{"id":3643,"date":"2021-06-30T17:52:24","date_gmt":"2021-06-30T17:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=3643"},"modified":"2021-09-30T18:34:54","modified_gmt":"2021-09-30T18:34:54","slug":"co-celebrants-of-being","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2021\/06\/30\/co-celebrants-of-being\/","title":{"rendered":"Co-Celebrants of Being"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Co-Celebrants of Being<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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A brief history of great letter-writing\u2014and a look at why corresponding with one another mirrors the incredible access to Himself that God offers us through the Incarnation.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Douglas V. Henry
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Hearing of correspondence, a litterateur first thinks of a genre, celebrated instances of which stretch from classical Athens to modern America.<\/p>

Consider Plato\u2019s famed Seventh Letter, addressed to Syracusan friends of his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Dion. The Athenian philosopher justifies intervening with the tyrant Dionysius to \u201cbring about friendship instead of war.\u201d Despite spectacular failure, Plato\u2019s ambitious attempts at political reform reveal to his dubious correspondents a philosophy worth its salt: \u201cstriving after what is noblest . . . [is] always right.\u201d<\/p>

St. Paul\u2019s missionary letters share Plato\u2019s penchant for occasionally self-justifying autobiography. The apostle, like Plato, also encourages his sometimes-uncertain audience. Yet time and again, St. Paul\u2019s epistles crackle with spiritual fervor and earnest love of God, the likes of which are not seen in Plato\u2019s correspondence. The philosopher\u2019s letters chronicle, explain, teach. St. Paul\u2019s epistles do more: they befriend, catechize, and inspire converts to lay down their lives for the kingdom of God.<\/p>

Fervent piety runs through St. Paul\u2019s letters, but another fervor inspires Abelard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse\u2019s impassioned correspondence. Her \u201cwit and her beauty would have stirred the dullest and most insensible heart,\u201d Abelard writes. He was smitten, overwrought, and consumed by a romantic love that delighted\u2014before it led to violent humiliation and the agonized memory of forbidden love. H\u00e9lo\u00efse, reading tear-blotted letters in the nunnery founded for her by her forlorn lover, pledged to love Abelard \u201cwith all the tenderness of my soul till the last moment of my life.\u201d Soaring affection and immeasurable heartache trade places in the pair\u2019s intimate revelations.<\/p>

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\u2019s correspondence looks less a letter than an essay.<\/p>

A finer example of scientific correspondence arises between Princess Elizabeth of the Bohemians and Ren\u00e9 Descartes. Full of mutual respect and marked by probing questions and elucidation, these correspondents revel in intellectual friendship. Elizabeth praises Descartes\u2019 \u201ckindness and generosity.\u201d She prizes his explanations and advice \u201camong the greatest treasures\u201d she possesses. Equally obliging, Descartes calls her correspondence \u201cinfinitely precious\u201d and promises to keep it as \u201cmisers do their treasures, . . . grudging the sight of them to the rest of the world and placing their supreme happiness in looking at them.\u201d Imagine\u2014a Frenchman whose speculative metaphysical discourse shades over into courtly flattery!<\/p>

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\u2019s letters nonetheless exemplify his brilliance and humanity, whether corresponding with his father, city officials, the king\u2019s councilors, or his wife (a friend the likes of which \u201cI have none . . . more intimate\u201d).<\/p>

Austen\u2019s cleverness, probity, and sense of drama\u2014in family relations, social commerce, and the world writ large\u2014come to the fore in letters penned to sister Cassandra. Of a horticultural crisis, she writes, \u201cI will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.\u201d Of high society at a ball, she relates, \u201cThere were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome,\u201d before telling of fat necks, bad breath, vulgar features, and ugly husbands. She writes self-consciously, apologizing for letters \u201cnot very long or very witty,\u201d and admitting to \u201clooking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room.\u201d<\/p>

The incomparable Mark Twain apparently wrote whatever he thought in peripatetic letters posted from New York (\u201cI have taken a liking to the abominable place\u201d) to California (\u201cfires are never lighted, and yet summer clothes are never worn\u2014you wear spring clothing the year round\u201d) to the Sandwich (or Hawaiian) Islands (\u201ca perfect jubilee to me in the way of pleasure\u201d). In a letter to his mother and sister dated June 21, 1866, he marvelously mixes self-confidence and self-deprecation: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>

I could gloss Matteo Ricci\u2019s epistolary reports, extol Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s prayerful missives to God, and honor Walker Percy and Shelby Foote\u2019s six-decade-long correspondence. Thomas Merton\u2019s letters to legendary publisher Robert Giroux are fascinating, and his open \u201cLetters to a White Liberal\u201d in Summer 1963 are most worth reading. What about comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse\u2019s 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?<\/p>

Among the varied kinds of writing\u2014from epic poetry to Petrarchan sonnet, scientific report to long-form journalism, Bildungsroman to graphic novel\u2014published correspondence is relatively uncommon. Nonetheless, it represents a perennially reclaimed genre that draws readers. Why do we delight in looking at others\u2019 letters?<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Often by design and always by default, what one writes in a letter and how one expresses it show one\u2019s interests and priorities. Letters are revelatory.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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\u2014it responds to another\u2019s interest; answers an actual or implied call to convey, share, or communicate; and rallies together those privy to the exchange.<\/p>

