Co-Celebrants of Being
A brief history of great letter-writing—and a look at why corresponding with one another mirrors the incredible access to Himself that God offers us through the Incarnation.
By Douglas V. Henry
Hearing of correspondence, a litterateur first thinks of a genre, celebrated instances of which stretch from classical Athens to modern America.
Consider Plato’s famed Seventh Letter, addressed to Syracusan friends of his protégé Dion. The Athenian philosopher justifies intervening with the tyrant Dionysius to “bring about friendship instead of war.” Despite spectacular failure, Plato’s ambitious attempts at political reform reveal to his dubious correspondents a philosophy worth its salt: “striving after what is noblest . . . [is] always right.”
St. Paul’s missionary letters share Plato’s penchant for occasionally self-justifying autobiography. The apostle, like Plato, also encourages his sometimes-uncertain audience. Yet time and again, St. Paul’s epistles crackle with spiritual fervor and earnest love of God, the likes of which are not seen in Plato’s correspondence. The philosopher’s letters chronicle, explain, teach. St. Paul’s epistles do more: they befriend, catechize, and inspire converts to lay down their lives for the kingdom of God.
Fervent piety runs through St. Paul’s letters, but another fervor inspires Abelard and Héloïse’s impassioned correspondence. Her “wit and her beauty would have stirred the dullest and most insensible heart,” Abelard writes. He was smitten, overwrought, and consumed by a romantic love that delighted—before it led to violent humiliation and the agonized memory of forbidden love. Héloïse, reading tear-blotted letters in the nunnery founded for her by her forlorn lover, pledged to love Abelard “with all the tenderness of my soul till the last moment of my life.” Soaring affection and immeasurable heartache trade places in the pair’s intimate revelations.
By contrast, nothing like personal affection appears in a letter received by the Grand Duchess Christina from Galileo. The great scientist thinks of little other than sketching a biblical hermeneutic compatible with his empirical epistemology. Single-minded focus guides his effort to show her Serene Highness how scriptural piety and heliocentrism may be united. Impersonal and workmanlike, Galileo’s correspondence looks less a letter than an essay.
A finer example of scientific correspondence arises between Princess Elizabeth of the Bohemians and René Descartes. Full of mutual respect and marked by probing questions and elucidation, these correspondents revel in intellectual friendship. Elizabeth praises Descartes’ “kindness and generosity.” She prizes his explanations and advice “among the greatest treasures” she possesses. Equally obliging, Descartes calls her correspondence “infinitely precious” and promises to keep it as “misers do their treasures, . . . grudging the sight of them to the rest of the world and placing their supreme happiness in looking at them.” Imagine—a Frenchman whose speculative metaphysical discourse shades over into courtly flattery!
Powers of astute observation and sparkling wit elevate commonplaces to profundity in letters written by Michel de Montaigne, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. Somewhat less composed than his ruminative essays, Montaigne’s letters nonetheless exemplify his brilliance and humanity, whether corresponding with his father, city officials, the king’s councilors, or his wife (a friend the likes of which “I have none . . . more intimate”).
Austen’s cleverness, probity, and sense of drama—in family relations, social commerce, and the world writ large—come to the fore in letters penned to sister Cassandra. Of a horticultural crisis, she writes, “I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.” Of high society at a ball, she relates, “There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome,” before telling of fat necks, bad breath, vulgar features, and ugly husbands. She writes self-consciously, apologizing for letters “not very long or very witty,” and admitting to “looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room.”
The incomparable Mark Twain apparently wrote whatever he thought in peripatetic letters posted from New York (“I have taken a liking to the abominable place”) to California (“fires are never lighted, and yet summer clothes are never worn—you wear spring clothing the year round”) to the Sandwich (or Hawaiian) Islands (“a perfect jubilee to me in the way of pleasure”). In a letter to his mother and sister dated June 21, 1866, he marvelously mixes self-confidence and self-deprecation: “I have loaned Mr. Burlingame pretty much everything I ever wrote. I guess he will be an almighty wise man by the time he wades through that lot.”
I could gloss Matteo Ricci’s epistolary reports, extol Flannery O’Connor’s prayerful missives to God, and honor Walker Percy and Shelby Foote’s six-decade-long correspondence. Thomas Merton’s letters to legendary publisher Robert Giroux are fascinating, and his open “Letters to a White Liberal” in Summer 1963 are most worth reading. What about comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse’s correspondence with the queen of crime novels, Agatha Christie? Anyone for Edith Wharton or Virginia Woolf, who wrote letters illuminative of their unique lives and times?
