Ho ho ho
A member of our Commentariat complains about our misuse of the word, “issues.” But it is part of our “Gangnam style.” It is among the demotic expressions in which we delight. It casts light, or can do, into deep wells of unhappiness & misfortune. We heard once a young lady speak of an uncle who languished on his deathbed. “He has cancer issues,” she explained, as if it were some little fuss putting him out of his humour. Perhaps we should explain that she loved this uncle, & visited him almost every day. And that, to the end, he never approved of the way she dressed. (At his funeral, she appeared in Goth. )
Another for example is the word, “whatever.” We have heard it abused with real genius, & this excites the spirit of rivalry in us. The applications in theology, philosophy, & the other sciences, are downright stupefying. From how many mantraps could we have been sprung by the judicious insertion of this word, “whatever.” The mind buckles!
There are also complaints, in our email, about our promotion of pop videos, can you believe it?
We have a Moravian friend, Aegidius, who is, or at least was before he seemed to lose his television, our authority on pop videos. A man of learning, gravity & grace, he assured us that these videos must be seen; that they were hilarious. In truth, perhaps YouTube is too much of a good thing. But Aegidius kept that television only for the MuchMusic channel. It was thanks to him we discovered, those years back, so inspiring a video as this one.
Of a mediaeval disposition of mind, Aegidius is disinclined to condemn anything. As Dante, he is moved instead to arrange the phenomena of history, lovingly, each into its correct hierarchical position; thus in the Divine “Comedy” making use of all the rungs in Hell. Or lest we be taxed for too narrow a focus upon the heritage of Christendom, let us adduce the wise counsels of that Yogin of Amdo, Shabkar Tsodruk Rangdrol. Follow in the steps of this “laughing philosopher” through the fields & footpaths of a mediaeval Tibet (actually early 19th century), & one will hear echoes of our own wandering scholars, & their laughter in the face of the dangers of the road. And feel with them the great beauty of a world without cars, or televisions; only low-tech highwaymen.
We have lost, as a consequence of that Reformation, & in the scowls of the Puritans, that wonderful mediaeval sense of humour, so simple, even childish, & yet so profound. Verily, we have heard the echo of that breach in Christendom, in the excruciating feminist motto: “That’s not funny.” We have even lost this sense of humour ourself, & would be trying to recover it.
They had parades, for instance, in which they celebrated Fools, & the Lord of Misrule. Confronted himself with a Gay Pride Parade, our Moravian friend did not flinch. He laughed heartily. He found the whole thing hysterically funny. “Let us not be sombre, in the presence of a farce.”
Rabelais could laugh merrily at the spectacle of bad men getting their just deserts, even in this world, through some trivial accident or miscalculation. We read him today & are appalled that he could take such pleasure in great human pain; we scowl. But there was none of this modern censoriousness in Rabelais.
Meanwhile, do good & abjure evil. But not as the Pharisees, or the Pagans.
First, Godspeed in finding your sense of humor. When you do, kindly advise where it was, as perhaps mine is there, too.
I do not mean to be reproachful, feminist, Pharisee, Pagan, or modernly censorious. And if what one is encountering is only a farce, mirth is a fine response. But isn’t it a bit dangerous to laugh at the condemned rungs of the ladder of hell (I don’t think Virgil or Dante did), as that gets rather close to laughing at the condemned souls who occupy the rungs, or whose acts in this life leave them hurtling towards those rungs? The danger that I have misunderstood your intent is high, as whenever I find myself in a possible disagreement.
Sorry, but in my list of things I did not wish to be — reproachful, feminist, Pharisee, Pagan, or modernly censorious — I neglected to include Protestant, or at least Puritan. I regret the oversight. Perhaps in a post sometime, you might sort out the redundancy in that list.
Let us put it this way, Mr Belly. Our own first instinct, when confronted with such farcical scenes as post-modernity may present, is to provide the GPS coordinates for a cruise strike. But then we reflect that God does not need GPS coordinates.
The puzzle to us is that we, less holy, react spontaneously in this way, whereas in several cases we have seen men unquestionably more holy react in the Aegidius way. Were they laughing at the damned?
Aegidius might say, “No, I am laughing at their parade.” Rabelais, perhaps, “The damned are the damned. I am laughing at how his foot caught in the stirrup while he was trying to make his getaway. And how that little oversight led to his rather painful demise.”
For to the thoroughly Christianized mind, such as we find in those Middle Ages, God comes to Judgement. Man is mercifully relieved of that task.
As to Damnation, per se, their instinct was not to dare wish that on their worst enemies. It would be blasphemous. (Of course, mediaeval man was actually capable of blasphemy, unlike the post-modern.)
