This is terrific, Mac. You're not alone.

I actually did read the entire book; it took me six months. Like you, I was woefully unprepared. I thought Lyotard was something ballerinas wore. In the end I understood little of it; I'm not even sure I understood the main point.

But I enjoyed it all the same! One of the ideas that Hart expresses in the book is that beauty is a fleeting quality that shimmers on the surface of being, unsystematic and ungraspable, manifesting in myriad forms the glory of God. After a while I began to experience the book itself in that way: as an analogy of being. I would ride softly over the ungraspable depths, being occasionally rewarded with a palpable aphorism or brilliant digression, but mostly just beholding in my mind's ear the shimmering beauty of the musical prose (for it is musical).

Now, that "analogy of being" is not, I think, the "analogy of being" that Hart refers to so often in the book. Indeed, I believe that my inability to grasp the correct meaning of that phrase was a major impediment to my comprehension.

Does this help?

It took me about 30 years to get the message, but I got it at last: "Shoemaker, stick to thy last." There are many books just not written for the likes of me. I began to bang up against this fact many years ago when trying to read Charles Williams's He Came Down from Heaven and/or The Forgiveness of Sins. The dismal decade was the Nineties, when the mail would bring the enticing Eighth Day Books catalog and other advertising to which I would respond by ordering books I would never, in fact, read.

I wish that some relatively high-profile authors and publishers would release books that would give the likes of me some of the riches that are "locked up" in books and articles that I find unfinishable.

Because life's too short. I have plenty of books and articles that I can read or reread, too many to make wasting my time with unreadable books and articles a good use of time.

I'm reminded, by the way, of C. S. Lewis's wistful remark about the undergraduate who, humbly wanting to come to grips with Plato, gets hold of a bunch of modern commentaries on the Greek sage, rather than just reading Plato, whom he would find much more readable. Granted, it isn't clear from context (as I recall) whether Lewis assumes the undergrad can read Plato in the original Greek!

Does anyone know of Christian writers who have written well and readably on beauty? I will mention one whom I haven't read in depth: Coventry Patmore, the Victorian poet and essayist. His little essay on "The Still Point in Art" is well worth the few minutes it will take you to read it. In fact, Mac, I suspect that if you read it you will write a blog entry about it and invite readers to mention examples. Patmore is thinking of painting and literature. Here's a teaser: I think Bombadil is the still point in The Lord of the Rings.

I wrote, "I wish that some relatively high-profile authors and publishers would release books that would give the likes of me some of the riches that are "locked up" in books and articles that I find unfinishable."

That is, I wish we could have some good "popularizations" of the good stuff that, presumably, Hart and others cannot or don't want to write for the ordinary reader. It is obviously possible to write intelligibly and responsibly for ordinary readers on profound topics -- vide C. S. Lewis and a lot of subsequent authors.

I am assuming that Hart really is profound and that he isn't taken for being profound because he is hard to read.

I did accept, some time ago, that I was never going to read a great deal of philosophy. Had I pursued an academic career, I might have at least gotten acquainted with the big names. I did have a 2-semester history of philosophy as an undergrad, which now that I think about it may have stopped around 1800 or so. Or maybe we got progressively further behind so that everybody after that got only a lick and a promise. Anyway, that was pretty much the end of my education in that line. I picked up a sense of what some thinkers were about by encountering them in other contexts, but that doesn't really get you very far, as the present case shows.

It's been pretty much the same with theology. Nothing formal, and only hit-and-miss efforts on my own. At this point in my life, old enough to have a real sense of limited time remaining--that life is literally too short to fit everything in--I really don't think I will ever fill in these gaps. I think I'll persevere with Hart, though, at least for a hundred pages or so.

I had a similar though less severe problem with Francesca Murphy's book. I think she's offline for Lent--it would be interesting to hear her view on this.

Speaking of Lewis, I found myself, while reading Hart, at one point feeling a sort of appetite for a good solid bit of Lewis. A very different mental world, there, and closer to my own.

Here is an example of a short digression that I liked; I may have mentioned it before.

That "atheism all the way down" idea makes me think of Nietzsche, who has already come up several times in the introduction. I've always had a liking for him, for taking the logic of the absence of God all the way to its conclusion.

