Essays in Idleness

We have, for the purposes of everyday life up here in the High Doganate, made a distinction between sloth and acedia. Either might be considered idle, but where the first is closer to philosophy, the second is farther away. I convict the whole living world of acedia, except perhaps some obscure patches in the mountains somewhere.

It often takes the form of “busy work.” I’d say about four in five of those actually employed, in this cold northwestern region of former Christendom, are doing things that shouldn’t be necessary, that don’t need doing, or that ought to be against the law. But they aren’t lazy. Some are working hard.

This proportion (four in five) corresponds to the number whose jobs could easily be sent offshore, or done by machines; and therefore are being exported or mechanized. (Meanwhile we import people for the jobs that need doing.) Our economy is based on acedia, not sloth.

My title today may sound a little grand, except to those who read the New Testament in the original Greek, or other classical types. I propose to travel, by the shortest route, from acedia to asthenia.

Asthenia could be translated “weakness” in many contexts — debility; loss of vital power — but wouldn’t you know, the flavour is a little different from the modern term. By putting the word “spiritual” in front of it, we move at least slightly backward, towards the recovery of things as they are, and thus away from things as they aren’t.

To the ancients, asthenia wasn’t mere laziness. It was disease. By the modern medical fraternity it is being gradually rediscovered as a form of disease; but one they can do nothing for, because it is, after all, a spiritual condition, and modern medicine won’t go there. But modern psychology will, and has gone, with the invention of the term “neurasthenia,” which so far as I can see adds nothing but a syllable.

Nietzsche, master of the neurasthenic pansies, is, I suspect, systematically misunderstood, on the assumption that he is advocating, as opposed to diagnosing, our nihilism. German thinkers often skim through our hair in this way, without leaving intellectual wounds.

Over at seminary, I have my poor beleaguered charges reading Hermann Broch (1886–1951), whose Death of Virgil (and other poetical novels) confuse the English reader, and German ones, too, because we forget he might be Catholic. (He was, albeit subtle about it.) He, too, was studying spiritual asthenia, chiefly through creative art. But in a never-completed academic treatise entitled Massenpsychologie (published anyway in Zurich, after his death) he tried to be scientific. Unlike others who traded in mass psychology (Elias Canetti; Ortega y Gasset; Wilhelm Reich for that matter) he eschews material explanations of a spiritual condition.

The mass-man can be addressed only to the extent he has ceased to be fully human. He has become instead a product of nation, race, class, whatever. He is interchangeable, like industrial parts. He resonates on precisely the same frequencies as everyone around him. The modern crowd is not a plurality of individual cells, as in a whole body; it is a singular thing. It is more like dust, and can be whipped into dustdevils.

All this could be filed under the heading of asthenia.

Broch was concerned chiefly with the German-speaking world, from which he came. (Viennese.) His overall view is larger, but he is focused on a political history which he takes from around 1880. That was about the time from which Hitler was coming, though the man himself was not yet born. Still, the wind out of Prussia was blowing, on the modern mass man, no longer anchored.

On men who were, in the New Testament sense, weak. (Not, most assuredly not, meek.) On the man who had lost his spiritual centre, thus his balance. Who could be blown about.

The temptation of evangelism today is to join the party; to blow men our way; to sweep them with a broom into our corner; to improve our demographic position, or slow the decline. But this is ineffective. We are reducing religion to politics — from a something to a nothing.

Rather, the metaphor should be damp them down; return them to the mud of their Creation, so they may live; free them from the weakness, the spiritual asthenia, that has made them slaves.

This has nothing to do with removing their shackles. For remove those, and they are still shackled, no longer to the earth but to the wind.

I wish that God would send us a few more Mother Angelicas. Now that the first one has surely gone to Heaven (from Alabama), and Mother Teresa (of Calcutta) is so long gone that she is scheduled for canonization in September, there is a discernible need for more Mothers of this sort. I mean, Mothers who don’t take any nonsense, even from liberal bishops, and perform miracles of fundraising and proselytization right before our eyes. Mothers who attract not only congregants to Holy Church, but nuns to holy convents, and priests to the sanctuaries, and more generally, get people praying, and acting, just as if they were Christians.

She (Mother Angelica), who died on Easter Sunday — born Rita Rizzo into a badly broken home with an abusive (if soon absent) father, and a mother given to clinical depression, plus “health issues” that would kill off any normal child — discovered early in life that having God on your side makes all the difference. It started with the nine days she devoted to a novena to get her deadly stomach pain cured. (It worked, of course.) Soon after she became Sister Mary Angelica of the Poor Clares. An Ohio girl, she was called (by God) to go found a nunnery in the heart of the ultraprotestant South, and naturally she obeyed. And then another monastery, and so forth.

Gentle reader may know her chiefly as the founder of the television network, EWTN. Her “media outreach” began with tapes of her spunky talks, sold with the baked goods to raise a spot of money. There were the usual tribulations associated with starting a broadcasting empire in a nunnery garage. One thing led to another, however, and now it is beaming Masses, Rosaries, major church events, and much Catholic instruction into a couple hundred million homes, quite around the planet. And this without ever stooping to the dissemination of filth, which was the means to success in most parallel cases.

I don’t watch television myself, but I know some people who do, and am assured that EWTN really does teach orthodox religion, or at least tries consistently to do so; that it has yet to be taken over by the liberals in human flesh, who (like the Devil) can never create anything, so focus on appropriating other people’s creations.

Like most other saint-grade Catholics, Mother Angelica was of the curious opinion that Faith could move mountains; and leaves a record of mountains moved.

There are many delicious anecdotes of her to be found by Google-searching the obituaries. Never having met her, I have none to add. Let us be content with my quoting just two of her remarks which, from this great distance, seem to bare her soul.

