Essays in Idleness

To those who know nothing about the mediaeval, “byzantine” East of Christendom (and what do I know about anything?) a book by the respectable Oxford scholar, Averil Cameron, is worth mentioning. It is a short survey of developments in her academic field, entitled, Byzantine Matters (2014). It poses five basic questions on which our common assumptions are mostly wrong, and provides succinct directions for thinking again.

Mediaeval Greece, the Byzantine dynasties, and Orthodox Christianity: these are far from interchangeable concepts. Moreover, “Byzantine art” — the focus of enthusiasm in the anglosphere through the last century or so — is misunderstood. The term “Byzantine” itself — conceived from late antiquity as a deprecation — persists in the academy as an intelligence neutralizer. The vanity of “the West” gets in the way of appreciating a parallel Christian realm, which flourished for more than a thousand years, and never succumbed to the Arabs. (It finally succumbed to the Turks.) We disdain what amounts to an alternative universe of Christian witness and high culture, of great variety and depth, even more obtusely than we disdain our own Middle Ages.

We are narrowed and prejudiced by the attitudinizing of Edward Gibbon, and the inheritance (or disinheritance) of our Western “Enlightenment,” to view as backward a civilization in most ways superior to our “modern” own, from pride in the tinsel of technology. From AD 330 (the founding of Constantine’s capital) to 1453 (when it fell into Ottoman hands), we see only a continuous story of “decline.” But there were many declines over this vast period, and in the intervals between them, many recoveries.

I don’t review books in this space, any more than I provide a news service. I mention them only to advance some thought of my own, however unworthy. Today’s is on this matter of “decline” or “doom” — at a time when we casually accept that our own, Western, multi-century run is more or less finito. The idea of “Decline and Fall” is the verso of our progressivism. If we are not going up, we must be coming down, and since the evidence is plentiful for the latter, the idea seems too plausible to examine. (Why fight for a dying civilization? Take your pleasure now!)

What I like about this book is its elevation. Just as at the seminary where I sort-of teach, we try to supply students with “a map,” Dame Averil takes us aloft. Some things become visible from above, that cannot be discerned from ground level. With respect to Byzantine history, we are overdue for some bold revisionism, and could wish for a tremendous expansion of scholarly effort to publish many of the most prominent literary, artistic, and philosophical monuments.

But with respect to the world at large, and to the broad question of how things work in time, we have a model of still greater value. The very unfamiliarity of so much of the terrain — its comparative freshness — helps us see what, in the case of our own past, eludes us from over-familiarity.

We see that nothing in Byzantine history was necessary. None of the declines, defeats, disintegrations were inevitable; nor any of the rebounds, revivals, reconstructions. And yet, neither decline nor recovery was in any sense “a choice” — as we say, conventionally, about things like elections. What to human eyes seems pure bloody luck is always there, including centrally the presence or absence of men willing to run long odds; who take faith, when the world turns faithless, and will not agree to “steady as she sinks.” Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but in societies as in individuals nothing is determined; and the game ain’t over till the fat lady sings.

The best argument I have heard for voting at all, in the USA election — and thus voting for Trump — is that he has promised to leave Catholics alone (and by extension other Christians, and maybe even Jews, and other business-minding, law-abiding types). Therefore my gentle American readers can plead self-defence, and perhaps need not run to the Confessional (after pulling the lever for the Republican slate, and checking that the machine wasn’t supplied by George Soros).

On the other hand, the Catholics who vote for Clinton, after all that she has said and done, and what has been revealed about the machinations of Podesta and the others in her train, may not need to run to the Confessional, either. Rather they might prioritize getting their heads examined. For they propose to support an agenda that is unambiguously and aggressively evil. (More here.) Surely they cannot intend that.

If Trump wins, it will seem like the end of the world. The media will present it with the opposite of the glee with which they welcomed the triumph of Obama. But while this is an encouragement to vote for Trump, it is not decisive.

We should not allow ourselves to be swayed by these devils one way or the other. Bear in mind that the opposite of what they say is not always true. Much of their criticism of Trump is quite reasonable.

Since before the Declaration of Independence (i.e. going back to the Continental Congress), candidates for all parties have presented each election as “the most important in our lives.” This is nonsense, however. Whichever is elected, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride on. There isn’t one of those presidential candidates I’d feel comfortable voting for, were I a citizen of those USA.

Except possibly Calvin Coolidge. He left everyone alone.

[This piece has suffered overnight enlargement.]

*

“Prophecy” is a word with lots of cheap synonyms, so that one uses it with restraint, and would rather use the synonyms wherever they might apply. The prophetic is not the prognostic, for instance; yet the prognostic might be, at an angle, prophetic. Our (contemporary) notions of “vision” and “the visionary” are substitutes for the prophetic, but empty in so far as they are agnostic or atheist. To discern truth, underlying appearances, is in some paradoxical relation to “seeing what is right in front of your eyes,” but in no conventional understanding of eyeballs; for one is seeing through what is superficial and essentially false (because incomplete: “heretical”).

The use of such terms in the celebration and self-celebration of opinion leaders and the fashion coolies could be called a sign of our times. The former are just madmen. The latter deal in a kind of “spilt beauty,” much like spilt religion.

A prophet is more like a messenger; to kill the prophet is to kill the messenger; Him who sent the message remains. And like a messenger, the prophet may not entirely understand the message he has brought from afar. He speaks better than he knows. A poet can be prophetic in this specific way; he is sometimes a poor interpreter of his own work. He discovers things in his own work that he hadn’t intended to put there; and these things include structural devices, shaping echoes and resonances, undercurrents and counterpoints — not just chance verbal jewels. The song or the story “gets away from him,” and often a poet has said of his most anthologized and remarkable poem that it “wrote itself.”

