When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defense
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 12
I once asked a college friend what he believed was the most important criterion for judging between good and evil. He gave me the Darwinian answer: survival. That got things backwards and was beside the point. What is good will allow man to thrive because it is good, and man has been made for good and not for evil; but not everything that gives a man an advantage in the struggle for existence is good. Robbing his neighbor is not good, though it would give him the money to impress the vivacious Miss Lovegold, and that in turn might result in marriage—and then think how grasping he must learn to be.
If we make the Kantian move on the chessboard and say that if everybody robbed everybody else, there would no longer be any property to rob, I reply that such were the cultural habits of the pagan Germanic tribes, so long as it was other tribes they robbed. “That was a good king,” says the Christian poet of Beowulf, speaking with a subtly ironical air of Scyld Sceafing, the deceased warlord of the Danes, whose claim to being good was that he smashed the mead-benches of his neighbors and made them pay tribute. If we combine Kant with Darwin and say that such habits do not conduce well to the survival of your people, I reply that they did not kill off the Germans who swarmed over the Roman empire, and besides, mankind is no longer in any danger of disappearing from the earth. We are going to be around as sure as the sky is blue.
If we are reductive materialists and say that our notions of good and evil have been bred in us by the pressures of survival back in the ages when that was by no means assured, I answer, besides that there is no evidence for that claim, that that turns things backwards again and evades the issue. What do we do now? It is not sufficient to say that Johnny must be honest with his employees merely because his parents taught him so, nor does it alter the question if you extend his parents backward into the days of stone knives and bearskins. We say instead that Johnny must be honest with his employees because honesty is good, and that because honesty is good, man does not merely survive by it, he thrives by it, as men have seen for as long as men have dwelt upon the earth, in every part of the world, in cultures at every stage of technological development. That is likely why his parents have taught him to be honest, and their parents before them, and we do well to heed the testimony of the ages.
But my friend was on to something after all. He didn’t know it, because he had not read any philosophy or theology, and neither had I, at that time—keep in mind that we were American students at one of the most famous colleges in the world. We were not likely to have learned much from the past. He had intuited something about man’s relation to time. But because of the pseudoscientific reductions he had uncritically accepted, he could express no difference in that regard between man and a flea. Those biters and burrowers also are driven to survive. We sense, though, that time for man is different from time for a flea, though the bodies of both should age and decay and turn to dust. What this difference means for man’s home, and his homecoming, we shall see.
Consider the above sonnet by Shakespeare. In his day, a collection of sonnets was not a grab bag of love poems tossed in at random. It was a highly organized and intricate work of art, and each sonnet was a piece of the whole. Shakespeare has thus begun his sequence of sonnets with seventeen poems that all have to do with one way, the most obvious way, to defeat the fell purposes of Time. You have children.
So the narrator of the sonnets, whom we should not naively identify with the poet himself, begins by telling the young man whom he addresses that he had better get married soon and have children, because Time, that “delves the parallels in beauty’s brow” (Sonnet 60, line 10), will be doing its inevitable work. As spring passes into summer and summer into fall, and as the sheaves are brought in on a bier, like the body of an old man with a white beard brought to the burial ground, so must we too pass away. The urgency is not for the human race but for the individual person. It seems but a few years ago when I was strong and not a single hair on my head was anything but glossy black. I have arthritis developing in my knees. If I eat as much as I used to, I will put on weight—and I have put on weight. The malady that will send me out of this world may now be working unseen and unknown in my body. And I see my fresh-faced children, and they, though not children anymore, cheer my heart.
Again, Shakespeare puts it most brilliantly, striking home to the point where childhood greets old age and makes a man feel young again. So says King Polixenes about his nine-year-old son:
He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;
Now my sworn friend, and now mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all;
He makes a July’s day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood. (The Winter’s Tale, I.ii. 199–205)
We are not talking merely about boosting the old man’s metabolism. He has thoughts that would thicken his blood; these thoughts, in our quiet moods, in our old age, must be of the passing of time, the loss of loved ones, the things we have done that we cannot undo, the things we should have done that we left undone, and death. No other creature upon earth experiences anything remotely resembling these thoughts. We are immersed in time, as all things are, but we alone can grasp it as it passes, can stand above it or beside it. We alone are conscious of age and death. We alone can sin and know that we have sinned. We alone can mourn our lost innocence.
