[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 7:2 (December 2007).]

Blaise Pascal’s Mathematical Milieu

Daniel Julich

Historical study is, from my perspective, about the search for wisdom. It is about listening to the voices and events of the past and allowing them to bring new light and understanding to the way in which we think and behave. But looking into the past must not be oversimplified as merely piecing together big ideas independent of important bits of context that shape the perceived outcome. As one looks at Blaise Pascal, his philosophical and religious ideas cannot be separated from the life with which they are interwoven. This is precisely the holistic, incarnational view of life upon which the Christian tradition is based.

In this essay, I want to lay out some biographical background on Pascal, and then I will describe how his thinking was shaped in no small way by his training in mathematics. Indeed, it is my view that Pascal’s early apprenticeship in mathematics shows up in his later religious and philosophical reflections. While I will only touch on his religious and philosophical ideas here, it will be clear that mathematics provides a prominent backdrop for Pascal’s life in general, and an obvious context for his thinking in particular.

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France, a town 260 miles south of Paris and he died in 1662 in Paris at the age of 39. He spent the greatest portion of his adult life in the French capital, but also spent some years in Rouen, a city just a little bit north of Paris. His years include part of the reign of Louis XIII and the commencement of Louis XIV, although the so-called Sun King’s personal reign did not begin until a year before Pascal’s death. Pascal was born and died Catholic, like most of his countrymen, but he embraced a particularly Augustinian version of Catholicism during the latter part of his life. During his lifetime, Pascal became known especially for three endeavors. First was a mechanical calculating machine that he invented in his twenties and continued to develop into his thirties (incidentally, this was the key reason for naming a computer language for him). Second, he was known in his life for the publication of his thoughts and experiments concerning the creation of a void and the demonstration of the weight of the air. And third, he was recognized as the pseudonymous author of the witty and ironic Provincial Letters.

Although well-known by some through these three accomplishments during his lifetime, the publication of some scientific, mathematical, and religious/philosophical works posthumously, made him even more famous. Some of the most well-known aspects of his work, especially for those of faith, are contained in his Pensées, literally Thoughts. These are simply a collection of scribbled fragments ostensibly intended to be a part of a larger religious work but never completed. The order of these fragments is a matter of interpretation, and their place within the grand scheme of the proposed apologetic work is unclear. For anyone who spends much time with Pascal, this disjointedness can be extremely frustrating. Pascal does not give us a coherent articulation of his philosophical and religious views. Despite being unfinished, the Pensées have attracted the attention of thinkers since their first publication. The very famous Wager argument is contained in these Pensées, as well as Pascal’s reflections on the greatness and misery of human beings. Many have also heard of Pascal as having spoken of a “God-shaped void” in the heart of human beings, a paraphrasing of one of the Pensées.[1] Additionally, Pascal’s statement “the heart has reasons which reason does not know” shows up frequently in common parlance.

Pascal’s earliest biographies, written by his family not long after his death, extolled both his precocious genius in mathematics and his exemplary piety. Others followed suit in this evaluation. Mathematically, Leibniz praised Pascal’s first work on conic sections, completed while he was still in his late teens. He has also been hailed as the “founder of modern probability theory” together with Pierre de Fermat. His name has become associated with the arithmetic triangle, sometimes called Pascal’s triangle. Although he did not originate the triangle, he developed many applications of it. The work in physics that came out of the experiments on the void led to what some have seen as significant advances in the field of hydrostatics. And finally, his last mathematical venture dealt with a particular mathematical curve.

One of the especially puzzling and yet fascinating aspects of Pascal’s biography is his supposed renunciation of mathematics and science in order to devote himself fully to religious reflection. His sister, his first biographer, set the stage when she stated that from the time he was twenty-four years old, Pascal “renounced all other knowledge in order to apply himself uniquely to the one thing that Jesus Christ calls necessary.”[2] And Pascal’s writings do indeed suggest a deep unease about the ultimate usefulness and value of geometrical studies. Yet, in his religious writings I found Pascal making use of mathematical metaphors and mathematical ways of thinking that seemed to suggest that his mathematical reflections actually helped him to understand the problems of being human and being a man of faith.