With painters, too, this experience is common: that a picture emerges almost in opposition to the painter’s intentions, so that he might think the “image behind the image” came out in front. He has shown more than he saw, or created an atmosphere beyond his own skills. He, too, becomes a messenger of some kind, and while his first training was only in the (imperative) craft, his last training is in the chastity required for revelation: making himself the means, not to his own but to the artistic purpose.

Or as I like to put this, “What makes the artist is not what makes the man.” His work is apart from him; it has its own development and sense of occasion. As the art becomes greater, the artist becomes less. At the extreme, he is nothing at all, his “personality” dissolves as Dante’s in the 30th canto of the Paradiso, or perhaps Bach in The Art of Fugue, where the composer dissolves into his composition. Farther, he cannot go. His “vision” is now perfect, his purpose is fulfilled, and he is transformed:

Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a Sea-change
Into something rich, and strange …

Only indirectly can one write about beauty, and never can it be understood, for what is embodied is a mystery: a Word negating words, and a sentiment guiding beyond the human. We are left with similes, analogies, correlatives: but to what?

*

An old friend, who is a trial lawyer, has written a book, on “a common preoccupation,” which he has entitled, The Experience of Beauty. (Harry Underwood, here.) He has been living with beauty in a special way, for his wife, Denise Ireland, is an explosively floral painter. (By which I don’t mean only “botanical.”) Regardless of its subject, each of her paintings is, on its surface, a wanton distortion of all elements, including colour. Everything is depicted with an uncanny vividness, which we might call “life affirming,” but is something more. It is as if she has done the opposite of paint: instead scraped or washed away everything that concealed or clouded until she has “restored the original.” The light, especially sunlight she exhibits, is not cast upon the objects, nor comes from within them, but seems to be everywhere; all the figures dance; and there is patterning that sings like a chorus.

For decades, Harry has had to live with this, and think about it, too. His book often resembles Denise Ireland paintings, done into words. At its centre Nietzsche and Plato are having a debate; their discussion spreads through seven other essays. I don’t think it gets anywhere at all (this is one of my finer compliments), yet in the course of not getting there, gets somehow behind it. He is writing about the capacity of art to enhance what it represents; not about tricks or abstraction. His final essay, on “The Beauty Within,” goes part way to explaining, in terms to which both Nietzschean and Platonist might plausibly subscribe, “the poetry of art” — bridging philosophical incommensurables.

Wallace Stevens said somewhere in his Adagia that, “Philosophy is the official view of Being; poetry is the unofficial view.” Persnickety Wittgenstein said as much in several places. And Plato’s near giddily destructive remarks on poetry and art — where he suggests banning them — are presented in the high poetic garb. They go beyond irony. We are dealing with something which cannot be explained in terms of something else, nor fitted in a scheme, because it is something in itself, incapable of translation.

But I disagree with Harry’s approach, for he reconciles art with life, and thus finds a beauty fed by experience and growing within us. It is feeling rising to thought, through some process of distillation; it involves self-discovery; and instead of the radical external of the divine, we get those bastard things, “ideals.” (His precis of Augustine seems more appropriate to Walt Whitman.) This is much the opposite of what I wrote above, but in moments seems another way of saying the same thing, as especially where he insists (in defiance of current opinion) that art must inspire us. In the moments when I lose him, however, I feel the trap closing on the cage of, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

To my mind, art and life are irreconcilable; the reconciliation is on another plane, that is vertical and not horizontal. Art, I would say, reconciles us with God, by making reality at least partially accessible to us. Rather than assuaging, it tears at our flesh, pries our clamped shell, immolates our glibness. It is by doing so that it has moral consequences, pulling us into the realm of charity. That “inspiration” is not something that enriches us, so much as it is something that annihilates us. We are there, when before we were here; we have escaped the prison of gravity and routine. The beautiful is “over the top”; I want to laugh sometimes when I see it. We return to our world of weight and measure with regret — unless we can somehow keep that beauty.

And as I have written persistently, the apprehension of beauty is contingent upon Love — alerted suddenly from storge (“affection”) to unconditional agape. It is harrowing, in that way: to love what one cannot possess, except as a commodity through art dealers. (And I would almost speak like a socialist, and say that when “owned” it begins to fade and die.)

But as Augustine in fact said in his Confessions, a longing is aroused for nothing that can be satisfied in this world. And as Plato, it is for something of which this world can only remind us. The test of art is that mysterious mnemonic, almost déjà vu.

The “prophetic,” the “visionary,” has always this untranslatable, this inevitable quality. It seems to stand alone. Instead of taking it into us, we must take ourselves out to it. We must, as it were, become artists to see “art” — whether in human works, or in nature (which is saturated with art).

And once we have been there, and done that — been exposed to a revelation of God’s will in an exhibition of the shocking beauty of His world — we are drawn out of our miserable selves, out of our hapless daily routines; restored to a form of life that is not merely biological but implicitly everlasting. For instead of the two convenient dimensions to which we had become too easily accustomed, there is suddenly a third: the Gloria.

For some reason, I’ve forgotten what, I’ve been dipping lately into the Roman historians. Not in a serious, studious way (I hardly ever do that), simply opening a Loeb here or there, in just the way I used to open a newspaper. There is a view of history that is utterly unHegelian, and I take it. I’m sure the story makes some sense, run forward in strictly chronological order; it seems to make better sense run backward. Whichever, we may discover the sound-and-fury significance, but not in this lifetime. Meanwhile, if we spread it out on our mental broadsheet of space and time, it’s just a lot of news; and as others have observed, extremely repetitious.