It is not then survival that we ask from our children, but hope. I am not yet speaking in specifically Christian terms. At the beginning of the same play I have cited above, two gentlemen are speaking about another young lad, the son of King Leontes. The counselor from Bohemia tells the counselor from Sicily that his people “have an unspeakable comfort of your young Prince Mamillius; it is a gentleman of the greatest promise that ever came into my note.” The Sicilian agrees: “It is a gallant child, one that indeed physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh. They that walk on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him a man” (I.i). The boy “physics,” or gives healing medicine to, those who look upon him, and the lame man who is near the grave wants to live if for no other reason than to see how a boy of such intelligence and grace should grow to be a man worthy of his childhood.
Although the child is at the center of both the sonnet and these reflections in The Winter’s Tale, there is a difference. The speaker of the sonnets has a narrow view of the child. The proposed son is to be a mirror in which the young man will see his beauty born again, an heir to that beauty, a bounty that comes from using your wealth wisely while you have it rather than to “make worms thine heir.” The child is an instrument of egotism.
But Shakespeare—I am speaking of the author, not the voice in the sonnets—is the playwright of his age who most boldly shows his love of children and his sense of the peculiar evil in offenses against them, which he never leaves unpunished. The child, like every other living person, is a bearer of legal rights, though no more than that, and if we are to believe the philosopher Peter Singer, much less than that, particularly if he is newborn or if a defect of birth makes him more vulnerable to someone’s desire to have him out of the way. The child is a vessel of hope—the foot soldier in the vanguard against time, which is also a battle against the ruins we have made in time. He is the bearer of a hope not in mere survival but in spiritual regeneration, not in life as bios, which vitality the sheep and cattle have, but in the life of life, the zoe that is divine. Yes, we know that the child will grow into a man, a sinner who will likely spoil some things in his turn, but when we see him uncorrupted, we can understand, even if not yet in any specifically theological sense, why Jesus said, “Let the little children be, and do not hinder them from coming to me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14).
Perhaps that explains why people in our time who have no faith tend also to have no children. You might think the reverse, that if you do not dwell in the precincts of heaven, looking to the horizon whence glory shall come, you will be thrown back with all the greater force upon the natural expedient and attempt to “live” forever through your healthy brood of progeny. But that is to think mechanistically, as if the human soul were an overheated boiler, so that the steam that would be released through a clogged valve must press the more urgently upon the valve that is still free. But we are not so. Hope will color the whole man—hope, not its impostor, optimism—or the whole man will be pallid and frail. Marcel again, considering the adventurousness of the large family, notes “the horror of this very risk which prevails in an ever-increasing fraction of a country on the way to progressive devitalisation.” Such people think you can use life as an element “to obtain a few patent satisfactions, without which the world would be nothing but a prison.”1 Life, for such, has all the glare, the noise, and the triviality of an amusement park.
But soon that speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets leaves off recommending a child as a stay against the onslaught of Time and turns to another expedient. He introduces it briefly in sonnets fifteen through seventeen, then makes it the center of number eighteen, one of the best known in the sequence:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The sun declines to westward, the summer fades, the flowers wither, but into you, you callow and inactive lump of humanity, I will breathe the breath of life, or inject the ink of life, and you shall live. What kind of life that is is an open question and not one that critics have wanted to ask. That is because they assume that Shakespeare, confident in the staying power of his poetry, really believed that he was conferring upon the young man a kind of eternal existence. A strange existence it is, when the greatest creator of characters the world of letters has ever known describes not one of the man’s features other than his fair skin, when we do not know the man’s name, and when his behavior implied by the poems is at best dubious and at worst treacherous. So why do we take the speaker at his word? I think we are disarmed by something else we take for granted: that our creations can live on after us. We achieve an ersatz eternity by means of “children,” that is, by works of art and culture. “Exegi monumentum aere perennius,” boasted the poet Horace: “I have made for myself a monument more enduring than bronze” (Odes, 3.30.1).
