David Hume, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Christianity:
Can Any Good Thing Come From Cardiff? You Bet It Can!!
Essay Posted September 25, 2007 by James E. Nelson
I’m a big fan of the Welsh. Part of it is their underdog status; few people remember (or don’t even know, because they were day dreaming that day in school) that they’re one of the four separate countries making up Britain (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales). Their underdog status is no better illustrated, in my opinion, than by their lack of a famous city. England has London and Cambridge. Scotland has Glasgow and Edinburgh, Northern Ireland has Belfast. All these cities have storied and romantic pasts. Wales, on the other hand, has . . . Cardiff—sort of the Butte of the British Isles. (For those non-Montanans who are confused by this reference, drop me an email, and I will explain.)
Welsh music has also been a strong part of my sensibility since college days. All the Celts love to sing, but while the Scots and Irish are best known for their drinking songs and football anthems, the best known Welsh musical export is their church music. Not only is Cwm Rhondda a truly glorious melody (and unofficial Welsh national anthem, by the way), the spelling has fascinated me since I was child looking at the tune names in the hymnal of the church where I grew up. (For those of you who don’t pay attention to the names of hymn tunes, it is most often set with William Williams’ text “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.” I think there is no more rousing hymn than Cwm Rhondda when sung by a male choir or all the male clergy that typically populate a Presbytery meeting.
I went to college with Tony Gumley, a Northern Irish lad. In the dark of night, when neither faculty nor dorm counselors were in earshot, he would sing us some of the British Football versions of the song, which were quite scandalous, but oh, so funny, to us wayward Bible College students. I recently discovered that snippets of those irreverent football songs can be found at the Wikipedia entry for Cwm Rhondda if any of you are curious.
Beyond Cwm Rhondda, I developed a whole new appreciation for Welsh church music in Lincoln. On one occasion I had to represent Westminster Presbyterian Church (where I was on pastoral staff) at a huge annual hymn-sing put on by ethnic Welsh Methodists. I don’t want to cast aspersions, but the Celts have their reputations after all. It was like hundreds of sober soccer fans belting out music as if they were drunk. I suspect that no one can sing church music quite like the Welsh. Their style is a bit more subdued than African-Americans, but every bit as vibrant.
When I fell in love with poetry it was by and large the Celtic poets to whom I was most attracted: The Irish poets, W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney, the Scots Hugh MacDiarmid and Robert Fergusson (when his poems are translated into contemporary English) and the Welsh poets (known mostly to us in their hymnody) such as George Herbert and Henry Vaughn, as well as the contemporary Welsh poet R. S. Thomas (d. 2000).
Maybe nothing gets at the understated and underappreciated glory of Wales than their women. Irish women are famous for their comeliness while Welsh women, especially the rural working class, are noted for their homeliness. Yet no one is more dazzling on the silver screen than Welsh movie star Catherine Zeta-Jones. I was reminded of this casual dismissal of Welsh beauty in the new BBC science fiction television series Torchwood. Cardiff native Gwen Cooper (played by the Welsh Eve Myles) is portrayed as a somewhat frumpy and ill-kempt police woman. Myles even hosts a classic set of British teeth (bad). And yet, behind that frumpiness, which seems to be an inherent part of the British vision of Wales, is a true Welsh beauty.
Although this is evidently a debated claim, a couple of the sociological works I have read about J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series claims that Wales is basis of the Shire and Hobbits. In Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth, the Shire is a beautiful rural place that is off the beaten path and is largely ignored as both uninteresting and unimportant by the rest of world. Likewise, Hobbits are small and despised. So much so that many of the races of Middle Earth have no idea they exist. And yet the wizard Gandalf recognizes that they are made of tougher stuff than most. Not only are they remarkably durable, they are folk of remarkable character. Tolkien’s description is a beautiful portrait of what I imagine Wales to be (although I’ve never been there).
So why all this blathering about the Welsh? There are a couple of reasons. First, I am not a consciously active Welsh-ophile. I don’t dream of traveling to Wales, nor do I generally sing the glories of Wales and her people. It’s an appreciation I’ve more or less unconciously soaked up over the years. On occasion something happens that causes me to connect the various Welsh dots of my past experience, and I suddenly realize how much I like Wales.
I recently had just such an experience growing out of a one-two punch of reading sublime poetry and watching campy British sci-fi on telly (which are two of my favorite genres, by the way). The campy sci-fi show is BBC’s brand new (to America, at least) series Torchwood. In the first two episodes I have found myself utterly captivated by the interaction between the swashbuckling and arrogant American, Capt. Jack Harkness and the quietly persistent—and oh, so Welsh—Gwen Cooper. The show captures the romantic weltanschauung of each culture in a very smart and creative way. It’s a sort of X-Files meets Dr. Who; the kind of thing in which the Brits excel.
