How I Stayed Catholic at Harvard: 40 Tips for Faithful College Students

How I Stayed Catholic at Harvard: 40 Tips for Faithful College Students.  By Aurora Griffin, Ignatius Press, 2016.

 

Many religious parents mourn the fact that a disturbingly large number of young people graduate from college considerably less religious than when they entered.  This is a common problem, no matter where one goes, though many of the most prestigious universities is the nation are known for being particularly secular.  On the television series The Sopranos, even though the titular parents made their living through organized crime, during the second season Tony and Carmela Soprano were particularly concerned about their daughter Meadow’s choice of college, worrying that the feared evangelist atheist influence of Berkeley would prove to be detrimental to their daughter’s spiritual life, leading Carmela to use whatever influence she had at her disposal in order to nudge her daughter towards Georgetown.

 

Aurora Griffin is a Harvard graduate, a Rhodes scholar who studied philosophy at Oxford, and plans to pursue a career in business.  How I Stayed Catholic at Harvard is her first book, where she describes her undergraduate faith life, where she describes how she maintained and expanded her religiousness in an environment that was not particularly conducive to faith.

 

In his introduction to the book, Peter Kreeft writes,

 

“Few things can be more important than the faith of the next generation.  The future of our civilization, that is, the goodness and truth and beauty of our culture, depends on the Source of all goodness, truth, and beauty, God; and the umbilical cord to God is faith– not just faith in anything, but the Faith, the one God invented, not us.  And the Faith is not automatic (it doesn’t just “happen”), not is it genetic (God has no grandchildren); it must be rediscovered, reaffirmed, chosen, and kept anew by each generation.  If it falls into the abyss of the current “generation gap,” our culture will fall into an abyss of even greater nonsense, immorality, and ugliness than it already has.  Nothing is more practical than drawing a line in the sand here and now.

 

And no place is more important than the university, because the university has replaced the church, the state, and even the family as the primary teacher and cultural determinant.  Everyone who is influential in our culture is formed by the university: media people, pastors, teachers, politicians, scientists, businesspeople, lawyers, doctors, creative writers, journalists– almost everyone but rappers and professional football players.  This is the battlefield, now is the battle, and here is a very good set of weapons.”

 

The “weapons” in question are a series of tips that Griffin advises as a means of maintaining a vibrant religious life.  The forty tips are divided into sections: “Community,” “Prayer,” “Academics,” and “Living It Out.”  Of course, this book presupposes that that the person reading this book has a strong interest in staying Catholic and living a religious life throughout college and afterwards.  For the already lukewarm or disinterested young person raised Catholic, there may be little incentive to take the extra steps to strengthen one’s faith life, nor is there any particular desire to avoid the entertainments and distractions that lead many young people away from traditional Catholic morality.

 

There are a wide variety of tips, ranging from engaging in an assortment of religious activities to maintaining a diverse and supportive group of friends.  In each case, Griffin provides her own autobiographical experiences, explaining how each of these steps helped her.  At times, it seems like Griffin was constantly under pressure from all sorts of directions to drift into a state of unbelief or at least to start ignoring the tenets of the Church.  

 

She writes: 

 

“For a Catholic going to a secular university, it is all too easy to get swept up in what the world says is important in college.  The attitude at most secular universities is that college is about having fun and finding yourself by casting off old ways of thinking, leaving your faith and values behind.  For many, it becomes about partying and embracing radical philosophies.  A worldly lifestyle promises glamour and excitement and fulfillment, but in the end it is empty.  Only as we become the people God made us to be, do we become freer, happier, and more ourselves.”  

 

One of my favorite experiences in college is when an acquaintance did the math to figure out just how much a single fifty minute class cost, when subtracting food and housing from the annual tuition and dividing appropriately.  I don’t have the exact number, but about fourteen years ago, every missed class was approximately $180 down the drain.  My acquaintance and I put that line on the dormitory whiteboard as a kind of motivator for the hungover students who believed that attending class was optional.  The cost has gone up dramatically in recent years, and as Griffin points out, there are many intangible and priceless benefits from college that may be missed through improper use of time.

