← Old School with Shilo Brooks
Loading summary
Transcript145 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hey, y', all, I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO, and I happen to believe that reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm talking with Father Jonah Teller. Father Jonah is a Dominican friar who serves as parochial vicar at St. Joseph's Church in New York City. George Eliot's Middlemarch, a study of provincial life published in eight installments from 1871 to 1872, changed Father Jonah's life. Today, I'm asking him why this is old school. Hey, it's Shiloh Brooks. If you want a news podcast that's informed, uncompromising, and outside of your echo chamber, check out the Gist with Mike Pesca as the longest running daily news podcast and become a mainstay on Apple's top charts. In 30 minute episodes, the Gist tackles thought provoking questions that don't fit neatly into partisan lines. With the help of expert guests from the worlds of economics, entertainment, academia, and more, Mike criticizes the right and keeps the left honest. He isn't afraid to spotlight absurdities, debunk conspiracies, and explore tricky topics like the impact of sports betting, for example. As an award winning journalist with bylines in the Atlantic, the Free Press, the Washington Post, and more, Mike delivers sharp analysis with even sharper wit. Find the Gist every weekday wherever you get your podcasts. So you chose George Elliot's Middlemarch. Yes, that's what we're going to discuss today. And I want to, you know, we're going to talk about along the way where that book hit you and how it hit you. But you seem to be a lover of long books. The Bible's a long book. I suspect that book is not, you know, is near and dear.
- [01:47]
B
Well, it's a library. It's a long library of books.
- [01:49]
A
Thomas who we talked about that. He's written some long books. And then you get in here and you hijack the past three weeks of my life because you're like, hey, man, read this 900 page novel by George Elliott, Victorian novel. And so I did.
- [02:03]
B
Yeah.
- [02:04]
A
But, you know, clearly you're a reflective person. You got some time on your hands because you're choosing books that are a thousand pages long. They're your favorite. But let's talk about Middlemarch. So let's talk about the first time you read it.
- [02:16]
B
I mean, Middlemarch was always on my family's bookshelf. And I remember one time in high school, I was like, I don't know what to read. My mom was like, read Middlemarch I love it. And so I remember sitting in a chair in the living room and opening it up and like 15 minutes later, just closing it. It's, like, boring. Yeah, like, so I got like all of 10 pages into Middlemarch in high school, closed it, didn't open it for over 10 years. So this is like, I'm a priest. So I went through the whole, like, studying to be a priest thing, had been ordained a priest. This is maybe three years ago. I'm like, I pick it back up and I read it, and when I finished it, I immediately wanted to start it again.
- [02:58]
A
Now, this is hard to summarize, I'm not gonna lie to you. So let me just say to people this, that there's like four or five plot lines going on at the same time. I mean, we could count them, but there's different marriages that are working themselves out, different couplings that are working themselves out. The novel was published in serial, so it was almost like television episodes where you get a new. And so, in a way, a lot of these Victorian novels come out this way, and they're like what we would today call the television, where there's binge on it, or you don't get them all at one time, they're trying to hook you for the next, whatever. So there's a lot of plot twists and a lot of parallel plot going on here. In general, we take Middlemarch, we take its subtitle, which is about, you know, provincial life. What is Middlemarch about? For somebody who's never read it?
- [03:47]
B
Sure.
- [03:48]
A
Just. And I know it's a huge novel, it's gonna be hard, but give us the distilled candy version of it.
- [03:52]
B
Gotcha. Middlemarch is about how your tiny little life affects lots of other lives, no matter how you live it. That's what I think it's about. It's about just. You drop a stone into the pool of your soul that's gonna ripple out and hit other people no matter what you do, no matter where you live. That what I think. That's what I think the book is about. Now, plot wise, it's about. It's in the 1800s in England. It's about a small area, a province. It's a provincial. A study of provincial life. And it's about a number of people in this small, sort of rural territory. So it's about this woman named Dorothea. She's 19 when you meet her, and she gets married to this old, like, academic, dry as dust, pedantic, boring clergyman who's like, in like, nearing 50. So that's like more than twice her age. Because she's super idealistic and thinks, like, I need a man who can explain Hebrew to me and can help me, like, chase a great ideal. She's very idealistic. So she gets. She just makes this mystique mistake of her life marrying this guy and is totally disappointed because he is not what she thought he would be. And then there's also a number of other people in this town. We'll say, for lack of a better word, there's this doctor who gets. Also makes a poor marriage. There's kind of two mismatched marriages. And then basically Dorothea has her husband die and then she falls in love with another guy who is his nephew.
- [05:22]
A
Oh, man.
- [05:22]
B
Yeah, I know. It's already complicated. It is. And like, this guy was. The old guy was jealous. So he puts a proviso in his will that if Dorothea marries Will, she doesn't get my money. And so there's tension there. And then there's a lot of small town drama and there's other couplings and things like that. So in some ways this is probably not a way to sell it. Like, the plot is not the point. I mean, there is like real human drama, but it's more about the interior characters and the decisions they make and then seeing how the decisions they have made in their individual lives have. Have this domino effect all around you.