One was her explanation of why she did so poorly as a child at school. She said that she had difficulty remembering e.g. what the capitals were of the various United States, “because I was more curious about whether my mother had committed suicide that day.”

The other was her response to Archbishop Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles (retired, thank God), whose typically callow misrepresentation of the Real Presence she had rebutted point by point on air. When it was ill-advisedly insinuated that she was risking her control of her nunnery and her network by correcting him in this way, she replied: “I’ll blow the damn thing up before you get your hands on it.”

Now, this is precisely the attitude I recommend when dealing with that (human, all too human) part of the Catholic hierarchy that seems intent on replacing Jesus Christ with the worship of “progress”; and verily, liberals of all other sub-species. Correct them on points of doctrine and of fact in the plainest, untimidly public way, and don’t be afraid it will cost you.

It may, it probably will cost you, in my experience; but if one is sufficiently robust, the mountains may begin to rumble.

Mother Angelica was notoriously “indiscreet,” but discretion does not come into this. What does, is the determination to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and in the words of that wonderful old cliché, let the chips fall where they may.

Let it not be said that no truth is ever spoken in our Canadian House of Commons, notwithstanding the Party of Lies has been in power these last 148 years (9 months, and 4 days). On Maundy Thursday of this year, the Hon. Kevin Sorenson (Battle River-Crowfoot), rose to say:

“Mr Speaker, this weekend, around the world those of the Christian faith will celebrate Easter. Western civilization, our Parliamentary institutions, human rights, the Canadian Constitution, common law, criminal law, and le Code Civil all have deep roots in Christianity.

“Our traditions and cultures have evolved over time from the promise of a coming Messiah in the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. We are promised everlasting life when we put our faith in Jesus Christ. The struggles of our daily lives and the sacrifices that we make pale in comparison to the sacrifice of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. He died on the Cross at Calvary to pay for our sins and then rose from the grave to give us hope for our resurrection and eternal life.

“This weekend we celebrate the life and death of our Lord Jesus Christ, but even more we celebrate his victory over death.”

*

“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate famously asked. This was very droll.

I love old Pilate. I’m sure Jesus did, too, in his tough-love, Christian sort of way. Here was a man with plenty of guile, but also at some level, an humane administrator given half a chance, usually in control of his personal demons. At this key moment, it is remarkable how many, not only of droll lines, but of droll situations, have been captured by Saint John the Divine.

Or by Saint Luke: for instance, the little affair of the two administrators, as Pilate, discovering that Jesus is from Nazareth, thinks he can shunt Him off on the governor of Galilee. For that governor, Herod Antipas, happens to be in town. Herod, who does not know what to do with Him either, sends Jesus back. Neither could have wanted the Son of God to land in his jurisdiction.

We “just know” that given a choice of Jesus or Caiaphas, Pilate would rather take tea with Jesus. Early churchmen and mediaevals often saw it that way. Pilate is less than perfect, ahem, but he is a civilized man, and one may imagine him rolling his eyes at all the religious crazies, of whom he must be thinking, “this Jesus is hardly the worst.” The instinct to wash his hands is itself the mark of a good man. It is as if he already knows, in the Trotskyite vernacular, that he is getting put on “the wrong side of history.”

I have no idea how the Risen Lord must deal with gentlemen like Pilate. The Living Christ did, however, break His silence to have a few words with him. This, to me, seems to have some significance: that Pilate was not beyond speaking to. And in the words, “thou sayest,” Our Lord is speaking in Pilate’s own language of legality.

O poor Pilate, whose political office has blinded his eyes to Faith. Like the rich man, the man of power cannot afford to give up all he has. This saddens him; he must make compromises. He tries to squirm out of impossible situations. They are “above his pay grade,” or, he wishes they were. He gives the crowd the choice, Jesus or Barabbas. But he knows what crowds are like, once aroused. Pilate has instead given himself the choice of this choice; and finally he “is stuck with” the Crucifixion. He was no Judas, however; he wasn’t doing it for money and fame. He was only doing “what he had to do,” in the order of his blindness.

It is my belief that John, in his Gospel, fully apprehends the political “ironies” which each of the Synoptics has touched upon: the ironies, and with them, some of the implications, that otherwise must speak for themselves. I, at least, think the disciple that Jesus loved was, for all his virtues, ill-fitted for the first papacy.

John emphasizes the little paradoxes, the little twists, to carry a minor theme. This is the impossibility of “political solutions,” including, most pointedly, “democratic” political solutions. The others know this from Christ’s own lips, but John has it, too, from the deepest meditation: that Christ alone can save. Hence, paradoxically, he is the boldest of all the Apostles; and in his boldness at the foot of the Cross, the only survivor among them to old age.

*

John on Patmos with his eyes fixed on Heaven, faithfully transcribing what he has seen. That John, who is a small wooden statue standing as sentinel beside my bed: carved, I think, in the eastern Carpathians. His symbol is the chalice he is holding, which, like the figure, is tall and thin; John’s hand is cupped over the chalice. A world of meanings in that symbolic gesture; the peasant wood-carver successfully conveyed them.

It was sold to me by a Persian junk dealer, many years ago. He had no idea what it was or from where it had come. My sense of its provenance is from my own researches.

The sight of it reminds me there are no political solutions. We think there are, sometimes; sometimes we think this even up here in the High Doganate. We think, at least we can pass them off. Someone can be elected “to take care of it”; someone will know what to do. But no one knows.

And it is the man who says, “I know what to do,” while he is running for political office, who scares me. The Mister Fix It who will make us all great again. When, in reality, in the conditions that pertain to this planet, we are all going to die. Yet it is also pointless to fear: for what will happen, will happen.