These seemingly unrelated fields of knowledge, mathematics and theology, are in fact part of the philosophical makeup of an informal society of mathematicians by which the young Pascal was shaped. But before describing that group’s ideas and personalities, it would be helpful to understand Pascal’s own family influences that led him to that group. When Blaise was born, his father Étienne was a significant political official in Clermont. Étienne was 35 years old when he became the father of Blaise, his only son. There was an older sister (three years older) and a younger sister (two years his junior), and his mother died when Blaise was just three years old. Étienne, for his part, never remarried during the 25 years of life that remained to him. Instead, he invested his energy in his children, and in 1631 he left his post in Clermont in order to move to Paris and to devote himself to the education of his children and especially his son. This was a move that was not all that unusual at the time. Existing educational institutions were being challenged in their methods and in their outcomes. The Renaissance rediscovery of those ancient Greek and Latin writings hitherto unknown either completely or only imperfectly, had already created an atmosphere that would particularly value the questioning of authority received from the Middle Ages and the application to ancient languages in early life. Furthermore, there was, in the 17th century, a growing recognition of the difference between childhood and adulthood. This, in turn, fostered an emphasis on ensuring that children were not pushed beyond what was prudent for their age. Following these trends, Étienne Pascal first taught Blaise languages and sought to keep him from distractions of other subjects.

Besides Blaise’s education, Pascal’s father also pursued his interest in mathematics. When Étienne arrived in Paris, he began to meet regularly with a group of individuals who were skilled at and interested in mathematics. It is a group that gained notoriety for its specifically mathematical focus. The group is often called the Mersenne Group or the Mersenne Academy, being named for its organizer Marin Mersenne. Mersenne was a monk who is known for his wide correspondence network that included mathematicians, natural philosophers, theologians, historians, and musicians. Mersenne would often bring problems to the group that had been revealed to him by his correspondents and the group would seek solutions for them. These sorts of informal groups were common in the Paris of the time, but this one is specifically noteworthy because of its specific focus on the mathematical disciplines and the mathematical approach to physics and other sciences. These meetings were not simply professional gatherings. In fact, there was probably only one of its members that could be called a professional mathematician.[3] The group was made up of friends with a common interest, and the meeting place would often rotate between the homes of its members. Pascal the son was undoubtedly privy to many of the meetings of the Mersenne group during his late childhood.

His family recounts a story that marks his unofficial entry into mathematical endeavors, and has been one of the major factors for Pascal’s consideration as a precocious “genius.” According to this story, although Pascal wanted to know more about geometry, his father restricted it because according to his understanding, mathematics had the potential to be so alluring that it would monopolize the child’s time and draw him away from his other studies. But when Blaise was twelve or thirteen, as his older sister recounts in a biography, his father walked in on him as he was making figures on the floor with chalk. These figures amounted to the working out of a proof that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle equal two right angles; furthermore, when asked, Blaise explained what he was doing, using the appropriate geometrical reasoning from first principles. Too proud to be angry, Étienne shared his discovery and Blaise was allowed to be a junior attendee of the mathematical conferences in which his father took part.

Pascal was nurtured intellectually then, not only by his father, but also by this group of mathematicians. It was within this context that Pascal did his first work on conic sections, completed when he was only 17. This work dealt with a number of results that he had discovered that were universally true of conic sections – that is, circles, parabolas, ellipses, and hyperbolas. The Mersenne group and especially Mersenne himself, promoted this early work of Pascal’s. By this means, Blaise Pascal’s skill became known to numerous mathematicians in France and the rest of Europe. Importantly, one of the reasons that he was touted was that his mathematical skill was evident at such a young age.

This “mathematical academy” of Marin Mersenne constituted a philosophical and religious approach to the world. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an increasing attempt to restore orderliness and rationality to the universe. The mathematical approach to the world was a part of this drive. This mathematical group of which Pascal became a part, moved in the same direction as had Galileo, seeking to quantify phenomena in the world and to discover the proportionality that underlay its processes.