- [06:00]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think we could sum it up with talking about the significance of the title. It's called Middlemarch. Now, what is that? That's a town. Right. And so in a way, the book is a universe. Right. It has all of these human types interacting with one another in this enclosed, like, sealed town. And, you know, you get this sort of psychological spinning out of all these human types in the small town interacting with. So it's like a microcosm of. Of the world in which we find ourselves, or something like that. It's Middlemarch, but it's also like the world.
- [06:29]
B
That's right. And it's also the human soul, the.
- [06:31]
A
Way human beings are. In a lot of novels, plot is an occasion to develop character. In other words, something happens to a person as a consequence of that happening, we get to know them better. In Middlemarch, the character is an occasion to make a plot. In other words, it seems to me that Elliot's story emerges from character. It's character. Character first, plot second.
- [06:54]
B
Yeah. There's a way that Elliot bookends the whole novel. She starts by talking about Teresa of Avila, St. Teresa of Avila. Who is this Spanish woman in I think the 1500s who entered a Carmelite monastery in the Catholic Church and was a great reformer. She like really changed her entire religious order. And her spiritual writings are continually very popular, very influential in the Catholic Church. And she remains a real force in the Western world as a result of that. And she had a real effect on Europe at her time. And Eliot starts the novel referencing how you, not all people are like her. They have the same sort of drive and spiritual capacity, you could say, or personal capacity. They have a real greatness within them and deep ideals. But the elements of their life and the way things pan out mean that they don't have the stage on which she had. They don't have the stage that she had to play her life out. And then that comes back at the end of the novel talking about this woman, Dorothea, who if from the surface, what's her life? She's a young, idealistic, romantic girl who makes a bad decision and gets married and then has her husband die. And then after a lot of emotional distress, marries a younger guy and lives a pretty nondescript life. And that's it. And like the whole town, Middlemarch doesn't approve of her later marriage. It's an unpopular thing for her to do. And that's her life. It's very nondescript, very boring. But there's a passage, I'll read it at the very end of the book that Eliot sums up this phenomenon of how you can't have a St. Teresa sized life, but you can still affect other people. It says her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. And that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. So that's a lot of fancy verbiage, but it's saying that the life that you and I have that is good is affected by people we're unaware of and the small decisions they made, they affect us. So Dorothea has an on paper boring life, or one that you might even disapprove of. But throughout the whole plot of the novel, the goodness of her character saves a lot of other people like this guy Lydgate and his wife Rosamond. They have a totally dysfunctional marriage because they're both kind of idiots and marry each other without like understanding each other well. So they're idiots in that regard. But Dorothea plays a really pivotal role in saving their marriage and just by really one conversation and then just sort of her observed example.
- [10:19]
A
This novel's for you if you love sort of psychological portraits of a variety of interesting sorts of people. You mentioned Dorothea. I mean, there's a sense in which she's sort of the protagonist. I mean, she's from, you know, the St. Teresa thing is at the very beginning, the man you mentioned, she marries a very old man, older. He's not that he's 45 years old, for crying out loud. I mean, I'm almost a very old man. What are we talking about?
- [10:43]
B
But it's like a 19 year old marrying me.
- [10:44]
A
Exactly, but she's 19, which is weird. But at any rate, and he's like a scholar, really cold, dry is working on this book which is he calls the key to All Mythologies, which is supposed to be like the grandest book on the grandest theory of the world ever written. He's. She has these noble aspirations to help him. It turns out he's not that interested in her help anyway. Things go awry. So he's an interesting character. In my view. He's one of the best characters of Victorian literature. What do you like about him? The pathology of the scholar is present in him. And the pathology of the scholar is so interesting to me. I happen to have been an academic and I know every academic I know has a little bit of this guy in them. The kind of I want to go lose myself in footnotes that no one cares about. And I want to accumulate all this knowledge and what I'm working on is the single most important thing. And you just wait because when I write it, it will make sense of the whole world. That's like an academic disease that everyone thinks that the small niche in which they're working on is the last piece of the puzzle. And when you. So I just love that about him. I just love the way the other thing I love about him, speaking of characters, is the way he provides this platform of kind of dry, old stodgy man as a Contrast to Dorothea, 19, vigorous, naive, innocent, great hearted ambition, you know, and they just couldn't be in a way more different. And so they each bring out, they each show the contrast of the other. In other words, their marriage provides Elliot an occasion to make this 19 year old, innocent, ambitious girl come to life. But it also provides her an occasion to show in fact how boring in a way Casaubon is because he's married to this, what is frankly a very interesting young woman. And he's just like totally not into it. And so I just love the way Elliot combines character types to make larger points about human nature and human life.
- [12:43]
B
I've not found another author who can get into the interior life of a character with such fine levels of detail. She can just give you somebody's interior landscape, how they think, how they feel in a way that really rings true to like. That's right. That's. That's what it's like to be uncertain. That's what it's like to be angry. Not able to express yourself to somebody else that you love. That's really powerful to. That's the grass. Great literature, great poetry is like giving you a thought, giving you words to feelings you have always had.
- [13:14]
A
Yeah.
