Paul, a Playwright, and a Poet

“In the real world that I’m living in, / Being with you is like science fiction.”

Jonathan Thulin, ‘Science Fiction’, Science Fiction (2015)

Faith and Fiction. Can they cooperate? Can fiction which makes no reference to matters of faith be of any relevance to them?

I think 1 Corinthians 15: 33 might just provide an answer in the affirmative. This is it:

Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”¹

Usually, of course, when we encounter chunks of New Testament around which some helpful editor has placed quotation marks, the same helpful editor has footnoted the quotation and provided a reference to the chunk of Old Testament being quoted – but this quote isn’t from the Old Testament. Some Bibles leave it unreferenced (which makes those of us who have spent hour upon hour painstakingly decorating our essays with footnotes and bibliography rather unhappy); some suggest that it probably comes from a play called Thais (a woman’s name) by Menander.

Thanks to Jastrow on Wikimedia Commons for this picture of Menander’s face, or at least a 2nd-century AD Roman copy of a 4th-century BC Greek original sculpture of his face.

“Who is Menander?” you demand, overwhelmed by curiosity – at which point I grin the kind of enthusiastic ‘I-am-glad-you-asked-me-that’ grin that tends to spread itself across the faces of Classics students when you ask them Classics-related questions, and your insides are suddenly struck by an unpleasant sinking feeling, while your brain urgently starts working on an exit strategy for this conversation.² Fear not, I shall keep my explanation short. Well, relatively:

I am glad you asked me that. Menander was a Greek playwright who lived around the turn of the fourth to third centuries BC. He wrote so-called New Comedy, notable for its everyday, domestic settings; tidy plotlines, where everything ends well with all the couples neatly paired up; and use of stock characters. (Think along similar lines to some Shakespearean comedies, or perhaps The Importance of Being Earnest.) Greco-Roman society was obsessed with Menander, but, to the great chagrin of scholars, hardly any of his work survived past the Middle Ages – until the 20^th century, when people started digging papyrus out of the Egyptian desert and came across large numbers of fragments and some near-complete plays. Classicists were thrilled: now at last they could read the works of genius which had been so loved in the ancient world. And they read them. And it turned out that Menander wasn’t actually very funny. Cue disappointment.³

Anyway, the point is, it’s most likely Menander that Paul is quoting in his first letter to the church in Corinth. That is, Menander the Greek playwright from centuries before Christ whose work had absolutely no links to the God of Israel or his Messiah. Why?

One entirely plausible suggestion is that Paul had no idea he was quoting Menander; rather, that particular line had found its way into everyday Greek speech as a common proverb, and that’s what he was quoting. This seems pretty likely. All the same, God knew where the line came from, and purposed that it should be included in the letter. Furthermore, Paul presumably knew he was quoting something, even if it was just a figure of speech. He was teaching about spiritual matters using cultural reference points his audience already had.

The same principle applies in Acts 17:28:

for in him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, “For we are also his offspring.”⁴

At this point, Paul is in the middle of a chat with some Athenian philosophers. It’s a fair bet that Mr Average Athenian Philosopher wouldn’t have had the first clue about the God of Israel or the promised Messiah, so Paul starts from what his audience did know about. He talks about their shrines and temples and explains why God doesn’t need them. He talks about God being Lord of every individual and nation, making it clear that this applies to Mr Average Athenian Philosopher as much as anyone else. And then he quotes from the fifth line of the astronomical poem Phaenomena (‘appearances’) by Aratus.

“Who is Aratus?” you mumble reluctantly, with a due sense of dread. Fear not – the guy has never come up in any of my lectures or background reading, so I have no more knowledge about him than can be acquired by scanning a few paragraphs on Wikipedia. Still, he was apparently very popular. What’s more, this time Paul clearly knows that he’s quoting a Greek writer. He is deliberately using pieces of the Athenians’ own culture, things with which they are familiar, to explain to them who God is.

