Order and Ardor

These two words, order and ardor, can set a man’s mind running in many directions. I first heard the combination in an address by John Mackay, then president of Princeton Seminary, and I stumbled on them again recently in John S. Whale’s latest book, Christian Reunion: Historic Divisions Reconsidered.

These words are descriptive of another of our day’s polarizations: one can increase the order of a thing and decrease the ardor, or he can let the ardor run and destroy any semblance of order. This has to do with government vs. freedom, police and the street gangs, discipline in high schools and colleges, controls in the home, and even the ways of high church vs. the Jesus movement.

Imagining for a moment a straight line with order at one end and ardor at the other, one discovers a “right” balance somewhere along that line when there is the “proper” ordering of ardor. But the right point for that balance is always dynamic, necessarily out of balance to those who are urging a move to one or another of the two extremes; i.e., no fixed point will satisfy everyone. From where I sit, for example, the ardor of our day needs considerably more ordering.

Back in high school we had a Latin teacher whose name was Wilhelmina Fredericka Schmitz. We all liked her name, and we always used it in full when we spoke of her. “Who ya got for Latin this year?” “Wilhelmina Fredericka Schmitz.” She had no nicknames. She was German (ha) and must have come from a long line of Prussian top sergeants. Since we had around 3,000 students in our high school and Latin was still considered a worthy subject, we had several Latin teachers; but in the vagaries of scheduling I always seemed to end up with the aforesaid. Out of eight semesters I landed her seven (the other time I had “Butcher” Beggs, so called, I think, because of the way he attacked a blackboard).

Wilhelmina Fredericka Schmitz had the strange pedagogical notion that the reason for the Latin class was that we were jolly well going to learn Latin. I never found out whether she liked us, and I had the general impression that she didn’t care a fig whether we liked her. I don’t think she even cared if we liked Latin; she only cared that we learn it. Strangely enough, as we came to learn it we came to like it.

Wilhelmina Fredericka Schmitz took it as a personal offense if we were unprepared. If we even stumbled, she would begin to frown and move the pencils around on her desk nervously. We had some troubled times. The point is that I never went to that class unprepared—once I stayed home “sick” because I wasn’t prepared—and by preparation was meant perfection. When I argued long and loud with my parents about the injustice of all this, my mother’s response was always the same: “You stick to it, the discipline will do you good.” It seemed in those days that the discipline of such a course would serve a man in other departments of life.

Since that day the wise ones in education have tended to cry down any transference of discipline from one subject to another. I am not sure what the status of this particular debate is; educational debates have a way of never being settled. But I have been convinced all my life that there was some kind of a transference from that Latin class: whether the discipline transferred or not, something did. I know what it is to be responsible for getting ready, I know when I am ready, and I know there are great satisfactions in knowing and in knowing that you know.

Also, as another professor once told us, “interest is at the heart of any subject, but you must get to the heart of it.” I really did enjoy Latin by my senior year. Watch the satisfaction of a high school chorus under the most rigid discipline the school offers, or the satisfaction of a football team when a perfectly disciplined play goes just right. When discipline goes out of life there is an impoverishment, and the satisfactions are on the far side of the discipline—they can’t be discovered on this side by any sort of arguing. You have to “will to do his will” to know.

The big thing now is to keep things “unstructured.” Let’s have the ardor and not the order. But it won’t do. Lolling around on the floor instead of sitting on chairs may give an air of freedom, but pretty soon it is required that one shall loll on the floor in order to preserve the unstructured approach. Adolescents are laughable when they slouch just the right way and won’t be caught dead without the right messy clothes. I say quickly that they can do this if they want to—but do they have any idea what they are doing? A subculture is indeed a culture, and one learns the rules. Woodstock may go well for three days, but after that someone has to empty the garbage. Since emptying the garbage is not what anyone prefers to do, then either someone makes someone else empty the garbage for the good of the community or some person’s self-discipline is such that he bears this burden for love’s sake, which is a pretty demanding approach to life too, come to think of it.

It is good news, I think, that the Jesus people have come up out of the sea (at least that was the impression I got of them at first from the national publicity) and it is a good thing, I think, that their approach is simple and direct. But a long history of Christianity from Augustine to Dooyeweerd via Pascal and Calvin, not to mention Barth and Tillich, would seem to indicate that there are marvelous riches of the spirit still to be mined, and that these young believers wouldn’t even have a Bible in their hands if someone hadn’t been disciplined enough to master Hebrew and Greek. It is good to hear also that many, many lively groups are turning to Bible study and, even better, are seeking out instructions from ministers and churches. And isn’t it interesting to note that the churches are there to help—to provide shelter from the weather, places to meet, financial aid, various other sorts of assistance—because someone did his homework. And, in a way, that’s what the church—at least that building on the corner—is about: it’s a gathering place to structure what everyone wants to do about his faith, a place for the ordering of ardor.

All this is not foreign to one’s personal devotional life. If one governs what he does only by what he feels, he will feel less and less about doing it. It is an act of the will first, the forming of habits, the development of new hungers, the discovery of the satisfactions on the far side of the disciplines. You read your Bible and you say your prayers and you read that difficult book and you go to church. That’s where it all happens, but it won’t happen until you make your move. New Christian powers are loose in our day; now they need some channeling.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

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