The OED<\/em> offers an instructive Latin etymology: correspondere<\/em> unites \u201ccor-\u201d (or com-), meaning \u201ctogether, with each other,\u201d and \u201crespondere,\u201d meaning \u201cto answer.\u201d Cor-respondence is more personal and relational than, say, Aquinas\u2019s austere respondeo<\/em>, \u201cI answer that,\u201d which appears nearly three thousand times in the Summa Theologiae<\/em>. A scholastic disputation responds, or answers, to reasonable objections. But for two parties who share friendship or common interests, correspondence<\/em> with each other, not mere response, is the thing desired.<\/p>

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\u2019s Duke Senior reveals one sense when he celebrates nature\u2019s resplendent correspondence: \u201ctongues in trees, books in the running brooks, \/ Sermons in stones, and good in everything.\u201d Here, the cosmos itself becomes God\u2019s 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\u2019s language, \u201cFor words, like Nature, half reveal \/ And half conceal the Soul within.\u201d<\/p>

These two kinds of correspondence\u2014one literary and the other natural\u2014share some common features. I spoke earlier of letter-writers\u2019 penchant for self-disclosure. Often by design and always by default, what one writes in a letter and how one expresses it show one\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cinvisible attributes . . . have been clearly perceived . . . in the things that have been made.\u201d Nature can be read as God\u2019s love letter to us (although Hume\u2019s Cleanthes and Philo memorably tussle over the notion).<\/p>

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\u2019s Forest of Arden again bears attention. When Duke Senior hears \u201ctongues in trees,\u201d he is caught up short not merely because of the marvel. He is moved because at court\u2014full of \u201cpainted pomp,\u201d \u201cperil,\u201d and \u201cthe penalty of Adam\u201d\u2014words 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, \u201cThis is no flattery; these are counsellors \/ That feelingly persuade me what I am.\u201d He revels, he praises, he cor-responds.<\/p>

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<\/em>, Latin for heart, unites with respondere<\/em>, to answer. When our hearts answer God\u2019s 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 \u201cthe mountains and the hills [that] break forth into singing\u201d at the sight of God.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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We are able to correspond with each other, writing and reading and returning letters, because our language has purchase on reality.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Another sense of correspondence underlies the two forms, literary and natural, explored above. This third sense invokes the deep-down, recondite correspondence that is possible between ideas and things, word and world, mind and nature, thought and reality. We are able to correspond with each other, writing and reading and returning letters, because our language has purchase on reality. Put another way, language itself corresponds\u2014it is caught up in a call and response relationship with the world in which it participates and to which it refers.

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It would be difficult to overstate the beauty and wonder of such a state of affairs. Mirabile dictu<\/em>! The splendid world created out of nothing by the love of the Divine Logos\u2014and bestowed with meaning by the God who made it and us\u2014can 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.<\/p>

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On the other hand, it is easy to understate<\/em> 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.<\/p>

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Somewhere between na\u00efve 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\u2019 understanding. And the world itself has its own dependable order. The ancient Greeks were right to see nature as a kosmos<\/em>, 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<\/em> leads naturally to thoughts of logos<\/em> and theos<\/em>. They recognized rational theology as the ground in which correspondence is rooted and grows.<\/p>

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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: \u201cIn 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.\u201d 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 \u201canswer together,\u201d 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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 \u201cwe are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar,\u201d so the English Jesuit did not likely read the German atheist\u2019s Twilight of the Idols<\/em>. Hopkins\u2019 poetry, however, responds with assurance to Nietzschean scorn. While pushing convention\u2019s limits, Hopkin\u2019s poems manifest his belief in God and grammar. His prodigious oeuvre<\/em> 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, \u201cPolitics and the English Language,\u201d makes clear a similar disdain for imprecise, debased language that gives \u201can appearance of solidity to pure wind.\u201d We must recover confidence in the power of words to convey truth, he argues.<\/p>

C.S. Lewis also explores the derangement of words and things, most memorably in That Hideous Strength<\/em>. 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\u2019s speech and human discourse. When Professor Dimble utters the Great Tongue, \u201cit 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.\u201d But for the Fall, Lewis intimates, our words would participate more deeply in the heavens\u2019 perpetual declaration of the glory of God, whose \u201cvoice goes out through all the earth.\u201d<\/p>

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\u2019Connor once wrote.<\/p>

In Walker Percy\u2019s Symbol and Existence<\/em>, the great Catholic thinker and novelist suggests that in learning to name things\u2014his example is a two-year-old who learns \u201cball\u201d\u2014we \u201chit upon the secret of knowing what the world is and of becoming a person in the world.\u201d When we first self-consciously name something, \u201cit is very likely the most portentous happening\u201d 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. \u201c[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!<\/em> Once again we are co-celebrants of being.\u201d<\/p>

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 \u201cthe Word became flesh,\u201d 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Douglas V. Henry<\/strong>, Ph.D., is Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. His published work addresses\u00a0such 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 <\/em>Three Rival Versions of Education.<\/em><\/p>

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A brief history of great letter-writing\u2014and a look at why corresponding with one another mirrors the incredible access to Himself that God offers us through the Incarnation. 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