*

Thomas Traherne: “News from a forrein Country came, / as if my Treasure and my Wealth lay there: / So much it did my Heart Enflame. …”

“Few will believ the Soul to be infinit,” the same poet wrote in his Centuries of meditations, “yet Infinit is the first Thing which is naturaly Known. Bounds and Limits are Discerned only in a Secondary maner. Suppose a Man were Born Deaf and Blind. By the very feeling of His Soul He apprehends infinit about Him, infinit Space, infinit Darkness. He thinks not of Wall or Limits till He feels them and is stopt by them. …”

The “news” of this Easter season comes only to one thing: that, from all the “wall or limits” of this world, He is risen.

This day, apparently for the last time until anno 2157, is both Lady Day and Good Friday. Our pre-modern ancestors, and those non-modern who walk the earth today, celebrate this Conjunction with our fast. For as this link explains (here), the 25th of March has been taken for the historical date of the Annunciation to Mary, and too, of Christ’s Crucifixion thirty-three years later. The two events are intwined, in doctrine as in mystical contemplation. In this moment we see something whole, which is perhaps lost on many.

On ðone fif ond twentegðan dæg þæs monðes com Gabrihel ærest to Sancta Marian mid Godes ærende, ond on ðone dæg Sancta Maria wæs eacen geworden on Nazareth ðære ceastre þurh þæs engles word ond þurh hire earena gehyrnesse, swa þas treowa ðonne hi blostmiað þurh þæs windes blæd. …

This is quoted from the Old English Martyrology, in the link.

“Through the hearing of her ears, like trees when they blossom at the blowing of the wind. …”

In the grim days, when I was an overpaid prisoner in a newspaper chain, writing daily columns on matters of no importance as member of the chain gang, there were breaks. One was granted annual leave, of five weeks in my case. One was even allowed to choose which weeks, subject to negotiation with one’s editorial keepers. Invariably I chose Easter: partly because that would be spring after the long Canadian winter, and partly because it would be Easter. I would write my dangerously orthodox Easter blunderbuss (in my role as “the token Christian”), then make off. Through Lent, I would be counting down the days to my coming furlough. For I have always hated writing, but hated writing for newspapers most of all.

Five weeks is a long, an excessive time in modern life. There could be five Super Tuesdays in that period. Governments might rise or fall, with the pundit nowhere to be heard. His readers might be at a loss what to think, for the duration. In my other role, as “the token conservative,” I had several readers, who would pepper me with emails saying, “Hurry back!” This was kind, but I would smile, because I was in no hurry. Other members of the chain gang could carry on the brutal heavy work of removing the foundations of Western Civ, to build with this stone the grand prison maze of our Dictatorship of Relativism. I would be out in the park, feeding sparrows.

As I will be, soon again, for I intend to take not five weeks (that would be excessive) but Holy Week to start, then Easter Week, too, for a kind of vacation. This takes us, I believe, to April 4th. Let gentle reader be assured that I need it. I shall try to catch up with correspondence in this time (I keep falling badly behind), but give no guarantees for that, either.

I am blessed with, I think, more readers than I had as a chain-gang hack — more widely spread, and on balance, more discerning. I am indebted to a few of them for keeping me in food. I ought to be grateful, and in fact, I am, and wish them all a hard Fast and then a blesséd Feast, as we silently approach the Crucifixion of Our Lord, and His unimaginable Resurrection.

I write today about Ratzinger over at Catholic Thing (here). He is back in the news, quite modestly, and I seize on almost any chance to echo my hero of the last forty years. Over here, in this Idleposting, let me add what I had no space for, though little enough it adds. Apart from reading Ratzinger, whose Collected Works are now beginning to appear in English (see here), there is his example. To know, or begin to know a priest, one might say, is to watch him say a Low Mass, ideally in the most adverse circumstances. (Vidi.) But that is a personal judgement, from a man who must himself be allowing his attention to wander in the Mass. The alternative is to observe the priest over time, ideally over a long time, in the role dictated by his vows.

There is general agreement among most of my correspondents that we are desperately in need of a man like — of men and women like — Ratzinger in our living Church. This is not necessarily a critique of Bergoglio; and a comparison that might be impertinent is more likely to be irrelevant in this case. Plutarch drew comparisons and contrasts in parallel lives — who am I to judge Plutarch? — but comparisons often lead us astray. They emphasize what is unique in each respective individual, at the expense of virtues in him that may be universal.

And Ratzinger is unquestionably a Bavarian, and a pianist who adores Mozart and Schubert. He is a book-lover, too, in a way separate from his propensity for reading and study; he is “aesthetically” at home in libraries. As pope, he was the opposite of Wojtyla in his shyness and privacy, and with this we appreciate the flavour of his modesty (which is the universal virtue). Though very disciplined, and brave, one could almost see him flinching from the stands he had to make. He did not enjoy controversy. All these things are virtues, in their way, and virtues that happen to appeal to me, but they are not “universal” virtues. I mentioned the acknowledged saint, Wojtyla, to suggest some painterly shading: there are aspects of “personality” endowed by God, that remain through self-denial; that Lord Who created a world of extraordinary, seated variety, and must have done so to a purpose.

But there are simple and universal virtues, in which all may partake. Let me give an example of one, reflected in Ratzinger’s intellectual life.

He was determined to see things whole. His patience and caution and prudence are guided, consistently, to that end; his discipline prevents him from being cute or glib. This is evident in the interview with the Jesuit, Jacques Servais, or that portion of it translated into Italian in the Milan newspaper, Avvenire (here), currently making minor news. It is in Ratzinger’s nature to review events of the last fifty years in the light of the last five hundred: he cannot be satisfied with the immediate. Nor did he ever respond in the “media” way, to events of the last five hours or five days. First, he examines.

