A Variegated Life

Book Review

Title: John Donne, The Reformed Soul
Author: John Stubbs.

So far I've read several biographies. Of those, the two people whose lives have engrossed me the most were Aimee Semple McPherson and John Donne. I guess it's because they both were xtians and both had convoluted edges about their lives. By different routes, they both ended up being preachers.

Back in 2004, the Royal Society of Literature awarded John Stubbs the Jerwood Award for his biography of John Donne. I must say that Stubbs definitely earned every bit of it. His book was very well written and conveyed a vivid picture of John Donne's variegated life and the times in which he lived, during the transition from Elizabethan to Jacobean England.

The book is now out in an American edition from W.W. Norton. As I recall, there was an earlier edition printed in the U.K. under a somewhat different title.

But I would like to point out a quote, given at the start of chapter 17 in the book. There Stubbs is quoting Donne from his Sermons (vol.2, Nº13, page 280, 19th December 1619):

The true Church, Donne insisted, "Loves the name Catholique". If one followed "Those universall, and fundamentall doctrines, which in all Christian ages, and in all Christian Churches, have been agreed by all to be necessary to salvation…then thou art a true Catholique."

The emphasis was mine. Of course, being a Protestant, Donne had a larger and more universal idea in mind when here he used the word "Catholique", certainly not in the more limited sense that nowadays we mean by the term "Roman Catholic". But what is especially interesting to me is Donne's use of the word "fundamentall", by which he was referring to something that exists at the very core of things—those doctrines that simply cannot be let go of. Because if someone lets go and departs from them, he essentially has ceased being part of the Church and has become something altogether different.

For if there is nothing that is genuinely fundamental, and everything can be subtracted out, with absolutely everything being negotiable, then surrender is really all that is left over. Nevertheless, it does seem that the word "fundamental" does go back a long ways and is not merely something that got started back in the 1920s.

I highly recommend John Stubb's book.

All Purpose Word

It's very odd that neither Bryan A. Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage" nor Wilson Follett's "Modern American Usage" nor H.W. Fowler's "Modern English Usage" have an entry for the word "fundamentalist".

Yet it is such a peculiar word, and it gets tossed around so much nowadays. And lots of seemingly disparate groups of people get lumped together using this all-embracing word. For example, Joe Schmo, a top notch news reporter from Time Magazine, will handily use it to take a Bible-clinging Southern Baptist in Texas and somehow toss him in together with a shaheed in Syria who's wiring up his suicide belt. For Joe Schmo, somehow they're both considered "fundamentalists." How strange that this one word manages to embrangle so many different things. Yet nobody among the literati has tried to sort out all its nuances.

I suspect that this word has an interesting history and would be worth studying all on its own, from a philological point of view.

Birkenshaw Tale

I have Jeffrey Kacirk's famous desk calendar on "Forgotten English". Occasionally I try to make up stories using some of the words. Here is an example based on today's word:

Today's Forgotten English: birkenshaw—"a sunny place of all kinds of brushwood—a poet's country. There they roam unseen amang the Birks and yellow broom, and tune their pipes." (John McTaggart, Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, 1824.)

Example of usage…

Some aged hippies from San Francisco, with backpacks stuffed with all sorts of good stuff, wandered around the birkenshaw of northern Marin county, looking for a nice spot for grooving out on Nature while smoking some of it. Of course, they were wearing Birkenstocks in the birkenshaw, and funky tie-dyed shirts with little leather vests with dangly strings and beads. After a day of grooving in the birkenshaw, they traipsed back to the highway and hopped in their volvos and drove to their favorite Starbucks, back in San Francisco, for some mochas and pastries. The next weekend, the aged hippies returned to their favorite spot in the birkenshaw for another beautiful afternoon of love, peace, and soul. When they arrived, they found their hideout taken over by some deranged bums. One bum pulled a knife on them. Screaming in terror, they fled as fast as their Birkenstocks could carry them.

Moral of story: To paraphrase V.I. Lenin, "One bum with a knife can beat a hundred aged hippies without one."