Living Wittily

A second hand bookshop where clutter is an art form

Most times when I visit Glasgow University Library I make time to go to Voltaire and Rousseau's. They are a second hand bookshop 5 minutes from the library. The proprietor, Joseph McGonnigle, I've known (as Joe), since 1971.

The University Library has thousands of books, arranged neatly on shelves, catalogued and cared for. Voltaire and Rousseau's, which is the size of a small supermarket, also has thousands of books, some on shelves, and nearly as many on the floor. They are piled at times three deep up to three or four feet high. Looking down the book aisles is like looking at one of those 1950's disaster movies with special effects showing the aftermath of a San Francisco earthquake, with skyscrapers leaning crazily in all directions and threatening a domino effect collapse in the event of an aftershock. So first time visitors should probably do the basic health and safety training, wear a hard hat and luminous yellow waistcoat, and stay near the exit point. Och only kidding - it isn't as bad as that - but it is impressively chaotic, as you can see. The glorious photo was taken by J Malky, see more here. .

The books are in a rough kind of categorised arrangement. As you come in the door, Theology is at the far right hand corner, poetry is middle left, philosophy is middle aisle half way down, and Scottish stuff faces you as you go in the door. Roughly speaking, in general terms, on a good day, when due allowances are made, you can find the section you're looking for.

Today I came back with some spoils. Because whatever else, this is a shop where bargains are still found, and those odd "never thought I'd get my hands on this", kind of books can be discovered, even if not where you thought it might be. Of course one person's gold is another person's dross. But here's what an hour's digging produced.

The Confessions of the Church of Scotland. Their Evolution and History, C. G. M'Crie. (Edinburgh 1907) £3.50. One of my heroes is the Rev James Morison of Kilmarnock who along with John McLeod Campbell, did so much, at enormous personal cost and spiritual sifting, to compel the Scottish churches to rethink and restate the doctrine of the atonement in terms less thirled to the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. In these Thomas Chalmers Lectures M'Crie is an eloquent and sympathetic guide to the post Reformation spiritual history of Scotland.

Only One Way Left, G. F. MacLeod (Iona Community, 1954) £1.20. Aye, George Macleod knew how to tell a story too, especially the story of the Kirk and its need for constant renewal, reformation and reconstruction. These 8 Lectures were the Cunningham Lectures and they contain much of Macleod's pastoral and liturgical theology, written with outspoken passion. They are fuelled by fearless intellectual fire that energised a ministry of preaching, imagined communal renewal and informed half a century of theologically principled protest against nuclear weapons.

Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, P. T. Forsyth. (London: Independent Press, 1964) £0.60 pence. I know Jason. Surely Jim already has this book. Yes but this is a clean copy and anyway it cost me more to park my car for an hour! And nobody gets to walk away from a P T Forsyth book because they grudge the cost of an hour's parking! I'm off at meetings in Birmingham and Oxford later in May - this cheaply priced preacher's tonic will provide the spiritual verve needed to recover both energy and equilibrium. Forsyth's lectures on preaching, like so much of his work, helps me find again "the soul's magnetic North".

A Gathered Church. The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930, Donald Davie, (London: RKP, 1978). £2.50. Davie is a poet I first encountered as the maverick literary critic who took seriously the poetic achievement of classic hymns by Watts and Wesley. In his volume Purity of Diction in English Verse, he opened my eyes to the lucidity and leanness of Augustan English, and showed how well it serves the theological and rhetorical purposes of Watts and Wesley.

He also edited the Oxford Book of Christian Poetry, and had no embarassment including hymns from Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, John Newton, and James Montgomery. The introduction to the volume is one of the best apologia's in print for the hymn as poem, and an enthusiastic rebuttal of all those literary snobs who look down their noses at hymns, especially evangelical hymns. Though what Davie would have made of the modern praise song is quite another matter, and whether many of them will ever be anthologisable (new word?), I doubt. Deeply and pessimistically, I don't think so.

But to lift the heart again after that brief moan - Total cost for the four books £7.80. Worth wearing a hard hat for, eh?  

Confessions of a Bibliophile - judicious selection isn't an excuse

Samuel Butler advised "Never read anything until not to have read it has bothered you for some time." There's a lot of time invested in reading a book, and the longer the book the longer the time it takes. Which argues a need for judicious selection, and good reasons for reading long books - of which more later.

We used to visit a small bookshop on the south Deeside Road. It was a wee room of a wee cottage which was part of the Camphill Community. Compared to the urban sprawl that was the interior of the book megastores on Union Street, the Camphill Bookshop was rural, quaint, small, quirky and I doubt I ever went in without finding something different, interesting, worth reading.