 

It continues to baffle me how many young people believe that they are paying tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands of dollars a year for a four-year bacchanal.  Griffin observes that college is more than just paying large sums of money and taking tests in order to get a diploma.  College is an opportunity to learn and grow, but as personal observations have shown me, many college students grow less mature, less creative, and less intellectually curious.  Griffin argues that to be a better student, a better person, and a better Catholic, you have to continually strive to be stronger– if your faith (or intellect) isn’t growing, it’s probably shrinking.

 

Griffin writes:

“It was my faith that kept me studying late at night when I was tired because I felt obligated to be a good steward of my opportunities.  It was my faith that served as the reference point for all my studies, rendering no lecture of assignment irrelevant.  It was my faith that led me to meet a great group of friends, whom I’ll cherish the rest of my life.  It was my faith that kept me out of the dangers and drama of the college party scene.  Because I made these decisions– to work hard, to invest in good people, to avoid trouble– my time in college was both successful and happy by secular standards.  And I gained so much more than that from my faith.  My college years meant something.  I grew in the most important thing of all: knowing God.  And after graduation, I stepped into the world with a peace and a sense of purpose that even my most successful secular friends do not have.”

 

If college students are determined to burden themselves with crushing debt and spend the better part of their weekends with their heads in public toilets, there is little their parents or anybody else can do to stop them (unless their parents decide to stop paying tuition).  This is one young woman’s testimony as to the importance of her religious faith in her life, and the effort she was willing to make to keep it.  Not every college students shares her tenacity and dedication, but her personal experiences are inspiring, and Griffin’s enthusiasm for being Catholic radiates off the page.

 

–Chris Chan

Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? and The Books That Changed My Life

Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?  By Carl E. Olson, Ignatius Press, 2016.

 

The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People.  By Bethanne Patrick, Regan Arts, 2016.

 

People may not believe everything they read, but what they read may have a deep and lasting effect on their mindsets and beliefs.  The two books discussed in this review, Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? and The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People both discuss how reading material affects people’s thoughts on all aspects of life.  Olson’s book focuses mainly on how works of Christian (and anti-Christian) apologetics may shape the minds and faith of those who read such books, whereas Patrick’s work explores how all kinds of books change the lives of people from all walks of life.  C.S. Lewis said that “a young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”  Comparatively, people of any ideological persuasion may be affected by their reading material, and these two books illustrate just how what one reads affects how one may think.

 

If a Christian were to reads only one book of apologetics about the resurrection of Jesus, whichever book is chosen may have an immense impact on the direction of that person’s belief system.  In his introductory chapters, Olsen summarizes books on Jesus’s resurrection from a wide variety of perspectives, from an Episcopalian who dismisses the supernatural, to New Age figures who believe that they have a deeper understanding of the “true nature” of Jesus than members of the Catholic clergy, to atheists who attack all aspects of belief and religious history.  Olson’s book targets each of these viewpoints in turn, arguing that none of them is as convincing or as close to the historical truth as what the Catholic Church officially teaches.

 

Olson writes in his introduction:

 

“From the start, the proclamation of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead has been met with a wide range of emotions and responses: fear, amazement, joy, perplexity, astonishment– and disbelief.  In the succinct account at the end of the Gospel of Mark, the three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, who go to anoint Jesus’s body with spices were amazed to find a young man in white robes, an angel, sitting in an otherwise empty tomb.  “Do not be amazed,” he told them, “you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him” (Mk 16:6).  The women fled the tomb, trembling and astonished, “and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.” (Mk 16:8).

 

So afraid, we read, that they said nothing to anyone.  Who would believe them?  Why would anyone believe them?  And, sure enough, when Mary Magdalene told the grieving disciples that Jesus had appeared to her the following morning, “they would not believe it” (Mk 16:11).  In the words of Luke, the account given “seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (Lk 24:11).  “For the early Christians,” writes noted New Testament scholar Craig S. Keener, “neither the empty tomb nor the testimony of the women was adequate evidence by itself (cf. Lk 24:22-24); they also depended on the testimony of the men for the public forum (cf. 1 Cor 15:5-8).” The disbelief of the male disciples is, by any measure, both understandable and embarrassing, and Keener states that the “criterion of embarrassment indicates that no one had apologetic reason to invent the testimony of these women.”

 

Throughout his books, Olson argues that the early Christians had no reason to make up a story about Jesus’s resurrection, and that accusations that the early Church was less than honest are unfounded.  In an early chapter, Olson addresses the theologian Gerhard Lohfink, and notes that the Church needs to make its teachings– what it believes happened and why– absolutely clear, because people have a habit of selecting what they like to think is most reasonable, rather than what might actually have happened.  

