh from seminary when he is introduced arriving in Woodilee. Woodilee is not the most illustrious parish a young minister could hope for but Sempill eagerly takes up his labors for the Kirk, poring over his books and delivering homilies and paying calls on his parishioners. In the course of getting acquainted with Woodilee, he meets many upstanding and quaintly charming members and elders of the Kirk; Daft Gibbie, the village idiot; and, most intriguingly, Katrine Yester, a young noblewoman who lives at nearby Calidon with her uncle, the local laird. David also comes to rely upon Isobel, his widowed housekeeper, for cooking, cleaning, and insight into the locals. He also discovers the Black Wood.

The Black Wood—or Melanudrigill—is a dense forest on the outskirts of Woodilee on the way to Calidon. It is here that David first met Katrine, dancing merrily in a little clearing among the dark trees one afternoon. David is fascinated. But Daft Gibbie warns him away from the wood, and Isobel, though refusing to say why, fearfully urges him not to go near the place at night and quietly works to prevent him from investigating it further.

But David will not be deterred. He finally contrives an opportunity to be away from his house one evening and slips in among the trees, searching for the clearing. When he finds it, he observes a dark, firelit rite around a centuries-old altar. Led by a man in a goat mask, worshipers dance ecstatically and obscenely in animal costumes and when David, with the boldness of youth and theological certainty, confronts them, they mob him. He awakes at home aching all over and with one fleeting, nightmarish memory of the night before—the face of one of his most prominent and faithful parishioners, leading the devil worship in the woods.

David, despite Isobel’s pleading to avoid trouble, determines to root out the heresy in his parish’s midst. He is enraged to see the faces of devil worshipers in his church every Sunday but needs evidence to expose them. He enlists a drunk to help him and attempts to mark members of the cult, with ambiguous results. Is a local woman burning her husband’s clothes to destroy the scent of an oil poured on them by David’s agent during the night? Or because a tramp infected them with fleas?

Further complicating matters are two events: The ongoing Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a conflict fought in several phases as an outgrowth of England’s civil war between Parliament and the supporters of King Charles I, and a new outbreak of the Plague in Scotland. From the wars come political intrusions, with Covenanters supporting a theocratically established Presbyterian Church in Scotland attempting to capture and eradicate Royalist enemies like Mark Kerr, a soldier of the Marquess of Montrose who makes David’s acquaintance early in the book. And with the Plague come more immediate and dire threats to life in Woodilee.

The Plague may prove David’s finest hour, as he offers succor to the sick and dying heedless of danger to himself and works hard with a mysterious stranger to prevent the spread of the disease. But it also proves his undoing, as becomes clear once the epidemic subsides and he finally presents his case against the suspected heretics to the presbytery.

I don’t want to explain much more about the plot, as it is complex, surprising, and moving. Witch Wood is a powerful slow burn, steadily increasing in tension as the naïve David uncovers more and more rot in a seemingly idyllic country parish and his investigations are complicated and thwarted by turns. Buchan, always a master of pacing, carefully and slowly reveals the truth of what is happening in the Black Wood, thereby creating a creeping sense of paranoia and vulnerability, and as the story progresses the novel’s rich and oppressive atmosphere gathers like the darkness as the sun goes down.

Witch Wood’s slow revelation and dramatic change of mood from tranquil to threatening made this one CS Lewis’s favorite novels: “all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish,” Lewis wrote. “That's the way to do it.”

But the horror of uncovering a relict paganism under the noses of a staunch Christian establishment—something familiar especially from later “folk horror” films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar—is only part of what makes Witch Wood so good. The Scottish Borders setting and the historical context are not only vividly and accurately drawn, with most of the characters’ dialogue in Scots dialect, but actually matter to the plot, and the characters are among Buchan’s best. Their complexity and ambiguity, even in the case of a seemingly straightforward character like David’s drunk collaborator Reiverslaw, contribute to the anxious mood of the story as much as the nighttime revels David witnesses. And David himself is one of Buchan’s most compelling characters: callow but determined, full of book learning but ignorant of the world, a prime example of what biographer Ursula Buchan calls “one of his most cherished character types: the scholar called to action.”

