Essays in Idleness

Not for the first time in my experience, but for the first time in more than a week, I encountered a young lady on the weekend who told me that she believes in God, but fears organized religion.

“But it is very poorly organized,” I tried to assure her.

Normally I ask which god, or gods are favoured. There are so many in the marketplace today, I do not like to presume on brand loyalties. For whatever can be said against laissez-faire, one is compelled to admit that modern arts and sciences have stocked our supermarkets full. It is only when one looks at the fine print on the packaging, to read the ingredients, that one is inclined to scratch one’s head. None of these variously advertised gods strikes me as fresh.

The One into Whom I have bought, or more precisely by Whom I hope to have been boughten, “came down from Heaven” in a provocative way. Careful examination of the background, and also of the foreground of the Scriptures, has led me to the conclusion that they are authoritative, if often misunderstood. I note that Our Lord was personally guilty of founding one of these “organized religions,” and of appointing the deeply flawed Saint Peter as its first CEO. And that, whatever can be said against it, the organization is still around, with the same sales message never yet updated, and in as much of a mess as ever before.

Verily, the more I read of history, the better persuaded I become that Catholic Church, TM, has been on the brink of collapse, continuously, these last two thousand years. As Hilaire Belloc put it, and I do love to quote this:

“The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”

By comparison, I suppose, the Prophet of Submission could be accounted wiser, to have taken arms against his sea of troubles. His outfit would descend from the unattended dunes upon complacent strangers, in hours when they were unaware. (The whole process arguably in anticipation of the Welsh art of Llap-goch.)

For our “Christian” part, even in the colonies, it was the piratical State that arrived this way — with a disorganized gaggle of proselytizing priests, seldom in their baggage, under the impression they must save men’s souls, wherever the ships sailed — unarmed, and frequently alone, in circumstances perfectly unpredictable, except for the reasonable expectation of a grisly end. They were, in the Americas as elsewhere, more likely to be pleading on behalf of the beleaguered natives against the State, than exacting tributes to the State’s command.

There is a real contrast here in marketing strategies.

But yes, our religion is “organized” in the sense that it is formally hierarchical, and the Sacraments are “administered” in an aforethought way. That much has not changed, and even the architectural arrangement of our franchises has remained fairly constant on the crucifix floorplan, with the head pointing, at least in principle, to the East. (Not towards the Tomb, but instead towards the rising Sun, which is why the churches east of Jerusalem also point east, sort-of.)

And as Cardinal Sarah recently reminded, our priests are supposed to be pointed that way, too: ad orientem, as the saying goes. Verily, it is a mark of our current state of confusion, disorder, debilitation, attenuation, and horseplay, that so many of them are pointed the wrong direction.

Hence the rest of my reply to that sweet young ingénue:

“Please, lady, you do us too much credit. We are only trying to be an organized religion. We haven’t got there yet; your fears are premature.”

When you look for something and don’t find it, the explanation might be that it is not there. At least, that is the case up here in the High Doganate. I have, for instance, satisfied myself that there is no woolly mammoth living in these rooms, no dodo ensconced on the balconata, no blue whale swimming in my tub, nor even an hippo wading. The case is more subtle with fermions and bosons — I am actually persuaded by the Standard Model of Physics that they must be here, though I cannot spy even one. And who knows what other subatomic particles. Many superatomic, indeed supermolecular particles I have been able to detect under a magnifying glass, but without announcing it to the world. Only last February I acknowledged in this space the possibility of gravity waves; and a Higgs’ Boson may have passed through without my noticing.

To be frank with you, gentle reader, I do not have the (U.S.) 13.25 billion that was required to detect this last; and may not have, unless PayPal contributions increase substantially. … (Hint.) … Nor, really, do I find space up here to fit another Large Hadron Collider. The one a little west of Lake Geneva in Europe will have to do for the foreseeable future.

I do not know what it has cost them to not find any other particles, but so far more than a billion a year.

Through the pop science media, I heard the fanfare that accompanied the possibility that the LHC community had found one such particle, in May. Since, the bump they discovered in the data has disappeared. They begin to forget, but at the time — ancient history now, three months ago — the world’s fund-providers were being told, with uncontainable excitement, that they were on the verge of nailing the first evidence of something beyond the Higgs’ Boson (which was predicted in the Standard Theory). The “holy grail” (as they like to call it, in celebration of themselves) was at hand. Visions of Supersymmetry abounded.

Now we are told we will have to wait, and in view of the complexity of their undertaking, possibly forever. Dark matter, dark energy, dark this and dark that filling the “96 percent” of the universe which the Standard Model cannot account for, must continue to tease.

Here is where it gets rather sad. All this expensive equipment, and several millennia of research-person lives, are premissed on a hope of showing that something from the last half-century of theoretical physics corresponds to “real.” Whole multiverses depend on it, to say nothing of the string theories. The very idea that pretty math is an infallible predictor of pretty events might be on the line.

Except, it isn’t.

Sometime during the 1960s, the age of “zombie theories” burst upon the planet. The previous scientific revolutions (say: Alexandrian, Mediaeval, Copernican, and Victorian), in which theory was adapted to the explanation of phenomena that had been observed, have been succeeded by an “evolution” wherein pure theory enjoys a life of its own. In the craved new world of particle physics, we have propositions as undisprovable as the tenets of Darwinian biology: the “plausible” ever more fully detached from the “demonstrable.” We have desert mirages that could be pursued indefinitely.

Galileo and Kepler both, to my recollection, distinguished the world on paper from the world of sensory observation, insisting upon the priority of the latter. Today, we have what could be politely described as a “semantic shift” — an inversion in the sciences that, at least to me (and who else writes these little squibs?) resembles the inversion of our moral values.

Which is to say, hard testable fact dissolving into somebody’s utterly unsubstantiated “theories.”

My piece over at Catholic Thing this morning (here) is once again assigned to my Idlepost readers. What I write for them is probably better than what I write here, for I’m compelled to stop after one thousand words. Also, there is “editorial oversight,” the anticipation of which makes one less wayward. The commentariat at the Thing is, for some, an attraction. I have noticed that certain self-established commentators hold court, and post not on my, but on their own, personal obsessions. Subsequent comments are addressed mostly to them, which has the effect of excusing one from any sort of liability. Choose a highly political topic, and one hundred comments will self-assemble around the usual nodes. Choose one that is narrowly “religious,” or “philosophical,” and maybe a dozen will appear. This is impressive, for at a more “secular” website (or as I like to say, “profane”), the ratio will be closer to a million to one.