The contrast between a bookshop with a stock of around 3,000 books, and a megastore with hundreds of thousands can be measured in serveral ways. Bestsellers piled feet high, promoted titles on tables at eye level, 3 for 2 offers laid across your path as you walk in. The attempt to be a comprehensive book supermarket, means aisles of travel literature from Tiree to Thailand and body mind and spirt stuff where these two extremes have their equivalent in the geography of new age esoterica; the ephemeral bestsellers get front of shop priority and classics require to be looked for, walls of crime and sci-fi, more walls of IT manuals and self-help handbooks - I find the places exhausting, frustrating, and finding the book I want is like looking for a known face in an overpopulated foreign city without a streetmap and only a tourist level vocabulary

Then there's the Camphill Bookshop. No big franchise money there to reduce prices, promote bestsellers, demand huge discounts from publishers. A judicious selection of books (remember the phrase used earlier), loosely defined as 'good books'. By which the proprietor meant books that enrich the mind, enlighten curiosity about human life and achievement, touch those places of ethical and theological importance that illumine and deepen human experience. I never bought there a book I didn't read, and they didn't have many brieze-block volumes.

Which brings me back to long books. Consider. This summer two books on Paul will be published with a combined page total of 2,723 pages (1347 plus 1376). The first is by J D G Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, the second volume of his "Christianity in the Making" three volume project.

The second, The Deliverance of God. An Apocalyptic Reading of Jusrification in Paul, is by Douglas Campbell. This is a massive restatement of Pauline soteriology in the light of current controversy and development in New Testament history and theology in which the main protagonists are people like Dunn, N T Wright, Francis Watson. Years ago, after reading The Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and Unity and Diversity in the New Testament,  I formed the habit of reading James Dunn's books when they come out, as key indicators of the best NT scholarship. N T Wright's bigger books likewise. Over the years their books have kept getting bigger! And in addition to the two books mentioned above, the next major work from N T Wright in his six volume "New Testament and the People of God" series, will also be on Paul. If it's the same size as his first three it will be a modest 700 pages, half the size of those other two noted above!

Samuel Butler advised "Never read anything until not to have read it has bothered you for some time." So - an experiement in judicious selection - how long before I begin to be bothered...........hmmmm.

Desideratum: The English Poems of George Herbert

desideratum. Noun
- something desired as a necessity; 
- essential, necessary, requisite
- anything indispensable;
"food and shelter are necessities of life"; "the essentials of the good life"

This book has for some time been a desideratum. Too expensive for me to justify the expense.

Given to me for my birthday from Sheila. One more of those accumulated kindnesses that strengthens marriage "like seasoned timber",(1). Each kindness a sacrament of friendship, making grace as undeserved favour less incredible, because so often encountered in the generous being-thereness of those special others in our everyday life.

(1) Checking the reference in my new book :))  the phrase is from Herbert's "Vertue", line 14. The note on the line says "wood matured and tested (through the trial of the seasons)". Just so!    (pages 316, 319) 

Confessions of a bibliophile - culpable carelessness

This is a real confession. A genuine mea culpa. Of all the stupid, reprehensible, careless demonstrations of absent minded irresponsibility....

Realised this morning that I left my book on the Easyjet plane from Bristol.

Wouldn't mind if it was a pulp fiction time filler. But it was the Denise Levertov interviews, and I had annotated it and marked the good bits!

Going to trust in miracles, providence and people's good will and phone them to see if it's been handed in by some cabin cleaning crew with literary sympathies and a high functioning work-ethic.

If not will I buy it again???  Hmmmmm.

But drat it....

Libraries as Storehouses of History

  Two or three weeks ago I reminisced about libraries I have loved! Recent visits to various places sparked a further chain of memories. I still remember an April evening sitting in the Carluke library (near 40 years ago!) reading an outline of European History to get a handle on the Benevolent Despots. The sunset streaming through the glass sided windows, the place virtually to myself, as an 18 year old about to sit Higher History having studied at night class, there seemed nothing more important than sorting out the policies of Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great of Russia, and the other guy from Prussia. (The photo is from the current Carluke Library website!)

By the time I got the Highers, and was offered a place in the Glasgow MA course, books had simply become an essential fact of my life, and one of its indispensable nutrients. But of course there are books, and then there are books. The first book I bought at University was for the Moral Philosophy class – it was Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, a masterpiece of political realism that anticipated the excesses of contemporary democratic decay such as cynicism and truth-bending, power mongering and self-serving, and suggesting legal and contractual restraints to channel and constrain political power. Actually, not all that far from the allegorical connections to be discerned in Watership Down, the odd Western, and the rise and decline of the Benevolent Despots!