This is precisely the virtue — prudence in its essential form — that seems most absent from contemporary life. It can be made to account even for our atheism, or “agnosticism,” which is by nature a response to passing events. I often think recklessness is not the opposite of prudence; rather, glibness is the vice. The recklessness is the product of our glibness.

We, today, as men in all ages, cannot do without the anchoring of faith, which begins in an attachment to the unchanging. The detachment from “breaking news” follows from this. I pass by the profound theological observation, that underlies all faith — that it originates in the grace of God, not in some human intention — only because I am giving an external description. A man of any culture — East or West — who is not by desire rooted in the unchanging, is not rooted at all. He is not prepared to see things whole, when he deals as he must with what is constantly changing. He is adrift in a world liquid and not only uncharted, but unchartable.

Ratzinger, especially as Pope Benedict XVI, set a wonderful example for us, of freedom from the “breaking news.” To my mind it is exhibited at its best in such documents as Summorum Pontificum, a masterpiece of careful construction, in which the Old Mass was restored to common access, without upsetting the current order. In answering to a grievance from one side, he did not give grievance to the other, and it took extraordinary skill to avoid doing so. He then turned his full attention to completing the task of removing demonstrable defects in the wording of the New Mass. Only good was accomplished.

He did not “take sides.” Rather he kept his attention firmly on the good that either side must, at its best, intend to serve. He had no choice, in his office, but to play ecclesiastical statesman, but with a diplomacy fixed upon the cause of the Holy.

To take responsibility in this way — to know in one’s heart, and also on one’s lips, that one must finally serve the common interest beneath and beyond any faction’s reach — requires just this anchoring in what is changeless. It has been the wisdom of Holy Church herself, confronted by so many distractions, through the last twenty centuries or so.

We are living in a time when often it seems even the Barque of Peter has slipped her moorings. Yet we know by the promise of Christ that this cannot be so. It is incumbent upon us at just such times to avoid the panic that we find all around. I admire Ratzinger for his splendid example, of how to remain still and upright when the barque is tilting in the sea.

[Lazily brought forward, and only slightly revised,
from something I wrote a couple of years ago.]

*

Barely three centuries have passed since English travellers in Ireland noticed the wearing of “shamroges” in “vulgar superstitious” displays of patriotism on the 17th of March. These, along with “excess in liquor,” and other inducements to debauchery, are recorded with finely jaundiced Protestant sobriety. The notion that the Saint had used a sprig of trefoil grass (there is some dispute over which clover species) to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity, is apparently more recent than that. The accretion of folk customs and beliefs about the fifth-century Saint Patrick began, it seems, within a century of his death, in the marvel-laden hagiography of Muirchu. By now he is taken for a creature of legend. The Disney touch was added in America.

We have two documents, however, from Patrick’s own hand, that stand up to every reasonable critical test as contemporary with him. And they ring in a voice that is unmistakably that of a real man. The first is his Confession, rather in the spirit of Augustine’s, though shorter; the second his Letter, of exhortation “to the soldiers of Coroticus” — evidently a Pictish or other warlord from the “Scottish” wilds (there was no Scotland then), with fallen Christians in his train. Breathing through these documents is precisely the Catholicism that has been taught down to this day, infused with scriptural and credal references that any educated Catholic would recognize.

“Patrick the sinner, verily, unlearned: and I am a bishop, appointed by God through His Church, in Ireland. I most certainly deem that I have received what I am from God. And so do I live, here, among the barbarians, a stranger and an exile, for the love of God. He shall be witness that this is so. It is not that I want to speak so harshly and so roughly, but I am compelled. …”

So the Letter begins, of this latter-day Roman from Britannia, called to become one of the three major patrons of Ireland (along with Saint Brigid of Kildare, and Saint Columba the Abbot), among the many Irish apostles. Through his own words we may form a picture of his tasks, and glimpse his real accomplishment in the conversion of thousands, on an island now floating in distant time. But his words are vivid, and that island draws close as we read him: that Ireland which becomes a nursery of saints, and missionaries for the conversion of western Europe. All this remarkable work was done through men and women, utterly convinced of the truth in what they carried, and prepared to witness that truth to death.

The spirit of parading nationalism and chauvinism is as alien to the character of Patrick, as our times are alien to his. The world was nevertheless the world, back then, and the ruthless play of power was as common. The distinction between a king and a pirate was a subtle one, as the distinction between a citizen and a slave.

Well, this is so today, though we are ever more blinded to the plain truth by our material comforts, enmired as we are in virtual bread and circuses.

The task of Patrick was to free the inhabitants of that island, that beautiful Ireland, from the ancient despotic rule of heathenism; to show them whose sons they really were. He did this through his own person — that person quoted, above. He was a true bishop, whether or not the first in the succession of Armagh.

Let us lift that sleeve of green-tainted ale, in the usual celebration; and spill it over our own heads in the hope that it may bring us to our senses. For I think our task for this day is to forget all the vanity of “Ireland,” and remember the cause of Saint Patrick, instead.

My curmudgeonly instinct is to dash to the support of the Republican Establishment. This would be easier to find if anyone would admit to belonging. More, I think, advertise their membership in the KKK. I am used to being a minority of one; used to supporting defunct causes. But the Republican Establishment is supposed to have living members, so where are they?

By a course of reasoning, I guessed that everyone who thinks Trump is “vulgar” must secretly participate. I have told gentle reader that I share this view, and thus await my invitation to a Country Club. Except, further inquiry reveals that entry is debarred to those previously blackballed by the Tea Party, who seem to have eaten all the Grand Old Partiers during the last couple of election cycles. This makes them (on Idi Amin premisses) the Establishment today. That is certainly what poor Mr Rubio, present à l’heure du goûter short years ago, discovered this time around. Yesterday’s disestablishmentarian somehow got pushed in, and now carries the mark of Cain forever.

