Ordained Servant: The Orthodox Presbyterian Church

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has gained considerable notoriety in the Reformed world in recent years, as a number of Christian writers have drawn from and expounded upon the insights in his 2007 book, A Secular Age. In his latest volume, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, the prolific nonagenarian considers how poetry from the Romantic era and beyond responds to the disenchantment that took place as a result of the Enlightenment, resulting in a shift from seeing the world as having its own natural order and mysterious agency to adopting “a picture of the universe as the realm of mechanical causation, without intrinsic human meaning” (179). This reduces reality (including human beings themselves) to something subject to human manipulation and technocratic control. While Taylor does not address this in this book, in our society this is largely done through the propagandistic shaping of narratives and “vibes” that inform the public mood and regulate behavior. This bears mentioning because it is such an obvious misuse of language, and language is central in Cosmic Connections.

The book draws upon the way Romantic poets used language in their efforts to counteract disenchantment, as they sought to reveal the true nature of the larger order and thereby bring man to a point of self-realization. As Taylor puts it,

The central notion here is that this is what revelation through a work of art as “symbol” does. It doesn’t just inform you about the links in and with the cosmos. It makes them palpable for you in a way which moves you and hence restores your link to them. . . . [Poetry] evokes for us, gives us a vivid sense of what it is like to be in the situation of the lover, the bereaved, the devout seeker of God. Or otherwise put, it invokes the intentional object of the emotion. (20–21, 70)

Another way Taylor explains this is by saying that a poem can open up an “interspace” of interaction between us and the world, a concept that Taylor puts forth as a third way of discovering human meaning, “challenging the simple distinction [between] ontological versus psychological” (55), that is, between the reality that exists external to the human mind versus that which is the product of the mind. For Taylor, the interspace created by poetry is not merely subjective, but situates us before nature in a revelatory manner and gives “a powerful sense of [nature’s] meaning for our purposes, our fulfillment, or our destiny” (85).

The bulk of the book consists of chapters in which Taylor traces this idea in the works of the poets Hölderlin, Novalis, Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Eliot, and Miłosz, as well as several others along the way. While there is much to ponder here, it will be best appreciated by avid poetry readers who are already familiar with these works, as Taylor strings together citation after citation, many in the original German or French (with translation). In spite of the amount of space devoted to this, whatever insights into the natural order Taylor derives from these poets remain fairly vague. Perhaps this is related to his appreciation for the Symbolist movement in poetry, which condemned works that attempted to give exact representations of reality and made indefiniteness a virtue (475–76). Indefiniteness is indeed an important aesthetic quality, as Emily Dickinson shows in this poem:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—[1]

Taylor’s fondness for indefiniteness extends well beyond the realm of aesthetics, even finding expression in the way he follows Miłosz in preferring an “open and human variant of Catholicism, very different from the cramped, self-enclosed, and backward-looking” variety (541, cf. 594). Readers get a sense of what this looks like for Taylor when he expresses his support for “gay rights” (578) and his appreciation of Pope Francis’s ambiguous calls for pluralistic openness (580–86).

Given that Taylor’s religion is accommodated to our secular age, it makes sense that he embraces the identitarian moralism that is so prominent in Western society. This is seen in his expression of contempt for “U.S. Republican voters,” whom he characterizes as being threatened by “universal human rights” and sympathetic to “white superiority,” traits supposedly made evident in their embrace of “the scarcely veiled appeal of Donald Trump to uphold ‘law and order’” (16). At first, this seems like an isolated rant. But its centrality to the book’s argument becomes clear in the penultimate chapter, “History of Ethical Growth,” where Taylor considers whether poets help bend the “arc of the moral universe” toward justice (553), drawing upon the Romantic “notion that the things of this world are a language, and that poets are those who can decipher this” (392) and help us reach our destiny of “a condition of harmony and resonance with Nature” (95). His conclusion is that, although humans have “come up with deeper ethical insights” across the centuries, we do not “on the whole act more morally than our ancestors” (586). While he acknowledges the advances that have been made in civil rights, he still asserts that “Jim Crow, and white supremacy, continue to wrack American society” (562). Unsurprisingly, the villains are those who belong to “the American Right” (in which Taylor groups such disparate figures as Mitt Romney and Donald Trump), who defend “the individualism of unlimited freedom, of a general license to follow [one’s] own way” (560).[2] Taylor also denounces the Right for striving to protect their privileged status in society by clinging to their cultural heritage (570–77), promoting “vote-suppressing legislation” (575), and opposing an expansive welfare-state (576–77).

