De Amore Christiani: Collected Thoughts I
Last Thursday, at the end of Medieval Literature, Dr. Libby asked us a challenging question.
"How would you go about artistically proving that there's something more ultimate than sex? In other words, what would a great Christian romance look like?"
We students pondered in silence for a few moments; then, fragments of ideas began to surface.
"Well... has there ever been a great Christian.."
"What about Crime and Punishment?"
"That's what I was thinking."
"Certainly nothing written now..."
Several voices: "Certainly not!"
Although a few suggestions were put forward, no one had a workable idea. No one could even point to a precedent. And everyone was annoyed to discover that great stories seem to end infallibly at the altar.
"How can you show anything if you won't talk about what happens after the vows?"
It was a rather disheartening realization in one way, to think that the Christian world has--in our limited but classical experience--failed to produce a single shining example in these two thousand years of existence.
"Maybe," I thought to myself, "Maybe that just goes to show that we don't need such a story. Maybe we're living it, and maybe that's enough."
But I wasn't satisfied. So I sat down again to think, and think, and think.... what would a great Christian romance look like? What might be the shape of it; what its nature; what its meaning? And, in pursuit of answers to these questions, I cast my mind back...
When I was a child, I thought as a child. That is to say, I disregarded romance as an inexplicable adult mania, something morbid but--paradoxically--wholesome, like their obsession with lima beans and other vegetables. Being always a late-bloomer, these ideas continued more or less in kind until I was about fourteen, and were not wholly disposed of until sometime in my twentieth year.
As a teenager, romantic love became suddenly dangerous and interesting, though no less inexplicable and still quite distasteful. It became, also, a badge of longed-for maturity. Grown-ups are in love. Grown-ups understand (or at least seem to understand) love. If I want to be a grown up.... Q.E.D. Like driving a car or holding my own in an academic debate or mastering the essay (yet not quite like any of them), this thing called romance became one more skill-set that could be learned. Girls my own age were eager (in a shy way) to acquire proficiency in the subject. "Proficiency" had nothing to do with sex. Rather, it was a sort of point system in which the goal of the game was to get attention--lots of attention--from the other half of the species.
The whole idea interested me as a subject for abstract analysis (in fact, I analyzed it to death), but also I found it intolerable. Especially I hated flirting, as I saw it done in the halls of private school and the church lobby after services--never overt, but always so terribly lacking in sincerity or weight. It was light, unsteady, chimerical--I hated it.
In addition, my own preferred attitude toward whatever was dangerous amounted to a single principle: "Run as long as you can, then turn and fight like a wildcat." I maintained that principle with zeal towards three things: cars, boys, and logic. I wanted nothing to do with any of them, and consequently left high school at eighteen with a barely-won driver's license (acquired three months before graduation), very little idea of modus ponens, and a settled reputation for a sharp tongue with the boys---a regular Katherina. What I didn't know about flirting technique could have filled a very large book, and whatever I gained in righteousness thereby I lost in smug self-satisfaction that "I was not like those girls." In fact, I was just like them, not in technique but in desires: selfish, frightened, attention-seeking, conceited, and confused.
I have said so much in order to illustrate one particular kind of "love": the kind that is done for selfish reasons and means less than a thimbleful of dirt. Over and over, to my pain, I have read of and seen and even (I am ashamed to admit) practiced it. I was never a flirt in the sense of calculated gestures or manipulation--that was not my way. But my heart was the same as the most determined flirt that ever stepped in shoe-leather. I conceived of love as that which would conclude in the acquisition of a male devotee, to worship at my shrine for the rest of my natural life. It looks pretty put that way, doesn't it? But that's what it was, and I am sorry to say that I knew very few girls who felt any differently. I am even more sorry to note that few Christian romance novels paint a different picture.
Indeed, I am angry to think of it. Why, silly little fool--my heart--did you put your faith in stories that were clearly untruthful, unreal? Why did you choose to believe them rather than the quiet daily example of your mother, your friends' mothers, and all the noble women you knew? Living with them, could you not see that love is other than stories say? And you, you writers of romance novels, did you never stop to think how many girls would be influenced--moved in their deepest hearts--by the lies you wrote? They were lies, and it is no good to protest that all fiction is lying. Stories are beautiful things with natures of their own, and those natures may be good or bad. Why did you put evil souls in shreds of bright glittering garments? Why did you betray young Christian girls? Did you hate us, that you used us so? Why did you do it---and why do you still?