- [13:15]
B
But not had words for before. She does that in spades. I also think that she's really funny. She's really witty in the same way. Like I'm right now I'm reading Moby Dick again and like Melville is funny. Yeah. It's a funny book. And like seriously read it and read it in the sense of like it's a light hearted dude talking about wailing and whatever the heck else is on his mind. And Elliot's similar and she sees these little like savage side barbs that she'll do. Like when she's introducing James Chetham, who is the guy that Dorothea doesn't marry. He's. She describes him as this. Or Dorothea thinks about him as like this amiable, handsome baronet who says exactly to every one of her remarks, even when she expresses uncertainty, you know, which is funny. He's like. He's just this dude who's like, yes, exactly. Even when she says I am uncertain, it's like, exactly. And she has these kind of ironic critical distance at a distance sort of comments like you said, of a philosophical sort of musing nature. That's really enjoyable. It's like the author kind of turns to look at you while she's writing the book to just sort of speak to you about what she thinks about the situation. Which is very charming and interesting.
- [14:28]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, I find those same things quite charming.
- [14:31]
B
Sort of like a director's cut.
- [14:33]
A
Yeah.
- [14:34]
B
With commentary.
- [14:35]
A
Yeah, it's true. And the book's so long, it's almost like it does feel like a director's Cut. Sometimes books don't come to you until you're ready for them. They can sit on your shelf for 20 years, and then one day, God knows why, you pull it off the shelf, and it's the most meaningful thing. And you're like, why didn't I read this 10 years ago? So who is the person? And who were you? Such that. And I want to get back to the details of the book later, such that when you pick this up, dorothea, these characters. Middlemarch, 19th century, resonated with you and was kind of a medicine for you.
- [15:00]
B
On the one hand, I think this book is a cure for people who think that they live. That they live a hidden life that doesn't affect the world and that they have nothing to contribute.
- [15:13]
A
Yeah.
- [15:14]
B
And I think this book is a cure for that because it shows in a very believable way that the interior, private decisions that you make about how you want to live your life, about what you think is good, about what you think is worth staking your honor to that. That in a way that is out of your control but also really dependent on you, can affect and will affect people in ways you have no idea of. Dorothea is just a woman who is seeking to be good, and because of that, she saves someone else's marriage. She inspires other people to do good things. And there's other characters, too. Like there's this minister whose name is Fairbrother, I think, Camden Fairbrother, who is a man who is in love with a woman, but lets her marry another man because he knows that they're better for each other.
- [16:13]
A
Yeah.
- [16:13]
B
And he has this moment where he could have had her love. It was kind of there for the taking, and he holds back, and he, in a sense, like, just lets them get married and they have a good life. And it's this man's, like, in a way you could say, was training his whole life to make that decision with all the little moments that you have. Like, there are a couple guys, Tom Rui and Bob Frayner. They taught me. They were my basketball coaches when I was in grade school, and I've still never forgotten them. So if you're listening. Thank you. I think about them many, many days throughout the year because, I mean, it was just like a dumb little. I was homeschooled, like a little homeschool basketball team. But they. They drilled us with a lot of good discipline about. They were constantly saying, it's not about basketball. It's about Life. You know, 10 minutes early is on time. On time is 10 minutes late. 10 minutes late is unacceptable. Or, like, you know, when you sprint, that's when you have to give, like, you know, 110%. Because it's not about basketball. It's about life. And I've never forgotten that, that these men really cared to just form us as, you know, as young men into people who understood the little things that you do will cash out later.
- [17:28]
A
Yeah.
- [17:29]
B
But in ways that you can't prepare for.
- [17:31]
A
And Middlemarch is teaching that same lesson.
- [17:33]
B
In a way I think it is.
- [17:34]
A
I love that, because this is a novel that I think most people would say is typically for women. It's got all kinds of love and marriage. It's written by a woman using the pen name of a man. And yet you've just connected it to basketball. You see, like, and like. Like what it tells you is how to live. And that's the beauty of a book like this, is that those lessons come in clothes that you don't expect. Like a Victorian novel that's a thousand pages. You seem to be saying, I got something from this that's similar to what I got from coaches. And I like that you say, well, you know, one of the things that the book shows is it takes this microcosm universe, as I've called it, Middlemarch, and it shows how you make these decisions and you live in a community in which the things that you do and the decisions you make have intended and unintended consequences, and those things play themselves out in the grand scale.
- [18:22]
B
And it's very easy to say to tell yourself that your life doesn't matter because maybe you didn't get the job you wanted, or maybe the girl you asked out didn't accept you, or maybe you just spend your whole life just scrolling and you feel like, I mean, what does it matter if I, like, want to get a better job, if I want to exercise or get up early? What does that matter? It's so easy. We're just afflicted by this kind of cultural despair about the meaning of our life. But that's not true. And in this book, I really. I know it sounds weird. Like, I think this book does help you escape from that in the sense that the tiny decision you make, like, you know what? I'm gonna set my alarm clock and get up.
- [18:59]
A
Yeah.
