“Because there was no room for them at the inn.”

Those words, some of the most poignant in all of Western literature, words which have inspired countless treasures of music and iconography and devotion, may be a mistranslation.

That is the suggestion of Ian Paul, an Anglican theologian who argues that the Greek word kataluma which St. Jerome rendered diversorium and most English Bibles translate “inn” may well mean simply, as it does elsewhere in the Gospels, “upper room.”

… the actual design of Palestinian homes (even to the present day) makes sense of the whole story. … most families would live in a single-room house, with a lower compartment for animals to be brought in at night, and either a room at the back for visitors, or space on the roof. The family living area would usually have hollows in the ground, filled with straw, in the living area, where the animals would feed.

—mangers, that is, which would provide a natural place to rest a baby.

Paul provides a few other reasons, aside from the philological one, as to why the traditional picture of the Holy Family alone in a stable or cave may be lacking in historical accuracy: most notably, the hospitality customs of the Middle East would have made it nearly impossible for St. Joseph not to have been received by some of his relatives.

Read the rest at the Register.

Why People Don’t Like C.S. Lewis

I was reminded, in listening to the WSIRN podcast (the guests of which skew decidedly more center-left than I, and therefore provide interesting fodder for thought), of how many people dislike CSL.  The guest who brought him up said she found his Space Trilogy “boring”; that is a non-obvious critique in terms of a taste that I understand without sharing.  But it put me back to thinking about the more obvious reason that many people dislike Lewis’s fiction: because they read it as proselytizing.

Now if you’re a certain type of literary purist (whose Christian initials might be J.R.R.) you may, though sharing Lewis’s Christianity, nevertheless regard his fictionalizing as insufficiently … fictional.  Again, a taste that I understand without sharing.    And certainly I understand (again: understand) that if you’re Phillip Pullman, or of his mindset, you will take it ill to discover that a beloved childhood chapter book should turn out to be about Jesus in disguise.

But I think that any critique of Lewis for being a ham-handed proselytizer misses the point.  Lewis was no psychological dummy.  Even if his Narnia books are simplistically Christian, his Space Trilogy contains penetrating (sometimes devastating) psychological insights; if his Space Trilogy is unconvincing or unappetizing or “boring,” I would point still-dubious readers to The Screwtape Letters and Till We Have Faces.  Non-Christians (or Christians with different philosophical commitments) might still disagree with Lewis’s presentation of human psychology; but I think any fair reader would have to admit that (1) Lewis is trying to be realistic and (2) he does a remarkably good (if imperfect) job.  It’s a bit like reading Tolstoy: one can sit back at the end of the day and say “Yes, but people don’t really/always/exactly work like that,” while still holding that Tolstoy is an amazing portrait painter.

(Mind you, I mostly agree with Lewis’s psychology.  But I’m trying to wear the other man’s hat today.)

If, then (or as Mrs. Bennet likes to say: “But, however”), we admit that Lewis is no psychological dummy, can we suppose him to be the ham-handed proselytizer that he is sometimes portrayed as being?  Perhaps; but the portrait becomes less plausible.

This brings me to my unanswered question: What if, instead of reading Narnia (and to a lesser extent the Space Trilogy) as books to convert readers, we read them as books to give pleasure to readers?  What if the whole thing really is a game in which Lewis knew his readers knew exactly what he was doing, and believed pretty much as he believed, and the fun was in seeing him do it, and how he would do it?  What if they’re not persuasion, but entertainment?

What if Lewis had just said to Tolkien one fine day: “Tollers, there isn’t enough of our sort of fiction floating about.  We just have to write some ourselves.”

To put it as a statement (as my dogmatism struggles to escape this quaestio genre): I suspect that a lot of the Lewis hatred I’ve seen over the years is based on the supposition that he was trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes.  And I suspect—indeed, I am almost certain—that that supposition is mistaken.

Did Shakespeare’s Wife Get Stressed Out?

One of the things that occurred to me, in considering the cautions we’ve received as soon-to-be first-time parents, is the implausibility of such cautions being delivered in another era.  In some other eras, perhaps: I could see Glencora just-made-Palliser being taken aside by some well-meaning aunt and counseled as to how her life would soon change EVEN MORE once that pregnancy corset came off and the baby inside came out.

Then again, the counsel probably wouldn’t do much for Glencora,

and Glencora is probably in more need of it than many a heroine of her era.

(P.S. No, this is not Victorian fashion.

For some reason, the Victorians didn’t do the showing-off the-bump thing.)

But I can’t for the life of me imagine friends gathering around Ma Ingalls (pre-Mary) or Laura Wilder (pre-Rose) to tell them how tough things would be when the baby didn’t sleep through the night.  Nor, for that matter, can I imagine anyone telling Anne (née Hathaway) Shakespeare to Be Prepared.