 

Olson describes Lohfink’s position, writing that:

 

“Lohfink says that amid such confusion “it is the church’s urgent and even essential duty to make clear what is specifically Christian.”  Such a task is difficult, in part because the Enlightenment project has aided an even promoted a dismissal of religious belief and has also encouraged a reactionary syncretism in which an often irrational stew of religion and spirituality is set up against the rather cold and rational forces of scientism and technocracy.  Thus, to put it simply, Christianity has been attacked from one side as superstitious and anti-reason and from the other as too exclusive and dogmatic, and thus fundamentalist.  Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in a remarkable homily given at the Mass prior to the papal conclave in which he was elected pope, asked, “How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking?”

 

Olson fills his short volume with reasoned arguments, and one of his most interesting and compelling sections is a “question and answer” chapter where he explains the reasoning for Catholic teachings on Jesus’s resurrection and why Christians need to believe in it as a real event, not just a metaphor or a legend used to make for a better story or to inject mysticism into a more prosaic story.  Describing the reasons his own approach, Olson writes:

 

“In short, Christianity without a risen Christ– truly alive and with a real, glorified body– is an essentially empty, even false belief system.  “If Jesus didn’t literally rise from the dead,” argues philosopher David Baggett, “then at most we would have to settle for a demythologized and deflationary analysis of Christianity.  The fact is, classical Christianity would be false and Jesus usually a philosopher at best or a madman at worst.  If Jesus did bodily rise from the grave, what could be more important as a clue to the meaning of life?  The resurrection matters.”  The stakes, in other words, are high; it really is an all-or-nothing proposition.”

 

Olson covers a wide swath of recent literature about religious apologetics, and explains that not all books are created equal.  Many books seem convincing because they never challenge their central theses within the context of their volumes, which is why someone can set down a book completely unaware that the arguments that sounded so unassailable on the page have been thoroughly rebutted by other researchers.  Olson sets up his book to be a counter-argument to all of the bestsellers and prominent voices he cites in his work.  He knows that books can be incredibly formative influences, and seeks to make his book a counter-force, discrediting those other works.

 

While Olson criticizes other books on the grounds of bad logic, poor theology, and twisted history, Patrick celebrates all books rather than taking a stand on whether or not some books are better than others.  Patrick asked scores of writers, actors, politicians, doctors, and other notable people if there was a book that served as a transformative influence in their lives.  Patrick describes her project, writing that:

 

“One of the parts of this project that makes me happiest is that although no one interviewed was given a list from which to choose and although none of them were told others’ choices in advance, there is only one duplicate title on the list.  That doesn’t mean all the books spoken about meet any parameters.  There are children’s books, poetry collections, biographies, classic novels, modern favorites, and even a comic book included.  What this says to me, and I hope to you, is that life-changing books don’t come with “Read Here” labels attached.  They have as much to do with the reader’s perspective as with the author’s voice.”

 

The essays in Patrick’s book are a very mixed bag.  Some are shallow and self-serving, while other essays are virtue-signaling “aren’t I clever and/or empathetic” puff pieces.  Still, throughout the book, there are some genuinely moving or inspiring pieces, and a handful of them are genuinely spiritual pieces, focusing on the religious aspects of literature.  Most of the essays are only two or three pages, with a few lengthier exceptions.  One of the best passages is by Patrick herself, as she writes about the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo:

 

“[I]n the late winter of 1988, someone in the group selected a novel by a Japanese author I’d never heard of: Silenceby Shusaku Endo.  First published in 1966, a winner of the Tanizaki Prize, and considered by many to be one of the best novels of the twentieth century, Silence is the story of a Portugese missionary to seventeenth-century Japan whose fidelity to Roman Catholic dogma is challenged by armed persecutors of local Christians in hiding.

 

No, Silence did not effect my conversion.  However, I was then, and remain, a seriously spiritual person, and I’d never before encountered a book that was both a testament to faith and a work of art.  It doesn’t matter, when you read Endo, whether you are a devout Christian or a committed atheist.  Although his material is more overtly religious than, say, a fellow Catholic like Flannery O’Connor’s, like O’Connor, Endo uses his beliefs to explore the moral center that unites the greatest works of literature in all world cultures.  His fiction wastes no time on proselytizing.  It focuses on character, conflict, and truth.”

