This is the deepest subject

This is the deepest subject; don't know if I'll articulate it; but I've been driven, driven, driven by literature (the themes and subjects of good and great novels) - and also by reading good literary criticism - towards the content of the book Human Nature in its Fourfold State. Why? Because HNFS presents every theme and subject one finds in such works at the rock bed foundational level. On each page of HNFS you can see a theme an entire great novel can be composed on. (And the secular literary critics will sense it and see the power and meaningfulness, even while missing - or denying - the Biblical truth connection. I.e. the human condition as the Bible explains it and as it is manifested in life. In fact, these are the very themes critics *look for* in works of literature to distinguish such works from what they deem more middlebrow works.) Even in the rebellion from those truths in great and good literature are those truths manifested.

Human Nature in its Fourfold State is unique as a doctrinal work in presenting these Biblical truths in a way where we see the power and reality in them just as they manifest in all great literature, under the surface.

So when I see the literary critic struggling with determining the worth of one writer or another and grappling with themes and so on I'm driven to the foundational raw material it all manifests from and Human Nature in its Fourfold State is the unique work of Biblical doctrine that captures it. (Again, this should go without saying, but... I'm not saying Boston's great work has material in it other works of on-the-mark Christian doctrine don't have, just that it is unique in presenting biblical doctrine and understanding in a context and in a way that enables one to see such themes in other realms such as great literature. You read it and you 'see' this is the raw material of Shakespeare.)

For instance (a small, trivial example) think of how a secular or atheist critic can write an entire book on Kafka or Samuel Beckett writing on the theme that their mother is unclean (I just made that up). Or maybe an actual example, perhaps a Faulkner depicting the dead mother rotting and stinking in her coffin in As I Lay Dying.

So on page 65 of Human Nature in its Fourfold State Boston quotes Job 14:4 and talking of Adam's sin asks who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one. If the root be corrupt, so must the branches be. It is such as makes man's days full of trouble. Every person that is born of the course of nature is born unclean. Man is born of a woman.

Would Kafka or Beckett (or Faulkner) understand the theme? Not necessarily. Just hitting on it and writing around it without totally snuffing it out is enough for what they are doing. Inspired writers will touch on or penetrate the theme and expose it in different ways to differing levels of truth and vision and power. Some writers will be perverse and take the Devil's side. "Mother is clean." The atheist Thomas Hardy did this with his fiction (presenting antagonists as the hero, which is not the same thing as creating an anti-hero). This is why his novels are strangely 'off', and without life, despite his skill in depicting nature and so on.