My last posting on “Cultural Continuity and Memory” appeared under a new Substack name; no longer “Lloyd’s Thoughts Now and Then,” my blog’s title had changed to “Through a Glass, Darkly.” I promised then to explain that change in a forthcoming post, so here it is.
My original title was based on a standard format issued by Substack for people just getting started. I modified it slightly by highlighting that my blog would encompass now and then, both present and past. I intended to include not only my current thoughts, but also thoughts from the past, preserved in the form of letters, papers, and articles from my academic life. That is still my intention. However, the old title seemed merely descriptive and generic, and I prefer one that better captures what I think of as my fundamental stance in the world – something to encompass and characterize whatever content might appear in my future blogging.
I have chosen my new blog name from a phrase used by the apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. It appears at the culmination of a beautiful and moving tribute to love – “agape” in the original Greek, and “charity” in the 17th century English of the King James Authorized translation (1611). Shakespeare, in writing his own tribute to love in sonnet 116, would have had before him as a scriptural reference the earlier Geneva Bible translation from 1560, which translates “agape” not as “charity” but rather as “love.” Hence, this sonnet on “love,” not “charity”:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand'ring 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 brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me prov'd, I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
This sonnet follows Paul’s poem to love, as we shall see, in its initial intent to define what love is by negation: love is not love if it alters or bends, nor is it time’s fool; the sonnet then counters that with affirmations: love is a fixed mark and a true star, and, in the most striking image of the poem, love “bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
Since Shakespeare’s time, “charity” has taken on quite a different meaning in English, referring to acts of kindness and generosity to the poor and needy. “Love” has survived into modern English as the best word to bear the weight of meaning that the Apostle Paul (and the poet Shakespeare) have given it. Here is the familiar passage from the King James version, which I have not only rendered in lines of verse, but also replaced “charity” with “love.” I have also color-coded key words and phrases to help reveal the structure of this passage, particularly the way it teeters on the edge of a love-denying nihilism. (To see the color-coded text you must open the following PDF File; otherwise read the following plain text.)
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, And have not love, I am become as sounding brass, Or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, And understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; And though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, And have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, And though I give my body to be burned, And have not love, It profiteth me nothing. Love suffereth long, and is kind; Love envieth not; Love vaunteth not itself, Is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, Seeketh not her own, Is not easily provoked, Thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, But rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, Believeth all things, Hopeth all things, Endureth all things. Love never faileth: But whether there be prophecies, They shall fail; Whether there be tongues, They shall cease; Whether there be knowledge, It shall vanish away. For we know in part, And we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, Then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: But when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; But then face to face: Now I know in part; But then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; But the greatest of these is love.
This passage is, at its core, a poem on love but it is also a poem of negation: in the absence of love, it tells us, there is nothing.
The first three stanzas repeat a simple but profound formula five times: Though I have X, Y, or Z, and have not love, I am nothing. In the absence of love I cease to be, for to be is to have love. Being, we could say, is conditional on and subsequent to love.
And what is love? To know love is to know—and to avoid—seven things that are negated by love: to love is to not do X, Y, and Z. Balanced against these empty, negative activities are seven positive ways that love acts and is thus revealed: love suffers long, is kind, and rejoiceth in the truth; love beareth, believeth, hopeth, and endureth all things. Love, in summary, is the affirmation of Being.
Therefore, Paul’s letter argues, love never fails, in contrast to prophecies, which shall fail, and tongues, which shall cease, and knowledge, which shall “vanish away.” Love is what is left after all else has disappeared or fallen silent. It is the remainder.
The explanation for this mystery rests on the difference between our present experience, which is fragmentary and in shadow, and the eventual perfection of the whole: we possess now only partial knowledge, but “when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” A temporal horizon opens here between our present condition and a future transformation; it is equivalent to the change from childhood to becoming an adult.
Is there solace in our present frustrating experience of human limits? Yes. Paul’s letter reminds us that we exist in the transition between now and then: now we are as children, we “see through a glass, darkly”; now we know, but only in part. However, we live in the expectation of a future “then”: then we shall see face to face; then we shall know even as also we are known. This exhortation ends with the “now” of our present condition: faith, hope, and love abideth with us even now, even when beset by darkened vision and partial knowledge. And the greatest of these three is love.