Whatever the great Christian romance is, it is emphatically not the beautiful young man and woman whose faults are infinitely excusable; whose virtues consist exclusively of passion, quick wits, and a certain vulnerability; whose whole personalities are unstable as thought and subject always to temptation; whose whole beings and identities are wrapped up in the idolatry of one another. Give me your Lauras, your Sarahs, your Kates, your Jessicas... yes, and your Marks, Erics, Jordans, Johns, Joshuas---let me take them as you have written them and submit them to the test of the everyday that my mothers and noble matrons meet with such beautiful love. Not one will pass. Not one.
These feeble heroes and heroines are never put to the trial because they are not the sort to pass trials--their virtues are only passion and vulnerability impersonating virtue. Their faults likewise are untried rather than corrected, or, worse, excused by these same "virtues". A person who can pass through fire and come out the other side refined gold must have gold ore to begin with---something heavy and massy, not light and inconsequent.
No! A thousand times no! Is this the model you would have me take for my imagination's picture of the Bride of Christ as she ought to be... as she in some sense is already? Are these heroes to serve as my image of a Christian husband--or worse yet, of Christ? Oh, evil thought! Strike it down, away, get it out of my sight! It is an abomination to think so little of my Lord and God. All pains are as prickings of the little finger compared to such a great agony--an agony of the whole body--and soul!
This, then, is not Christian romance. What, then, is it?
"How would you go about artistically proving that there's something more ultimate than sex? In other words, what would a great Christian romance look like?"
We students pondered in silence for a few moments; then, fragments of ideas began to surface.
"Well... has there ever been a great Christian.."
"What about Crime and Punishment?"
"That's what I was thinking."
"Certainly nothing written now..."
Several voices: "Certainly not!"
Although a few suggestions were put forward, no one had a workable idea. No one could even point to a precedent. And everyone was annoyed to discover that great stories seem to end infallibly at the altar.
"How can you show anything if you won't talk about what happens after the vows?"
It was a rather disheartening realization in one way, to think that the Christian world has--in our limited but classical experience--failed to produce a single shining example in these two thousand years of existence.
"Maybe," I thought to myself, "Maybe that just goes to show that we don't need such a story. Maybe we're living it, and maybe that's enough."
But I wasn't satisfied. So I sat down again to think, and think, and think.... what would a great Christian romance look like? What might be the shape of it; what its nature; what its meaning? And, in pursuit of answers to these questions, I cast my mind back...
When I was a child, I thought as a child. That is to say, I disregarded romance as an inexplicable adult mania, something morbid but--paradoxically--wholesome, like their obsession with lima beans and other vegetables. Being always a late-bloomer, these ideas continued more or less in kind until I was about fourteen, and were not wholly disposed of until sometime in my twentieth year.
As a teenager, romantic love became suddenly dangerous and interesting, though no less inexplicable and still quite distasteful. It became, also, a badge of longed-for maturity. Grown-ups are in love. Grown-ups understand (or at least seem to understand) love. If I want to be a grown up.... Q.E.D. Like driving a car or holding my own in an academic debate or mastering the essay (yet not quite like any of them), this thing called romance became one more skill-set that could be learned. Girls my own age were eager (in a shy way) to acquire proficiency in the subject. "Proficiency" had nothing to do with sex. Rather, it was a sort of point system in which the goal of the game was to get attention--lots of attention--from the other half of the species.
The whole idea interested me as a subject for abstract analysis (in fact, I analyzed it to death), but also I found it intolerable. Especially I hated flirting, as I saw it done in the halls of private school and the church lobby after services--never overt, but always so terribly lacking in sincerity or weight. It was light, unsteady, chimerical--I hated it.
In addition, my own preferred attitude toward whatever was dangerous amounted to a single principle: "Run as long as you can, then turn and fight like a wildcat." I maintained that principle with zeal towards three things: cars, boys, and logic. I wanted nothing to do with any of them, and consequently left high school at eighteen with a barely-won driver's license (acquired three months before graduation), very little idea of modus ponens, and a settled reputation for a sharp tongue with the boys---a regular Katherina. What I didn't know about flirting technique could have filled a very large book, and whatever I gained in righteousness thereby I lost in smug self-satisfaction that "I was not like those girls." In fact, I was just like them, not in technique but in desires: selfish, frightened, attention-seeking, conceited, and confused.