The justification of this deep investigation of the mathematical properties of music and of the universe in general had, for these mathematicians, both a religious and a philosophical motivation. One of the most popular quotations for 17th-century mathematicians, given as a religious motivation of their study comes from the Apocryphal Book of Wisdom. This quotation reads: “thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.”[4] Mathematicians justified their pursuit of these patterns and proportions, then, in the name of uncovering the thoughts of God the geometer. In the case of music, the harmonious structure represented not just a mathematical, but an aesthetic exploration of God’s creation. The book of nature, Galileo had stated, was written in the language of mathematics.[5] But in Mersenne’s writings we catch an even more in-depth understanding of the type of atmosphere in which Pascal was raised. Mersenne writes of the godlike task of discovering the multitude of consequences that can be produced from a single mathematical principle. At the most basic arithmetic level, he considers the way in which unity (what we call the number 1) can produce an infinity of numbers through addition and multiplication. He compares this to the basic unity of the Godhead which produced the full spectrum of creation in all of its variety. On a more geometrical level, Mersenne says of the figure of the circle: “if one knew all its properties, and its uses, and all that one could draw and conclude from it, one would know more than all that has ever been written in matters of the sciences.”[6] As one seeks out these connections within geometry or the possible permutations of musical compositions, the state of divine knowledge is approximated. So that, when speaking of the remaining mysteries of geometry, Mersenne writes that such discoveries approximate the state of heavenly beatitude. He writes this: “The Angels know all these difficulties perfectly, and we will likewise know them when it pleases God to take us into the ranks of the blessed.” Mathematical knowledge, for Mersenne, is a part of heavenly knowledge.

The interaction between Mersenne’s expressed hopes for mathematics and his description of Pascal place the young man in a category that may perhaps be thought of as a “prophet” of mathematics. In a work written in 1625 (two years after Pascal’s birth and long before Mersenne knew the family), Mersenne expresses the hope for a timely nativity:

May it please God to cause to be reborn in this century some new Archimedeses, who will lead Mathematics to their last perfection…[7]

During the 17th century, the figure of the third-century BC mathematician-engineer named Archimedes came to stand for greatness in mathematics and inventiveness both practical and theoretical. Mersenne’s invocation of the rebirth of Archimedes has indeed the flavor of a prophetic hope. In the 1640s, Mersenne would label each of [ital]two[end ital] outstanding young mathematicians as “Archimedes.” One was the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens (six years Pascal’s junior), later one of the most important of the founding members of the French Academy of Sciences. The other was Blaise Pascal. There is obviously a bit of literary flair to comparing these young men to a great Greek mathematician. But it is also an extension of the attitude that emerged from the Renaissance that knowledge was growing and increasing to such a degree that the progress of ancient thinkers would be taken up and finally come to completion or perfection. A number of utopias appeared during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which the research of the sciences and mathematics by those specifically trained for them were central to the ushering in of the perfect society. This golden age of knowledge was very much akin to Christian hopes of God’s reign on earth. For Mersenne and for others in his circle, mathematics was emerging as the central key to this perfection of knowledge. Hence, the label of Archimedes carried with it this prophetic vision.

This kind of optimism about knowledge was, however, not universally shared. Instead of a coming consummation, many saw the undoing of the possibility of any knowledge. The discovery of new worlds and the questioning of traditional interpretations of the world encouraged many to claim that no knowledge whatsoever was possible. For Mersenne and others like him, mathematics was one of the key weapons against such pessimism about knowledge and truth. Not only was the performing of mathematics an imitation of the mind of God, its methods and structure provided it as the paradigmatic discipline of certainty. In 1625, Mersenne wrote a book entitled The Truth of the Sciences Against the Skeptics. In it he calls mathematics “the sciences very certain and very true in which suspension [of judgment] does not find a place.” The geometrical method of proof based on distinct definitions and clearly accepted axioms was considered by them to show that mathematics, at least, could attain to some certainty. This is not to say, however, that all knowledge could be discovered through mathematics. Besides the proof structure, what gave appeal to those looking for certainty was also that mathematics allowed one to isolate quantitative and numerical aspects of nature. To quantify the world was to make possible exact comparisons. It made for measurability of the world, a true sense of comprehension of it.

The capacities of mathematics to approximate to God’s infinite productivity and attain certainty were extremely attractive. For the group in which Pascal grew up, full of men who were mostly amateurs rather than professionals, proficiency in the mathematical disciplines was a mark of pride. And Pascal was shaped by these values. Growing up among mathematicians who were his father’s friends and some years his senior, he was mentored and promoted by those who were consciously or unconsciously seeking to perpetuate and further their study of geometry. In a later summary of some of his mathematical works Pascal himself would write of “the benevolence which has sustained me since my first years in this learned School.” [8]