- [18:59]
B
And I am going to tell the truth. I'm just gonna spend this week, like, I'll just tell the truth no matter what. But these little, little decisions you make about your character do matter, you know, not least because your soul matters and your own character matters. And that really, that's the, that's the small little town you have the most control over.
- [19:20]
A
Yeah.
- [19:20]
B
Can you, you know, give the world one well ordered soul? That's a great gift. But that it will inevitably affect other people no matter what. You could flip burgers at McDonald's. And there's, there's honor in that.
- [19:31]
A
Yeah. In order to get a better handle on the novel, I want to talk about some big themes, like just, just big themes of the novel so that people kind of know what to expect from it and talk about what we can get from it. So I mean, the same way that we have these big questions in our own political life about religion, politics, et cetera, those things come up in the novel. So I'm just curious, I'd like to get you to reflect, I mean, given your profession, on the religious dimension of the novel. I learned that George Eliot, real name Marianne Evans herself, was by the end of her life, agnostic, atheist type. And yet in the novel, there are several. You've already mentioned one. Religious characters. Dorothea seems to have a piety about her. You mentioned the Reverend. There are others. What exactly is this? Is it a critique of religion? Is it a. Because Bulstrode. There seems to be in that story. I don't want to get too deep into the weeds for people, but there seem to be some characters who are sympathetic to religion and some characters who seem to be sort of critiques of it by the way that they live and the things that they mouth. And given where Eliot landed, she started, of course, a believer. So I'm just trying to figure out, you, as a guy who reads this book, what's its religious message that you. What do you take away?
- [20:48]
B
I guess for me, it's much more of a natural version virtue message than a supernatural virtue message because, yeah, it comes across very, how to say, like humanist, that she's interested in the dignity of the human spirit on a sort of natural plane. Now, of course, the book is soaked with Christianity because it's, it's England in the 1800s. That's just sort of like, that's what you are. Everybody's kind of a believer, you know, because you just kind of are. That's. That's the culture. And there are people who are motivated by religious beliefs. Dorothea clearly is. And you don't really see her like going to church. I mean, she does go to church and, and she does pray. But it's. You can see just as a motivating influence of seeking to be a good soul and Then you have like, fair brother, this younger clergyman, who is. Is a good man. He's also got his flaws. He's like a card player, which I guess at the time is like, much like bigger of a deal, I guess. And there's this other guy's like, maybe I'll be a clergyman, maybe I won't. So it's kind of the idea of being like a minister is around and going to church is around, but the plot, the life of the novel takes place mostly outside of church.
- [22:03]
A
Yeah.
- [22:04]
B
And then there are characters like Nicholas Bulstrode, who's actually one of my favorite characters because of this one scene. But he is basically a hypocrite. He's a person who projects himself as like the classic holier than thou. He lives what is, you know, on paper, an extremely disciplined, ascetic life. He denies himself a lot of things. He lives a life of real austerity and he prays a lot and he goes to church. But you learn like he's got this really compromising past that he has struggled to set aside. And he's also a very like, cruel, cold, just very socially isolating man. So you have that and I think it's an accurate thing. I mean, look. Yeah, there are, I don't need to tell you that there are hypocrites who profess religious faith.
- [22:54]
A
One of the things that occurred to me when I decided to ask you that question was I have studied for some time this, you know, very atheistic philosopher, Nietzsche. And I recall a quote, yeah, you've probably heard of him. I recalled a quotation which I have down here, which, that he wrote about Middlemarch. And I want to read it to.
- [23:13]
B
You because he did not like it.
- [23:14]
A
Yeah, but he has in mind the fact that Eliot, just to preview this, that Eliot is not Christian and yet her work seems to call a person back to Christianity. So he says this about just England in general. He says they are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency we do not wish to hold against little moralistic females a la Eliot. In England, one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. So he's saying something. Eliot was like, oh, she's free of Christianity and yet she feels so guilty that, that she writes this novel which calls people back to Christian morality. And of course, Nietzsche's famous Criticism is. That's Christian morality without the Christian God. And that's the modern world in which we live. And I would agree God in the world.
- [24:17]
B
I would agree with Nietzsche that.
- [24:19]
A
You heard it here, folks.
- [24:21]
B
Yeah, that's right. End pod.
- [24:23]
A
We're done.
- [24:24]
B
Priest agrees with that. With Nietzsche. I agree with him that if that's what you have, you need to blow that up.
- [24:30]
A
Yeah.
- [24:31]
B
If you have. Because that's also, like, what do we hate? Like, if I were to grab a random person off the streets of Manhattan, say, hey, what do you think? What does the Catholic Church think? Like, well, they think sex is bad and you shouldn't do it. And there's a lot of rules. And like, well, if life is just a bunch of rules, then get rid of, like, there's no point. But if life is about, you know, discovering the loves that move you and that order your life and that give you purpose and fulfill you and actually satisfy the thirst of your soul. Yeah. And that, yes, there are paths that you need to walk by because you have a nature. And we make the claim that there's a creator who made you for himself and that your heart is restless until it rests him. If that's the case, then, yes, there will be sort of a way to get to him and a way to walk away from him. Like, if you want to get to New York, don't drive south towards Miami. Yeah. So you could say, oh, that's a rule. How dare you, like, pinion me. But if it's. If I only tell you, you have to drive north, because I said so, well, then screw you. Like, why would I listen? Why should you listen to me?
