Thank you, Chris, for your warmest wishes and your thoughtful response to David’s sermon. Knowing David as well as we do, I am not surprised that he chose the passage on the creation of Eve to speak about. David is a serious political thinker, and Arendt is one of the thinkers he most admires. The last few pages of her book I find to be spectacular, and I endorse wholly her view, echoed by David, that a wife is a man’s most secure access to reality, and his best guard against thinking the worst. The problem we’ve had since Simone de Beauvoir seems to be that women have been taught to hate what a woman is (immanence) and instead want what men have (transcendence). Knowing Matthew as I do, I agree that he needs the companionship of a wife so that doesn’t think things to their worst. The fact is, he is smarter than I am, and so thinking things can go on and on. A cheerful wife arrests thinking, and ground’s everything in love.
What an astonishing thought: that totalitarian rule might be stopped by the simple act of a wife loving a husband. May it be so for us all!
Hi Marilyn, I only read your wonderful comment this weekend because for some reason Substack didn't send me a notification about it. As always when you've written more than a line or two, I've thought about your comment for several days before feeling ready to reply, however inadequately.
Firstly, I'll say your commendable modesty about Matthew's relative intellectual horsepower is gracious and simultaneously beside the point. I'm reading another biography of Kurt Gödel right now, who was Einstein's daily walking and conversation companion at Princeton. As was the case with Einstein and Gödel, as is the case with you and Matthew, at a certain level heirarchy no longer has meaning. The point is that both of you have been richly gifted by God and you have both devoted intense and passionate effort, over a very long period, to fully realizing those gifts and making them available to others. For which I'm personally very grateful, in all four of your cases.
I'd also like to acknowledge my recently dawning awareness that Winnipeg seems to be a serious spiritual center, heretofore unrecognized by me. I was just talking with a dear friend, the 87 year old Bob Lehmann, who lives 300 yards away and is my closest neighbor. Bob is a highly intelligent and cultured and accomplished man, and he happened to tell me that his favourite preacher is Erwin Lutzer, who was for many years associated with the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and is still alive at 82. Lutzer is the author of the sermon "How Can You be Sure You will Spend Eternity with God?", which I remember on my father's bookshelves. It turns out that Lutzer was from Winnipeg and got his degree in theology from Winnipeg Bible Institute!
So I can see that Lutzer, David Widdicombe, you and your daughters--and now Matthew, grafted onto the spiritual vine of Winnipeg just as Paul tells us Christians were grafted onto the vine of Judaism--are all part of a vibrant and authentic spiritual community of distinguished provenance.
I do have reservations about Arendt, about whom I cheerfully acknowledge I am no expert, unlike Reverend Widdicombe. I know her best via Heidegger--of whom I deeply disapprove--and their love affair and letters. I've also read "The Human Condition" several times, starting as a college student. Arendt was a very powerful thinker, of course, and there is much good in her work.
But I'll diffidently make just a couple comments about her thought. Firstly, the historical example of Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, in particular but also a very long list of wives of bloodthirsty and mendacious totalitarians makes me question, on its face, the notion that Arendt's insight about a man's loneliness leads to the conclusion that marriage is the best protection against the totalitarian temptation. I prefer the idea advanced in Todorov's wonderful book "Facing the Extreme: Moral life in the Concentration Camps" that a married man and woman is the smallest effective unit of moral action. I also love what you've written about the balance in your and Matthew's relationship.
BTW my own favourite passage in Arendt's "The Human Condition" is when she writes that forgiveness is the best and only way to escape the pain of the past, and hope is the best way to manage the uncertainty of the future.
Arendt is a fascinating thinker with many elements to her thought, but I also believe Matthew's life, career, and writing may refute some of Arendt's ideas in "The Human Condition". I realize her book could be read both ways, but to me she over-emphasizes the man freed of all economic necessity who fully realizes his inner nature by acting in the pure sphere of the political, which to Arendt is (I believe) the ultimate arena of action, as the ideal model for a meaningful human life. She discounts the domestic world, the social world, the world of techne and praxis as beneath the truly superior man. Beginning with Matthew's book "Shop Class as Soul Craft" I'd suggest he qualifies--if not refutes--the Heideggerian / Classicist excesses in Arendt's thinking. With her famous notion of "the banality of evil" she also seems to discount, trivialize and impute evil to the quiddity and concreteness of daily life and physical action which Matthew--in my view with complete justification--celebrates both for its essential integrity and as the launch pad for truly meaningful transcendence.
