On Beauty and the Art of Handwriting
by Erin Doom
Feast of St Jason and Sosipater, Apostles of the 70 & Their Companions
Anno Domini 2020, April 29
Missal of Bishop Antonio Scarampi (1567)
1. Essays et al: “Handmade Beauty” by Joshua Sturgill
This is a wonderful essay in defense of cursive, or on its demise and its relationship to beauty. Here’s a snippet from the middle of the essay:
The act of handwriting, its grounding in Beauty, is irreplaceable. Handwriting involves the collaboration of the individual creative mind with the whole of an ancient written language. It can become a craft and a relationship between a writer and reader. You might ask how this is different from sending an email—or reading a blog post. Besides the obvious—that handwriting leaves a mark on the physical world—I believe it also leaves a mark within the persons involved in the creation and communication of the writing.
When the Internet is down, I may still type on my computer. When the electricity is off, I may still write with pen and paper. If I have no paper, likely I still have graphite or ink. With none of these, I have nothing but my mind, my hand and perhaps a stretch of sand—or a piece of charcoal, or a stone and chisel.
What I am thinking of here is the possible series of interventions between myself and the result of my labor. The more interventions, the less the labor is mine and the more it belongs to the intervening media. This, I believe, is why television shows and commercials tend to be so much alike. Why canned food tastes canned. Why Google can give you a list of stock suggestions for email replies.
Here’s more, including a couple of sentences worthy of quotation in one of our forthcoming “Eighth Day Quotables” on Facebook (see preview at end of email):
To write a letter or a diary entry is to create a work of intimate art. An email, however, is grimly pragmatic. And a text message borders on the barbaric. I often think that our socially embedded image of the cave man grunting at his fellows has nothing to do with our ancestors and everything to do with our use of technology. We are becoming primitives who live in little hand-held caves and throw pictographs (emoticons) at each other with decreasing communicative effect.
Others are saying similar things right now. There are excellent books on the subjects of internet-brain, social-media-syndrome, teenage-cell-use. But I think the simplest, best sign of decay is the loss of the art of handwriting. Loss of literacy will follow. Then critical thinking. All of this is a flight from Beauty.
2. Books & Culture: “Beauty: A Very Short Introduction” by Roger Scruton
As some of you may know, I received the gift of being able to attend Scrutopia (Roger Scruton’s annual summer school) shortly before his death. Prior to that inimitable experience, I was only barely familiar with Scruton (solely through selling his books while working at Eighth Day Books). Had not an Eighth Day Member
sent me on that pilgrimage, I don’t know when I would have finally realized how important Scruton is. I have dipped in and out of his books ever since and will eventually read them all cover to cover (and will provide book reviews). While in England I read his book Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays
(here’s a link to an issue of my Director’s Desk about arriving in England and reading that book).
I’m now reading his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. This morning I wrote this short review, which includes the book’s preface. The next Director’s Desk, published in our Christian News-Letter
for Eighth Day Members, will continue a series of reflections on Scruton, this time in light of COVID-19.
3. Bible and Fathers: “Unrivaled Beauty as Source of All Beauty” by St. Gregory of Nyssa
Acts 4:13-22 and John 5:17-24. Online here.
St. Gregory of Nyssa (one of the three Cappadocian Fathers; brother of St. Basil the Great; died A.D. 394) reflects on the theme of beauty in his treatise On Virginity
(chapter 11). Here’s St. Gregory, with a reference to a ladder which happens to be the name of our headquarters (“The Ladder at Eighth Day Institute”):
As regards the inquiry into the nature of beauty, we see, again, that the man of half-grown intelligence, when he observes an object which is bathed in the glow of a seeming beauty, thinks that that object is in its essence beautiful, no matter what it is that so prepossesses him with the pleasure of the eye. He will not go deeper into the subject. But the other, whose mind’s eye is clear, and who can inspect such appearances, will neglect those elements which are the material only upon which the Form of Beauty works; to him they will be but the ladder by which he climbs to the prospect of that Intellectual Beauty, in accordance with their share in which all other beauties get their existence and their name.
More, this time on the path toward Beauty:
This, then, is the path to lead us to the discovery of the Beautiful. All other objects that attract men’s love, be they never so fashionable, be they prized never so much and embraced never so eagerly, must be left below us, as too low, too fleeting, to employ the powers of loving which we possess; not indeed that those powers are to be locked up within us unused and motionless; but only that they must first be cleansed from all lower longings; then we must lift them to that height to which sense can never reach. Admiration even of the beauty of the heavens, and of the dazzling sunbeams, and, indeed, of any fair phenomenon, will then cease. The beauty noticed there will be but as the hand to lead us to the love of the supernal Beauty whose glory the heavens and the firmament declare, and whose secret the whole creation sings.
And finally, a bit more on reliable guides to the “only absolute, and primal, and unrivalled Beauty and Goodness”:
there are those who, as might have been expected, wish to discover, if possible, a process by which we may be actually guided to it. Well, the Divine books are full of such instruction for our guidance; and besides that many of the Saints cast the refulgence of their own lives, like lamps, upon the path for those who are walking with God. But each may gather in abundance for himself suggestions towards this end out of either Covenant in the inspired writings; the Prophets and the Law are full of them; and also the Gospel and the Traditions of the Apostles. What we ourselves have conjectured in following out the thoughts of those inspired utterances is this.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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