No one would deny that “so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,” people will be reading Shakespeare. “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them,” says T. S. Eliot; “there is no third.”2 This is hardly the opinion only of academics. After all, until a century ago, the works of Shakespeare were not even taught in colleges. They were written in the mother tongue, and there was no reason to engage famous scholars to help you read and understand English. But the judgment of Shakespeare’s greatness was early indeed and was rendered by those who should know best and who would have had selfish reasons not to praise Shakespeare but to depreciate him. From the youthful John Milton, for example, writing “On Shakespeare” about fifteen years after the playwright’s death:
What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones
The labor of an age in piled stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star y-pointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame,
What needst thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a livelong monument.
For whilst to the shame of slow-endeavoring art
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath, from the leaves of thy unvalued book,
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble by too much conceiving,
And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
Shakespeare, says Milton, needs no pile of slave-dredged bricks to build himself a pyramid pointing to the stars, such as the pharaohs of old Egypt had and such as Horace boasted to have erected for himself. He has a finer monument than that, a livelong monument, one that is alive and always shall be. Milton is not saying in a sentimental way that Shakespeare will live on in his work. The very spirit of Shakespeare, what he thought and felt, what he saw of the truth and what he imparted of that truth in power and beauty, seizes the souls of his readers just as the prophet god Apollo seized his human votaries whether they would or no and literally astonishes them—turns them to marble with the amazement of “too much conceiving,” thoughts too great for them, a progeny of the mind. We who read Shakespeare and are stunned by his genius are the sepulchers, alive, in which not we but the poet speaks. Kings build grand tombs for themselves, but Shakespeare needs none. He has us, alive with gratitude and struck still with wonder.
Eliot would agree, with a stern proviso: Without tradition, it cannot be. When tradition is scorned, when the love of home has vanished, when man has neither the longing for home nor its brother-longing, the spirit of the pilgrim, Milton’s words make no sense. We are the walking dead. We do not grow but shrink into obsolescence and oblivion.
This life that transcends the limits of death warrants some careful thought. It is not conferred upon great artists, thinkers, and statesmen alone. Nor is it sufficient that somebody or other, several hundred years hence, may open your book and muddle about in it. The plays of Shakespeare are a gift bestowed upon the receivers. We require both those who give and those who receive: we require the living, who take and cherish with gratitude what has been bequeathed to them. Otherwise the “life” of Shakespeare on this earth is a bumpy line on a statistical graph—meaningless. We are here in the realm of culture.
As always, I wish to fend off misunderstandings. By “culture” I do not mean what people with a lot of money do—going to La Scala to hear Rossini and then boasting about it at a luncheon the next day. I do not mean culture as commodity or as a sign of social prestige. I certainly do not imply what has happened to “high” culture in our time, in the so-called Regietheater of the opera, turning works of tremendous power into crass political statements laced with the profane and the obscene.
The word suggests the inner reality. It is culture because a farmer (Latin agricola) has tilled (Latin cultivare) the soil. Not with a machine for razing everything in sight; the true tiller of the soil has nothing in common with Mao. You must be careful of the soil, and the seeds you plant now may come to full fruit long after you have passed away. A man gathers the apples from a tree planted by his grandfather, and grafts into hardy stock a slip of a peach tree in the hope, not the optimism, that his children and his children’s children will reap the rewards.
Charles Péguy, in his magnificent lyrical meditation The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, has captured the essence of culture in the plain work of a farmer with sons:
If they don’t inherit his house and his land.
At least they will inherit his tools.
His good tools.
That served him so often.
That have grown to fit his hand.
That have so often dug the same earth.
His tools, from use, have made his hands callous and shiny.
But he also, from using them, he made the handles of his tools all polished and shiny.
At the handles of his tools his sons will gain, his sons will inherit, the hardness of his hands.