Cassius Dio and Ammianus Marcellinus are the ones I want to be reading, but those Loebs somehow disappeared in the course of my last personal catastrophe. But everything is online anyway, these days, in a form that will wreck your mind and eyesight.

The former was a ten-volume bore, as I distantly recall. Dio takes his Historia Romana from the arrival of Aeneas down to his own early third-century floruit, when he was himself a player, watching horrible things happen, first-hand. (He was a rather pompous Roman senator, and sometime provincial governor.) The text is scatty, but largely recoverable from Byzantine compilations. His eightieth and last scroll is the best. It leaves us shortly after the reign of Heliogabalus, the fourteen-year-old transgender Syrian boy who became emperor in AD 218 (thanks to the machinations of his very wealthy high-born mother), and who amazed the establishment “inside the beltway” of the Eternal City with a crazed, sick religious cult, and his own vile, disgusting behaviour, until his Praetorian Guard mercifully “took him out” in 222. Gentle reader must consult the original sources for hints of that behaviour; I won’t repeat them in this family website.

The latter, Ammianus, who took upon himself the task of updating Tacitus, wrote a Res Gestae that has almost entirely disappeared, except for some good bits towards the end, which give a chronicle of events through the generation AD 353 to 378. Having served at a high, mostly soldiering level in Persia, Egypt, and elsewhere, and being familiar with the court of Constantius II, and then Julian (“the Apostate”) — he is an elegant and charming gentleman to my sight, who provides a wonderful, sometimes mildly droll, world picture of that age, when the western Empire has not yet properly collapsed, but the whole is trending increasingly oriental. It is the age that corresponds to the Arian utter mess in our Church. Ammianus is not a Christian himself, but he has nothing against Christians, and nothing to do with what we might call the last stand of classical paganism, which expressed itself in more persecutions.

Let us not overload this post with (Greek-speaking) Roman historians. I want to emphasize the time between the two I have mentioned: about six generations. And I do this to deny two illusions about the Roman “decline and fall.” The first is that it was “progressive,” in the sense that things got continuously worse. The madness at the top was fairly continuous, but was often worse in the earlier centuries than in the later. The second is that, despite memorable (and frequent) catastrophic events, the thing took a long time to fall, and only in the West did public order collapse, almost entirely, into what we call the Dark Ages. Even those have been misreported to the popular mind, for relics survive to the present day, and the Holy Roman Empire went down only the day before yesterday, historically speaking. (To be replaced by Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Hitler, &c.)

Through it all, through every century so far as I can see, the apocalyptic sense has been active. We are always, and reasonably, thinking “things can’t get worse,” but things can and often do, and any apparent relief from the long disaster of human self-government is, at best, a quick and confusing “time out.”

The American Republic was (rather ostentatiously) founded in the image of the Roman, and to my mind had already mutated into something more like the Empire, by the time of Andrew Jackson. History is too grubby to form neat parallel lines, but we should not be surprised to find by now that leadership is in the hands of men (and women!) who are (on the analogy of alcoholics) “functioning insane.” And as all the more decadent emperors of the past, their power depends on their supporters, many of whom justify their loyalty because, well, the alternative is worse, and must be avoided at any cost. In the end, some Sardanapalus pulls them all down — spiritually, but also materially.

This is no Apocalypse — which may still come at any time. But when it does, we’ll know it. You can’t miss stuff like the sky actually falling.

Instead, everything is normal. Augustine touched on this in De Civitate Dei. Gentle reader will recall that there are two cities. We should not be surprised, and our efforts should not be principally directed towards the wrong one. Rather than, say, trying to make America great again, our worldly efforts should instead be directed only to preventing the worst from happening; to deflecting missiles, as it were, regardless of their source; to calling “time outs” whenever possible, and tending to the victims. Because that is the limit of what we can do, in this vallis lacrimarum.

People like me are “obsessed, scrupulous, self-appointed, nostalgia-hankering virtual guardians of faith and liturgical practices, very disturbed broken and angry individuals, who never found a platform or pulpit in real life, holy executioners, deeply troubled, sad and angry.” I’ve selected these descriptives from a single sentence of Fr Thomas Rosica’s, last May, when he was speaking on the need for dialogue, and receiving some media award. For three years now, he has been the current pope’s English-language spokesman, never corrected by his boss. We knew him before, around here in Toronto. Less said about that, the better, especially as the man is litigious.

My contrary view could be stated more economically. I think Father Rosica is a thug. I could add adjectives all day, but there are other things in my obsessed, scrupulous agenda.

Yet I am reminded of this man in my All Saints morning ramble through the electronic diselysium. He just took a kick at the Catholic Herald, for instance — a paper which often publishes orthodox Catholic writers, and today points out that Catholic and Lutheran positions (plural, possibly on both sides) have never been farther apart.

His name came up in relation to the latest papal appointments, by which the whole Congregation of Divine Worship was overhauled. Cardinals Burke, Bell, Scola, Bagnasco, Ranjith, Ouellet, and others friendly to the Old Mass, have been suddenly replaced by a selection from Bergoglio’s new brooms, in an act reported by the Catholic press in Europe (often enthusiastically) as a sharp slap to the face of the Congregation’s prefect, Cardinal Sarah — and his tireless work to restore reverence to the Mass, in both its old and new forms. We wonder now, which slipper drops next? For Rome abounds with rumours that Pope Francis is reversing Pope Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum — piecemeal, so not to provoke open schism between the “progressive” and “catholic” ecclesial factions.

