FAITH

If faith is blind,
it is not blind from birth
but feels its way by handholds
remembered from its sighted days
to reach for destinations
barred to those who see.

A man steeped in knowledge of the plays of Shakespeare who has been enriched by their wisdom and subtle reflections on the human psyche reads for the first time Shakespeare’s last work ‘The Tempest’. He finds it disconcerting, odd to say the least; it doesn’t make sense to him in the way that earlier plays did; it lacks dramatic tension; he is not drawn into the sketchily drawn characters of Miranda and Ferdinand, the humour of Trinculo and Stephano seems strained; there is only spectacle where he expects to find insight into character. He thinks to himself that if he had read this play in isolation, not knowing it had been written by the same hand that wrote ‘Hamlet’ and ‘King Lear’, he might well have dismissed it as, apart from a few sublime passages, a work of little merit. But in the light of what he had already learned of Shakespeare, he considers that it might be the quality of his own appreciation that is at fault. In short, his long and detailed experience of Shakespeare persuades him to suspend his rejection. He is aware that his judgement may be too quick and allows the possibility that the great master of theme, character and stagecraft may have had a different agenda in his farewell to the stage, an agenda that is beyond the present level of understanding of his latest reader.

There is a sort of faith here based on experience. Could such an accomplished writer suddenly slip into his dotage and write a second-rate play? Of course, that is a possibility and one not to be forgotten. Even Homer nods, as the Greeks used to say. He does not, this reader coming to ‘The Tempest’ last, blindly assume that any work written by Shakespeare must by that very fact of authorship be of supreme quality. He simply holds back in his assessment of ‘The Tempest’, gives it time, allows that the problem may lie more in him than in the play.

I wonder if this experience might be a useful illustration of what is meant by faith. Faith is not blind, that is to say, it is not unrelated to what has been learned from past experience. It is not a leap into the complete darkness. But it goes beyond experience. It learns from experience and it extends and extrapolates.