Erin Turner is our special guest host this week! 

Erin is a PhD student studying 17th and 18th century literature in Dallas at Southern Methodist University. We met attending the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s conference “Oxbridge” in England a few years ago. She’s hosted me a couple of times in her home for house concerts, and I’ve always enjoyed talking with her about what she’s learning in her studies, and even, a couple of times managing to get her to read a little aloud from the fantasy novel she’s working on. 

Erin is called to be a scholar, which is a student, a good listener to works of literature that have stood the test of time. She’s a kind of treasure hunter. And, personally, I think of the work of a faithful scholar like Erin as a form of intercession. She is laboring to listen to some forgotten song, on our behalf, so that she might retrieve the lost music and bring it back to our ears. This kind of scholarship is necessary for the preservation and communication of the things that make us human. 

Follow Erin on Instagram @withtheclassics and on Youtube

One of Matthew’s podcast episodes from last season, “Being ‘Beautifully Unuseful to God,’” struck a strong chord in me. In the podcast, Matthew, summarizing Josef Pieper, says, “leisure is not about practical ends, it’s not about utility, it’s about protecting and cultivating the things that make us whole and human.” 

Literature is something we need to protect and cultivate. It shows us humans at their very best and their very worst. It opens our hearts to love and beauty and adventure. It encourages us to dream, cultivates empathy, and helps us encounter other times and places and ways of thinking.

The world has begun to see humanities scholarship as fundamentally unuseful. And I struggle to understand how my study of a random seventeenth century poem helps those in the Kingdom of God flourish. The day this podcast was released, I had been asking God (again) why He had called me to be a scholar.

What I realized was that scholars, especially scholars of the humanities, are mediators. We stand between posture and practice, shepherding those who need help into the wonders of literature. Through a lifetime of deep, intense, focused study, scholars re-learn, re-discover, those things which have been forgotten or lost, sharing those discoveries with other scholars, and with the world. We stand between the book, the past, and present readers, trying our best to interpret the work for everyone who wants to read and understand, to facilitate that learning and, through teaching, to train others to engage in their own kind of mediation, between the book and themselves.

Scholarly study is often a practice; we dig through archives and discover or re-discover works and documents that had been forgotten. We research, we write, we teach. Like Curdie with the pigeon, we try to understand what a work is. Sometimes, our work is only read by other scholars, and does feel irrelevant to the ordinary person trying to understand Dante or Herbert.

However, scholarship isn’t just so we can preach to the choir of other scholars; ultimately, that only results in talking in circles. The end of scholarship is fulfilled when I get to unfold literary wonders to my waiter, a child, or a friend over coffee so that they might be equipped to discover for themselves the treasures that lie waiting in Dante or Herbert, who themselves were caretakers, mediators, and shepherds of God’s riches through their poetry. That kind of discovery begins with study, with digging, and, over time, orders and shapes the posture of the human heart toward God.

Thinking of scholarship as mediation not only provides focus for its use in the Kingdom, it opens the door for me to help others discover and engage with life-giving literature in whatever way God has in mind. I can pursue that kind of mediation as a professor, as a writer, as a YouTuber, as a mom. The important thing is that I use my gift for literary mediation to help shepherd others towards flourishing.

Providing an example of this is challenging. Scholarly mediation is often most visible across time; in the classroom or over the course of a book. And I want to emphasize that I don’t have any special talents; anyone can do this kind of work with a lot of study. So, for a glimpse of what I mean, let’s look at a poem by George Herbert, “The Forerunners”:

The harbingers are come. See, see their mark: 

White is their color, and behold my head. 

But must they have my brain? Must they dispark 

Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred? 

    Must dullness turn me to a clod? 

Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God. 

Good men ye be, to leave me my best room, 

Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodgèd there:   

I pass not, I, what of the rest become, 

So Thou art still my God be out of fear. 

    He will be pleasèd with that ditty: 

And if I please him, I write fine and witty. 

Farewell sweet phrases, lovely metaphors. 

But will ye leave me thus? When ye before 

Of stews and brothels only knew the doors, 

Then did I wash you with my tears, and more, 

    Brought you to church well dressed and clad: 

My God must have my best, ev’n all I had. 

Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane, 

Honey of roses, wither wilt thou fly? 

Hath some fond lover ’ticed thee to thy bane? 

And wilt thou leave the church and love a sty? 

         Fie, thou wilt soil thy broidered coat, 

And hurt thyself, and him that sings the note. 

Let foolish lovers, if they will love dung, 

With canvas, not with arras, clothe their shame: 

Let folly speak in her own native tongue. 

True beauty dwells on high: ours is a flame 

    But borrowed thence to light us thither. 

Beauty and beauteous words should go together. 

Yet if you go, I pass not; take your way: 

For Thou art still my God is all that ye 

Perhaps with more embellishment can say. 

Go, birds of spring: let winter have his fee; 

    Let a bleak paleness chalk the door, 

So all within be livelier than before.

The speaker discovers grey hairs, the “harbingers” of old age and, rather dramatically, begins to worry about what will happen if aging means he loses the ability to write poetry. After lamenting his potential loss, the poet reminds himself that really, all he can say is “Thou art still my God,” and he can do that without fancy poetry. In this, he is comforted.

It’s a lovely poem when read this way, and this is a legitimate, if superficial, reading. But Herbert’s poetry is rarely one-dimensional, and this poem has a lot of layers. One layer, the most important one, in my opinion, depends on a piece of historical information that Herbert and his contemporaries would have known, but that we don’t, generally. “The Forerunners,” the title of the poem, refers to a group of servants who would run before the king’s retinue as he traveled between castles. When they reached a town where they would stop for the night, the forerunners put a chalk mark on the doors of those houses where the king and his entourage would stay. It was both a huge honor and a massive inconvenience to be marked.

So the “harbingers” in the poem aren’t only grey hairs, but heralds of the King’s arrival. By introducing this metaphor, Herbert constructs a drama that’s really about salvation. While salvation is wonderful, it is also inconvenient. In order to make room for God, we must let go of those things we hold dear but which fill up space in our lives; we must “clean house,” as Herbert pictures happening here.

The “Lovely enchanting language,” the poetry that Herbert had rescued from the romantic sonnet tradition and dedicated to God, is not sinful. But it takes up space in his life, and in stanzas three, four, and five, he wrestles with the idea that God might ask him to give it up. Finally, he decides he doesn’t care if they leave (“I pass not” means “I care not”). What really matters is his confession that Thou art still my God, and if he has to say it in plain language instead of poetic language, it’s okay. Even if outside his heart, the “house” in his narrative, is bleak, because God is there, it will be “livelier than before,” when he did have the poetry he so loved. I love that phrase, “livelier than before,” because it evokes a kind of house party, something warm and friendly and convivial. The new guests are even better than the old ones.

Once we learn to attend to the historical and linguistic nuances in “The Forerunners,” we are ourselves enlivened with an assurance that accepting God’s salvation and grace, though costly, is also rewarding. While not all literature is overtly Christian, as Herbert’s poetry is, it still facilitates our growth in virtue. So while you all are out in the world, doing the unique work God has called you to do, I’ll be here if you have any questions about what you’re reading.

Benediction

I have two Wendell Berry poems printed out and attached to the wall beside my work space. One of them is “How to be a Poet (To Remind Myself).” In it, Berry reminds himself to “make a poem that does not disturb / the silence from which it came.” In another poem, so small I wrote it carefully on a yellow sticky note which now graces the bottom of the printed poems, Berry exhorts us to “Do your work like the snow / quietly, quietly, / leaving nothing out.” I love the thought that your work is like a snowfall, a lovely, quiet snowfall that blankets the barrenness of the winter world. 

Scholarship of the humanities is inherently unuseful. It serves no other purpose than to help cultivate a posture that, as Matthew put it in his earlier podcast, “is open and sensitive to goodness, truth, and beauty.” So, a you work, whatever that work looks like I encourage you to ask yourself, as I ask myself, is this gentle, quiet, and thorough?  Does it help somebody better achieve a posture of beholding? Does it work “like the snow, quietly, quietly, leaving nothing out”?