But also their skill, their great skill.3
With good work, it is not possible to distinguish between the man and the instrument or between the man and the field, as the meter is in Shakespeare and Shakespeare is in his meter, and as the hands of Michelangelo are scarred by the hammer and chisel and stone, and in the stone are his thought and his love and his wish to bestow upon other men the gift he so cherished and cultivated. Péguy’s good farmer is in his small and local way like Shakespeare, like Michelangelo. Working his land is already an act that transcends his own day, for there is no shine on the hands and the tools without the long and quiet past, and with every thrust of the hoe against the earth, he prepares a world for his sons to be.
We know of no human society, except perhaps our own, without culture so defined. Every people we know of, except perhaps ourselves, has sung the songs its fathers and mothers sang and celebrated the holy days and prayed the prayers and prepared the food and carved the shillelaghs and done the thousand other things that are the more precious to a people because it knows, in its heart, its mind, and its very fingers, that they have been done just so, and will continue to be done.
Without the acknowledgment of a gift, there is no culture, even if scholars still compel sweating students to forget their debauched lives for a moment, to gaze instead at the corpus of Shakespeare, like a piglet preserved in formaldehyde and lying on a laboratory table, to which poor thing they apply their galvanic shot of politically tendentious criticism to get the trotter to twitch and jerk.
We have heard tell of people in possession of some rare work of art or craftsmanship, some precious memento of an historic battle, a batch of unknown correspondence between Grant and Sherman bound with string and forgotten in an attic, who toss the things away and let the Landfill of Progress swallow them up—and only later realize what they have done. For the most part, our schools from kindergarten to the doctorate are a vast waste-management operation, hauling the past away to be buried while passing out the flyers of social and antisocial fads. A well-read and relatively unschooled woman of the nineteenth century, such as Sophia Hawthorne, could and did write letters and read books that would tax the minds of almost every college student today. Those letters and books would be filled with references as unintelligible to today’s professors as the hieroglyphics on the tomb of Cheops. If Sophia and her husband, Nathaniel, are dead to them, it is because they, the professors and students, have never come to cultural life to begin with.
I do not exaggerate the incapacity. Students can find on the internet a variety of sites that will help explain to them what the letters of Abraham Lincoln mean. I would say that newspapers will soon be stocked with their own cheat-notes, but it is hard to imagine even now that anyone would need help reading “See the President run.”
People who scoff at the past rob us of our soil. Better to have your pocket picked than to have your cultural field sown with salt or the works of your hands left to gather mold and spiders.
Culture shows us that, as I have suggested, man’s relation to time is as far from that of a clump of matter as it is possible for a bodily creature to be. It is far also from the mere animal. Man does more than remember. He recalls. He does more than anticipate the near future, as my dog, Jasper, does when, hearing that I have stopped playing the piano, he knows it may be time for a walk. Man plans; he looks far into the future. He can contract long vistas of time into a single perception, as when he sums up his life and says, with Jacob, “few and evil have the days of the years of my life been” (Genesis 47:9), or with Job, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle” (Job 7:6). He can do so not only for himself but for his forebears and his children, his neighbors and the men and women and children who fall to their knees beside him in prayer.
Consider how great a crime it would be to infect someone with a disease that would cut his life short by five or ten years. But to deprive him of an entire dimension of his temporal being, the dimension that allows him to transcend his three score and ten, or that steeps those years in long years past and years to come—to cut him off from the wellsprings of culture and set him adrift in the river of time like a dead thing among the flotsam of what used to be rich and human—that is a crime that would undo the word of the Creator who said, “Let us now make man in our image.” Man without culture is an inert thing, acted upon by the psychological manipulators of mass education, mass politics, mass marketing, mass entertainment. It makes no difference that those in apparent control of these mass phenomena are themselves carried along by their swell and flow. If anything, it makes matters worse. George Orwell’s linguist in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Syme, knew all about the ideological aim of Newspeak and explained it to Winston Smith with the chilling enthusiasm of a destroyer. A few weeks later, Syme was no more to be seen. Evil eats its own.