The pope himself has been delivering colourful insults to our beleaguered faithful, throughout his reign; Rosica merely echoes and amplifies. On Sunday, the original date for the Feast of Christ the King, while the Basilica of Saint Benedict was crumbling in the earthquake at Norcia, he was proceeding to Sweden to celebrate the 499th anniversary of Lutheranism, in the old Lund cathedral with the lady primate of the state Church of Sweden. His homily for this Hallowe’en was full of breezy ecumenical platitudes, and tooth-grinding historical clichés, of no doctrinal substance whatever; though he did declare a new category of sin: not against Christ, but against “ecumenism.”

I am tempted to commit one of those. The Reformation was the greatest disaster to befall the Western Church, and its anniversary is an occasion for lamentation, not the sort of celebration we associate with professional football. From my (“catholic”) Catholic perspective, there can be no undoing its effects until the descendants of the heretics return to Holy Church.

We also recognize many Lutherans and other Protestants who are, at this day, far more orthodox than many Catholics (including recently-appointed bishops); and that, reunion with them would be a source of extraordinary joy. But it cannot be shallow and rushed, for there are real theological and liturgical obstacles, that cannot be kicked over.

Such obvious things need repetition at a time when idols like “ecumenism” are replacing Our Lord in the worship of our diminishing Western congregations.

*

That was yesterday; in the rapid evolution of modern life, today is All Saints. I look to Lund, and its venerable, romanesque cathedral, that fell into the hands of the State nearly five centuries ago, by what is called “robbery under law,” in an operation parallel and roughly coterminous with what was done in England by Henry VIII. The whole town of Lund was once bristling with the spires of churches, chapels, shrines, convents, like a northern Rome. It was once the spiritual, and also the artistic, cultural and intellectual, even political centre of Europe’s sub-Arctic. Today it remains, a stripped and shrivelled “symbol” of an amended past, waiting for the return of its riches.

Lund cathedral contains one restored, delightful curiosity. It is an elaborate astronomical clock, built about 1380. One may watch it to anticipate sunrises and sunsets, moonrises and moonsets, throughout the year, and to calculate with the help of its perpetual calendar the movements of the heavens through the passing hours, days, weeks, months, decades. It is known as the Horologium mirabile Lundense, and at its crown the visitor may see Saint Lawrence, the ancient patron, flanked by the four Evangelists.

That saint: who was martyred under Valerian (AD 258), for his slowness in turning over Church property to the pagan Roman authorities of his day. … Ah, Valerian! … who ended in Persia, as an exhibit, stuffed.

And ah, Saint Lawrence, that saint who, when commanded to surrender the riches of the Church, brought forth a crowd of the poor, the crippled, the blind, the diseased, the old and frail, to the intense irritation of the Roman bureaucrats.

Who chose death over “dialogue,” and platitudes.

One thinks of all the saints who, borne upon the breath of Saint Lawrence, and the wind from out of the empty tomb, Christianized the Danes and Swedes; of all who faced the vast expropriations at the material founding of Luther’s new church; the monks and nuns and all the religious turned out of their cells by a human earthquake. Of their old houses, “reformed” to make such splendid estates for the fat lords of the new bourgeois order, and quarried for their stone. …

That time of yeare thou maist in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few doe hang
Upon those boughes which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. …

And then, one considers the uncountable, forgotten holy men and women who have witnessed Christ, through every threat and punishment, down centuries in all nations, now ascended beyond our capacity to imagine.

Pray to them, to all the Saints, at a time when the skies are again occluding, and we need them in our appeal to God — to send more Saints, that they may show us through the fearful darkness the way Home.

“If it falls down, it will have to be mended.”

The words are recalled from a French Canadian builder, and pertained to a chimney, not the whole house. A mason of worldly understanding and broad reading, he was not commenting upon his own work. I learnt that the words, in their original French, were from some Quebec City building instruction of the seventeenth century. (The drollness was probably intended.) That’s about as close as we get to the Middle Ages, in Canada, and it is indeed fascinating to look into the builders’ practices, and the codes and regulations which applied to them, three and four centuries ago, as Peter Moogk did in his fine volume, Building a House in New France (1977).

It is a mistake, incidentally, to think that they were libertarian in the past. Towns, back as far as we can see, were always run about with building restrictions; and craft guilds were once quite particular in seeing regulations enforced. Today we have national building codes, which are so general as to be ridiculous; and cities have by-laws that can be bought off. Freedom doesn’t come with loose laws. Rather it comes with laws that are precise and constant. But that is just an aside.

We were working on some old house I had bought in Kingston, Ontario. It was a true fixer-upper, in four storeys of limestone. The work cost me more than the house, as I was determined to restore it properly. This involved much amateur archaeology, as well as rebuilding. Over a year or two, I became closely acquainted not only with the ways of contemporary builders, but also with those of the 1840s and the decades in between. My chief lesson was of the importance of inspection: that it is unwise to leave any workman entirely to his own estimation of the soundness of his work. Encouragement is good, too, but inspection is crucial. And this would have been as true in 1841, as it was a sesquicentury later.

