Author Archives: memoirandremains

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 4.3

28 Friday Aug 2020

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The last post concerning this book may be found here:

In the last section of the chapter In Defense of the Analytic Attitude, Rieff comes to the questions of Freud’s “children,” those who followed after him. This question of Freud’s descendants will comprise the majority of the remaining book. At this point, Rieff looks generally at psychoanalysts, with some mention of Adler and Jung. Jung will also get an entire chapter of consideration.

Rieff notes some basic elements of a system. There is a canon, or a source of authority: “Every science has its established body of authoritative makers of opinion.” (69) There is also a system of conveying that knowledge through education. Rieff notes the poor quality of the education, which rather than delivery intellectually inquisitive analysts who can quarrel with their “father,” “Those post-Freudian analysts who remain orthodox never have had that healthy bout of rebelling which sharpens orthodoxy.” (84)

He lays a great deal of the trouble to analysis being made a branch of medicine. The discipline thus took on a non-productive empiricism and reductionism which was counterproductive to the process of analysis.

There is also the tendency to fall away from Freud’s anti-commitment. In the Freudian there are simply powerful psychic forces which seek for place in the functioning of the human being; there are also countervailing forces which seek to limit the demands of the id. There is then a negotiated peace of the ego.

Freud’s work was to merely lay bare the process of these competing forces: one welling up in the individual; the other pressing down from the outside, mediated by an internalization in the individual. To maintain an objective distance, and to prevent the patient from being brought into a more intimate relationship with the therapist, there is the necessity of the fee. The fee acts to “guarantee the essential impersonality behind the ostensibly intensely personal character of the psychoanalytic relationship.” (87)

But the pressure will always be present to select a new system of symbolic commitment to make such a competition of forces and the resolution of such forces into a meaningful whole. 

Freud’s goal was to make men “free”: you could do what you wanted with your own forces welling up and forcing tapping down. There was a need for strength to understand these forces and to not succumb to any system which would soften the blow and make the resolutions on its own terms. 

But the power of such knowledge proves too much, oftentimes, “For inevitably, at a certain point of societal power, knowledge seeks to transform itself into faith.” (83)

Jung did this by means of a “God [] rendered completely interior. The ‘Thou’ term becomes a function of ‘I.’” (83) But since Jung will receive a chapter, he is presented briefly. 

Here Rieff directs some attention to Adler’s political theory of analysis. Rather than deal with the ambiguity of a multiplicity of forces and turns in the individual life, Adler however sought a single master narrative, an explanation which gathered up all the individual examples into a single force and competition. 

Adler’s theory of an “inferiority complex.” Rieff explains Adler in terms of Adler’s socialism and class war. The feeling of “organ inferiority.” The North American Soceity of Adlerian Pyschology summarizes it thus:

Adler photo
Alfred Adler

“In his youth, Adler was a sickly child, which caused him embarrassment and pain. These early experiences with illnesses and accidents probably account for his theory of organ inferiority and were the foundation for his theories on inferiority feelings. According to Adler, each individual has a weak area in his or her body–organ inferiority, which tends to be the area where illness occurs, such as the stomach, head, heart, back, lungs, etc. Adler said that to some degree every emotion finds expression in the body. From his understanding of organ inferiority, Adler began to see each individual as having a feeling of inferiority.”

Rieff explains this in terms of Adler’s transformation of psychoanalysis into politics.

“Viewed thus, Alder’s psychology reveals the quality of his socialism; it was, said Freud, characterized by (1) protest and (2) self-assertion, the aggrandizement of personality. Here is a sudden swoop down into the very bowels of the socialist dynamic, with its inevitable cult of personality wherever it triumphs.” (81)

Rieff quotes Freud further on Adler’s system, “The view of life which is reflected in the Adlerian system is founded exclusively on the aggressive impulse; there is no room in it for love. It might surprise one that such a cheerless view of life should meet with any attention at all.” (82)

Pastoral Counsel and the Law

23 Sunday Aug 2020

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(The following is a draft from the introduction to a chapter in a book which will published later this year concerning counseling and the law.)

