So, it happened again.  The Big Question.  It came from a student over the breakfast table a week or so ago.  Why do we study Ovid (you can substitute Chaucer) when he’s so ... scandalous, objectionable, indecent?

As a professor of Humanities, I get this question annually at WCC.  I never got it when I taught at state colleges, or the private Presbyterian college from which I came to WCC.  But here, I get regularly.  As I keep reminding myself, this is a good thing.  We have to continually challenge ourselves.  Why do we study what we study?  Why do we study the story of Tereus and Procne, for example, which involves rape, mutilation, and cannibalism?  Why do we study the Miller’s Tale, a story that treats adultery as if it’s a joke?

My first thought is that Chaucer doesn’t tell us the story of the Miller’s Tale.  Robin the Miller, a man so drunk he keeps falling off his horse as the pilgrims begin their journey to Canterbury, tells the tale.  The tale illustrates the man.  It’s not Chaucer who’s being scandalous, but the Miller.  Chaucer is asking us to wonder what kind of a man would tell a tale like this.  Sure, it’s a witty tale.  But the wit consists quite a lot in laughing at the tactless Miller, rather than admiring the cleverness of the adulterous lovers.

Great poetry isn’t at all like philosophy or theology.  It doesn’t deal with ideals, but with life as we experience it.  As a student wrote in a paper I read recently, “I love poetry—it’s like philosophy with its clothes on.”  To put it another way, philosophy and theology give you the bones of experiences, the principles by which life should be lived.  Stories give you examples of what happens when you put those principles into practice.  Sometimes, people don’t get it right.  They sin.  And poetry describes that sin, delineating the consequences.

Take the other example.  Ovid’s tale of Tereus and Procne is about lust that overpowers a man.  The consequence is an act of cannibalism—he consumes his own child, and then is transformed into a beast.  The story enacts physically what happens spiritually and psychologically to someone who becomes a slave of sin.  His lust is self-consuming and bestial.  But Ovid doesn’t merely tell us this—he demonstrates us, and involves us emotionally with it.  Consequently, we feel the lesson much more deeply.

If poetry is to do its job, the sin has to look bad.  Poetry—real poetry—doesn’t glorify sin.  Its pleasure isn’t in contemplating the sinful action itself, but on understanding what such sin does to the soul of man, the squalor of sin’s consequences.  We go past Tereus’ lust to the madness of his sorrow after the consequences of his lust have been brought home to him.

It’s certainly a risk, reading the great books.  You never know what might happen.  But perhaps the consequences of ignoring the lessons of the great books are even more dire.

Mark Adderley is Associate Professor of Humanitiesat Wyoming Catholic College.  The first two novels in his Matter of Britain series, The Hawk and the Wolf and The Hawk and the Cup, are available from Amazon.

Here I am, sitting on top of a mountain and trying to write poetry.

If I were any good at writing poetry, there’s plenty of stuff to write about around here.  There are pink rocks off to my right, and above my head, the pine needles are emerald and gold against an azure sky.  God’s heraldry is at its brightest here.

Unfortunately, I’m not much good at writing poetry.  I never have been.  Prose is my medium.  My verse is halting, my rhymes puerile.

I’m here for a FireWorks hike: my family (wife, teenager, two small boys, and a pair of ornery dogs) and six students from WCC have driven out to Blue Ridge, pitched tents, and hiked halfway up Cony Mountain.  Inspired by the splendors of the natural world, we will write some poetry—marginalia, as it were, in God’s first book.

Except my poetry is … well, it’s not Shakespeare.

But I’ve had a good hike, largely thanks to Sadie C. ('13) and Clare K. ('13), who organized the outing. For a while, I had to carry my six-year-old, Nick, but for a much longer time, Rick T. ('13) took over, bearing him heroically on his back like a latter-day St. Christopher.  The dogs sometimes had problems with the terrain, but fortunately Elissa H. ('14) got Merry and Jolly through the boulder field. Most of the way, Jack C. ('14) talked military history and medieval legends with my ten-year-old son Will.

We stopped halfway up the mountain, but my teenager Jack summited the peak with Clare, even though she had a slightly injured hand. I stayed behind (I have no head for heights) and my wife and I shared some verse by Hopkins and Tennyson with Sadie. And if we’re lacking for poetry, I know it will be provided by the most gifted student-poet I’ve ever taught, Cloe Z. ('13).

Pretty soon, it’s going to be time to hike back down to our camp, and once again, I’ll have no poetry to show for it. But I’ll have the memories—times I shared with my wife, kids, and students—the wider family of WCC. My family, my students, my friends.

Now that’s poetry.

Mark Adderley is Associate Professor of Humanities and the Trivium at Wyoming Catholic College.  The first two novels in his Matter of Britain series, The Hawk and the Wolf and The Hawk and the Cup, are available from Amazon.

Few Catholics today would deny that the world of arts and entertainment is profoundly hostile to our faith.  Anti-Catholic images abound.  Not every priest or bishop in the Middle Ages was corrupt, but every Hollywood prelate seems to be.  Children formed by such portrayals become wary of Catholicism—not even open-minded about the faith, but actively hostile to it.

The secular community has raised its children with the ostensible aim of enabling them to choose their own religion.  In reality, though, images from the popular media predispose these children to atheism, agnosticism, and nihilism through a lifetime of anti-Catholic art.

What they need is a new kind of art—the kind that will predispose them to view the Church positively, to make it their viable answer.

In a way, works of art are sacramentals, what the Catechism defines as “sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments.  . . . By them men are disposed to receive the chief effects of the sacraments” (1667).  A sacramental, such as a rosary, scapular, or St. Benedict medal, will not of itself bring a person to grace, but will make that person desire grace.

Similarly, art can make people desire the Church, not by presenting Catholic dogma in a crude or didactic manner, but by involving audiences in an appealing world that makes Catholic assumptions.  We all know that the Church is right; art makes her attractive too.

A fellow Catholic novelist, Mark Sebanc, calls this Stealth Catholicism.  Anyone who has seen the recent movie The Book of Eli knows what Stealth Christianity looks like—a work of art that appeals to a wide audience but which slips Christian assumptions in covertly.  In fact, Stealth Catholicism will obey all the rules of the genre it infiltrates.  A Stealth Catholic post-apocalyptic movie like The Book of Eli will be crude and violent in many ways.  What audiences won’t expect is the subtle affirmation of the Catholic worldview that leads them, almost unconsciously, to the Church.

Millions of people in the secular environment are sick of it, and ready for the Church.  It’s the job of the Catholic artist to introduce them to Her.

Mark Adderley is Associate Professor of Humanities and the Trivium at Wyoming Catholic College.  The first two novels in his Matter of Britain series, The Hawk and the Wolf and The Hawk and the Cup, are available from Amazon.