My reasons for thinking “Little Donnie” a vulgar man are, however, not quite aligned. I hardly objected on this ground to (for instance) his proposal that supporters punch hecklers in the face (and he would pay their lawyers’ fees). Rhetorical thuggery of this sort can be “common,” but among the elegant and refined we have also a long history of chivalry and duelling. The candidate was not being vulgar in this case, rather girlish and fairy: he should have offered to punch them himself (and pay his own frigging law bills).

To me, skyscrapers are vulgar. Anything called a Trump Tower is in execrable taste. I have toured with Melania (via Fox News) the interior of the sprawling apartment in Manhattan, and it is what I call “Louis XXXIInd.” The furnishings appal me. The mansion in Palm Springs is probably worse. I haven’t read Trump’s various memoirs, but from the bits I’ve seen quoted — boasting of his sexual conquests — I can see he is no gentleman. That the three layers of his family speak well of him does not surprise me: his sons are clones, and the rest must be in fear of his lawyers.

His manner of public speaking clinches my argument: he says no coherent thing. Not one sentence follows from another, even when, by accident, they parse. Such a spray of non sequiturs (non sequuntur?) shows he nowhere received an elementary education. Granted, other politicians do that, too, but none with such ebullience. He presents no policies beyond “win, win, win,” but more to the point, no principles. (I am not counting “deport eleven million people” as a policy.)

Is he another Hitler? Of course not. Hitler’s mother wasn’t Scotch. And he is more Berlusconi than Mussolini. Perhaps, indeed, the American electorate is on to something the Italians learnt, by trial and error. If you elect, consistently, as Americans are now doing, the biggest jerk in sight, eventually the bureaucracy becomes dysfunctional, and people can get on with their lives.

On the liberal principle, of blaming the victim, Trump is held responsible for organized leftist attempts to foment violence at his rallies. I’ll have none of that: they’d be there even if the cissy hadn’t told others to punch them. If he wins the general election, or alternatively if he loses, there may be riots across the USA. But these won’t be his fault. I have no sympathy with rioters, paid or unpaid: spare the lathi and spoil the child. True, Trump has contributed to the decline in public morals, but he is only one clump of snow in the vast avalanche of Western Civ, beyond cause or symptom.

A correspondent, who signs himself Denis the Carthusian (from somewhere in Wisconsin, I think), has considered the matter deeply. He has a scheme to improve upon the Italian strategy, that would contain the violence before it spreads through the streets:

“My proposal for ‘electing’ a president is to have the various candidates duel with pistols. Last man (or woman) standing wins. We could use the same method for senators, congressmen, governors, too. … Just think how much better off a country would be with so many less politicians; how much money would be saved, rather than wasted on campaigning; how few would even step forward.”

On the topic of novels, a very good one has fallen into my hands, by a dear friend, who is crazy, in all the right ways. The book is entitled, Israel Madigan. It is by Robert Eady, and good luck finding it, for the publisher is small, Catholic, and not pushy. (One might start trying, here.)

Anita Brookner died last Thursday, it was announced this morning in the Daily Telegraph. I mention this because she was the opposite of Mr Eady. Her desolate novels, of lonely spinster women like herself, and the occasional lonely man, are refined and crisp. They expound, with genius, the subtle acts of betrayal, that make life more interesting. These include the betrayals of nature, for people once young grow old and die. She makes unhappiness more attractive than it might otherwise be. Nothing memorable seems to happen in these novels, but the prose is so lucid, so patiently understated; the psychological tension so close to that of the examined life; that one is compelled forward. Miss Brookner was a Freudian, and I would deduce an atheist; punctiliously honest, and very well-read. Naturally, she won the Booker Prize, for her worst novel. This, too, was a kind of betrayal.

Both authors came late to writing novels. In Brookner’s case it was a “displacement activity,” from a quietly successful career as art historian and instructor in the Courtauld. She seems to have needed something to do with her free time, to avoid going mad; her works are remarkably tasteful. She turned them out annually for a long time, starting at age fifty-three.

Whereas Eady, whose second novel this is (the first was, The Octave of All Souls, same publisher, 2013), has started later still, after a life of dayjobs, and as a disregarded poet. He has also been the author of magnificent letters to the editors of various defunct or soon-to-be-defunct newspapers, the best of which should be gathered in a collection. These would be those the editors did not publish, because they were offensive in all the right ways. Definitely Catholic; and one might say, rightwing.

He is as far from Anita Brookner as, say, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or Flannery O’Connor, and in the same approximate direction. But his narrative world is that of a small, and beloved, Ontario town, poetically re-imagined. It is because he can capture the serenity and goodness in such a place, that his depictions of black evil are so effective. Men and women betray each other, subtly or not; but Eady is able to show that they also betray God, subtly or starkly. He is deeply insightful of the criminal mind, and of a selfishness which does not recognize subtle restraints. He is unmodern in not trying to excuse it.

This is what I have found exhilarating in both of Eady’s novels; for there are few authors who can capture sanctity; fewer who can capture demonry, too; and it is hard to think of another alive who can capture their interaction — in warfare. Instead we get cartoons; we get glib Punch and Judy, downsized to the politically correct. Eady, by contrast, goes bravely where only angels would not fear to tread.

To raise as protagonist and heroine a (“former”) prostitute, and gangster’s moll; to cast her in the avenging role of the “deuterocanonical” Judith; to enter into the very tent of Holofernes; is at least ambitious. To tell the story through the eyes of a haplessly observant, ex-convict rubby-dubby, and in the reactions of a simple Catholic priest, lifts the burden higher. To make the stakes a small bastard child, and weaponize the power of his mother’s love, is to pass beyond the boundary of what is conventionally attempted in modern fiction. I think Eady pulls it off.