For variety, let us cite Hilaire Belloc’s memorable remark, that one of the pleasures of Heaven will be hurling rocks at the damned in Hell. We are still puzzling over the theological implications of such a view; perhaps it was pitched too high. But on at least one occasion it helped us resist the temptation to throw an actual rock at someone. (“No, save it,” we said to ourself, & were soon rather giggling.)
Laugh and the world laughs with you;
Weep and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth
But has trouble enough of its own
The opening lines of “Solitude” attributed to Ella Wheller Wilcox for which she received $5 for her effort from the New York Sun in 1883.
I think your Moravian friend, Aegidius, is a wise man for keeping humor close.
I had always heard that urinating on the heads of the damned was one of the great pleasures of heaven. I never heard of throwing rocks at them, as the rocks in heaven would be celestial and not heavy. Then again, where would the urine come from considering that those in heaven do not suffer from thirst?
Maybe the elect get to laugh at the damned who are usually pretentious liberal “progressives” who deserve no quarter either now, or in the hereafter. The one thing a liberal really hates is any type of humour where the target of that humour is not a coservative.
That last word in my post above was “conservative” not “coservative”. As everyone knows, a coservative is a waiter with two heads.
Otio,
If it’s a matter of having to be holy to understand, no wonder I’m uncomprehending. If by “laugh” in this case we mean to rejoice at God’s perfect judgment, yes by all means. But that is in the next life. And once again in danger of being Puritanical, a reference to scripture: no indication of laughing at those burning or left outside the banquet on account of their own foolish choices. The rich man in the Lazarus parable is separated from the better side by an insuperable (but not incommunicable) distance or barrier, but he is not laughed at. And as much as I revere Belloc, if he said that, it was one of the very few stupid things he said. His record is thus much better than mine,
In the thoroughly Christianized mind, God judges and we are relieved of the burden. Beautifully put. But that does not mean we laugh at the condemned or the rungs of hell where they hang.
Somehow, you and the holy ones to whom you refer see a difference between the blasphemy of wishing condemnation on their worst enemies, and laughing at those who are condemned. It seems to me a distinction without a meaningful difference.
Perhaps much of this just comes down to my great aversion to being laughed at, especially by Viscount D’s anti-coservatives, if they turn out to be right about a few things where I hold strong contrary beliefs.
Mr. Belly, it would be a charity to laugh at the damned, as whatever punishment they receive is divinely willed and justified. By laughing, you are adding to their purpose, which is to suffer eternally for their mortal sins.
One can never correct a liberal progressive in this life by using arguments. When one views onself as absolutely right on all matters, and also perfectly virtuous by nature, then contrary opinions are not admissable. Laughter, however, has its mysterious way of bringing the pompous and pretentious down to a level where they can at least see the tops of the heads of ordinary human beings.
Mr Belly, we must now ask by what privileged channel of information you know that these people we are laughing at are damned? How can we with any certainty determine — on the basis of our very limited information about their past present & future — that they may not be saved? And we damned?
Might it even be possible that a man, nearly damned, could be saved by the sound of some saintly laughter? Or might his objection to that laughter be only from false Pride?
Lord Dochart, the retired but never retiring,
Your assessment of the value of laughter in dealing with progressives is obviously correct. But I wonder how well it will work from a prison or psychiatric cell, which in my country (south of Otio’s) may soon be the predicament for, shall we say, people like us, at which point differences on the Novus Ordo will seem quaint. As for laughing at the damned, I had thought they were beyond charity, or pity, or even laughter, making them irrelevant to the saved who are fully occupied worshiping God (see Paradiso, where one finds many smiles — except for Our Lady herself, who smiles not — but no laughter at the damned, no concern for them at all, as they and all earthly sins are a “memory of a memory”). The laughter of the saved would thus reflect only on the saved themselves, which goes back to my original incomprehension.
I looked up your dominion recently, and if Wikipedia is to be believed and yours is the Dochart in Scotland, it’s a wonderful place where you and your family pass this life. Let me know if you welcome long-term visitors.
Otio, my only privileged channel of communication is your column. For those in this life, pop video stars or progressive politicians, you are surely correct that they still have the opportunity to repent (though I really have to wonder if VP Biden and a few others are exceptions), and even after they die those of us who remain cannot know what God decided about them. If they are committing sins as the Church teaches sin to be, I suppose we can try to laugh them towards the confessional, but it does seem an odd approach to such grave matters, about as effective as sicking an ecclesial SWAT team on them would be. You referred to the rungs of Hell and, later, to throwing rocks at the damned as a pleasure for those in Heaven, so I thought we had shifted from the temporal to the eternal, in which case my previous comment to Lord D may be of use.