We (religious nutjobs, such as myself) do not risk prison by our writings, because they are so easy to ignore. Believing Catholics, and other Christians, have managed to locate “the still point” in the moving media world. Those who would persecute, will first have to find us. Our views might be expressed in provocative language, but will be soon seen of no consequence, given present public concerns.

One might claim to be writing for future generations, but I doubt the Internet cloud will persist. Moreover, I am persuaded by my readings in history that future generations will prove as stupid, and incapable of learning from experience. Hope for the world’s future has always been misplaced. We are wiser to fix our hopes on Heaven.

By contrast, the views of the more flamboyant Muslims are noticed, but only because they are blowing things up. I should think that if a Catholic, or even a Presbyterian, were to detonate bombs in a crowded place, while citing passages from Scripture, we would be taken more seriously. It would also help if we had millions of refugees, from countries under Christian theocratic rule, to improve our demographics. But on checking I find that there are no such countries.

Our pope tells us — and here I should allow that his remarks may have been a sarcastic parody of the crazed, liberal way of thinking — that Catholics in Italy commit as many violent crimes as Muslims; and, I would guess, in Argentina, too. He notes that upon consulting his newspaper each morning (he claims to read only La Repubblica, the communist paper) he discovers that some possibly Catholic person has murdered, say, his accountant, or his mother-in-law. He insists that all religions have their fundamentalists — Catholics, too — and so, who is he to judge?

Perhaps if, while murdering unwanted tradesmen and relatives, Christians would remember to shout, “Jesus is Lord!” — they would get the rest of us more publicity. Alas, I suspect they do it for the tedious, customary reasons; their “hate crimes” focused on only one person at a time. Yet even there, the traditional Muslim may be tarred for his statistical advantage, for the poor man could have four mothers-in-law to deal with.

We are told, incessantly, that the great majority of Muslim people are peaceful and law-abiding. This is also true of the rest of the human race. Is it not unfair that this should be specified only of adherents to Islam? Again, one suspects some invidious special pleading: for surely the fact that Muslims are like the other humans — complacent, anxious, trying to get by — should not need explaining.

My piece at the Thing this morning has nothing to do with Islam, incidentally. It has more to do with that background complacency, in its Western, post-modern iterations. There are different ways to escape this condition, and let me clarify that becoming a violent psychopath is not the option I prefer.

Cyrene, Leptis Magna, Sabratha, Ghadames, Tadrart Acacus — are among the archaeological sites now being bulldozed or similarly molested by the Daesh, in Libya. While the destruction of populated Aleppo in Syria is closer to the front-page news, I saw mention of these Libyan places in a media “Style” section this morning.

From an economic perspective, I suppose, it is not much of a story: Libya has no tourist industry left to lose. Neither, for that matter, has any other North African or Middle Eastern country, except Israel and the disneylands of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, patiently awaiting their turn. As an opponent, generally, of the whole tourist trade, which everywhere overwrites the genuine with the virtual, one might think I would be more enthusiastic. But no, I should like to see the genuine preserved, including the peace of genuine pilgrims and travellers.

As I have written before, there are innumerable monuments, scattered across the old middle of the world, some of them extremely large; and the Daesh are inefficient. Those possessed by devils — so often misdiagnosed as “mentally ill” — usually are. (“Get away from me Satan” were apparently the last words of that murdered priest in France.)

By their end, the present generation of Muslim terrorists will probably have scratched only the surface of the world’s archaeological heritage, most of which anyway lies buried still. They can hardly compete with the ravages of time. And thanks to the assiduous work of European and American imperialists, we do retain records of what we found, and thus the materials to continue reconstructing the ancient world in our imaginations.

Why would the Daesh, under attack from armed enemies in so many locations, bother with such an expensive and time-consuming task? It takes much tireless work under the blazing sun to pulverize acres of stone, even with the help of modern, capitalist-supplied explosives and earth-moving machinery. Granting that, from their point of view, these wonders of the ancient world are idolatrous; granting even the traditional Islamic practice of destroying evidence of pre-Islamic culture (V.S. Naipaul is good on this politically-incorrect point) — why couldn’t they wait until they had consolidated their victory? For then they could go about the task with more income and leisure.

I don’t think they expect to win, in the shorter term. They embrace suicide, not only on the small tactical scale, but on the larger strategic. They are thinking ahead to what may be a more distant apocalyptic future, when in their view Islam will finally prevail. The struggle involves the gradual elimination of everything non-Islamic from the planet. As well, given iconoclast ideals, this triumph must eventually consume the most beautiful monuments of Islam itself.

The modern history of Arabia will help us understand. The fanatic Wahabi sheikhs, whom the British left in place to protect their oil interests, did not only scour the desert landscape of the remains of Ottoman rule. They also destroyed the legitimate archaeological evidence of early Islam, in Mecca and Medina, while building then constantly rebuilding their own ever glitzier “theme parks” over the top. The stuff they replaced was too piddling and small; they wanted the grandiose to impress the crowds of humanity on Hajj. Historical veracity never appealed to them: that is a distinctly Western conception. The heritage of oriental despotism is different in kind. In today’s Saudi Arabia, almost nothing visible survives that predates the 1960s; soon little will be older than the present young century. The Kabbah stone itself, at the centre of Mecca, has been successively enlarged, so that possibly nothing remains of the original.

The giant Buddhas, carved from the cliffs of Bamiyan, were demolished by the Taliban because they were so big, and also because the Taliban realized it might be their last chance. These extraordinary works of monastic enterprise had stood for centuries in their remote valley, as evidence of Afghanistan’s Buddhist past; but also of the failure of past Muslim rulers to be sufficiently thorough. They were one “scandal” — from the Wahabi point of view — that could be corrected for the rest of time.