But this is a novel that is not self-regarding. Nor does it lack a convincing plot. It is not shy or pixie, either. The author is acquainted not merely with the existence, but with the demands of literature, in high story-telling; but conservative in adherence to the realistic genre. The characters are all sharply distinct people; no extra-terrestrials are admitted, except through the portals of the narrator’s visions, which are tightly delineated. Eady is intent upon grabbing gentle reader’s lapels, and telling him something; something he wasn’t expecting to hear. The experience is cathartic.

I do not think this work will win the Booker, however. For it lacks effeteness, and will take too long to stale.

Let us revise the “Benedict option,” named by Rod Dreher, and proposed by him and many others. They invite us, in effect, to head for the hills, or to the nearest virtual equivalents; to separate ourselves, in mind if not in body, from the depraved society in which we find ourselves immured. Christians should detach, so far as we are able, and go our own way. To some extent, we must always do this, or have always done, insofar as being sincerely and faithfully Christian puts one beyond the worship of worldly power. We have always been in one sense traitors to Caesar, and to his successors; in another, perhaps Caesar’s only real friends.

I, for instance, have already retreated to my ivory tower, or mountain hut, or small apartment, high about Parkdale. Unfortunately I can still hear things from the street; and must leave my sanctuary to do imperative things, such as go to the corner and buy cigarettes. And while I may have ninety square feet of balconata, plentiful sun, and a water tap still working, together with computer access to hydroponic, and even aeroponic methods, I frankly cannot feed myself by gardening. Others I know have found parallel constraints, in their attempts to disengage from the filth around them.

Sometimes I walk farther than the corner, and often to a small, blessed seminary where I teach “CatLit” (Roman not feline) to some impressive young men. They wear costumes that mark them apart from other denizens of Parkdale; and while none is yet a priest, nor fully launched on the life of monk or canon, all would appear to point in that direction. Often they astound me because they seem to have mastered, in scarcely a score of years, things on which I’m still working after three. They have, in the old hippie terminology, turned on and tuned in (to the Holy Trinity), and dropped out (of conventional society), in a way my contemporaries could not imagine when I was young.

This is partly, let me aver, because there are “options” available to them that weren’t there for young Catholics when I was (not Catholic but) young. Several had the luck to come from “underground” — from backward-looking, “traditional” Catholic families. A high proportion were home-schooled, in America or far abroad. But all through happy circumstance came in touch with a religious order that is rekindling our ancient Faith. Forty, and even fifty years ago, in my cultural orbit, monasticism was too busy collapsing to offer a plausible vocation to almost any young man. Today it is reviving, though not everywhere. But there are beacons in the desert of modern life, that have been lit by a small minority of Latinate “Traddies,” who are also filling churches that had emptied “in the spirit of Vatican II.”

It often happens — I am tempted to walk so far as, “it always happens” — that a small, almost invisible minority begin to grasp Truth by seeking it. The great majority are otherwise engaged. Catholic civilization was hardly built and rebuilt by some silent majority. The conversion of the rank and file of men and women, after their first movement away from the profane and towards the sacred, depends on the work of Peters and Pauls, often doing things that make no outward sense to bystanders.

A “Benedictine” option is my preferred revision, to acknowledge this mysterious call. The “still small voice” is beyond most hearing. Yet somehow it can still be heard even in a society like ours, heaped with noise and unspeakable vulgarity. The Holy Spirit has not ceased His whisper; and the ear of human conscience may not be quite deaf.

I blame the Church for many things — from allowing the Reformation to happen, to losing the Culture Wars today — by foolish retreat from her own divinely-appointed authority. She has, through five centuries of frequent failure (and not five decades as we glibly assume) let the “modern,” post-Christian world metastasize. Her task is now impossible, “with or without divine assistance,” most people believe.

Yet they are wrong. Anything once achieved is by definition achievable. Even within the modern world, impossible things (such as the Counter-Reformation) can be somehow pulled off. As the (Gospel) saying goes, “With God all things are possible.” But this is not so with man; and that is why politics have never ended well. We are radically mistaken to imagine that man can accomplish anything by himself, from his birth, forward.

The “Benedict option,” so far as I have seen it expounded, strikes me as one of the mistakes. It is a proposal for what we, as men, can do to make things better. The word “option” already gives the game away. We have created a society that is spiritually uninhabitable, with all our other options. This one will fail, too; fail even to get started.

In my youth, a few hippies went back to the land, and a few of those did stay there (becoming wild reactionaries sometimes, as they toughed it out). I applaud “back to the land,” myself, as a half measure. But it isn’t the solution to any real problem. Real options are presented only by God.

*

It happens in class we have read, in passing, the scientifictional “classic,” A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). I won’t go here into its virtues and flaws, how well it was composed, or whether it belongs in its assigned genre. The “idea” of it is spectacularly good: to cast light upon the nature of human history by projecting a parody of it, leaping forward about six centuries at a time. It was cleverly done, to attract the mass audiences it has enjoyed since it was first published; though its doctrinal core is lost on most. The author himself might perhaps be counted among his misreaders, for he ended by blowing his own brains out, after being unable to finish another book.

He seems to have written the one he did finish in memory of the military obliteration of Monte Cassino (founded by the original Benedict of Nursia), in which he had participated as an American soldier during the Second World War. He married a Catholic, and for a time his trauma was turned to good effect; then the trauma returned. I find in it the poignant story of a fragile man, trying to chart the intractable, with inadequate tools. There is, however, much to be learnt by considering his brave but hopeless attempt: to understand history in relation to a feeble yet weirdly indestructible Church.