And Witch Wood is thematically rich, with an intricate plot turning on a series of ironic reversals and themes of faith, authority, and the corruption and perversion of the institutions meant to uphold both. By the novel’s end, in which Buchan surprisingly but perfectly fulfills the promise of that present-day prologue, David is a changed man, having revealed much more—both to himself and to us—than he expected when he first snuck into the Black Wood by night.

Jünger and the homo religiosus revisited

At the beginning of last year I posted a passage from Ernst Jünger’s short series of interrelated essays The Forest Passage about the homo religiosus—man as a religious animal, with a need for religion that will be filled by something. Now, just over a year later, I’m reading his allegorical novel On the Marble Cliffs, and unsurprisingly given the novel’s context the same concern is manifest.

On the Marble Cliffs takes place in the Marina, an idyllic Mediterranean region by the sea. The unnamed narrator tells the story of how the tyrannical host of the Head Forester, a warlord in the forests far to the north, infiltrates and turns the Marina to the Head Forester’s will. Unlike the Marina, which seems to exist in a placid mix of genteel paganism and the gutsy but learned Christianity of the Church Fathers or the early medieval Benedictines, the northern forests are the home of brutal idol worship and crude nature gods. The narrator mentions the Æsir explicitly, as well as a grotesque bull god worshiped in a sacred grove.

As the narrator tells his loose, dreamlike story, the avenues through which the Head Forester gains control over the Marina become more and more clear, but the religious one proves particularly striking:

Yet who would have believed that the gods of fat and butter who filled the cows’ udders would gain a following in the Marina—of worshippers, at that, who came from houses in which offerings and sacrifices had long been mocked? The same spirits who deemed themselves strong enough to cut the ties that bound them to their ancestral faith became subjugated to the barbarian idols’ spell. The sight of their blind obedience was more repugnant than drunkenness at midday.

Per CS Lewis, whom I also quoted in last year, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served.” The scoffing abandonment of the old religion does not leave the apostate unreligious; it just leaves an opening that must be filled by something else, probably something worse.

On the Marble Cliffs was completed in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland. When it was published it was pretty quickly interpreted as a fabular broadside against the Nazis, an interpretation that is certainly hard to avoid. It was even taken seriously enough by the Nazi regime that Goebbels tried to have the book suppressed.

And yet Jünger insisted that it is not just an anti-Nazi parable but more broadly applicable, and the insight offered above—that irreligion, especially the elite ability to see through it and treat it with derision, leaves the scoffer open to far worse in the form of ideology and political contagion—is certainly relevant in our day and age. I have certainly seen plenty of acquaintances abandon religion as closeminded and oppressive only to embrace far more shrill, narrowminded, intolerant—and, not insignificantly, much less fun—political ideologies, and with a “blind obedience” that makes me feel pity for them more than anything else.

I’m reading Tess Lewis’s new translation of On the Marble Cliffs for NRYB Classics. It’s excellent so far and I hope to finish it this evening, after which I’ll read the introduction and other apparatus. For those interested, Thomas Nevins also gives the novel pretty extensive treatment in his book on Jünger, which I mentioned a few weeks ago in a much more lighthearted context.

Looking for the big W

Jonathan Winters as Lennie Pike in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

Over the weekend I finished watching It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with my kids. First time for them, zillionth time for me. The movie has grown up and aged with me the way a lot of other comedies haven’t, and part of the reason has to be the density of its jokes—slapstick, sight gags, visual puns (Jimmy Durante literally kicking the bucket), comedy of manners, observational humor, wordplay, banter, innuendo, shock, celebrity cameos, pop culture allusions, over-the-top situational comedy… every trick in the book. My kids were delighted by all the slapstick, especially Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett’s airplane antics and every time Ethel Merman got knocked upside down.

But the older I get the more I appreciate the film’s generous leavening of pure irony. The film is shot through with it from the start, the most fundamental irony being the situation itself—a small group of people witness an accident and, by doing the right thing and stopping to help, become privy to a secret (there’s $350,000 buried under “a big W” in Santa Rosita State Park) that sets them all at each other’s throats and precipitates the entire manic, frantic, madcap race to find stolen money. It’s as if the Good Samaritan stopped to help the victim of bandits and ended up taking off to Jericho to find Achan’s buried treasure.