In Afghanistan, as in Libya — indeed across North Africa and through most of the Middle East — there was a history of high civilization, through millennia before the Islamic conquests. There is hardly a place across the vast region that was not more civilized, two thousand years ago. In Egypt, for instance, the Islamists often declare their intention to blow up the Pyramids, as a grand symbolic act. With that goes the larger ambition of deleting all evidence of ancient Pharaonic, Graeco-Roman, and Coptic habitation. To the Islamist mind, all of it constitutes an insult to Islam.

Bamiyan, and the World Trade Centre, were hit for the same reason. They were not only “icons” in themselves, but evidence of civilizational superiority. By surviving, they provided a counter-weight to the blather of fanatical imams. We have in them the mindset that could conceive a Thousand Year Reich; a Qin Shi Huang or Tamerlane or Mao — dreaming a gigantism to crush all evidence of what had gone before — but weirdly displaced to a fanciful seventh century, to add another layer of madness.

And therefore they propose and enact an evil that must not only be defeated, but be seen to be defeated, and utterly wiped away. I have no patience for the dribbling “containment” strategies, now argued within the retreating West. Within days of 9/11, Bush took back the word “crusade.” He should instead have repeated it, to meet the propaganda of Islamism head on.

Now, here is the paradox. The Daesh work constantly from UNESCO lists, to choose their targets. They are looking for the most famous, the most widely known; for the biggest theatrical effects. (Through history, iconoclasts have always been theatrical.) In a larger view, we may see that the very success of the mass-market tourist trade creates the conditions for the destruction of the goods which it appropriates.

This is the story of post-modern “fame” — that directly or indirectly, we contribute to the destruction of whatever we purport to love.

Among books of spiritual direction, that are short, and in English, my favourite is probably The Cloud of Unknowing — written in Chaucer’s day by some anonymous cleric, perhaps a Carthusian. He is not without personality, so that once we notice it we realize that a second treatise, The Book of Privy Counselling, must have been written by the same man. The full flavour of him requires familiarity with Middle English, and thus with that age: the colour and sparkle, tilt and lilt in each sentence. But there are some winning modernizations, such as that by the late Anglican vicar Clifton Wolters, quite free of bilge. Nothing in the little book is stuffy. It can even be satirical, as where it pricks the pretentions of showy religious fakes.

The book is Catholic as they come: entirely free of that grimness which arrived with the Reformation; that fixation or “enstaplement” as I call it — the sonorous preacher balanced on one foot, while the other searches for his gaping mouth; the bear with one foot stuck to the floor, attempting his dance routine.

One might read The Cloud simply to escape from the presumption and preachiness of modern religion; for a return to the mystical and exemplary, pregnant with silences. At the heart of the instruction for contemplative prayer is the hint from Augustine: that gentle reader, as gentle author, can know nothing of God from his own researches. For God is concealed, as it were, in a cloud of unknowing, penetrable only by Love; and as by analogy a beloved maiden is perceived not for her attributes but for herself, we might press ourselves upon The Lord without the usual want-list or catalogue of preconditions. Instead put God’s attributes right out of mind; forget about yourself, your past, and all nature. The cloud of unknowing lies above; let the cloud of forgetting close below.

The book is extremely encouraging, as it assures us that we are to do something that will last all our lives, and involve constant, often vexing difficulty.

Here, I must confess, it is a great pity the frescoes have so largely disappeared from the church walls, through these last painful centuries — for they, almost Chinese in their brush lines, but Italian in their peopling, were useful in lifting the Christian from the earthly plough to another realm. White walls with isolated pictures, statues or casts, make not the same presentation. They put us instead in a gallery or museum. Rather we need the draughtsman’s spirit of Lascaux.

But this is of course not what our “Cloud poet” would say; only what he would take for granted: the environment of prayer. That it must draw us away from febrile attachments.

“I truly believe that the Day of Judgement will be a lovely day.”

Now that is something he did say, and in a chapter full of paradox and surprises for the reader approaching from six-plus centuries away. He writes about a day on which, to our true merriment, we will find abject sinners conversing with the saints; and some who seemed so holy looking for a cave. This while we are still absorbing another counter-intuitive revelation, from a couple of sentences before.

Of course the “work” of contemplation, and of personal amendment through its effects, will be more onerous for the serious sinner than for the “quasi-innocent” woman or man, since the latter enjoys such a long head start.

“Yet it often happens that those who have sinned hideously and habitually come sooner to perfect contemplation than those who have not sinned at all.”

Well, I have touched only the surface of the book, and in only one place. But felix, felix, felix culpa.

“Any one reading the chronicles will find that since the birth of Christ there is nothing that can compare with what has happened in our world during the last hundred years. Never in any country have people seen so much building, so much cultivation of the soil. Never has such good drink, such abundant and delicate food, been within the reach of so many. Dress has become so rich that it cannot in this respect be improved. Who has ever heard of commerce such as we see it today? It circles the globe; it embraces the whole world! Painting, engraving — all the arts — have progressed and are still improving. More than all, we have men so capable, and so learned, that their wit penetrates everything in such a way, that nowadays a youth of twenty knows more than twenty doctors did in days gone by.”

This paean to globalization was (purportedly) written by Martin Luther, in celebration of the century that lay behind the moment of his own arrival on earth — the last full century in which the Catholic Church had her monopoly on the affection and consent of Western Christendom. And while I, too, am impressed by the achievements of the fifteenth century, I think the passage overstates them. In particular I note that a youth of twenty is a youth of twenty: now and in all times likely to be a fool, regardless of education.

(Perhaps the fault lies partly with the Benedictine, Gasquet, through whom the quote passed. He had the unscholarly habit of improving his quotations.)

Yet prior to the Reformation, the five-hundredth anniversary of whose launch our strange pope intends to puff in Germany next year, a youth of twenty had opportunities that were not yet closed. An English youth, for instance, in possession of universal Latin, could travel to any continental university and pursue his studies there; he could wander freely from one famous centre of learning to another. Vice versa, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge welcomed youth from all over the Continent, and sometimes beyond. Suddenly, with the Reformation, the gates swung shut, and Europe was divided into dominational zones, so that the youth who crossed the boundaries would not be welcome home. Wars, bloody wars, would further divide a Continent whereon Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic offered different “takes” on indivisible truth, and their intellectual energies were now expended on smearing one another.