Not merely technically but in a profoundly personal way, Mersenne’s mathematical group served as Pascal’s place of initial apprenticeship, and there was a profound sense of responsibility that went along with this. It would be of little surprise if he wrote about religious matters in the Pensées using the metaphors of mathematics. But what I want to suggest is that the connections between Pascal’s mathematical-scientific works and his theological reflections are perhaps even more than metaphor. When he writes his religious thoughts in terms that are similar to those used in mathematics, he is drawing on a kind of structural similarity that reflects theological truth. I believe that the similarity has to do with the relationship between what may be known with certainty and that which transcends the abilities of human knowledge. This relationship is undoubtedly bridged by Pascal’s rich training in mathematics by way of the Mersenne group. It would be the thing that certain people would argue Pascal abandoned for theology, and it would also be the thing which others, including myself, believe enabled him to offer important theological insight. In other words, for Pascal mathematics becomes not a competitor of theology but, rather, a lens through which he would be able to see and articulate an understanding of life that becomes an important thread of the Christian tradition.

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Daniel Julich is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Florida where he is currently writing his dissertation on Blaise Pascal.

[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 6:4 (June 2007).]

Childhood, Aging, and the Fall: A Reflection on Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

Margy Weinert

Editor’s note: In the spring of 2007, the Christian Study Center hosted a class on “The Poet as Priest” in which we asked representatives from the Department of English at the University of Florida to address the question of whether or how poetry might point beyond itself to something transcendent. One of our speakers was Margy Weinert, who reflected on childhood in Wordsworth’s poetry. We offer an abridged version of her talk here.

There’s a little paragraph I found in the middle of Moby Dick a few years ago, and though it’s not necessarily a significant paragraph in the book as a whole, it has nevertheless resurfaced in my ponderizations many times since I first read it. This little passage was in fact the starting point for the contemplations that led to my interest in Wordsworth’s poem, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In the passage, the narrator, Ishmael, is on a hunting exhibition away from the main ship, the Pequod. As he looks over the side of the small whaling boat, he gazes into what he realizes is an underwater nursery. In the calm center of an otherwise agitated herd of whales drift the female whales who are pregnant or nursing, as well as their babies. As the other whales fight off the human spermaceti hunters, the mothers and babies are in an otherworldly world of their own.

As human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; — even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight…Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond (Chapter 87).

In a previous talk in this series on “The Poet as Priest” Professor Richard Brantley, speaking on Emily Dickinson, summarized the relationship between Romanticism and Christianity. Wordsworth and other British Romantics were, he said, able to “conceive of the physical senses as portals to epiphany, and not just as analogies to spiritual insight.” This is just what is going on in Wordsworth’s “Ode.” The speaker in the poem describes how his perception of the world has changed based on input from his physical senses, so that through his physical senses he is led to contemplations of the supernatural. During his talk Dr. Brantley read a poem by Dickinson in which the speaker seems to be expressing a feeling similar to one that Wordsworth expresses in this poem. Dickinson writes, “I know that He exists. / Somewhere – in Silence / He has hid his rare life / From our gross eyes.” The speaker in Wordsworth’s poem is similarly concerned with an elusive Higher Being who seems both impossibly distant and infinitely immediate.

When I recently stumbled upon Wordsworth’s poem in an anthology, I found in it an expansion of the idea I hinted at before with the passage from Moby Dick.

In the second stanza we see a description of some of the beauties of the earth – Rainbow, Rose, Moon, and sunrise – and then we read, “But yet I know, where’er I go,/ That there hath past away a glory from the earth” (II). The speaker has a sense not only that the earth has lost some ineffable glory, but also that he himself, through his gradual realization of this loss, has lost some of his own glory. As a child he was “appareled in celestial light,” now he wears something far weightier, “earthly freight…Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!” (VIII)

In the fourth stanza, he mentions two sights that in the midst of earth’s beauty recall to his mind the loss he has suffered. “But there’s a Tree, of many, one,/ A single field which I have looked upon,/ Both of them speak of something that is gone” (IV). Could the Tree in fact be the Tree of Knowledge, and the field the Garden of Eden? The speaker does use lots of Edenic language to describe early childhood; it’s as if he is drawing a parallel between the fall of humanity and expulsion from the Garden on one hand and the aging of the individual human and loss of the Childlike Vision on the other hand. In its infancy the human race lived in a Garden that was separated from Heaven by only the thinnest of veils, so that God Himself would come down to walk in the Garden in the cool of the evening. And just as that thin veil between Heaven and Earth became an opaque wall with hardly a peephole in it – so too does the human child, born still in a seeming state of mystical communion with or awareness of its Creator, seem to lose that communion the longer he lives on this side of the opaque wall. For Wordsworth, the redemption of the human race is represented by the newborn human baby; babies are the freshest and purest among us, and they also promise the future survival of the human race. For the Christian, however, redemption is found in only one Baby – the Christ child, who gives new life to all who believe in Him.

