Copious Flowers

Welcome. I’m Jesse Hake. My writing here is a modest affair, but David Bentley Hart has said that the title of this newsletter “may be among the best publication names on the platform.” Even more effusively, his brother and fellow author Addison Hodges Hart has kindly said of me: “I unreservedly recommend subscribing to his page.” Others such as Matthew J. Milliner have also been far too generous in recommending my essays. Evidently, if you enjoy something here, you are not entirely alone.

Copious Flowers is named for the practice of keeping a florilegium (or commonplace book). This habit has been extolled by many, including Desiderius Erasmus, the author of Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style. Florilegium compilation points to the old and widespread image of bees gathering goodness from a wealth of blossoms. Saint Basil the Great uses this image famously in his “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature” (c. 370), and Amy Hunt of The Occidental Tourist shared the prayer “A Bee Among Flowers” by Saint John Mauropous (c. 1050) with me as another example: “living among books like a bee among flowers, nourishing myself on words like a grasshopper in the dew, content to live only in the present, demanding nothing save salvation.”1

My first posts under the Copious Flowers name were on a blog that I maintained from June 2011 through January 2022. For a few years after that, I supported a team writing site with Jeremiah Carey and several others. In July 2023, I started this subscription newsletter. While no longer a florilegium, it still reflects the threads of my reading life and continues to have plenty of passages quoted at length. The two living writers who I most admire are Wendell Berry and David Bentley Hart. See here for tips on how to get started with reading Hart.

I’ve been a K-12 school teacher or administrator for most of my adult life, including high school and college classes in history, world religions, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy as well as serving for seven years as a K-12 academic dean and principal at Logos Academy in York, Pennsylvania. I am the director at ClassicalU.com (which provides a subscription service for educators within the renewal of the classical and liberal arts with over 100 video courses). Some of my articles shared elsewhere include:

• “The gods present their arguments” is my May 2025 review in The Christian Century of David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods.

• “Chapter 4: God’s Sparrows and Our Resurrection: Animals in the Restoration of All Things” is my contribution to this book (Quoir, April 2025). My chapter engages with the thought of the Apostle Paul, church fathers, C. S. Lewis and many others on the topic of animals in the kingdom of God.

• English text and notes from the Russian text of Bishop Basil Rodzianko’s 1996 book The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Holy Fathers. Find the full book here at: Part 1 and Part 2.

• The Russell Kirk Center invited me to review Andrew Kern’s book Unless the Lord Builds the House: Shared Foundations for Christian Education. This book was a delight to read, and my review was published here.

• A review of “Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz” for Principia: A Journal of Classical Education in 2022

• “A Human Fall From Out of Another Kind of Time” at Eclectic Orthodoxy in March 2024.

• “Building Folklore Wealth” for Front Porch Republic in 2019

• “The Hagia Sophia and Secularism’s Unquestioned Authority” for Jacob’s Well (Orthodox Church in America, Diocese of New York and New Jersey) in 2022

• “Religiō as a Universal Human Quality: On the Harmony of Faith Traditions” for Jacob’s Well (Orthodox Church in America, Diocese of New York and New Jersey) in 2023

• “Roland in Moonlight: Finding a Muse Amid the Hellscape of Modernity” for Macrina Magazine in 2021

• “Can Christianity be Saved by Fairies?” for New Eden in 2023

• “Our Mother’s Womb: An Advent Reflection” for New Eden in 2021

I’ve also had the privilege of writing the publishers notes at the start of The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature by Dr. Anika Prather and Dr. Angel Adams Parham as well as A New Natural Philosophy: Recovering a Natural Science and Christian Pedagogy by Ravi Scott Jain, Chris Hall, and Robbie Andreasen.

Here is the passage from “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature” by Saint Basil the Great on the blessings available in pagan literature:

For just as bees know how to extract honey from flowers, which to men are agreeable only for their fragrance and color, even so here also those who look for something more than pleasure and enjoyment in such writers may derive profit for their souls.

A later example is Desiderius Erasmus as he describes the daughters of his good friend Thomas More:

As they flit like so many little bees between Greek and Latin authors of every species, here noting down something to imitate, here culling some notable saying to put into practice in their behavior, there getting by heart some witty anecdote to relate among their friends, you would swear you were watching the Muses at graceful play in the lovely pastures of Mount Helicon, gathering flowers and marjoram to make well-woven garlands.

Extending the flower imagery, I especially love parallels between flowers and stars. One example is in the story “Are You Alright?” by Wendell Berry:

Neither of us thought to use a flashlight, though we each had one, nor did we talk. The moon gave plenty of light. We could see everything—underfoot the blooms of twin-leaf, bloodroot, rue anemone, the little stars of spring beauties, and overhead the littlest branches, even the blooms on the sugar maples. The ground was soft from the rain, and we hardly made a sound. The flowers around us seemed to float in the shadows so that we walked like waders among stars, uncertain how far down to put our feet.

…It was a long walk because we had to go around the inlets of the backwater that lay in every swag and hollow. Way off, now and again, we could hear the owls. Once we startled a deer and stood still while it plunged away into the shadows. And always we were walking among flowers. I wanted to keep thinking that they were like stars, but after a while I could not think so. They were not like stars. They did not have that hard, distant glitter. And yet in their pale, peaceful way, they shone. They collected their little share of light and gave it back. Now and then, when we came to an especially thick patch of them, Elton would point. Or he would raise his hand and we would stop a minute and listen to the owls.

As seen in several wonderful places such as “The Starlight Night” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, flowers and stars and eyes all shine with reflected and living light. Gandalf says upon passing some flowers in The Two Towers: “How fair are the bright eyes in the grass!”

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