Essays in Idleness

For Christmas this year, at the United Nations, the USA will be “taking names.” The vote comes tomorrow, on a resolution to condemn the United States in the General Assembly for moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital, which is Jerusalem. With her characteristic charm and candour, Nikki Haley mentioned this yesterday. She’ll be taking the names of those who are naughty or nice, to my favourite superpower.

For years, decades, centuries it seems, the United States has been serving not only as sugar daddy to NATO and the like, but as meals-on-wheels to most of the world’s nasty little third-world despotisms — governed, almost invariably, by Leftists of some sort. And, getting abuse in return, instead of gratitude, for all this “foreign aid.” We might want to refer the matter to the ACLU, which objects to Christian displays in public. By comparison to any other world power, the USA has been downright Franciscan. Too, the Americans not only host but generously fund UN operations, at cost not only to their national Treasury, but to the municipal services of the City of New York. And again, they get all this lip in return. Why, Santa, why?

The fear, of course, is that if the Americans don’t pay, the Russians and Chinese will step into the breach. But this is just what we should want. An important part of the late Mr Reagan’s strategy, in winning the Cold War, was to assist the USSR in piling up expenses. The arms race also helped. As the brilliant George P. Schultz explained, much that Washington could afford, overstretched Moscow. Thus the military spending spree, until they said, “Uncle.”

As for Nikki Haley, well, I have been half in love with her since the day, four Christmases ago, when a friend showed me a Facebook post by the Governor of South Carolina, as she then was. “I must have been good, Santa gave me a Beretta PX4 Storm,” she boasted, with a picture of this elegant little firearm, which fits so nicely in a lady’s purse. The sort of thing a woman needs, I now reflect, while escorting Harvey Weinstein to the police station, in his pajamas. (After calling the tabloids to come and take pictures.) A very pretty pistol indeed: the Italians sure know how to design them. And engineer them, too: packs an even bigger punch than Saint Nicholas of Myra.

I love it when the Americans go John Wayne. It bodes well for the peace of the world. Or perhaps, Clint Eastwood in his Spaghetti Westerns (I don’t know much about movies). For now that Hollywood has gone over entirely to the dark side, we need better theatre from Uncle Sam. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And some of the best men are women.

The idea that ideas have consequences has had many unfortunate consequences. They were never the intended ones. Disciples are a pain. They understand little of what their master is saying, and go off on tangents. This is why schemes for brotherly love always end in fratricidal warfare. The means to the end become the contention; the end quickly fades from view. Reductionist “prophets,” such as Marx to the Marxists, contribute only by getting the main point wrong. Anything they happen to get right will be twisted.

Schemes to eliminate oppression by “class,” “race,” “sex,” or whatever, lie behind most of our violent convulsions — which continue until there is no blood left to be shed between contending parties. Then we get a tentative truce.

A friend forwards an item from UK. It seems the authorities at University College London, in the course of promising that the campus would stay open despite snow, mentioned some prospect of a “white Christmas.” As Rod Liddle reports:

“Oh, the furore. Oh, the anguish and outrage.”

He quotes one of the deranged undergraduates: “You know who else dreamt of a white campus? Adolf Hitler, that’s who! Disgusting!” Another demanded an immediate retraction and apology, accusing the college of purposefully overlooking the whole history of suffering and oppression. Et cetera.

“And what did UCL do? Oh, come on. You know what it did. The cringing apology. …”

I blame George Steiner. He was the white man who, half a century ago, wrote Language and Silence. It became the standard account of how the German language and culture had led to Auschwitz; about how men who could enjoy Shakespeare and Goethe, Bach and Mozart in their leisure hours, could murder millions without compunction in the course of their dayjobs. Moreover, language was inadequate to describe the horror of it all. In order not to acquiesce, we must all (except Steiner) remain perpetually silent.

My mildly satirical précis is meant to emphasize that the book was nonsense. The idea that the German language carried some special virus was later expanded by Edward Said to indict all Europeans, then the chargesheet was spread to all whites. The cultural “evolved” into the genetic — an exact parody of Nazism — and now we are all instructed to shut up and be punished in the “narrative” of payback. The rest of the Indo-Europeans are being diligently added to the target list, by the academic crackpots who have noticed that the Sanskrit classics are also “supremacist”; soon someone may notice the Chinese. And it is true: every literature of which we have record contains the bitter seed of fallen man. Only those who can claim a cultural history that is completely blank, have some chance at exemption.

Rather, why blame Steiner? I only dismiss him as a posturing self-promoter and unscholarly buffoon. The trahison des clercs is an old story; there have been men like him on campus for centuries. The reduction of the welter of events to a single dominant intellectual absurdity was, after all, the theme of the Reformation. (That is my current single dominant idea.) Beyond, it is the blame game of the ages.

