assures its failure, because it itself involves a claim of human agency’.^59 Fish
points out an intriguing tension or paradox presented in all Christian art,
namely that yoking of humble obedience andfierce expressiveness which
Herbert himself treats brilliantly in his pair of Jordan poems. In his long
poem on the church, calledThe Temple, Herbert articulates this tension in the
self, which Fish alsofinds and examines in Milton. The Christian self, argues
Fish, is defined by a paradox. The true human self, the historical self, emerges
with the fall, when disunion with God exposes the human race to the‘world of
chance and hazard’, granting it an independent story line.^60 To overcome the
fall means to end this independent story, to give up the self in order to receive
God’s grace and re-enter communion with him. In Herbert’s poem, death
itself confronts the Christian with this dilemma with the words,‘Alas, poor
mortal, void of story.’^61 In his analysis, Fish seems to overlook the irony of
death being the one who claims that man is void of story. Christians, by
contrast, know better than to consider themselves story-less, living as they do
fully in the faith, knowing God to be at the same time the great storyteller
and, in the person of Christ, his own protagonist in the human story. Fish
misses the incarnation as the divine–human story of humanities recovery and
reappointment.
The literary critic Lee Oser identifies anti-human outlooks and writers such
as Beckett and Sartre. But he situates their bleak witnesses within a broader
context that he identifies asThe Return of Christian Humanism.Oser wants to
use past humanist thinkers to help revive the dialogue between secularists
and Christians, because‘Christian humanism conserves the radical middle
between secularism and theocracy’.^62 Oser hopes that reviving interest in
humanists like G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Elliot, and J. R. R. Tolkien will allow
us to‘approach the future consciously’, with our humanist heritage in mind.^63
Conversely, I have lately had the pleasure of speaking with my colleague Allen
Jacobs, who contemplates a new book making a claim more or less opposed to
Oser’s. His tentative title isConcentrating the Mind: Christian Humanism and
Total War. Thefirst phrase of this title alludes to Samuel Johnson’s reported
comment that‘when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it
concentrates his mind wonderfully’.^64 The title is telling, then, for Jacobs
intends to explore the diverse responses to World War II among Christians
(^59) Stanley Fish,Versions of Anti-Humanism: Milton and Others(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 8.
(^60) Fish,Versions of Anti-Humanism, 148.
(^61) ‘The Temple’,inHerbert’s Poems, and Country Parson(Edinburgh: Baynes and Son, 1824),
215 – 16.
(^62) Lee Oser,The Return of Christian Humanism(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
Press, 2007), 5.
(^63) Oser,Return of Christian Humanism,6.
(^64) James Boswell,The Life of Samuel Johnson(New York: Penguin, 2008), 594.
190 Brett Foster