{"id":1824,"date":"2016-08-28T15:07:57","date_gmt":"2016-08-28T19:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/elflandletters\/?p=1824"},"modified":"2016-08-30T06:38:05","modified_gmt":"2016-08-30T10:38:05","slug":"remembering-robert-kirk-david-bentely-hart-on-the-secret-commonwealth-and-contemplative-rationality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/elflandletters\/2016\/08\/28\/remembering-robert-kirk-david-bentely-hart-on-the-secret-commonwealth-and-contemplative-rationality\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Robert Kirk: David Bentley Hart on The Secret Commonwealth and Contemplative Rationality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

David Russell Mosley<\/p>\n

\"Description
Description
English: The Minister\u2019s Pine According to local legend, the spirit of the Reverend Robert Kirk who is said to have had contact with the faerie world is trapped within the tree. To this day people still tie pieces of material or \u201cclooties\u201d to the branches of the tree in the hope of having their wishes granted.
Date 21 December 2008
Source From geograph.org.uk
Author Kay Lennox
(CC BY-SA 2.0)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ordinary Time
\nSt. Augustine\u2019s Day
\nThe Edge of Elfland
\nHudson, New Hampshire<\/p>\n

Dear Readers,<\/p>\n

Today, as my children napped, my wife and mother-in-law watched a little television, and my father-in-law, was running errands, I sat outside with my pipe and did some work and some reading. After my work and spiritual reading were done for the moment I turned to David Bentley Hart\u2019s new collection of essays, A Splendid Wickedness<\/i>. There I read, for the second time, his essay \u201cThe Secret Commonwealth.\u201d Hart initially wrote this essay for First Things Magazine <\/i>on October 20 in 2009.<\/p>\n

The essay is broadly about a book by Robert Kirk, a seventeenth century Presbyterian minister, entitled The Secret Commonwealth. <\/i>I\u2019ve actually written about Hart\u2019s essay briefly in this, what is ostensibly my first ever letter on Faeriean Metaphysics<\/a>. I will return to the same point I made there by the end of this letter. However, I want to take some time to look closely at Hart\u2019s essay.<\/p>\n

So again, Hart\u2019s essay is broadly about the book written by the Scottish Presbyterian, Robert Kirk though one might say it is really about Kirk himself, or the way Kirk viewed the world. Hart tells us that there are two competing legends concerning the death of Robert Kirk (aside from the \u201cofficial\u201d story which says that Kirk is simply dead). In one version, Kirk is the captive of unseen folk, the faeries, and in fact asked his cousin to rescue him from them at the baptism of his son. Sadly, if this version of the story be true, Kirk\u2019s cousin was so stupefied by the ghostly presence of his departed cousin, that he could not do what was necessary to rescue him. In the second version, however, not entirely unlike the titular character of the children\u2019s books The Spiderwick Chronicles<\/i>, Kirk was taken for knowing too much, but is not a prisoner, but \u201can ambassador, able to convey messages between the two realms that over the years have become increasingly estranged from one another\u201d (Hart, 23).<\/p>\n

Hart writes that:<\/p>\n

These beings are, says Kirk, nothing but those elemental guardians of the nations who, according to the New Testament, have been appointed as wardens in the earth, but who frequently forget their roles and resist the sway of God. They are dangerous, but not evil; they are, rather, morally neutral, like the forces of material nature (Hart, 25).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am again reminded of the works of Lewis and Tolkien when I read this passage. Part of Tolkien\u2019s project, at least early on, was to discern, through story, how it is we have tales concerning mischievous and capricious creatures who crudely dairy, tie your hair in knots, or seek to lead you to your doom whether by wailing in bogs or appearing as lights to lost travelers; and yet that we have other stories which see these creatures as being benevolent and have given us names in the germanic and nordic languages such as Alfred (counselled by elves), Alvin\/Elwin (elf friend), and other such names that seem to indicate a positive relationship between man and elves. Part of Tolkien\u2019s project included the dark elves, those elves who never crossed the sea and saw the light of the two trees in Valinor. These elves were often far more leery of men in Tolkien\u2019s stories. Or again, there are the words of Cecil Dimble in That Hideous Strength<\/i> which suggest that once, perhaps in Merlin\u2019s day, there were creatures who were neither angels nor men but beings neutral as regarded us, if not neutral (or not capable of remaining neutral) as regards God.<\/p>\n

For Kirk, these beings, at least when they are behaving, or at least the realm in which they live, is what was often seen by or perhaps better seen through by the prophets. Kirk goes so far as to suggest that those gifted with second-sight\u2013\u2013the ability to see into Fa\u00ebrie\u2013\u2013\u201dare of the same family as the prophets of ancient Israel, and of all prophets in all lands and among all peoples\u201d (Hart, 25).<\/p>\n