Again, I realize Arendt is a comprehensive, learned and subtle thinker and I don't want to pig-headedly create a pastiche of her philosophy and then self-righteously refute it.
I guess I'll close by saying that I do believe, if Arendt errs, that Matthew the man and thinker offers the antidote to whatever may not be right in her philosophy, and also to once again congratulate both you and Matthew on your wedding and on being an absolutely splendid married couple!
Hah! I knew it! My hunch is validated! What wonderful news! What an extraordinary homily befitting the thoughtfulness and courage you bring to your marriage. The Lord's richest blessings upon you and yours.
Dearest Matt and Marilyn, with joy I read that you are married; Konstanze and I's marriage at the end of next month will reach its 32nd year. We wish you much good and God's blessing, which is closeness, tenderness and mercy. Yours Roberto
Congratulations Marilyn, to you and Matthew! I wish you much happiness together and a great era of creativity as the two of you come together and blend into an even more precious and extraordinary alloy than the already rare and precious metals you two have always represented as individuals. Best wishes also for the decades ahead of your united family life with your four charming daughters.
I can see why you're so attached to your parish, having read good Dr. Widdicombe's homily twice, and reflected on it overnight. He seems to have been highly motivated to rise to an appropriate literary standard while performing the nuptial ceremony for two such talented and accomplished writers as you and Matthew.
There is indeed much in his homily that resonates with truth, expressed beautifully. As you and Matthew graciously wrote, there is much that is magnificent in Reverend Widdicombe's nuptial homily for your wedding.
I must say I was startled to find one of Harold Bloom's extravagant theories introduced into the very heart of the discourse. It was also interesting to me how Reverend Widdicombe used Bloom's speculations to artfully re-direct the subject of his homily away from the text which you and Matthew actually chose, which he acknowledged for its "theological grandeur and meditative profundity." He did so, he declared, as a prophylactic measure to prevent either of you, or anybody in the congregation, from being "lulled into an uncritical sentimentality . . . and a romantic-sentimental view of marriage."
Instead, Reverend Widdicombe helpfully chose to be "usefully provocative" by conducting you and the congregation through the "cunning complexity" of the account told in Chapters 2 - 4 which "invites or even forces us to view marriage in its world-historical and institutional context."
I enthusiastically concur with Dr. Widdcombe's many encomia and hortatory passages about marriage and the blessing it represents from the most intimate to the world-historical scale, but interpolated into these wonderful, beautifully expressed truths are rather odd asides grounded in the speculations of odd, unreliable Dr. Bloom about a woman in the court of King Solomon being the true author of the early narratives in the Torah.
Evoking an unknown woman genius is of course thematically appropriate in a wedding ceremony in which the bride happens to be herself a writer of exceptional originality, talent and accomplishment, and I'm sure the charming sally about the unknown genius of King Solomon's court was appreciated by all, very much including me.
But, in relation to the exceptionally talented and accomplished bridegroom, Dr. Widdcombe's Bloomian and Arendtian fueled theme "it is not good for a man to be alone" culminates in his connecting a man's loneliness (which is implied but not stated in the Biblical text) and the totalitarian impulse, courtesy of a line from Luther via Hannah Arendt. Given that totalitarianism has racked up a hundred million or so deaths in the 20th and 21st centuries, it seems to be a low blow, and entirely irrelevant to Matthew Crawford.
I must say, I learned a lot from Dr. Widdicombe's quotation of Dietrich Bonhöffer's observation that Adam names Eve ("living") only after the divine curse has been pronounced. It truly is a wonderful moment, which I'd never noticed, when Adam proclaims her the source of life and I'm truly grateful to Dr. Widdicombe for this profound insight.