Paul chooses his quotation carefully. The opening of the Phaenomena is actually an ode to Zeus, so if he had quoted, say, from the fourth line as well – “Everyone everywhere is indebted to Zeus” – it would have been much harder to get the point across that he wasn’t talking about Zeus at all. There’s such a thing as trying to squash Jesus into a framework provided by fiction and ending up distorting him. The key is to keep him and his truth as the baseline and measure everything else against that baseline to see if it fits.

So can fiction which does not concern itself with God have something to say about spiritual concerns? Paul thought so. God evidently thinks so. Chosen carefully and set in the right context, ideas found in fiction can help us to understand, and to explain to others, more about who God is. 

On that note, I’ll launch into a spot of shameless advertising: my home church in Peterborough (http://www.stmarkspeterborough.org.uk/) is launching a new style of service at 5pm tomorrow, Sunday 6^th September 2015 (helpfully called Sunday @ 5), which is going to operate very much on that principle. There will be film and TV clips, time for discussion over plenty of pizza, a short talk considering the ideas expressed in the clips, and some music as well. Having been somewhat involved in the planning process,⁵ I honestly think it’s going to be a really good and different way of doing church, and I’m pretty gutted that I’ll be over two hundred miles away at the relevant time – so do go and check it out if you’re in the area.

Finally, if you’re still scratching your head about my opening quote, I felt that Jonathan Thulin’s album Science Fiction was an excellent example of the representation of spiritual truth using ideas familiar from fiction. It includes tracks based on time travel, Jekyll and Hyde, the fountain of youth, and the boy who cried wolf, as well as referencing things like Star Wars and Superman within the lyrics. It’s already rocketed to the status of one of my all-time favourite albums despite only having been released earlier this year, so I’ll basically take any excuse to recommend it.⁶

On the other hand, I probably won’t be enthusiastically urging you to read Menander any time soon. 

Footnotes

¹ Here’s the whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+15&version=ESVUK.

² Don’t worry, Blimey Cow has you covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZUcW15PGT4.

³ This is all based on what I learned in my Greek and Roman Drama module in my first year of university. I’m quite prepared to believe there are a good number of Classicists out there who are huge fans of Menander, though I’m not quite sure why anyone would be. (He’s not that bad. He’s just not that good, either.)

⁴ Do take a look at the whole chapter. Context matters, kids! https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+17&version=ESVUK.

⁵ I didn’t come up with the idea or anything; I just sat in on some meetings and designed a snazzy-looking flyer.

⁶ Some delightful human has compiled a YouTube playlist of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn53h0Wch1g&list=PLY7HXIrlrzWXcVHdcYqxdDn1xOxuOGRPf.

Five British Authors Who Shaped My Childhood

Some of my favourites

“And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends … in other words you allowed him [a] real positive Pleasure.”

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

1.       Joyce Lankester Brisley

Lankester Brisley, Joyce, Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories, London: Kingfisher (2001)

“But nothing happens.” Along such lines is the reaction of my sisters when I express a lingering fondness for these short stories about a little girl who wears pink-and-white-striped cotton frocks and lives in a nice white cottage with a thatched roof.

To some extent, I can’t refute the argument. Not much does really happen to Milly-Molly-Mandy. She runs errands, visits little-friend-Susan, hosts a party, makes a tea-cosy – in one particularly thrilling episode of the second anthology, she even gets as far as the seaside. I suspect that it was this very lack of tension and crisis that defined the charm the stories held for my younger self. I never had to fear for my heroine’s safety or happiness. I could simply follow her about the various interesting activities of her life, and such a pleasingly neat, idyllic, uncomplicated life it was.

“Reading these stories is like being wrapped up in a warm, reassuring blanket,” writes Shirely Hughes in the preface to my copy of Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories. And it is. In a world so often painful and stressful and perplexing, Milly-Molly-Mandy appealed to my deep-seated human longing for things to be good, for them to be right and innocent and genuine. Of course, by no means do I advocate her as a serious solution to that longing, but it explains why I still like her so much.