Distinguishing our work as biblical counselors from the counseling work of a licensed psychotherapist will require some ca.eful consideration. From one perspective, our work is indistinguishable from the work of a licensed therapist: someone comes to us with a problem. The person desires our counsel, our help. We listen, pay careful attention; we ask questions. We consider one thing important and another irrelevant. We give advice and direction, discussing words, actions, motives, avoidance, behavior, repetition, et cetera. 

As explained in chapter __, reliance upon the Bible is not a factor which clearly distinguishes us form the licensed therapist. The state, in most instances, cares very little whether we rely upon the source of our authority, the Bible, Adler, Jung, Maslow, astrology, are all matters of indifference to the licensing authorities (we will mention, at the end certain areas where we will face a conflict). 

But our work is also similar to the work of a friend. A friend listens to troubles; asks advice; gives advice; sympathizes. The state, as of yet, does not regulate the speech between friends. Why then does our work not fall into the category of friend-speech: a matter of no interest to the state?

Well, we profess a degree of expertise. Your friend may be remarkably pompous in how he describes himself; but, in the end, he is your friend. You speak with him because he is your friend, not because he is an “expert”.  Another difference is that one’s circle of actual friends (even when extended to acquaintances) remains limited. When your friend comes to see you, it is because he is your friend and you already know him. 

We often counsel people whom we barely know before the counseling relationship. We even counsel people we do not know at all prior to the relationship. These people come to us not because they are our friend, but because we offer counsel. 

The state does not intervene in our friendship relationships. However, the state does regulate relationships which are open to the public on a “professional” (broadly stated) relationship. As explained in chapter __, the state’s goal is the maintenance of public order and safety. Professional relationships take place between relative strangers on the basis of the professional skill promised.

I am an attorney. I hold myself out as possessing specific skills as the result of education and experience. My possession of this knowledge and skill has been regulated by an initial text, the bar exam; and is confirmed on the basis of observation before judges and other attorneys. A professional organization regulates my maintenance of a license. I am subject to investigation and discipline – including the loss of my license –if an investigation demonstrates I lack certain skills and ethics.

I make a public claim which the state confirms by permitting me to maintain by license. 

When a member of the public contacts me, there is at least a minimum qualification which they can expect. That minimum qualification is a requirement across any number of “professional” relationships. 

By requiring a psychotherapist to maintain a license, subject to state regulation, the public is able to expect a minimal level of skill from that therapist. By seeing clearly the motivation of the state in licensing therapists, we can better understand the motivation of the state.

Caveat:

In its endeavor to protect the public, the state may not merely regulate the quality of the counselor’s experience, but also the content of the counselor’s speech. And again, we do not necessarily consider that a bad thing. For instance, it is illegal for me to counsel a client on how to break the law. I cannot help a client perpetuate a fraud. If a therapist learns that a client intends to murder someone, the therapist must report the intention to the authorities – not assist the client in the commission of a crime.

This is where the trouble comes for us. If the state’s interest were merely proof that we had received some minimal education and had been tested in accordance with some general standard, there would far less concern with licensing.

But we as orthodox Christians, intent on communicating the historic norms and life of the Christian church, hold to positions which are inimical to the current state of public morality, particularly as concerns the life of the family, the nature of the human body and sexual behavior. Indeed, Romans 1 lays out a fairly clear picture of the manner in which we will differ in our counsel from current public morality. 

For example, California law (Bus. & Prof. Code §865.2) provides, “Any sexual orientation change efforts attempted on a patient under 18 years of age by a mental health provider shall be considered unprofessional conduct and shall subject a mental health provider to discipline by the licensing entity for that mental health provider.”

The obvious means of avoiding this restriction is to take our work outside of the scope of licensed therapy. 

We should also note something else is taking place here. This – and much other speech which is both mandated and restricted in the public sphere – is indicative not of some neutral position which is merely seeking to limit the scope of governmental intrusion, but rather is seeking to impose an actual religion upon the public. 