Now, to my limited understanding, the northern French traditions, carried to the New World, also provided that work be guaranteed for twenty years after it was completed. So that, if after a decade or so, the roof leaks, the roofer must repair it at his own expense. If the chimney cracks — well, the New World was “progressively” cutting corners. The idea of “contract law,” and court enforcement, was developing in new ways, and a clever workman would propose contracts in which the twenty years of fading “tradition” was quietly replaced with e.g. “one year plus one day,” and did not apply to “acts of God.” (To lawyers, those are always mendacious.) So that, by the time poor workmanship were discovered, the home owner could fix it himself.

There are natural limits, to human life. I’m aware, from reading splendid authors such as John Harvey, that long before the Reformation, decendants of a builder might find themselves embarrassed by their ancestors’ little foibles, when these were exposed. Standards, gentle reader must understand, have been in decline for some time now.

I’m looking at pictures of the damage to Norcia in Italy, from the latest earthquake over the weekend. It would seem that, except much of the façade, and the wobbly remains of a bell-tower, the Basilica of Saint Benedict is now … down. I flinch, at the fine art now mixed in the rubble.

No one was killed, this time, thanks to repeated warnings from the groaning earth; but it was touch-and-go. The sight of Saint Clare nuns emerging from a cloister, in which they had been for many years secluded, was to me especially heart-rending. The town looks much the worse from this latest six-point-six shaking, centred near the surface only a few miles away; and the geologists have every reason to expect more is coming from the local faults, as they (the stone faults, not the agile geologists) seek a new equilibrium within the crush zone between the continental plates of Europe and Africa.

As five centuries have passed, I doubt we can hold the builders responsible. Nor could they be thought entirely to blame: the buildings did hold up through the last few thousand shocks and aftershocks, in that quake-prone region. There are limits to all materials and joins. One might design a building that would survive turning sideways, or upside down; but it would look too much like a ferris wheel. The good news is that with the quakes continuing, we might take our time, planning the reconstruction. So we’ll have the opportunity to think it through.

But it will have to come. Everything must eventually be restored, much as it was before, though to an even better standard to resist all these geological convulsions. The thought gives one a certain satisfaction, at a time when one needs also to restore morale. Surely we can build it again, even better than it was before, and even more secure against the whims of nature. And more beautiful, except the loss of some patina; but that will eventually grow back. It is exciting to think how we are going to do this; and how much craft we will re-learn in the process.

This thought applies to all the facilities of Holy Church, moral, material, intellectual, and spiritual: that, “if it falls down, it will have to be mended.”

The two Saints Simon and Jude have been linked together in the Canon of the Mass, since time out of mind. We continue to celebrate them, this day. Our missals suggest the reason: for these were Apostles, “brethren of Our Lord,” who went off to Mesopotamia, then into Persia. From hints in Bible and Tradition, Simon was a converted Jewish Zealot; Jude the sage author of the short New Testament Epistle, preserved in his name. (More fully, Judas Thaddaeus, pointedly distinguished from Judas Iscariot.) There is e.g. an apocryphal Passion of Simon and Jude, on their fate in Persia. We have hints of them in conflict with Zoroastrian priests and court magicians; of their previous success in making many converts. We cannot tell at this distance of nearly two thousand years, any more than we can of other major events, exactly what happened. For that matter, we cannot tell exactly what happened yesterday, this side of the grave. But we can see that this Simon and this Jude were famous, and easily guess what they were famous for.

We see from the news that the conversion of Persia is not yet complete. Indeed, it was farther ahead at several times in the past. To the modern mind, which takes Christianity as a brand, and may compare its spread to that of a global corporation, setbacks can be attributed to bad management. I like to mention the less-appreciated factor of market resistance. It is interesting to me that the objections raised against the Gospel account of Jesus, by Parsees, Mandaeans, Nabataeans, Manichees, and others, are only to his death and resurrection; otherwise they are happy to appropriate Him.

In other ways this habit of easy assimilation — but only on the condition that Christ is not Absolute — carries back to the old Persian, and Arab tribal religions, and forward into Islam. What the Arab historians called the Sabians — lumping together miscellaneous “peoples of the book” (of one book or another) — are always strongly dualistic. The Judaeo-Christian outlook is not. We all perceive a War in Heaven; for them it is more evenly matched.

To my mind, the significance of this is large. At the deepest level, to the mindset of this East, the Good Lord needs our help; to our more startlingly “Hebrew-Hellenic” outlook, we need God’s. Contemplation reveals that our respective notions of “will” (and “free will”) are founded in these different soils. To our prophets, there is no question that God will prevail. To theirs, even after the radically monotheist corrective of Islam, there remains a sneaking doubt, and I attribute a recurrent fanaticism to this recurring demand, in effect, for Allah to prove that he is still winning.

From ancient Sasanian to modern Salafist, they have been betting on the strong horse; and therefore, instinctively, on conversion by force. We, by contrast, have been betting on the weak one — which would be foolish, had we not some inside knowledge.

But now I am going deeper than I can dive, in pursuit of some pearl beyond me.

A couple of years ago, a friend sent this link (here) to an artsy little flick on an old man living in the California mountains. He was ninety-three; still making violin bows, with gout-knobbled fingers; and chopping wood for his stove. The cabin itself, which he and his adoptive son had built many decades before, was itself a craftsmanlike beauty. The man, Jack English, was the surviving half of one of those immortal love stories, his wife’s ashes still with him, waiting to be mixed with his own. In the film, he explains that he doesn’t want to be in any “convalescent home.” He was lonely, but people did come to visit, and he liked people, though not in swarms. Well, all that’s in the film, I think; perhaps I should have checked, before writing this.

Gentle reader may agree that the man was memorable, however. His voice was unforgettable, too. Suddenly remembered his name today, and Google-searched my way to his obituary. He made it to ninety-six; died last March.