It is to be regretted that when Language and Silence came out, the majority of critics were obsequious. Some grumbled that in the area of their own expertise, the book was silly, but assumed it was solid in other respects. So far as I know, only Anthony Burgess had the guts to suggest (respectfully, of course) that the whole thesis, from beginning to end, was unrelieved bullshit.

Even then, fifty years ago, we lacked a janitorial infrastructure of the educated and courageous; and the disciples followed as a great wall of muck.

Towards the end of the Elizabeth Anscombe edition of remarks Ludwig Wittgenstein collected in a shoe-box (entitled, Zettel), there are some glorious oddments. My eye just cast upon one of my old favourites:

“Numbers are not fundamental to mathematics.”

It is a long time since I first obtained, then wrestled with this book. Yet I distinctly recall my laughter when I came to this phrase. It was not mocking laughter, of the sort cultivated in our modern academic asylums; the strange mad sarcastic laughter of dissonance. It was what I would call “the laughter of hope.” Suddenly an obstacle to understanding is removed, and one laughs in surprise at what one finds under or behind it. It is the eureka laughter.

In six words this Wittgenstein has eviscerated not only Russell, but possibly Frege. Or rather, he has exposed the mental blockage, by which “logical” and “scientific” man constructs a world, and peoples it with objects, described by their “properties” — confusing what lies glibly on the surface with what has lain profoundly, “underneath.” We think, for instance, that math is all about numbers. But no, the reverse of this is true. We only use numbers as a means to understand math. They are like tags or labels in a museum collection, things tied or pasted to the sui generis exhibits themselves.

We glimpse conceptual unities, not with numbers but through them. Yet we only begin to describe what we have seen, and can never make an end of it. There can be no analogy to an absolute; no metaphors to do it any part of justice. And this we must remember in giving it a name.

Similarly, we imagine the “infinite” from a projection of the “finite.” In fact, we can’t see it, because we have confused our multiplying counters with real things. So we become accustomed to talking nonsense. “Infinity” is a word we made up, as is “zero,” as are “one,” “two,” and “three.”

“Two and two makes four” is confidently asserted, but cannot be proved. It can only be demonstrated. “Four less two leaves two” is hardly proof. It is instead a circularity.

This is to my mind why such a concept as the Holy Trinity is lost upon the moderns. Presented as God, Christ, Spirit, it can make some sense to any peasant; but the “threeness” of it only leads us astray. It is a quality in the Divine that has nothing to do with number; it is indeed an impenetrable Mystery. Or shall I say a mystical fountain, gushing forth: “I am that I am.”

The ancient Hebrews were rightly reticent of naming what could not be named. Only, I think, in the Messiah did God, for our salvation, “name Himself.”

He would come, He has come, He will come: now there’s a trinity. But there is no three in it. Past, present, future are not three separable things. We cannot describe Time from within Time, nor understand it any better as an infinite recession in two directions from our own “fixed” point. In the moment we begin to apprehend it, it passes away.

Towards Christmas, if perhaps Advent is observed, the Gift comes irresistibly into view. It is nothing like a box with ribbons; nothing like a package with a present inside. Nothing in the womb of Our Lady is reducible to “an item” like that. It is Gift in the absolute, as our own lives are absolute Gift: a totality that cannot be reduced to pieces. It is a mysterious Event, that transcends events. We can only pretend to accept it or reject it, for it simply and immortally IS.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. … I am already in receipt of correspondence expressing alarm that I may be endorsing the view of Antonio Spadaro (the progressive Italian Jesuit), who says that in his (appalling) theology, two plus two may sometimes equal five. This is not anything like what I meant above. Some things are so absolutely [bad-word] obvious that the joke is, they cannot be proved. They can be demonstrated, however, and work every time, and must therefore be accepted by those who have not gone mad. But there is no deep philosophy here. It’s only, 2+2=4.

We might take this a little farther and assert that, by extension, all “mathematical proofs” are essentially circular, but this would require more energy than is available to me today. This does not mean the “proofs” (actually demonstrations) are wrong. Quite the opposite: a proposition is shown to be inevitable, by extension from the very first and simplest numerical postulates; i.e. it is shown to be “as true as, 2+2=4.” Thus, it must be accepted, on its own terms, by everyone who is not insane.

Of course, there is mad and mad. Some people go off their nut from biochemical causes. These can sometimes be treated with drugs. But some others go off it by choice, and meds cannot help them.