This irony is neatly bookended by one character: Dorothy Provine’s Emmaline Finch. Emmaline firmly opposes going after from the beginning and spends most of the movie fed up with her feckless, incompetent husband (Milton Berle), her domineering mother (Ethel Merman), her idiot brother (Dick Shawn), and everyone else she meets and talks to along the way, including the most seemingly decent of the original group, trucker Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters). She oozes disgust toward all of them and their low, vulgar, unethical, and illegal quest.

Until, that is the entire bunch arrives at Santa Rosita State Park. At first she refuses even to get out of the (stolen) truck they arrived in, but eventually leaves to find a water fountain to freshen up—and spots “the big W.”

Within minutes, she has told a complete stranger (Spencer Tracy’s Police Captain Culpeper, undercover) what is buried there and has hatched a plan to split the money with him and run away by herself. Emmaline’s standoffishness, it turns out, has always been more about maintaining a certain moral posture against everyone else than about actually doing the right thing. Everyone is a crook when the opportunity presents itself. There is none righteous.

Of course, Emmaline’s plotting is short-lived. Almost immediately, Pike finds one Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers), a schemer who had abandoned him in the desert to go after the money himself, and chases him, intending to settle the score. It’s in the middle of this sub-sub-sub-pursuit that Pike runs through the palm trees that form the big W, and he has his big epiphany.

That’s the irony that got me thinking about all of this: the two people who find the big W—Emmaline, stewing in her own self-righteousness, and Pike, furiously chasing his betrayer—are the ones who aren’t actively looking for it at the time. Sometimes, when you’re looking for something, you have to give up on it to find it.

Some kind of deep spiritual truth? I don’t know. It is first and foremost finely crafted irony. But like all good humor, it resonates with life and existence—that is, it rings true—as does the movie’s larger, climactic irony: all the men who wind up on a fire escape ten stories up, wrestling each other for the suitcase containing the stolen cash, lose what they’re striving so desperately to keep.

Summer reading 2022

Well, that went by fast. The summer of 2022 is gone and I’m well into my fall semester now, so the time has arrived much more quickly than anticipated to recap the best of my summer reading. I read a lot of good stuff this summer and hope y’all can find something here to enjoy for yourselves.

As always, for the purposes of this blog “summer” constitutes the time between some point in May between the end of my spring semester and the beginning of my college’s summer session and Labor Day, an arbitrary but convenient cutoff point.

Favorite non-fiction

This was a fiction-heavy summer for reasons I’ll discuss below, so the pickings in history and other non-fiction reading are pretty slim. But I did have favorites and, in no particular order, these were the five best non-fiction reads of my summer:

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—The discipline of history began 2400 years ago with one Greek’s inquiries, an examination of the past best summarized by the question “How did we get here?” This is the most fundamental and profitable question a historian can ask, especially in times of upheaval—whether militarily, as in the days of Herodotus, or on the scale of an entire civilization’s understanding of reality, as today. Strange New World is Carl Trueman’s short approach to answering this question for we 21st-century folk, when 300 years of skepticism, hostility to tradition, a hermeneutic of suspicion, individualism, and relativism are bearing their most poisonous fruit. Light and well-paced, this is an excellent popular introduction to some important intellectual history and I look forward to reading Trueman’s longer, more scholarly treatment of the same subject, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, this fall.

The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind, by Jason M Baxter—I read this on the strength of Baxter’s excellent previous book, A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy. His new book examines how particular medieval authors—Boethius, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and many others—shaped Lewis’s thinking on a variety of topics. A good short guide not only to Lewis’s worldview but to a variety of important medieval writers.

The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, by Max Adams—Caveat lector: the emphasis here is much more on the “times” than the “life.” Covering the century or so around the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, Adams’s history focuses on Northumbria, a kingdom often overlooked in the rush to study Mercia or especially Wessex, and makes a strong case for the importance and uniqueness of the Northumbrian achievement. But as the author is an archaeologist, the human narrative is sometimes hard to track (it’s borderline “pots not people,” the besetting sin of archaeological writing), the archaeological material is thoroughly but sometimes laboriously presented, and Adams is unduly skeptical of much of the written evidence. My views on such skepticism are well known. Nevertheless, this was an interesting and deeply researched read and I found it well worth my while.