A long day, today. Once again, the Sikorsky helicopter did not arrive, to lift the High Doganate out of this apartment building, and set it down in a remote location. Just as well, I suppose, because I still haven’t figured how to unbolt it from the structure it is in. And you don’t want to keep helicopter pilots waiting: they charge a fortune. Maybe I’ll get that together next week.

The voice, the face: time to watch it again. I can remember old men like that, from childhood. Not so many since. But some day there’ll be more.

A young man of my acquaintance belongs to an interesting club. The members communicate with each other in an unusual way. They write letters, by hand, and fold them into envelopes, onto which they affix postage stamps. They eschew email — except for communication with institutions and strangers. Telephones might also be used in emergencies. They also meet, physically, from time to time, when their busy young lives allow it. (Being generally Catholic, and much blessed with children, they tend to be busier than most.) But their conversations are sustained by letters. Urban members of this “cell” may live within a few miles of each other, but still, pen and paper is preferred, along with coherent, linear thinking. Gentle reader might want to know more about them. So would I, but I’m not in their loop.

On the other hand, I am now so old that I can remember when such behaviour was normal. One received a letter in the mail; one replied with another letter; and often these were kept; which accounts for the wonderful correspondence of Charles Lamb I was recently reading, surely meant for the ages. Today it would all be lost.

When my father died, and I inherited what was left of his files, I discovered all these letters written by his son, from far and exotic places. Being that son, I had an almost unhealthy curiosity about them. What had I written twenty, thirty, nearly forty years before? Much came back to memory that I had not forgotten, simply not thought about since. On balance it was an unpleasant experience, as with the eyes of a greater maturity I could see myself posing one way or another, selectively omitting relevant facts, or boasting of things that make me cringe today. But there they were, these letters, to my perpetual benefit, in preparation for the Last Day. … “Father, forgive.”

Faces came back to me, with their names. Had I recalled names only, the faces might be lost, and vice versa. But from a letter, people are recollected whole, and come back to mind with the poignancy of the relic in one’s hand. I cross myself and pray. What has happened to this man, this woman, this child? Lord, keep them, whom I will not see again on this Earth; be with them in their hour of trial. Fates that meant nothing to me then, mean something to me now, as I see a human soul more clearly for the distance.

Much of the substance of letters — physical letters on paper with ink, kept in envelopes with the old stamps and the scent of past time; handwriting that was once familiar — is not “rational.” (I am using that word as it is abused today.) But the academic term, aesthetic, will not serve either. Something larger is systematically eliminated by computer. Iris Murdoch invented the term, “touchment.” It can be restored from raw text only by memory and imagination, but these are crippled when all their stimuli are stripped away. We lose details that go beyond words.

People write to me because of this Idleblog, whom I have never met, never seen; and they leave no clue even to where they are writing from. Seldom do they sign their full names, and if the email is full of abuse, all clues to source will be missing. Several times I have asked, “Who are you?” — then been told, smugly, it is none of my business. My reasoning was, you know who I am, why shouldn’t I know as much about you? Even with the friendliest correspondents, I should like to know, am I dealing with Charles in Melbourne, or Charles in Topeka, or Charles now working in Dubai? I must search for clues in a (highly mutable) electronic archive.

These “accidents” of location are thought, by the implicit rules of globalization, to be of little consequence. But they are of consequence as more than mnemonic. A man is more than computer coding.

And besides, there are practical reasons to revive the epistolary arts. In the world to come — our world, not Eternity — it will be useful to master forms of communication that cannot be computer searched, nor recovered from hard drives. The post office may also become too dangerous for Christians to use. But by means of trusted messengers, and secret document stashes, we may once again, as in former times, be able to convey humanity and truth — through space and time — right under the noses of the “progressives” and their thought police.

Archbishop Chaput’s recent punch-in-the-nose speech, at Notre Dame (text here), has been widely reported but little read. I link it because it is worth reading through. A dozen major themes in contemporary Catholic and Christian life are thoughtfully woven together. Chaput, among my favourite Roman bishops, overflies the territory staked by Rod Dreher and others as the “Benedict Option” — named for Benedict of Nursia, founder of Western monasticism and symbol, East and West, of a certain aloofness. All these gentlemen remind that as Christians we must keep some distance from any worldly power that tries to legislate “above its pay grade” — to arrogate the divine jurisdiction. (With results we now see all around.)

By the nature of Christ’s claims — and they are not modest — we cannot “fit in” to a non-Christian, or “post-Christian” society. At most we can hope to be tolerated. If we are not tolerated, so be it. The hardships will then have to be endured, as they have been endured, in many times and places.

We are not, were not, and can never become some sort of ethnic group, adding flavour to the stew or witches’ brew of “democracy.” (No one is a Catholic by birth.) This is not some discovery, made under the pressure of current events; it was part of the teaching from the beginning. Our loyalty, which necessarily exceeds our political affiliation, is to a Kingdom not of this world. Our voting, if we vote, is done in that context. We may have opinions on the best way to proceed, but to ends that are not negotiable. There is no possible compromise between a view of history as Salvific, and a view that is “liberal” or “progressive” in denial of Our Lord.

This needs to be said again and again, in current circumstances, when Christian ideas that formed Europe and the West are pointedly disowned. It is more than the disavowal of “a past,” for we are still living, and thus ourselves disowned. We cannot pretend to be part of any “inclusivity” that the State may offer, after it has rejected the premiss of our being.