Hell, from what I hear, must be a paradise for interior designers, as there are so many special places in it. There is a special place for people who prey on children, according to the theologian, Ivanka Trump; and another special place for Republicans who didn’t support Roy Moore, according to Steve Bannon. I am more with Ivanka on this one; though I did want Moore to win, for reasons quite unrelated to his sex life in the 1970s, whatever that was. (I am partial to his sort of lunatic.)

On the other hand, I should like to point to the special place in Hell reserved for women who falsely accuse men of “rape,” or “sexual assault,” or “sexual harassment” (terms now used almost interchangeably) — even if the man were guilty of some drunk and blundering lubricious act. (That’s when you slap his face, to sober him.) And then another special place, for men and women alike, who fail to speak up when they know that the facts of some case are being misrepresented. And these in addition to the special places for actual rapists, and psychopathic goons — accessible by noose under our auld arrangements.

(This is one of my arguments for capital punishment, incidentally. It helps us distinguish between the serious and the frivolous; wakes the jurors up.)

Oh, there are lots of places in Hell, and in the course of a life now extended into a seventh decade, I have watched so many make their selections. I have also had occasion to be drunk myself, and though I don’t recall sexually assaulting anyone, I have been decked by a jealous boyfriend. Surely I did something to deserve that.

I’m prepared to believe almost anything said about the denizens of Hollywood, on the evidence of their movies. I haven’t watched one in a long time, but I’ve seen a few trailers. (They show them on the Internet, whether or not you ask.) These are stewing in sex and violence (have you noticed, gentle reader?) and when the makers affect to be prim, I cannot help chortling.

I have further noticed that a lot of movie stars are content to be packaged as tarts. I find it especially amusing when a woman who puts her “sexiness” on aggressive display — in the absence of any other memorable quality — whines for being taken as a “sex object.” (It is an old adage that those who do not want lodgers should not advertise for them.) … Or, for that matter, when an utter sleaze of a don-juan poses as upholder of women’s rights. (Surely hypocrisy could be better concealed.)

The same industry that is currently awarding itself for a movie that celebrates man-boy sodomy, pretends to be horrified by child molestation. Similarly, participants in films wherein bystanders are cut down by the dozen, pretend to be scandalized by gun violence. I think there must be a special place in Hell just for movie producers.

Some of these special places must be here on Earth, for police departments in all the big towns are getting cloyed with sex investigations of the rich and famous. (Useful tip: avoid “success” and you will never be sued.) As the feminist rage swells, we will need prison camps, whole Gulags and Guantanamos, to house all the accused. And nine in ten of these will be the formerly self-adoring progressive types.

That’s the good news. The sexual revolution has now progressed to the stage when it eats its own. Thousands of scorpions in that “special place” bottle, but every day a few less.

Lately I find that the choice before those who populate the former Christendom is reduced to two paths: 1. To go Christian. 2. To go mad.

I realize there are non-Christian readers who will disagree with this assessment. But notice how ecumenical I was. I didn’t say “Catholic,” I said “Christian.” As someone who took fifty years to find the One Holy (from a standing start), I am sympathetic to those who may be dawdling. Let me also concede that our Roman Church is in such an extravagant outward mess, that conversion is presently discouraged. (But that’s all the more reason to come aboard. We need your help.)

Recently in Idleposts I have touched, from several successive angles, on what might be called “problems of translation,” and “good sense.” The pope in Rome pushed the discussion along with his extempore proposal to destabilize recitation of the Lord’s Prayer — some last freeboard against the mounting waves. He is an accomplished boat-rocker, determined to rock the Barque of Saint Peter as she struggles to level in the modernist storm.

This is … “not done,” as the cultivated used to say, over tea. … Still, it must be grasped that the elevation of Bergoglio to the captaincy was a symptom, not the cause of our terrible disorder. It showed a loss of judgement.

For the rôle of the Catholic Church, within a world that is not entirely Catholic, must be kept in view. In my humble but unalterable opinion, held even before I was received, the steadiness of her doctrinal position is of some moment. No other institution — whether gentle reader considers it to be divine or not — can sport her two-thousand-year record of maintaining, or repeatedly recovering, a coherent body of thought and teaching. This is sanity, par excellence. She has thus a responsibility towards all the non-Roman confessions, including to my mind the Eastern ones, to act as lodestar. Even those who disagree with her positions, benefit from keeping them in sight.

She has another function, that we are rediscovering, and must never again discount. In a world going or gone mad (as the world is inclined to go on its own cognizance), she must be the last monastic refuge of the sane.

Oddly enough, to the moralists, I care more about this than I do about whether remarried divorcees are illicitly taking Communion, or the many other instances of what tea-drinkers call “bad form.” The crucial thing, in  a time of convulsion and catastrophe, is to maintain Christ’s self-consistent course. If the law is breached, the breach can be repaired; rescind the law and everything is lost. And I mean everything, for in addition to the Barque, all lesser ships are lured towards the shoals.