I have said so much in order to illustrate one particular kind of "love": the kind that is done for selfish reasons and means less than a thimbleful of dirt. Over and over, to my pain, I have read of and seen and even (I am ashamed to admit) practiced it. I was never a flirt in the sense of calculated gestures or manipulation--that was not my way. But my heart was the same as the most determined flirt that ever stepped in shoe-leather. I conceived of love as that which would conclude in the acquisition of a male devotee, to worship at my shrine for the rest of my natural life. It looks pretty put that way, doesn't it? But that's what it was, and I am sorry to say that I knew very few girls who felt any differently. I am even more sorry to note that few Christian romance novels paint a different picture.
Indeed, I am angry to think of it. Why, silly little fool--my heart--did you put your faith in stories that were clearly untruthful, unreal? Why did you choose to believe them rather than the quiet daily example of your mother, your friends' mothers, and all the noble women you knew? Living with them, could you not see that love is other than stories say? And you, you writers of romance novels, did you never stop to think how many girls would be influenced--moved in their deepest hearts--by the lies you wrote? They were lies, and it is no good to protest that all fiction is lying. Stories are beautiful things with natures of their own, and those natures may be good or bad. Why did you put evil souls in shreds of bright glittering garments? Why did you betray young Christian girls? Did you hate us, that you used us so? Why did you do it---and why do you still?
Whatever the great Christian romance is, it is emphatically not the beautiful young man and woman whose faults are infinitely excusable; whose virtues consist exclusively of passion, quick wits, and a certain vulnerability; whose whole personalities are unstable as thought and subject always to temptation; whose whole beings and identities are wrapped up in the idolatry of one another. Give me your Lauras, your Sarahs, your Kates, your Jessicas... yes, and your Marks, Erics, Jordans, Johns, Joshuas---let me take them as you have written them and submit them to the test of the everyday that my mothers and noble matrons meet with such beautiful love. Not one will pass. Not one.
These feeble heroes and heroines are never put to the trial because they are not the sort to pass trials--their virtues are only passion and vulnerability impersonating virtue. Their faults likewise are untried rather than corrected, or, worse, excused by these same "virtues". A person who can pass through fire and come out the other side refined gold must have gold ore to begin with---something heavy and massy, not light and inconsequent.
No! A thousand times no! Is this the model you would have me take for my imagination's picture of the Bride of Christ as she ought to be... as she in some sense is already? Are these heroes to serve as my image of a Christian husband--or worse yet, of Christ? Oh, evil thought! Strike it down, away, get it out of my sight! It is an abomination to think so little of my Lord and God. All pains are as prickings of the little finger compared to such a great agony--an agony of the whole body--and soul!
This, then, is not Christian romance. What, then, is it?
posted by Praelucor at 6:20 PM
4 Comments:
I think the only Christian romance is with God -- and then, amazingly, one finds the same passion for God in the heart of another. So it is shared passion for God above, acted out in sacrifice to each other.
Oh, I don't know ... I think the Christian romances I read are beautifully understated ... much like real life.
What about the Anne books?
What about Little Men?
What about Little House on the Prairie?
What about That Hideous Strength (excellent example, I think!)
I agree, Christy, that examples of Christian romance are everywhere, and that they are characterized by:
1) Selflessness
2) Faithfulness
3) Centered outside of their partner (e.g. on Christ)
4) Romance (He, pursuing; she, responding)
Christian married sex, rightly understood, is simply the physical expression of a life of romance, marked by these qualities I've described above, in my experience.
Boy, do I love my wife!
Maybe I've said this before, but the Bible seems to be the very definition of a Christian romance. The question is, since the Bible can never equaled, either in its scope or profundity (it is, after all, non-fiction) and certainly not in its authorship; What is the Christian approach to creating works of literature that reflect it? Lewis did it so well in his Space Trilogy, by creating worlds of the hypothetical and imagining how, given certain circumstances, true Christian love would look.
It is in the interface between the Divine and human that the best art is born. I think of the unmatched work of an artist like Rembrandt, or a musician like Bach or Cesar Franck, or a writer like Lewis. These men were devoted to the First Romance, and they reflected it in their art.
Sorry for these rambling thoughts. -PCS
Hmm. I found That Hideous Strength to be rather disturbing, and the commentary about love, especially for Lewis, who wanted to be a poet and who admired Spenser (Bower of Bliss and Garden of Adonis anyone?), was rather more like philosophy than story.
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