June 2010

Written in 1719 by Daniel Defoe, this book about a castaway who lived in an inhabited island somewhere around South America is sometimes considered the first novel in English.

Despite being less sophisticated in form, the book brings us back to the age of ocean travels, of slave trade and pre-industrialization innocence. The book's depiction of a unbelievable 28 years of isolated living in a people-less island was so vivid that I think it is the cruelest punishment to any human beings. Living among cannibals is a thousand times better.

In the beginning of the book, Robinson's father advised him to settle for comfortable living near home and family. The old man's argument is precisely like the Chinese philosophy of "the middle way," or Zhong Yong.

My father…told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found, by long experience, was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind.

He told me, I might judge of the happiness of this state by one thing, viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wish they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches.

He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses, either of body or mind, as those were, who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagances, on one hand, or by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean and insufficient diet, on the other hand, bring distempers upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtues and all kind of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life

While in Cancun, I started reading this book, thinking I'm reading the life of the famous apple-inspired physicist, Isaac Newton. It was not until a hundred pages later that I realized this is a different Newton. Fortunately, the prologue made me feel vindicated (the author's friend questioned him how he's going to handle his subject's complicated math and theories).

But John Newton turns out to be a kind of parallel to Isaac Newton, achieving much on the spiritual side of human intelligence. As the subject of one of the most popular Christian conversion books, he was first a shameless slave trader, an evil person all around. During one of his ocean voyages, a terrible storm hit and almost sank the ship. He prayed and in the end survived the storm. From then on, he became a devote Christian and later contributed greatly to the abolition of slavery in England.

Citing a motto he had come to believe in, "Never deliberate," Newton slipped away from the shore party under his command while they were loading up the longboat.

With thirty thousand to forty thousand slaves a year being transported from Africa to the Americas, vast fortunes were amassed by slave traders, sea captains, and shipowners.

Medieval Europe by Henry William Carless Davis is not a book for someone with no knowledge of the period. It assumes the readers already know the characters, themes and the events of the middle ages. Davis does a wonderful job weaving everything together into an elegant treatise of the often misunderstood age.

If nothing else, one should walk away from the book conscious of the misconceptions. The term "the Dark Ages" is not more suitable for the Medieval times than it is for today.

Such a period were the Middle Ages–the centuries that separate the ancient from the modern world. They were something more than centuries of transition, though the genius of a Gibbon has represented them as a long night of ignorance and force, only redeemed from utter squalor by some lingering rays of ancient culture.

It is true that they began with an involuntary secession from the power which represented, in the fifth century, the wisdom of Greece and the majesty of Rome; and that they ended with a jubilant return to the Promised Land of ancient art and literature. But the interval had been no mere sojourning in Egypt. The scholars of the Renaissance destroyed as much as they created. They overthrew one civilisation to clear the ground for another.

We should not, however, judge an age by its crimes and scandals. We do not think of the Athenians solely or chiefly as the people who turned against Pericles, who tried to enslave Sicily, who executed Socrates. We appraise them rather by their most heroic exploits and their most enduring work. We must apply the same test to the medieval nations; we must judge of them by their philosophy and law, by their poetry and architecture, by the examples that they afford of statesmanship and saintship.

The highest medieval achievements are the fruit of deep reflection, of persevering and concentrated effort, of a self forgetting self in the service of humanity and God. In other words, they spring from the soil, and have ripened in the atmosphere, of a civilised society.

Modern life has travelled so far beyond medieval Christianity that it is only with an effort we retrace our steps to the intellectual position of a St. Bernard, a St. Francis, or the Imitatio Christi. Apart from the difficulties of an unfamiliar terminology, we have become estranged from ideas which then were commonplaces; beliefs once held to be self-evident and cardinal now hover on the outer verge of speculative thought, as bare possibilities, as unproved and unprovable guesses at truth.

Our own creeds, it may be, rest upon no sounder bottom of logical demonstration. But they have been framed to answer doubts, and to account for facts, which medieval theories ignored; and in framing them we have been constrained partly to revise, partly to destroy, the medieval conceptions of God and the Universe, of man and the moral law. This is not the place for a critique of medieval religion. But, unless we bear in mind some essential features of the Catholic system of thought, we miss the key to that ecclesiastical statesmanship which dominates the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This is an interesting way of narrating Christian theology:

The first article in this theology is the existence of a personal God who, though all-pervading and all-powerful, does not reveal Himself immediately to the human beings whom He has created to be His worshippers, and does not so order the world that events shall always express His will and purpose.

He has endowed man with a sinful nature, and has permitted His universe to be invaded by evil intelligences of superhuman power and malignancy, who tempt man to destruction and are bent upon subverting the Divine order of which they form a part. He is supremely benevolent, and yet He only manifests the full measure of this quality when His help is invoked by prayer; His goodwill often finds expression in miracles–that is, in the suspending or reversing of the general laws which He has Himself laid down for the regulation of the universe and human destinies.

He is inscrutable and incomprehensible; yet to be deceived as to the nature of His being is the greatest of all sins against His majesty. The goal of the religious life is personal communion with Him, the intuitive apprehension and spontaneous acceptance of His will, the Beatific Vision of His excellencies.

But this state of blessedness cannot be reached by mere self-discipline; the prayers, the meditations, the good works of the isolated and uninstructed individual, can only serve to condone a state of irremediable ignorance. The avenue to knowledge of Him lies through faith; and faith means the unquestioning acceptance of the twofold revelation of Himself which He has given in the Scriptures and in the tradition of the Church.

The two revelations are in effect reduced to one by the statement that only the Church is competent to give an authoritative exposition of the sacred writings. Upon the Church hangs the welfare of the individual and the world. Without participation in her sacraments the individual would be eternally cut off from God; without her prayers the tide of evil forces would no longer be held in check by recurring acts of miraculous intervention, but would rise irresistibly and submerge the human race.