It seems that I must accept my finitude, my limits, the current darkness of my vision. I look forward, though, with faith and hope, to a time—a perfect time, the perfection and fullness of time—when I will know, in the clarity of a face-to-face encounter, even as I am known. This reciprocity of knowing is, I believe, another name for love. To give my blog this name—"through a glass, darkly”—is to confess to my partial and occluded vision, to acknowledge that my thoughts and understandings are always provisional, and that truth is found now only in obscurity; but this name also signifies that I will indeed continue to look through that cloudy glass, and write thoughts motivated and sustained by the love that endures all things, a love that never fails, a love that abides.
Other writers since the apostle Paul have borne witness to this very human experience of seeing through a glass, darkly. One can think of Dante, who, at the beginning of the Inferno finds himself lost in a selva oscura, a dark wood, in despair about where to go. But I will call attention to three other exemplary writers: the English poets William Wordsworth and John Keats, and the American novelist Wendell Berry. All three, in their own unique ways, leave a valuable record of what it is like to see through a glass, darkly.
Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” contains these crucial lines as he reflects on his childhood:
The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest; Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:— Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized.
Here Wordsworth recalls the perplexity and confusion of childhood, not as bad things to be forgotten or left behind, but rather as worthy of a “song of thanks and praise,” as memories that breed in him “perpetual benediction.” Paul too remembers his childhood: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.” This is entirely appropriate at that stage of our lives – so too is the parallel condition when, as adults, we see through a glass, darkly. We perceive the world now as spiritual children and must patiently accept and even embrace that condition of our humanity. We do not yet see face to face, but when we do, when we know as we are known, we will look back with “thanks and praise”
Another example of “seeing through a glass, darkly,” is the following passage from John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” Keats first expresses to the nightingale his desire to join it in its carefree life, to give himself over to wine and thus escape from this painful world of suffering and death:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
However, he resists the temptation offered by Bacchus, the Greek god of wine and drunkenness; addressing the nightingale, Keats says these words:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen;
This is the human condition as envisioned by Keats: though his dull brain perplexes and retards he strives to mount to the heavens, to soar like a bird. But in this dim world he finds no clarity, no ready answer to the problem of human suffering and death, – no light, “Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.” Keats, too, with Paul and Wordsworth, experiences the phenomena of the world as through a glass, darkly. And yet, with the trace of light from heaven he makes his way through the darkness among the flowers and trees that surround him. To fly aloft with the nightingale, on the wings of poetry, Keats is drawn back to the elemental earth, to creation with its rich soil, plants, colors, odors, and sounds: Darkling I listen.
My last example of seeing through a glass, darkly, is taken from one of Wendell Berry’s many novels and stories about the imaginary rural Kentucky farming community of Port William: The Memory of Old Jack (Berkeley: Counterpoint 1974, 1999, 121-123). In this excerpt Old Jack remembers the time when, after much suffering, he had finally paid off the mortgage on his land; he and his land were now free of the threat of loss and ruin. As he returned from the bank, with canceled mortgage in hand, this practical and tangible material reality became a transformative spiritual experience for him:
At the top of the rise beyond the ford on Birds Branch he comes in sight of the upland fields of his own place: the house and outbuildings and barns, the winter-deadened sod of the pastures, the veil of green wheat over last year’s croplands, the gray stone of the fences bending along the contour of the slopes, the trunks and the webbed and spiked branches of the unleafed woods. And now it seems to him that his soul breaks open, like a dull coal, shattering brilliance around him. He has been gone but little more than two hours, and yet he returns as from a long voyage or a war. Now he does consciously feel the open sky above him, the eye of heaven clear upon him. In the long, unwearying gaze he feels the clarity of his outline. Over his farm in the distance the broad cloud shadows pass, darkening and leaving bright again the rinsed air.