The sixteenth was the century of the great narrowing, and the rise of the modern nation state; the great triumph of politics over charity, humility, and reason; a great age for martyrs and massacres, exceeded only by the centuries that followed. Henceforth the old containable dynastic conflicts, in which faith was not at stake, would mutate into the new ideological wars, ascending towards the Total War conceived in the Enlightenment era. Yet it was already a new age: of smashed monasteries and cathedrals, torched libraries and the destruction of the Catholic artistic and philosophical heritage — wherever the puritan devils in human flesh could lay hands upon it.

But also, a century of steady material advance, not only in the implements of torture and homicide, but in provision for men’s bodily comforts. Life expectancy might be everywhere shrinking (for a host of reasons), but while men lived, those sufficiently shrewd in politics could enjoy luxuries their ancestors had denied themselves, or been indifferent to. For as the property of the Church was seized and “privatized,” a New Class built themselves extravagant estates, using monasteries for quarries. Over centuries to come, by the “trickle down” effect, men were gradually liberated from the ancestral fear of God, as from earthly participation in the heavenly Gloria.

Did the technological acceleration of the later Middle Ages make such developments inevitable? This would be the argument of the historical materialists, the sycophants of “progress” in both Marxist and Liberal (“capitalist”) trains. One thing “evolves” into another, with them, and everything in the universe has a purely material cause. Darwin, to my mind, has significance not as biologist, but as synthesizer of the emergent cosmology, in which everything of interest — all beauty, truth, and goodness — can be explained away; can be rendered glib and meaningless; and the world is made safe for the atheism that grew out of the scandal of warring ecclesiastical tribes.

It will never be safe, however. Not even “technological progress” is safe, for while cumulative (it would have proceeded in Europe with or without the Reformation, though possibly slower in the absence of so much military patronage), it depends on continuity of use. It lasts only so long as its beneficiaries can sustain the superficial order through which it is transmitted. The ruin of many civilizations which enjoyed technological progress in their time is spread through the archaeological record which our own technological progress has enabled us to see, though not to learn from.

More fundamentally, a civilization is held together by intangibles; by what is called faith, or even “good faith.” Man may be ever so inventive — primitive man as well as urban man — but his fate is tied less to inventions, than to purposes for which they are applied. We use ours only to pleasure ourselves, and the squalour and ugliness of our lives portends the catastrophe that awaits us. Our bone, our spiritual marrow, deliquesces. Men who are “meaningless” soon expire.

Conversely, not even our decline is safe. For as long as that spark in man, which first lifted him above the condition of the animals, continues to be implanted by God, there is chance of recovery and renewal. And that spark, once implanted, is ineradicable. We might almost call it an imposition on our freedom: that men cannot satisfy themselves forever with the life of swine.

Anger is not “useless.” Were it so, it could be ignored. It does not like to be ignored, however, so that often we must deal with it. Often, too, it is quite justified. This is especially so in a conflict where anger is being used tactically. The general coolly does things to make his opponent angry, in hope of provoking a foolish response. For it is true, even for the blind, that “anger makes one blind” — makes one awkward, and collision-prone. In warfare, there are other methods for driving an opposing general spare, but like frustration, they resemble it. In all events the target is wise to keep a cool head: and an eye on the puck, as we say in hockey.

But like so many other vices, anger is human. I was impressed once in reading a summary or transcript of a conference where Joseph Ratzinger (later pope) dealt with the intemperate words of a colleague, directed, deviously, at him. A soft word turneth away anger, according to Proverbs, and Ratzinger reviewed his colleague’s argument in the most charitable light, improving it for him along the way. Rather than ignore the intemperate expression, Ratzinger called it “a very human response,” sweetly conveying fellowship to a man who might now be feeling in need of forgiveness.

It is better to put out fires than to start them, unless one is a potter or a cook.

Christ, and Aristotle, are I think in agreement, that anger should not always be suppressed. But even when it is not suppressed, it must be regulated. It communicates that a significant wrong has been done, when soft words would fail. Like a good bombing, it should be carefully aimed, against the risk of unintended casualties. If it can’t be, one must hesitate to drop the bomb.

Having been born a hothead, like my father, I watched carefully as he wrestled with his condition. He tried to deflect his (almost invariably justified) anger in harmless ways. I noticed his quick recoveries. And as he grew older, and older, he became ever more benign, until it did not seem he had a temper. He was himself of the opinion that benignity beats malignity every time; that it is better to suffer, than to inflict an injustice; that punishment should be administered calmly.

Unfortunately, this is beyond the imagination or intelligence of today’s gnostic public educators, who are incapable of distinguishing punishment from rage. To them, the parent who disciplines the child is always in the wrong. This is why they can approve only those parents most likely to rear juvenile delinquents; and why they threaten to seize children from good homes.

But punishment is a means to instil self-regulation, or should be so at rising levels of sin. It cannot take away the wrongdoer’s unworthy desires: only Christ can do that, if the subject will let Him. It can, however, teach him to control his impulses, in order to avoid the consequences of them. Of course, some cannot be taught, in which case it may be best to despatch them to the highest Court, where justice is infallible.

The need, in some circumstances, for e.g. capital punishment, is lost on people who can conceive the act only as emotional retribution. Whereas, a good public hangman will be tranquil as a good family butcher. His demeanour, with the creature soon to die, will be kind and reassuring. (Lord protect us from executioners whose craft skills are skewed by impure emotion.) For that matter, all administrators of punishment should be benign by disposition, as, by analogy, doctors and nurses. They must not let themselves become “emotionally involved.” This can only lead to botches.

(Note that I advocate capital punishment only for those found guilty of capital crimes; not exclusively for the innocent, as the liberals do by abortion and “euthanasia.”)

And let the principle not be confined to nurses and doctors and public hangmen. The judge who rants at the prisoner, upon his conviction — this is becoming a commonplace in our courts — should never have been allowed to practise law. He has exposed himself by taking personal retribution.

Instead, justice must be served, tempered by mercy where mercy may serve justice, but not where it can only compound the wrong. A certain distancing is required, for justice does not belong to us, and we can only aspire to it. The virtue of justice requires that we acknowledge our personal interests (as we can do by the habit of frequent confession), recusing ourselves when potential conflict is espied. For justice must be, and should be seen to be, impartial.