Among the varied kinds of writing—from epic poetry to Petrarchan sonnet, scientific report to long-form journalism, Bildungsroman to graphic novel—published correspondence is relatively uncommon. Nonetheless, it represents a perennially reclaimed genre that draws readers. Why do we delight in looking at others’ letters?
Often by design and always by default, what one writes in a letter and how one expresses it show one’s interests and priorities. Letters are revelatory.
Correspondence, whether between illustrious or ordinary persons, is special for many reasons. Letters are often intimate and given to self-disclosure, whether explicitly or by undertone. For well-known persons, correspondence presents important biography or historical context that would otherwise be inaccessible. Readers also find themselves drawn to the inherently relational quality of correspondence. It always directly addresses another party, prompting interest in the intended recipient. Sometimes correspondence is addressed to only one person, without expectation of a third-party audience, but many instances of famous correspondence reckon on a public readership. Indeed, correspondence earns its very name from its relationality—it responds to another’s interest; answers an actual or implied call to convey, share, or communicate; and rallies together those privy to the exchange.
The OED offers an instructive Latin etymology: correspondere unites “cor-” (or com-), meaning “together, with each other,” and “respondere,” meaning “to answer.” Cor-respondence is more personal and relational than, say, Aquinas’s austere respondeo, “I answer that,” which appears nearly three thousand times in the Summa Theologiae. A scholastic disputation responds, or answers, to reasonable objections. But for two parties who share friendship or common interests, correspondence with each other, not mere response, is the thing desired.
The term naturally leads one to conjure exemplary instances of letters, as I have done. Yet poets and philosophers alike ponder other senses of correspondence. Shakespeare’s Duke Senior reveals one sense when he celebrates nature’s resplendent correspondence: “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Here, the cosmos itself becomes God’s correspondence with us. We thus may read what God writes to us through nature, allowing of course for ambiguity or polysemy, and therefore, interpretation. Like Tennyson, we do not always easily descry the meaning of either ordinary words or nature’s language, “For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within.”
These two kinds of correspondence—one literary and the other natural—share some common features. I spoke earlier of letter-writers’ penchant for self-disclosure. Often by design and always by default, what one writes in a letter and how one expresses it show one’s interests and priorities. Letters are revelatory. Christians have long supposed that the world itself, too, discloses a message, one the Divine Author inscribes into the nature of things. Put differently, the world is one aspect of God’s self-disclosure to all those made in his image and capable of understanding. This is why St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that God’s “invisible attributes . . . have been clearly perceived . . . in the things that have been made.” Nature can be read as God’s love letter to us (although Hume’s Cleanthes and Philo memorably tussle over the notion).
Correspondence always presupposes a possible relation between the writer and her correspondents. A personally received message invites one not merely to respond, but correspond. Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden again bears attention. When Duke Senior hears “tongues in trees,” he is caught up short not merely because of the marvel. He is moved because at court—full of “painted pomp,” “peril,” and “the penalty of Adam”—words run to contrivance, intrigue, and disorder. But in the forest, he descries a concordant world in which natural beauty communicates a good and intelligible truth. The Duke enthuses, “This is no flattery; these are counsellors / That feelingly persuade me what I am.” He revels, he praises, he cor-responds.
There is a biblical analogue. In gratitude to the divine correspondent who inscribes his word upon our hearts, we return praise out of the abundance of the heart. This is cor-respondence of a most fitting kind. It almost makes plausible an inventive etymology in which the cor, Latin for heart, unites with respondere, to answer. When our hearts answer God’s word, which is written in nature and in our very being, we nearly reach the zenith of correspondence. The high point arrives not in a single answering heart, but in a creaturely plenitude that encompasses the communion of saints and all “the mountains and the hills [that] break forth into singing” at the sight of God.
We are able to correspond with each other, writing and reading and returning letters, because our language has purchase on reality.
It would be difficult to overstate the beauty and wonder of such a state of affairs. Mirabile dictu! The splendid world created out of nothing by the love of the Divine Logos—and bestowed with meaning by the God who made it and us—can be apprehended by our minds, described by our words, and communicated to others. In light of this profound reality, we are not, in the final estimation, estranged from either the world or our neighbors. We are at home in a correspondent cosmos fit for our understanding.
On the other hand, it is easy to understate the beauty and wonder of such a state of affairs. So-called correspondence theories of truth can be limned in formulaic, procrustean fashion. If the world did no more than present brute facts to which we matched prosaic statements, asserting truth when they correspond, our mental life would be pitifully austere. Yet this is a caricature of correspondence. Such silly misrepresentations of the relation between words and the world have recurred from fifth-century Athens to the present. Ours is no cosmic matching quiz in which we simply pair sentences with facts. Although the late Richard Rorty wrote an important book that incredulously regards anyone who treats language as a mere mirror of reality, no one really thinks of language in that way.