 

Both of these books provide a compelling case that “you are what you read.”  The power of the printed word can shape opinions of religion, politics, and aesthetic taste, among other possibilities.  Olson argues that no book exists in a vacuum, and Patrick puts special stress on the relationship between a book and its reader.  Patrick writes and edits from a largely secular love a books, whereas Olson is arguing about the truth of one of the major events in world history, and writes as a religious man who believes the veracity of what he argues.  Both books pay special attention as to how the written word is often a transformative influence to a reader’s mind and soul. 

 

 

–Chris Chan

Catholics in America & Champion of Women and the Unborn

Catholics in America: Religious Identity and Cultural Assimilation from John Carroll to Flannery O'Connor.  By Russell Shaw, Ignatius Press, 2016.

 

Champion of Women and the Unborn: Horatio Robinson Storer, M.D.  By Frederick N. Dyer, Science History Publications, 1999.

 

 

What should the role of Catholicism in the public sphere be?  How should Catholics live their faith and try to shape the broader American culture?  In Catholics in America and Champion of Women and the Unborn, Russell Shaw and Frederick N. Dyer profile sixteen Catholics who had a distinct impact on America, though in very different ways.  

 

Shaw is very concerned about American political culture, and worries that American Catholics are inclined to dilute or even repudiate aspects of their faith in order to better fit into the general stream of American popular opinion.  He opens his book with an observation of the conditions of church and state in the U.S.

 

“In my parish church, as also, I suppose, in many another Catholic church in the United States, two flags are prominently displayed.  One is the Stars and Stripes.  The other, unfamiliar to most Americans, including many Catholics, is the gold and white flag of Vatican City, with the papal coat of arms– the keys of Peter and the papal tiara– imposed upon the vertical white band.  In many churches, the two flags flank the sanctuary as if to salute the sacred ritual celebrated there.  In mine, they hang from the choir loft at the back of the church, where they seem to be maintaining a benign surveillance of the congregation.

 

In all my years of visiting Catholic churches, I’ve never heard anyone, priest of layperson, say a word about the symbolism of the two flags, perhaps because it’s so obvious that it doesn’t need explaining.  Their message plainly is twofold: first, that Catholics have a dual loyalty– to the Church and to the United States; second, that there is no conflict here.  On the contrary, their reply to the ancient question, “Can you be a good Catholic and a good American?” appears to be an implied, “Who says I can’t?””

 

Many Catholic pundits have noted that Americanism is considered a heresy, by which it is generally meant that American politics and social attitudes should not be given precedence over the teachings of the Church.  (It might be fair to inquire whether comparable criticism has ever been given to “Europeanism.”)    Shaw is concerned that secular and even anti-Catholic forces are affecting all aspects of American Catholic cultural life, and suggests that Catholics should play a more active role in determining the directions that America takes.  This attitude reflects the Chesterton quote, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”  Shaw muses,

 

“For the most part, that [the idea of Americanization] has remained conventional wisdom to this day.  Now, though, this may be changing.  In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that the Church needs to rethink the old project of unconditional assimilation into American secular culture.  Yes, assimilation has been the preferred strategy of Catholic leadership since John Carroll.  But should it always be?  A persuasive argument can be made that it needn’t and shouldn’t.  For the cost of assimilation to the Church has grown unacceptably high as the secular culture has become ever more inhospitable to Catholic beliefs and values, a process now observable on issues from abortion and same-sex marriage to the creeping economic strangulation of parochial schools.  Currently the question has particular urgency in light of the presence in the United States of yet another large body of mainly Catholic newcomers: the Hispanics.”

 

In order to explain the influences that Catholics have played in American history, and how they inspired other Catholics to play more public roles in their culture.  Increasingly, major political figures have argued that people have the right to worship as they see fit, but they ought not to allow their personal beliefs to interfere with the dictates of the state.  There are widespread arguments that some cultural debates need to be settled, and Catholics should not try to influence or shake up the decreed consensus.  Shaw argues that this is nonsense, and Catholics have a moral obligation to keep involved and to shake up the current political, intellectual, and cultural state of affairs.  He asks,

 

“Can we still be fully Catholic while also being fully American in American secular terms?  The response of many Catholics today is simply more assimilation into the values and behavior patterns of the society that surrounds them. But for a remnant of believing, practicing Catholics, it’s a different story.  These people find themselves increasingly alienated from the secular society and deeply concerned to know what to do about it.  Perhaps they will find some help in what follows.