It was possible in the past to be, as I think my own parents were, not Christian and yet not mad. I think that can be done for one generation, at most two. That was certainly the case with the Victorian sceptics, who lost their faith but remained stiffly moral, dispensing with anything beyond a vague theism but hardly questioning the biblical commandments. Their children, however, lost the rest of the connexion. They took everything into their own hands — and lived shameful self-destructive lives. They kept some of their parents’ (irritating) earnestness, but their judgement went haywire.

The sublime Fr George Rutler, whose homiletic works I try never to miss, made this point last Sunday. Insanity, he explained, is not a loss of brains. It is a loss of judgement. This is a point often made by apologists for Christianity. The madman may reason perfectly well. He may indeed be a teapot short and stout, on his own phantastical premisses; or a “trans-sexual,” or whatever pleases. It makes sense if you can be anything you decide. As Chesterton put it: “The madman is not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything except his reason.”

For better or worse (i.e. for better), the Christians in their rise and creation of “Western Civ” carried off everything of value from the cabinet of ancient, “secular,” Greek and Roman Civ, carefully assimilating it into what they now knew by divine revelation. They achieved, in this way, a kind of monopoly on sanity. After all these years we can’t detach again. We would have to start over from scratch, but even scratch has fallen into chaos. The only game in town for the sane is the old Christian one. But look around: not everyone is playing.

As my Chief Argentine Correspondent (this guy) likes to say, “I can give you the simple answer; but for the correct answer you will have to consult other sources.” A certain modesty in declaring the limits of one’s knowledge is just what we don’t find, almost anywhere we look on the Internet. (Not even here.) And the truth is not even in the hands of the admitted experts, although their carefully qualified opinions are likely to be more interesting than those of the [insert bawdy epithet here]. For these experts are all men, including those who are women; and there are strict limits on what such creatures can know. Put not your trust in them.

Notwithstanding, I have a simple “theory” of exegesis, which begins with Holy Scripture but may also be applied in every other realm of human perception. It is called “common sense” in English, and corresponds to sensus communis in Latin, κοινη αισθησις in Greek, and phrases in many other languages. The bon sens of French sounds prettier to my ear, for it is among my insights that what is “good” is not necessarily held in common. Too, I like the parallel we might draw between “good sense” and “good taste,” along with all-round goodness, preferable to badness in almost every case.

Aristotle had a word or two on this, and he says “common” (the koinos thing) in an uncommon way. His whole account in the De Anima is superbly teleological. Things work in a certain way, because otherwise they would not work. He does not mean by “common” that we take a vote. He means that something makes good sense when there is a coalescence of impressions in the soul. In my understanding, this is something like facial recognition. Everything fits together in such a way that we confidently hail the familiar, even when it is obscured by such accidents as wounds or advancing age. There is this “all of a piece” quality which is actually transcendent of sense impressions, much though it may begin with them. We have a “good idea.” Or we have a bad idea and get everything wrong.

We get the “gist,” and that gist is not a “whatever.” It is something specific, that does not continually “morph” into something else. Changes can be explained, but as the old man discovers, he is not a different person than he was at three. Nor is anyone not that.

Good sense begins with the recognition of realities that are outside us. The baby emerging from his mother’s womb may at first be in some confusion (I know I was). But in very little time he discovers that his mother has a face; that for all the profundity of his relation with her, she is someone else. It is the beginning of “good sense,” and with the passage of time other discoveries may be added to it, and answers found to such deep questions as, “Who is that other person?”

Good sense (or “horse sense,” perhaps, in honour of the wise Houyhnhnms) proceeds from known to known, and tends to avoid the leaps of “theory.” Which is to say, it does not follow rules. Instead the rules follow the knowledge, and no rule is ever quite secure.

I mention all this because I have the sense impression that modern man, especially in Greater Parkdale, lacks good sense. His development is less and less experiential. “Science” — or scientism, as preached in our schools — has taught him to be cowed by authority, and he is chiefly moved by the authority of opinions that are not his own. He believes the strangest things. To him, the world is full of djinns: spirits who take care of things, and make the most absurd demands, such as that he put his trash into different coloured boxes. He has the “cargo cult” mentality towards the State, and does not realize it is made of other persons. He is extremely easy to manipulate and fool.

Two things I miss from my Anglican days: the King James Version, and the Book of Common Prayer. My friends who remained Anglican also miss them, for both have been removed from church services by the Anglican bureaucracy. As the priest who received me into the Roman Church said, Anglicans make ideal converts. We already know at first hand what happens when liturgical, scriptural, and other received norms are “progressively” abandoned: the church itself disintegrates. Thus no one need hold our hands when we discover e.g. Roman bishops much like the cowardly, patronizing Anglican ones we left behind. We are ready to face them.

