Essays in Idleness

My title is the North American variant on just one of the many fine sausages of Bologna, made traditionally not with yak meat, but from pork ground finely together with wee blobs of delicious lard. American inspectors force the manufacturers to conceal these blobs, perhaps on the theory that what you can’t see won’t hurt you. But if the lard’s not there, the stuff is inedible. It is bland, like a Mortadella, but when made properly (almost never in the big meat factories) it is sublimely bland, both in taste and texture. A worthy substitute for my mock chicken, adored in childhood. I love overstated spicy food. But I also love the understated, such as real Wien wieners and mild “ballpark” (Montreal kosher) mustard, sweet green relish, and French processed cheese, in a bun. (I believe this is called a “hot dog.”) I love foods that whisper, as well as foods that shout. But they should whisper affectionately.

The term baloney is also rightly applied to “foolish and deceptive talk,” perhaps originally as a variant of ballyhoo (“blarny, humbug”), bally having been a euphemism for “bloody,” later applied to cheaply cured woods in the manufacture of inferior fishing schooners, that tended to break up in North Atlantic storms. By some otherwise mute inglorious Milton, these concepts were all brilliantly “Yanked” together.

But as a connoisseur of suspicious etymologies, in the grand philosophical tradition, I am myself inclined to substitute another explanation. I argue that the association of Bologna — the city of the ancient university — with foolish and deceptive talk, might be the origin of the idea. And that this notion first spread in the Italian city states of the later Middle Ages, which were crawling with Bologna graduates.

You see there were, as I count, three major intellectual centres, back in the day: Paris, Bologna, and Toledo. There were a hundred other less celebrated, but these were the great magnets for the sharpest pins among the young. You went to Paris to study theology and philosophy, to Bologna to study law and administration. Toledo was the interesting place where Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and other venerable languages behind the three monotheist faiths were being translated into Latin — which every educated European could read — by impressive Christian scholars. Arts and sciences retrieved, especially from the Hellenic past (good Aristotle texts for starters) were being disseminated through Europe, along with the languages themselves. Also Salerno, Palermo, Montpellier, in those days; and far up north — e.g. Cologne, Oxford and its little offshoot at Cambridge — universities were vying to attract faculty who, for instance, could read and write in Arabic. (Oxford libraries hold much evidence of this.)

Somehow I have failed to mention Padua, Toulouse, &c — for which I can only hope to be forgiven. But from the centre of Christendom, at Rome, Pope Alexander IV could declare (in 1255) that, “It is at Paris that the human race, deformed by original sin and blinded by ignorance, recovers its power of vision and beauty, by the knowledge of the true light shed forth by divine science.”

Not, be it noted, at Bologna, famed as it was for the study of law, and then dominant among Italian universities. The graduates from Bologna were very smart people, who moved quickly into almost all the high political posts; including inside the beltway at Rome, where they presided over the blossoming of our Canon Law. I could not wish to belittle their accomplishments in all secular fields, though my mediaeval heart is Parisian.

But of course, they were also detested for their arrogance and sophistry, their “old boy” clubbishness and networking. They, as it were, spoke “Bologna,” and my speculative etymology is founded on this fact.

Today, the populist Trump is doing something remarkable. He is making appointments not from the “Ivy League.” Candidates from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia — who overwhelmingly populate the senior bureaucacy of Obama, as other administrations going back to FDR, if not to Woodrow Wilson, or Adams — suddenly evacuate the gene pool. This, to my mind, is a significant development; one I was not entirely expecting. Trump has the nerve to look across the rest of America for talent and good sense. Somehow he noticed in his flyovers from Manhattan that there were people down there.

We will see if the result is a disaster. At first, the horror of the outgoing establishment is laid on pretty thick. Poor dears: they must yell while they can, until their microphones are snaffled away. These new bosses replacing them lack their instincts, their manners, their sycophancy towards the old holy cows. They will be like yaks in the china shop.

But when the mass of “Bologna” disappears, we must accustom ourselves to a more varied diet. We are presented with salsiccia fresca; some ’nduja at Energy, perhaps; some oily zambone at State; the Modeno cotechino in the Treasury; ciavàr at Interior; thin-sliced soppressata at the EPA; the rustic lucanica at Education; a hunk of biroldo at the DoD. Truth to tell, I had tired of all that baloney, every bally day.

I love a good cold spell; it shuts the climate warming crazies up for a while. We have a nice one now, up here in the Canadas, thanks to an ectoplasmic extension of the amoebic polar vortices, that spin air from Santa’s larder down to these lower latitudes which, in the more Arctic view, correspond to our country’s “banana belt.” In Parkdale, here, thanks to immigration from Tibet, we feel right at home. Plunging temperatures and gale-force winds: just like the high plateaux of Central Asia. “Yak weather,” I call it, in commemoration of one of nature’s cuddliest bovines.

Yet there are no yaks in Parkdale, or rather I should say, lest I be caught spreading fake news, none that I have noticed. Nor is this remark designed to distract the animal rights authorities from any yak I might be keeping on my balconata. I’m for free-run yaks, and ethical spider-silk harvesting in cutting-edge violin manufacture, to cite just the top two items in an eco-friendly website recently shown to me. The spiders on my balconata, which have all presumably frozen to death, were strictly free-run; and the yak is, I swear, an optical illusion.

