ancient hungers

At The Imaginative Conservative, Professor Birzer offers this quotation from Russell Kirk:

In a generation like ours, which has forgotten the natural law and has knelt to Leviathan, Antigone takes on a meaning little understood during the nineteenth century. . . . There exist in human nature, common to the Greeks of the fifth century and to us, certain constant qualities. Of these qualities, among the rising talents of every generation, are a longing for poetic imagery; a dim participating in the tragic view of life; and an aspiration after ethical insights. Antigone is a great drama because it is humane in the highest sense: that is, Antigone exemplifies the educational discipline called humanitas, the training of the ethical faculty through the understanding of powerful literature. Despite all the muddled positivism and pragmatism to which college students have been subjected since the age of five or six years, truth will demand a hearing now and again. The ancient hungers of the imagination are hard to deny. [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 36-37]

We should live in fear and trembling toward the "ancient hungers of the imagination," toward the full extent of the "humane in the highest sense." It is only indirectly that it is we who are hungry. Our generation is not prepared to participate in a genuine hunger for "the tragic view of life." Even (especially) Catholics find it difficult to say with Antigone that "It is the dead, / Not the living, who make the longest demands: / We die forever . . ." To say those words is one thing; it is another to train oneself to "go gentle" in that ethical way. Positivism and pragmatism are not choices for our generation. They are our ethical way. It is true that some are capable of being attentive to the truth that demands a hearing, but who can choose, like Antigone, to enact that demand, to be a moment of its appearance? Are even the greatest educators of humanitas capable of gouging out their eyes?

We have always been the recognizers, the pilgrim observers. How can we be asked to satisfy a hunger that goes beyond the verge of sense and dialogue? It is here that we have always encountered the nearness of the divine. It is here where we have been capable of belief. We preserve the tradition of the illative sense and we believe in the communion of saints. Isn't that enough? Is there really something wrong with our imaginative preference for Jane Austen? With a conservatism that is the natural ally of "the cleric, the unambitious family man, and the housewife"? Is it not the positivists and pragmatists who deserve to face the intrusion of Dostoevsky's "fantastic" realism?

Percy's "emotional comprehension" of women

Simcha Fisher recently wrote that she "received terrible lessons" about romantic love when she read Walker Percy's "terrific" books as a teenager:

[They] were just above my emotional comprehension (and I worry a bit about Percy’s own emotional comprehension of women). The romantic escapades of Dr. Thomas More are his tragic flaw, and a symptom of his deeper, similarly flawed relationship with Christ, which comes in cycles of ecstatic lust and regret. But a teenager will likely take any likable character as a role model, ignoring or normalizing the misery and distress that the character suffers.

As Matthew Lickona comments, Percy is a diagnostic novelist who is more interested in depicting whether and how his characters get "through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon" than in giving them the sort of emotional range that would make them adequate role models. The reader can relate to the diagnosis of malaise and the initial prescription of the capacity for lust (these are, in my opinion, the moments when Percy reaches a genuinely artistic description), but not to much more than that. Some men sit like Achilles or run through swamps; even more women balance a Coke like Sharon Kinkaid or drive like Margot. When it cuts through the malaise, "romantic love" is like whiskey rather than water. Its surprising heaviness and sweetness is nearer the thigh than the face (the locus of "emotional comprehension"). And that is not nothing. But it does reveal, as Lickona also says, the limits of the diagnostic aim: "One of the difficulties of writing a diagnostic novel is that you have to people it with other . . . people." Dr. Thomas More really is as boring as his confessor says he is toward the end of Love in the Ruins: "Meanwhile, forgive me but there are other things we must think about . . . things which, please forgive me, sometimes seem more important than dwelling on a few middle-aged daydreams" (399). And Binx and Kate are no Jack and Anne and certainly no Elizabeth and Darcy.

Anyway, the Korrektiv discussion of Mrs. Fisher's post includes this comment:

Next: a post on Kierkegaard and women. I love SK, but it’s gonna make Percy look like Oprah.

Funny. The Kierkegaard of Works of Love and Myshkin were my teenage models for comprehending women and articulating romantic love. Whoops. Failing to live up to that wasn't anything you could call graceful. But I think Kierkegaard was more imaginative about women than the odd pseudonymous text would suggest. As he wrote in his Journal: "Had I had faith, I would have stayed with Regine. Thanks be to God, I can see that now. During those days I came close to losing my senses."

the old man

Hermann Diem, writing in Kierkegaard: An Introduction:

To Kierkegaard, it was no accident that the "forgiveness of sins" and the "resurrection of the body" are juxtaposed in the Creed. What is made new through faith in the forgiveness of sins is the old man, not someone else. A man does not become a blank page. What he realizes in his new life are possibilities lying in his own past history, even if he has already bungled them. (26)