Hence in our time, the longing to go home must also be a longing for a heritage lost. Again, I note a paradox. If we adopted that hydraulic view of man, we might guess that people who do not have many children would be all the more committed to preserving the arts and letters and folkways of those who came before, intuiting that their own descendants might do the same for them in turn. Or they may conversely fear that if they treat their forebears with contempt, they will instruct those who follow them to do the same: to heave their works away along with their stiff and empty shells. But it is not so. They who have lost their faith in God generally have little good to say about the past and resent anybody who retains an attachment to the time-gathering and time-transcending power of culture. It has been those most committed to the Landfill of Progress who have rubbed out of our schools almost all the heritage of English literature, replacing diamonds and emeralds with costume jewelry, cheaply acquired and quickly discarded. But show me a young person who reads Milton, and I will show you someone looking over his shoulder, catching sight of a nearly overgrown path, and seeing in his mind, a thousand miles along its adventurous way, something that looks like a home.
I have said that culture is one of the means by which man makes his dwelling in time and beyond time, and that it therefore requires generosity and gratitude; I must accept with thanks what I have been given and preserve all that is good in it, which will be great indeed, and seek to measure my works by its high standard and pass it on to my children with love. The iconoclast—the icon-smasher—is not generally a lover of mankind. Here let me add something that is hard to see when we are thinking only of selves and their survival. It is that the longing to go home, to a real culture, is also a longing not to be alone anymore. They who are cut adrift in time are like survivors of a shipwreck, each clinging to his own spar or beam. They who are at home in culture dwell in something that spans the generations and renews them, throwing bridges across the divides of class and sex and age. Think of a black man and a white man who both love the poetry of John Keats, and what a profoundly beautiful thing they share in the depths of their souls. At the best of times the rich man and the poor man do not share enough. In our time, the rich man and the other rich man share almost nothing. We are alone.
I return to Shakespeare to illustrate the point. Not this time to the often confused and exceedingly selfish narrator of the sonnets but to the rustic comedy As You Like It. We are in the Forest of Arden with Orlando, a young man whose elder brother has sought his life. With the lad is his servant, Adam, a loyal man of more than four score years. The forest is wild, it is winter, food is scarce, and the poor old man is near to death. So Orlando tries to cheer him up, keeping him as warm as he can, before he sets off to catch something to eat: “Yet thou liest in the bleak air. Come, I will bear thee to some shelter, and thou shalt not die for lack of a dinner if there live anything in this desert. Cheerily, good Adam!” (II.vi)
The Forest of Arden happens also to be the wilderness where the good Duke Senior, his own brother having usurped his throne and driven him out, has retreated with his loyal retainers. They are about to have some venison for dinner—they too feel the pinch of the cold and of the empty belly. Orlando, frantic and half crazed with fear for Adam’s life, bursts upon them, sword drawn, demanding food—as if he were a savage and so were they. When the Duke answers him in a gentle voice, Orlando begs pardon, and no longer demands but asks:
Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you:
I thought that all things had been savage here;
And therefore put I on the countenance
Of stern commandment. But whate’er you are
That in this desert inaccessible,
Under the shade of melancholy boughs,
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time;
If ever you have looked on better days,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church;
If ever sat at any good man’s feast,
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear,
And know what ’tis to pity and be pitied,
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be:
In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword. (II.vii. 107–120)
To which the Duke responds in kind:
True it is that we have seen better days,
And have with holy bell been knolled to church,
And sat at good men’s feasts, and wiped our eyes
Of drops that sacred pity hath engendered:
And therefore sit you down in gentleness,
And take upon command what help we have,
That to your wanting may be ministered. (121–127)
Every man in this scene, including the desperately weak Adam offstage, is an exile, and yet we do not feel homeless here. That is not merely because the Duke is kind. I have sometimes stopped in my car to pass a ten or a twenty to a homeless man begging on the corner, but still the man is homeless, and there is little human connection between us. Let us look closely at the terms of Orlando’s question and Duke Senior’s response.