For Parkdale has no buildings tall enough to make a free-range roof yak feel comfortable. Eleven floors up might seem a start, but for his heart and lungs, two thousand storeys would be more like it. Moreover, while his double-covering of fine yak wool fits him for our winter gusts, he might die of heat prostration in our summers. I am told yaks do not even have sweat glands, and thus should be entitled, if they are bred here, to an air-conditioned barn (whatever our pope may say to the contrary).

Perhaps I have boasted before that we have a Serbian butcher in our neighbourhood, who has wisely catered to a growing Tibetan clientele. Yak chops and ground yakmeat, yak fillets and yak sausages, are plentifully available in beautiful downtown Parkdale, though we have no high-end shops: the truth being that, given our average income, we hardly need them.

I have found that a yak sausage will challenge the assumptions of a lowland, Western cook. The first time I tried to fry one, I found it gave off smoke generously, but was in no way physically altered, except in becoming more like a rock. It was only after diligent inquiry I learnt it had to be soaked for a very long time, and then simmered for another very long time at about the boiling temperature for water at 18,000 feet. After what seemed several days of such exercises, the thing became very slightly elastic, as well as somewhat bigger, and promised to become mutable. Only at this point would it have been possible to insert a kitchen thermometer spike, perhaps with the help of a sledge hammer. To call it “lean” would be to understate the matter. I was warned by the butcher not to try microwaving the thing, for fear of an explosion. Not having a microwave, I was not tempted to try this experiment.

On my next visit, the butcher’s pretty daughter suggested that I try yak chops instead, which are not, after all, processed to twice the density of pemmican, and go well with fruit chutneys.

Did you know that there is no word for “yak” in Serbian? (“Well, we spell it with a ‘j’.”) That is how English spreads as our lingua franca. Our own language expands by theft, in this case from the Tibetans. Or, “loan words” as we like to call them. In the old days, before we stole “yak,” we called this beast a “grunting ox,” our explorers having noticed that it does not moo. It is a peaceable animal, when approached warily, not like the pushy and vexatious cows who were the progenitors of modern European culture. (See here.) Which is well, because a wild, fully-grown male yak weighs about one tonne (metric or Imperial, makes no difference) and has some genius for manoeuvring the high ground.

I like to think of it (picture here) as “the coconut of the Himalayas” — as the coconut is the yak of the South Seas. It can be used to make everything: food, clothing, shelter. Better than a coconut, it can also be used as a beast of burden, in yak trains through the mountains, or to pull a plough. It will carry the bonny Tibetan maiden. The wool has a thousand household uses, the leather will insulate and waterproof your yurt, the calves entertain your children. And the milk goes finally into your tea. (I am thinking here of Tibetan po cha, which comes in a brick, to be hot churned with yak butter and salt, and which the unsuspecting Western guest may mistake for an emetic. Suggest starting with the cheese, instead.)

But the very best thing about a yak is that, should tragedy impend, and you are caught out in the high pastures, which are mostly of stone and free of other food — you can always eat it.

Everything, except God, has a context. I write this morning to contextualize yesterday’s post, which might (I realize from several emails) be misunderstood. Readers, especially outside the Catholic Church, might think I am saying everything is going to Hell, or gone, when in my experience, on balance, the Church is recovering, and promises to continue recovering. And this for reasons that, superficially, make no sense.

In particular, the quality of our priests seems to be rising; the celebration of Mass is becoming more focused, more reverent; many young are being drawn in, and those who come take the Christian teaching more seriously; the monastic movement is once again advancing, with zeal; the standard of Catholic thinking among our intellectuals is rising — albeit, in each case, from what could be described as “historical lows.” This is a gut feeling, on matters that cannot be statisticized, and need to be anecdotalized cautiously. While my observation is biased towards North American sources, I am aware through correspondents and reports of parallels in, I think, all the countries of Europe, and the wide world beyond.

Much heroic work was done by our recent popes, Saint John Paul and Benedict XVI, to rescue and defend the fabric and integrity of the institutional structure, but more than this is going on. To my mind, the Church herself, as a vast and mysterious organism, is now recovering from a period of insult and abuse that began long before Vatican II; and of which what I unfondly call “the spirit of Vatican II” was not the cause, but the fever. She is throwing off what I would characterize as the disease, of modernism, aptly described in its several aspects by popes and theologians going back to the eighteenth century. For all the principalities and powers, still wrecking from within, the “rigidity” of this structure is being restored, and usefully tested. In time, the parts not rigid are being washed away.

What Ratzinger called the “Council of the Media” indeed continues to prevail — in the noise of the media. That is, the forces for “progress” away from the Church’s Christ-given mission, towards accommodation with the vagaries of the world, retain their pride. But shocks have already come, and bigger are coming. Those whose faith is in the inevitability of this progress find themselves increasingly in the position of those who believed in the inevitability of Hillary Clinton. Not that Trump will prove any kind of godsend (let us leave for two years any judgement on his secular effect). I use this only as an analogy to what is happening at many dimensional levels, throughout the West.

It is a cliché that, “our hope is in the young.” In worldly terms, there is no other place to look. But at a time when huge proportions of our young are in despair — as evidence the mounting drug deaths — we have lost and found. I have been in a privileged position, getting glimpses of “youth movements” within the Church, through everything from “world youth days” to the students I have encountered teaching in a small seminary. Even in so apparently shallow a thing as popular music, I am struck by the revival of a capella in the cause of e.g. Christmas carols. Those looking for an escape from the oppressive materialism, the moral disorder and cynicism of modern life are — often naïvely and with many setbacks — finding it is there, and was there all along, in Jesus Christ.