A Brief History of Germany, by Jeremy Black—A handy short history focusing primarily on “Germany” since the late Middle Ages and especially the 19th century, when Napoleon demolished the Holy Roman Empire and the nation-state we think of when we hear the word Germany was formed through revolution, nationalist upheaval, and war. The publisher advertises this book as “indispensable for travellers” but you’d better be a traveler who remembers some of your college Western Civ, as Black assumes a certain level of familiarity with the subject on the part of the reader. Nevertheless, this is a solid, well-organized overview covering a lot in a little space, with especially good chapters on the World Wars, interwar politics, and postwar divided Germany, plus plenty of room left over for some fun and informative sidebars on all kinds of cultural topics.

General Lee, by Garnet Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley—A short, engaging biography of Lee, primarily focusing on Lee’s campaigns from 1862-5. Wolseley was a British soldier with vast experience across the British Empire and met Lee while in Virginia as an observer in late 1862. His personal anecdotes of Lee as well as his outsider’s insights into the peculiarities of the American military situation—not only in the material, strategic, and logistical domains but in broader political and social conditions—are especially interesting and make this very old book a worthwhile short read even today.

Honorable mentions:

The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History, by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, trans. Yair Mintzker—A good concise history of the latter half of the Empire’s existence primarily focused on its continuously mutating political and religious institutions and the way they adapted to numerous changes and pressures, both internal and external. Dry but well-structured, informative, and insightful.

Being Wagner, by Simon Callow—This was my first historical/biographical reading this summer and I greatly enjoyed it. Callow’s writing is elegant and witty and I came away with a solid grasp of Wagner’s terrible personality—which Callow represents honestly and without excuses—and the broad outline of his life story. However, in reading about the book afterward and trying to run down more information on a few interesting side topics myself, I found that the book has some problems with accuracy and interpretation. I don’t think these problems are severe enough to ruin the book, but if you decide to check it out—whether as a fan of art, music, German history, 19th century Europe, or just good writing—be aware.

Favorite fiction

I read a lot of fiction this summer, but most of it was for a special project—about which more below—and even though those were some of the best books I’ve read in a while, I’m excluding them from consideration here. That narrows the field considerably. So here, in no particular order, are my five other favorite fiction reads of this summer:

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—There are a few ways one can approach a war novel. One is to minutely and exactingly create an entire unit and study the whole through a few focal characters, as in The Naked and the Dead or Matterhorn. The other is to focus narrowly on a few key characters and study their interactions and the effects of the war upon them, as in All Quiet on the Western Front. This novel takes the latter approach and does it brilliantly, presenting the stories of two soldiers, the veteran Sergeant Burch and the raw Private Shane, and one local Afghan kid, Sadboy, over the course of a year’s deployment in the most remote mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan. The result is a taut, economically written, but absorbing character study that proves powerfully moving.

McPadden is a veteran of the US Army Rangers and this novel won the ALA’s WY Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction in 2019. Deservedly so.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—I somehow made it to the age of 38 having only ever read one Agatha Christie mystery, Murder on the Orient Express. After watching Kenneth Branagh’s blah adaptation of Death on the Nile, I decided it was time to read more of Christie herself. I started here, and was not disappointed. Intricately plotted but briskly paced, I read this in a day—a rewarding read.

Spook Street, by Mick Herron—The fourth entry in Herron’s Slough House novels, Spook Street is perhaps the best of them yet. Like the previous volumes, it has a meticulously plotted story that unfolds in complicated layers over the course of a day or two. Like the others, it takes Slough House’s familiar cast of characters and puts them through challenging arcs as they variously cope with grief, addiction, failure, lack of recognition, or Slough House chief Jackson Lamb’s flatulence. But Spook Street also has some major twists and revelations that complicate not only this novel’s plot, but the stories and backgrounds of major characters as well. All four of the novels I’ve read have been good or great so far, but this one is worth beginning the whole series just to get to.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—A brilliant slow-burn survivalist tale set in western Kansas and the Rockies about a decade after the Civil War. Will Andrews, a Bostonian reared on the high-minded nature- and self-worship of Emerson and Thoreau, heads west to find himself and falls in with a team of buffalo hunters whose expedition into a remote mountain valley he agrees to fund—if they let him tag along. Part Moby-Dick, part Deliverance, but with all the best traits of the Western, Butcher’s Crossing is engagingly written from the first page and slowly draws the reader into a hypnotic and absorbing quest for more, with a story and conclusion that feels both inevitable and surprising. I’ve been meaning to read this since I read Williams’s Augustus six years ago and am glad I finally got around to it. A genuine classic.

