Well, I’ll stop the description of the total stereotypical dude right there and turn my attention to the broader principle: that every man, woman, and child is ultimately feminine.  Masculine and feminine is rather defined by degrees as far as we are usually concerned.  Men are only “masculine” because they are more masculine than women.  Some men are more masculine than others.  But on a purely objective scale, all may be defined as feminine.

What is masculine and feminine?  Well, first what is it not?  It does not refer specifically to the biological.  Men are men, and women are women, and there is a clear definition there.  Rather, the masculine and the feminine is a function of speech.  It does not describe anatomy, primarily.  Rather, it describes function of action.  The masculine acts.  The feminine is acted upon.  The masculine is initiates and the feminine responds.  This is common to virtually every language.

And that is why we may rightly say that ultimately all mankind is feminine.  Because we are, and are to be responsive.

C.S. Lewis says, in the context of a discussion of the priestly role of men:

Only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him.

There is definitely something to be said for this.  The reason why all the human race is ultimately feminine is because God initiates.  Man responds.  When God breaths life into dust and speaks the imperative: live, man lives.

Likewise, Christ initiates His covenant with us, His people, and we respond, receiving Him in faith.  Each one of us as an individual received the call of God and responded to Christ’s sacrifice.  Corporately, we, the Church, are the Bride.  Christ initiated this relationship on the cosmic scale as well, taking on our humanity and coming to redeem his beloved.

We were lost.  Dead.  He revived us, and we responded by living.  Jesus’ Bride receives Him in faith and in love.  The Church is forever “she” to Him.

So what does that mean for us guys?  Well, first, be masculine in relation to those who are properly feminine (women).  Masculinity initiates and leads, protects, guards, and courts.  That is the picture God has painted in His creation of humankind.  That is why men are to take the commission and to represent Christ to the Church corporate, as Lewis suggests.

Second, get in touch with the feminine.  By this I mean: submit to God’s ordained authority of Church, family and government.  Don’t be so caught up in your masculinity that you forget that you are feminine as well—that you refuse to receive and respond, insisting on always being the initiator.  For we all must receive and respond to Christ.

Therefore, cultivate responsiveness.  If that means watching a sappy movie or two, taking a dance class (which actually is an exercise of a man’s masculine, which I might write about at a later date), or reading and actually feeling poetry, so be it.

. . . we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us.

Further reading:

C.S. Lewis on Priestesses

Origin of Speech, by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

“If the theory of love were perfectly clear to you and Love’s dart had ever touched you, your own feelings would have shown you that love cannot exist without jealousy, because . . . jealousy between lovers is commended by every man who is experienced in love . . .”

So said Andreas Capellanus, the scribe of The Art of Courtly Love, during the reign of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in England. It was the time of chivalry and pageantry, when kings and knights marched boldly to Crusade in the Holy Land . . . or to rape and plunder their neighbors—whichever impulse took them first.

Capellanus revolutionized the idea of romantic love. There is some debate over whether he was being totally serious about what he was writing. So much of Courtly Love oozes with cynicism and satire. In any case, I ran across this particular “rule” of courtly love earlier today while reading a book, and that made me stop and think.

Is this statement true? Is love really impossible without jealousy? Shouldn’t true love be generous, giving and forgiving, tolerant, and unconditional? I suppose that would require one to define jealousy. First, I think we must distinguish it from envy. Often the two are confused with one another. But envy requires an object—a person to be envious of. When one envies, one covets something that object of envy possesses.

On the other hand, jealousy is an attitude. A particular way of regarding a relationship. A man might be a jealous person without having anyone to be jealous of. Capellanus defines jealousy thus:

“Now jealousy is a true emotion whereby we greatly fear that the substance of our love may be weakened by some defect in serving the desires of our beloved, and it is an anxiety lest our love may not be returned, and it is a suspicion of the beloved, but without any shameful thought.”

That last is, as he makes clear later, any “shameful thought” regarding the beloved’s fidelity. In other words, “suspicion” of faithlessness without actually believing that the beloved is unfaithful. Well, that is worded a bit subjectively for a definition, so let’s abstract it a little bit. Essentially, jealousy is the lover’s desire for the beloved to requite one’s affections and the displeasure the lover has in the case that the beloved does not, and especially, at the notion that the beloved might love another.

Okay, so where am I going with this? I had a couple observations regarding this definition of jealousy.