The abbey at the centre of the novel (really three novellas, varied on a theme) is presented as a small unflagging island of civilization, in a desert both of space and of historical time. It is out in nowhere, as the Church it represents; yet somehow the world has revolved around it. Inside, the monks have done what monks have always done — kept alive things only they would or could, in retirement from the world. They have preserved tiny archaeological fragments, which they imperfectly understand, from our own era — which had then passed not only through the “Flame Deluge” of a nuclear war, but a subsequent murderous “Simplification,” darker than any Dark Age. And all their efforts are turned against them in the end, for the world has meanwhile grown no wiser, and makes the same mistakes again and again.

A monk in anno Domini 529 is not, in principle, different from a monk in 1960, or a monk in 3781: the same tasks, the same Mass, the same way of living, without “evolution.” And all this time the world goes round in circles. Walter M. Miller, Jr., presented this as fact — beneath the superficial facts of change. To the end, 1,765 years from now, the same old Church is still “blindly” resisting such peccadilloes as euthanasia and abortion; is still confessing the same unrevised Creed. Out there in the world, the “good guys” are still losing; and men still do not know what causes they serve, from out of the same old vanity that blinds them.

The Benedictine “option,” or rather calling, is to the few, not to the many. It is, and has often been, unimaginable to those who descend from parents, and leave children in their turn; or otherwise follow the louder calls of our human nature. Even to hermits, the obedience is hard to fathom: the aspiration to die unto self. Yet by the grace of God it will be heard in some quarters; and over time it is efficacious — not by human, but by divine will.

Quietly, it may be, God is resupplying the monks and nuns we so desperately need: to pray for us, constantly, and actually to preserve us, against an Enemy we can’t even see.

Though we might exempt poets and philosophers, what people do is usually more important than what they say. Though sometimes, even among the unpoetical and unphilosophical, speech can be a crude action; or actionable, depending on the angle. One must consider these things case by case.

Sandro Magister gave examples yesterday (here). I had noticed over the past three years that the rhetoric of “a Church that is poor and for the poor” rings hollow. Reading Laudato Sí, I sometimes thought it meant, “a Church of the Left and for the Left.” Posturing on behalf of “the poor,” while doing photo-ops with their more fashionable “oppressors,” is among the many things Christ avoided. He was under watch as a revolutionist in Roman Palestine, not least by co-religionists; but the charge was false.

He neither proposed demagogic “reforms,” nor schmoozed with the rich and famous. So much was He not a politician, He could say, “They have their reward.” He addressed explicitly “the poor in spirit” — distinguishing thereby from the poor in cash.

When it came to His Crucifixion, He found no special interests on His side; only a few disciples who, in the main, thought it safer to pretend that they didn’t know Him.

There is no class formula in the Christian religion. In its (par excellence) Catholic form, we have endured many political operators. But too, “we” (the historical “we,” the “we” of two thousand years) have invariably returned to our origins in which, “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female.” There is the soul in the confessional; there is the soul who kneels anxiously at the railing. There is a “preferential option” for unfeigned holiness.

Always, this is true, but especially on the verge of the holiest weeks in the Christian calendar, when we recall what Christ did to save us, transcending pain and death. For we will not be living in this world forever.

At a time when this world is (characteristically) going to Hell, I think it is best to ignore the politicians of church and state, and focus instead on the foundational simplicity. Christ instituted His Church that we might belong to no earthly cause, rather, immortally to Him.

Yairs, yairs, gentle readers, well spotted. I refer to the apparent howler yesterday, on the tail of my seventh paragraph, which read, “I only fired people for being useless.” It was to be taken more in the tone of spiritual confession, than in that of professional pride. But since not one of you has read the (unpublished) memoir of my years before reception in Holy Church — The Half Life: Fifty Years of Sin and Error — you may have missed the context. I was young then.

Much retrospective confusion attends my editorship of Business in Thailand (and allied publications, 1978–80), a literary journal posing as a glossy business magazine in order to reap subscriptions and advertisements. I look back on the adventure mostly with regret. It was a time when I sincerely believed in “economic growth,” to alleviate material poverty. I was a maven for “development economics.” I thought capitalism could fix the Third World; and indeed it fixed, everywhere it was tried; but not in the way I expected. It destroyed much good worth conserving. It did not replace with better.

Thailand was an odd place to be advocating wealth. “There is rice in the fields and fish in the streams,” according to an old Siamese proverb; on which the gloss might be, “except during monsoon, when there is fish in the fields and rice in the streams.” It is one of those countries richly blessed by nature, where nothing short of socialism could ever bring about starvation.

How could I miss what was plain before me (as it had been from childhood, when my father also worked there): that here was a country at ease. Any more wealth would be redundant. The generals were already driving in Mercedes, and all the major roads were paved. They had imposed a corrupt pseudo-democracy; but the people adored their gracious King. Except those schooled in modern Western values, they were kindly, generous, and content. Ask any of them what was wrong with their country and they might say, “Too hot.” Otherwise, they couldn’t think of anything.

When I left for the last time, Bangkok, “the Venice of the East,” was already a hell-hole of progress. The klongs (canals) were being filled for expressways; skyscrapers were beginning to ascend; the air was such that one had to smoke, in order to avail of a filter. A few more decades have passed, of what became a playground for whores and tourists. From what I can see through Google-goggling, nothing has been added that is not vile.

God save the King (Rama IX), God save the people. And God save me, as I reflect on my own tiny role in this dystopic transformation.

But to the point, I remember the three people I did actually fire from the publishing enterprise in which I was complicit. All useless, for the purposes of the enterprise, but at least two of them more perfectly “useless men.” To understand this term as I presently use it, gentle reader must consult a previous Idlepost (here). I now take it for high praise.

