The English language is not logic, but art. We string together roots from different languages because it sounds better than purity of extraction. As one language historian noted, our language does not borrow words from other languages. English chases them down dark alleys, beats them senseless and rifles their pockets. Thus, our Germanic root tongue offers the single word see (“zay” = sea) for our puddle, bath, pond, pool, lake, reservoir, and ocean, along with the properly derived sea.
I’m not the first to notice modern English suffers a paucity of words in those things most important in life. Each of those words for “body of water” carries a connotation, a difference in flavor, which makes them not simply descriptive but also giving character. We have no such elaboration for love, and with precious little do we cover knowing any better. Modern language arts has enhanced our knowledge of material things, but has surrendered any hope of discussing higher things.
Thus, we know precious little of love. There was time when poetry in the English language did yeoman duty in covering these gaps through other means, but it has died. That is, poetry was killed when knowing was killed. How do you explain knowing from some source which is not mere intellect, and certainly not base emotion? When I was younger, still in school, I was exposed to decent array of poetry. I liked poetry itself, but found some of the samples were repugnant, though I hardly had the development of mind to know why. I knew, but not on a conscious level.
These days, I can probably tell you more about it. For example, a whole school or “modern” poetry in English is nothing more than sheer propaganda, lies of Satan to further press his materialist vision. Indeed, it should not be so hard to find Frost, Whitman, Pound, Cummings, even the revered TS Eliot, were all avowed socialists, among other things. While more subtle than the blatantly existentialist James Joyce, it was still the same ugly decapitation of the human soul. Socialism philosophically was aimed at deflating the entire realm of higher grasp, chopping it off and replacing it with some artsy materialism. They had an agenda, and it was to destroy what little was left of mysticism in Western Christian faith.
These writers fed directly into the mythology which now besets and imprisons Christian religion. The call of Christ is to leave this world first by a commitment to Heaven, then to leave it physically when God is through revealing Himself. This is imparted wholly across the fallen human race, but is an individual experience, as well. Eliot in particular destroyed that other-worldly appeal, making Christian faith a mere adjustment of mind to a better life in this world. Even CS Lewis, flawed as he was in his theology, called Eliot on his evil.
Faith is not rational, but is almost anti-rational by virtue of being far, far above it. Socialist poetry aims to make faith less than rational. Even allowing how faith can make one more noble in this life, they subtly denigrate it, making it out to be a mystery which can be ignored if you don’t really need it. Faith and things of God are a mystery, not because they aren’t up to the intellect, but can’t be told because intellect can’t reach that high. It’s part and parcel of the same move which shoved love into the realm of the unknowable and uncontrollable. In Scripture, love is the choice you make to exert yourself on behalf of another’s welfare. It was never simple sentiment, but we recognize emotional attachment comes from that underlying commitment. The feelings are derived, a response of the emotions to something which emotion cannot control.
The biblical anthropology asserts we are flesh, that the flesh registers in the mind as emotions. The intellect can quell emotional raging, and decide by the will to act more rationally. But that is in the absence of a living spirit. Fallen man is born with a dead spirit. That is what the Fall did to us. Only by grace does God invade our beings and awaken the spirit to life with His Spirit. The modern poets of socialism deny the existence of the spirit, not overtly, but in denying it’s power. They make it a lifeless mystery, a something which does affect us, but they are resolutely agnostic about it. This is but a step from denying it. The Bible assumes the spirit is the only true part of human nature which can be real, because “real” means eternal. All Creation, after the Fall, is quite “unreal” — it’s not what God had in mind.
We have no power to love or know what is truly real, in that sense, until our spirits are born and put in charge of the soul. So long as the intellect rules, we cannot ever quite grasp reality as God calls it. The spirit knows from the Spirit of God what love really means, that there are no words for the sacrifice on the Cross, nor that same sacrifice reborn in every act of grace which flows from His power working in us. In Christ alone can we know and love. Even the word “faith” has been so perverted by a vast shift in background associations it no longer means a conscious lifelong commitment and loyalty.
Thus, in the Bible, the spirit is meant to rule the intellect. This is anathema to the socialist poets of Modern American Poetry. How it is they invaded and took over the entire range of institutions which tell the public what is and is not good poetry is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. That this was their goal all along, to usurp all the arts and the full range of academic pursuit, and thus take over the entire culture of the West, cannot be denied. Thus, by denying the existence of any higher reality, Western Civilization has died. The corpse is rotting even now, and the time for burial is long past.