"Part of the point of Hart's book (I think) is to contrast the "peace" of the Christian metaphysical vision against the "violence" of the atheist one."

His invocation of the word "peace" seemed a little odd to me in several places, but it makes sense as a response to the idea of "ontological violence." More indication of the difficulty of trying to read the book without knowledge of this context.

Sorry, I've had to drop out of the conversation for a bit--problems at work.

I don't know much about Foucault--died of AIDS, right? but Nietzsche didn't end prettily, either, though from the little I've read it may not have had anything directly to do with his thinking.

Was this perhaps his dissertation? Even if not, it seems that this book might've been meant for a much more specialized audience.

This will probably sound too needlessly dismissive, but I say cut your losses, refresh yourself with Alan Sokal's book (as applicable here as to Sokal's particular targets, it seems), and move on to something from which you'll get more information.

Very insightful, Jesse--it was indeed his dissertation, or at least it began that way. But as for giving it up...I really don't want to, because I know there is good stuff here. If it weren't so hard to keep the book open and type at the same time I could quote some excellent bits. And I don't think he's being fraudulent in his rhetoric, the way some of Sokal's victims seem to have been. At any rate he's not engaging in pseudo-scientific "discourse." Fashion, maybe?

In any case, though, I think the reactions here indicate that it is de facto if not intentionally meant for a specialized audience.

Louise, that poem (one of Gertrude Stein's) was merely modern, not postmodern. As far as poetic practice is concerned, it seems to me that the biggest difference between the two is that modern was considerably more rigorous and more intellectually disciplined, in spite of its apparently chaotic surface. I'm not sure whether that applies to Stein or not, though.

Dale, I will definitely seek out that Coventry Patmore essay. I remember Patmore's name from a Victorian lit class long ago and have always wanted to read more of him.

There are some positives to postmodernism inasmuch as it offers a critique of Enlightenment assumptions about knowledge. The bad thing is, its critique is itself rooted in Enlightenment categories, so that it finds itself unable to offer any real epistemology alternative. To borrow a phrase from Huston Smith used in another context, it is totally apophatic about knowledge, but it is an apophaticism with no cataphatic backup.

The Enlightenment was wrong in that it limited knowledge to facts, science, ratiocination, etc. Postmodernism is correct in questioning this limitation, but since it, like the Enlightenment, rejects all other absolute truth, it has nowhere else to go but to retreat into subjectivism -- the true has become the "true for me," and that's really all there is.

While posturing itself as a critique of modernism, what it really is is modernism gone to seed. It is the dead end of the Enlightenment, and the only way out of the cul-de-sac is to begin looking seriously at pre-Enlightenment thought again.

I think this sentence that you quoted is the one that started me thinking about Sokal: “Within the world, beauty does not merely adorn an alien space, or cross the distance as a wayfarer, but is the true form of that distance, constituting it, as the grammar of difference.”

Of course, it's taken out of context, but it reminded me of the excerpts in Sokal's book, in that it seems to be using everyday concepts but in a metaphorical/literary/whatever world that is so far removed from experience as to be almost a novel in itself. In fact, I remember a conversation from a long time ago with a friend (who by now must be a professor of literary theory somewhere), in which he tried in vain to teach me how nonfiction is in fact no different from a novel, something he'd learned in his postmodern theory classes.

I can see now how there might be some truth to that, but only in a very vague and impractical (perhaps "in principle") sense, and I don't have much sympathy or use for it.

Of course, I'm totally willing to accept the proposition that I'm just ignorant and/or naive. I've spent very little time even attempting to study this sort of thing, so I probably shouldn't even be commenting. :-\

Actually that sentence made me think of Sokal, too, Jesse, although I don't think it crossed the boundary into abuse of scientific or mathematical terminology.

I'm actually something of an empiricist within certain limits and tend to be impatient with literary constructs that are overly vague and un-concrete. This seems to me to be one of those. Whatever "grammar of difference" means, I'm very doubtful that it needed to be expressed that way. Looking at it purely as a literary construct, I don't care for it--it obscures without adding anything aesthetically.

I think your friend who said there's no difference between fiction and non-fiction is...well, I started to say crazy, but let's just say very mistaken. This seems to me like various other intellectual pathologies, such as solipsism--in this case, rationalism run amuck, incapable of distinguising "influenced by the writer's culture and perceptions" etc etc and "totally invented." In a way it's like those insane variants of the slippery slope argument: better not go to the barber shop, because letting somebody cut your hair is ultimately the same thing as letting him cut your throat.