Our Lady was pregnant with the Christ, we believe. She was not “half pregnant,” or “symbolically” pregnant, and the consequences of Christian faith are similarly not half there. Though Very God of Very God, in us, that Child lives or dies; and we live or die in Him. This is how things are. On what can we compromise? Which corners can we cut?

In his composition of the phrases “Culture of Life” and “Culture of Death,” Saint John Paul laid out the alternatives. We cannot choose both. It would be well to state clearly that a Catholic who advocates for abortion, or votes for someone who does, excommunicates himself. For that is an issue of life or death. The same extends throughout the “life issues” on which Christians have been comprehensively defeated. We are pariahs not only in the eyes of a Clinton, but those of Podesta, Biden, Pelosi, Kaine, Anthony Kennedy, Justin Trudeau — apostate Catholics, collecting “ethnic” Catholic votes, as Chichikov collects “dead souls” in Gogol.

Nothing changes. The Christians of the first centuries had to decide whether they would bow to the divinity of Caesar. They would pay taxes, but those with courage would not bow. The same choice confronts us today, when we are asked to bow before the State’s new ideological and “gender” gods, in rejection of Christian teaching. This is not a small matter, and we must show it is not small, by refusing to do it.

Let the Church shrink; let her become more “exclusive” to those who profess a genuine Christian faith. We are not in a contest for numbers. Our strength is rather in the living Christ; and him crucified.

People do silly things when they are ill. The worst thing is, to consult the Internet. The medium is a magnet for fad-mongers. As no method has yet been invented to screen against idiocies, and only an infinitesimal fraction of Internet content is of any value — actual or potential, material or spiritual — it is best generally to ignore it. But as this advice comes to gentle reader from the Internet, he’d be wise to ignore it, too.

Let us be plain. Human beings, as other species, would not have survived as long as we have without certain useful instincts, natural curiosities, and latent compulsions. Men (a category which includes the women and children of our kind) have been discovering remedies for various conditions by observing animals, from time out of mind. Too, by the reckless method of trial and error. We also take counsel from our own prophetic fleshly bodies, which were ingeniously designed by our Maker to submit cravings to our brains, in response to corporeal disequilibrations.

The neurological roads must of course be kept clear of highwaymen, such as conceal themselves in junk foods. One thinks, for instance, of the atrocities committed by chemicals masquerading as sugar; or others that omit calories, for stealth. Never stop for them: all are malign.

Modern medical science cannot understand colds. This is because they are too complex and disparate for the logic-chopping machines, and unpredictably interactive with each unique organism they invade. Which is why one person gets the same sort of cold, from quite different germs; and why the treatment that benefits one, may not benefit another. (I uphold the germ theory with many reservations.)

It should be understood that the pharmaceutical industry — successors to the ancient pedlars of snake oil and occult spells, whose remedies were often more effective — do not deal in cures. This could not possibly be good for their business. Their research efforts are directed to suppressing symptoms, instead. Their medications are thus more likely than not to impede the body’s natural immune responses. Best to think this through. (Is it moral to spread a contagion, the more effectively because one’s symptoms are masked?)

Best, in most cases, to leave one’s metabolic soldiery to get on with the job, and simply suffer until the enemy is either defeated, or prevails. For at the minimum, suffering will improve the character. Focus instead on providing the good soldiers with the resources they need, and have asked for, to carry on the battle. These are what they communicate through the cravings; cravings that might too easily be ignored if one is expecting miracles from some shiny little pill, and thus trusting to its placebo effect.

Of course, old wives’ tales are also worth consulting.

In extreme cases, one might try prayer.

Being fairly ill myself, at the moment — something to do with long walks through chill and drizzle, I suspect — I did the sensible thing. In stillness, I asked for their shopping list. My soldiers wanted Florida lime juice, Portuguese garlic, English mint, Naga chillies, and Greek olive oil, so far as I could make out. They wanted nor seeds nor nuts, for some reason, and so for transport I employed chickpeas, but dropped the tahini. Thus I boiled and mooshed an hummus from these ingredients, to be scooped with soda crackers. Chicken broth was also requested (in moderation), and if possible prune juice, pressed in the Scottish way. Fortunately all were at my quartermasterly command. Green tea was ordered in preference to black. By the soldiers on my metabolical front line, I think the prune juice was especially welcomed. Half pint of that, and they were much invigorated, boldly advancing with their bagpipes sounding.

Other resources may be requested for the later mop-up operations. This is as one would expect; the cravings for them will be issued in due course.

As hunger is indicative of an effective diet, so physical suffering goes with fighting a disease. Foolish is he who tries to avoid it. One may increase it with plenty of physical exercise, thus speeding the battle along. There is no such thing as a painless remedy. This is as true for society at large, as for any individual. Fight requires discipline and perseverance, with strict obedience to signals.

*

Next morning update. … And so, a gentle reader wonders, of my inspired hummus concoction: Will it work for other people? … I don’t know; perhaps. … All I can say, with confidence, in light of my experience this last night, is that it hasn’t worked for me. …

Never judge a book by its contents, I was reminded the other day, by one of my worthy acquaintances. There is much wisdom in that. People buy books because they are interested in the topic. They are fools. They buy books by fools.

The intelligent reader will first look about, to discover which authors, or more immediately which singular author, might be worth reading on the topic in question; or on any topic at all. Look for primary sources, for “classic accounts,” ignoring what is “up to date,” and therefore very dated. Laugh at the credentials of specialized “experts.” If an author does not have, in addition to his area of known expertise, a broad general education, and many other specific interests, then he is worthless. His account of his own subject will be facile, narrow, thin. One risks being poisoned by him.