Orlando begs on condition that the Duke and his men have shared not only his trouble but a way of life—nothing less than a culture. What does it mean to have “known better days”? We learn immediately. It means to have been called by the church bell to join your fellow men in the service of God. It means to have sat at the table of a good man and enjoyed his generous gifts. It means to have shared intimately in the humanity of your fellows assailed by sickness or loss or death, and to have shed a tear of sacred pity: pity set apart from the necessities of the workaday world. It means to have been merciful to others and to have been shown mercy, as Orlando applies the words of Jesus to the situation at hand, an allusion that would not be lost on the Duke. They are in the middle of nowhere. If they returned to what should be their homes, it would cost them their lives, yet they are home with one another. They share nothing less than the world.
Man without religion walks the streets of an interminable film noir but without the talents of Orson Welles or Paul Muni to transform it into art. He cannot know what he is missing. Consider the words of the Eucharistic prayer in a Catholic mass, immediately after the elevation of the Host: Unde et memores: we declare ourselves to be mindful, in remembrance, and not only of some event long ago, but of the re-enacted sacrifice of Christ before us now. My Jewish readers should think of the Passover supper, meant not just to celebrate the dread night when the angel of death passed by the houses marked with the blood of the lamb, but to re-enact it ritually, with your loins girt as if for flight, eating the unleavened bread of haste: “And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand the LORD brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage” (Exodus 13:14).
Nor only once a year, this remembrance. Many of the psalms dwell upon the magnalia Dei, the great works of God for the Jewish people. The psalms were the treasured prayer book of the Jews, central to the worship of God in the Temple and still at the heart of Jewish piety and liturgy to this day, three thousand years later. The psalmists know very well they are composing acts of remembrance. They have it specifically in mind, because it was God who commanded the remembrance in the first place—God, the maker of time and of times himself:
For he established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel,
which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children:
That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born;
who should arise and declare them to their children:
That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God,
but keep his commandments. (Psalm 78:5–7)
When Jesus and his apostles ate the Passover supper on the night before he died, they said the prayers their forefathers had said and sang the songs, and so when Jesus himself commanded remembrance of that moment, he was doing far more than asking the apostles to think of him when they were in their cups. He was instituting a new rite of remembrance, a new re-enactment of the liberating magnalia Dei, those past and that which was soon to come, his sacrificial death upon the Cross, as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). That is why Saint Paul insists upon a faithful tradition, a handing on, from one believer to the next, from one generation to the next, of what Jesus did before his own blood would be spattered on the posts and lintels of a world in bondage to sin and death:
For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come. (1 Corinthians 11:23–26)
This is more than habit or custom. Dogs have habits. People have plenty of customs which are little more than commonplace ways of greeting someone or saying goodbye. This is tradition in the strict sense: the bequeathing of a heritage. It is also more than that. It is a grasping of time past, time present, and the time to come, in communion with your fellow worshipers in the church where you are kneeling, and before all the altars of the world, at all times, so long as time shall be. It is exuberant in the literal sense, as of a womb overflowing with life. It is, as Josef Pieper puts it, “the spontaneous expression of an inner richness,” far beyond mere utility, for such richness causes people to build “not merely a functional meeting hall but the basilica of Ronchamp or a cathedral.”4
Nothing in the experience of secular man is like it. I state the obvious. When does secular man read and hear words spoken two thousand years ago, not as curiosities but as urgent revelations and warnings and commands and consolations, as still present, as if spoken to him and to his fellows face to face, words that interpret for him the whole journey of his life and the journey of the life of mankind from Adam to the men of the last day? And if it should happen to him once, what is that but an accident? It is not a tide-surpassing experience as regular as the tides. Secular man, having lost the dimension of the eternal, must be swept along the rapids and eddies of time; he has no stay against them. He is “lost in the cosmos,” as Walker Percy says. He builds houses in time but no home, either in eternity or in the here and now.5 For man is meant to rise above time or to step aside from it, even as he is immersed in it. A house that is no protection against the elements is not much of a house. A home that is no protection against oblivion is not much of a home. It is as if you were to “build” on a flat piece of paper a two-dimensional domicile for three-dimensional beings. For man, height and width and depth will not suffice.