Alas, anger is contagious, from our courts, as from our politics. It is a fault of mass or mob democracy, such as we have today in all the Western jurisdictions, that it depends upon the mobilization of anger, through media of disinformation.

The just statesman works towards the reconciliation of rival factions, by articulating a higher common good. He looks beyond lobbies to those who can provide, impartially, relevant missing information. He would rather do nothing, than do something wrong, and does not act in the absence of necessity.

Yet to get himself elected the contemporary politician must cultivate the wrath of one party against another. He must likewise present an agenda for “change.” To keep himself elected he must continue to divide and conquer. He must sabotage any opponent’s attempts to assuage. He must, regardless of moral cost, advance himself, in an environment where the old Christian constraints are going, if not gone. His wickedness, though he tries to conceal it in self-serving rhetoric, will necessarily twist all his legislation. He must please his supporters by doing gratuitous harm to any class of people they despise (such as, these days, faithful Christians). He rewrites law to curl an angry whip against those impeding “progress.”

Whereas, a true leader would check the intemperance of his followers; seek, consistently, a chance to reconcile; and likewise, promise to preserve the common heritage. He will intend, as we read in most Westminster-inspired constitutions, not the victory of a cause, but “peace, order, and good government.”

Which is to say, he will be unelectable.

Today, according to the Roman Martyrology, we celebrate a saint “who protected the freedom of the Church against the encroachments of the laity; fought against corrupt and simoniacal clergy, and, at the Council of Claremont, urged Christian soldiers that, signed with the Cross, they liberate their oppressed brethren from the infidels and free the Lord’s sepulchre.”

That would be the Frenchman, Odo of Châtillon-sur-Marne, in Champagne, better known to history as Pope Urban II, who died on this day in 1099 — not knowing that his valiant knights had just taken Jerusalem. He had outmanoeuvred an antipope and the Holy Roman Emperor; clinched the Gregorian reforms of the Church from within; eliminated simony, investiture, and clerical marriage from high places; and restored Sicily and Sardinia to Christendom.

But this is a long, as well as glorious story, across the top of which I skip.

Even before his election to the papacy at Terracina, this Cluniac monk had accomplished extraordinary things. As legate of his papal predecessors, he had travelled Europe to confirm rightful bishops in their sees, and depose those under anathema, with breathtaking holy nerve. Upon election, he was shut out of Rome, but soon entered in the train of bold Norman soldiers. The victim of a coup once he stepped out again, Pope Urban spent three years in the wilderness of an eleventh-century Europe in terrible disarray, gathering the loyalties for his triumphant return.

One event especially appeals to me. It happened towards Easter in 1094. With the partisans of his opponent still in control of the strongholds of the city of Rome, he returned to the surrendered Lateran — just in time to celebrate the Easter Mass.

Pope Urban was no dawdler. His sense of priorities was sublime. He was a man of majestic fortitude, against whom opposition finally collapsed. To the inspiration of faithful Catholics in all subsequent ages, he defended the sanctity of marriage, and of clerical celibacy, at a time when both were everywhere under attack; excommunicating and often successfully dethroning secular rulers who had attempted divorce and taken second wives. For Henry VIII of England was hardly the first king to defy the unambiguous teaching of Jesus Christ.

Alas, upon Urban’s accession, the crisis in the West was nothing to the crisis in the East. The Seljuk Turks had overrun Byzantine Anatolia, and were pressing towards Constantinople. From there, and from Christians across the Middle East, Rome received desperate pleas for help. Christians were persecuted by their Muslim overlords; their peaceful pilgrims to Jerusalem were slaughtered, as the Holy Land was closed to them. Then as today, ancient communities faced extinction across a region which had centuries before been Christianized, without the help of swords.

By diplomacy, oratory, and example, Pope Urban rallied true men to their defence, from across the Western realms. In one of history’s most profound acts of Good Samaritanship, the First Crusade was launched. Horrors followed aplenty, of course — then as now, war is war — but in the miracle of events, within the years 1096–99, the Holy Land, lost to Arab conquest in the seventh century, was restored to Christian freedom — crowned with the capture of Jerusalem as the saintly Pope lay dying.

Some things I lack the stomach for, and I’ve been unable to watch even short snippets from either of the American political conventions. One checks the news by Internet, receives it through email, notices headings in the newspaper boxes grouped by the trolley stop. Sometimes they are yuge. People leave papers in the seats, full of lifestyle features, and lifestyle ads. If a “story” catches one’s attention, one pursues it: a story such as that on which I touched, yesterday. I wanted to know more about the backgrounds of the two Muslim hitmen.

Hardly to my surprise, I learn that the latest murderous adolescents were problems for the state’s social services long before they were “radicalized.” One was diagnosed as nuts by the child-shrinks at the age of six. The use of drugs usually comes into it. There are family “issues,” and schoolyard issues, in most cases. The child makes himself despicable and is thus despised. His race and religion need not come into it: denizen of a Muslim ghetto, he is surrounded by his own. Yet he is not isolated, because the blue-rays of the outside world are beamed in. His confusion is exacerbated by the deconstruction of all cultures in the contemporary West: the loss of continuity in custom and governing norms. He becomes a different kind of Muslim from his parents, who can’t understand him. In many mosques, financed by the oil-monied Wahabis, the worst features of Islam are emphasized. The Islamists do much recruiting there, and also in prisons: like the Communists before them, they are looking for psychoses to exploit. And of course, the Internet is a great boon, to all of satanic tendency.

A proof, to my mind, that we deal with the unbalanced, is the incompetence of most terror strikes. The operatives kill and maim a handful when, with the weapons they had accumulated, they could have killed far more. They lack the needed organization and skills. But training psychos is like herding cats.

The Daesh in Iraq and Syria pretend to run a military organization, but from everything I’ve seen, it is poorly disciplined. A real army will reject psychologically unstable recruits: they get in the way of teamwork. They won’t properly focus on whom to shoot. Their reckless, suicidal courage is more a danger than an inspiration to their comrades. Even one-on-one in a boxing ring, a psycho is too wild. He will score a knock-out only by chance, get knocked down easily, and always lose on points. No professional sportsman could want to coach a psycho.

