[We venerate St. Edward] because we will not let ourselves be blinded by the lure of wordly success so as to forget that the true statesmanship is exercised in the council chamber, and true warfare fought on the battleground of the human soul. \u00a0Ask yourself which you would rather have been, in life, of all those great dead who lie in Westminster Abbey, and you will find it a difficult question to answer: there is so much that dazzles, so much that captivates the imagination. \u00a0Would you rather have written this, have painted that, have built that, have discovered that, have won this triumph or have carried that enactment\u2013you can hardly say. \u00a0But ask yourself which of those great dead you would rather be now, your body there, your soul far away\u2013is there any Christian who would not ask to change places with the Confessor\u2026 there to wait for the opening of the great Doomsday Book, in which nothing is recorded of men, but whether they meant good or evil, whether they loved or neglected God?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Something of Knox\u2019s discussion of our desire to be the one who created, and to have our name pinned forever to the work that we did, reminds me of an argument that occurs in Tom Stoppard\u2019s\u00a0Arcadia<\/em>. \u00a0Valentine, a math graduate student, is arguing with Bernard, a literature professor, about whether it\u00a0matters<\/em> to pin down the author of a disputed text.<\/p>\nVALENTINE: Well, it\u2019s all trivial anyway. [\u2026] The questions you\u2019re asking don\u2019t matter, you see. It\u2019s like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn\u2019t matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress.<\/p>\n
BERNARD: [D]on\u2019t confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There\u2019s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle\u2019s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God\u2019s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I don\u2019t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. [\u2026] If knowledge isn\u2019t self-knowledge it isn\u2019t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing \u2018When Father Painted the Parlour\u2019? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I like both sides of this argument. \u00a0It\u2019s hard to feel too<\/i> much ownership of a discovery about the natural world when what you\u2019re doing is something like an archaeologist\u2019s work, digging up and brushing off a pre-existing artifact that we hadn\u2019t spotted before. \u00a0There\u2019s plenty of room for joy, but it\u2019s clear that your discovery is always going to be pointing past yourself, at something that exists for all of us to share.<\/p>\n
(I\u2019m reminded of what I learned when I sat in on my roommate\u2019s Roman Law class \u2014 that in Rome there were no professional lawyers who were paid to appear in court by clients, because lawyers simply explained and examined the law, and you could not honorably charge money for amplifying the world-as-it-is; everyone was entitled to that knowledge, and you were obligated to share it.)<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s still a sense that work that is written down and knowledge that is handed on will\u00a0endure<\/em> long after all of our everyday kindnesses have vanished along with the people we offered them to. \u00a0Part of the argument\u00a0for<\/em> ordinary goodness can be cribbed from Bernard\u2019s lines (though he might not appreciate me doing so).<\/p>\nGoodness,\u00a0especially<\/em> everyday goodness, is an\u00a0urgent need<\/em>. \u00a0It is always timely, falling precisely into your own life and the life of the person you are serving. \u00a0We can\u2019t wait for love and care, the way we can for knowledge. Many saints live and love at a much smaller scale, and reach far fewer people, that Bernard\u2019s own idol (Lord Byron), but each offers a work that we can hardly wait for, even if it isn\u2019t recorded for posterity.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2015, I\u2019m reading and blogging through\u00a0Ronald Knox\u2019s\u00a0collection of sermons on Christian exemplars,\u00a0Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes. \u00a0Every Monday, I\u2019ll be writing about the next portrait in the book, so you\u2019re welcome to peruse them all and\/or read along. \u00a0 In this week\u2019s chapter, Ronald Knox sets up St. Edward the Confessor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":11307,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[240],"class_list":["post-11305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-knox-bookclub"],"yoast_head":"\n
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