The need to build families, to build neighbourhood, against all odds, is a yearning deep in human nature. It is perpetually buoyant, and rising back to the surface. With it comes the starch to resist the demonic forces run loose in our society. Mistakes, terrible mistakes, are made (how I know this from the inside!) yet, where the help of God is honestly petitioned, there is recovery.

As I say, this is the overall gut feeling, of an old pundit trying to understand what is happening around him. That the media ignore this story can hardly surprise; they deal only with surface, and characteristically misrepresent whatever they see floating there. Whereas, what I characterize is happening underneath. On balance I would say, things are actually improving — in a direction opposite the one from which we’ve come.

*

A dear friend — the art directrice of my former Idler magazine — had been suffering from an extended flu (perhaps the same one I have been enjoying). Sitting with her dog and her tea, she heard singing outside her house.

It was carols. “Like, real Christmas hymns.”

She lives (like me) in the middle of this city, even closer to the heart of banking Moloch.

“I looked out the window and standing around my tiny brightly lit Christmas tree, in the mass of beautiful, unsullied powdered snow, were three carollers. It was like a scene out of Dickens — except for the electric lights.”

She grabbed her little doggie, and joined them. (I should mention that this Mitzi has a glorious singing voice.) They sang together, and had a chat. She asked if they were collecting for a charity. They weren’t, they were just out carolling. They wanted to wish people a “Merry Christmas.”

This is the sort of thing.

Blasphemy, idolatry, heresy, and bad manners are not exactly new things in the history of Holy Church. Not even “difficult” popes are new, nor priests who aren’t believing Christians, and in prevision of the circumstances that might arise, Our Founder provided a Mass that is very hard to fuddle. It could be illicit — could be Not the Mass — but with bona fides in order it is impossible to render invalid through any human act that is not visibly and audibly intentional. And even then the devil may fail, surrounded as I hope he would be by sincere Christians, not intending to be scorned. Even full-dress clowns in the sanctuary can’t invalidate the Mass, if there is a licit priest presiding, and he has gone through the motions of the consecration — whatever rubbish he might privately believe. His mistakes remain on his head only, until we try to disencumber him.

I mention this as a public service, from the many queries I get, which ought to be addressed to a competent priest. It seems to me that a great deal of unnecessary anxiety is endured by “Trad Catholics,” left wondering whether they have just been conned, and must now attend Mass in another parish to fulfil their Sunday obligation. This is especially enervating for them, when no other Catholic church is in hiking distance, they have no car, and they are stuck with the ministrations of some vain, liberal-progressive head case. This is hard, but I think the wisdom of the ages would proclaim: “Be patient until you can see him off.”

(Often they see themselves off, voluntarily; the quicker when faced with a hardy congregation. Unfortunately, given the priest shortage that “the spirit of Vatican II” brought about, there is danger they will be re-posted elsewhere.)

Christ, in my fairly secure understanding, would not do this to us. He might allow tribulations, that will always be deserved, but He would not make His own presence in our lives conditional upon the antics of befrocked delusionaries. He is not only present in the sacrifice of the Mass, but like us, came on purpose. An “invalid” celebration (actually there is no such category) would be so obviously Not the Mass, that no one present in mind could be fooled. And anyone who could be, is anyway under His protection. There would have to be a fake priest, or no consecration at all. The intention to profane the Host would have to be sufficiently obvious that only those intending to profane it would themselves receive. It would have to be unsubtle.

Of course this does happen, sometimes. But the notion that we must sit in the pews, constantly judging our priests in our distraction, is also unCatholic and unChristian. If the priest is determined to go to Hell, there is little we can do to stop him. We need not follow him there with our imprecations.

Meanwhile, I pass along the counsel from many who endured something much like desolation, through decades of the “deforms” after Vatican II; which seem to be returning under the current pontificate. It is best expressed in the colloquial: “Don’t let the bastards drive you out of the Church.” Nor yourself abandon, to their misery, your fellow faithful. Bad priests come and go, for all they may tarry, but the Church will endure. And things are worse in Aleppo.

Priests (or even bishops) preaching heresy and rot is much more common, these days. And this is worth the occasional public confrontation, in which, incidentally, one is likely to lose. In the short term, however, one can tune the homily out, by tuning in the Rosary. One may follow the Missal, whatever the priest is doing. While avoiding the kind of ostentatious deportment that will alienate the laity around you.

The rules are as Cardinal Burke explains: to transmit one’s dubia first in private, then in public only if that does no good. Only thereafter should one take it over the errant’s head. The rules for just engagement in war are similar. Even a declaration of war should be delivered with civility and politeness and the proper ceremony; and collateral damage ought to be avoided.

*

The same holds, I have come to think, by analogy in the rest of life. People do things that are bad. Or so I allege, backed by the weight of Scripture and Tradition. I have seen examples of very bad. I have seen more examples of bad masquerading as good: by people who have convinced themselves (if they really have) that their bad behaviour, their evil plans, somehow can be justified. It is by their fruits we know them.

So deeply ingrained is the human moral sense, that some attempt at self-vindication is likely to be made, even by the babbling insane. But seldom is there any puzzle, and if one follows the plot with modest attention one need not be vexed. For by the time an action needs to be condemned, and resisted, no subtlety is left. Nor need one be hot-headed in response to the crime. The malefactor will have gone out of his way to make the situation clear: the universe is so constructed that he has no choice. His pretence of goodness is ludicrous. His casuistry becomes self-satirizing. He is beyond kindly admonishment now.