At the same time I’m reading Welsh poetry. Several months ago I purchased an anthology of R. S. Thomas poetry, published shortly after he died. The book has been hidden and forgotten in my briefcase for months and I ran across it on our recent trip to western New York. As I have begun to read it I realized that some of the memorable poems that I’ve read over the years were R. S. Thomas poems, but I tend to forget his name. (The poor Welsh, they’re not particularly memorable, and everyone forgets who they are! Or, if they’re dazzling, they forget they’re Welsh!)
It was not just an insight, more of a flash which illumined the previously shadowed landscape of all things Welsh in my mind, as I was reading the poem The Airy Tomb: The Welsh have a world-weariness, yet a hopeful and determined world-weariness that creates a sensibility which is particularly open to authentic Christian spirituality.
All the Celts seem possessed by the world-weariness, but they express it differently. The Irish live carefree in spite of their trouble. The Scots hunker down and hold close all they have. Each sensibility has produced interesting results for the native Christianity. Irish spirituality tends toward a nature-mysticism which soars and escapes the world. Scottish spirituality is stern and practical. But the Welsh are different than the other Celts. World-weary, yet quietly hopeful and determined, their spirituality is in a sense dark and very aware that death and destruction are never far away, yet persistently faithful, making the best of the situation and bringing beauty, however momentary, to this world. It is rooted in the here and now, and yet it is transformative.
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Back in the early 18th century, Irish Bishop and world renowned philosopher George Berkeley and Englishman John Locke made the case for Empiricism, a very this-world philosophy that claims that we know through our interaction with the stuff of this world. Period. Even though he was a churchman, Berkeley was widely condemned by the church in subsequent generations because his philosophy implied that all we knew was the stuff of this world and were therefore stuck with only guesses and imaginations about God. Traditional Christians and theists recognized that if Berkeley was right, we were cut off from any real knowledge of God.
But in typical Irish fashion, Berkeley wasn’t trapped by the logical conclusions of his philosophy. By the end of his life he had, for all practical purposes, become a Platonist—completely enamored by the ideal world, the world “out there,” the world of God, which was always distant from us. Those who followed his philosophy tended to become weighed down by the stuff of this world that they lost their connection with God altogether, but Berkeley himself seemed to soar to the heavens is a sort of philosophical mysticism that was unencumbered by the logical conclusions of its own premises.
Scottish philosopher David Hume, on the other hand, took Berkeley very seriously and carried his premises to their logical conclusion. He was widely viewed as anti-Christian, even his own day. He told the following story on himself: One evening, coming home from the pub, he fell into a mud hole and got stuck. A good Christian woman from Edinburgh began to help him up, until she realized it was David Hume. Performing her proper Christian duty, she promptly let go of him and left him in his own predicament.
But in true Scottish fashion, Hume didn’t let his philosophical circumstances keep him down. He tirelessly worked for political freedom, and is one of the most important thinkers that shaped what would become American Jeffersonian Liberalism, which was the bedrock of the American political experiment which conservative Christians love so dearly.
In a very real sense, Berkeley and Hume took the same ideas embodied them in utterly typical Irish and Scottish fashion. But in the following poem by R. S. Thomas we see these “great ideas” ingested and embodied in classic understated and humble Welsh fashion:
Truly (by R.S. Thomas)
No, I was not born
to refute Hume, to write
the first poem with no
noun. My gift was
for evasion, taking
cover at the approach
of greatness, as of
ill-fame. I looked truth
in the eye, and was not
abashed at discovering
it squinted. I fasted
at import’s table, so had
an appetite for the banal,
the twelve baskets full left
over after the turning
of the little into so much.
What is true greatness? Berkeley was an inconsistent fool (in the Biblical sense of the word) and Hume was an unbelieving skeptic. So scandalous were their ideas that a great deal of Christian ink has flowed in outrage against them. But toward what end? I propose that the Welsh sensibilities of R. S. Thomas are far more Christian than all our swashbuckling American outrage against the infidels. Authentic faith seems so “banal,/ a mere twelve baskets full left/ over after the turning/ of the little into so much” by the likes of Berkeley and Hume. And yet that humble recognition of our true station in life and contented satisfaction to relish it as it is, allows us the freedom to accept God as he comes to us rather than climbing the ancient tower by our own devices to storm the gates of heaven (the Irishman, Berkeley) or merely shaking our fist at a God we can never grasp (the Scot, Hume).
It seems oh so pedantic. And yet, when we embrace such a perspective on our lives, the occasional ravishing beauty of who we were created to be springs forth like the miracle it was truly meant to be.
Copyright © 2007 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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