Reclaim the Dreaming Spires
Hello again, brothers and sisters. It's time for our Golden Age π°
It's a common affliction for students of history to suffer from the antiquarian fallacy. This is a pretentiously fancy phrase meaning the belief that somewhere in the past lies a far-off Golden Age. It was unique, beautiful and pristine. It suffered from none of the ills of our drab present. The only drawback of these golden ages, of course, is that they are imaginary.
It's a fact that I have to constantly call to my memory. Everyone has their preferred golden age as well, a tiny slice of historical moment that they long for. Mine has consistently been the period of flourishing scholarship, literary creativity and philosophical development that sprang from a small group of eccentrics studying at Oxford during the 1930s and 40s. In a brief flash of breathtaking wisdom and inspiration, this tiny band of Christian authors and academics created works that have since altered the thought-landscape of western civilization. They drew from inexhaustible wells of intellectual life now dried and inaccessible to us. After all, they inhabited a mythical world all but lost now to our time, only conjured in our minds as blurred flashes of tweeds, typewriters, ancient stonework and rainy afternoons outside glazed diamond windowpanes. A perfect world, gone forever.
Or at least that is what I tell myself. Back to cold reality for us now! Because any decent student of history also learns that the antiquarian emotion is still a fallacy. As we read the writings of each successive age we discover that they, too, looked back to their ancestors with longing and regret. They thought of their own time, beloved and hallowed by us, as a pathetic attempt to recapture the age that had just passed into memory. It's a deeply human response to sigh sadly at the present and wish for other years, hoping against hope that the ills of our world are late inventions. No ills are innovations, and each age was filled with an even share. For those like me who find themselves tempted to respond to the challenge of the present by retreating to the past, I'll issue a challenge of my own. When you feel that you've lost the age of your heroes, itβs time to find out what they did to become heroic.
The fascinating thing about the group of authors who called themselves the Inklings is how similar their place in history is to our own in many respects. Finding themselves in the early maturity of a new century, they were close enough to several previous generations to compare themselves to living legends and feel the lack. They were children of conflict and suffering, experienced firsthand through the Great War and the 1918 Influenza pandemic. They found themselves in a period of profound and destabilizing changes on every axis. Their age was one of intense questioning of every norm and saw the branching of myriad paths of possibility where only a handful had existed previously. Exploding technological forces seemed to be crowding out or destroying the ways of the past. Looking back, we can see that the slightly frenzied air of the 1930s was a breathless calm before a tidal wave, but they had no such prescience until they lived through the storm. When Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, Williams, Dyson, Green and others trooped into their favorite public house to read each others' drafts on a Tuesday sometime in the early 30s, I highly doubt that their intention was to fling the arc of history into a new track. I suspect they were more concerned with writer's block, academic controversies now forgotten and further banalities. They were anxious at the loss of what was bright and good in the Victorian Age and filled with a desire to establish the Classics on a firm footing as the Modern Age ground forward. But they weren't (only) reactionary conservatives. The greatest contributions of their hectic age were sparkling innovations, not tired retreads of old forms.
So much for their setting, strangely familiar to us when divorced from the glow of vague nostalgia. What kind of men were they who produced literary flights of fancy and winsome philosophical discourse? The closer we look the less impossibly giant they seem. They were Readers. Writers. Walkers. Talkers. Convialists. Correspondents. Friends. They came from a patchwork of philosophical backgrounds and each landed in the arms of the Church after varied and eventful journeys. However we see them now, they saw themselves as men in thrall to Truth and romanced by Beauty, producing art that expressed honestly their deepest convictions. Seen in this way, there is nothing about even one of the most fertile periods of literary history that should discourage the hopeful creators of today. The killer app always turns out to be simplicity itself. It is the false gurus and the poseurs who pile requirement on top of impediment. Would you write works that change minds? With some sort of word processor, access to the great works of literature and a few friends to help refine your ideas, you have all of the tools of Lewis and Tolkien. Would you save souls? With a Bible, an empty room and a few friends to spread the word, you have everything that Spurgeon and Moody had to begin their ministry. The seeds of a nascent Golden Age are always lying dormant in the ground.
What made the Inklings different from us? Only that they are remembered together. They fought the centrifugal force of isolation, refused to become angry monastic antiquarians uselessly burrowed into their libraries. They came together to laugh and encourage each other towards the best work. They reminded one another constantly of the real reasons they wrote, of the Beauty they were trying to capture and retell. There is a certain type of thought-fruit that can only grow from mutually fertile minds in a setting that prioritizes thought and debate. It was never the institutions that produced the Inklings, and in any case those institutions are now shadows of their former selves. The Internet can be our Dreaming Spires, or our Paris, or wherever we imagine the special ground of genius to be located. In the world that web3 is creating, there is absolutely nobody able to prevent from us finding the people filled with the same animating spirit as ourselves. Make your own table, set out some chairs, and get ready to spar and laugh with your own circle. There are thousands of lights in the darkness, people longing for others to share their vision. Some of them are probably in your own town already, and some you'll discover scattered across the globe on Discord and Twitter. Write down your vision, combine the best of past and present anew. Be honest with one another, demand your friend's best and give it in return. Then do it again.
Someday, they'll pore over our discarded drafts and scattered thoughts, searching for the secrets to their own Golden Age.
And that sweet City with her dreaming spires
She needs not June for beautyβs heightening,
Lovely all times she lies, lovely to-night...
Why faintest thou! I wander'd till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side. ~ selected lines from βThyrsis,β Matthew Arnold
Say not, "Why were the former days better than these?" For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. ~ Ecclesiastes 7:10
Of all your essays, this one is my favorite, not surprising I suppose, since my entire blog is about Oxford. Somewhere in my journals, I have a passage about a room at Oxford where shafts of golden topaz light were fractured by the tracery and cut-glass windows into diamonds. The room's window faced an interior courtyard, hidden from the world, just as William Holman Hunt's painting Light of the World was cloistered in the side chapel of my college (my favorite place to pray). I suggest that the Golden Age is a misnomer. It is not an age or time period, but rather a state of mind that is accessible, if we choose look for it.