- [25:28]
A
Yeah. What do you. Well, that's a nice way to tie the religious line up in a bow. But let's talk about some of the other themes. So in the background of this novel, there's this reform act that's going on and there's.
- [25:42]
B
Are. You're gonna have to ask me about context.
- [25:44]
A
No, no, no, no. There's a character who's gonna run for Parliament. Dorothea herself wants to build cottages for commoners. The middle class is kind of on the rise. This is a real historical moment in the novel that takes place sometime before it was actually written in the 1870s, I think has in mind is 1830s, 1840s. And so the novel seems to have at its heart at least some political tension with respect to the aristocratic landed classes in a certain way, struggling with. It seems to be a kind of coming tidal wave of liberty and some equality. And I don't know if you have thoughts on that, but I want people to know that that's another one of the major themes is that there's a political commentary here sort of about the compatibility of the old aristocratic ways with a certain kind of coming freedom. And this is going to be very popular, a very big issue in Europe in the 18th and 19th century. Another part of the book that's not unpolitical, which is related to the political half, is in the background. In addition to the coming of a kind of liberal way of thinking, liberal government is sweeping through a more humanitarian way of doing things. Equality. There's this science and progress that's coming through, embodied by a character, Lydgate, the doctor who wants to build hospitals with what we would call the latest technology, medical diagnoses and these sorts of things. There seem to be some skeptics about this in Middlemarch. And so you have in the background, first of all, people are collecting books, all the aristocrats are very proud of their libraries and they go and show there's this kind of appreciation for enlightenment. And Lydgate comes along and represents this with new medical technology, science, new ways of diagnosing. And I'm just not sure what we're supposed to make of that in the novel, given that it seems to be like enlightenment is coming to erode tradition.
- [27:38]
B
What that highlights for me is the fact that you cannot escape the need to be a likable person. What do I mean by that? I mean that Lydgate is this young, idealistic, cutting edge, kind of bleeding edge doctor with all this science and research behind him, but he has no patience for fools, for people he sees as fools. And he has no patience for like, you know, winning the good favor of the old guard. He just kind of has his way and he's just pretty isolated and isolating. And as a result of that, he just loses a ton of favor. He also kind of links himself to Bulro, which he doesn't realize or doesn't care is a really bad social thing to do because lots of people don't like Bulro, but he has got money. So Lit Gate's like, all, I need this for my project so you can have the best idea in the world. But if you don't have the social prudence, if you don't have also the, the care and the, how to say, the kindness and respect for other people to at least get to know them, earn their trust, show them you're of goodwill. You could have the best idea in the world and it will go nowhere because they don't trust you. Yeah, you're not going to be able to like, when was the last time that you had somebody who you did not trust convince you of something?
- [29:09]
A
Right.
- [29:09]
B
It just doesn't work that way.
- [29:10]
A
And that's pretty interesting because I would say today there's a widespread distrust of science and experts. Take it from me as a person in the academy, that's very funny because.
- [29:19]
B
At the same time, we're a people who have jettisoned God in favor of science.
- [29:24]
A
Right.
- [29:25]
B
So we now are people without any God.
- [29:27]
A
I mean, you're just doing Nietzsche, man. It's unbelievable the way. But you know, the novel touches on those issues. They seem like they're 19th century issues, but they're contemporary issues. What about marriage? I suppose the closest analog for people out there who have a taste for, who have read Jane Austen.
- [29:42]
B
Yeah, it's similar to that.
- [29:43]
A
It's similar, but it's different. It's different in the following way. Elliot, this is the, in my view, this is the genius of the book. I mean, what do I know? She stops and she talks in her own voice and she'll say, I think. And Austin never does that. Austin, yeah.
- [29:59]
B
She's. Far as I'm aware, my Fanny. I'm not an expert as a character, like at the end of Mansfield park. And that's notable because it's like the.
- [30:07]
A
Only time she's a person so she doesn't speak in her own voice. Elliot speaks in her own voice. It's a conflicted voice. It's a voice that's strongly opinionated. You're not sure if it's a voice you can trust. But what I find wonderful about the book is that if you like Jane Austen, this is, you know, you'll like this. But you'll also get something in addition, which is Elliot's own commentary on her own characters.
- [30:27]
B
When I think about marriage, the, the relationship that I actually think about the most is Fred and Mary. Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, who are. Fred's kind of upper class. His dad's like a really successful, I think, like Merchant or something like that. And Mary belongs to a sort of lower class family, but just really good stock. Like a great father, a really good mother. And Mary herself, you just really admire her. She's a woman of sterling character. And Fred is like this really well meaning fool. Yeah, like he's, he's a good guy, but he's like, doesn't have a lot of self control. He like bets bad on the ponies or he like, makes a bad horse deal and like, yeah, you know, but he's in love with Mary and she does love him, but she has so much restraint when it comes to that she won't just fall in love with him.
- [31:15]
A
Yeah.