I had never heard the translation used by Dr. Widdcombe for Genesis 4:1 when he said Eve exclaimed "I have created a man as Yahweh has". Having now refreshed my memory by looking it up, all the translations render Eve's exclamation as "with the help of"--certainly not claiming equality with God. Perhaps Dr. Widdicombe, clearly a man of great learning, has a sound reason for saying in his wedding homily that Eve claims equality with God, but it seems to be over-egging the cake in the exaltation of woman.
Dr. Widdicombe closes his homily by acknowledging "that writer may undervalue the role of the man in her story." Addressing Matthew directly, Reverend Widdicombe piles on further, declaring that the hypothetical woman who authored the story stipulates that "woman is his most secure access to reality, his best protection against overthinking and thinking things to their worst (n.b. the origin of totalitarianism and mass murder!), and that the gift of the woman must never be taken for granted."
There was so much good in Dr. Widdicombe's wedding homily, but much that seems unfair to husbands and men in general, and very certainly to Matthew in particular.
Nothing Dr. Widdicombe said about men, husbands or Matthew himself in his wedding homily resonates so vividly and attractively and truthfully as your two wonderful recent comments on Matthew's posts, the first in which you relate how Matthew confronted the noisy cholos in his neighbourhood and the second in which you describe the awesome motorcycle ride on which Matthew took you. Those were truly wonderful and give readers a vivid sense for how extraordinary Matthew really is, and why an amazing woman like you loves him and chose to be his wife.
It's possible Dr. Widdicombe may have succumbed to the temptation to compete with the gifts of the two illustrious writers standing before him. Matthew seems to have showed exemplary patience and you have, seemingly as effortlessly as usual, entirely out-matched Dr. Widdicombe's literary achievement.
I wish you and Matthew much happiness, joy and peace in the decades ahead--along with even greater creativity and accomplishment--I'm sure your marriage and literary partnership will be a great blessing to countless numbers of people.
There is a passage in the homily that strikes me as particularly brilliant not only because of the hypothesis of a female writer of the sacred text (and not a male writer), but also because by now polygamy, at least in its latent form, is the nihilistic form that is present in all of us; emphasizing monogamy as a value is a powerful reminder, like Ernst Jünger's hypothesis that the nihilism within us is surmountable.
Thank you, Chris, for your warmest wishes and your thoughtful response to David’s sermon. Knowing David as well as we do, I am not surprised that he chose the passage on the creation of Eve to speak about. David is a serious political thinker, and Arendt is one of the thinkers he most admires. The last few pages of her book I find to be spectacular, and I endorse wholly her view, echoed by David, that a wife is a man’s most secure access to reality, and his best guard against thinking the worst. The problem we’ve had since Simone de Beauvoir seems to be that women have been taught to hate what a woman is (immanence) and instead want what men have (transcendence). Knowing Matthew as I do, I agree that he needs the companionship of a wife so that doesn’t think things to their worst. The fact is, he is smarter than I am, and so thinking things can go on and on. A cheerful wife arrests thinking, and ground’s everything in love.
What an astonishing thought: that totalitarian rule might be stopped by the simple act of a wife loving a husband. May it be so for us all!
Hi Marilyn, I only read your wonderful comment this weekend because for some reason Substack didn't send me a notification about it. As always when you've written more than a line or two, I've thought about your comment for several days before feeling ready to reply, however inadequately.
Firstly, I'll say your commendable modesty about Matthew's relative intellectual horsepower is gracious and simultaneously beside the point. I'm reading another biography of Kurt Gödel right now, who was Einstein's daily walking and conversation companion at Princeton. As was the case with Einstein and Gödel, as is the case with you and Matthew, at a certain level heirarchy no longer has meaning. The point is that both of you have been richly gifted by God and you have both devoted intense and passionate effort, over a very long period, to fully realizing those gifts and making them available to others. For which I'm personally very grateful, in all four of your cases.
I'd also like to acknowledge my recently dawning awareness that Winnipeg seems to be a serious spiritual center, heretofore unrecognized by me. I was just talking with a dear friend, the 87 year old Bob Lehmann, who lives 300 yards away and is my closest neighbor. Bob is a highly intelligent and cultured and accomplished man, and he happened to tell me that his favourite preacher is Erwin Lutzer, who was for many years associated with the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and is still alive at 82. Lutzer is the author of the sermon "How Can You be Sure You will Spend Eternity with God?", which I remember on my father's bookshelves. It turns out that Lutzer was from Winnipeg and got his degree in theology from Winnipeg Bible Institute!