No government, no speech, no ethics are neutral. Human beings cannot but worship. The public square is not a place of neutral logical positions, but of competing religions. Jonathan Leeman puts it well in his book Political Church, “The public square is nothing more or less than a battleground of gods.”[1]

Thus, while the argument is phrased as a matter of religion versus medicine or science or politics, in the end it is a matter of one religion versus another. Since, until recently, the public religion was a vaguely generic form of Christianity or Judaism, recognizable as to its own but not terribly distinctive. As the Ninth Circuit held in Newdow v. Rio Lindo School District (2010):

“We hold that the Pledge of Allegiance does not violate the Establishment Clause because Congress’ ostensible and pre- dominant purpose was to inspire patriotism and that the context of the Pledge—its wording as a whole, the preamble to the statute, and this nation’s history—demonstrate that it is a predominantly patriotic exercise. For these reasons, the phrase “one Nation under God” does not turn this patriotic exercise into a religious activity. “

What this tells us that the space for the old civic religion, is a religion which is devoid of any content. In the space of that contentless religion, a new religion is taking shape which has very definite truth claims. 

And so in giving direction in the remainder of this essay, I understand that while the discussion will take place on the level of religion versus therapy as a “scientific” discipline (which admittedly permits distinctively non-scientific claims); there is a religious conflict. However, should the conflict to such a place where we cannot avoid a clash, we should be clear that we are advocating a distinctly religious position against a religious position. And we know who that conflict will end. Matt. 16:18.

[1] Leeman, Jonathan. Political Church: The Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ’s Rule (Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture) (p. 14). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

Kuyper, Common Grace, 1.15

20 Thursday Aug 2020

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The previous post on Kuyper’s Common Grace made found here.

In chapter 15, Kuyper considers the how the environment of humanity has corresponded to our spiritual state. In a state of innocence, we lived in the Garden. Under sin, we live in a fallen world in a body subject to illness and death. Under damnation, we live in hell. But redeemed and restored, we are fitted for heaven. These correspondences of our body and our circumstance could be considered from the point of view of our desires and thoughts et cetera.

The original state of humanity, the Garden, is no more and can only be imagined – since it could not be found. When we think of the Garden must realize a few things: First, the Garden of Eden was a place; it was not the entire world. Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden. Second, the Garden was not what we might consider a Garden, not the least because four great rivers ran through it. Third, the Garden was no a place of quite, but rather a place of superabundant life. 

The only trouble of the Garden, for Adam, was that he was alone. The animals were with other animals; but Adam had no other like himself. But human beings were created for society – not for endless solitude. And thus, God made Adam, but he took Eve from Adam’s body. The connection there was so profound that a marriage can no only approximate and recall that original bonding, as he writes, “it is a weak effort to restore and redress what was lost through sin.”

There are two additional points of some interest in this chapter. First, he contends that animals were made in the image of human beings (thus reversing the Darwinian contention, that we came from animals). His argument at this point cannot be put more succinctly than has already put it:

When God created the animals, he already knew within himself the human being he would create, and he knew that human being in soul and body. And in order that that animal world would be suited to man and would not be too alien to man, but as it were, a part of his own life, God created the animal world in such a way that, in increasing measure, the bodies of the animals contained a clear foreshadowing of the body he had intended and ordained for man. We can also express this succinctly: God created the animals in the image and likeness of humankind.

His contention is clear and the argument makes some sense. But I am not sure that I would phrase it as Kuyper has done. That there is a sort of correspondence between human beings and animals is abundantly clear. There is a likeness between the two – and a likeness which is quite different than the similarities between human and spiritual beings mentioned in the Scripture. But I am not certain that “image of” is the correct way to capture that similarity. But anyway, there it is.

Second, a far more helpful point concerns the nature of human desire and aspiration. In Andrea del Sarto, Browning’s artist muses:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, 

Or what’s a heaven for?

Kuyper picks up the matter of aspiration as follows:

The heart virtually never strives after a higher ideal. But the heart should do that. We must not put the condition of our highest desire lower than God has ordained it for us. When we do that, we demean our life and surrender that which God has destined for us and has by grace ordained for us once again. It dulls us when we settle for less. We then miss less because we desire less. We make ourselves less sensitive, and therefore have less pain. But that impassivity then also brings us into a false situation, falsifies the standard whereby we measure things, and distorts our view of the past and of the future. And what we also must not forget is that our sense of guilt suffers from this, because when we do not clearly recognize from how high a state of bliss and heavenly overabundance we have fallen, we cannot gauge the depth into which sin has thrown us. It is therefore not an indifferent, incidental matter to clearly perceive in what state of bliss God had originally placed humankind. Only when we form the correct conception of this state of bliss do we understand what has been thrown away through sin and has been lost, and also what the ideal is toward which we reach in Christ.