- [31:15]
B
And give in to that. That she exercises this real strength of character, which I think is a really good lesson for us today of there are some things in life that are not worth compromising your honor for. And Mary is really good about not giving her hand to Fred, though he has her heart and it's clear that she does love him, but she has this sort of self control over her hand in marriage to give to him before he has really shown himself to be worthy of being a husband. Yeah. I'll say this also like to speak to today's age. We can tend to think again that maybe our lives right now, let's say maybe you're single or you're just. Yeah, you're just living the bachelor life or you're a single woman. You tend to not think the way you live now matters because maybe one day I'll just get married and then my life will change. You're a fool if you think that because right now you are deciding to be the person you will be for the rest of your life. You choose that moment over and over and over again. And so if you want to get married, act like a good man now. If you want to get married, act like a good woman now. Somebody with honor, something with principles that you are not willing to compromise on, not in a rigid way, but in a sense of there is a good way to live life. And to lose that for the sake of emotion or attachment is not worthy of my soul. That sounds very sort of beautiful, haughty and. But I think that our culture has just shifted away towards sort of like, if it feels right, do it. And that. That you should just like fall in love, give into your passions and it will work out. But you can just see, like, life is so much more complicated than that and that you do need to become a person of substance in order to have a long life that's happy.
- [33:23]
A
The word of the day is character. It came up because George Eliot is a master developer, writer, inventor, illustrator of individual characters. I love words that are ordinary words that we use, that we think we know the meaning of, but that we've never really thought of. That's in contrast to words where you hear it and you go, what? I've never heard that word. A word that you hear all the time but that you don't really fully understand. So today in Middlemarch, one of the things that Father Jonah and I discussed was what a master creator of characters Elliot is. Middlemarch is full of unique characters. It's a menagerie of all sorts of human types. And Eliot introduces these characters with masterful vignettes and sketches of their inner lives and their thoughts and their actions. And she just is a beautiful creator of character. But the word came up in a different sense, because Father Jonah, in talking about the different characters in Middlemarch, began to speak quite eloquently about the importance of developing character, your own character and substance, that is to say, a set of moral principles which are consistent, which are inviable, unmovable in your life, on the basis of which you live and from which your actions are identifiable to anyone who knows your character, the difference between right and wrong, you know it, you believe in it, you act on it, and you're a person of character on whom others can depend on to do right. So character can be used in a lot of different ways. The word is Greek in its origins. It comes from this Greek word, character, which meant a stamping tool. And so when you think about the word character in its third sense, you think about a letter on a page, a font, the character in a text, an A or the Z or the R or the at symbol, is a character on a page that comes from the Greek word stamping tool. But in the case in which we mean it with respect to its moral intonations, it's the moral principles that are stamped on your soul such that they're permanent and inviable and that guide you in your life. One of the things the book exposes you to, I've already said it exposes you to a wide variety of human types. But the other thing that it exposes you to with respect to marriages, the wide variety of kinds of marriages that there are. This is something that comes up in classes I teach on Shakespeare, where we'll talk about the love between Romeo and Juliet in one play, and then we'll talk about which is Romeo and Juliet. Then we'll talk about the love between Kate and Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew, which is another play. And we'll talk about the different kinds of relationships that Shakespeare presents and that they're not all identical, such that there are many kinds of marriages, and they all have a different sort of character depending on the dispositions of the two people involved. And I think young people a lot of time envision the Taylor Swift marriage Where it's like, it's how I saw it in the video, or it's how it is in the movie. And that's the perfect marriage. And if my marriage doesn't correspond to, like, this one in the movie or this one in the song, then it's not a healthy marriage. When the fact of the matter is. And what you get from Middlemarches, there's a hundred kinds of marriages, all of which can be healthy. Some of them are unhealthy. I don't want to deny that I think Dorothea and Casabon fundamentally unhealthy. But there can be a wide variety of kinds of marriages that are created from and animated by the human types who come into union together.
- [37:02]
B
Absolutely.
- [37:02]
A
You see that in Jane Austen, too. You see what I mean? Like, they're not all Mr. Darcy and his wife. You know, it's not. There might be a different kind and a different kind. That's what I get from this book.
- [37:12]
B
Yes. And I'm so glad you brought that up, because there's another marriage we haven't talked about, which is Nicholas and Harriet Bulstrode. Yeah. So Nicholas is kind of the villain of the story in a certain way, and Harriet is his wife. And what I love about them, and actually, my favorite scene in the whole novel comes from the two of them. And they show that you can have a marriage, that maybe there was even deep deception in it, and there was real wrong that was done. And there can be scandal, and there can be real heartbreak and betrayal, but even in the face of that, you can choose to be merciful, you can choose to be faithful, and you can maintain a good relationship even in the face of real suffering. And that's another thing that I think our age needs to hear, is that a catastrophe does not have to destroy your life. It does not have to define you. You can have wounds, but you can carry them. The Christian tradition, you'd say that the resurrected Lord Jesus keeps his scars, which is a really profound thing if you think about that. He just defeated death. Why did he keep his scars? I think he keeps them as a real emblem of hope for us, that no matter what happens to you, it can be triumphed over.