If Lord Belly of Beast is under the impression we supply a privileged channel to the Most High, we must quickly disillusion him. We send messages but receive no replies. The best we can offer is a variation on the proud boast of dear old salvageable Oscar Wilde: “We all have our heads in the gutter, but some of us have our feet in the stars.”
Your idea of “ecclesiastical SWAT teams” has much merit. If we can at least find someone with a privileged channel to the Vatican, we will pass that one along.
A deliciously wise post, David. Bravo.
Speaking of Gay Pride Parades: the first time I was confronted with one was in Paris in 1995, after three years living in India. I had been in Paris only two days and was still experiencing “culture shock.” Try to imagine the bewildered expression on my face when I stepped outside the entrance to my small flat to witness, well, the “event.”
All I wanted to do was cross the street, but that looked (nearly) out of the question. I noticed a small frail-looking elderly woman dressed in black on the nearby corner. I asked her (in my poor French) if she too was waiting to cross. Indeed she was, and we stood there together until the floats and parade people had passed. Then she took my arm and we slowly crossed the street. On the other side, she watched the parade round a corner far off, and glanced back at me, smiled, shrugged her shoulders, then gave me a kiss on the cheek. I felt like I’d been touched by the spirit of a vanished Paris. The Paris I knew from old films and books.
Little did I know that in a few days a terrorist bomb would explode in the Metro, not far from where I was staying. Algerians everyone said. By a Grace I don’t deserve I wasn’t on the Metro that day.
Anyway, David, here’s hoping that you and yours have a Merry Christmas.
Mr. Belly, the Dochart that is part of my exalted name is a small creek near Arnprior, Ontario, that runs into the Ottawa River. It was named, of course, from the Dochart in Scotland.
As per the damned, we must recall Psalm 57:11 “The just shall rejoice when he shall see the revenge: he shall wash his hands in the blood of the sinner.”
Then again, St. Thomas has quite a lot to say on this matter, so it is best to read him to discover if the elect get to laugh at and mock the damned. (Perhaps too much wishful thinking on my part.)
My paternal Grandfather never really approved of the beard I wore in College. However, he always welcomed me when I visited him.
David, all this talk about laughter and videos brought St. Benedict to mind.
His Rule has something to say on darned near everything and reading it brings a peace to my mind and heart. He talks about silence, idle words and frivolity in speech – he really does not like giggles and laughter at all.
The original grinch eh? But I think he could speak to our use of words in a way that would bring home the fact that we must account to God for them. Would that include words we read? Would that include words/pictures we see?
Will our tongues burn with a special heat in Purgatory for laughing when we should weep?
At great risk to DW’s new quality standards, I will venture into theological analysis. According to a 16th century Rabelaisian translation of Eponymus’ Musings on Mecca and other Topics: A spontaneous chuckle at images of the Chosen throwing stones at, or relieving themselves on, the Damned will not preclude a spot in Heaven. Prolonged or public laughter at stoning or acid washing one’s enemies will put one on probation. Public widdling, or even exhortation to widdle, on anyone will earn a reservation in Hades. Hope this helps.
So what, we wonder, would Saint Benedict prefer? That we giggle at our own anger & amour-propre? Or that we brain the guy with a rock? Believe us, there are times when it is down to those options.
The Benedictine Rule is monastic, & it enjoins silence in retreat from the world. We have ourself felt called short reading it, & distressed by the very passages on which Mrs Barbara focuses, which on the face of them would put humorous natterers like Chesterton in Hell, & leave poor joyful Benedict himself stuck in Heaven with Calvin, Knox, & a million Cathars.
Or my hero Saint Thomas More: often laughing, characteristically droll, & even frivolous sometimes. Not a weeper at all, but cracking jokes all the way to the axeman. Laughed at many things that would appal us, & when confuting Martin Luther descended into the most vulgar imaginable language. On a strict interpretation of Saint Benedict’s rules, it seems to us that he & pretty much every other Saint is done for. For the lot of them are joyful — in many, many different ways — & hardly a one is ever pinched.
Our conclusion has been that there are times & seasons; & that there is actually a danger in trying to achieve monastic goals not only above one’s capacity, but inappropriate to one’s station in life.
Very big topic this, to which we will surely return. Wish we could get a sound priest to weigh in; but Perfesser Estey has been very helpful.
I occasionally say that in humor sometimes the truth leaks out.
In humour, Mr Cassels, & in poetry. One of our favourite aphorisms of Wallace Stevens: “Prose is the official view of Being. Poetry is the unofficial view.”