Criticism Willingly Given and Freely Received

A few years ago I came across an article in the National Review called The Duty of Harsh Criticism.

The National Review has a tagline "Where intellects collide," so most National Review articles are intended to be read by intellectuals.

The Duty of Harsh Criticism was written in 1914 by a twenty-one-year-old woman named Cicely Isabel Fairfield (picture left), who wrote under the pen name Rebecca West.

Rebecca believed that was the duty of free-thinkers to listen in a disrespectful manner.

In her mind,  criticism should be the norm.

And, according to West, critical thinking has become a lost art which is in need of recovery. Listen to just one paragraph from her 1914 article:

"There is a serious duty before us, the duty of listening to our geniuses in a disrespectful manner. Criticism matters as it never did in the past, because of the present pride of great writers. They take all life as their province to-day. Formerly they sat in their studies, and thinking only of the emotional life of mankind—thinking therefore with comparative ease, of the color of life and not of its form—devised a score or so of stories before death came. Now, their pride telling them that if time would but stand still they could explain all life, they start on a breakneck journey across the world. They are tormented by the thought of time; they halt by no event, but look down upon it as they pass, cry out their impressions, and gallop on. Often it happens that because of their haste they receive a blurred impression or transmit it to their readers roughly and without precision. And just as it was the duty of the students of Kelvin the mathematician to correct his errors in arithmetic, so it is the duty of critics to rebuke these hastinesses of these writers, lest the blurred impressions weaken the surrounding mental fabric and their rough transmissions frustrate the mission of genius on earth."

It may take two or three times to comprehend the paragraph above.

I will summarize it:

"Critical readers and listeners are needed to keep professional writers and speakers sharp. Prideful, self-absorbed people despise criticism, but those who treasure receiving it and freely give it become the genuine experts." 

Could it be that one of the reasons Christian writers, speakers, and leaders are often puerile, vague, and formulaic is because we have wrongly associated criticism with evil?

Criticism must begin at the house of God.

It is to be given willingly and it is to be received freely.

Practicing the lost art of criticism is the only way to prevent "blurred impressions" of the truth of Christ.