We suffer sometimes from sensory deprivation. And yet this moral sense is so powerful, that the loss of sight and hearing — of smell, taste, or even touch — can hardly impair it. Too, it engages with all the other senses, when they are functioning; and I would not say only with these five because we have many more than five senses. (Indeed, scientistic materialism attempts to undercut this knowledge, by restricting the field; but this is a topic for many other days.)

My point for today is only that scrupulosity — one of the temptations in religious as in social life — can be safely forsaken. As the law once recognized, there is nothing ambiguous in an act of bad faith; and as Christians should know, Christ would not put us in that situation, where we must judge fine points beyond our ken. Moreover, as in the Mass, He is there when called upon. Faith is faith.

Yes, it is Gaudete Sunday. Christmas is coming for sure. It follows that we, who at least pretend to believe that Christ has come, and will come again, should be rejoicing. I have worded this in the “ironical,” post-modern way, in deference to the times. For today, we “have problems with that.”

Take Parkdale, if you will. The Lake is warm, after an unusually hot summer; the breeze is gentle; the air temperature only a little below freezing; and that breeze is blowing from the Lake. In consequence, we may be buried under a foot of pure, bright, beautiful snow. Our ancestors — at least, those not from Bangalore or Brazil — tell us to hitch the bells to the sleighs, and the sleighs to the horses, and go gladly riding. Dong-a-ling, dong-a-ling. Shall we not arrive at the church singing?

But no, Parkdale has changed in the last century. It is full of people trying to start their cars; and waiting for the snow ploughs; or grimacing as they spread their salt and scrape their shovels. It will be worse next morning, when they must go to work. Not one of them even owns a sleigh; or a horse; or bleeding bells for that matter. It would seem that we have ruined everything.

The achievement of those ancestors is worth remarking. They came here to the white-wool North, often as refugees from one place or another. Looking back, over the hump of time: not all survived their first winters. The birds began to fly south, and soon they understood why. Staying warm, and staying fed, wasn’t always possible. The preparations had to be learnt.

But they were learnt, and within a generation, a season of fear, death and starvation, was transformed into one of joy and leisure. And this with the help of no power tools, except such as could be turned by water. There is nothing so cozy as a cabin, with the hearth blazing, once the harvest is in. And the picking, the threshing, the canning and the stowing, was gaiety itself. The joy in common work — all hands gathered — is lost upon us now. For now we hire people. And we are all strangers.

My late mother, born as recently as 1920, remembered the gathering at Homeville, Cape Breton. In winter they sang, by the piano; jigged to the fiddle, whistled through the flute; read the Bible and some other books, often aloud; wove rugs and knitted; darned socks and patched shirts; played with the paintbox; told tales, and tales within tales; muffled in their woollens and furs; went out to feed the animals in their sheds. (They bred foxes, but also chickens. This required some tact.)  Or they walked under the shining stars; and the Northern Lights would come to them as angels. Mama in her turn told stories, to my little sister and to me, passed voice to voice down the generations. People long dead lived again in them.

The old carols remind, where it is still legal to sing them, of what has been lost — or will be lost, unless we recover the moral fibre to smack down the “progressive” devils. For the ancient ability to confront evil was also exchanged for our life of ease.

We do not tell stories to our children any more. We give them “children’s literature,” and video games. (They find their own drugs.) Hardly anyone has a piano. We have no notion of the thrill in the gift my mother recalled, of an orange. (That was the Christmas that little cousin Freemont got “the monkey what runs up the stick,” and wet himself when he saw it.) On the other hand, we have smartphones and widescreen TVs.

But these are all worldly delights, remembered or sustained; the Gaudete draws deeper than that. It is available to all men of goodwill, and of all races, by now around the planet — the knowledge that Christ is coming — and all we need is to discard our anxieties, with the bad living that is the cause of them. True, it has a worldly aspect: from our digging holes until the sky shrinks above us. Still, some shafts of light filter down. And Advent is “the rousing time,” to rise from our subterranean torpor.

Our friends, our families, and ourselves, enter and exit. The clouds settle, then move on. There is loss and gain; there is pain and pleasure; there is clarity and then bewilderment again. All of this must be accepted; even loneliness and galling injustice, because we are in the world. But through bad luck and good, the Truth is unfading. In all weather it speaks to us. “Rejoice in the Lord alway,” it is telling. Make your modesty your show. Repent every wrong — then fret for nothing. Direct your petitions in humble prayer. For the Lord is at hand.

And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at quarter past nine.”

The quote, and its variants, have been attributed to Faulkner, Maugham, and whichever hack comes to mind as the esprit du jour. I expect it will be traced to a little-read passage in the table talk of Virgil.

My own (wormlike) witlessness can be attributed to the hard fact that, I am often busy at nine-fifteen. Or perhaps there was some other reason why, at whatever time, I found myself staring at a blank page, or glancing down my handlist of a thousand topics, or at titles inscribed on a thousand book spines, without anything genial coming to mind. So it has been today, gentle reader — who, were he desperate for David Warren Thought, could have consulted the Catholic Thing (here).

But at this late hour a promising question arrives, from a remote place in the Canadas:

“Mr Warren, I have been trying to articulate a definition of Toryism for myself. Newman called it loyalty to persons; Enoch Powell said it is the belief that power is immanent in institutions; Walter Bagehot said that it constitutes enjoyment (i.e. of institutions and traditions); and Samuel Johnson (the original Idler) said a Tory is one who adheres to the ancient constitution and to the Apostolic Church. You in turn have called it the political expression of a religious view of life; without faith it becomes conservatism; without memory it becomes progressive conservatism. Could you furnish me with another definition of Toryism, your own?”