So I can see that Lutzer, David Widdicombe, you and your daughters--and now Matthew, grafted onto the spiritual vine of Winnipeg just as Paul tells us Christians were grafted onto the vine of Judaism--are all part of a vibrant and authentic spiritual community of distinguished provenance.
I do have reservations about Arendt, about whom I cheerfully acknowledge I am no expert, unlike Reverend Widdicombe. I know her best via Heidegger--of whom I deeply disapprove--and their love affair and letters. I've also read "The Human Condition" several times, starting as a college student. Arendt was a very powerful thinker, of course, and there is much good in her work.
But I'll diffidently make just a couple comments about her thought. Firstly, the historical example of Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, in particular but also a very long list of wives of bloodthirsty and mendacious totalitarians makes me question, on its face, the notion that Arendt's insight about a man's loneliness leads to the conclusion that marriage is the best protection against the totalitarian temptation. I prefer the idea advanced in Todorov's wonderful book "Facing the Extreme: Moral life in the Concentration Camps" that a married man and woman is the smallest effective unit of moral action. I also love what you've written about the balance in your and Matthew's relationship.
BTW my own favourite passage in Arendt's "The Human Condition" is when she writes that forgiveness is the best and only way to escape the pain of the past, and hope is the best way to manage the uncertainty of the future.
Arendt is a fascinating thinker with many elements to her thought, but I also believe Matthew's life, career, and writing may refute some of Arendt's ideas in "The Human Condition". I realize her book could be read both ways, but to me she over-emphasizes the man freed of all economic necessity who fully realizes his inner nature by acting in the pure sphere of the political, which to Arendt is (I believe) the ultimate arena of action, as the ideal model for a meaningful human life. She discounts the domestic world, the social world, the world of techne and praxis as beneath the truly superior man. Beginning with Matthew's book "Shop Class as Soul Craft" I'd suggest he qualifies--if not refutes--the Heideggerian / Classicist excesses in Arendt's thinking. With her famous notion of "the banality of evil" she also seems to discount, trivialize and impute evil to the quiddity and concreteness of daily life and physical action which Matthew--in my view with complete justification--celebrates both for its essential integrity and as the launch pad for truly meaningful transcendence.
Again, I realize Arendt is a comprehensive, learned and subtle thinker and I don't want to pig-headedly create a pastiche of her philosophy and then self-righteously refute it.
I guess I'll close by saying that I do believe, if Arendt errs, that Matthew the man and thinker offers the antidote to whatever may not be right in her philosophy, and also to once again congratulate both you and Matthew on your wedding and on being an absolutely splendid married couple!
Very best wishes, Chris
Hah! I knew it! My hunch is validated! What wonderful news! What an extraordinary homily befitting the thoughtfulness and courage you bring to your marriage. The Lord's richest blessings upon you and yours.
Dearest Matt and Marilyn, with joy I read that you are married; Konstanze and I's marriage at the end of next month will reach its 32nd year. We wish you much good and God's blessing, which is closeness, tenderness and mercy. Yours Roberto
Congratulations Marilyn, to you and Matthew! I wish you much happiness together and a great era of creativity as the two of you come together and blend into an even more precious and extraordinary alloy than the already rare and precious metals you two have always represented as individuals. Best wishes also for the decades ahead of your united family life with your four charming daughters.
I can see why you're so attached to your parish, having read good Dr. Widdicombe's homily twice, and reflected on it overnight. He seems to have been highly motivated to rise to an appropriate literary standard while performing the nuptial ceremony for two such talented and accomplished writers as you and Matthew.
There is indeed much in his homily that resonates with truth, expressed beautifully. As you and Matthew graciously wrote, there is much that is magnificent in Reverend Widdicombe's nuptial homily for your wedding.
