During Lent, Christians often engage in spiritual reading. From what I understand, books are still being published—even today—but, as this Covenant list suggests, Lenten reading can include works originating in times and places ranging from the fourth-century Egyptian desert to modern Heidelberg to a small room in medieval Norwich. (Our list further expands if it includes Lenten viewing.) Why read old books in Lent, especially during Holy Week? What should we learn from history?
C.S. Lewis recommended reading old books to better understand a long-standing conversation that we are only belatedly entering. But Lewis also recommended reading old books as a form of asceticism. We perceive the “characteristic blindness” of our age because the distance of old books allows them to serve as a counteragent. We recognize the spiritual unity among Christians that our ecclesial divisions otherwise prevent us from seeing. “You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan,” Lewis remarks.
In a recent book, drawing in part on Lewis, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker likewise argues that reading history lets us see that to which we were once inattentive. She recounts her conversion story, which involved a church in Florida she first attended as a “stranger.” She listened to words and music—“Take, eat: This is my Body which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me”—that took her “out of Tallahassee, out of myself and into a much larger story.” Here, in T.S. Eliot’s words, was the “still point of the turning world.”
From this liturgy onward, she became aware of multiple forms of unawareness, most obviously the hollowness of life directed only to a “relentless cycle of achievement.” There is also the unawareness in all those forms of Christianity—“rootless consumer faith”—that do not foster the receptivity through which Christians may “inhabit the tensions between the immanent and transcendent in their daily lives.” These mark the “characteristic blindness” of today to the imperious self and its designs. There is also the ecclesial unawareness that led a friend of Irving-Stonebraker’s to honestly if parochially ask, “Protestant meditation? Who knew?” when she told him about Joseph Hall’s The Arte of Divine Meditation (1606). (“You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan.”)
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There is an overarching contrast between divine generativity—“This is my Body which is given for you”—and human failure. One of Irving-Stonebraker’s “old books” is the speech “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?” by Frederick Douglass. He stood “with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion” to pronounce slavery “the great sin and shame of America.” But he did not finally despair of the United States, because “The fiat of the Almighty, ‘Let there be Light,’ has not yet spent its force.” (Arguably, the contrast is even sharper than in Irving-Stonebraker’s account. Because, Tricia Posey notes, Douglass “did not mention the church playing a role in this new future,” as it had been largely insensible to the Fugitive Slave Act.)
As Rowan Williams writes, old books can introduce us to history as a theology of the cross, “inviting wonder at the capacity of God to maintain the steadiness of his work in the middle of earthly conflict and disruption.” As Luther might ask, “Where could we more perfectly see this ‘strange work’ of God but in the place where the wretchedness of the created world and the total failure of human resource or human virtue is most fully exhibited?” This work creates the graced possibility of standing “with God and the crushed and bleeding slave” alongside Douglass, witnessing in extremis through martyrdom to a divine presence beyond that of any emperor, and seeing other Christians as brothers and sisters above confessional divisions, as had C.S. Lewis. In all these things, the once unaware self has been taken from itself to be recentered on God’s generativity—that same “This is my Body” that Irving-Stonebraker heard in Florida.
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We see these three possibilities come together in another old book: the writings of Alfred Delp, a German Jesuit who was a member of the Kreisau Circle, a group of intellectual resistance to the Nazis under the Lutheran aristocrat and lawyer Helmuth James von Moltke. Delp was arrested in the aftermath of the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler. In prison, as his biographer Mary Frances Coady writes, “He began to realize also how much of his pre-prison God-talk had been so much rhetoric, that his spiritual nakedness in the presence of God within the confines of his cell was of a new and terrifying order.” Delp wrote, “‘God alone suffices’: I said that once when I was very self-sufficient. And look at me now.” He imagined himself as Peter flailing in the water when left to his own devices. He wrote, “I’m aware that I’m on a tightrope.”
After his death sentence in a deeply unfair trial, Delp recognized all his efforts had led to nothing before the incorrigibly anti-Jesuit judge. “The whole proceedings led to one disaster after another.” Delp could not discern God’s purpose in any of this, much less what he should do—go on hoping, or resign himself to the inevitable? “Often I just sit before God looking at him questioningly.” He could only grasp, as he wrote, “I must surrender myself completely.” It had never occurred to him that he might die like this; once he “had spread my sail to the wind and set my course for a great voyage, flags flying, ready to brave every storm that blew.” And now he could just say, “May others at some future time find it possible to have a better and happier life because we died in this hour of trial.”
On January 23, 1945, he wrote, “More than ever, my life is standing absolutely on God. Every rational influence has been withdrawn.” On February 2, 1945, he was killed.
The late Jesuit theologian Philip Endean wrote of Delp’s martyrdom, “the actual experience involves a permanently ambiguous process of disintegration, in which the assurance of faith is always in interplay with an unmanageable unknown.” God’s presence was there for Delp, who wrote during his trial, “I kept the Host with me,” but Endean says there was no way for either Delp or his later readers to know how this presence became operative. Delp’s profound honesty exposes several forms of unawareness—that “characteristic blindness” of Delp’s age that piously imagined the sufficiency of sentimentalized forms of religiosity and (in Endean’s words) “hagiographic abstractions” in the face of death, or, worse, remained fascinated by the Promethean heroism of a self that paradoxically exalts itself as godlike in its readiness to will its self-destruction. (See John Bauerschmidt on Ernst Jünger and the “spirit of an age” here.)
Delp’s martyrdom reveals yet another form of our unawareness as it enabled him and his imprisoned Protestant comrades to discern the Christian unity too easily dismissible in ordinary times—“This praying Una Sancta in chains,” in Delp’s words. This unity meant, as Delp told the imprisoned Protestant pastor Eugen Gersteinmaier that when they got out of prison—at this point, he thought they would—the separation of the churches “should never again become a Christian disgrace.”
At their trial, the Protestant von Moltke was accused of having “consorted with bishops and Jesuits,” as Delp put it, yet this accusation ironically reflected something that had become very real—von Moltke, who was hanged before Delp, would tell his wife he was dying “as a martyr for St. Ignatius of Loyola.” After all, von Moltke said, he had been “attacked and condemned for his friendship with Catholics,” and therefore finally stood before the judge, “not as a Protestant, not as a big landowner, not as a nobleman, not as a German—all that was explicitly excluded in the trial … but as a Christian and nothing else.” As the Jesuit theologian Peter Nguyen recognizes, the deaths of von Moltke and Delp show a shared witness, an ecumenism of blood.
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What we see when we read old books in Lent, especially Holy Week, is our chronic unawareness—a “characteristic blindness” affecting not only ourselves but also Christians of all times and places. We see that our divisions have concealed a deeper unity. But we also perceive that the “strange work” of God exists even amid failure, even the pitch-black darkness of ecclesial failure during slavery and the Holocaust and all scandals of today. Divine generativity, mysterious and uncategorizable, continues, and the Spirit provides “an affirmation as real as the fetters on my wrists,” as Delp wrote. “The fact that one is lifted out of oneself and able to look at the situation from a new angle is in itself a great step forward.”
Perhaps that decentering “new angle” is what we must receive this Holy Week, even if we risk being “thought a Papist when [we] are actually reproducing Bunyan,” as Lewis might say.
Neil Dhingra, a Roman Catholic, is a doctoral student in education at the University of Maryland.