What is there to add?

Having thought on this while reheating a portion of mushroom pizza, for my supper up here in the High Doganate, I have decided to reply:

“Put not your faith in Toryism, but in Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”

The advice of a solid old Anglican priest — back when the Anglicans had a use for solids — was to retain one’s balance. “Don’t try to do everything at once,” he said, after my conversion on that bridge over Thames. In particular, “Don’t try to believe everything at once. It is bigger than you, you shan’t be able to do it.” And, “Never abandon your scepticism. If it doesn’t make sense to you, leave it and get back to it later.” And, “The trick to walking, whether you are a babe or very drunk, is: one step at a time. Those who get ahead of themselves tend to fall over.”

We do not offer catechism class in this anti-blog. At least, not officially. To understand the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, requires participation first of all. Be there in the Mass. It is hard to learn anything when one is perpetually absent, and the teaching in this case as in all other cases begins not in some textbook or theological primer, but by interaction with the Thing Itself. That is where the beauty of it is displayed: the incomprehensible beauty. Unless, alas, it is obscured or shadowed in the pro-forma of the postmodern ritual, when it dissevers mind from feeling.

But it is hard to obscure the inner truth, I think, when the Epistle for today — the passage from the eighth chapter of Proverbs which sings prevenient grace (“a Dei per dominum Christum Iesum praeveniente gratia,” as the Trent Council explained) — is followed, and inwardly digested. The attributes of Wisdom that the Church has applied to Our Lady may be found in the Old Testament, as much as in the New.

Dominus possedit me in initio viarum suarum, antequam quidquam faceret a principio: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His ways, before He made anything, before the beginning. …”

I teach “EngLit,” sometimes, and “poetics,” sort-of. In plays, such as Shakespeare’s, the speakers are well-marked. In open verse, including his Sonnets, there is often a big question. Who is speaking? It could, it might, be the author himself. Or it could be someone, or something other. The better one listens, the clearer it will be. If they were nothing more, the Prophets of the Hebrews offer a training in this vital dimension of poetry. In this remarkably prophetic passage, within the Proverbs, the question is brought to our attention in a spectacular way: Who is speaking here? Who is she?

To begin with the formal dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception, is to begin to miss the point. For as we learn from today’s epistle: we can understand nothing unless we begin before the beginning. (Which perhaps helps us to explain why we seldom understand anything at all.)

Long, long, long before the formal definition of Pius IX, belief in the Immaculate Conception of Mary was common, in the East as in the West. This, too, was a beginning before the beginning, and a correction to those who imagine that popes, or any other men, make doctrine. They only defend it, when it is challenged. (And to define is to defend.) This is what happened, in 1854. But that is not the origin of something which, though logically necessary to the Christian theology, sinks beneath the necessity of reason into the profundity of faith.

Our task is to understand God in Christ; that, God Is That He Is, and not another. It is to the Mother of God we fly. We will not understand the Son without the Mother; nor conversely the Fiat without the Fiat Lux, the Fiat Panis.

All of us in this class are beginners.

A correspondent in Brazil replied to my Idlepost last night by, as we say, “blowing up the trumpets in Zion.” He sang back one of the Songs of Ascent:

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
     we were like those who dreamed.
Our mouths were filled with laughter,
     our tongues with songs of joy.
Then it was said among the nations,
     “the Lord has done great things for them.”
The Lord has done great things for us,
     and we are filled with joy.

Restore our fortunes, Lord,
     like streams in the Negev.
Those who sow with tears
     will reap with songs of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
     carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
     carrying the sheaves with them.

This canticum graduum needs little commentary, because it explains itself. Picture the Hebrews singing, in their ancient pilgrimages, mounting the hill to Jerusalem, and the steps to the Temple. Bear, too, in mind, the idea of restoration, as in this instance Zion was restored, and the people Israel delivered from their captivity.

We deal here with an aspect, or dare I say a reality, of the Christian teaching that is overlooked: that of victory and deliverance, by the grace of God. We do not hope to be “tolerated,” and left to our own business alone, as my friend Bruno Galli Cicconi explains. Our Lord, creator of the universe, is not looking for some special dispensation.

Quite apart from the liturgy, I associate the “gradual canticles” with Advent, and the long march rising, towards the shepherds, and above them the angels on high. The whole sequence (Hebrew CXX to CXXXIV) speaks to me of this rising, this announcement, this restoration of the Kingdom, from our “vale of tears.”

Cicconi: “May the sacrifice of the Vendeans not have been in vain, because the whole world has forgotten what was perpetrated there, but the Lord forgets nothing.”

It is among the tenets of our faith that zombies can be cured. And there are a lot of zombies in France, according to the political sociologists. These are the people from the more traditional regions, which long resisted the Revolution and the lashings of laïcité that followed through nine or ten more generations. From materials sent me by a concerned priest, I learn that they are now called “Catholic zombies.” This because, while among the walking, spiritually dead, who no longer attend the Mass, or otherwise engage with the living Church, they still have basically Catholic attitudes. Many were even baptized, once upon a time. Which is to say: they are a bunch of terrifying reactionaries, who don’t kill their babies and think marriage should be cross-sexual. (Sometimes a million or two of these zombies march on Paris.)