2.      A. A. Milne

Milne, A. A., Winnie-the-Pooh, London: Mammoth (1991)

Despite my ongoing love affair with all things Disney (as far as being Music Director of my University Disney Society¹), I never managed to form much of an attachment to the great animation company’s interpretation of the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood. In an odd sort of way, they just make too much sense: Pooh and Piglet’s visits on the Blustery Day, for instance, become to wish their friends a ‘Happy Windsday’, rather than the delightfully absurd ‘Happy Thursday’ Milne originally wrote about.

I seem to recall owning some kind of Winnie-the-Pooh treasury when I was very young, and, later, my dad used to read Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner to me and an assortment of small siblings at bedtime.² It’s all beautiful work, marrying unassuming hilarity with easy profundity, and the carefully crafted poetry is, of course, an added bonus.

3.      Enid Blyton

Blyton, Enid, The Faraway Three Collection, London: Dean (2002)

My love for Enid Blyton began with the Secret Seven and blossomed out from there. The sheer quantity of her work means I never came close to exhausting it, but I devoured book after book: instalments of the Riddle series and the Adventure series and the Five Find-Outers – not to be confused with the Famous Five – Malory Towers, Amelia Jane, the Enchanted Wood, one which nobody else seems to have read about the adventures of three brownies in various Lands…

As I understand it, Blyton’s work has often come under heavy criticism for, among other things, lacking literary merit, which seems to me like a strange criterion for judging children’s fiction. Blyton’s stories aren’t supposed to be intellectually dazzling; they’re supposed to be glorious fun – and if children are reading Blyton and finding it glorious fun, as I did, surely they should be encouraged, if only for the sake of their learning to recognise reading as something valuable and enjoyable? They may later come to reach a stage where, along with the critics, they consider Blyton’s prose uninteresting, her plots implausible and repetitive – but without the love of reading that she fuelled in the first place, they would never have developed the capacity to make such literary judgements.³

4.      J. K. Rowling

Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, London: Bloomsbury (2003)

My older sister was into Harry Potter and, since she was, in my eyes, the coolest person on the planet, I therefore was too. Before I had even picked up …the Philosopher’s Stone, I started writing what was arguably my first fanfiction, based on information gleaned from conversation with her. I demanded a Harry Potter Easter egg, complete with Norbert the dragon cast in green-coloured chocolate, to match hers. And soon I was reading the books for myself – I was on the third one by the time I was six.

The irresistible allure of the Harry Potter series is the idea of this entire magical world hidden so close at hand to our own. Like ours, it has school and shops and media and money and government, but unlike ours, it sparkles with the possibilities of wizardry. The impossible becomes accessible. Add to that one of the widest spheres of plausibility⁴ in fiction, a generous sprinkling of humour, and plenty of heart-pounding adventure and heroism, and it was unthinkable for me not to love it.⁵

5.      C. S. Lewis

Lewis, C. S., Prince Caspian, London: HarperCollins (2001)

“Did you know C. S. Lewis was a Christian?” I remember gleefully asking my older sister one day, having caught a few moments of a TV documentary which informed me as much.

“Really?” Her surprise was evident.

“Apparently Aslan represents Jesus,” I continued.

“I thought he was trying to, you know, replace Jesus,” she replied.

“So did I,” I admitted, still grinning.

And from then on, my appreciation of the Narnia series was transformed. I already loved it for the sheer wonder of travelling to another world rich in magic and marvels, for the adventure and the emotion: now I loved it for its spiritual allegories as well, though many of them continued to go totally over my head for years. I’m still finding new meanings in the narrative even now, as I employ chapters of Narnia as bedtime stories for my little brother (we just finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).

It was, unsurprisingly, several years later that I came across that other great work of Lewis’, The Screwtape Letters, which is an epistolary story consisting of advice from a senior demon (Screwtape) to a junior (Wormwood) on how to ensure the soul of his assigned ‘patient’ will have its final destination in hell. Re-reading it recently, I was struck by the way Screwtape is so vehemently against Wormwood’s allowing his patient to read a book he genuinely enjoyed. “…you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures,” writes Screwtape. “How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?”