During my time at Glasgow in the 1970’s, theology and philosophy were on Floor 6 of the University Library. I still remember that first encounter with hundreds of metres of books, set out in shelves, under subjects, every volume findable if you could use the new technology of microfiche and translate Dewey System into the kind of mapping code that took you to the very volume. Here were more books than all the other libraries I’d known, all put together. I spent a whole evening handling, browsing and reading bits of the multi-volume Encyclopaedia of Philosophy; reference books have always drawn me like iron filings to a magnet. The idea of an encyclopaedia, a repository of authoritative knowledge, isn’t very popular now, in the post-modern climate of suspicion about overarching frameworks of knowledge. Did anyone else love and wade through the Children’s Encyclopaedia of Arthur Mee?

In those first few weeks at University I took down off the shelves books whose titles I had no way of interpreting since I hadn’t yet encountered the currency of philosophical discourse - metaphysics, epistemology, the categorical imperative, empiricism, theodicy, utilitarianism, - or names like Immanuel Kant, Benedict Spinoza, Duns Scotus, G W F Hegel. I was both ecstatic and terrified – so many books, most of them crammed with words I hadn’t ever had need of before. Like everybody else today, I surf the internet – but the battery hen approach to knowledge much of the internet represents has never replaced for me its organic free range alternative - the serendipity and random purposefulness of browsing in a library with more books than you can ever read, but with enough time to touch, handle and peruse, and perchance read.

 

Since then I’ve gradually built my own library, housing on its shelves books that are now important clues to my story and character. As a self-confessed, unembarrassed bibliophile, I’ve no difficulty admitting my entire grown up life (and much of my childhood) has presupposed a book budget – by which I mean money to purchase, time to read, space to shelve and freedom to choose. From those childhood days when my sainted Aunt Edith sent a ten bob note (10/- or 50p in today’s money) for birthday with clear instructions to do what I liked with it – which meant books – to now, books have simply been an existential presupposition, an assumed necessity for human flourishing, that without which I could live, but not without near fatal diminishment of soul.

Amongst those I have to thank for endless and now uncountable hours of joy, work, learning, questioning and at times finding, are those librarians of school, university and public libraries, whose choices and suggestions opened up entire worlds of knowing and wanting to know.

George Herbert: Secretary of Praise

Amongst my treasured literary possessions are several carefully sought out, frequently handled, and regularly read editions of The Temple, George Herbert's matchless contribution to Anglican Spirituality. For my 40th birthday I was given a leather bound early Victorian copy by my friend Kate. It was given as a prize for Arithmetic, to Master W L Riddell, in 1864, while a pupil at Mr Crerar's School,13 Forth Street, Edinburgh. It was published by the Edinburgh firm of James NicholI, around the time they started issuing those famous sets of the works of Standard Puritan Divines such as Thomas Goodwin and Richard Sibbes. The book has copper engraved borders within which each poem is placed like a framed word picture - which much of Herberts verses are. In bookseller's parlance, the condition is "used, no marking, previous owner's bookplate (the prize label), finely bound in tooled and gilt leather with signs of some use." Perfect - and it couldn't be in safer, more appreciative hands!

 

  Nearer my 50th Birthday I uncovered another Victorian edition, maroon cloth, elaborate gilt celtic tooling, and used enough in the past 150 years to make me feel that reading it is an act of recognition, that someone else, numerous someone elses, have enjoyed the look and feel, the smell and heft, as well as the contents of a favourite book. This edition has copper engraved prints(an example here) as well as page borders, good illustrations of how the Victorians imagined seventeenth century English life, and now enjoyed by a 21st century bibliophile. One example of Victorian devotional book illustrative art shows the choir singing 'Let all the world, in every corner sing, My God, and King'. I've  never visited  Bemerton where Herbert was country parson, but later this year, as part of several sabbatical pilgrimages, I'm going looking for Herbert's church of St Andrew's, Bemerton. and Leighton Bromwold. Salisbury Cathedral  which I've never seen is nearby and will be enjoyed as an enduring  expression of  devotion to God through archtecture on the grand scale. But the little church Herbert restored bears witness to a different scale and quality of devotion - in my imagination I see Herbert being as careful about the details and care for restrained beauty of expression in the restoration of God's house as he was about the selection and arrangements of words and images in The Temple.

