Author: py3ak

(Quotes from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria)

Still the Church presents to every man of learning and genius a profession, in which he may cherish a rational hope of being able to unite the widest schemes of literary utility with the strictest performance of professional duties.

This attitude seems rather unfortunate: not, of course, because many of the authors whose maintenance was provided by the Church of England did not both diligently discharge their duties and also write widely and learnedly; but because, in spite of prohibiting any positive ministerial neglect, still would view the ministry of the Gospel as a means to another end. It is acknowledged that it is considered a noble means; and it is acknowledged that the end in view is quite the opposite of mean. But it cannot be consistent with the attitude of the Apostle to the Gentiles that preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ should be subordinated to any other purpose. And Coleridge�s rather skewed attitude is demonstrated a little lower on the same page:

That not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure morality, the mere fragments of which
�the lofty grave tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight received
In brief sententious precepts;
(Paradise Regained)

and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato found most hard to learn and deemed it still more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as commonplace, is a phenomenon, which must withhold all but the minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading-desk. Yet those, who confine the efficiency of an established Church to its public offices, can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate imitation; this, the inobtrusive, continuous agency of a Protestant Church establishment, this it is, which the patriot, and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price.

Here the point to be emphasized is the curious connotation of the line, undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading-desk. This does not seem to place the highest value on the work of the pulpit, and the following statements make it regrettably clear (for we would fain think well of Coleridge in all parts and relations) that he thinks of the civilizing influences of the Church above and beyond its saving influences. The point is not to undervalue the effects of the Gospel on society as a whole (though here too, I think we must expect more from the proclamation of Christ than from the discreet attendance at garden parties and the citation of Horace), but to lay the emphasis with Paul that it has pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe: their salvation is fundamental to other influences (at least those of a perdurable nature): and it is primary. We may have the former without the latter, but we shall never have the latter without the former.

Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam, “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion”

The present dominance of aspersion and ridicule in American public life is a reflex of the fact that we are assumed to want, and in many cases perhaps do want, attitude much more than information. If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno or Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think. That is, they short-circuit the functions of individual judgment and obviate the exercise of individual conscience. So it is to a greater or lesser degree with the media in general. It is painful to watch decent and distinguished people struggle to function politically in this non-rational and valueless environment.
Finally, granting that consensus enforcement, and the endless small concessions made to endless small coercions, are no doubt universal in human civilization, they cannot be without cost, precisely because they disable courage. No one can truly submit to unreasonable coercion�by suppressing one’s thinking, one’s identity, one’s metaphysics�without falling a little in one’s own estimation. And no one can deal in coercion without cynicism. Both sides of the transaction compromise.
Cultures commonly employ the methods of cults, making their members subject and dependent. And nations at intervals march lockstep to enormity and disaster. A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candor, and disrupt thought.

Austin Farrer, “The Christian Apologist” in Light on C.S. Lewis, Jocelyn Gibbs, ed.

[Speaking of differences in apologists] There is what one might call the Munich school, who will always sell the pass in the belief that their position can be more happily defended from foothills to the rear. Such people are not commonly seen as apologists. They are reckoned to be New Theologians. They are too busy learning from their enemies to do much in defence of their friends. The typical apologist is a man whose every dyke is his last ditch. He will carry the way into the enemy’s country; he will yield not an inch of his own.
(…)
The day in which apologetic flourishes is the day of orthodoxy in discredit; an age full of people talked out of a faith in which they were reared. To say that they want to believe if they could only see how is doubtless to simplify, for who are they? Which is the self, among all the warring selves in any breast? The very thing that reconversion does is to persuade a man to take a believing self as his fundamental self. We may say at the best that belief is a real (if smothered) attitude in such minds; and it is that offers an opening to the apologetic approach. ‘You have been rattled and browbeaten,’ says the apologist. ‘You have been sold a false image of faith and an inflated estimate of her enemies. Give faith her rights, and you will again believe.’�’Thank you, we will,’ replies a grateful audience.
(…)
It is commonly said that if rational argument is so seldom the cause of conviction, philosophical apologists must largely be wasting their shot. The premise is true, but the conclusion does not follow. For though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.
(…)
A voice which says ‘You must adopt the posture of an admittedly de-Christianized world; you may wriggle into a Christian attitude if you can’ is presuming that neither the authority of revelation nor the doctrine of original sin can be taken seriously.