And be sure to avoid “popular” writers, especially in the sciences. These people are journalists — sludge pumpers, pointing their hoses. Professionally giddy. The moment you detect the “upbeat” tone, toss the book in the fire; or on your woodpile for the winter months ahead. (Not nearly enough books are incinerated these days.) Nothing exposes an author quicker than this tone of false advertising. Read carefully: the first sentence will usually be enough to secure a conviction.

Rather, as when learning to swim, get right in the water. Dive in primary sources first, leaving the secondary until after you are dead. Far more can be gained by struggling with a “hard” author, who disappears below surface sometimes, than getting coated by a “hoser.” Read, and drive through the obstacles; do not be slowed by dictionaries. Those may be consulted when you read the book again. For the book not worth re-reading was never worth reading to begin with. Let yourself grow, and experience the joy that comes with return to an old favourite, with an understanding less murky than before. For life and letters are woven, and will weave, in the graceful pattern.

Currite ducentes subtegmina, currite, fusi. …

Know that you don’t know. Never forget that you don’t know it. Keep remembering what you don’t know, and learn to appreciate it. A time may come when you do know a little. Wait for it. …

This, anyway, is what I tell students when I have any: don’t waste your time. Ask stupid questions. They are the only questions worth asking, yet moderns always sneer at them. Wait patiently for the answers to grow. Let the matter of a great author unfold, and meanwhile sing the words and rhythms. (Of course you must, like the plague, avoid authors with no poetry in them.) If you can’t at first, then by self-training, make yourself ever more naïve, and receptive. Listen with both ears and both eyes, and all the other fifteen senses enumerated by the mediaeval inquirers. (More on this some time.) Best to read with your lips moving, mentally pronouncing, as an actor learning his lines. Add a few plausible gestures. For you will never master what you haven’t taken in; and only so much will fit through your eyeballs.

Languages are important! Every author speaks a different one.

Many different styles of poetry have been discovered. The Summa, for instance, is in one style; the Divina Commedia in another. Each genre has its own perfections; its own peculiar means of guidance. Drift from one to another for range.

As I insist, this applies even to novels (which are a poor substitute for tales). A good novelist, for instance, will spend the first thirty pages seeming to shake you off. For what can be picked up at half attention, isn’t worth having; and “light reading” can be left to float away, like a bad gas. It will prove unchaste. And I do not mean by that, only lubricious, for the scent will spread through every moral layer. Read what is clean. In anything too easy, suspect a trap.

True love is hard; true love is enduring. This much at least can be known.

Bear constantly in mind this motto, taken from that fine Swiss perfesser of Germanistik, Emil Staiger (1908–88), exquisite commentator on Goethe and others. By the grace of God I first encountered it when still young (in the front of Albin Lesky’s enthralling history of pagan Greek literature); and by a further grace soon realized that it was entirely and unanswerably true:

“The organs of recognition, without which no true reading is possible, are reverence and love. Knowledge cannot dispense with them, for it can grasp and analyse only what love takes possession of, and without love it is empty.”

One is surrounded today by reductionists, and reductionism. It is a form of magic, or rather, prestidigitation. The man dressed in the labcoat makes his move and, poof! … There is no rabbit any more. But I tell you there is a rabbit and — poof! — it is back again. Anyone who follows pop science will be familiar with these sleight-of-hand tricks, in which unsolvable mysteries of mind and matter — the existence of rabbits is just one of them — are explained away. Then cleverly brought back for the next demonstration. (Perhaps this reproof is a little over-condensed.)

But I prefer other forms of magic. An example would be the Nereids, dancing on the waves when the world began. Dancing, still.

Wandering though the back alleys, homeward from the latest Trinity College book sale this evening, in gorgeous dusk and drizzle, I was carrying in my satchel a glorious book. It was published by the British Museum, in anno 1928. Verily, a grand folio, with 52 large gravure plates in sepia on fine art paper, shewing classical marbles and bronzes from that museum’s remarkable collection. I saw this book only once before, in Luzon’s, when it was in Great Russell Street, London, forty years ago. I had not seen another copy since. I seem to remember it was priced at 90 pounds, in 1976. Poor autodidactic scholar that I was, I could not dream of paying so much.

But today, for 15 inflated Canadian loonies, it is mine; thanks to that Trinity book sale. This makes me quite happy. For today I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Indeed, I must have about three thousand books accumulated, up here in the High Doganate. That’s at least ten times as many as the richest person I know!

Enough of my boasting. (I am getting worse than Donald.)

Upon returning home — to tea, tea! — I find one of my sea nymphs, on Plate XIII. There she is carved in marble, yet also in wind-blown drapery, running over the waves. There are three of them in the British Museum, astride: I used to walk past these dancing Nereids almost daily, on my way into the old library rotunda (now sadly gentrified). Though a slight detour from the front gate, I did this because they thrilled me. The truth is that, twenty-three centuries before, they had stood between the columns of a splendid tomb, above Xanthos in Lycia. And billions of years ago, they danced on the waves at the beginning of the world.

Examining the plate carefully with a glass, I discover something I never knew before. Between the feet of this Nereid there is the fragment of a sea bird, floating on the waters. Head and wing broke off long ago, but I had not discerned this in the remaining jumble. In the reproduction I can see it. To the mental image I have carried all these years, one more part is added, that will not be taken away.

For the whole thing is irreducible. She, and they, are dancing on the waves. And at the beginning of the world. I can almost hear what they are singing.