More than a Ghost

God of the Angel Armies in Culture

*These thoughts were shared at a salon in Newport Beach on Sunday, November 17 alongside Dana Gioia, James Matthew Wilson, Joshua Hren and Hannah Watson. Special thanks to all those who called us together to share about the beautiful things God is doing in culture!

Flannery O’Connor once called the South “Christ-haunted.” She was talking about the average reader “fearing,” in her words, “that he may be formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive,” she says. “They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature.” It’s a brilliant insight about her 1950s era culture. However, I wonder if we need a different metaphor from “ghost.” While Christ is unseen by so many, he is more than a ghost. He is alive and active.

I was teaching Virgil’s Aeneid this past week. In book II Aeneas is relaying his adventures to Queen Dido of Carthage. He must justify to this queen why he didn’t die heroically in Troy as the Greeks sieged it. As Aeneas charged into the burning city, his goddess mother Venus intervened to prevent him. He was acting without being able to see clearly—his humanness had blinded him from observing divine action. Venus says, “I’ll sweep [the mist] away/ so murky, dark, and swirling around you now,/ it clouds your vision, dulls your mortal sight.” (II.748-750).  Once she dissipates the mist, Aeneas witnesses Neptune “ripping up the entire city by her roots” and Juno leading the Greeks out of the ships, Pallas Minerva flaming forth, even Zeus himself “filling the Greek hearts with courage.” This vision undoes his desire to save the old Troy, and he acquiesces to the will of the gods to flee the city with his family and found a new Troy elsewhere.