I agree, Rob, that does seem to be at least a part of what Hart is doing.

Gene Hargrove, in “Tom Bombadil and the Movies” (BB 5/03) cites a letter from Tolkien in which he says Bombadil is “not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’,” and quotes movie director Peter Jackson as saying that the Bombadil episode doesn’t really advance the story and doesn’t tell us things we need to know. What, then, does the Tom Bombadil sequence contribute to The Lord of the Rings?

Victorian poet Coventry Patmore’s paper “The Point of Rest in Art” may help us understand the very real value of Bombadil. (Interested persons will find the complete short essay in Patmore’s Principle in Art.) Beginning with examples derived from paintings, Patmore finds a punctum indifferans, a “point, generally quite insignificant in matter, on which, indeed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it involuntarily returns for repose.” This object is, in itself, “the least interesting point” in the whole canvas, but “all that is interesting” in the picture “is more or less unconsciously referred to it.” In a landscape it might be the “sawn-off end of a branch of a tree.” In Raphael’s “Dresden” Madonna, it is the Infant’s heel. The point of rest doesn’t create harmony where it does not exist, but where it does exist, “it will be strangely brought out and accentuated by this in itself often trifling, and sometimes, perhaps, even accidental accessory.” Patmore proposes this test: “Cover [these points] from sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole life of the picture[s] will be found to have been lowered.”

Patmore includes literary examples drawn from Shakespeare – the “unobtrusive character of Kent” in King Lear, etc. Kent is “the eye of the tragic storm which rages round it; and the departure, in various directions, of every character more or less from moderation, rectitude, or sanity, is the more clearly understood or felt from our more or less conscious reference to him.” Other Shakespearean characters also serve as a “peaceful focus radiating the calm of moral solution throughout all the difficulties and disasters of surrounding fate: a vital centre, which, like that of a great wheel, has little motion in itself, but which at once transmits and controls the fierce revolution of the circumference.”

I think this helps us to understand Bombadil’s very real contribution to our enjoyment of The Lord of the Rings. Always in the back of our minds, while we are occupied by the hurry and tumult of so many persons and events, we have the sense of that one “insignificant” but whole, innocent, uncorruptible person in his realm that is only a pinpoint on the map of Middle-earth. Gandalf emphasizes just this in his comments at the Council of Elrond. If summoned to the Council, Bombadil “‘would not have come.’” If the dreadful issues bound up with the Ring were explained to Bombadil, “‘he would not understand the need.’” If the Ring were given to him, he would forget it or discard it, because “‘[s]uch things have no hold on his mind.’”

Patmore says that “a point of rest and comparison is necessary only when the objects and interests are many and more or less conflicting.” If he had had a copy of The Lord of the Rings at hand, he would have been able to cite a perfect example of such a “point” in the character of Tom Bombadil.

"BB" is the Tolkien 'zine Beyond Bree.

I thought Coventry Patmore's idea of the "point of rest" in art an illuminating and understandable contribution to one aspect of the discussion of beauty.

I just added the Andrew Louth book to my "wish list", only to discover that it was already there. Rob G, you must have mentioned it here before!

Mac wrote, "I don't know that I have enough visual sense to find a point of rest in a great painting or sculpture. Thinking about it a little more, I'm not so sure it transfers very well to literature. I think what's bothering me is the idea of the eye involuntarily returning to it. I do think that Bombadil serves a purpose something like this, but my mind doesn't return to that episode in anything like the manner Patmore describes."

Do you think that there would have been no effect on LOTR if Tolkien had omitted the Bombadil episode?

I'll grant I'm putting a lot of weight on that "back of our minds" idea. Obviously, LOTR is not a painting, presenting in an instant an entire work to our attention, but is more like a piece of music, existing as something experienced over the course of time -- in the case of LOTR, probably quite a few days. I don't think that, when people reread the book, they find themselves thinking: "Oh, Bombadil! I'd completely forgotten about this part of the book," or wondering why the episode is there.

You've made me really glad that I didn't rush out and buy that book. I'm having enough trouble with Introduction to Christianity.

AMDG