In Stanza Five, the speaker introduces a paradox. Birth is a “sleep and a forgetting,” an entrance into mortality that is in fact not unlike death. The speaker describes four stages of human life.

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,

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.

So the growing boy is gradually imprisoned and limited by his own improving knowledge and intellect. Our own experiences, knowledge, doubts are like vines gradually growing and twisting around us, ensnaring and imprisoning us.

Stanza Six describes Earth’s attempts to distract us with her own inferior pleasures and beauties, just as a nurse might offer a hungry baby a bottle of formula when what the baby really wants is its mother’s breast milk.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,

And, even with something of a mother’s mind,

And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can

To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man,

Forget the glories he hath known

And that imperial palace whence he came.

Skipping to Stanza Nine, the tone shifts to one of hope, almost, if one can be said to have hope in a memory of the past rather than in the future.

O joy! That in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

For Wordsworth, or whoever’s voice he is speaking in, there is a two-fold memory that lends comfort in the listless sorrow of adulthood: the memory of childhood, and the memory of having had during childhood a more immediate memory of Eden. He says, “The thought of past years in me doth breed / Perpetual benediction.”

In Stanza Ten, the speaker continues on the theme of finding comfort in the past:

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

Finally, in the eleventh stanza, the speaker seems to decide that humanity has made a worthwhile trade, that in fact it is enough to have just the memory of the past delights and the actuality of the present delights offered up by Nature and the earth. And so the speaker finds that, in later life, long after the childlike vision has faded, the adult vision that has replaced it may be richer still.

In talking about this poem I used the phrase “Childlike Vision” to describe a particular childlike way of thinking and seeing and being, a special sort of vision that fades away as we age. I’ve been wondering about this Childlike Vision ever since I first read that passage in Moby Dick about four years ago. Trying to remember what it was like to have it, wondering what it was, and why we lost it.

Before we have words for the objects around us, before we understand their uses and where they came from, everything we see is a great abstract wonderland. If we look around and imagine that we don’t know what anything is – the carpet on the floor, with its countless little threads, except we don’t know words like carpet or floor, how it got there, and why it’s there – all we see are images, and all we can do is marvel. Until we know what a thing is, it could be anything. Around age two, the identities of objects are not yet fixed in our minds so that we can easily pretend they are something else. A blanket becomes a giant ocean wave, then you crumple it up and it’s a storm cloud, then you bury yourself in it and it’s quicksand. Samuel Johnson described this childish quality – as well as the loss of it – as eloquently as usual in one of his Idler essays.

We are naturally delighted with novelty, and there is a time when all that we see is new. When first we enter into the world, whithersoever we turn our eyes, they meet Knowledge with Pleasure at her side; every diversity of Nature pours ideas in upon the soul; neither search nor labour are necessary; we have nothing more to do than open our eyes, and curiosity is gratified.

Much of the pleasure which the first survey of the world affords, is exhausted before we are conscious of our own felicity, or able to compare our condition with some other possible state. We have therefore few traces of the joy of our earliest discoveries; yet we all remember a time when Nature had so many untasted gratifications, that every excursion gave delight which can now be found no longer, when the noise of a torrent, the rustle of a wood, the song of birds, or the play of lambs, had power to fill the attention, and suspend all perception of the course of time… (No. 44 in the Idler, 17 February 1759)

As childhood wears on and we learn more and more of the world and all its labels and explanations, this Childlike Vision fades. And when it is gone, we can only dimly remember that we once had it; we can’t remember the Vision itself. No matter how we may try to remember and recapture this Childlike way of seeing and being, we never can because that kind of knowledge cannot be forgotten. There is a reason why, as we grow and live, and we see more of the ugliness and the decay in the world, we are surprised by it. It is because whether or not we are born with a “sin nature,” we are not automatically at the point of deepest evil. Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge not only introduced evil into our lives, but also gave us knowledge of good and evil – we recognize what is evil and good, and we know that “good” is how things “should” be.