Somewhere between naïve realism and radical nominalism lies the richness of our actual human situation, in which our experience, understanding, and speech harmonize. They correspond, in the sense of answering together the questions that our existence poses. Our language cor-responds to actions, feelings, ideas, perceptions, sounds, things, times, wishes, and much more. Our words bear sufficiently stable meaning to facilitate others’ understanding. And the world itself has its own dependable order. The ancient Greeks were right to see nature as a kosmos, a beautifully ordered arrangement in which our lives have a place, rather than a chaos, a violently disordered abyss in which no foothold can be gained. Moreover, some of those Greeks understood that seeing the world as a kosmos leads naturally to thoughts of logos and theos. They recognized rational theology as the ground in which correspondence is rooted and grows.
Informed not only by this tradition, but by his Jewish messianism and life-altering encounter with the Messiah himself, St. John begins his Gospel with astonishing lines: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Logos of which John writes is not a falsely reified concept, an imaginative gambit without reference, but the uniting of a rational Person and the ground of Being itself. Thus does the apostle vividly proclaim the correspondent character of the cosmos: originary Word, transcendent God, and the indwelling, incarnate presence of both in the World “answer together,” enabling our earth-bound words to reach the heavenly Father who seeks correspondence with us. That this Word was in the beginning and dwelt among us betokens the deepest intimacy and profoundest correspondence imaginable of word and world.
When we are shorn of trust in language, and live as if in a dumb, disenchanted world, our desire for correspondence with others is enervated.
Writers as divergent as Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Orwell worry about the unhinging of words from things. Hopkins died the year Nietzsche wrote with regrettable cynicism that “we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar,” so the English Jesuit did not likely read the German atheist’s Twilight of the Idols. Hopkins’ poetry, however, responds with assurance to Nietzschean scorn. While pushing convention’s limits, Hopkin’s poems manifest his belief in God and grammar. His prodigious oeuvre expresses faith in a divinely superintended world in which words correspond to the things portrayed. Orwell held an undoubtedly different religious outlook, but his well-known essay, “Politics and the English Language,” makes clear a similar disdain for imprecise, debased language that gives “an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” We must recover confidence in the power of words to convey truth, he argues.
C.S. Lewis also explores the derangement of words and things, most memorably in That Hideous Strength. Like Hopkins and Orwell, he offers a better way. Guided by his Christian Platonism, Lewis dramatizes a cosmic correspondence of word and world that enfolds nature’s speech and human discourse. When Professor Dimble utters the Great Tongue, “it was as if the words . . . were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For . . . the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop.” But for the Fall, Lewis intimates, our words would participate more deeply in the heavens’ perpetual declaration of the glory of God, whose “voice goes out through all the earth.”
We need renewed trust in what language itself betokens. Ours are world-weary, distrustful times. Bluster, guile, manipulation, and ennui break asunder the correspondence proper to words and things. Moreover, neglect of Arden dulls our ears to the trees, brooks, and stones that would cor-respond with us. When we are shorn of trust in language, and live as if in a dumb, disenchanted world, our desire for correspondence with others is enervated. Small wonder we settle for bursts of self-preoccupied posturing on social media and eschew the patient, communicative self-disclosure of personal letters like Abelard, Montaigne, Austen, and O’Connor once wrote.
In Walker Percy’s Symbol and Existence, the great Catholic thinker and novelist suggests that in learning to name things—his example is a two-year-old who learns “ball”—we “hit upon the secret of knowing what the world is and of becoming a person in the world.” When we first self-consciously name something, “it is very likely the most portentous happening” in our development. But Percy goes further. The child who learns to name taps into an inchoate power not only to unite thought and existence, but to bind herself to others in shared gladness. “[I]t is the office of the poet to give us a word. If the poet is good . . . , we rejoice at the naming and say Yes! I know what you mean! Once again we are co-celebrants of being.”
Percy recognized that the Incarnation provides warrant for a world of authentic correspondence. In that world, with the best words we can muster, we should delight in answering together the God who made us, in naming the world marked by the signs of his love, and in corresponding with persons made, like us, in his image. Because “the Word became flesh,” we are invited to see ourselves as correspondents of greater purpose, whether writing letters to friends or lovers, or longing in prayerful reverie for the redemption of the world.
Douglas V. Henry, Ph.D., is Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. His published work addresses such varied writers as Plato, Boethius, John Bunyan, Iris Murdoch, Walker Percy, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Cormac McCarthy, and it ranges across diverse topics including allegory, divine hiddenness, doubt, ecumenism, freedom, hope, and love. He is currently at work on a constructive critique of the modern university entitled Three Rival Versions of Education.