Clear and whole before him now he sees the object of his faith as he has not seen it for fifteen years. And he feels opening in himself the stillness of a mown field, such a peace as he has never known. For the last five years he has lived at the limit of his strength, not looking up from the ground, perishing at night into lonely sleep as though his bed was a grave from which he rose again in the dark, sore in his bones, to take up again the labor of repaying the past. And now, the shudder of realization in his flesh, he sees that he has come through. He has been faithful to his land, through all its yearly changes from maiden to mother, the bride and wife and widow of men like himself since the world began.
He lost his life – fifteen years that he had thought would be, and ought to have been, the best and the most abundant; those are gone from the earth, lost in disappointment and grief and darkness and work without hope, and now he is only where he was when he began. But that is enough, and more. He is returning home – not only to the place but to the possibility and promise that he once saw in it, and now, as not before, to the understanding that that is enough. After such grievous spending, enough, more than enough, remains. There is more. He lost his life, and now he has found it again.
Words come to him: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” –the words of the old psalm that Nancy had made him repeat when he was a boy until he would remember it all his life. He had always been able to see through those words to what they were about. He could see the green pastures and the still waters and the shepherd bringing the sheep down out of the hills in the evening to drink. It comes to him that he never understood them before, but that he does now. The man who first spoke the psalm had been driven to the limit, he had seen his ruin, he had felt in the weight of his own flesh the substantiality of his death and the measure of his despair. He knew that his origin was in nothing that he or any man had done, and that he could do nothing sufficient to his needs. And he looked finally beyond those limits and saw the world still there, potent and abounding, as it would be whether he lived or died, worthy of his life and work and faith. He saw that he would be distinguished not by what he was or anything that he might become but by what he served. Beyond him was the peace and rest and joy that he desired. Beyond the limits of a man’s strength or intelligence or desire or hope or faith, there is more. The cup runs over. While a man lies asleep in exhaustion and despair, helpless as a child, the soft rain falls, the trees leaf, the seed sprouts in the planted field. And when he knows that he lives by a bounty not his own, though his ruin lies behind him and again ahead of him, he will be at peace, for he has seen what is worthy. . .
“That his life was renewed, that he had been driven down to the bedrock of his own place in the world and his own truth and had stood again, that a profound peace and trust had come to him out of his suffering and his solitude, and that this peace would abide with him to the end of his days – all this he knew in the quiet of his heart and kept to himself.”
In this moment of illumination Old Jack’s faith becomes a spiritual reality. He makes David’s words in the 23rd Psalm his own: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” What he can truly know in this valley amounts to very little: “He knew that his origin was in nothing that he or any man had done, and that he could do nothing sufficient to his needs.” Those “nothings” are an acknowledgment of his dependence on something to sustain him, something beyond himself: “the world still there, potent and abounding, as it would be whether he lived or died, worthy of his life and work and faith. He saw that he would be distinguished not by what he was or anything that he might become but by what he served.” In the theological obscurity of Old Jack’s thoughts there is no explicit mention of God, for Old Jack inhabits the world as it appears, in its phenomenological reality, as through a glass, darkly. But parallel with Paul’s “then face to face,” his “then even as I am known,” Old Jack too puts his faith in a beyond: “Beyond him was the peace and rest and joy that he desired. Beyond the limits of a man’s strength or intelligence or desire or hope or faith, there is more. The cup runs over.”
We see our lives as through a glass, darkly, precisely because to be human is to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Death is the obscuring shadow. We know neither our beginning nor our end; all is in darkness. We experience frustration in pushing against our limits; we despair in the bitter undoing of plans and expectations. But these literary instances offer hope that the valley is not endless, and that, finally, we will come out of the shadow into sunlight and renewed life. There is a beyond for Old Jack, as there is for Keats, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Paul, and indeed for each of us. We take refuge in the shade of such a cloud of witnesses! Writing is an act of faith in that beyond. As I reflect upon the change of name for this blog, I realize that my original title, “Lloyd’s Thoughts Now and Then,” presciently echo the Apostle Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” My change of title turns out to be less of a change than I originally thought. However, while my “then” was pointing to the past – incomplete, ephemeral, lost – Paul’s anticipates a future fullness and perfection; it is something that, as yet, we can only see dimly, faintly, and, as through a glass, darkly.
I need to read this several times. Thank you for sharing.
Lovely thoughts💕