 

Several themes are at work here, exemplified by the following fifteen influential American Catholics: Archbishop Carroll and Cardinal Gibbons– the assimilation option as it has been accepted and promoted by leaders of the Church in the United States; Saint Elizabeth Seton, Father McGivney, and Al Smith– anti-Catholicism and the Catholic response; Archbishop Hughes and Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini– the immigrant experience; Cardinal Spellman– hyperpatriotism as an assimilation mode; Dorothy Day, Archbishop Sheen, Flannery O’Connor– the ambiguities of American culture; Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker– the feasibility of evangelization; John Kennedy and John Courtney Murray– resolving the tension between church and state.

 

Let me reply at the start to a possible objection: this is not an unpatriotic book.  “My country, right or wrong” – words associated with the early nineteenth-century American naval hero Stephen Decatur and later repeated, with disastrous results, but Cardinal Spellman– expresses an unassailably correct sentiment, provided the sentiment is understood to be, “No matter how foolishly or unjustly my country may act, it’s still my country.”  But this fundamental acknowledgement of national filiation does not excuse patriotic citizens from criticizing their country when it acts foolishly or unjustly, and trying their best to get the country to stop doing that.  These things, too, are expressions of patriotism, indeed arguably more useful than blind acquiescence.”

 

Dyer takes a very different approach to outlining the public role played by Horation Robinson Storer, a physician who Dyer believes saved so many lives that most Americans wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for his innovations in women’s medicine.  Dyer’s website includes the following description of Storer’s career:

 

“The Boston surgeon, Horatio Robinson Storer, M.D. (1830-1922), is known for his key role in creating the specialty of gynecology^[and for being the first surgeon to remove a pregnant uterus.^[ The diseases peculiar to women were little understood and poorly treated when Storer began medical practice in 1853.  Medical specialization of any kind was unacceptable to physicians at that time and a physician who paid attention to the female genitals was particularly suspect, given that there were “quacks” who pandered to women's non-medical needs.  Horatio faced strong resistance to his campaign to promote gynecology, particularly from powerful Boston physicians and surgeons who also were upset because Horatio advocated chloroform, the anesthetic discovered by his Scottish mentor, Dr. (later Sir) James Young Simp­son.  Ether was worshipped in Boston where it was the anesthetic used when anesthetic surgery was first demonstrated to the world in 1846.  Chloroform, ether's most serious competitor, was hated by these “Etherites.”” (http://horatiostorer.net)

 

Storer was instrumental in saving lives through passing laws against abortion (the crude procedures led to the deaths of countless women during the nineteenth century), pioneers safer anesthesia, and fought the medical establishment tooth and nail to institute innovations that would save many lives.  Though some of his beliefs about women might be considered sexist today, they were common for the time, and in any case, over the course of his career Storer launched so many life-saving initiatives that millions– perhaps tens of millions– of Americans owe him a very great debt.  Storer converted to Catholicism later in life after marrying a Catholic woman, and his life is certainly what Shaw would consider an exemplary case of a Catholic shaping the public sphere.

 

Shaw and Dyer have created profiles of people who have changed America in very different ways, and these biographical sketches serve as an excellent way to inspire Catholics to live their faith and “be the change that they want to see in the world.”

 

 

 

–Chris Chan 

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams.  By Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016.

 

This is a biography of four men, all academics, all writers, all Christians.  The Inklings have produced some of the most beloved works of literature of the twentieth century, but not all of them are household names.  J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings saga, and C.S. Lewis, best known for the Narnia novels and many works of Christian apologetics, are the most famous Inklings, but the lesser-known authors such as Owen Barfield and Charles Williams are also addressed.  Some other more obscure members of the group, along with “unofficial” Inklings such as Dorothy L. Sayers, also receive some attention.  Williams receives far less attention overall due to his untimely death in 1945, and Barfield, who long outlived the others, receives more space.  Barfield was known as “the first and last Inkling,” and lived for nearly a quarter-century after Tolkien died in 1973, Lewis having passed a decade earlier.