The deliquescence is everywhere; why would it not be here, in the Catholic Church, too? All the once-familiar markers of Christian teaching and prayer are in the process of demolition, by revolutionary forces within each denomination; and those who long for consistent order are denounced for “nostalgia.”

As we are reminded in daily mutterings from Rome, the Swinging Sixties aren’t over. The swinging balls are still crashing through the ancient glass, and the sacrifices are still being made: of manners, dress, comportment, modesty, custom, courtesy, propriety, decorum, form, taste, decency, reasoned argument, logical consistency, &c. Parousia may now be interpreted as, “let it all hang out.”

But returning to my topic, it was the beauty and poetry, the precision of phrase in the named works that appealed to me. Stable, as they had been for so many generations, and breathing elevation, it was possible to memorize extensive passages; to absorb something timeless, in its nature and in its aspirations. Almost every phrase in KJV and BCP could be read and prayed as catholic. One was drawn out of oneself; lifted. One learnt the language with the gestures, and in the dance of tradition, did not have to think where to step. For the dancer who must think is always stepping on one’s toes.

The (characteristically glib and fatuous) argument of the progressives was that the KJV translation had, in the course of three or four centuries, gone out of date. Many words had changed in meaning. (A good example is “temptation,” as in the Lord’s Prayer. It meant a testing then, as Jesus in the desert; it means a chocolate cake now.) And scholarship was marching. New manuscripts, fragments and palimpsests continued to emerge from obscure monastic archives and the sands of Egypt.

I once had on my shelves the massive Variorum Teacher’s Edition of the Holy Bible, edited by Cheyne, Clarke, Driver, Goodwin, Sanday — all once names to reckon with — anno Domini 1881. It contained the text of the King James, unrevised. But it also contained extensive notes, alternative readings, explanatory essays and other materials to help even the reader without Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or any dialect of Syriac, to see into the text. Books like Frederic Kenyon’s Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts (1895) keyed into this Variorum. That book I still have, and although it is now more than a century past its “sell-by,” it continues to offer a foundation on which an intelligent, independent reader may build an understanding of all the genuine advances in biblical scholarship, since — decidedly better than any later introduction I know of.

In my former life, when I entertained grand schemes, I dreamt of publishing a multi-volume revision of that Variorum, with the latest scholarship, but attached to the same old, resonant King James text. (This project could as well have been mounted on the explicitly Roman, and similarly magnificent, Douay-Rheims.)

There are now, in print, more than one hundred alternative English translations of the Bible, and the reader who buys, say, the top twenty, to compare them, is wasting time. He could actually save time by mastering the original languages. I rather think it was the Devil’s idea, to undermine the simple Christian’s confidence in Scripture by means of multiple translations, and innumerable petty and irrelevant distractions.

The New English Bible’s first volume, a translation into “modern idiom” of the New Testament, was published in 1961. It is dated now in a way the KJV will never be, and has in fact been succeeded by the many other “improved” — and desperately flawed — ever more “modern” editions, including those which intentionally misrepresent the original texts to keep up with the latest “gender” abominations. Yet even when it first appeared, T. S. Eliot could say that the new translation “astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic.”

That criticism holds, so far as I can see, for every modern-language “update” of scripture and liturgy. The hard truth is that the medium of contemporary language is incapable of conveying the substance we require.

Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set.

It is a nice question, what has caused more havoc in rush hour traffic this morning: a prematurely-exploded pipe bomb in New York City, or snow and black ice in London? At the time of writing, headlines from both sides of the Atlantic suggest a growing consensus on behalf of the pipe bomb. Either, however, could have a dampening effect on Christmas shopping, thus potentially inhibiting consumer confidence insofar as it is measured by the trend of daily sales: though by less than one dollar in a million.

Some snow in Greater Parkdale, too, but we’ve seen precipitation in this form before. Not enough to impede traffic. The merry bells of Christmas are ringing, or would be ringing at the cash registers all around town, except that new technology has obviated that delicious old “ching-ching.”

Now, if the North Koreans were to succeed in exploding an EMP device (that’s electro-magnetic pulse, I gather) high over our heads, I should think the consensus for “story of the year” would be overwhelming. The difficulty would be in reporting it, however, with the electrical grid out, and powered machinery at a standstill. This would be a serious inconvenience, and according to one frequently repeated estimate, 90 percent of the population would die as direct or indirect consequence of the blackout.

