What We Fear (Plagues and Dracula) | John Mark N. Reynolds – Patheos

What we love defines our best possibilities and what wefearour worst.

Love,desire, can be fuel to reason, but fear breaks down our ability to think. Fear is passion with no possibility of noble action, only of ever more evil possibilities. Love, like any virtue, can be twisted and so misused. Our charity may be false or weakened byfearor a desire forpower.

Fear, as I am using the word, is aterror that is pure aversion. You cannot love what you fear and perfect love will cast out all fear. There is an English use of fear that can mean a reverence or appropriate respect for power, the fear of the lord and of the Lord! This isnot the sort of fear that kills. We should have a reverential awe when facing the power of a nuclear reactor, the Sun, or (most of all) God omnipotent.

This is reasonable.

Fear claws at us in the night and unmans us. This is, must be, the enemy of reasoned action. If welove truly, then we will do what is best for the beloved. In the time of a virus, we will keep calm, have greatrespect and awe for the terrible power of that virus, but we will not panic. Panic is the child of fear.

The College is readingDracula at present in a plague year. This underrated novel, ignore all the motion pictures, is a brilliant exposition ofwhat we fear.Dracula is an ancient terror that, the author reminds us constantly, is no longer believable until he appears and upturns the assumptions of the late Victorian era. He is a throwback, something thatwe believed defeated.

Science is not the problem. Scientists help defeat Dracula. A trouble for our heroes in the novel is an overconfidence in scientism, that we have nature cracked and broken, understood and reduced to a servant. We have not, because nature is not merelystuff.There isanother world and if this world intersects with our world, then this may overthrow all our comfortable assumptions.

We might face an apocalypse, even if this time we probably do not. Whatever happens, we almost wish to panic as we know thatthis could be a forerunner forthat: an anti-Baptist warning us of the soon coming of the antichrist.

What does happen is the reverse of fear,shaking our confidence in the regular order of modern society. Dracula stands for the fearful thing for Victorians and can be used for us as well. Dracula is the unexpected, uncontrollable, that makes us panic.

How can we fight this unearthly thing?

Thepeasantsin the early portions of theDracula have a reverential awe of the vampire, buttheyhave a crucifix, prayers, and a sensible view of how to avoid the evil. A few have been co-opted to become servants of evil. They are notafraid, not the way the moderns will be later in the book.

Against this Bram Stoker puts the man ofreason. He knows science, can even be a scientist. He studies the problem and proposes a solution. He does sowithout fear, though with respect for the power of the vampire.

Be rational. Be loving. Fear not.

That is the message of Christianity in the time of Dracula.

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What We Fear (Plagues and Dracula) | John Mark N. Reynolds - Patheos

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Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero
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