No, war is serious business, and it is a huge scandal that the Daesh were not wiped out in short order. The Arab armies opposing them are also poorly disciplined, for cultural reasons our technologist trainers are ill-equipped to plumb. But behind these dubious allies, is the schizophrenic, shadow-boxing West. Our attacks are almost entirely from the air: mallet blows against the ants in their native sand. We have not wanted to get our hands dirty — to suffer casualties in an electoral season — and besides, the Daesh have been convenient to many political interests, not only within the Middle East.

But mostly, we are pussies (it is best to put this in a vulgar way), whose minds are addled by “political correctness.” We don’t know who we are; we cannot find a place in our own multiculture; we can imagine nothing to defend that is not some evanescent abstraction. Consumer goods have not made us concrete. Jogging has not fortified any spiritual muscle. (It is just another drug.)

Whereas, previous generations knew who they were; and were thus capable of understanding when they had been attacked. They had some concept of adulthood. We had men, once. And the thing about men is they have something to protect, beginning with women and children — and ending, as for that manly priest in France, with that desperate attempt to defend the sacraments. God made men that way, and with time, I expect, they will return to their calling. But for now, we are experimenting with our own, amateur, designs: the New Man, “liberated” from his masculinity.

The post-modern male has only his own strange and unaccountable package of appetites and lusts; and the strange and unaccountable restraints upon them, beyond self-regulation. He is pure consumer, and he is lost. That is what lies behind, “No more war!” It is not principled pacifism, ready to sacrifice — to die, rather than to kill — but a consumer choice, a lifestyle option.

I am not a priest. Neither, so far as I can see, are the ten-thousands posting “Je suis prêtre” in the latest public display of maudlin and posturing grief in France. Most aren’t even Catholics; it is this week’s way to self-congratulate, in solidarity with the crowd. Few will ever find themselves in any real and present danger from Islamists, and if one does, I doubt that “Je suis prêtre!” is what he will exclaim.

But I began with political conventions. We do have a problem with our world falling apart, and some of it is the consequence of a resurgent, militant Islam — a genuinely external phenomenon, with which we ought to be familiar, after fourteen centuries of it. And the choice, for voters in the West’s only superpower, is now between Hillary Clinton, who is not a woman, and Donald Trump, who is not a man. People are “angry,” but cannot articulate why. They cannot look into themselves, to discover what is wrong; instead they look outward for the latest scapegoats.

This feels to me like a lifestyle option, a consumer choice — strange and unaccountable, like evil.

On checking the news later, I discovered that I had not chosen the perfect morning to write lightly about the phenomenon of “hatred.” Or perhaps I had. One reader complained that my piece on the artist Mondrian yesterday was, in light of breaking news from France, in “extremely poor taste.” He proposed that I take “hatred” more seriously.

I won’t. I have been exposed to hatred all my life, and my mama taught me to laugh at it.

But the use of the word “hate” as a term of art in the New Jurisprudence is now well-established. The purpose is identical to that which the liberals advanced when replacing the term “rape” with “sexual assault,” the definition of which could then be gratuitously extended. The idea was to slur the distinction between the heinous crime of rape, and minor infractions such as “unwanted touching” and flirtation. This would, for a start, enable feminists to tout fresh statistics showing that one-in-three women had been “sexually assaulted.” (Perhaps two-in-three women were too modest.)

“Hate crimes” put coarse language on a level with murder. The intention was to get something into law that could be used selectively against political opponents, while “sensitizing” (i.e. neuroticizing) the public to the fuller range of progressive Newspeak.

Conversely, in his role as the serious criminal’s best friend, the contemporary liberal diminishes the significance of rape and murder. These are reduced, in principle, to the level of saying things that are rude. The law of course still observes gradations; but I noticed that, in Germany for instance, where violent attacks not on but by immigrant Muslims have become an almost daily occurrence, the cops were busy raiding sixty addresses to arrest people accused of posting hateful anti-Islamic blather in social media. As the old ballad had it, “The world turned upside down.”

Facebook, Twitter, and Google — a fair cross-section of service providers — have all agreed in Germany and elsewhere to put “programs in place” that use all their search resources to track and silence such inconvenient voices as that of Milo Yiannopoulos; if not for what he said, then for what some trolls contributed by way of enhancement.

Yesterday’s “incident” was the murder of a Catholic priest, during Mass at the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen, Normandy. The police knew that this church was targeted; and one of the perpetrators had been released after actual conviction on terror charges. It is good to know now that he is dead, and so will not be participating in further “incidents.” (Unless there is some conduit from Hell.)

The French president said it was an attack on all French citizens, which presumably includes the citizen Islamists; our pope called the violence “absurd.” I find these lies in extremely poor taste. It was not an attack on all Frenchmen, but symbolically on a Catholic priest. And it was not absurd, but purposefully directed to that end. Father Jacques Hamel was martyred during the morning Mass. His throat slit, then by some accounts, beheaded; two nuns and two others at prayer also seized and tormented; and another throat slit; while a rant was delivered from the altar, in Arabic.

I am truly disgusted by remarks from Rome that we hope the elderly priest is at peace, and that we condemn “every form of hatred.” This reduces the teaching of Our Lord to the asinine. Reference to Islam was carefully avoided.

One wonders what atrocity the Islamists must commit, to make their point more explicit.

I really don’t care if they hate us. That is their opinion, and none of my concern. I do care that they are trying to kill us, on the basis of verses plausibly cited from the Koran. Would it hurt their feelings if we called them on this?

A minor matter it may be, and with no legal repercussions, I hope, but let me mention that I hate Piet Mondrian. I only realized this yesterday. Prior to that I rather liked him, or more precisely, dutifully applauded his uncompromising abstractions, his pursuit of “the absolute” in growing disregard of all the traditional “content” of painting, such as representation, draughtsmanship, colouring and shading; the “pure plasticity” he advertised. The actual enjoyment was tepid at best. I knew he was Dutch, which makes me quizzical; and of a Calvinist background, which puts me on my guard; and a convert to Theosophy, which sets off the alarm. From photographs, I have guessed that the man himself would irritate me, regardless what he was. I do not like “tight little people.” But I’ve long been willing to waive my prejudices on behalf of a great artist.

