ILLUMINATIONS by Anthony Esolen
Our Quiet Lord
The wise men of our day have been busy inverting our commonsense perception of things. They tell us, with the hair-tossing flippancy of a sophomore, that a thing is nothing but the aggregate of matter that composes it. I illustrate for my students the madness of that instance of the compositional fallacy by scratching my arm. There go fifty thousand cells. "I'm not the man I used to be," I say. So determined are the wise men to deny God, they will gladly deny also the existence of perduring things, and even of real personal identity.
They can squint for quarks if they like, but we Christians can rout them on their own microscopic ground. For we look to the God who is not only infinitely beyond all things. We look to the God who is infinitely within all things. Even if a quark were nothing but a nondimensional point, our God would fill it with his fullness. Smaller even than the quark, infinitely smaller, dwells the boundless freedom of God, who gives to things and to persons both their determinate limits and their liberty. And the Person of the Trinity through whom this truth is most sweetly perceived is the Holy Spirit.
When the Spirit descended upon the apostles at Pentecost, there was a great rushing wind, and tongues of flame appeared above them; and that is the most obvious thing the Spirit does in Scripture, if we look only to what can be reduced to measurements; and even at that, the fire does not devour, and the wind is visible only in its effects. "The wind bloweth where it listeth," says Jesus to Nicodemus, explaining and not explaining what it is to be born again, "and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." There's nothing to see; and all at once we look up, and there are men reborn, crying, "Abba!" and a royal priesthood, a holy nation, called out of darkness into God's marvelous
light.
The Spirit at Work
A woman named Harriet Auber (1773–1862) captured a sense of the quiet power of the indwelling Spirit in her hymn for Pentecost, "Our Blest Redeemer."She chooses a variation on the simple English ballad meter, but instead of giving the final line three beats, she gives it two—setting it apart, and stressing both the smallness and the boundless potency of the Spirit at work in the Christian soul:
Our blest Redeemer, ere he breathed
His tender last farewell,
A Guide, a Comforter, bequeathed
With us to dwell.
The word that ends the stanza rings throughout the poem: dwell. Where is God? Here, now; abiding in the soul of the Christian, not as some abstract principle of being, but personally and intimately.
Mrs. Auber finds that lesson, too, in the manner of his descent at Pentecost:
He came in tongues of living flame,
To teach, convince, subdue;
All-powerful as the wind he came,
As viewless too.
We shouldn't hear an "although" in there. The viewlessness and the omnipotence of the Spirit are one. That is how he works, imperceptibly speaking within the soul, teaching us, convincing us (and, with us, that may take some time; well it is that the Spirit is so patient), and subduing us to the truth, so that we may be free.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more on imagination from the online archives
11.5—September/October 1998
Speaking the Truths Only the Imagination May Grasp
An Essay on Myth & 'Real Life' by Stratford Caldecott
19.10—December 2006
Training Up a Child Requires a Well-Formed Imagination by David Mills
18.4—May 2005
The Idylls, Idols & Devils That Corrupt the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
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37.5—Sept/Oct 2024
A Battle Plan for Peace While Growing Old by Anthony Esolen
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