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Graced Grit

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Monthly Archives: March 2014

Unconfessed Life and Literature Part 2: The Monster Speaks the Unspeakable for Us

29 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by Barbara in Bram Stoker, C.S. Lewis, Dracula, Frankenstein, French Revolution, Hamlet, History, King David, Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Monsters from the Id, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Tale of Two Sons, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Theology, Twilight, What We Can't Not Know

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confession, French Revolution, King David, morality, sexual sin

Most would agree that a particular type of emotional healing comes in the confession, that is, the telling of one’s story. Not just any story about how our trip to Europe went or how long we were in labor with our first child, but in telling things we would rather not. Sometimes the telling of those things is so frightful that we become paralyzed and cannot. Confessions of this ilk are in almost every case tied to two things as was demonstrated in Hamlet: sex and murder.

The part of the human psyche that represses confessions about the scandalous is demonstrated in the story of King David and his goings on with Bathsheba. So repressed was his transgressions that he didn’t recognize himself in the narrative of Nathan. God in his mercy relieved David’s id in forcing the confession, and still… a life was lost. Without the confession, would there have been more?

Monsters from the Id

Monsters from the Id

E. Michael Jones points out in Monsters from the Id, The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film, the potency of the unconfessed. Originating in the Enlightenment Utopia of the French Revolution, the monster Frankenstein emerges to take revenge on those that will not confess the truth. “As the Age of Reason gave way to the Terror, not only in Paris but in Mary Shelley’s own life, the first monster of the modern imagination was born.” Both Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft would live the horror in their personal lives and witness it on the streets of Paris. The English had only begun on the trajectory of sex and horror, while the French trajectory was at the end as Burrell notes, “women were brutally violated before being torn to pieces by those tigers; intestines cut out and worn as turbans; bleeding human flesh devoured.”

Jones spends a great deal of time outlining the influential writing of the Marquis de Sade that unleashed the suffering while at the same time prophetically agreeing with St. James in his epistle regarding the end of lust outside of boundaries. Though the Enlightenment promised that “releasing sexual passion from the confines of the moral order can be managed and its bad effects rendered harmless by legislation or technology…” it was not to be, as “sex emancipated from the moral order ends in murder and death.”

The role confession plays is either to ameliorate, as is the case of David, or to warn like a prophet crying in the cultural marketplace of literature and art as Camus states, “a guilty conscience needs to confess.

A work of art is a confession.” The first case is voluntary, but the second is a function of the human id. Jones explains, “sexual liberation is so frightening, I cannot talk about it, those like Mary Shelley seem to tell us. But then they turn around and say the opposite: It is so frightening, I cannot not talk about it. The monster speaks the unspeakable for me.”

Continue to Part 3

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The Unconfessed Life and Literature – Part 1

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Barbara in Bram Stoker, C.S. Lewis, Dracula, Frankenstein, John MacArthur, Literature, Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Tale of Two Sons, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Twilight, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, What We Can't Not Know

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Bram Stoker, Conscience, Mary Shelley, Monsters from the Id, Twilight, What We Can't Not Know

The major literary forms of poetry, novel, and myth are replete with the theme of confession. Interestingly, one entire category of literature, the horror genre, is a direct result of the failure to confess. When the moral order becomes unhinged from reason, the outcome is death. Christ described it, as did Shakespeare, as did Nietzsche.

While speaking poetically can and does describe the splendors of our existence and the universe – it also encompasses the whole of our humanity…including our darkest thoughts and fears. In fact, it is precisely at the point that we cannot speak that imagination becomes most useful in communication. The depictions of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation is described using imagery – otherwise, how could we bear it?

taleoftwo


 

In his book, A Tale of Two Sons, John MacArthur explains that the entire story of the prodigal son is a twofold chiasm (ABCD-DCBA) in which the last verse is intentionally left out of the second chiasm. The first relates to the younger brother, and it goes like this:

A. Death – the younger son departs

B. All is Lost – he spent all his inheritance

C. Rejection – wallowed with swine

D. The Problem – I have nothing

D. The Solution – I will go so that I don’t perish of hunger.

C. Acceptance – the father gladly receives him

B. All is Restored

A. Resurrection – he was lost – but now is found.

Second chiasm relating to the older brother: Continue reading →

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The Classical Approach to Education – The Three Ways

01 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by Barbara in Education, History

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Classical Education, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, The Trivium

The ancients such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, et al., were the fathers of what is known as classical education, the trivium. The Latin term trivium simply means where the three roads meet, or, the three ways. Consisting of distinct stages, Sister Miriam Joseph points out the distinctions of each aspect (Joseph,2002):

Image

Grammar School

  • Grammar – the art of thinking
  • Logic – the art of inventing and combining symbols
  • Rhetoric – art of communication

St. Augustine and the church fathers subscribed to this method in all or part. The writings of such ancients as Quintilian, Education of the Orator, solidified the trivium as “the common paradigm for education throughout the Western world” (Hart, 2004).

Though the philosophers stumbled upon God’s truth in education, they by no means invented it. For the most ancient history of all for the trivium is found in Hebrew scripture described as:

  • Knowledge (Grammar)
  • Understanding (Logic)
  • Wisdom (Rhetoric)

The first incidence mentioned in the Bible of being filled with the Spirit is in Exodus 31:3 referring to the artisans that would craft the items for the Lord’s dwelling. “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge…” Long before Plato, God put the trivium in the Jewish people’s heart and the fruit of that was the triad of truth, goodness and beauty…the consequence of being “filled.”

Men may attain a purely secular classical education and the carnal man will bear some fruit Continue reading →

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Frodo: “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

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Not this day!

Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.

A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of woes and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down!

But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you “stand…” Aragorn

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