Verily, it is the teaching of our Church that anyone can be saved, even Hitler. Though truth to tell, it may be too late for him. A religion which holds that the dead rise will have a natural affinity for zombies. Though I’m not sure I would want to take that theological observation too far. Rather, I would rephrase it to say, once a Catholic always a Catholic, even if a Catholic who is bound for Hell. It does not follow he will get there, however; for as Father Brown put it:

“I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

This may strike my non-co-religionists as abstruse. But they may always read G. K. Chesterton for themselves. (Or Brideshead Revisited, wherein it was famously quoted.)

Indeed, I would say it of the whole of Western Civ, and cite myself as an example. For my people took their leave of Catholicism five centuries ago. A very long thread, to be sure. But look, I am back.

Verily, we live in a zombie civilization, which seems sometimes to have severed itself from its origins in Our Lord Jesus Christ, and yet is at the present day still hacking and thwacking at the invisible thread. And why? Because secretly it knows itself to be still attached — that it is still Western, and even Roman in the strangest freaky ways. The zealotry, the frenzy of the progressives, who never can believe they have freed themselves, so that they “move on” from one outrage to another, is curiously the best evidence for this. Little things — even a little thing like Trump — can drive them to hysteria. They thought all that was buried; they thought they’d put the stake through it. They thought they were on the right side of l’histoire.

And there it is, trailing with ghastly wounds and swaddling gauze — the undead, vestigial Christianity.

The stuff to which I was referred (here, for starters), wanders along this line. The mere rise (from retirement) of the politician, François Fillon — self-declared Thatcherite, but also notoriously practising Catholic — was the occasion for this delightfully shrieking headline in the progressive daily, Liberation:

“Help, Jesus has returned!”

But of course, they overstate the political significance. The zombies are for the most part still zombies; only some of them are cured. Patience, patience. They make only a blip in the demographics; enough perhaps to turn an election or two, but not and never enough to “change history.” Here today and gone in the next newspaper headline. Put not thy faith in demography.

Instead, consider what would be the effect if, instead of merely voting their frustrations, they returned by the millions to Holy Church. It has happened before in the chronicles of nations, and Lord, I would like to see it again.

It has been observed, in some book I was perusing which I can recommend to no one, that in the old Roman literature, the views on gardening are only those of a literate male elite, and that moreover, they have more to say on the “male discourse” about gardens than about “women’s lived experience in them.” … Well, I’ll be.

Perhaps the academic authoress understates her case. To the pagan Roman eye, I should think, a woman in a garden was more part of the scenery, than part of the conversation. Rather, her place was in the kitchen.

Not that I take this view myself. My gardens are Edenic; I am a Christian and an Augustinian and, as I proceed from the antediluvian to the historical, the garden I imagine is the one in Milan where Augustine met God. (Women he had met before.)

I daresay members of the “literate female elite” mucked about in Roman gardens, too, though we do not seem to have inherited any of their manuscripts. Only the “mansplaining.” For male-hating harpies I can imagine that’s a source of real irritation, and that the advice, “suck it up, buttercup” will never be taken well.

Well, Homer touches on gardens (ah, Nausicaä!), and I think the ancient Persians had more to say, and the Babylonians and Egyptians and Indusians and Chinese — though all oppressively male. What interests me here is not “gender studies,” however, but the Roman aesthetics. In my view, perhaps subject to modification, their gardens must have been rather ugly and awkwardly contrived, until they fell into delicious ruin.

Those Romans spoke most suggestively, it seems to me (the caudillo of this website), of the garden not as paradisal retreat, but as “art for art’s sake” — illusion for the sake of illusion. I find implicit, especially in old Pliny, the dangerous idea of an enveloping illusion — the aspiration towards a “virtual reality.”

In Virgil’s Georgics, on the other hand, I feel this encroachment being subtly resisted. In Horace, subtly satirized as he glances upon the garden of his patron, Maecenas. (In Seneca the Younger, it was satirized less cautiously.) That, and worse, the gardens of the Emperors, and others among the Roman nouveaux riches, contained many California touches, including oversized swimming pools and necropoli worthy of Evelyn Waugh’s flourishes in The Loved One.

If I am not mistaken (and I often am) our modern, Western conception of an enveloping illusion begins with those Roman writers on gardening — with Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia, and his adopted nephew Pliny in his Letters, too; with Columella before them, and even back to Cato the Censor, and that polymath, Varro; all, to my over-sensitive mind, conveying a notion of “escape” that is suspiciously worldly.

But forward, leaping the centuries, we come to Rutilius Taurus Æmilianus Palladius who, when the Roman Empire was winding down, wrote a most useful treatise in twelve books corresponding to the months of the year — in prose but breaking into elegiacs at the mention of trees. (I love the works of Late Antiquity, more than those of Late Postmodernity.)

And very useful it was, this last, through subsequent Darkish Ages, and into the Middling ones, too, as we find it still copied and circulating in e.g. mediaeval England. One may read it in Middle English (here), and in doing so gain partial entry to a surprisingly refined and sophisticated agricultural environment, with rural hicks far from the clod-busting oafs we suppose them to have been.

But that was the Rome for all ages; the cornucopian Rome; the Rome that is living still and always, from an Empire that was the boilerplate for Christendom.

There is decadence here, but it works in the reverse of our usual chronological assumption of a descent into decadence. The earlier writers — the more dignified and grave — are also the more infected with the desire to spiritualize their materialism. It is the more fully pagan Rome — Petronius, the somewhat sick arbiter of elegance, wrote near the prime, not near the fall, of Roman urbanity — that aspires to the trompe-l’œil, to the showy opulence, to the show-and-tell of Hollywood and Palm Springs. (I use California only as a placard, for while it is being fancifully exceeded by the stage-hands of Dubai and Red China, it remains for us the Disneyland par excellence.)