And now I return to the child. Dogs breed, man pro-creates.
The sexual equivalent to the rejection of culture is a crass and mechanistic hedonism, seeking the pleasure of the day for its own sake. In our time of pills that fool the taker into thinking that youth can endure, the hedonist seeks his pleasure in the least human way. He fools himself into thinking that it can last. He is without that sad and salutary sense of self-defeat that shades Horace’s poem whence we derive the saying carpe diem—seize the day, as a low-hanging fruit to be plucked and enjoyed, because no one knows what the morrow will bring. So said Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Magnificent one whose faith was residual, and who wrote poems when he was not managing far-flung business interests and keeping the city of Florence under his iron rod:
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia!
Di doman non c’e certezza.
Who would be happy, let him be!
Tomorrow knows no certainty.
So one body preys upon another, and the last thing in the mind of either “partner”—note the business term—is that what they are doing should partake of time long past and time to come. The man is planting seed that contains within itself unnumbered generations, and the woman bears the egg, the haven for that seed, to be penetrated by it and fertilized, so that what begins from that moment is a new human life, a new instantiation of the divine image, a new dweller in time, oriented to eternity. That is in fact what is happening, but the hedonist denies it. He says that the child-making thing is not for making children. It is how he strips the topsoil or avoids the green fields, to live instead in an arid and hopeless plain. We might put it this way:
They are not half in love with easeful death,
They are not half in love with anything;
No field in summer makes them catch their breath
Where the corn ripens, and the sparrows sing;
The man wishes he had no seed to cast
In the warm spring upon the ready earth;
The woman, that her womb were bolted fast.
Death they may fear, but birth
Is perfect terror, or the sad and slow
Contraction of the little life they play,
Without a germ or root or bloom to show,
Numb to the pulse of both the night and day.
Nor do they go where Moloch’s flames appall,
Because they would not bear a child at all.6
Rape, assault, and even consensual fornication are still rightly felt as violations of a sacred act and of the sanctity of the womb, that fearful haven which is to be set apart and never reduced to a tool or a factory. But we have lost the language of the sacred, so we are left naked to the winds. We can speak only of will, a vague and shifting thing. We breed no children but disillusionment and antagonism between the sexes.
Shakespeare could have told us about that too. He began his sonnet sequence with a sometimes unpleasant and strangely mechanistic appeal to the young man to beget a son. He deliberately and fittingly ends that same sequence not with marriage and hope for fruitfulness, but with descriptions of sterile and treacherous sexual action, madness, and venereal disease:
Past cure am I, now reason is past care,
And frantic mad with evermore unrest:
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed,
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. (Sonnet 147, lines 9–14)
That is what you get when you do not understand what the child-making thing is.
To give yourself over in love to a little child, the most economically useless creature in the world, is to forget yourself and your immediate purposes, unless you imitate the aims of the sonnet-speaker, and have your child’s career planned out, turning him into a protracted business proposition, a thing bound to time, like bonds with interest. There is in a healthy person’s self-forgetfulness before the child something of the time-leaving and time-transcending character of culture and of sacred worship. And perhaps that is why those who would use children to further their political purposes have ever been those who despise what culture is all about.
Let me illustrate. Many a feminist critic of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—note that it is not The Storm but The Tempest, with its suggestion of the action of time—has abhorred the idea that the young and pure Miranda should not be “in control” of her sexuality but must submit to the moral law as embodied in and propounded by her father, the mage Prospero. Shakespeare would have found such criticism to be callous to the beauty of woman and the profundity of sexual being. The desire to be “in control” of what you do down under is like a mechanistic and merely chemical view of agriculture. It is to marriage what agribusiness is to tilling the fields. Nor does it matter that you are the one in charge of your own denuding. Your commitment to technical control bespeaks, to cite Marcel again, “a spirit of suspicious vigilance, which is perhaps incompatible with the inward eagerness of a being who is irresistibly impelled to welcome life with gratitude.”7
Hence such critics have little to say about the masque that Prospero directs for the benefit of the newly betrothed Miranda and Ferdinand. It is a celebration of chastity and therefore a celebration of fruitfulness. It is in harmony with the order of creation, and the seasons, and therefore it transcends the seasons; it is within the world of change and above it. So Juno, the goddess of marriage and childbirth, and Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, pour their blessings upon the young and happy couple:
Juno: Honor, riches, marriage-blessing,
Long continuance, and increasing,
Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings on you.