- [38:30]
A
Yeah. One of the things I asked you to do is prepare a passage for us that, you know, moved you or that you thought, you know, we could draw particular meaning from. Do you have one that you are interested in?
- [38:45]
B
Sure, yeah. So this is from a scene near the end of the book.
- [38:49]
A
What chapter?
- [38:49]
B
This is chapter 70. 74. Okay. Yeah. End of chapter 74. And Harriet Bulstrode is this, like, middle aged woman who has been married to one of the richest men in town, Nicholas Bulstrode. And. And she has just found out something about him that has destroyed her social standing, has destroyed the happiness of her marriage. It has destroyed her sense of who she thought he was, who she was marrying, what her own life is like. And it is just, I can't stress enough, it has just ended her sense of what her life has been like. She has just learned this. She has been out. She comes back home, her husband is in his room. Who knows that? She now knows. But they haven't seen each other yet. And so it's this really fraught moment. And I'll just read a couple of paragraphs from the end of that chapter and then just say what I love about it.
- [39:48]
A
Yeah. Give us a taste of it.
- [39:49]
B
Yeah. She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life. Before she could walk steadily to the place allotted to her, a new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently. The 20 years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest, ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal. But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. And then she, in her room, changes from her sort of gaudy, ostentatious fancy clothing to a very simple dress. She walks into her husband's room and she sees him. It was 8 o' clock in the evening before the door opened and his wife entered. He dared not look up at her. He sat with his eyes bent down, and as she went towards him, she thought he looked smaller. He seemed so withered and shrunken. A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her like a great wave. And putting one hand on his, which rested on the arm of the chair and the other on his shoulder, she said solemnly, but kindly, look up, Nicolas. He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her, half amazed for a moment. Her pale face, her changed mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, I know. And her hands and Eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying, and they cried together, she sitting at his side. I love that passage because Elliot has such a respect that she pays even her worst characters that she could have just let Bulstrode be a villain and go into the past and have his family and life ruined and have his wife, Harriet, be miserable. But she lets you see. And it doesn't really move the plot at all. She just lets you see this moment of mercy in this woman who is faithful to her husband, who has been dishonest and bad, and that she goes to him and chooses your lot is my lot. And that great moment that her hands and her eyes rested gently on him, and that she stays with him even in the face of knowing what he's done, that he knows that she knows what. But she stays there with him. And Elliot lets you feel the weight of what she herself is giving up. But then you also. She gives him this bad man, this great dignity of look. You know, he may have been a villain, but he is still a man with his own heart and with his own wife that he is worried he's going to leave him. And she. He gets this tremendous gift of experiencing the mercy and faithfulness of his own wife. It's just such a poignant moment.
- [43:07]
A
Yeah, poignant. Certainly religious, but also for marriage. I mean, these things are required for a marriage. Sometimes one has to digest the worst kinds of catastrophe and tragedy.
- [43:19]
B
50% of marriages end in divorce in America. That's awful.
- [43:24]
A
Yeah.
- [43:25]
B
That's so hard for everybody involved. Husband, wife.
- [43:28]
A
Absolutely.
- [43:29]
B
Man, Children. And that there are all these wounds that are just cutting.
- [43:33]
A
Yeah, man.
- [43:34]
B
Gutting us. And this is a really powerful thing to see that you could have something that. That is like. You could say, well, it's no fault, divorce today. But you could easily see Harriet going to her Lord and saying, I need to get a divorce. I want half of whatever he has, and sayonara. But she doesn't. Yeah, she stays with him. And there's great honor and great healing for both of them in that. So I would really wish that for any. Any couple who's struggling really, to realize that you can choose mercy and that can heal things.
- [44:02]
A
Very powerful counterexample. Very powerful counterexample. You're interesting in that you majored in English and you're a man of God. I find this interesting for the following reason. There's a long tradition of religious authority, broadly speaking, claiming that novels. It's a corrupt art form, because, first of all, it cultivates idleness. But Worse than that, it permits you, in your innocence and purity, access to, as we've said in this whole conversation, psychological longings, situations, temptations that on your own you wouldn't feel. And so, you know, one can say that novels are degrading and corrupting of the soul.
- [44:54]
B
For.
- [44:55]
A
For precisely this reason. I'm curious to get your take on the notion that novels somehow corrupt. My own view is that they enrich precisely because they give you access to human beings of a type that you are not. But I can see the argument that, no, no, you're an innocent, pious person, the 19th, 20th, or 21st century. You get a hold of the wrong book and it. And I've been corrupted, I have no doubt, by certain books and characters and these sorts of things morally. And so I'm curious how you make sense of the art of the novel in the larger horizon of religious belief.
- [45:37]
B
Wow. Yeah. I mean, bad company corrupts good morals. That's St. Paul. I think that's true. Like, if you jump into the river on St. Patrick's Day and it's dyed green, you got a white T shirt on. You get out, your shirt's going to be green. So that's true. If you just go to the erotica section of a bookstore and just buy it all and read it all. Yeah. I would say don't do that. If you just read things of a low nature and you present that to yourself as good.