Remember that feeling you used to get when your mom read you your favorite book? A feeling like you’re flying…a feeling in your stomach or your heart. A tensing of your toes. Whatever physiological form the feeling takes, it is something like Lewis’s description of joy. A longing for something, somewhere. As adults – and Christians – we often identify this as a longing for what is to come, our eternity in Paradise. But perhaps it is also a longing for – nostalgia for – memory of – what came before. Perhaps the Fall is played out individually in the life of each of us. In the same way that we fell all at once through the actions of Adam and Eve in the Garden, and so were severed from God, so too throughout our lives do we experience a sort of fall from a state of blissful infancy to a rueful adulthood.

The Childlike Vision goes beyond wonder and curiosity and imagination. It allows a total surrender to play and make-believe. A certain lack of concern for or understanding of the ways of the world. This way of seeing and being is one that, curiously, in an adult would be considered eccentricity or even mental illness. Imagine an adult playing like a child, and you get something like Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, busying himself all day with his mock-battles, which he likes to arrange on the lawn outside and then act a heroic role in himself. Year after year he fritters away his fortune on gunpowder and other materials. At first Uncle Toby just seems lovably comical; then we come to see how sad and strange it is for a grown man to be trapped in the carefree world of his own imagination. Maturing is a necessity. And, as Wordsworth seems to say, the knowledge and wisdom brought by maturity lend an even deeper beauty to the sights we so delight in as children, a mixture of beauty and sorrows that is “Too deep for tears…” (XI).

We mature in part by gaining knowledge, and it is as we gain knowledge that the Childlike Vision fades away. It may not even be that we forget how to be and think like a child, but that we are no longer allowed to be and think like a child. Because adults are supposed to know things that children don’t, and this knowledge binds and inhibits us.

Another feature of the Childlike Vision is, I think, that it allows children to exist in a sort of eternity. For all the talk of children’s short attention spans, I’ve found that children often get “stuck in a moment” repeating the same action over and over. Whether it’s having you read the same book to them five times straight in a single sitting, or – as a two-year-old I know recently did – leaping repeatedly into a pile of pillows, serving as an imaginary anthill, and having me, with great show of effort, rescue him from the ants while his four-year-old brother pretended to hose him down with an ant-killing concoction. The time it took to do all this was not enough to satisfy his desire to do it; he seemed to want to be in a state of doing it. So we did it continuously for a half-hour or so, and to him it was as if no time at all were passing.

In a poem called “My Kingdom” that R.L. Stevenson wrote for children, he speaks in the voice of a child playing in a little dell he has found, imagining that all the land around him is his own kingdom. He is completely immersed in his pretend world when the voice of his mother calls him home. The child is called back from one reality to another – to a playing child the pretend world does seem all but real. I’d guess most of us have memories of similar experiences. One summer Sunday afternoon when I was maybe seven, my brothers and sister and I were playing in the backyard, pretending our swing-set was a space ship hurtling through distant galaxies. I can still feel the warm, moist air of that afternoon, and I can still feel my bare feet caked with dirt. I was in that purple realm which to a child is earthly heaven. Until we were interrupted. Long before we would have stopped our game, my dad called to us that it was time to come inside and clean up for evening church. I begged him to let us stay and play. Something in it felt wrong to me, to leave this glorious outdoor world behind in exchange for a stiff dress and a hard church pew. That summer evening, I felt I was not simply being told playtime was over; I was being yanked from a state of bliss that was beyond time.

So where do all of these contemplations leave us with Wordsworth’s poem? I wish I could give a confident and expert conclusion summarizing the meaning and significance of this poem, but I’m afraid that that would somehow minimize not just what Wordsworth has written, but also what poetry is…If one purpose of poetry is to sing of the ineffable, to try to take an idea as ethereal and intangible as angels’ music and put it into the small, hard, tangible words we call poetry – then surely the words of a poem cannot be reduced any further into explanations without losing even more of whatever it is that makes it true and beautiful. In short, all I really know to say is that we should all read Wordsworth’s poem for ourselves and contemplate the Childlike Vision, if such contemplations seem valuable.

Is Wordsworth an example of the Poet acting as a Priest? Not in the sense that he acts as a mediator between Humanity and God, standing with his back to his congregation, performing rites and ceremonies in a foreign language. But he does take on a priestly function in the sense that he can inspire us to worship. He gazes up at the clouds in awe, singing of what he sees, and as we hear his song we feel compelled to do the same.

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Margy Weinert recently completed a Bachelor of Arts in the English department at the University of Florida where her emphasis was on pre-20th century British literature. This fall she will begin a doctoral program in English at Baylor University where she plans to narrow her focus to supernatural and religious themes in British literature.