Was Mondrian “a great”? That is the consensus of the art market. And how can one sniff at the judgement of someone who will pay 50 million Natted States Dollars for a grid of black-lined rectangles filled with flat primary colours (or white). True, there can be something romantic in a torrid competition, as at Christie’s last year, when the price of Composition No. III, with Red, Blue, Yellow, and Black was dong’d five times past the starting estimation.

People may pay what they want for art: at least the money doesn’t go to the poor, who’d be sure to waste it. Again, I do not hate Mondrian for that; and anyway it is hard to envy a man who died years before one’s birth. It can be done, but as I say, it is difficult.

No, I have decided that I hate Mondrian for his pictures. And that I hate them, not individually, but as a series — the whole career that began in soft twee chocolate-box depictions of Dutch landscape; that adapted repeatedly to the latest trends; and ended in the tyranny of professional abstraction. The final style, of his two famous Boogie-Woogies — the latter quite unfinished and rough, giving the game away from close up — has, I admit, a certain unique purity of expression. But this expression is pure style. I can no longer see his paintings as art, only as decorative objects, famous for being famous. And they are not decorations I would want in my home.

Perhaps my disapproval should be stated more gravely. I do not see a consistent development from representation to abstraction. I see chops and changes instead.

This notwithstanding I continue to adore e.g. Ellsworth Kelly, and Josef Albers, and to be entranced by their respective presentations of sharply delineated colour fields, which omit in order to reveal. And in the case of Kelly, to see a direct development from his early draughtsmanship of curves under Paris bridges, and the spookily nondescript oval faces. And in the case of old Albers, an investigation of optical effects, of genuine use to students. These men were chaste, and honest, craftsmen. I consider such work to be “catholic” in some broad sense, which I shall define in visual art as “discernments of truth within expositions of unexpected beauty.”

The truth is outside us; the sincere artist wants it manifested: called into view. In the nature of things, he will offend the Puritan, who thinks he has all truth already, and so interprets the beautiful in art as idolatry. (This is the opposite of Plato’s critique.) The Puritan will finally accept art only as perfume or decor. My hatred for Mondrian resonates with what I detect as his own edgy, puritanical self-loathing. He sought to make the kind of art that could destroy art: that could bust right through it.

I hate Mondrian, because I have come suddenly to the conclusion that he was not “making art” at all. He, who seemed most obviously trying to seek some “absolute,” was temporizing, fooling and pretending. The movement of De Stijl was aptly named: for it was style, only; a commercial art; trade in a currency from the beginning. It was, to my mind, the sort of thing Christ overturned in the courtyard of the Temple. Its proximity to the Temple condemns it.

And it points to what prevailed after the War: “minimalism” as an expression of pure style; the final collapse of the West’s art traditions, into cute, glib, demeaning “installations.” It points to the smug removal of “content”; to the creation of art that makes no demands. It does not lead towards the depth in colour field, but beyond, to the complacent generation of Warhol. Art, ambitiously reduced — to a form of clothing; to dressmaking for the current vogue.

Hatred has a use. It can be the flex in a pole-vault, the spring in a dangerous leap to freedom. It is important to survival, intellectually and aesthetically. My new-found hatred of Mondrian, for instance, helps me understand not only my long-standing love for the sun-filled contours and gleeful rotundities of Ben Nicholson at his most “abstract”; but for the playful, transcendental humour in Paul Klee — who noticed all the trends, and mocked them, in compositions one-tenth their size.

Hatred can be liberating. It can be a joyful creative force. Truth can surprise the hater of untruth by filling his receptive vacuum; has already helped him identify untruth, in confrontation with its persistent grimness. And it will not be clamped into a frame, for it is the power that declares, “I am and I joy forever.”

But of course, if gentle reader can find joy in Mondrian, he is welcome to keep it.

For some centuries now, the method of the progressives has been certainly anti-clerical, and even Averroëist; yet it is commendably mediaeval for all that. It is to identify “a problem” and then “solve” it, by making it larger.

Let us say, for instance, that someone is starving. A narrow and impulsive solution might be to bring him food. But if, rather than succumb to arbitrary doctrine and fallible instinct, we were to stand back, we might see that others are starving, too, including classes of humanity which we might research, and eventually define. By hard work in this long study we might classify the groups, analyse their respective conditions, and propose the means by which the larger problem of hunger could be “scientifically” alleviated.

Meanwhile the poor wretch has died of hunger, but to the progressive mind, hardly in vain. He was after all the inspiration for all this brilliant inquiry, and the new faculties of human enterprise that it launched.

*

Frederick II, Hohenstaufen (1194–1250), was a pioneer of modern science. He kept up an international correspondence from his princely court, wrote a carefully-illustrated treatise on falconry, sponsored mathematical competitions and congresses to discuss this and that. No effete bureaucrat, he also conducted experiments to put dogmatic ideas to empirical tests. For instance, he locked prisoners in barrels, to watch if their souls emerged at the moment of death; and raised newborn babies in complete sensory deprivation to find out what language they would speak.

At the universities of Padua and Bologna, where medical faculties were established entirely beyond the control of the Church, the new art of dissection was advanced. The ecclesiastical authorities had previously frowned upon that sort of thing. In Paris, and elsewhere, dissections were banned. But we owe our modern knowledge of anatomy to that pioneering escape from the scholastic ontological perspective, with its logical subtleties and bookish pedantry. The medicine men were also eager dabblers in the science of astrology, from which, arguably, our modern astronomy gradually emerged, if by accident more than by intention.

Moreover: Did you know? That Galileo was once put on quasi-trial for opposing the received Aristotelianism of the academy in his day? I bet you did know that, gentle reader. But it is interesting also to know that for three full centuries before that, not one man, nor woman neither, was visited by the Inquisitors for anything resembling a scientific investigation.

We must go all the way back to conservative Paris and the year 1277 to find an episcopal condemnation. This was the famous occasion when Stephen Tempier, archbishop in that town and thus effectively rector to her celebrated university, condemned two hundred and nineteen theological (40) and philosophical (179) theses being taught in his Faculty of Arts. It was a formidable “syllabus of errors,” and among the victims were the flourishing “experts” on necromancy, witchcraft, and fortune-telling.

