1	WORLD VIEWS IN LITERATURE Donald T. Williams, PhD Western Thought & Culture
2	Christianity
3	Platonism
4	Pantheism
5	Secularism
6	Post-Modernism
7	The Alternatives
8	The Alternatives THE IMPERSONAL Arbitrary Happenings No meaning No Purpose No Truth No Law GOD Creation Meaning/Relatedness Purpose/Destiny Revealed Truth Law (that can be broken) Sin Redemption
9	Platonism
10	Platonism The One remains; the many change and pass. Heaven’s light forever shines; earth’s shadows fly. Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity. Percy Bysshe Shelley
11	Platonism And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought . . . Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”
12	Platonism Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home.
13	continued Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
14	continued And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. - Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”
15	Pantheism
16	Pantheism Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me. I am part or particle of God. - Emerson, “Nature”
17	Pantheism “And my mother—well, she doesn’t think it’s good for me to think about God all the time. She thinks it’s bad for my health.” Nicholson was looking at him, studying him. “I believe you said on the last tape that you were six when you first had a mystical experience. Is that right?” “I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that,”
18	continued Teddy said. “It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.” Nicholson didn’t say anything. -Salinger, “Teddy”
19	Secularism
20	Secularism You know only A heap of broken images I can connect Nothing with nothing These fragments I have shored against my ruins. -T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
21	The Alternatives
22	Secularism This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented . . . The serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual. . . . She did not seem cruel to him the, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. --Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”
23	continued When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temple. “The Open Boat”
24	Secularism We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless
25	continued . . . Meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar. --T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
26	Post-Modernism
27	Post-Modernism Mr. Smith: Dogs have fleas dogs have fleas Mrs. Martin: Cactus, coccyx! Crocus! Cockaded! Cockroach! Mrs. Smith: Incasker, you incask us. Mr. Martin I’d rather lay an egg in a box than go and steal an ox. Mrs. Martin: Ah! Oh! Ah! Oh! Let me gnash my teeth. Mr. Smith: Crocodile! Mr. Martin: Let’s go and slap Ulysses. -- Ionesco, The Bald Soprano
28	Post-Modernism Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness. I despise what we have come to; I loathe our loathsome loathing, our place this time our situation, our loathsome art, this ditto necessary story. The blank of our lives. It’s about over. Let the denouement be soon and unexpected, painless if possible, quick at least, above all soon. Now now! How in the world will it ever --Lost in the Funhouse
29	Christianity
30	The Alternatives
31	Christianity At the still point of the turning world, . . . There the dance is . . .where past and future are gathered. . . . Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. --Eliot, “Four Quartets”
32	Christianity Circling round and round the dancers was a ring of dwarfs, all dressed in their finest clothes: mostly scarlet with fur-lined hoods and golden tassels and big furry top-boots. As they circled round they were all diligently throwing snowballs. (Those were the white things that Jill had seen flying through the air.) They weren’t throwing them at the dancers as silly boys might have been doing in England. They were throwing them through the
33	continued dance in such perfect time with the music and with such perfect aim that if all the dancers were in exactly the right places at exactly the right moments, no one would be hit. This is called the Great Snow Dance and it is done every year in Narnia on the first moonlit night when there is snow on the ground. --C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
34	Christianity “Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. And that may be an encouraging thought.” --J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
35	Christianity It was the unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed and then cried: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.
36	continued Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!” --C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle
37	The Alternatives THE IMPERSONAL Arbitrary Happenings No meaning No Purpose No Truth No Law GOD Creation Meaning/Relatedness Purpose/Destiny Revealed Truth Law (that can be broken) Sin Redemption
38	WORLD VIEWS IN LITERATURE Donald T. Williams, PhD Western Thought & Culture