 

The authors are fully aware that Tolkien and Lewis are the “lead” characters in their drama, and that Barfield and Williams are just the supporting players.  The Zaleskis also tailor their study to provide an informative reading experience not just for those who are already experts on their favorite authors’ lives, but also for those individuals who are completely unaware of the lives of the men behind the books.

 

“Interest in the Inklings often first dawns in the minds of readers who have fallen in love with Tolkien and Lewis, and wish to enter more deeply into their spiritual and imaginative cosmos.  But there are others who, though immune to the evangelizing power of Faërie, are curious to know more about a movement that arose not long ago in the colleges and pubs of Oxford and continues to cast a spell upon our culture.  We have written with both kinds of readers in mind.”

 

The other major character in this history is Oxford University– the institution of higher education itself is presented as a complex figure that is both ever-changing and tied to tradition.  In the Zaleskis’ depiction, it seems as if the legendary school has a soul of its own, or at least the ability to affect the souls of those who studied and taught there.  They write:

 

“Whether high or low church, Evangelical, Broad Church, or Catholic, Oxford was in love with the idea of Christian perfection.  It was here in 1729 that Charles and John Wesley founded their “Holy Club” and from here that George Whitefield went forth to evangelize America.  It was from Oxford in the 1830’s that the Tractarian movement set out to re-Catholicize the national church, and it was in Oxford that the saintly John Henry Newman made his submission to Rome.  Here John Ruskin, who had a love-hate relationship with the city and with his own Evangelical roots, sought to awaken the nation’s sleeping conscience to his vision of Christian socialism, medieval artisanship, and educational reform and it was here, in the cathedral-like University Museum that Ruskin helped to design, that the ornithologist and bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, took on T.H. Huxley in the celebrated 1860 debate on the validity of Darwinian evolution.  The Victorian crisis of faith took place here, but so did what the historian Timothy Larsen has called “the Victorian crisis of doubt.”  From Ruskin’s time until the days of the Inklings, a pattern of religious rebellion and rediscovery would repeat itself; one could be a militant skeptic like Huxley relishing the escape from Victorian restraints, or a militant believer like Ronald Knox relishing the escape from modern liberalism, or an initiate in any of the manifold schools of occultism, theosophy, and spiritualism that flourished in Oxford as well.  All the spiritual alternatives were on offer, all could be sampled, but there was little room for indifference– certainly not for a generation that lived through the Great War.”

 

One particularly memorable aspect of the book is how it humanizes the various real-world effects of literary criticism and academic politics.  Readers learn how Oxford was beset by various rivalries, alternative cliques, and other forces that endangered the careers of the Inklings.  C.S. Lewis lost a chance at a fine position because people on the voting committee didn’t want somebody who wrote Christian apologetics.  It is also revealed how certain literary critics were deeply prejudiced against all things fantasy-related, and how certain prominent academics strove to keep Inkling authors off of the “approved” reading lists.  Indeed, The Fellowship underscores the point that there was a distinct “antimodernist” movement in literature and culture that ran parallel to the modernist movement.  Even though modernism took hold in academia, as the careers of the Inklings illustrate, the antimodernists still have played a role in shaping the broader culture and intellectual debate.

 

“If Virginia Woolf was right that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” in the direction of modernism and daring social experiments, the Great War intensified that change; according to standard histories of this period, the rising generation of British writers reacted to the catastrophe by severing ties to tradition an embracing an aesthetic of dissonance, fragmentation, an estrangement.  Yet the Great War also instilled in many a longing to reclaim the goodness, beauty, and cultural continuity that had been so violently disrupted.  The Inklings came together because they shared that longing; and it was the Inklings, rather than the heirs of the Bloomsbury Group– the other great, if ill-defined, English literary circle of the twentieth century– who gave that longing its most enduring artistic form and substance.  Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.  It was a belief that set them at odds with many of their contemporaries, but kept in the broad currents of the English literary heritage.  They shared much with Bloomsbury, including love of beauty, companionship, and conversation, but they differed from their older London counterpart in their religious ardor, their social conservatism, and their embrace of fantasy, myth, and (mostly) conventional literary techniques instead of those dazzling experiments with time, character, narrative, and language that mark the modernist aesthetic.”