Not only in our cybernetic fantasia, but in the concrete world of our metastasizing glitz, we express a desire for enveloping illusion. It is the flip side of the old Roman, stoical gravitas: the desire for a Garden the opposite of Eden, where we may construct our own reality-denying “safe space” — apart from an inquisitive God.

In the words of the late Scottish philosophical gardener, Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006), “Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.”

Father Mark A. Pilon’s piece in The Thing this morning (here) gives an unusually frank account of the mess Holy Church is now passing through, which (Warren opining now) may yet prove a blessing. Sometimes war offers the only way forward; or in this case, the “moral equivalent” thereto. There are acts — there could be acts even by a pope — that must be confronted and corrected. Surrender is not an option, when one has Christ’s own Church to defend, whether the enemy be from without or within.

In his refusal to reply to the Dubia of the happily-dubbed “Four Cardinals” — Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, and Joachim Meisner — all learned, sober, and impressive men — Pope Francis has displayed a shocking insolence, a caudillo hauteur. His very job, as pontiff, is to uphold the teaching of Holy Church, never more needed than in a time like this, when it is taken frivolously. It is to end confusion. In the five questions addressed to him – straightfoward, concise, and each answerable with a yea or a nay — he was requested to do that. These questions were not only about divorce and communion. They drew attention to five distinct points in Amoris Laetitia, at which a grave contradiction could be construed between what the pope was teaching, and what the Church has always taught.

On that marriage question alone, it is worth reading with attention Ross Douthat’s comments in (of all places) the New York Times (here). Douthat shows, with admirable precision, the consequences of Bergoglio’s doctrinal adventure for Catholic life, and thus, in the souls of a thousand million living people.

From the beginning of his pontificate, it is now clear to many, whose trust he has squandered, Bergoglio intended what amounts to sabotage; to rekindle the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” that Pope Benedict so eloquently condemned; to undermine the courageous work of Saint John Paul, to restate for our age Catholic moral teaching in his Familiaris Consortio and other writings. We cannot simply ignore the consistency with which he has insulted reliable Catholic teachers, and the longsuffering Catholic faithful — in his words, in his flighty and irresponsible gestures, in his persistent appointment of craven liberal mediocrities to vital Church offices. He has been described, aptly, as a papal wrecking ball.

The justification for the cardinals’ action in these circumstances has been stated (here, most accessibly).

A pope serves the Church, and not vice versa. He is servant of her servants. He is charged to defend the Faith, not to revise it. Beyond the specific issues, in which Bergoglio has toyed so coyly with doctrine and law, he has set an appalling precedent for his successors. It cannot be allowed to stand.

Yet all this may prove, in the long view which Christians strive to maintain, a blessing in disguise. We are coming to a juncture in which a glib, smarmy, and false account of Catholic Truth is widely accepted — even within the Church, where it is expressed in a slapdash liturgy. The parallels with the Arian crisis of the fourth century become ever more striking (see here).

It may take a few more decades to extinguish the Hydra-head modernist heresies. Without intending, I think our current pope draws the reckoning nearer.

Our Lord is not indifferent to the fate of His Church, and we may be surprised by what Flannery O’Connor called “the terrible speed of mercy.” (Not the fake mercy of laxity, but the divine action, which includes the admonishment of sinners.)

A path will emerge; may have emerged already.

As I have perhaps mentioned before, somewhere or other — I write a lot, you know — there is a saying among the drivers of Delhi three-wheelers that deeply appeals to me. I have cited it in my headline.

Some context is necessary to understand this saying. Gentle reader must place himself imaginatively on the bench behind the driver of one of these frail, motorized rickshaws (as these). He is going around one of New Delhi’s innumerable traffic circles (worse than Washington, I think), along with many other tuk-tuks, cars, proper taxis, little trucks, buses, bicycles, big trucks, motorcycles, and possibly farm animals. Or rather, he is hopelessly caught in their jam, with an appointment to get to, that is gradually receding into the fog of history.

The more enveloping and immediate fog is of intense petrol fumes and of smoke discharging, into which is mixed the rich tropical scents of rotting fruit and vegetables, and other odours unhappier to describe. The sides of the little cart are open. The temperature is in three figures of Fahrenheit. It is also quite humid, and there is no breeze. One is wearing a tie, which one might mistake for a garrote vil.

But one’s driver is serene. He has, to understate the case, been here before. He reassures his apparently distraught Western passenger that the destination — some several miles away — is nearly in view. “A path will emerge,” he observes, sagely.

I recall being myself once in the position of this passenger, approaching one of the Shajahanabad gates, through which, if we ever passed, the streets would become much narrower, and twisting. But I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Instead, I noticed, with growing alarm, that two Delhi transit buses — whose diesel exhaust I was now tasting — were closing in upon each other, from our either side. It struck me that their drivers were mounted so high that they would not see us. I pictured the mangled metal in which we would die. Perhaps my alarm was communicated.

“A path will emerge,” repeated my tuk-tuk charioteer, Krishna to my Arjuna.

I queried him on the likelihood of our being crushed.

His philosophical serenity undisturbed, he added, “Death is a kind of path.”

It takes some work, some hard-earned life experience, to attain such a degree of fatalism. I had yet to climb that mountain. I still have not climbed, these last twenty years, to the upper reaches, in which the truth, in its seeming inevitability, comes in view above the clouds, and one may accept the Gloria. My mind instead craves more oxygen. But if you can’t breathe, you can’t breathe — what could be simpler than that?

