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Tag Archives: Matthew

Does the Beauty of the Gospel Story Attest to Its Truth? (Einstein, C.S. Lewis, and Others Answer)

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, Alistair McGrath, beauty, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, C.S. Lewis, Caravaggio, Christian Apologetics, doubt, Faith, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Julian Barnes, Luke, Mark, Matthew, Narrative, Nothing to Be Frighted Of, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, religion, Resurrection, Storytelling, The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, the gospels, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Thomas Cahill, truth, Walter Isaacson

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

Does the aesthetic splendor of the four Gospels, when considered like works of literature, emit the ineffable whiff of something genuine? Is there a patina of truth — truth endorsed by beauty — coating the Biblical account of the Nazarene? Cahill explained the concept; Einstein flirted with the idea; C.S. Lewis, through his buddy Tolkien, was converted by it; and Julian Barnes paid it some provocative thoughts. You can decide for yourself.

From the pen of Thomas Cahill, writing in his even-handed historical survey The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus:

What especially makes the gospels — from a literary point of view — works like no others is that they are about a good human being. As every writer knows, such a creature is all but impossible to capture on the page, and there are exceedingly few figures in all literature who are both good and memorable. Yet the evangelists, who left no juvenilia behind them — no failed novels, rhythmless poems, or other early works by which we might judge their progress as writers — whose Greek was often odd or imprecise, and who were not practiced writers of any sort, these four succeeded where almost all others have failed. To a writer’s eyes, this feat is a miracle just short of raising the dead.

As retold in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Albert Einstein had grappled with the question, too:

Shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Einstein gave a remarkable interview in which he was more revealing than he had ever been about his religious thinking. It was with a pompous but ingratiating poet and propagandist named George Sylvester Viereck… For reasons not quite clear, Einstein assumed Viereck was Jewish…

Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. ‘It’s possible to be both,’ replied Einstein. ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.’

Should Jews try to assimilate? ‘We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform.’

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? ‘As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.’

You accept the historical existence of Jesus? ‘Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.’

In Alistair McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis, there is an account of how, ultimately, the great medievalist don was swayed after studying the Gospels according to J.R.R. Tolkien’s conception of them as “True Myths”.

To understand how Lewis passed from theism to Christianity, we need to reflect further on the ideas of J. R. R. Tolkien. For it was he, more than anyone else, who helped Lewis along in the final stage of what the medieval writer Bonaventure of Bagnoregio describes as the ‘journey of the mind to God.’…

Tolkien argued that Lewis ought to approach the New Testament with the same sense of imaginative openness and expectation that he brought to the reading of pagan myths in his professional studies. But, as Tolkien emphasized, there was a decisive difference. As Lewis expressed in his second letter to Greeves, ‘The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.‘

The reader must appreciate that the word myth is not being used here in the loose sense of a ‘fairy tale’ or the pejorative sense of a ‘deliberate lie told in order to deceive.’… For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys ‘fundamental things’—in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. They are like splintered fragments of the true light…

In his somberly comic study of mortality, Nothing to Be Frighted Of, Julian Barnes imagines a moment in which some unnamed future generation could look back and evaluate the history of the now-disappeared Christian religion:

It lasted also because it was a beautiful story, because the characters, the plot, the various coups de théâtre, the over-arching struggle between Good and Evil, made up a great novel. The story of Jesus—high-minded mission, facing-down of the oppressor, persecution, betrayal, execution, resurrection—is the perfect example of that formula Hollywood famously and furiously seeks: a tragedy with a happy ending. Reading the Bible as ‘literature,’ as that puckish old schoolmaster was trying to point out to us, is not a patch on reading the Bible as truth, the truth endorsed by beauty.

__________

The painting is Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602).

Explore on:

  • Eric Metaxas answers the droll question – Would Jesus be a Republican or a Democrat?
  • Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Updike address whether we can assume the existence of God
  • Cahill contrasts the Greek and Christian worldviews

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When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

John Milton, Matthew, On His Blindness, the Bible, The Parable of the Talents, When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.’

__________

“On His Blindness” by John Milton.

In 1652, just a few days shy of his forty-fourth birthday, John Milton’s world went black. Struck with glaucoma, and lacking a cure, the great writer experienced the gradual loss of his vision — the onset of optic nerve pressure, the steady contraction of his field of view, the dimming of his sight, and the final eclipse of darkness that left him permanently blind. “That one talent,” Milton lamented, “lodg’d with me useless.”

“On His Blindness” is one of the most celebrated poems in English. The work, which was written — or rather dictated — by Milton in 1655, is a meditation on what God demands of men, blind or seeing. Milton begins with a simple premise: When I consider how my light is spent. In this, the poem is a work of epistemic philosophy, very logical in its force, for it posits a simple fact and then moves to deduce others from it.

But the brilliance of Milton is not merely a matter of his logic. “Spent” here also establishes an extended metaphor. Milton is overlaying the Biblical “Parable of the Talents” onto his own struggle to cope with the desire to work in the face of debilitating blindness. Thus “talent” in the third line is a double-entendre — it refers to the talent of sight as well as the talents, which are units of monetary measure, in the New Testament allegory. Those who have read Matthew 25 will know the significance of talents in the parable, for they are the treasures left by a master to his three servants as he leaves for an extended period. The master entrusts them with this bounty so that they may use their talents for good while he is gone. However, upon his return, the master finds that only the first two servants have turned their talents into a profit. The third servant merely hid his treasure, burying it in the ground.

Milton regards himself as that third servant. His talent — death’s to hide — has been spent.

The parable of the talents also provides the origin of what many Christians view as the salutary pronouncement which will be uttered upon their entrance to heaven. “Well done, good and faithful servant,” says the master to the first two men, “You have been faithful over a few things, I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.” (Matthew 25:23) Hence, the word “account” is also a double-entendre, which applies to both sides of the extended metaphor. The account given by each of the servants, which describes how he used his treasure, mirrors Milton’s “true account”: the justification he must offer for what he has done with his allotted talents and time on earth.

Yet from this legalistic view of a vengeful Maker, Milton asks, ‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’ The answer he finds is ultimately freeing. ‘God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts (the talents God bestows in us)’.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Milton died on this day, 338 years ago.

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