 

Throughout The Fellowship, we see a subtle argument that realism may be overrated, that the use of fantasy provides an emotional and imaginative sphere that fiction that precisely mirrors the real world cannot.  The idea that imaginative and speculative fiction can tell truths and lessons and provide a connection to the reader that other forms of life cannot is an impressive one, because it contends that creating a supernatural world is critical to exploring supernatural issues connected to religion and morality.

 

“Fantasy, then, was in Oxford’s blood, and it is no wonder that the major Inklings experimented in so many fantastic subgenres (myth, science fiction, fable, epic fantasy, children’s fantasy, supernatural thriller, and more).  They chose to be fantasists for a variety of reasons– or, rather, fantasy seemed to choose them, each one falling in love with the genre in youth (Lewis in Ireland, Tolkien in Birmingham, Williams and Barfield in London) many years before coming to Oxford.  Their passion arose, in part, from the sheer excitement of the genre, the intoxication of entering the unknown and fleeing the everyday.  For all of the leading Inklings, however, the rapture of the unknown pointed also to something more profound; it was a numinous event, an intimation of a different, higher, purer world or state of being.  Fantasy literature was, for the Inklings, a pathway to this higher world and a way of describing, through myth and symbol, its felt presence.  Fantasy became the voice of faith.  And it made for a cracking good story.”

 

The Fellowship is a “cracking good story” of its own.  The book manages to make each of its four central characters real, living persons, with noticeable flaws that are dwarfed by their virtues.  Tolkien often comes across as curmudgeonly and sharply critical of his peers’ work, but he remains a loving family man whose force of will helped to propel the literary careers of those close to him.  Lewis’ personal problems and turbulent early life underscore just how revolutionary and transformative his embrace of faith became.  

 

This book is in many ways an epic of the twentieth century, emphasizing how war shaped the minds and souls of men.  G.K. Chesterton wrote that “education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to the next.”  The Oxford Inklings built their lives around educating and entertaining others, and this book is a fine testament to their memory and a staunch defense of their legacy.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

How to Be Holy & Eleven Cardinals Speak on Marriage and the Family

How to Be Holy: First Steps in Becoming a Saint.  By Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, 2016.

 

Eleven Cardinals Speak on Marriage and the Family.  Edited by Winifried Aymans, Ignatius Press, 2015.

 

Every person of faith has to address several major questions.  Two important ones that are addressed in the books How to Be Holy and Eleven Cardinal Speak on Marriage and the Family are: What does it mean to be a “good” person, and why is it important to be “good?”  In How to Be Holy, Peter Kreeft discusses the various reasons why the average person ought to seek sanctity and discusses the reasons why people often fall short of this lofty goal.  Eleven Cardinals Speak on Marriage and the Family is a collection of short essays by prominent churchmen, explaining why the Catholic Church holds the positions that it does on relationships and hereditary bonds.  Both of these books are practical works, defining the reasons for behaving in what the Church considers to be a moral way, and then providing advice on how to live in that manner.

 

Peter Kreeft is the first to observe that there is a distinct degree of hubris in writing a book titled How to Be Holy.  In his very first lines, he rapidly confesses that he does not consider himself an exemplar of holiness, but the rest of the book is devoted to explaining how to move closer to achieving that nearly unobtainable goal.  In his introduction, Kreeft writes:

 

“The cover of this book is a joke.  You’re going to read How to Be Holy by whom?  Mother Teresa?  Saint John Paul II?  Saint Francis of Assisi?  No, by Peter Kreeft.  That’s like reading How to Be Honest by Pinocchio.

 

If you want to know how to be a sailor, do you read a book by a sailor or by a landlubber?  If you want to know how to be an astronaut, do you read a book by a successful astronaut or by a wannabe astronaut?  So if you want to read a book by a saint or by an absent-minded philosophy professor?

 

If you choose the second, I have a time share in Florida that I’d like to sell you.  

 

So why read this book?”

 

Indeed, why read this book?  It soon becomes clear that this is a self-help book, but it is a self-help book that asserts that success is impossible.  Though perfection may never be achievable, at least people can consistently improve themselves and their spiritual lives.  Some self-help books may help people improve their health, or follow their dreams, or make more money.  Yet none of these books produces a perfect success rate.  After all, many people read such books and do not improve their lives at all, and still others only lose a couple of pounds or make a few hundred dollars in their endeavors.  Still others follow the advice in certain self-help books and sadly wind up doing worse than before they started trying to make themselves better.  But while starting certain diets may actually result in weight gain, and certain get-rich-quick schemes may lead to financial losses, taking steps to purge sin from one’s life have a far smaller risk of backfiring and a much greater chance of leading to becoming a much better and virtuous person overall.

