Author Archives: cleithart

I am alive and have two legs. This state of affairs will hopefully continue for quite some time.

Sloan

I’ve read bits and bobs by Robin Sloan before (thanks to link-meister Alan Jacobs), but I’ve never really spent time on his site or in his newsletter. I’ve been enjoying it very much recently, especially this edition. Some favs:

  • His habit of creating “mini-sites” for his books. I love this idea and would love to do it with my own projects.
  • Random asides, like this: “The wheel gets a lot of credit — and sure, wheels are handy — but more and more, I think the key to human civilization is probably: the pump.”
  • Or this: “A starling only knows a murmuration from the inside — a scrum of dark feathers, the bird beside them breathing hard. They can’t see or understand the larger object. […] Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe one starling gets to watch. Maybe, every morning, a single bird is chosen to sit it out, and regard, with wonder and satisfaction, their own species.”
  • And, of course, the ongoing updates about his olive oil production business.

On Trinitarian Art

If the creative artists had been called in to give evidence about the filioque clause, they must have come down heavily on the Western side of the controversy, since their experience leaves them in no doubt about the procession of the ghost from the son.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Frustrated

The Devil is the most discontented creature in the world. He is the proudest creature there is, and the most discontented creature, and the most dejected creature.

Jeremiah Burroughs

Contentment

There are no works that God has made—the sun, moon, stars and all the world—in which so much of the Glory of God appears, as in a man who lives quietly in the midst of adversity.

Jeremiah Burroughs

Only Through Time

We must not, that is, try to behave as though the Fall had never occurred nor yet say that the Fall was a Good Thing in itself. But we may redeem the Fall by a creative act.

That, according to Christian doctrine, is the way that God behaved, and the only way in which we can behave if we want to be “as gods”. The Fall had taken place and Evil had been called into active existence; the only way to transmute Evil into Good was to redeem it by creation. But, the Evil having been experienced, it could only be redeemed within the medium of experience—that is, by an incarnation in which experience was fully and freely in accordance with the Idea.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Ideas in Education

The art is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas; and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received.

If this, then, be the definition of great art, that of a great artist naturally follows. He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

John Ruskin

Put this together with Charlotte Mason’s statement that the mind feeds on ideas (and is thereby educated) and you may conclude that great art is the best tool of educating the mind.

I’ll have to return to this later.