Chance or the Dance?

I have been faithfully working my way through my summer reading list, but it was time to cut away from the fiction side of things and move on to the non-fiction list. My first choice was: Chance or the Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism, by Thomas Howard



Some random thoughts:

Howard begins by comparing The Old Myth (a Christian view of life and eternity) with The New Myth (a secular view.) In the former, men "believed that they had souls, and that what they did in this life had some bearing on the way in which they would finally experience reality...Altogether, life was very weighty, and there was no telling what might lie behind things." In the latter, "Men were freed from the fear of the Last Judgment; it was felt to be more bracing to face Nothing than to face the Tribunal. They were freed from worry about getting their souls into God's heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven."

He discusses the role of imagination, the role of rituals and courtesy and ceremony, how poetry and painting express our view of human purpose and of our view of the existence (or non-existence) of God, and why any of this would matter in the midst of our ordinary lives.

This is not everyone's fare, but I found his critique fascinating. Thomas Howard is Elizabeth Elliot's brother; he converted to Catholicism in adulthood, and he is a fine thinker, and an imaginative and earthy writer. I like his book a lot.

From the final page:

"But (man) might note, because he has looked around him at a thousand images, that it is not unobserved that life issues from death - that spring rises winter, and the oak from the dead acorn, and dawn from the night, and Phoenix from the ashes.

These are all old moral saws. Nothing new here. Bromides. But then there is nothing new anywhere. The business of the poet and the prophet has always been to take the saws and astonish and delight us into a fresh awareness of what they mean by discovering them suddenly in this image, and in this, and this. And the rest of us may see it all either as a pointless jumble of phenomena, or as the diagram of glory - as grinding tediously toward entropy, or as dancing toward the Dance."

Major thanks to Martin Cothran of Memoria Press, who had this book in his booth at the Denver Homeschool Convention last summer. My VISA card was smoking when I left his booth, but it was right before Father's Day...we celebrated with great literary gusto upon my return! For you homeschooling types, the Memoria Press catalog is filled with great articles as well as products. It is the one catalog I keep around after ordering time is gone. To get on their list, go here.