The Golden Cord: A Short Book on the Secular and the Sacred

Chapter 8: Glory and the Hallowing of Domestic Virtue

163 c h A p t e r 8 GLORY AND THE HALLOWING OF DOMESTIC VIRTUE All our life is a festival: being persuaded that God is everywhere present on all sides, we praise him as we till the ground, we sing hymns as we sail the sea, we feel his inspiration in all that we do. —Clement of Alexandria Now I behold as in a mirror, an icon, in a riddle, life eternal, for that is naught other than that blessed reward wherewith Thou never ceasest most lovingly to behold me, yea, even the secret places of my soul. With Thee, to behold is to give life. —Nicholas of Cusa Consider G.K. Chesterton’s delightful account of divine r eveling in the context of his study of the wor ks of Charles Dickens. Nothing could be further from the dinner party of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I cite Chesterton at length: 164 T H E G O L D E N C O R D To every man alive, one must hope, it has in some manner happened that he has talked with his mor e fascinating friends r ound a table on some night when all the numerous personalities unfolded themselves like great tropical flowers. All fell into their parts as in some delightful impromptu play. Every man was more himself than he had ev er been in this v ale of tears. Every man was a beautiful caricature of himself. The man who has known such nights will understand the exaggerations of [D ickens’s] “Pickwick .” The man who has not known such nights will not enjoy “Pickwick” nor (I imagine) heaven. For, as I hav e said, Dickens is, in this matter , close to popular religion, which is the ultimate and r eliable religion. He conceives an endless joy; he conceives creatures as permanent as Puck or Pan—creatures whose will to liv e æons upon æons cannot satisfy . He is not come, as a writer , that his creatures may copy life and copy its nar rowness ; he is come that they may hav e life, and that they may hav e it more abundantly. . . . He is there, like the common people of all ages, to make deities; he is there, as I have said, to exaggerate life in the direction of life. The spirit he at bottom celebrates is that of two friends drinking wine together and talking thr ough the night. B ut for him they ar e two deathless friends talking through an endless night and pouring wine from an inexhaustible bottle.1 A. E. Taylor offers a similar portrait of how one might, in time, en counter a kind of divine atemporality or at least a w elcome detachment from our particular “patch of time” and a reclining and enjoyment of the present: At a higher lev el than that of mer e animal enjoyment, such as w e may get from basking before a good fire, or giving ourselves up to the delight of a hot bath, w e know how curiously consciousness of past and futur e falls away, when we are, for example, spending an evening of prolonged enjoyment in the company of wholly congenial friends. The past may be represented for us, if we stay to think of it at all, by whatever happened before the party began, the future—but when we are truly enjoying ourselves we do not anticipate it—by what will happen when the gathering is Glory and the Hallowing of Domestic Virtue 165 over. The enjoyment of the social evening has, of course, before and after within itself; the party may last two or three hours. But while it lasts and while our enjoyment of it is steady and at the full, the first half-hour is not envisaged as past, nor the third as future, while the second is going on. It is from timepieces, or from the information of others, who were not entering into our enjoyment, that we discover that this single “sensible present” had duration as well as order. If we were truly enjoying ourselves, the time passed, as we say, “like anything.”2 This sense of timeless, unhurried consciousness resonates, for example, with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and is the mirr or opposite of the dinner party in To The Lighthouse. In this final chapter I propose that the eternality of G...