Ceres: Earth’s increase, and foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty;
Vines, with clustering branches growing;
Plants, with goodly burden bowing;
Spring come to you, at the farthest,
In the very end of harvest!
Scarcity and want shall shun you.
Ceres’ blessing so is on you. (IV.i. 106–117)
And to show that this is not just a piece of elaborate politeness, Juno then invites harvesters—youths and maidens—to leave their work in time and step beside it, in the joyful and truly culture-making spirit of the time set apart, the holy day:
You sunburned sicklemen, of August weary,
Come hither from the furrow, and be merry;
Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on,
And these fresh nymphs encounter every one
In country footing. (124–128)
At which they all dance.
Prospero will momentarily disperse the spirits putting on this show when he suddenly remembers a plot against his life. We are still in a world of folly and sin. But the boy Ferdinand’s reaction to the masque shows the power of goodness and holiness. He loses all sense of time, and all sense of Italy and Naples, whither he and his father and their retainers were bound before the storm cast them up on an unknown shore:
Let me live here ever;
So rare a wondered father and a wise
Makes this place paradise. (113–115)
Paradise is, literally, a special kind of garden, as Christian painters and poets had long known:
A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
They plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,
Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:
A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. (Song of Solomon 4:12–15)
So is marriage, as they also knew. And here we return to time and eternity.
Nobody throws rice at the signing of a business contract. A couple will not wear a special suit or dress when they sign their first mortgage and then save the clothing for their children when they in turn will put themselves in hock. Again, dogs breed, but human beings marry. Theirs is a promise not for a long time, but forever. To include some kind of escape clause is to destroy the essence of the thing. It is like running a bank inside a church, and inviting the rebuke of Jesus: “Stop making My Father’s house a place of business” (John 2:16 NASB).
If you are in the middle of what looks like an adventure, but you can clap your hands or wave a wand and, presto, you are sitting in your recliner with a beer at your elbow, you are not on an adventure at all. It is not real. If you say the word “forever” and do not mean it, it is as if you had merely pretended to launch away from the shore. You are playing at sailing the seas, like a child in a sandbox, with a pail of water, except that the child is innocent and you are not, and the child may be wholly in the spirit of the thing, and you are not. Your anchor is wedged in the mud. But you cannot go home unless you leave the safe shore. So it is that the longing for home is not a longing for safety. It is a too strong attachment to safety that keeps people from returning home. To save our lives, we must lose them.
That is why Shakespeare’s speaker of the sonnets, at his most lucid, places not one reservation upon marriage. If it does not go beyond time, it is neither marriage nor love:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his spare hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (Sonnet 116)
His language is that of the marriage service. Says the priest, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer (1552):
I require and charge you (as you will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed) that if either of you do know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, that ye confess it. For be ye well assured, that so many as be coupled together otherwise than God’s word doth allow, are not joined together by God, neither is their Matrimony lawful.
The impediment warned against here might be consanguinity or compulsion. But the impediment that Shakespeare thinks of is a willingness to change. If minds are true—faithful, with the carpenter’s sense of being straight—they will not seek to “bend with the remover to remove,” nor to “alter” even when they find alteration. Good looks will fade and youth depart, but the true mind will not change. The ship wanders on the high seas, but love is the cynosure, the pole-star, that guides it through tempests. Love is not the “fool” of Time but, says Shakespeare, echoing Saint Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:7), “bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
Sexual desire without the moral law is disoriented and gone astray. The tempests batter the ship to flotsam. Marriage is not marriage without the promise of eternity. Home is not home if it is only for a time. All these truths are one.