 

I remember on a warm June evening, singing that Herbert psalm, 'Let all the world, in every corner sing', in the magnificent setting of Coats Memorial Church, with the choir (who didn't look anything like in the picture above) and a small gathered congregation. I've never forgotten the coincidence of mellow late evening sunlight, the soft authority of the great organ, the harmony of choir and congregation, and the aesthetic beauty of a building that is itself an historical accident. It was built in 1894, when the finest material and the most skilful craftsmen were affordable, when Victorian confidence was still high enough to build without thought to cost, and before the turn of the century move away from large scale gothic towards more functional, modest places of worship. But that night, the glow of late sun-soaked oak, the clear handmade glass, the sanctified spaciousness outwards and upwards from the chancel, allowing light to be shaped and toned by warm sandstone and carved wood, all of which was part of the architect's intention - it all makes for a memory still sharp with the sense of smell, touch and sound. Reading George Herbert's hymn still has the effect of collapsing time into vivid memory of sight and sound.

The amazing grace of biblical scholars!

"Amazing"! Amazing how often the word is amazingly overused. Overstatement is one of the most insiduous and pervasive linguistic diseases afflicting contemporary discourse. It's amazing we put up with it.  If most things are amazing, then jaw-dropping, eye-brow raising genuine astonishment becomes a redundant experience, and wonder is also out of a job.So when referring to human achievement, I try to use the word "amazing" to refer to those things which can be truly praised to the point of admitting I don't know how they did it, but in humble admiration I stand, (I use the word advisedly), amazed!

In which case I think Vincent Taylor's Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, published in 1952 is an amazing work of biblical scholarship and human endeavour.

Consider.

It was in process during and beyond the Second War. Taylor was a family man and an active Methodist Churchman. Travel to libraries was limited, the scale of the commentary was towards being a comprehensive summary of previous scholarship with Taylor's own independent judgement woven through. He was a practitioner of text, form, source and historical criticism, and by the time he wrote his commentary, a scholar immersed in study of NT christology and atonement, evident throughout his exegesis of the Markan passion story. And all this was done before PC's allowed cut and paste, painless re-drafting, footnote and bibliographic software, file back-up - and before the internet gave access to the bibliosphere and that republic of information communication called cyberspace.

 And there it stands. An amazing monument to meticulous, persistent, faithful, disciplined labour; described as a no-stone-left-unturned commentary. Part of the MacMillan series, those detailed examinations of text, syntax, Greco-Roman context, classical parallels, verbal studies - a thorough literary dissection aimed at all round textual explanation. The volume is a hefty repository of learning, set out in double columns of smallish print, few concessions to those untrained in the biblical languages, and here and there, in partial explanation of this labour of love, Taylor's own faith appropriation of the text.

I remember R E O White telling a story (whether apocryphal anecdote or true memory I never confirmed) of Vincent Taylor and ten tons of topsoil. Asked how he had managed to keep going at the commentary he recalled the delivery of ten tons of topsoil to his front drive at the manse. Over the summer he moved it round to the back of the house to rebuild the garden, shovel by shovel, barrowload by barrowload, till it was moved. The commentary was tackled in the same faithful incremental way.

Study of Mark's Gospel has moved beyond Taylor's work, and the concerns of contemporary scholarship are very different. Numerous and various forms of NT criticism have come and gone, pushing study of Mark's Gospel in excitingly different directions.  But few commentaries today are written out of a lifetime's textual cultivation of one allotment in the large acreage of biblical studies. Shovel by shovel, sentence by sentence, over the years, Taylor worked the text of Mark with the thorough patience of the gardener who knows the time it takes to build a garden, work the tilth of the soil, sow seeds and wait for worthwhile growth and eventual  fruit. For that reason, now and again, I open Vincent Taylor's Commentary on Mark, read him on some passage or other, and thank God for that unsung apostolic succession of  those who have given their lives to scholarly study of the biblical text. They are God's carefully chosen gifts to us.

As in a mirror - Calvin and Barth

'gloat' - to dwell on with smugness or exultation.

'admire' - to regard with esteem, respect, approval or pleased surprise.

'covet' - to wish, long or crave for

'bibliophile' - to admire a book, then covet a book, and then gloat over its acquisition at a fraction of the cover price.

'Confession' - the act of telling people on this blog that today, this bibliophile has moved from coveting and admiring to gloating.