Actually, gentle reader, I draughted for today a long and rather stern post, touching upon the behaviour of our Holy Father, who, to my mind, is leading our Church into the equivalent of the space between converging Delhi buses. And this, on perhaps a dozen levels, which I was attempting to enumerate. But the same information can be had from elsewhere, so why add my vexation to it? Hardly for the first time in the history of this anti-blog, I deleted my disconsolating words.

Let us consider the matter from a different perspective.

A path will emerge.

[Have, truth to tell, slightly extended this since first posted.]

*

The last generation of Communists in power, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, suffered from a debilitating foible. They did not themselves believe in the ideology they were preaching. Their efforts were thus directed to getting around the realities their forebears had not anticipated. They thus became their own enemies, working against their own unworkable socialist principles, and in the course of their tireless if frazzled ministrations, the Berlin Wall came down.

Capitalism suffers from the same problem today. The principles of Adam Smith are not seriously believed by any of its nominal advocates. They are not even known. Nor could they be, for like Marx, Smith is not even read. I have derived pleasure, on many occasions, from pointing out to some ideological enthusiast for Capitalism, that its supposed author was refulgently opposed to joint-stock companies. Which is to say, to the form of business ownership that controls — oh, I don’t know. Ninety-five percent of the so-called “private sector” economy today?

I observed that, apart from any consideration of morality (and he was, after all, only an amateur economist, but a professional Perfesser of Moral Philosophy), Smith believed that joint-stock companies were inefficient, because essentially bureaucratic. This is inevitable when ownership is separated from management. “Growth,” or Bigness, subtly replaces profit (both mercenary and non-mercenary) as the principal aspiration.

The perfessers today believe in “the evolution of Capitalism.” I don’t believe in evolution at all. I think, for instance, that “the hidden hand,” also known as “the law of supply and demand,” is absolutely static, like all the other “laws” that seem to govern our universe. Anything that happens to be true in economics, as in any other branch of scientia, was always true and will be true ever, in the world to which we are accustomed, regardless of the language used to describe. What “evolves” is rather our hallucinatory rhetoric, whether towards or away from the plain facts of life.

Within a nice Smithian economic order there could be no mega-mergers and buyouts; there could be no “megas” for that matter; companies would rather be born, live, and die, on the human scale; with economic decision-making leading up by an irresistible subsidiarity from living, twitching, irrefutable “consumers” (or “customers as we used to call them), uncontaminated by ubiquitous “lifestyle” advertising, or other wicked goads. Companies would by necessity fully adapt to the specific needs of their localities. There could be partnerships, and inheritances; exports and imports for sure; but no “free market” in stocks, of the kind we associate with Capitalism today.

For that matter, there would be no paper money (Smith despised it), let alone electronic — designed, as such things always are, to disguise debt. The moral hazard implicit in most modern, conventional business practices would be flagged and could be prosecuted under common law; as opposed to the cat’s cradle of universalized “rules and regulations,” imposed on the small by negotiation between big government, big business, big labour, and … big media. We could dismiss “limited liability,” too, leaving owners fully accountable for their delictions, derelictions, misdemeanors, and crimes.

And of course, we would all be poorer, by any abandoned statistical measure; and much happier, too, for having extricated ourselves from the global rat-race of “creative destruction,” leading only to Hell. For yes, if one thinks them through, Smithian economics are inherently conservationist, or as they say today, “ecological.” You work with what you have, rather than with what you can “leverage.”

Often I have read these moderns mocking mediaeval ideas about usury, about their notions of supply and demand, et cetera. But as a man of the thirteenth century, I feel perfectly at home in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Florentine double-entry bookkeeping is fine with me; whereas credit cards are an abomination. There is real solid wealth, denominated in real solid things, which neither appear nor disappear overnight; and then, there is the “wealth of numbers.” Presently, it is public policy to pursue the wealth of abstract, manipulable numbers. This includes wild swinging speculation on anything that happens to be real and solid.

*

An old friend of mine, among my bosses in late ’seventies Bangkok — Antoine van Agtmael, genuinely admired and loved — was the genius who invented the expression “emerging markets,” to replace that downer, “developing countries.” (Which in turn had been the euphemism for “backward countries.”) It was by such creative hocus-pocus that attitudes towards “Third World” investment were dramatically changed, in the era of Thatcher and Reagan. A man of indomitably good intentions; charitable, selfless, and a brilliant merchant banker; a little leftish in his social and cultural outlook — I give Antoine’s phrase as an example of the sort of poetry that changes the world. I took pride, once, in editing a book of his astute investment “case studies.”

Thirty-six years have passed, since in my youth and naiveté I was draughting a book of my own on what is still called “development economics.” (I was a business journalist in Asia then, who did a little teaching on the side.) It seemed to me that “free enterprise” should be encouraged; that “government intervention” should be discouraged; but that the aesthetic, moral, and spiritual order in one ancient “developing country” after another was being undermined by the success, as also by the frequent failures, not only of foreign but of domestic investors. This bugged me because, like my father before me (who had worked and taught westernizing subjects in this same Third World), my well-intended efforts on behalf of “progress” were ruining everything they touched; everything I loved.

My attempt to explain this, if only to myself, ended in abject failure to answer my central question: “Why does Capitalist success make the world ugly and its people sad?”

Only now do I begin to glimpse an answer; and that part of it could be expressed in the imperative, “Let us abandon Capitalism, and go back to Adam Smith.”