Last month I blogged about Williams’s use of sensory detail to create a “vivid and continuous fictive dream” in the mind of the reader. You can read that here.

Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith—The first in McCall Smith’s series of Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld “entertainments,” this is a collection of short stories that form a loose biography of the good professor’s life before the Institute of Romance Philology. Light, humorous, with lots of good cultural and academic gags and some well-crafted cringe comedy, but often with a touch of heart, too.

John Buchan June

This was my special project, an intensive thirty days meant to do a few things for me: first, reclaim my birth month from tedious activism; second, give me a huge booster shot of good classic fiction in genres I love; and third, force me into a discipline to write about all of what I read before the month was out, with no room for slacking. It was a great success for me, being both good practice and a daily pleasure, and I hope y’all enjoyed reading along.

Here are the eight novels I read by John Buchan (the first technically being a spring read), with a link to the reviews I wrote for each.

• A Lost Lady of Old Years (1899)

• Prester John (1910)

• The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

• John Macnab (1925)

• Greenmantle (1916)

• The Power-House (1913)

• Midwinter (1923)

• Sick Heart River (1941)

Among these eight my favorite reread was Greenmantle, only barely edging out the first Richard Hannay adventure, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and I have to admit a tie for my favorite new read between two Sir Edward Leithen novels: the thrilling John Macnab and the reflective and moving Sick Heart River.

I greatly enjoyed this inaugural John Buchan June and am already planning ahead for next year. In the meantime, y’all should certainly check out some of his work if you haven’t before.

Children’s books

I read a lot of books with my kids, but these three were fresh new standouts among this summer’s bedtime stories:

Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—I stumbled across a nice hardback copy of this little children’s novel at Bin Time and picked it up. It was a fun, short, easy bedtime read for my two older kids, who greatly enjoyed it and Basil’s investigation of the central mystery (while also noting how different it was from Disney’s very loose adaptation The Great Mouse Detective). The Sherlock Holmes-related stuff was fun for adults and could prove an effective gateway to Conan Doyle for kids. We’ll certainly be seeking out others in the series.

James Oglethorpe: Not for Self, But for Others, by Torrey Maloof—A kids’ picture book about one of my heroes, the founder of my home state? I bought this on impulse when I ran across it on Amazon and wasn’t disappointed. This is a good child-friendly introduction to the life of an overlooked hero in American history and the story of the founding of the last of the thirteen colonies.

(And let me note in passing that one of the many pleasures of John Buchan June was Oglethorpe’s appearance in a small but important role in the novel Midwinter.)

Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—I first read this children’s adaptation of some Norse myths and legends for my own enjoyment several years ago. This summer I reread it aloud for my seven- and five-year olds’ bedtime. Green very effectively melds the sprawling but fragmentary stuff of Norse poetry into a loose but coherent narrative that incorporates a lot of the best stories of the Æsir from both the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson. My kids greatly enjoyed it, and I enjoyed revisiting it. If you’re looking for a briskly written introduction to Norse mythology written at a kid-friendly level that nevertheless does not soft-peddle the Norse gods and is deeply rooted in the original sources, forget Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and read this instead.

Rereads

What I revisited this summer (excluding a few from John Buchan June), all part of my ongoing project of making myself return to good books I’ve enjoyed before:

• How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic, by Sallust, trans. Josiah Osgood

• Deliverance, by James Dickey

• Gisli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin Regal and Judy Quinn

• Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

Looking ahead

I’m three weeks into my fall semester and a week into my fall reading, and all is going well on both fronts. I’ve already finished a couple of interesting books and look forward to more. I hope y’all enjoyed some good books this summer and that this list has given you a few options for the fall and winter ahead. Thanks for reading!

Gilgamesh and Job

Sam Kriss, in an essay at The Lamp that is ostensibly a review of Sophus Helle’s new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh but is really an extended meditation on death, summarizing the value of Gilgamesh’s 4,000-year old refusal to answer:

The Epic of Gilgamesh is here to confront you with the problem of death, not to solve it. It is not therapy. It was not written to make the world any less cruel. But this is precisely why, against myself, I do find it comforting.

