{"id":1376551,"date":"2022-03-14T14:23:48","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T18:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1376551"},"modified":"2022-03-14T18:37:53","modified_gmt":"2022-03-14T22:37:53","slug":"the-truth-and-beauty-reviewing-andrew-klavans-latest-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-truth-and-beauty-reviewing-andrew-klavans-latest-book\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth And Beauty: Reviewing Andrew Klavan\u2019s Latest Book"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-truth-and-beauty-reviewing-andrew-klavans-latest-book%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1376551&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2022\/03\/Readers-Pass-Forbes-Truth-And-Beauty-Reviewing-Andrew-Klavans-Latest-Book16x9.jpg?w=1200&#038;h=800&#038;ixlib=react-9.3.0\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p><span>Andrew Klavan, creator of crime novels, screen writer, and satirist, has written the kind of book I prefer to spend time with: one that you want to spend even more time with. One you want to reread as soon as you have finished reading it for the first time. Few books give me that today. The novels of A.S. Byatt. The work of Thomas Sowell. The books \u2014 all of them \u2014\u00a0<\/span><span>of C. S. Lewis. For older writing, the poets Klavan covers in the first two sections of his book: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, to name a few of the Romantic poets, and, inevitably, John Milton and his great epic, Paradise Lost.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The argument is simple. Klavan believes that, as the cover of the book says, reading \u201cEngland\u2019s greatest poets point[s] the way\u201d to knowing Jesus. But the argument, when we reach the third section of the book, its heart, turns out not to be so simple after all. And it all hinges on the Logos, the Word, the beginning of John. On language incarnate: the God made Man. And, for those of us who believe in the God made Man, our commitment to also embody the Word, the language, his story in our story, our story in\u00a0 his.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>For, to Klavan, life is a story; we are literature, just as the greatest story, the greatest literature, was Jesus. However, as he writes, \u201cIt is not that Christ is who we should be. It is that he became what we are trying to become\u201d (215). He continues: \u201cThe Sermon on the Mount is a map of that experience, a way to recreate that experience in our own\u00a0<\/span><span>minds.\u201d But to reach this conclusion, we must first travel with Klavan through Part One, \u201cThe Problem of a Godless World\u201d and Part Two, \u201cThe Journey Toward Solutions.\u201d \u00a0The trip is worth it. For those readers who know the poets and novelists Klavan reads for us, it is as if we are reencountering them with him. For readers unfamiliar with the Lyrical Ballads, or the Odes of Keats, or Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet, Klavan provides a marvelous introduction, especially in his recounting of what he calls \u201cThe Immortal\u00a0 Evening.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The tale begins simply enough, as many of Klavan\u2019s complicated works do, with these words: \u201cOne cold Sunday in the Christmas season, 1817, Benjamin Robert Haydon had four friends to his room for dinner.\u201d One was Wordsworth; one Keats; one a Thomas\u00a0 Monkhouse, cousin of Wordsworth\u2019s wife; and, finally, the essayist Charles Lamb. From that simple beginning, Klavan roams far and wide in English literary and political and religious and scientific history, telling stories within the story of that boisterous dinner when, according to Klavan, the loss of faith was made manifest. Klavan calls it, boldly, \u201cthe spiritual hinge of history.\u201d When we come to the conclusion of the dinner, we are bound to agree. But not before John Milton enters to tell us \u201cOf Man\u2019s First\u00a0 Disobedience, and the Fruit\/Of that Forbidden Tree\u2026.\u201d Milton, says Klavan (citing C. S.\u00a0 Lewis as witness), explained the crack in the world when the true Hierarchy was shattered. It is a tour de force.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Along the way we meet Charles Dickens, the French Revolution (uncomfortably close to our own parlous political time), Dorothy Wordsworth (whose letters are well\u00a0<\/span><span>worth reading on their own), Mary Shelley and Frankenstein\u2026. It is as if Klavan set out to\u00a0 provide readers with a thorough education, the one he undertook on his own, as he explains in his memoir, The Great Good Thing. I would venture to say that his new book\u00a0 should be read as a companion to his memoir, as it is a natural result of his conversion at 49 from a secular Jew to a struggling Christian.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In short, The Truth and Beauty, is idiosyncratically Klavan\u2019s own journey to know the Christ \u2014 as he admits. But, also in short, readers on this same journey must admit that his journey and our own journey meet in many \u2014 if not all\u2014 respects. But until we read his book, we just don\u2019t know it. To read Klavan is to put ourselves under the tutelage of a wise guide to the Word made flesh. To understand the physicality of Christianity, of Christ, of our struggle to embody what He did.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But Klavan, in his conclusion, puts it better than I can:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><i><span>The world has told us that all our truths are mere stories, but this man who walks with us on the road to Emmaus, he told us that all our stories are really truths\u2014truths in human form, which is the form of beauty, which is the form\u00a0 divine, which is his form, the form of the Word made flesh (229).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span>Then comes the final line of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Truth-Beauty-Englands-Greatest-Understanding\/dp\/0310364612\/ref=asc_df_0310364612\/?tag=hyprod-20&#038;linkCode=df0&#038;hvadid=564643979031&#038;hvpos=&#038;hvnetw=g&#038;hvrand=1760888045314863319&#038;hvpone=&#038;hvptwo=&#038;hvqmt=&#038;hvdev=c&#038;hvdvcmdl=&#038;hvlocint=&#038;hvlocphy=9013185&#038;hvtargid=pla-1596179600840&#038;psc=1\">book<\/a>, which I will not quote here. Instead, I will put down the book, pause to think, then pick it up, and read it all over again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em><span>Cheryl Forbes is Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She is the author of eight books on theology, philosophy, science, and memoir.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><i>The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Andrew Klavan, creator of crime novels, screen writer, and satirist, has written the kind of book I prefer to spend time with: one that you want to spend even more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1376551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1376551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1376551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1376551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1376551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}