Think about your average Renaissance Englishwoman for a moment.  Think about Wolf Hall.  (Actually, don’t think about Wolf Hall.  It’s too depressing.)  There are rushes on the floor.  This always seemed silly to me when reading historical novels as a child—until I realized that a lot of the floors were dirt, and actually, having sweet flag to cover that was probably better than, well, just walking in the dirt all the time.  (And if you’re thinking that maybe those rushes would have had their own inconveniences, there’s a theory for that.)

So: rushes (or rush mats) on the floor.  They keep down dirt, smell, cold … Ah, yes, cold.  Let me say a few words about cold.  Sometimes we think they wore a lot of clothing back then.  This is true.  It might have something to do with the fact that they were in the middle of the so-called Little Ice Age, when global temperatures were relatively low enough to freeze the Thames on occasion.  In other words: it got cold outside.  Also inside, because there was no central heating, and while fireplaces had been invented, the Franklin stove (a much more efficient bit of artifice) had not.

Admittedly, being in Florida makes me look at these pictures with nostalgia.

But then again—I have central heating and wood stoves.

Then there was food.  Techniques of drying, oil-packing, and salting were available; but in many places (despite the cold winters) you couldn’t reliably freeze things to preserve them.  Fruits, vegetables, eggs, meat, and fish where all seasonal items.  Nuts, grains, and cheese and milk (because God made cows like mothers to produce milk on demand) could plausibly be eaten all year round.

Oh, and did I mention that the bathrooms were oftentimes outside (unless you wanted a chamber pot in your bedroom), and the animals were sometimes inside?  Probably not in the bedroom, though (in this regard, early modern folks may have been a little smarter than some of their twentieth-century descendants), unless your only room WAS the bedroom.

Just let your imaginations dwell on that picture for a while.

The fact is, in previous ages people dealt with a much more physical discomfort on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis than we did.  The additional hardship of adding a squalling newborn to the mix might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for some; but for many I suspect it was just one more facet of life-ain’t-easy-get-used-to-it.  And this particular facet, while it made just as much mess as the animals, smelled so much nicer (at least for the first few weeks)!

Meanwhile, here I sit in southern Florida, in a  climate-and-humidity-controlled apartment—infested with pestiferous boxes, to be sure (finally cleaned up, hurrah!)—wearing soft, stretchy clothing (elastic is my new best friend)—near a refrigerator full of food—well, hm, not that full; maybe it’s time to hop in my gasoline-burning miracle and go to the nearest Walmart?  Oh, and if I’m worried that the new absence of manual labor in my life may result in a subpar birth experience, I can head for the also climate-controlled gym, or better still hop onto YouTube (metaphorically) and go through that pre-natal Pilates video again.  (Complete with an instructor who is almost exactly as pregnant as I am, which is … inspiring? embarrassing?)

To unfairly borrow the words of Yum-Yum, herself facing the culturally-distinct prospect of burial alive, “You see my difficulty!”  I have it quite easy, compared to my female ancestresses.  Everything around me is tailored to my comfort, my convenience, my needs; really, tailored to my preferences.

OK, well, maybe not being in Florida itself.  Because Zika. 

And humidity.  And having to stay indoors.  But still!

I’m hardly complaining about the situation.  But it does mean that the permanent presence of a baby will make this the first time in a couple of years that I’ve had to tailor my daily life around anything but the preferences of myself and one other rational adult.  And—especially if one’s memory of parents’ doing the same is faded or non-existent—I can see how that adjustment would be dramatic, not to say traumatic.  In this one regard, at least; in not having so great an adjustment to make, Shakespeare’s Wife had it easy.

P.S. One more advantage that our ancestors may well have had in the matter of child-rearing: sleep habits.  New scholarship is suggesting that divided sleep cycles were not unusual prior to the last century or so.  In other words: Anne Shakespeare may already have been up once or twice a night, before little Susanna came along.

Something Natural in Separation into Three

“‘That there was something natural, if not also divine,’ remarks Professor Pollard, ‘in the separation of mankind into three classes seemed as clear to mediaeval philosophers as it did to nineteenth-century railway companies’ (and does—he might have added—to some university examining boards).  The idea, he reminds us, is as old as Plato; and no doubt it is much older.  But we need not investigate the mysterious attraction which the number ‘three’ has always had for the human mind, nor attempt to trace the course of the idea in the Christina Fathers and in the mediaeval philosophers.  The immediate point is precisely the feeling of the naturalness or even divinity of the threefold division of society—a division in no respect thought to be a result of royal will” (Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century, 94, in his discussion of the three estates).

And did you further know that people are more likely laugh at and remember things when they come in threes?  The Romans had a phrase for it: omne trium perfectum (every triad is perfect).  Indeed, it seems that we are also more likely to believe things or consider them to be significant when they come in threes.  Advertisers, of course, have made hay with this principle; but so have very good storytellers indeed.  One cannot sit on a two-legged stool; a three-legged stool satisfies not only the (deplorably duplex) feet, but the mind as well.