In The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Thomas Shepherd contends a holy life in this world derives from just such a state of desire:

Let the reproach of earthly mindedness, cast upon the face of Christians, be wiped off by your carriage being heavenly, holy, loosened from things below. Art thou in heaven with an earthly heart Is not heaven good enough for thee? Cannot that content thee which many have desired to see, and could not see, even the Lord Jesus, the King of Glory in his beauty, in the assembly of the saints.

Thus, that desire for what is lost and what is to come orient us correctly in this world. To be too comfortable is to be lost; it is like being pleased with being in the airport lobby and not the destination. 

Encouragement to a saint in quarantine

14 Friday Aug 2020

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(The following were written as an encouragement to a sweet saint who has been kept from physical fellowship and participation in church with the Lord’s Table. I hope it was of encouragement to her and perhaps it may be of encouragement to someone else.)

The night our Lord was betrayed, he told his disciples that he will leave but he will not leave the disciples as orphans. The Lord will ask of the Father and the Father will send the Comforter, the Counselor, the Helper, the Spirit in the Name of the Son. The Spirit has been with them and now will be in them. But not only the Spirit, the Father will come to those who love the Son, and the Son too, and they will “make [their] home with” his disciples.  John 14:23. That promise was made to them at first, but it is good to us in this day. Those who love Christ will receive Christ.

Our Lord then told his disciples that he is the vine – we are only branches. Our life is in him and we share in that life. As Paul write to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I know live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” Gal. 2:20-21. 

The life of every believer is bound up in the life of Christ. The people of God are the family of God and as Paul writes to the Corinthians “we who are many are one body.” 1 Cor. 10:17. 

That body of Christ, that shared life of Christ is not bound by time or space. The life which Christ imparted to his first disciples, is the same life we share today. The believer who lives furthest from me on this globe is today my brother or sister – and is today part of the same body of Christ. For Christ is not bound by space of time, as he said after his resurrection, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matt. 28:20.

And so while the physical presence of a fellow believer is a comfort to us, we are never distant from our true life, for we have died and our life is hidden in Christ. Col. 3:3. 

But God is gracious to the weakness of his children, he knows our frame, he remembers he made us from dust. Ps. 103:14. He gave us the cup and the bread so that we could have sensible forms to communicate this knowledge to us, to comfort our hearts and assure of his promise that we have been united to him. 

And the bread which the Lord gives to us is one, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” 1 Cor. 10:17. And as Christ is not limited by time and space, we who have lived so long after the first disciples and so far away from them still partake of that one bread of life. 

And I am certain that even now, even though you are kept physically separate from other believers – you are not separated from Christ and you are not separated from the true Body of Christ.  And the Lord who is gracious and merciful and not willing to lose the least of his sheep, will see your heart and your desire to partake of the one bread and will bless you in that desire to be obedient to him.

Freedom of Conscience is an insufficient ground to protect freedom of religion

14 Friday Aug 2020

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In his book Political Church, Jonathan Leeman consider the “freedom of conscience” argument as a basis for political freedom. I must admit that I found this argument, compelling and was confirmed in Luther’s words, “To go against conscience is neither right nor safe.” And while I affirm that a well-informed conscience is to be heeded, I also understand that conscience is an insufficient ground to protect the exercise of religion. In Leeman’s words