Lewis, C. S., The Screwtape Letters, London: Collins (2012)

I used to read all the time as a child. Books habitually nestled under my pillow, sometimes as many as I could fit along the width of the mattress – certainly I was almost always midway through both an upstairs and a downstairs book. Books crowded my birthday and Christmas lists. I endured with dismay the limit my parents placed on the number of library books I was allowed to borrow at a time, after one too many desperate searches for lost ones.

These days, I probably don’t manage an average of a book a month. My younger self would be ashamed of me. What happened?

It was some time ago that I became aware that reading, and fiction in other forms, had become an idol for me, and I have since been battling to make it not so. Nevertheless, I wonder if, in the process, I have not really torn down my shrine to Fiction at all, merely rededicated it to Productivity – a more demanding goddess to serve, and a subtler one.⁶ She persuades me that I am serving God by doing Useful Things, relegates time with him to merely one among many of these Useful Things, and taints the pleasure I get from reading by telling me I ought to be doing something more Useful. “If you insist on reading,” she says, “at least read a more important, intelligent book, the kind of book you can count it an impressive achievement for you to have read. And, for pity’s sake, stop reading things you’ve already read – cover some new ground!” Trumpery indeed – are these things really what I have come to value over whether I’m actually enjoying the book or not?

I sometimes thank and praise God for fiction after I have spent time reading a book I really enjoy. I don’t think I have ever thanked or praised him for productivity after I have spent time doing Useful Things. Unsure as I still am of exactly what relationship with fiction it is spiritually healthy for me to have, I’m pretty sure God would rather that I should read books I genuinely love to read, with the same joy with which I used to read those listed above, and so be prompted to thanksgiving and praise, than that I should shy away from a pleasure he has provided out of dedication to a false god.

Footnotes

¹ Yes, there is a Disney Society. Yes, we have an a cappella group. We do lots of other things too and it’s only £5 to join (well, I thought that since Freshers’ Week is coming up, I may as well mention it). http://www.exeterguild.org/societies/8265/

² He used to read us other gorgeous children’s classics as well – the Paddington books, Kipling’s Just So Stories, The Family from One End Street; we even made a valiant attempt at some of the later instalments of the Swallows and Amazons series, though were thwarted by library due dates. Still, excellent as these were, I felt Milne was most deserving of a spot on the list.

³ Actually, I perhaps feel like a bit of a hypocrite to argue for enjoyment over literary quality, since I have always taken rather a dim view of my little brother’s fondness for such series as Captain Underpants and Fleabag Monkeyface. Evidently the fairness of my judgement in such matters is something I should work on.

⁴ This is one of those moments where I don’t know what I’m talking about is a ‘thing’ or a personal theory I ought to explain. Essentially, what I mean by a ‘sphere of plausibility’ is the things which are established as possible in a particular piece of fiction. Harry Potter has a wide sphere of plausibility, because it allows for pretty much anything of a magical nature to be possible; Milly-Molly-Mandy, for instance, has a much smaller one, because all the events it contains could theoretically have happened in the real world. I find the term necessary because it’s hard to criticise certain kinds of fiction as ‘unrealistic’ if they are supposed to contain fantastical elements, but, quite often, a book or series of books will begin to include certain of these elements that do seem implausible based on their initial exposition. For example, I felt that Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series strayed outside its sphere of plausibility when it introduced a time-travel plotline: the secret underground high-tech fairy civilisation I was quite happy with, because it had been the premise from the start, but time travel demanded of the reader a whole new suspension of disbelief, and I felt Colfer was pushing it a bit. Generic location is as important a characteristic of a sphere of plausibility as size – for instance, Harry Potter would have infringed its sphere of plausibility if it had introduced aliens into the mix.

⁵ If anyone fancies adding me on Pottermore (http://www.pottermore.com/en/), my username is HazelDream11707. Let me know you’re adding me, though – I won’t accept if I don’t know who you are!

⁶ Just to be clear, I’m not trying to make any sort of statement by personifying Productivity as female. I’m simply more used to personified-abstract-concept deities being female from the ancient-world literature I’ve read.