That hyperlink is not an endorsement of the website or the ideas contained therein, by the way.  Being a Christian, and one moderately sympathetic to Platonism, I have my own suspicions about the importance of the number three.  For the moment, I will simply say that, not merely in the notoriously fertile and unreliable imagination, but even in the world of Euclidean arithmetic and geometry, there seems to be something qualitatively different about the number three.  One is not really a number, and two is questionably so; three is the first truly number-like number.  Two is a company; three is a crowd! (so went the old Shoppers Food Warehouse slogan, which promised to open a new register once the lines got too long).  But “crowds” by this definition are comparatively lovely things.  One is the number of solitude, and two is the mirroring number: the devil’s number, according to certain mediaeval and Renaissance thinkers, though (and, but of course?) also the number of romance.  But “Baby makes three”; or, as it is expressed in that immemorial sacred trifold rhyme dating no doubt back to the caveman, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.”

And card games, naturally, involve sets of three as well.

Be Very, Very Afraid

People keep telling us that once the baby comes, our lives will change forever.  For.Ev.Er.  And not in a good way, like when the chorus of sopranos in Handel’s Messiah sings, “Forever and ever, forever and ever!  Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ry!!”, if you know the part of which I’m thinking.  No, when people warn us that Baby will change our lives forever, they mean “change forever” like it’s boot camp with a catch-twenty-two stipulation in place.  I paraphrase a few real-life remarks received in recent months:

“You just have no idea until it actually happens.  I mean, you have NO IDEA.”

“It’s … I wish I could tell you it’s great.   I mean, it IS great.  But it’s a lot of work.”

“Hahahaha … Um.  Yeah.  You won’t be sleeping very much.”

“There’s just … so much to do.  But you’ll be … fine.  Fine.  You’ll be fine; I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”

“I can’t even—I don’t even know what to compare it to.  There isn’t anything to compare it to, so I’m not going to try.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get a child who doesn’t [insert hair-raising but relatively normal thing that most infants do do] like ours does.”

They’re all trying to be upbeat and encouraging, but somehow it doesn’t come off that way.  And I hasten to add, these are not secular people who plan on having zero to two kids, possibly laboring under the illusion that the planet is about to bust with people.  These are faithful Catholics in their twenties and thirties who are open to life.  They may (I don’t know) be spacing out kids with NFP to avoid Irish twin situations; but they’re quite happy and maybe even excited by the prospect of having five, eight, ten children down the road.  And yet what they convey is not joy, but fear.

Not the flower, dearest.  Dearest, he will certainly eat the flower.  Dearest!!!! ...

One further thing stands out: they are all young parents.  Most of them have somewhere between one and three children; rarely is the oldest more than five.  If we ran into more parents with older families, would they have anything different to say?  And if they did, would it be because (a) the most bitter early parenting memories fade, (b) their older children actually help with new babies, (c) they develop better coping strategies, (d) they perfect the fine art of equivocation and want to ensure the future of the human race, or (e) all of the above?

I don’t know that I actually wish people didn’t warn us about the difficulties of raising small children; after all, forewarned is forearmed.  And the warnings certainly incentivize sleeping (or trying to sleep) and exercising (or trying to exercise) and writing (or trying to write) and eating (or trying to eat), and generally just Keeping Calm and Carrying On, right up until the baby comes—which are all good things to encourage soon-to-be-parents to do.  But it might be helpful, while sounding the ominous notes of “Be Prepared!” to offer some concrete advice for taking care of little Simba when he arrives.

Not THAT kind of taking care of!  Good heavens, people.

In that spirit, I’ve decided to start cycling through a list of questions the next time someone starts into Your-Life-Will-Change mode.  If they’re going to tell me how it is, I certainly want to know …

Have you found that baby carriers/swaddles actually help keep the baby quieter, or are reports of their usefulness (like those of Mark Twain’s death) exaggerated?

(Women only:) Did you breastfeed, and do you have any tips to make that less of a hassle?

If you have a choice, do you think it’s better to let the baby sleep in your room, or in another room?

If the baby sleeps during the day, do you recommend using that time to catch up on sleep yourself, or do you read, or do you try to “catch up” (haha) on other things?

What’s the most helpful piece of baby gear/clothing/equipment you’ve used?  What’s the most useless?

(Women only:) Do you have any tips on recovering from childbirth, or any strategies that alleviated the misery during labor?

Hm.  Sounds like this is all very stressful.  What’s the best way you and your husband (wife) have found for coping with the stress?

Are there any things that you can still do to relax, with or without the children?  (E.g., are there parks, playgrounds, museums, nature walks, restaurants, etc. that you would frequent with a child/children?  Or, if you’re stuck at home with the kids all day because there’s a meltdown every time you get in the car, have you found anything that keeps them occupied and maybe even tires them out?)

I’m sure I’ll hear a lot of conflicting advice, and some of it may be completely off-base.  But at least it will be concrete leave-it-or-take-it-or-maybe-just-try-it-once-because-once-can’t-hurt advice, as opposed to …