It would be one thing to criticize certain figures and factions on the Right. But Taylor pathologizes the Right in general as xenophobic and white supremacist. This calls for a response, especially since it is how he applies the insights he gleans from his poetic interlocutors. What evidence does he set forth to support his contention that the Right is racist, and how does the evidence stand up to scrutiny? First, he implies that, because a disproportionate percentage of violent crimes are committed by racial minorities, it is racist to expect the civil magistrate to punish criminals. This illogical, and fundamentally unjust, notion is based on the civilization-destroying fallacy of disparate impact thinking.[3] Second, Taylor claims it is racist to think that a society should be united around a shared past and a shared understanding of the good, rather than be marked by its embrace of a multiculturalism that pits allegedly oppressed identity groups against whiteness. This exhibits Taylor’s blindness to the fact that a culture based on repudiation will inevitably break apart, and that some kind of consensus about principles and values is needed in order for a society to enjoy a measure of stability. While there certainly can be diversity within unity,[4] cultural roots and boundaries are necessary because they are constitutive of identity.[5] Third, Taylor claims that it is racist to oppose voting practices that undermine the integrity of elections. This ignores the fact that people oppose such practices because they imperil the legitimacy of the state.[6] And fourth, Taylor suggests that those who oppose an ever-expanding welfare state are motivated by racial animus. This is dismissive of patent evidence indicating that expanding and fostering dependence on state aid perpetuates poverty and a sense of victimhood,[7] enables the state to accumulate more power,[8] and pushes the nation closer and closer to a debt catastrophe.[9]

Taylor’s broad characterization of the Right as racist is the result of seeing the Right through the lens of an ideology that ignores one of the most basic human realities. As Daniel Mahoney explains,

The new ideological binary, innocent victim versus rapacious oppressor, forgets the insight so powerfully articulated by Solzhenitsyn in the opening volume of The Gulag Archipelago: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”[10]

Colin Redemer elaborates, “it is best to be reminded that we are all already guilty. The leftists who keep attempting to kill, jail, or otherwise destroy their rivals need to be reminded that our political longing, like all of our longings, will only be satisfied when they are satisfied in God.”[11] Carl Trueman adds that victim-oppressor ideology, also known as “critical theory,” is marked by its “inability to articulate a positive social vision in anything but the vaguest terms,” because it “denies that the world has an intrinsic moral shape.”[12] Note the irony. Though Cosmic Connections seeks to realign its readers with the order of nature, it concludes with Taylor promoting an ethical vision that is not rooted in that order but is a projection of what some people think the world should be like, a projection that is promoted through manipulative smears of racism. Without making any attempt to explicate the Right’s program as it is understood by the Right, Taylor simply asserts that it is indecent of the Right to notice certain realities. This undermines his claim that poets can unlock the meaning of reality and help advance ethical progress.

Being a poet, or a reader of poetry, does not exempt one from the impact that the fall has had on the human faculties. True, some poems may help better attune our thoughts and feelings to reality. But any insights we derive from poetry need to be tested against God’s revelation in Scripture, as well as by other insights from the light of nature. As is the case with all other human attempts to understand and connect with reality, poetry can enlighten, but it can also misconstrue, manipulate, and distort. So can the reader of a poem. This is illustrated by the way Richard Wilbur speaks of the power of language in his wonderful little poem “A Barred Owl”:

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.[13]

On the one hand, the words spoken by the parent calm fears that are not grounded in reality, as the owl poses no threat to the child. On the other hand, the parent’s words intentionally obscure elements of reality that might give the child nightmares. This is a kind of beneficent obfuscation.[14] But because human words have this power, the very ideas that bring ethical advances can also become instruments of ethical regression. This is seen in the way the Civil Rights movement was co-opted to advance the LGBTQ agenda and its rebellion against God’s natural order. In fact, even the Civil Rights movement’s correction of racial injustices had mixed results. As Christopher Caldwell has pointed out, “Starting with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, . . . the United States had re-created the problem that it had passed the Civil Rights Act to resolve: It had two classes of citizens.”[15]