 

Kreeft makes it very clear that holiness is not easy to achieve.  He notes this, and then turns this point into a reason to study his work.  He writes:

 

“[M]y very failure to practice what I preach is what you need if you, like me, are a beginner.  In my own field, philosophy, I know that “experts” are often the last people to trust.  Brilliant philosophers are often quite insane.  Genius and insanity are often closely connected.  But the saints are not insane; in fact, they are the only truly sane people in the world because they are living in reality, in real reality, in ultimate reality, in God’s reality.  Despite what the Supreme Court says, it is the Supreme Being, not the Supreme Court, who invents and defines reality.

 

Even when the experts are not insane, they are sometimes not the best people for beginners to learn from at first.  This is true in almost any field.  Beginners in chess are usually better taught at first by other beginners than by grandmasters.  For when the teachers are beginners, the teachers and students are together; they experience the same failures.  This book is not a great chef serving up a gourmet dinner; it is one desperately poor bum telling another where there’s free food.”

 

While Kreeft is a trained professor of philosophy providing an informal, good-humored book of advice on how to live in a holy manner, Eleven Cardinals Speak is a collection of explanatory sermons from some of the highest-ranking members of the clergy in the world.  If the point of How to Be Holy is explain the reasons why people should strive to be saints, Eleven Cardinals Speak tries to persuade people to make saints of their spouses and family members as well.  The book opens with the contention that the family is currently under sustained attacks coming in many different guises, and that the best way to repel such challenges is to promote and adopt behavior consistent with Church teaching.

 

“[I]n order to lend greater weight to the contributions and also to create greater interest, cardinals of the Holy Roman Church were invited exclusively to write essays for the present book.  Most of them gained their experience in their important responsibility as diocesan bishops of prominent local Churches, some in other significant ecclesiastical duties.  All of them, however, became familiar with questions about marriage and family life through their priestly ministry.  The authors were asked, not to enter into further systematic discussions, but to write in the form of an essay their own reflections about their personal experience and perspective.  All the authors deserve our respect and thanks for the fact that they took the trouble to compose their essays within a short time, alongside their official duties.

 

The result stimulates reflections of an entirely different sort.  The practical conclusions are sometimes based on more fundamental reflections of a philosophical or theological nature; others presuppose this foundation and follow simply from practical experiences.  In keeping with the essay format of the contributions, it seemed appropriate for publication not to try to group the essays by topic for publication, but simply to arrange them in alphabetical order by the authors’ names.”

 

If there is one serious problem with this anthology, it is the fact that many of the points made by the cardinals become repetitious.  After all, all of these churchmen adhere to the doctrines of the Church, so they are essentially reiterating each other’s claims, assertions, and sometimes even arguments and metaphors.  This is not a bad thing– there is nothing wrong with all of these princes of the Church speaking as one.  But some of these essays cover the same ground as earlier works in the book, and the works may have the effect of preaching to the choir.  The authors do a fine job explaining and defending Church doctrine, but unfortunately the book would benefit from several new and innovative arguments to defend Catholic teachings on marriage and the family in order to provide a better contrast to the barrage of arguments people are exposed to that seek to undermine Church teachings.  

 

Overall, the essays argue for striving to improve the world rather than by withdrawing from it.  The introductory essay declares that:

 

“The Church must resist the pressure of the spirit of the world.  People who are in an irregular situation should, however, participate in the liturgy.  In an anti-religious world, we should stop trying to be “modern” and, instead, strive to contribute to the creation of an inspiring atmosphere, as many religious lay associations so marvelously do.  The valuable lay movements for pastoral ministry to the family that have developed in Latin America must be promoted, both for marriage preparation and for the accompaniment of married couples (family gatherings, anniversaries, and so on).”

 

These books both focus on the need for virtue, the positive effects that come from living virtuously, and the consequences of behaving in an immoral manner.  How to Be Holy focuses more on how virtuous behavior affects the individual, while Eleven Cardinal Speak centers around the family and the broader community.  Both books are worth reading for those who seek self-improvement and reasons for living one’s faith despite the inherent challenges and problems in doing so.

 

 

–Chris Chan