First, I think Capellanus is correct. Without this kind of jealousy, it is impossible to love. Today’s idea of free-wheeling male-to-female and casual-intimate relationships, which is so glorified and idealized in modern media and story is not love. Any “love” that cares not whether the beloved is exclusively faithful is false. That means “you do whatever you like with whomever you like” is something entirely other than love.

Secondly, jealousy is a reflection of the divine, just as love is a reflection of the divine.

For YHWH your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
~Deuteronomy 4:24

The covenant God of Israel gets a lot of flack because skeptics look at this verse and others like it and say, “God is jealous? What kind of an almighty deity would be subject to such a petty emotion as jealousy? Surely God, if he/she/it does exist, is above that.”

But apply my distillation of Capellanus’s definition of jealousy, and one then reads this to mean that YHWH Elohim desires for his chosen people to love Him (with all their heart and soul and mind), and is most displeased when they do not love Him, choosing instead to go after idols and strange gods.

When people say today that so-and-so is “not a jealous man,” it’s usually intended as a compliment. But a lover who does not urgently desire the affections of the beloved and cares little whether or not his beloved loves someone else is no lover at all. Capellanus observes that such a lover will not go to any great length to secure the affections of the beloved. He has no concern that what he does will offend or displease his beloved, and he will not exhibit any of the other things that Capellanus has on his list of things that lovers do, because he doesn’t care enough to do so.

An un-jealous God would be incapable of the covenant sacrificial love with which YHWH regards his chosen people. Those who say that God should be above jealousy are in fact saying that God should be above loving them. If you say “God is so great that he does not care what I do. He is above being offended by such a little thing as me,” you are really saying, “I am so insignificant that God cannot and does not love me. And by the way, I don’t want him to.” Which is a truly terrifying thing to say.

We ought to be thankful for God’s jealousy. It is precisely because God loves that He is jealous. And it is because He is jealous that He loves. Were it not for his jealousy, He would not have cared whether we wandered in sin and darkness, chasing false gods and destroying ourselves with them. It is because of God’s jealous love—because of His desire that we should love Him as He loves us—that He sent Jesus, his only Son, to reclaim us.

God loves perfectly, and he is perfectly jealous. When man is jealous, even as when man loves, he is imperfect. That does not mean that jealousy of itself is sinful. Rather, it is when envy and covetousness creep in and taint jealousy that it becomes sin. God loves perfectly, and his love for his people is a jealous love. So we must conclude that in order to love more perfectly as God loves, we also must be jealous in our love.

On the point of jealousy, Capellanus is correct in the most essential sense. A love that is not jealous is not love, and he who is not jealous cannot love.

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of YHWH.
~Song of Solomon 8:6

Sources and additional reading:

Capellanus’s Rules of Courtly Love

The Art of Courtly Love (at Google Books)

I guess I was always going to get around to doing this anyway, so I might as well get it out of my system. What did I think of Twilight and its three sequels? I’ll try to write this review in broad strokes rather than dwelling on details, but there will be spoilers, so if you haven’t read the books and don’t want to know what happens . . . stop reading here.

Writing Style
Stephanie Meyer can paint a scene. She knows just the right details to sprinkle into her descriptions for the scenery to come to life in the reader’s head. The emotions of her characters are thick and tangible, causing the reader to feel the same things in empathy. Sometimes, however, she can stumble over her own prose, awkwardly using the same word twice or even thrice within one paragraph and unintentionally drawing attention to it. A zap-word, we call it. The dialog is generally passable, and often reverberates effectively with tension and emotion. Stephanie Meyer certainly knows how to tell a story. I’d file her along with Terry Goodkind into the category of “not such a great writer, but incredible storyteller.”

Thematic Elements
On the surface, the story is about a human and a vampire falling in love and making things work. Pretty silly, right? I know some people who are put off by the premise alone. But in the case of all fantasy, there are more fundamental issues in play than the surface details. Essentially, the theme that makes the story so compelling is the apparent impossibility of Bella and Edward’s love, made so because of the variance in their personal backgrounds, and the monumental decisions of self-sacrifice both of them make to be together. And that is a very real, very human experience, regardless of whether Edward Cullen has a heartbeat or not.

Characterization
The mystery that is Edward Cullen and his siblings immediately grabs you, stringing you out as you wait to discover the next thing about them. After the deeper mysteries have been revealed, the story keeps you going. Edward is sometimes rather controlling and exhibits some stalker-like behavior at first. Some of his actions are forgivable only because they’re done specifically with Bella’s personal safety in mind. But he later learns how to loosen his grip. Contrary to popular belief, he isn’t perfect, and displays some very human flaws.