In short, the traditional liberal formulation simply demands too much for the conscience and too little by way of foundations. Christians will like what it produces only when the vast majority of citizens inhabit a broadly Christian value system. It’s true from a biblical perspective that true worship cannot be coerced, and a biblical perspective on religious tolerance insists on carving out an area for the conscience to freely respond to God, as we will see in subsequent chapters. But this free conscience must remain hemmed in by a concept of right and not just rights. To argue that “the conscience is entitled to remain free” is an overstatement. It invests too much authority in the individual. It presumes too much about the rightness of the conscience’s claim. And in the end it will cave in on itself and undermine true religion because it’s accountable to nothing but the whims of whatever ideologies rule the day. All this is the result of asking the publicly accessible “conscience” to stand in for “religion.” This trade works just fine in a nation of believers and relatively biblically virtuous people. But in a nation of believers and unbelievers, the unattached, unaccountable conscience will be employed to legitimize the freedom of various religions (institutionally defined) only as long as the consciences of a nation’s decision makers value them. When a nation’s decision makers decide that the traditional (substantivist) institutional religions are a threat to liberty or equality or tolerance, they will banish them, first from the public square, then from the marketplace, and perhaps, in partial ways, from the home (“No, you may not indoctrinate your children”).

Leeman, Jonathan. Political Church: The Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ’s Rule (Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture) (pp. 90-91). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

A judge utterly without bias

11 Tuesday Aug 2020

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Not only would it be extraordinary to find a judicial officer who is totally without a thought on all issues, the discovery of such a rare intellectual eunuch would suggest an adverse reflection on his qualifications. For example, in a case in which he refused to recuse himself even though as an assistant attorney general he had previously expressed his legal opinion on the issues involved, Justice Rehnquist stated, “Proof that a Justice’s mind at the time he joined the Court was a complete tabula rasa in the area of constitutional adjudication would be evidence of lack of qualification, not lack of bias.” ( Laird v. Tatum (1972) 409 U.S. 824, 835 [34 L.Ed.2d 50, 59, 93 S.Ct. 7] (memorandum of Rehnquist, J.).)

Andrews v. Agricultural Labor Relations Bd., 28 Cal.3d 781, 791 (Cal. 1981)

Kuyper on Common Grace, 1.14

11 Tuesday Aug 2020

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The previous post in this series may be found here.

In the fourteenth chapter of Common Grace, Kuyper emphasizes the historicity of the Genesis narrative. We must read this as both real and reliable history. It must have come to us in words real words of actual comprehensible meaning. It must mean what it says not merely in general but in specifics. 

We must conclude thus on two grounds. Without a truly speaking God, we do not have Scripture: This speaking by God is the great fact that is placed in the foreground throughout Holy Scripture, ceaselessly and with stress and emphasis. It is that which makes Scripture [to be] Scripture. The crucial point in Scripture is not what man thought or contemplated, but precisely that which God spoke. (120)

The speaking is true speech; not that it is sound made by a mouth and airwaves. Rather speech is the conveyance of the content of one mind to another mind, “speaking takes place only when from the consciousness of the speaker consciousthoughts are transferred into the consciousness of the hearer.”

We need this text of the speaking God because we need a basis upon which to understand the world and place within it. These narratives provide the basis upon which we can understand ourselves and our place in this world. Calvin beings the Institutes with the observation that true knowledge of ourselves must begin with true knowledge of ourselves in relation to God. Without the Genesis narrative we have no way of putting ourselves into that context. 

The distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian, the distinction between the Protestant the Roman Catholic lie in the way in which we understand these narratives: What is the image of God, what happened to that image with the Fall, what is the state of the human being past the Fall? The distinctions among human understanding begin here in the distinction of our understanding of Genesis. 

On this point, Kuyper singles out the doctrine of common grace as critical to a Reformed understanding of human history, and thus our preaching of grace and salvation. 

Stephen Charnock, A Discourse on Mortification.4

11 Tuesday Aug 2020

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Charnock then considers affirmative evidence of true mortification. 

First, “When upon a temptation that did usually excite the beloved lust, it doth not stir, it is a sign of a mortified state.” He provides Peter as an example. Before the crucifixion, Peter famously boasted that though all desert Jesus, Peter would not. Peter proceeds to deny Christ. As Thomas Manton put it, “Peter, that ventured upon a band of men, was overcome by the weak blast of a damsel’s question.”

(Thomas Manton, The Complete Works of Thomas Manton, vol. 8 (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1872), 496.)

But then after Christ rose and confronted Peter three times with the question, “Do you love me more than these?”, Peter did not rise in his pride as he did before. “His answer goes no further than, ‘Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee,’ without adding ‘more than these.’”