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The picture is a detail from the Issenheim Altarpiece, and shows John the Baptist pointing to the cross and to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. A reproduction of this detail hung on Barth's study for years, reminding him that as a theologian all he could ever do was point towards the revealed mystery of Christ crucified. What fascinates me about this magnificent volume is the approach, which takes two of the most influential and 'epochal theological figures' and expounds their understanding of our knowledge of God, but without making them cancel each other out, and without feeling compelled to affirm one at the expense of the other. Like a two panel diptych, the theological portrait of each is displayed, and the hinge which joins them is the equally towering figure of Immanuel Kant. Calvin's theology was hammered out against the background of Renaissance humanism, reformation tumult and pre-modern culture; Barth's theology was a response to 'post-Kantian culture inclined to agnosticism', and to those forms of liberal theology that had declined to acknowledge the transcendent otherness of the Eternal Word; - and between them one of the stellar figures of the Enlightenment, whose own views of how we know, what we know, and how we know what we know, have shaped western philosophy for centuries.

Some books you don't read till you have time not only to do it justice, but to let it do justice to that part of us which recognises that, sometimes, the deepest and most satisfying truths are not to be had piecemeal. They demand, and repay, the costly labour of prayerful attention; they invite us into a conversation where we need all our wits about us; they satisfy, if only for a while, that hunger to know more about what it means to know God.

Recent acquisitions

No surprise that since I was over at Glasgow University Library in the diligent pursuit of knowledge, and since I was in the immediate vicinity, I found time to engage in some extreme used book searching at Voltaire and Rousseau's. I say extreme because venturing between the stacked aisles of books in that shop isn't all that different from walking through the threatening unstable landscapes of middle earth. I came away unscathed though, and with three purchases -

one of Heiko Oberman's earlier books, Masters of the Reformation.The emergence of a new intellectual climate in Europe (Cambridge, 1981) - a clean, hardback copy of a hard to get book. Oberman was one of the finest Reformation scholars whose detailed research and at times hard to read essays nevertheless provided a much more nuanced picture of the interface between medieval and Renaissance culture and the events and historical contexts of the European Reformations.

John Todd's careful study of John Wesley and the Catholic Church, a book I've read before but am glad to have. There's still alot of important and unexploited insight in some of the earlier work on the Wesleys. This book, along with others like Wesley and the Church of England, and Wesley and the Puritans highlights the range and variety of Wesley's theological taste - he has been called a 'devout eclectic', a classic case of pick'n mix theology long before pick 'n mix was made a cliche for post-modern consumer led choices!

And then it's always good to find a book by a friend - David Smith, Mission After Christendom, a nice fresh copy to replace the one of mine that went the way of most lent out books! What I enjoyed about buying David's book (at a ridiculously good price), was that it was shelved in the esoteric section, sandwiched between - wait for it - Buddhism Without Beliefs, a kind of western new age take on Mahayana Buddhism, and on the other side Awake at 3a.m. a study of the spiritual psychology (whatever that is) of insomnia!

As I looked at this book on mission, pressed on both sides by quite different and alien worldviews, I couldn't help thinking - for a book intended to open up new frontiers for witness in a globalised world, placing it amongst the esoterica seemed like an unintentional but highly symbolic prophetic act, indicating the plight of the church trying to do mission after Christendom!

Odd Enthusiasms

I have a tie that I like, but it is so time specific, and is now so dated, that even a tie-wearing radical like me probably won't wear it again. A tie- wearing radical is anyone who now turns up at conferences, committee meetings or to other occasions of social posing where a tie is not strictly necessary. So I'm wondering, just where now is a tie strictly necessary. I've recently been at funerals, weddings, ordinations where several of the key players didn't wear a tie. This doesn't make anyone a bad person - it just signals a social shift, and leaves me feeling that the few people who were cool and independent thinking because they dispensed with a tie, are now in the majority and it's those of us who still wear a tie who are becoming cooler. Or is my logic flawed yet again?

Anyway, the tie in question is a Wallace and Gromit tie, and against a navy blue background it is covered in sheep, only one of which is wearing green wellies. Now you see why I don't wear it now - and wonder with flabbergasted amazement why I ever wore it in the first place. But each to his / her taste. When I first wore it a friend who risked becoming an ex-friend suggested the sheep with the wellies was the pastor, who was just like the other sheep but wasn't prepared to walk unshod in the farmyard manure of life. Whatever, I doubt if there are many of this particular tie now in existence, and if anyone will ever risk wearing it again. But I still like the tie, and don't need the affirmation of other fashion officionados to justify my odd enthusiasm for it.

Which brings me to some of my other odd enthusiasms, of the literary kind. I've recently re-read several of books that I'm not sure many other people would get all that worked up about. Let me know if you've heard of / read / think much of:

The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen

A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, Garret Keizer

Walking a Literary Labyrinth, Nancy Malone

Wind, Sand and Stars, Atoine de Saint Exupery

Life and Letters of H R L Sheppard

The Dean's Watch, Elizabeth Goudge