I must say I was startled to find one of Harold Bloom's extravagant theories introduced into the very heart of the discourse. It was also interesting to me how Reverend Widdicombe used Bloom's speculations to artfully re-direct the subject of his homily away from the text which you and Matthew actually chose, which he acknowledged for its "theological grandeur and meditative profundity." He did so, he declared, as a prophylactic measure to prevent either of you, or anybody in the congregation, from being "lulled into an uncritical sentimentality . . . and a romantic-sentimental view of marriage."
Instead, Reverend Widdicombe helpfully chose to be "usefully provocative" by conducting you and the congregation through the "cunning complexity" of the account told in Chapters 2 - 4 which "invites or even forces us to view marriage in its world-historical and institutional context."
I enthusiastically concur with Dr. Widdcombe's many encomia and hortatory passages about marriage and the blessing it represents from the most intimate to the world-historical scale, but interpolated into these wonderful, beautifully expressed truths are rather odd asides grounded in the speculations of odd, unreliable Dr. Bloom about a woman in the court of King Solomon being the true author of the early narratives in the Torah.
Evoking an unknown woman genius is of course thematically appropriate in a wedding ceremony in which the bride happens to be herself a writer of exceptional originality, talent and accomplishment, and I'm sure the charming sally about the unknown genius of King Solomon's court was appreciated by all, very much including me.
But, in relation to the exceptionally talented and accomplished bridegroom, Dr. Widdcombe's Bloomian and Arendtian fueled theme "it is not good for a man to be alone" culminates in his connecting a man's loneliness (which is implied but not stated in the Biblical text) and the totalitarian impulse, courtesy of a line from Luther via Hannah Arendt. Given that totalitarianism has racked up a hundred million or so deaths in the 20th and 21st centuries, it seems to be a low blow, and entirely irrelevant to Matthew Crawford.
I must say, I learned a lot from Dr. Widdicombe's quotation of Dietrich Bonhöffer's observation that Adam names Eve ("living") only after the divine curse has been pronounced. It truly is a wonderful moment, which I'd never noticed, when Adam proclaims her the source of life and I'm truly grateful to Dr. Widdicombe for this profound insight.
I had never heard the translation used by Dr. Widdcombe for Genesis 4:1 when he said Eve exclaimed "I have created a man as Yahweh has". Having now refreshed my memory by looking it up, all the translations render Eve's exclamation as "with the help of"--certainly not claiming equality with God. Perhaps Dr. Widdicombe, clearly a man of great learning, has a sound reason for saying in his wedding homily that Eve claims equality with God, but it seems to be over-egging the cake in the exaltation of woman.
Dr. Widdicombe closes his homily by acknowledging "that writer may undervalue the role of the man in her story." Addressing Matthew directly, Reverend Widdicombe piles on further, declaring that the hypothetical woman who authored the story stipulates that "woman is his most secure access to reality, his best protection against overthinking and thinking things to their worst (n.b. the origin of totalitarianism and mass murder!), and that the gift of the woman must never be taken for granted."
There was so much good in Dr. Widdicombe's wedding homily, but much that seems unfair to husbands and men in general, and very certainly to Matthew in particular.
Nothing Dr. Widdicombe said about men, husbands or Matthew himself in his wedding homily resonates so vividly and attractively and truthfully as your two wonderful recent comments on Matthew's posts, the first in which you relate how Matthew confronted the noisy cholos in his neighbourhood and the second in which you describe the awesome motorcycle ride on which Matthew took you. Those were truly wonderful and give readers a vivid sense for how extraordinary Matthew really is, and why an amazing woman like you loves him and chose to be his wife.
It's possible Dr. Widdicombe may have succumbed to the temptation to compete with the gifts of the two illustrious writers standing before him. Matthew seems to have showed exemplary patience and you have, seemingly as effortlessly as usual, entirely out-matched Dr. Widdicombe's literary achievement.
I wish you and Matthew much happiness, joy and peace in the decades ahead--along with even greater creativity and accomplishment--I'm sure your marriage and literary partnership will be a great blessing to countless numbers of people.
There is a passage in the homily that strikes me as particularly brilliant not only because of the hypothesis of a female writer of the sacred text (and not a male writer), but also because by now polygamy, at least in its latent form, is the nihilistic form that is present in all of us; emphasizing monogamy as a value is a powerful reminder, like Ernst Jünger's hypothesis that the nihilism within us is surmountable.