Or the way in which a sick man will not eat the best dinner, it is a sign he has no taste for the meal. “So when a man hath a temptation to sin, decked and garnished with all the allurements the devil can dress it with, and he hath no stomach to close with it, it is a sign of a mortified frame.”

Second, “When we meet with few interruptions in duties of worship.” How easily and often are we turned away from our duty to “lay fast hold on God.” When everything turns us away, it implies that we are taken by everything but God. He compares this to an army: does it stop us at every turn? Then it is a “well-bodied army.” But where the incidents are few, there are few soliders. 

The third point is the key: merely refraining from sin is not mortification – but when the thief no longer steals but now works so that he can give to others, that is evidence of mortification. As Charnock puts it, “When we bring forth the fruits of the contrary graces, it is a sign sin is mortified. It is to this end that sin is killed by the Spirit, that fruit may be brought forth to God; the more sweet and full fruit a tree bears, the more evidence there is of the weakness of those suckers which are about the root to hinder its generous productions.”

Notes on “Item” a Poem by William Carlos Willam

06 Thursday Aug 2020

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Item

This, with a face

like a mashed blood orange

that suddenly

would get eyes 

and look up and scream 

War! War!

clutching her

thick, ragged coat

A piece of hat

broken shoes

War! War!

stumbling for dread

at the young men

who with their gun-butts

shove her

Sprawling—

A note 

At the foot of the page

Observations:

The first word, “This” is jarring: When “this” begins a sentence it acts to specify a particular noun: This particular apple (as opposed to all the other apples in the basket). But here, there is no specified noun: simply “This” – which then receives a modifying phrase: “with a face”. But there is no noun to be modified, only a pronoun without an original noun.

However, this lack of specificity is part of the meaning of the poem. In the third stanza we find a possessive, “her”. So we know it is a woman – especially as contrasted with the “young men” of the fifth stanza.

By not immediately identify the woman as a person – but rather as some unspecified object (note the title of the poem is “Item” – which could be the entire poem as in a “news item” or be a reference to the noun specified by “this”; she may be a woman, or simply be reduced to the story about the woman). 

We can a strange hint that there may be a person in this story, when we see the word “face”. But then why “with”; it makes it sound as if the face were an accessory which could be added or removed. Moreover, the image is immediately coupled to a “mashed blood orange”. 

When read of the young men with their gun-butts, the mashed face returns: She has been struck and her face has been destroyed. She also was seen “sprawling”.

The event comes to us out of historical order, but rather in order of comprehension: We move from the image before us – a mashed face of who knows what (it is a “this” not a “her” at first). 

Then the poet picks through the realization: eyes, a voice (she screams) hands which are known only by their action – clutching – he sees the coat, then the broken shoes, then woman now stumbling away from the young men; and here he sees the cause of her distress the young men with guns. 

Another point here: the face is indistinguishable, not quite comprehensible – because he did not see eyes at first. Note the 

that suddenly

would get eyes

The gap brought about by removing the adverb “suddenly” from the stanza of the verb “get” creates a strange distance in the realization. It seems that the poet noticed something which came out of nowhere and then too a moment to realize, oh, these are eyes looking at me.

So now we have a story, the poet comes upon a woman who has been struck in the face by a young man (they must be soldiers because they are identified with “War! War!”). She has sprawled onto the street, her face a bloody mess. She opens her eyes, clutches her old coat about her and tries to stumble to safety away from the soldiers. 

The line breaks come at grammatical structures, rather than completed concepts. As notes, “suddenly” separated not merely in a different line, but also a different stanza from its verb.

Or take these images:

clutching her

thick, ragged coat

A piece of hat

broken shoes

Clutching her what? What is clutching? Next line thick – pause – ragged coat – longer pause – A piece of hat (where is the rest of the hat) – doubled pause – broken shoes. 

By breaking up the images into distinct lines, we can imagine ourselves looking around for the hat, then the shoes – what has happened her? 

Then she begin dread stumbling to escape, standing, falling for broken shoes – trying to escape. 