This naturally brought to mind Chesterton’s most powerful and challenging paradox, from his “Introduction to the Book of Job,” the Old Testament book that is “chiefly remarkable . . . for the fact that it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory”:

This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. . . . Job [is] suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

And I happened to read Kriss’s essay this morning before heading to church for a sermon from Ecclesiastes 3, part of an ongoing series about the book which, with Job, is my favorite in the Bible.

Less therapy. More ancient Near Eastern confrontation of enigmas.

Read essays both at the links above. They’re well worth your while.

Jünger (and Lewis) on the homo religiosus

From section 24 of Ernst Jünger’s 1951 treatise on freedom in the face of the authoritarianism of the modern state, The Forest Passage:

Still more important is the consideration that in many people today a strong need for religious ritual coexists with an aversion to churches. There is a sense of something missing in existence, which explains all the activity around gnostics, founders of sects, and evangelists, who all, more or less successfully, step into the role of the churches. One might say that a certain definite quantity of religious faith always exists, which in previous times was legitimately satisfied by the churches. Now, freed up, it attaches itself to all and everything. This is the gullibility of modern man, which coexists with a lack of faith. He believes what he reads in the newspaper but not what is written in the stars.

One thinks immediately of CS Lewis’s observation, in his 1943 essay “Equality,” that “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

But just what happens when you’ve spent a generation or two gobbling poison? Later in The Forest Passage, Jünger further describes this gullible, average modern man mentioned above—the kind mass-produced by materialistic modern education (of whatever political persuasion):

Theologians of today must be prepared to deal with people as they are today—above all with people who do not live in sheltered reserves or other lower pressure zones. A man stands before them who has emptied his chalice of suffering and doubt, a man formed far more by nihilism than by the church—ignoring for the moment how much nihilism is concealed in the church itself. Typically, this person will be little developed ethically or spiritually, however eloquent he may be in convincing platitudes. He will be alert, intelligent, active, skeptical, inartistic, a natural-born debaser of higher types and ideas, an insurance fanatic, someone set on his own advantage, and easily manipulated by the catchphrases of propaganda whose often abrupt turnabouts he will hardly perceive; he will gush humanitarian theory, yet be equally inclined to awful violence beyond all legal limits or international law whenever a neighbor or fellow human being does not fit into his system. At the same time he will feel haunted by malevolent forces, which penetrate even into his dreams, have a low capacity to enjoy himself, and have forgotten the meaning of a real festival. On the other hand, it must be added that he enjoys the advantages of a peaceful age of technological comfort: that the average life expectancy has significantly risen; that the basic tenets of theoretical equality are universally recognized; and that, in some places at least, there are models to be studied of lifestyles that, in their comfort for all levels of society, their individual freedoms, and automatized perfection, have perhaps never existed before. It is not unthinkable that this lifestyle will spread after the titanic era of technology has run its course. Just the same, man is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence, which in some cities and even in whole lands so overshadows life that the last smiles have been extinguished and people seem trapped in Kafkaesque underworlds.

This is strikingly recognizable, like a description of the entire population of Twitter. And again—this is from 1951.

And what is one to do, at least with regard to reorienting man’s religious instinct? Jünger continues:

Giving this man an inkling of what has been taken from him, even in the best possible present circumstances, and of what immense power still rests within him—this is the theological task.

This is a tall order, not least because of the objection that Jünger anticipates earlier: of the self-evident goodness of statistical progress. Compare Jonah Goldberg’s review of The Reactionary Mind, by Michael Warren Davis (which I briefly recommended in my reading year-in-review). Davis spent much of his book pointing out the dislocation, distraction, and spiritual rot of modern culture and Goldberg responded with life expectancy and GDP. These people are not speaking the same language.

Food for thought.

The Forest Passage isn’t solely about modern man as a hungry homo religiosus, but it’s a significant support for Jünger’s overall argument about the powerlessness of the individual—atomized, overawed, divorced from the institutions that used to offer support, and neither educated nor pious enough to develop the individual will to resist—in the face of the state, which seeks to usurp the place of everything of importance in the individual’s life. This, as it happens, is something Jünger knew a lot about.

It’s dense and borderline mystical in places—an altogether German combination—and very good so far. I look forward to finishing it.

I’ve posted one of Jünger’s sharply observed descriptions of a typical modern man before, The Glass Bees’ Fillmor, “one of the highest peaks” in the modern “mountain range of narrow-mindedness.” Read that here. And I’ve speculated on one very particular field’s role as a substitute religion here.