Bella . . . well, she’s there. Her awkwardness and her self-deprecating humor are enough to convince the reader that she actually is human. Once in a while she feels the need to remind you of that fact with a panicky emotional overreaction, which can be quite amusing in itself. Usually she’s likable enough, and Meyer’s rendering of her emotions never fails to draw empathy, but overall, I don’t think she’s a very deep character. Her primary redeeming quality is the earnestness and constance of her love for Edward, although that does waver ever so briefly. Her morose reflections in New Moon may get a bit annoying though for some, though they didn’t really bother me.

Jacob, the Native American boy turned werewolf, is a likable and endearing character at first who turns into a self-absorbed vindictive jerk who doesn’t know how to let things be. I did not particularly enjoy his point of view section in Breaking Dawn all that much.

Alice rocks. ‘Nuff said about that.

Worldview
The story of Bella and Edward has some good qualities to it, along with a major, and ultimately fatal fault.

First, I must note that the biggest criticism I’ve seen in general reviews is the fact that Bella is a bad example for young women because she marries and then conceives a child so young, at age 18, before going to college. Scandalously, she accomplishes all this with the first guy she’s ever been in love with! Well, pardon me, but that’s a much better example than the pre-marital, free-love, trial-and-error sexual license that is so much more pervasive in young adult cultural icons. If it weren’t for the story’s fatal fault, I’d applaud it.

First the good:

Twilight gives props to creationism when Edward says there is no way he and Bella could have evolved by chance, and that the same creator who designed her must have designed him as well. Not an issue I expected to come up in a vampire story.

The story is radically pro-life. Bella refuses to give up her unborn baby even though keeping it means certain death. No ordinary baby this, since it’s also Edward’s child, it breaks bones when it kicks and demands human blood for nourishment (acquired from hospital donor banks). The delivery scene is like something out of a horror film.

The story is pro-marriage. Edward refuses to have relations with Bella before marriage, and refuses to turn her into a vampire until they are married. Bella has no such qualms and initially throws a fit about both, but she eventually comes to recognize the beauty of marriage and married life.

The story is pro-family . . . somewhat. Bella initially hides her relationship with Edward from her father, and the story appears to justify it by circumstance. It’s interesting to note that while Bella is the human, her parents are divorced and she’s rather distrusting of them. On the other hand, the Cullens are a model family, with a warmth and closeness between parents and most of the siblings, with respected authority structures and familial care, and little in the way of secrecy. The interior of Carlisle Cullen’s house is decorated by a giant cross . . . and it isn’t upside down.

The fatal fault:

The great sticking point of the Twilight Saga is entirely human in nature, and has nothing to do with it being a vampire story, which, as I said, is almost incidental backdrop for the thematic material. The real problem with the story is that it deifies romantic love. Love without the Triune God? As Admiral Ackbar says in Return of the Jedi, “It’s a trap!”

Certainly, Twilight is not alone. There are hundreds of love stories that do the same. In fact, any non-Christian love story will ultimately deify romantic love. But usually they’re more subtle. When Bella begins to say things like “I’d sacrifice my own soul to be with Edward for eternity,” that sort of brings the issue front and center. This deification displays itself in some weird and ugly ways, particularly in Breaking Dawn, which I won’t go into here.

Interestingly enough, Twilight models itself largely on the story of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which the lovers also stumble into the pitfall of deifying romantic love. Bella’s eagerness to offer her soul on the altar of love at all costs merely echoes Juliet’s appeal to Romeo to “swear by thy gracious self, which is the god of my idolatry.”

The difference between Twilight and Romeo and Juliet is that while Shakespeare’s play is a cautionary tale ending in tragedy, Bella and Edward commit the same offense but get to live happily ever after. While Romeo and Juliet warns young people against the dangers of deifying romantic love, Twilight positively revels in it.

Psychology
I’m adding this section after some discussion with Hannah Roorda and Laura LaPrise. It’s sort of a subset of the Worldview section, but I decided to separate it out.

There is a downfall to Stephanie Meyer’s deftly painted and highly empathetic characters. What they feel, the reader is made to feel as well. Be that love, fear, anxiety, depression, contentment, obsession, or physical desire. There is admittedly a great deal of difference between Twilight‘s long passages describing aching physical need for a person of the opposite sex and the interaction between them in Bella’s first person point of view and Shakespeare’s almost comically brief: They kiss.