And now we come to the answer about the “item” – is it the woman or the story? Well the woman certainly is being dehumanized, she is an item. But the poem uses her degradation to make her even less human: She is not the woman the poet saw, rather she is relegated to the news item. When the men strike, they render her so inhuman that they dash clean out of life and into a story: 

at the young men

who with their gun-butts

shove her

Sprawling—

A note 

At the foot of the page

When they strike her, she becomes a footnote in the story about the war. She is not important enough to consider at length, she is merely one of the many who are struck.

What then does the poem do? The poem causes us to toggle between the story about the woman and the reality of it. But it does it in a very different manner than an essay about this event could do. 

An essay has two natural starting places: the writer could start with the news item and then move backwards to the woman who is mentioned in the footnote. A sort of history of the overlooked. I am working through a biography of Napoleon at the moment. In the story of the retreat from Russia in 1812, he is listing the horrifying ravages to soldiers and peasants. The biography accounts in brief stories of soldiers being buried alive by angry peasants, prisoners of war being skinned alive, women being raped and murdered. The horror is unimaginable for me. 

One could take the time and develop more personally who has murdered or flayed or raped. 

Another way to tell this story would be start with the writer: As I was walking, I saw this woman lying in the street. At first I couldn’t tell she was a woman. 

But this poem does something which an essay could not easily do: It causes the reader to experience the event along with the poet. Rather than reading about through an essay – which would ironically make sure that she is reduced to a note on a page, an “item” – the poet forces us to confront the woman and watch her be physically injured and then reduced even further to being the note in the news item. 

The poem paradoxically gets us around the distance of the words which would make the woman an item by using words force us to experience the woman.

Stephen Charnock, A Discourse on Mortification.3

06 Thursday Aug 2020

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“The second thing is, how we may judge of our mortification.”

Those things which are not true mortification. 

Merely reframing from some action: “All cessation from some particular sin is not a mortification. A non-commission of a particular sin is not an evidence of the mortification of the root of it. Indeed, a man cannot commit all kinds of sin at a time, nor in many years; the commands of sin are contrary, and many masters commanding contrary things cannot be served at one and the same time.”

One may give up only the outward display of the sin while maintaining the desire. Jesus explains that adultery and murder begin in the heart as unspoken lust and anger. They are still sin, even if not displayed. 

Or one may cease to commit some particular sin for a number of reasons. Sometimes a sin is not committed because there is simply no opportunity to commit the sin. I would be thief, if only there were something to steal. “The pollutions of the world may be escaped when the pollutions of the heart remain.”

Some sins we cannot commit because our body will not cooperate with the sin. (It was once explained to me that one reason for jail for violent crime is that kept a young man out of service until he became too old to engage in such crimes.) “A present sickness may make an epicure nauseate the dainties which he would before rake even in the sea to procure. There is a cessation from acts of sin, not out of a sense of sin, but a change of the temper of his body.”

Sometimes a flood of guilt or shame keeps one off from a particular sin for some time, but when the guilt subsides and the opportunity returns, so does the sin. 

And finally, one may just trade one sin for other. “A cessation from one sin may be but an exchange.” Certain sins are mutually exclusive: you cannot be profligate and a miser at the same time. 

Being prevented from engaging in a sin: “Restraints from sin are not mortification of it. Men may be curbed when they are not changed; and there is no man in the world but God doth restrain him from more sins, which he hath a nature to commit, than what he doth actually commit.”

Why is a restraint not mortification? Restraints do not get to the heart. 

“Mortification is always from an inward principle in the heart, restraints from an outward.” True mortification will not be merely refraining from some action, but also a desire to refrain. “In a renewed man, there is something beside bare considerations to withhold him, something of antipathy which heightens and improves those considerations, whereby the soul is glad of them, because the edge and dint of them is against sin.”

In true mortification, one does not refrain from the sin because it is too hard to commit; one refrains from the sin because there is a “hatred of sin”.  “[M]ortification proceeds from an anger, a desire of revenge.”

Sin is not the bare action: the law distinguished between an accidental killing a deliberate murder: the intent made the thing a sin. Thus, mortification is not merely the outward restraint but a change in the thought and affection, “Mortification is a voluntary, rational work of the soul; restraints are not so. The devil hath nothing of his nature altered, but hath as strong an inclination to sin as ever, though the act he intends is often hindered by God.”