-If society were scraped away what could you build, what would you remember?

-If you were stuck in a cave without anything else what could you say?

-What sort of person could you make your child into without any help?

We say we live by the law of the bible yet we cannot quote the Ten Commandments.

We say we live by the constitution yet we know not even the preamble.

In older days to be elite and educated was to quote Virgil in Latin and Homer in Greek. Our shamefully illiterate, peasant ancestors knew the liturgy and litany by heart. To be a priest once meant to know the scriptures… all of them.

But surely we have surpassed these foolish Neanderthals? We are real Christians because we can read the Bible ourselves. We are truly educated because we have written thesis of our own. “Unlike our foolish ancestors we are literate!” (We say as we listen to audiobooks of self help or glorified pornography). We don’t need to learn the names or dates of history, we don’t waste brain space on rote memorization. After all, when we can always google anything—why waste time “memorizing” it.

I want to push back on these notions which I think have been engrained in each of us. It turns out the brain space wasted on lines of Virgil did not go to wider reading but went instead to the lyrics of Led Zeppelin the quotes of Warren Buffet or the bits of Shane Gillis. It turns out that the stiff poetry of the old hymn book was not replaced by a more genuine faith, but by vague emotionalism attempting the resonance of Coldplay.

If you put an illiterate English peasant in a cave he might find himself reciting the prose of Cranmer’s book of common prayer or mumbling the hymns of George Herbert. If you put the average evangelical in a cave they may find that without a vocalizing rock band their music falls flat and that they have 2 or three singular verses of scripture as the only remaining crumbs of what felt to be a kingdom. Perhaps the “dead” repetition of some ancient liturgy or the dull chanting of “boring” hymns has some gift to the Christian found alone in crisis. Their “spiritually dead” faith gave them something which cannot be stolen for it had been written on their hearts unknowingly.

Thankfully the secular person does not waste their time with the feigned history or philosophy of tyrants long dead, they learned how to “think for themselves”.

But it seems they have taught machines to do that too…

At least their mind isn’t wastefully full of old poetry, old hymnody, or old history.

—Of course, when they are stuck in a cave they realize that they too only have the quotations of their “art”.

We look down upon the memorization of Homer and yet pride ourselves on our quotations of Stepbrothers or Star Wars.

Perhaps after some consideration, we too have filled our brains with the words of better men ….but we have replaced the gold of kings with the scraps of court jesters.

We have not outgrown this way of knowing but been outgrown.

When you walk through the valley of the shadow of death you would be blessed to have Death Be Not Proud (John Donne) inscribed on the walls of your heart, but you’re above memorizing things so if you’re very lucky you’ll be able to mumble part of Not Afraid (Eminem).

I say all this not to be an elitist, but to encourage myself and my friends to be more than we are. Our value is obviously not based on how much we know (if anyone is opposed to ivory tower intellectualism it’s me). But our value also cannot be what we can do as we have allowed it to become (though I support meritocracy more than anyone).

Once we had to know and think. Then we outsourced our knowing partially to books and then to computers and kept the doing for ourselves. Now we find ourselves in a position where we have outsourced the thinking as well.

We have understated our humanity, there is something surpassing thinking and knowing, there is also being. What it means to be is no simple question, and one we must consider.

What does it mean to be? This act of being is a sort of participation which is neither the activity of an encyclopedia nor a calculator. (Mere knowing or doing)

We know that to be completely is to say “I am that I am”.

But that is far off, for now learning poetry is the beginning of participation in that third aspect which is beyond simple rationality and animality and approaches the fullness of our humanity.

-expect more on this soon (I hope)

Love you all

-Treebeard