I remember today the aptly-named Dr Tin Aye, elderly Burmese exile, who seemed to know everything that could be known about the geology of his native (and adjoining) land. Compassionate, benevolent, courteous Tin Aye; obsolete child of the Raj; appointed as our mining correspondent. Though educated in English, he could write nothing that was not incomprehensibly dated. Nor, as he casually admitted, could he understand any innovation in mining that had occurred since the Second World War; let alone, “development economics.” Yet he was a fund of intriguing oral tales from the lore of mining before that time.

The day I sacked him, he smiled, thanked me for the term of his employment, peacefully cleared his desk and made off. He never cashed the severance cheque I’d had cut for him. It was only because I brutishly insisted, that he’d taken this document at all. He said he hadn’t earned it; that he ought to be refunding his salary instead.

I can still close my eyes, and see him shuffling away: carrying his unravelling school bag, and some tattered map rolls under his arms; his left foot conspicuously dragging. From the little I could guess, perhaps a Catholic saint, known only to Christ and a few aging children. No use to “the modern world”; today his doctors might prescribe euthanasia.

A beautiful man, whom I fired, on my own initiative without instruction. But my boss congratulated me, when he heard what I had done. He said we have to be ruthless, “to protect the bottom line.”

“Why?” I thought, even at that moment. What fanatic puritanism could limit the purpose of a business to that, alone?

The business was flourishing. We had a hundred reasonably productive employees. We could easily carry a dozen lowly-paid more, who added to the charm and character of the place. And who reminded all young that tomorrow will come, as today we must respect our elders. And who sat as quiet guardians of order. Let all know, too, that they are working for a company that does not abandon its people to bureaucracy and chance; that does not throw human beings away.

I saw the old guy limping off; but in a dream of judgement I might turn with him, and look back upon the young executive jackass, drest in silk tie and “a little brief authority.”

The word, “untenable,” is not frequently used. Perhaps it is too philosophical for an age that is as unphilosophical as it is irreligious. Which is to say, our age of “science,” undermined by scientism, and mediated by a “logic” that is demonstrably insane. We lack the ability to abandon ideas that are untenable — that do not lead anywhere, because founded on premisses that are liquid, and drift. One may float or sink upon them, but they can lead us neither to wisdom, nor to Heaven. “Reason,” for the moderns, is only a “how-to” for trivialities — a “progress” of disconnected inventions and minor, cumulative, technical improvements that provide only more to consume, and bloat us. They have nothing to say on such primary questions as, how to live, and what to do; on, “the meaning of life,” if I may be so pretentious.

Consider: the Chinese, much our intellectual superiors, invented clocks and many other things long before us. And then left them on the junk pile of their material history, proving themselves more astute, too. We moderns assume they were foolish to do so — to take such inventions and treat them as toys, for a brief period while they remained in fashion. Then to forget them when some other vogue came along.

The Jamaicans used to have a saying about punctuality: “Is the clock for the man or the man for the clock?”

In Bangkok, when I was confronted by a new time machine, and told that the staff of a magazine I was editing must use it to check in and out every day, I created a decorative placard that briefly hung above it:

“The Hours of Folly are measur’d by the Clock; but of Wisdom no Clock can measure.”

The aphorism is of course from William Blake; I used it as a motto for my magazine, The Idler, later on. But in the meantime I encouraged a technically adept member of the staff at Business in Thailand to find a way to trick the new time machine, so that it would record our checkings out before our checkings in, thus puzzling the timekeepers who had, originally, intended the machine pour encourager des esclaves in other departments.

We were accused of arrogance, of setting a bad example; I was suitably chastised. But I wanted to make clear that my writers and editors were not chain-gang, nine-to-five people; that “one size does not fit all.” If one of my scriveners could do in one hour better than another in eight, I had no objection if he worked only four. I only fired people for being useless.

Count me as Chinese, in this respect. Keep your eye on the task, not on the clock. We can rely on the time to keep moving forward.

Though really I am a man of the thirteenth century. This was about when Western man began taking clocks seriously, yet before he began dispensing with his marbles. The monks invented both foliot and escapement about 1275. But it was to a purpose: the more careful regulation of the Hours of Prayer in monasteries and abbeys.

Too, like the Chinese, they were amused by the idea of an armillary sphere, that might mechanically parody the movement of the heavens.

Alas, the monks’ timepieces escaped into the “secular” or profane world, and began appearing on the towers not only of churches but of town halls and the like (at first with only an hour hand). These had (at first) their innocent uses — for instance to signal the public recitation of the Angelus, by automatic chiming of the bells. One hardly needs a mechanical device, however, to determine when it is dawn, noon, or sunset. By posting the unnecessary intervening times, in plain public view, the secular authorities were providing an early example of “too much information.”

For remember: Christ will come to judgement in a day when we look not for Him, and at an hour when we are unaware. The idea of a countdown, or worse, an alarm clock, is rather silly. And rather than contributing to, the ticking thing actually distracts us from, any contemplation of Time in its deepest mysteries. I would have been dead set against it.

If we need a device to limit the lucubrations of lawyers, rhetors, homilists, and prattlers, a sand-bulb or clepsydra (water clock) will do. And it will measure the time without this confounded ticking. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, indeed everyone had this problem — of vain speakers who go on and on — and all soon discovered the remedy. Mechanical devices should be kept simple; the more elaborate, restricted to use as toys.

I might embark on a wider critique of the nonsensical notions that began to clutter our world about the fourteenth century, and became more and more intrusive as the centuries proceeded. By increments, sound philosophy and diligent religion were replaced by tedious circus games. But I haven’t the patience or the time, today. I will content myself with this aspersion upon our modern chronographic fetishes, and again recommend — as I may have done before — that we ignore the “progress” of the last few centuries, and instead fixate on recovering our mind.