Hart argues, though perhaps that is too strong a word here as makes no references, that<\/p>\n

though Christian tradition came soon to abominate all the lesser spirits venerated or feared in pre-Christian culture as just so many demons, this was not the view taken of them in the Pauline corpus; there they appear as perhaps mutinous deputies of God, part of the compromised cosmic hierarchy of powers and principalities, whom Christ by his resurrection has subdued, but not necessarily<\/i> as servants of evil; Colossians 1:20 even speaks of them as being not only conquered by Christ, but reconciled with God (Hart, 26).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is, of course, not easy to square with Christian theology which normally, thanks in large part to Denys the Areopagite, views the Virtues, Powers, and Principalities as angelic orders. Though Hart\u2019s reading of Colossians 1:20 is nevertheless interesting for Paul does write, \u201cand through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.\u201d Whatever we may take Paul to mean here, we ought to take seriously his claim that things in heaven have also been reconciled to God, not damned, notice, but reconciled through the body and blood of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

Still, all of this aside, it is Hart\u2019s conclusion about Kirk that I find not only moving, but essential. He writes:<\/p>\n

One need not believe in fairies to grasp that there is no good reason why one ought not to do so. To see the world as inhabited by these vital intelligences, or to believe that behind the outward forms of nature there might be an unperceived realm of intelligent order, is simply to respond rationally to one of the ways in which the world seems to address us, when we intuit simultaneously its rational frame and the depth of mystery it seems to hide from us. It may be that the apprehension of such an unseen order, when it comes in the form of folklore about fabulous beings, has been overlaid by numerous strata of illusion\u2013\u2013but so what? Everything we know about reality comes to us with a certain alloy of illusion, not accidentally, but as an indispensable condition (Hart 26-27).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again one may come up against a place where much of what Hart is at least potentially ascribing to faeries is often, in Christian theology, ascribed to angels. However, here in particular that is of little importance because what is of importance is that<\/i> there are deeper realities behind and even upholding what we see every day. That there are guiding and vital intelligences, logoi<\/i>, ideas, forms, that direct and uphold the various creatures in creation. Whether these are elves or angels is of little consequence so long as we understand them coming from, and answerable to, the Holy Trinity.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Description:
Description: Merlin\u2019s Cave, Tintagel. According to legend, this is Merlin\u2019s Cave (the one on the right I believe).
Date 20 August 2002
Source From geograph.org.uk
Author andy
(CC BY-SA 2.0)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hart, however, admits the possibility that belief in fairies may not be something obfuscated by illusion but may be merely delusional. This, however, he says, should not bother us. \u201cA delusion this amiable,\u201d he writes, \u201cis endlessly preferable to boredom, for boredom is all of what is or is not true\u201d (Hart 27). Here Hart echoes Puddleglum. If the world around is simply what the materialist or atomist tells us it is, nothing more than a collection of chemicals arranged in this or that way, then the delusion of belief in fairies, and God for that matter, is preferable to reality since it makes more sense out of our actual encounters with reality.<\/p>\n

Hart ends his essay by saying:<\/p>\n

[\u2026] that the ability of any of us to view the world with some sort of contemplative rationality rests upon the capacity we possessed as children to see in everything a kind of articulate mystery, and to believe in far more than what ordinary vision discloses to us: a capacity that endows us with that spiritual eros<\/i> that allows us to know and love the world, and that we are wise to continue to cultivate in ourselves even after age and disillusion have weakened our sight (Hart, 27).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I know that for myself, contra many well-meaning Christian parents, belief in Santa Claus, or Father Christmas as I prefer to call him, and the subsequent \u201cdiscovery\u201d that he is not \u201creal\u201d as a child did not ruin my ability to believe in God, to believe in Christ and the Holy Spirit, to believe in angels and demons and Satan, or the Eucharist. Rather, it informed my ability to do so and more. It allowed me to believe not only in the \u201csuper\u201dnatural but in the natural as well. Not only was I able to quickly convert from my feigned atheism as a middle-schooler, but I was I able to believe in human beings, in trees, in dogs and cats, in bread and wine. Fa\u00ebrie did not take that away from me, it helped me see it. Of course it can be abused, for while it\u2019s possible that one of Kirk\u2019s motives for writing his book was to help liberate well-meaning Scottish women from the pyre who dabbled not in the devil but in nature, that does not preclude the possibility, nay the likelihood that some (and not just or even mostly women) did more than dabble in the former. For there are corrupted realities in this world. Still, we ought not to give over all our thought to them, for so doing gives them power. Rather, we ought to give over our thoughts and actions to the Good, seeking it wherever we may find it, for there is God.<\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\nDavid<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Russell Mosley Ordinary Time St. Augustine\u2019s Day The Edge of Elfland Hudson, New Hampshire Dear Readers, Today, as my children napped, my wife and mother-in-law watched a little television, and my father-in-law, was running errands, I sat outside with my pipe and did some work and some reading. After my work and spiritual reading […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2795,"featured_media":1825,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,21,752,773],"tags":[870,230,570,868,869,674],"class_list":["post-1824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faerie","category-faeriean-metaphysics","category-sacramental-ontology","category-the-radical-catholic-reimagination-of-everything","tag-a-splendid-wickedness","tag-david-bentley-hart","tag-robert-kirk","tag-robertus-kirk","tag-the-ministers-pine","tag-the-secret-commonwealth"],"yoast_head":"\nRemembering Robert Kirk: David Bentley Hart on The Secret Commonwealth and Contemplative Rationality<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"David Russell Mosley Ordinary Time St. Augustine's Day The Edge of Elfland Hudson, New Hampshire Dear Readers, Today, as my children napped, my wife 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