Two hundred and nineteen is a lot of propositions, and the document is fascinating as itself a carefully constructed, encyclopaedic survey of anti-Christian nonsense, much more exact than its reputation. Nor did it finger any individual practitioner of the dark intellectual arts, though we are given to understand that Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia took personal umbrage.

The topic is very large. Pierre Duhem (1861–1916), one of my greatest intellectual heroes, propounded the notion that modern physical science emerged as a consequence of this sorting out, in which, additionally, profane Aristotelian ideas received through the Arabs were put suddenly on the defensive. (That is an oversimplification, but I think it will do for my idle purposes.) Duhem flagged this as, paradoxically or not, a tremendous inspiration to free inquiry. (The very inquiry that Galileo was alleged to have taken too far, with scholars in the Protestant realms demanding he be executed.)

It was Duhem who first scandalized our own modern scientific establishment, early in the last century, by showing that the scientific breakthroughs of the seventeenth century relied on much earlier advances, and were in the nature of continuity, not rupture. This was interpreted as a fiendish impingement on the vanity of modern science, which conceived itself as a rebellion against the dogmatic slumbers of the Middle Ages; and the attempt in France to suppress the publication of his findings continued until it broke down in the 1950s, and the last five volumes of Le système du monde were allowed to appear.

More fundamentally, I think Duhem began to show that there are no scientific revolutions. When any civilization is stable, there is a cumulative progress of knowledge about how nature ticks; and the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, and the “breakthroughs” of the Seventeenth, were merely accelerations of this world’s most remarkable run of accumulation.

It is now, finally, running into the ground, or has been since the eighteenth century (a.k.a. “the Enlightenment”), owing to the imposition of a false premiss upon all fields of knowledge, from the empirical to the philosophical, and ultimately to the theological understanding of good, truth, and beauty.

That supposed madman, and real prophet, Joseph de Maistre, explained the reality in Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg (1821), an extraordinary book in classical dialogue form. He observes the cancerous growth of Enlightenment, proceeding from a fatal error in ethics. It is the belief that Nature is the “ground, source, and type of all possible Good and Beauty” (this summary is actually from Baudelaire, his essay “In Praise of Cosmetics”), and thus excludes the very possibility of original sin.

From the Enlightenment forward, to no thinking Christian’s surprise, science began to breed monsters. And not in the hobby-horse manner of the Hohenstaufen emperor, but as a tireless, impersonal, systematic, and jealously protected secular enterprise.

Let me specify, for clarity, that God, and not Nature, is the ground — not only of our knowledge but of human decency.

Well, anyway, this is what’s on my mind this morning.

At each stage of our decline we have, it seems, exchanged one truth for another. Let me give an example.

Photography was “invented” or “discovered” in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the pinhole camera was known many centuries before Christ to both Greeks and Chinese; and the Byzantines had, during our Western “Dark Ages,” worked out all the methods of the camera obscura. (It was, as so often, they who taught the Arabs, and the Arabs who taught us.) Albert the Great knew all about silver nitrate; and mediaeval alchemists dealt with silver chloride — they could in principle have produced “primitive” photographs, and probably did. The modern trick is not so much “discovery” of anything new, as organized or methodical play, in which various tricks, long known, are combined to a clearly-conceived purpose. (I believe this is called, “technology.”) The ancients only wanted to see; we wanted photographs to look at.

Not only photographs, but the means of reproducing them, in large numbers, had been worked out long before the end of the nineteenth century, and newspapers began to use them as soon as the reproduction became economic. They were immediately popular.

I have watched bargirls in Asia go carefully through Western fashion magazines, unable to read a word in English or any other language, but riveted to the colour photos. The semi-literate of our inventive West were similarly enchanted from the start; and as they obtained the franchise, our politics were transformed by still and moving pictures.

Serious newspapers resisted this revolution, and right up to the 1960s, would never put a photo on their front page. Then they made the concession of running boring photos, of diplomats arriving in airports, and the like. Of course, there are no serious or intelligent newspapers any more.

But today’s sermon turns on an invention of the 1930s. Inspired partly, I should think, by developments in fine art, and perhaps early cinema, this was the invention of the contorted photograph. Called by the late art critic, John Russell (in his book on the painter, Francis Bacon) “the formalization of disrespect,” it was the picture in which public worthies such as statesmen and royalty would be depicted, “wrenched out of the standard attitudes of traditional portraiture and shown as they actually are: harassed, inconsequent, racked by tics, their faces distorted, their clothes in disorder, their bodies off balance.”

From there, the development leads to the formalization of disrespect for humanity at large, and as a by-product, the development of that “post-modern irony” which looks upon anything well-composed or dignified as an aberration, that could be mocked.

One thinks of this, glimpsing imagery from the latest psychopath hit, on some Munich shopping mall. These scenes of people scrambling and hysterical are by now a journalistic norm. Big media will pay big bucks to the person who can hold his mobile steady during one of these panics, so the home viewer can get a good look, along with the soundtrack of all the screaming. In turn, the images quietly teach us how to behave, should we ever be caught up in a terror trauma.

The original “revolution” — the indignification of the respectable — could be presented as an advance in moral truth. The Church herself has taught that people are people, and gravely flawed. (She also teaches, however, that with God’s grace we can be raised to passable behaviour.) The “great and good” are not so serene as they once looked. They are “just like us” in the sense that, though in better clothes, they belch, get drunk, mishandle chopsticks, and stagger to the water closets. “Human, all too human,” we might say. The wind blows their hats off, and sometimes they try to kiss babies and miss. Focus closely enough on their faces, and we’ll be treated to buffoonish stares.

Balancing this, a new field of human enterprise arises, governed chiefly by Hollywood. Dignity itself is a matter of indifference, but with proper training, control of paparazzi, and editors willing to select, they may guide the ascent of the “cool” person. In the Natted States, Obama, in Canada, young Justin Trudeau, were sold to the electorate by means of this directorial process. To my mind, neither man is abnormally evil. Both strike me as mere airheads; but tutored by the pros on the keeping of appearances.

We celebrate, in art and elsewhere, the destruction of “bourgeois values.” This seems to move us closer to the truth. Really it moves us towards levels of hypocrisy that the actual bourgeois — the simple shopkeeper of former days — could not imagine, let alone reach.