This estimate came from a science fiction novel, but entered media consciousness via USA congressional testimony nearly a decade ago, and has since become “a thing.” It is like the climate change estimates, though easier to trace.

My guess is that it would be good for the economy; perhaps even better than a hurricane or earthquake. The blackout would take days to overcome; weeks in some places. A certain proportion of electronic baubles would be knocked out, a proportion of those would be permanently fritzed, then consumers would be queueing for new baubles in EMP-hardened shells. Over time there would be very expensive infrastructure improvements. Add a few permilles to annual GDP.

This is a curious thing about economics. The “science” (a term that now connotes self-flattery) is amoral. The pornography industry, for instance, adds handsomely to our Gross Domestic Product; and much other enterprise that is gross indeed. Speculation conjures billions in “Bitcoin” with no backing at all. In the absence of (unquantifiable) moral considerations, the good is expressed as economic growth.

I sometimes wonder what a man of the thirteenth century, magically transported to the present time, would think of our fast-paced, high-tech “civilization.” The received notion is that he would be mightily impressed. This is not what I imagine, though. As a man at least sympathetic to what I can reconstruct of thirteenth-century mindsets, I think even without the pipe bombs and the EMP, our time traveller would be under the impression that he had died and gone to Hell.

Christianity is not a religion of the sword. Or rather, it is. Jesus said that he brings not peace but a sword; that he sets son against father, daughter against mother. But He could not possibly have meant “sword” in the worldly sense, which now includes machine guns and ballistic missiles. There is a time and a place for stuff like that, very arguably; there have been Christian soldiers called to arms in monastic chastity and devotion; but the sword of which Christ speaks strikes to the heart in a different way from a metal pike. The Christian is not required to conquer by arms, but neither is he excused from evangelism. We seek to save, not destroy our enemies.

Saint Michael is depicted with a sword that bespeaks the good, the true, the beautiful — and in the highest divine sense, freedom. There is civic freedom, there are “human rights” so far as they are in accord with human duties, but there is also something larger than the human, in which human freedom is subsumed. God is free and above us. His ways may often be inscrutable to us, and yet He has revealed so much of Himself that we can know to serve Him, in our freedom.

One of the things I have admired in the few serious Calvinists I have known is their appreciation of the cosmic order. God is central, man is peripheral. (This does not mean that man is unimportant, or why would Christ come down to us?) Our orientation in religion must be to God, and we must do our best to comprehend His requirements.

His, not ours.

We may disagree, critically, on questions of interpretation, but there can be respect for the man who, though working from premisses we find skewed, is diligent and honest in his labours. The good Calvinist is seeking the original Scripture, not lazing in popular translations. He is rightly curious about the writings of the earliest Fathers, and about the life and language of biblical times. He wants the truth, from source, unadulterated, which includes the original context. We should honour his intentions, and debate his conclusions in a respectful way, the more effectively by listening for what we must reply to. He might well teach me a thing or two, from his oblique angle. He may be a better man than I am. Upon conversion, he will make a better Catholic.

So, too, the Jew, whom we (in the received Catholic and Orthodox traditions) believe to be apostate in his denial of the Messiah present and implicit through the “Old Testament.” We are obliged to debate, and to pray for his conversion. It hardly follows that we are obliged to persecute him; and we can hardly expect to convert a Jew or anyone through brutish, arbitrary acts. Without acknowledging the sincerity and intelligence of our “rival,” we do a disservice — to him, but also to ourself. He might well teach me a thing or two, from his oblique angle. He may be a better man than I am. Upon conversion, he will make a better Catholic.

Gentle reader will perhaps see the trend of this argument.

There is a season for argument, although in the end, by our own argument, all argument will prove vain. This is because not we, but God will be vindicated, not on our terms but on His. And we ourselves will be called to account, not for our cleverness but for our sanctity.

Peace — in the limited sense of avoiding conflagration — often requires as much boldness as war. To achieve it, the statesman must cut through illusions. He must not appear weak; weakness encourages aggression. He must cut through the illusions of his allies and his enemies, as well as his own. As war, peace requires taking risks, and not all risks are painless. Sometimes they don’t even work. But the avoidance or rather, the deferment of risk, is the formula for making any small problem grow.

To my mind — sincere, however addled — the decision to move the USA embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, after twenty-two years of bipartisan blather, is a bold stroke for peace. It is made at an especially opportune time, when the State of Israel enjoys openings to the surrounding Arab world thanks to the common external threat of Iran. The American decision is of course protested, from Cairo and Riyadh to the dark, pettifogged chanceries of Europe; but will be taken everywhere as a side issue. Erdogan of Turkey will make as much mischief as he can, and the Ayatollahs will amplify their bluster. But the case required a fait accompli.

Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States except Qatar, have come to realize with unusual clarity that Israel is not only not their enemy, but a necessary ally. Regardless of current public opinion in those countries and elsewhere, the radicalized Palestinian quasi-state is not their friend. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah — both now functioning as Iranian proxies — is useful to them. Therefore it makes no sense to be constantly arousing their peoples to anti-Semitic fits, or using Israel as the whipping boy to explain their own comprehensive failures.

There can be no peace around Israel until Israel itself is normalized, and a normal country has the capital of its choice. The Trump move from America hastens the recognition, that Israel is a permanent feature of the Near Eastern landscape. It is a danger to its neighbours only if they attack it. It will not go away, and cannot be removed without a war that will entail their own extinction. Other countries will gradually follow the American lead. The Arab states should, too, after a face-saving interval.

From a Christian point of view, it is well that Israel persists, and occupies our common Holy Land. Our question is only, Who will better protect our ancient shrines, and grant our pilgrims access to them, Israel or Hamas? And the answer to that is, Duh.

A young priest of my acquaintance tells a delightful story from his own ordination. He has several brothers, and during a reception after the event, one of them had to listen to some painfully cheap anti-clerical blather from some irreligious grinch, helping himself to the cupcakes. This brother had probably been selected for his patient and peaceable demeanour. He is known as a soft target for bores. But the wrong day had been selected. Mister Charitable suddenly punched the guy in the nose. Laid him out nicely.

What a joyous thing. It made me think of Saint Nicholas — the fourth-century Catholic and Orthodox original for the Protestant and shopping centre Santa Claus. By a jolly tradition, this Saint did the same at the First Council of Nicaea to some tedious Arian, perhaps Arius himself. Having tired of listening to the man spout heresies, he dropped him with a crisp right hook. For this, the good Bishop of Myra was stripped of his mitre and pallium, and escorted to a prison cell. But Our Lord and Our Lady came to visit in the night, thanked Nicholas for defending their honour, and dressed him up again: now as an Archbishop.

Sceptical scholars call this story fanciful. Let none of them near me.

They doubt all Saint Nicholas’s miracles, too, which included the raising from the dead of the three children from the tub of brine. They take a pass on the legends of his copious gift-giving to the poor and sick; the gold dowries that saved the penniless young maidens from lives of prostitution; the unending list of his heavenly intercessions through the centuries after his earthly death. Naturally, they have doubted that his relics, translated to Bari in Puglia in 1087, could possibly be genuine. That is the function of the sceptics: to preserve deniability for all the works of God.

It is the Feast of Saint Nicholas, today, in the West. He’s been gone these last 1,674 years. Shrines to his memory remain, however, scattered around the world.

The relics in the Basilica di San Nicola at Bari — substantial bone fragments — have just been radiocarbon tested by the labcoats of the Oxford Relics Cluster in England. Sure enough, they date decisively to the fourth century. More fragments from the Chiesa di San Nicolo al Lido in Venice, already known to fit with those in Bari, will now be tested for a DNA match.

This comes a few days after the news that tests under the Edicule of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem have confirmed dates for the tomb of Our Risen Lord. They tie in exactly with the historical records, of continuous veneration by Christians from the earliest times. The story is much the same for Saint Nicholas: everything lines up.

It is a little cosmic joke, that at a time when technology worship has replaced religious faith in so many hearts and minds, the most advanced technology now compels belief in what generations of sceptics dismissed as foolishness. Poor things; it must come to them like a punch in the nose.

With her impeccable timing, Christine Keeler has died. This is the woman who brought down, or more modestly, contributed to the destruction of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government in the “Annus Mirabilis” of the late Philip Larkin:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) —
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Yes, a lot of things happened in 1963, of which, at the time, I was imperfectly aware. (Just think, if sexual intercourse had never been invented.) It was also the height of the Cold War, and Miss Keeler (a teen-aged runaway from Berkshire to a London cabaret) got things properly rolling. She had been sleeping with John Profumo, Britain’s Secretary of State for War. Also with Yevgeny Ivanov, an attaché at the Soviet embassy.

She was a refreshingly honest girl, according to a laudatory obituary I’ve just read. (Served nine months for perjury, by the bye.) Not so Mr Profumo, who lied (can you believe it?) to the House of Commons when asked a perfectly straightforward question about broadly circulating rumours. His resignation was forthcoming with his subsequent admission that the rumours were quite true, and the case went down in the History of Tory Infamy. The disparity in ages (forty-six and nineteen) must have drawn additional winks and nudges, but was not the issue then.