Given that the poems discussed in Cosmic Connections are likely to be both daunting and unfamiliar to many readers, I would like to call attention to another book that makes a familiar English-language poet even more accessible: Jay Parini’s Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart. Parini teaches at Middlebury College and authored a highly regarded biography of Frost in 1999.[16] In his new book, he provides a brief introduction to Frost, makes a case for memorizing poems, offers several pages of helpful commentary on each poem, and gives practical tips on how to commit a poem (or even part of one) to memory. He also calls attention to how Frost’s poems often make use of elements drawn from the “daily work of farmers” (xxi), a fact that makes them especially helpful in connecting readers to reality. This includes life’s darker realities, as is evident in the first poem selected by Parini, “Storm Fear.” In it, Frost describes the experience of a father waking in the middle of the night while a fierce New England snowstorm rages outside his small family’s isolated farmhouse. Here is the full poem:

When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow
The lower chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
‘Come out! Come out!’—
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,—
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away,
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether ’tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided. (3)

The reader is made to feel how vulnerable we humans are to the forces of nature, and the ending suggests that the family is on their own in the face of this crisis. The frenzy of the storm is reinforced by the poem’s irregular form and rhyme scheme. Though this confronts us with a terrifying reality, it might nevertheless call our attention to the fact that we stand in need of help from Someone who transcends nature. Similar thoughts emerge as one ponders the other poems in the book, as well as Parini’s reflections upon them.

While discernment and critique are necessary, Christians should be sympathetic toward the notion that poetry can play an important role in helping us modern people reconnect to reality. Reading poetry helps us slow down, notice things, and ponder them. It can make us more responsive to realities that are external to us, and less susceptible to manipulation by those who would seek to control us. It can even be a source of civic cohesion and renewal.[17] Of course, as this article has shown, poetry can be misused. But it also offers considerable benefits, especially for a people who are called to seek the welfare of the earthly cities in which we sojourn (Jer. 29:7), to not be conformed to the pattern of this world, and to be transformed by the renewal of our minds (Rom. 12:2).

Endnotes

[1] Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language: From Chaucer through Robert Frost (Harper Perennial, 2007), 586.

[2] This is an odd criticism. It is the Left that promotes the radical licentiousness of expressive individualism, which it then ironically leverages to bolster its authoritarian managerialism. While the Right is not immune to problems with individualism, it is far more supportive of traditional institutions that constrain the excesses of individualism.

[3] See Heather MacDonald, “Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization,” Imprimus, vol. 53, no. 2 (Feb. 2024): https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/disparate-impact-thinking-is-destroying-our-civilization/.

[4] For a good example of this, see this article about my alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh: Howard Husock, “Diversity That’s Not Divisive,” City Journal (Sept. 3, 2024): https://www.city-journal.org/article/diversity-thats-not-divisive.

[5] See Adam Ellwanger, “Multiculturalism Is Anti-Culture,” The American Conservative (May 16, 2022): https://www.theamericanconservative.com/multiculturalism-is-anti-culture/.

[6] See Armin Rosen, “Broken Ballots,” Tablet (Sept. 3, 2024): https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/broken-ballots-american-voting.

[7] See John McWhorter, Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Penguin, 2007), 5–14, 63–72, 114–34, 153–96.

[8] See Mark T. Mitchell, “Plutocratic Socialism and War on the Middle Class,” The American Conservative (Sept. 9, 2022): https://www.theamericanconservative.com/plutocratic-socialism-and-war-on-the-middle-class/.

[9] See Jeffrey H. Anderson, “America’s Debt Emergency,” City Journal (Aug. 8, 2024): https://www.city-journal.org/article/americas-debt-emergency.

[10] Daniel J. Mahoney, “Mimetic Musings,” The New Criterion (Sept. 2024): 61–62.

[11] Colin Redemer, “Searching for Our Plot of Innocence,” First Things (Sept. 17, 2024): https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/09/searching-for-our-plot-of-innocence.

[12] Carl R. Trueman, “Critical Grace Theory,” First Things (Nov. 2023): 31.

[13] Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems: 1943–2004 (Harcourt, 2004), 29.

[14] Such efforts are not always necessary. When my daughter memorized this poem at the age of three or four, she found particular delight in reciting the last two lines.

[15] Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Simon & Schuster, 2020), 238.

[16] Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life (Henry Holt, 1999).

[17] “Reflective poetry that connects the past to the present . . . evokes a self-conscious sense of national identity, that is, our distinct humanity, that which makes us human in a specific way in our own specific circumstances.” David P. Goldman, “Can Poetry Save a Nation?” (Sept. 17, 2024): https://tomklingenstein.com/can-poetry-save-a-nation/.

Andrew S. Wilson is an OPC minister and serves as the pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Laconia, New Hampshire. Ordained Servant Online, November, 2024.