Primitive Piety: a Journey from Suburban Mediocrity to Passionate Christianity by Stackhouse Ian;

Author:Stackhouse, Ian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 3116662
Publisher: Authentic Media
Published: 2012-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Six

Surprised by Joy

Either we dismiss the Good News as too good to be true, or we permit ourselves to be overwhelmingly joyful persons because of it.

Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus

Umberto Eco is one of the most celebrated intellectuals of our day. He came to public attention with his novel The Name of the Rose.1 Unfortunately, having watched it as a film before reading it as a novel, I cannot imagine William Baskerville as anyone other than James Bond in a monk’s garb, since the part is played by Sean Connery. But be that as it may, Eco’s bestselling novel tells the story of a Dominican community in the Italian mountains where a series of murders take place. Baskerville, a Franciscan sleuth, is called in to investigate and eventually traces the crimes to the old, blind librarian Jorge, who exercises a pathological hatred of anyone who so much as gets near a certain book: namely, the second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, in which the great philosopher writes about the virtues of laughter. So great is Jorge’s fear that the students will read this book that he laces the book with poisonous ink.

It seems an odd book to want to forbid. One could understand a monastery wanting to ban some medieval equivalent of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, say, or the latest Jackie Collins, but to ban a book about laughter seems preposterous. Laughter is what makes us human. But Jorge’s fear – and on this he represents the fear of the church as a whole – is that to permit laughter is to allow victory to the devil. Laughter for the old monk represents ‘weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s licence.’2 To permit laughter, or rather for the monks to know that the great philosopher Aristotle encouraged laughter, would mean that the people of God ‘would be transformed into an assembly of monsters belched forth from the abysses of the terra incognita, and at that moment the edge of the known world would become the heart of the Christian empire, the Arimaspi on the throne of Peter, Blemmyes in the heart of the monastery, dwarfs with huge bellies and immense heads in charge of the library.’3

Well, if old Jorge was fearful that the church in subsequent generations would break out in mirth, he needn’t have been. The church, throughout history, has hardly been noted for its jollity. Quite the opposite. As Robert Louis Stevenson noted in his journal: ‘I went to church today and am not depressed,’ presumably because his usual experience was to come away feeling utterly bleak.4 I read somewhere, though I cannot find the source, that there was a certain man who was so morose that the last thing he did before going to church was to take the perch out of the budgie’s case. I guess he felt that if he wasn’t going to have fun on the Lord’s Day then neither was his pet budgie. Indeed, certain Christian traditions seem to make a virtue of their dourness.

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