Only recently we learnt, from released MI-5 files via our ever-vigilant media, that as an Oxford student in the 1930s, then young Tory MP, Profumo had a much longer affair with one Gisela Winegard, a “haughty, Teutonic” model, who happened to be also a Nazi spy. And that it was resumed after the War.

Was she “refreshingly honest,” too? Was Profumo, for his habit of writing endearments to his (invariably shared) mistresses on House of Commons notepaper? Enquiring minds want to know: How do such idiots become Ministers of the Crown?

I mention this history only in the context of current kiss-and-tells. It has come as a surprise to many that men, including older ones in positions of authority, have been manoeuvring attractive young women into bed. Also, apparently, attractive young men. It would be too dark a secret to reveal that this isn’t always difficult; that so perverse is human nature that, exempli gratia, lively young women are sometimes attracted to staid, rich and powerful old men; or might even try to exploit them. Or that there may be teen-aged girls who don’t know what they’re doing. Or worse, who do.

Mr Profumo spent the rest of his life working off his shame (received a CBE for his charitable activities in London’s East End), but still died with the reputation of having been the “Profumo” in “The Profumo Affair.” Miss Keeler attempted “normal family life,” achieving two divorces. Mr Macmillan, who crashed down as prime minister, was the picture of family loyalty and fidelity, and a heartbroken widower. It was his wife who had been cheating — for thirty years. He was also the devoted, longsuffering father of a troubled daughter, whom he knew to be not his.

Yes, men are bad and women are their victims, as the feminists are proclaiming once again. And it’s all hanging out there in the media breeze. But behind closed doors, there is much that goes off-script.

If there are two things that “foreigners” don’t understand about the Roman Church, they are these. 1. The Pope is an absolute dictator. 2. He has no power to change anything. Granted, this may seem a contradiction to some. I prefer to think of it as a holy “paradox.” It can be explained by the fact that there is someone above the Pope in the Church hierarchy. And that is Jesus Christ: King above Kings. The Pope is, as it were, His beadle. Should a Pope stand in conflict with the teachings of Our Lord, he is not serving his office. Instead, he is being an idiot, in the strict sense of standing alone.

Now, this is the world, in which things are always changing. But in their essentials, things never change. Perhaps gentle reader may receive this as another paradox. It is echoed in all areas of human life. The winds blow: it is necessary sometimes to adjust one’s footing, to remain standing in the same place. This is a thing of no consequence. Some habits of dress and turns of phrase may suffer adjustment, from time to time. One need not be confused by such “accidents.”

Over against this is the modernist notion of “evolution,” which puts the accidents in charge, of a world in perpetual flux. It is as wrong in science as in religion.

In both, the Truth is something we home in on, as the ratios in the Fibonacci series home in upon the absolutely constant Golden Section. Einstein did not overthrow Newton, but made Newton’s cosmology more exact. The very Catholic astronomer and mathematician, Copernicus, did not overthrow the pagan Ptolemy, for that matter: he explained observed movements more completely. Augustine did not overthrow Origen; Thomas Aquinas did not overthrow Augustine; &c. We may come, over time, to a better understanding of what was before us all along. No matter what revolutionary ideas are propounded, the Sun will continue to rise in the East.

The moral order is no more subject to revision than the observed physical laws. It might be explained differently, to one generation or another. But what is wrong is wrong at all times, no matter how many people are doing it; and what is right stays right, no matter how few. It is among the beliefs of post-modern nincompoopery that this order is subject to human choice. But attempts to alter what is founded in Nature will never end well.

That “there is nothing new under the Sun,” that Christ “came not to abolish but fulfil,” are words to bear in mind against the blathering. As too, the Psalmist’s “Therefore.” … “Therefore will not we fear, when the earth shall be troubled; and the mountains shall be removed into the heart of the sea.” If it happens, it is possible, but it does not follow that anything has changed.

Which takes us back to the papacy, and the book published in English today, The Dictator Pope. It is not before me as I write. I doubt, in fact, that I will ever read it, for from the publicity the Italian edition has received I see that it contains nothing new. It will be full of things that I knew already, in sufficient outline; which indeed my Chief Buenos Aires Correspondent told me in 2013. He, and several other fine Argentines said that the Conclave had made a terrible mistake. But how could they have known?

We have had bad as well as good Popes before; we will have them again, God willing. It happens, and thus it can happen. We were perhaps too spoilt with Popes better than we deserved. It may seem unfortunate, that mountains are shifting; but we should not be distracted by mere news.

____________

On the subject of new books, my friend Herman Goodden’s Speakable Acts — a collection of his plays — is also launched today. Surely a more agreeable read. Those in the vicinity of London, Ontario, are instructed to proceed to the Chaucer Pub (122 Carling Street), where the drinking will begin at four-thirty. (See here; see here.)