- [46:06]
A
Yeah.
- [46:07]
B
That will tinge your mind, that will tinge your soul. But if you read things that are great, that have stood the test of time, that are. That our civilization holds up of saying, if you want to be a good citizen of Western civilization, if you want to be a good man or a good woman, read this book that has been around for a long time. Well, then do that. And trust that there are great people in literature who can influence you. That they influence me. That there are voices and characters and virtues that I've experienced in novels that move me to this day and I think have helped me be a better man. Yes. There are also other people that are bad. There are books that you could read that are either just escapist or cheap, or you just read them to be, you know, titillated or to escape, you can do that. You can choose to go to a bad place.
- [47:01]
A
Yeah.
- [47:01]
B
But you can also choose to go to a good place and spend time with good people who are fictional.
- [47:05]
A
Yeah.
- [47:05]
B
If you just have all this book stuff crammed in your mind and you're sort of alone and you're hungry Just say like other parts of your life aren't going so well. You could be really easily swayed by it, to things that are bad. But if you're seeking to live a balanced natural life, it's like when I'm, you know, if somebody comes to me for spiritual counsel, I'll often ask them like, are you sleeping? How are you eating? Do you have friends that you talk to? Because a lot of natural problems will just present themselves as supernatural problems. It's like you just need, like to like, have a meal, have a glass of wine and get eight hours of sleep and the world will look 80% better the next morning.
- [47:40]
A
Yeah, let's go to a lightning round.
- [47:43]
B
All right, let's do it.
- [47:44]
A
So you can spend as much or as little time on these you want. They're designed to be answered quickly. But do you have a least favorite theologian? I know your favorite. Well, I think I know your favorite theologian. It's got, it's got to be Thomas, right? Do you have a list?
- [47:58]
B
My favorite. Carl Rahner.
- [48:02]
A
What's the best religious novel? Like, you know, novel that takes up themes in which you are engaged in.
- [48:10]
B
This house of breed by Rumor Godden. Yeah. All right.
- [48:13]
A
What's the worst novel you ever read?
- [48:17]
B
Probably something I didn't buy. Standing in a corner of half price books.
- [48:22]
A
What non Christian religious book do you like the most? I don't know. Like is not the right word. But do you think contains multitudes?
- [48:31]
B
The Chosen by Heim Potok.
- [48:33]
A
Okay, all right. Is there a book you couldn't finish? You were like, this is. I just can't do it. I can't, I can't do it.
- [48:40]
B
I mean, it started with Middlemarch. I did the same thing with Brideshead Revisited. I finished both of them.
- [48:45]
A
Yeah, let that be a lesson for people.
- [48:47]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [48:47]
A
Yeah. What's the last book that changed your mind about something?
- [48:50]
B
Matterhorn. It just made me just hate war even more.
- [48:56]
A
So I, I, I've been given to understand you're a bluegrass man.
- [49:00]
B
I've been known to death.
- [49:01]
A
Yeah. So can you give me, you know, give us some, a couple bluegrass band recommendations, I mean, in addition to your own and your favorite bluegrass song.
- [49:14]
B
Tony Rice is a great bluegrass guitarist. Ricky Skaggs is a great musician and a great man.
- [49:20]
A
Yeah, that's good stuff.
- [49:20]
B
He's a, he's a high priestly man. He's like the, a church father of bluegrass. Great man.
- [49:26]
A
Is there a bluegrass song where you're like that? Is it that encapsulates the genre right there? The art form.
- [49:31]
B
I mean instrumental, like. I think Salt Creek is a great tune. And then anything by Ralph Stanley.
- [49:39]
A
Do you ride the subway?
- [49:41]
B
I love the subway.
- [49:41]
A
Do you have heretical thoughts on the subway? And what's the most heretical thought you've ever had there? Oh, man.
- [49:48]
B
Probably. Probably. Don't talk to me, please.
- [49:52]
A
So, Desert Island Sacrament. You can only keep one. Which one do you choose?
- [49:55]
B
The Eucharist.
- [49:56]
A
No, that's fast. And lastly, is there a saint that you think more people should read and learn about?
- [50:02]
B
Saint Maria Goretti.
- [50:03]
A
Tell us why.
- [50:04]
B
She was 11 years old when her next door neighbor tried to rape her. And she resisted him and he stabbed her 14 times. Wow. She died on the operating table being operated on without anesthesia. And her dying words were, for the love of Jesus, I want to be with him in heaven. Speaking of her assailant.
- [50:24]
A
Wow.
- [50:24]
B
Her assailant was convicted, arrested. She appeared to him in prison, placed 14 white lilies in his hands. She had been stabbed 14 times. And then he converted the next day and spent the rest of his life as a believer.
- [50:40]
A
And when was this?
- [50:41]
B
This was maybe in the last, like, 150 years.
- [50:44]
A
Wow. So there's probably a book.
- [50:46]
B
Probably, yeah. Saint Maria Goretti.
- [50:48]
A
Unbelievable. Well, Father Jonah, thank you for being here.
- [50:52]
B
Great to be here, man.
- [50:53]
A
Yeah, it's been great.