Of course, Romeo and Juliet was written to be acted out on the stage, and that accounts for the brevity in the text. But prose has a powerful effect on the impressionable mind. Especially for those with vivid imaginations. Meyer avoids being graphic or explicit, but she gives more than enough for a reader to easily fill in the blanks.

Something should be said about the psychology involved in the widespread fan fascination with Edward. Another review observed, and I agree, that his appeal is because he offers to young women something they don’t get from real men.

In some ways, he is more of a man than most real men today. He sacrifices his needs and his very self against his own nature because he loves Bella. He takes control of situations, albeit sometimes with a heavy hand. He is the ultimate protector, disregarding even his own safety. And his love for Bella doesn’t drive him to give in to her every whim. He sets boundaries and sticks to them, more or less. Does this remind us of anything? It should. When a man displays these qualities in any combination and to any extent, young women are “wired” to respond in a certain way. Even if those qualities are displayed imperfectly. There is a theological reason for that.

I think when a cultural phenomenon like Twilight emerges, we should take notice of what exactly the appeal is. It might even shock us into realizing something we’ve been missing. Some will object that there are better materials to teach us that. I don’t doubt there are. The Bible is a good start. But sometimes a cultural phenomenon with its immediacy has more shock value for waking people up than a stack of “good” books.

Men today have forgotten how to be men. The feminist movement and the cry for total equality in roles as well as hierarchy has encouraged them to bend the authority structure and their very behavior to accommodate assertive women. Even those who don’t agree with feminism have been affected by a culture that neuters men and tries to empower women over them. When men won’t act like men, women are forced to step up and take control, whether they want to or not. But that goes against the natural created order. Men are still men, and women are still women. They innately know there’s something wrong with that picture. Men are responsible to lead, and women are created to follow.

Stephanie Meyer comes along and gives women something they are really looking for in a vampire named Edward Cullen. No, he’s not perfect. He has personality flaws. But Meyer has taken an ideal of masculinity and characterized it, exaggerating the virtues along with the faults. Young women everywhere have responded.

It’s interesting to note that the backlash against the series comes largely from two directions. Christians who are understandably and justifiably concerned with the effect that the series’ sensuality will have on young people . . . and feminists who can’t tolerate Bella’s submission of self to Edward.

Conclusion
I enjoyed the Twilight Saga while I was reading it (or rather, while I was listening to it on unabridged audio book). I am a quite a sucker for grand romantic tales of impossible love realized. But objectively, the Twilight Saga has a couple serious problems that would stop me from recommending it to anyone who might be especially susceptible to getting caught up in it all . . . which unfortunately includes most of its target audience of teen girls. I’d probably be more likely to recommend it to guys.

Will I read any additions to the series? Oh . . . probably. After all, it really is quite a rush.

Fiction is intended first to entertain.  Not to educate.  Fiction in a historical setting can and should be very educational, but must not interfere with the first and primary goal.  By all means, educate the reader.  But don’t make him feel like he’s being educated.

Do not be pretentious.  That goes for exposition as well as for dialog.  It is a good rule for all fiction, but one that is especially easy to break in historical fiction.  In general, keep to the rules of Strunk and White.  Use as many words as necessary and not a single one more.  Above all, avoid Victorian style histrionics.

Do not jolt the reader out of the story.  If you have a historical detail that you believe to be important to the story, weave it into the exposition or the dialog.  Don’t just drop it onto the reader in an undisguised parenthetical form.  Fiction is about the illusion of reality.  Do not dispel the illusion by reminding the reader that it is fiction.  The reader is not going to be impressed with the author’s knowledge of history or period if he feels like he is reading a textbook.

Do not jolt the reader out of the story (and that is not a mistaken repitition).  The author, along with his personal view and opinions, should be invisible.  The author is always behind the scenes, working the plot, laying down exposition, and directing the flow of dialog to subliminally influence the reader’s perception.  The writer should work to put a thought, perception, or an image in the reader’s mind as if she were the one who first thought of it.  It takes more skill and effort than stepping up to the soapbox and preaching to the reader, but in the end it is much more effective, both as fiction and as instruction.

Do your research.  Nothing jolts the reader out of the story more than glaringly anachronistic details, events, or dialog style.  Make sure you know your history.  Just because this is fiction does not give you the liberty to make things up entirely. If you must change actual details, be sure you know you are changing them, and why.  History is God’s story.  Treat it with respect.

Finally, be a writer, not merely a scholar.  In fiction, excellent writing can make some minor historical inaccuracies (such as time compression, geographic fudging, etc.) excusable, but historical accuracy cannot make up for slipshod prose.