Essays in Idleness

Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. … “As we pray, so we believe, and so we live.” … As I understand, the saying goes back to Prosper of Aquitaine (c.390–c.455), the disciple of Saint Augustine of Hippo, and the man who communicated Augustine’s remarkable teachings to the papacy, as adviser to Pope Celestine I, and as secretary to Pope Leo I. In its original form:

Ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi. … “The law of prayer establishes the law of belief.” …

The rhetorical third part, lex vivendi, was added much later. For of course we should live as we believe. Often it is added, with vocal stress or printed capitals, by contemporary Church liberals, who in their ignorance suppose that it somehow modifies the preceding proposition, so that it might now be translated, “If it feels good, do it.”

This is a small point, but then there are many small points on which we have been going wrong over the last few decades, and they do add up. Here is nothing new: that our lex orandi was modified radically, and for the most part gratuitously, before, during, and after Vatican II, and that the results are plain to see. This is what I like to stress, though I am not so rude as to use capitals. Catholicism exalts Truth, which includes vivid “facts on the ground.” And here is some truth about Catholicism in our English-speaking realms:

We have today a fraction of the churches we had before the “liturgical reforms”; a fraction of the seminaries; a fraction of the priests, and a fraction of the religious; a fraction of the baptisms, marriages, funerals. We have huge multiples of the annulments, the contraceptions and abortions. Where three in four Catholics attended Sunday Mass, in the 1950s, it is now less than one in four. And even among those who attend, there has been a terrible lapse in obedience and discipline. Our remaining priests and religious are mostly quite old; their congregations, too, are aging; and within less than one generation at the present pace, the Catholic faith will be, truly, the Church Invisible. It will survive in remote locations, corresponding almost entirely to the “traditionalist” parishes, which are (thanks to God for Pope Benedict’s motu proprio of 2007) actually growing.

*

The apostasy lies deeper than Vatican II. The cancer was spreading long before it showed these horrific outward symptoms. Evidence for this is widely available. A friend, for instance, calls attention to the Manifesto of the Catholic Laity, published in England at Pentecost, 1943. Consider this excerpt:

“We, the undersigned Catholic Layfolk, desire … to make known our true feelings with regard to the present controversy concerning the language used by the Church in her public worship.

“We utterly repudiate the subversive efforts that are being made to discredit the use of the Latin Liturgy, a precious heritage brought to the English people by Saint Augustine of Canterbury from our glorious Apostle, Saint Gregory the Great, and which we are proud to have preserved intact these fourteen hundred years, even throughout the hardships and dangers of the penal times.

“We therefore protest that we are opposed to all attempts to tamper with this venerable Liturgy, or to substitute for it a copy of any non-Catholic rite, however beautiful or impressive.

“We strongly resent the implication that we and our children are not sufficiently intelligent to understand the simple Latin of the Mass. …”

*

In Ottawa, the week before last, I had the honour to be with Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, visiting the town at the invitation of the NET youth ministry. Together with several other good friends, we lunched and dined with him in the intervals between the Masses at which he presided, at both the magnificent Notre Dame Basilica and the little Saint Theresa’s parish church.

Our greatest living authority on Canon Law, Burke was until recently Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, at Rome — in effect the “chief justice” of our highest Canon Law court. Events subsequent have been in the news.

Cardinal Burke happens to be among my greatest living heroes, perhaps the greatest after our still living Pope Emeritus. A man of real sanctity, and extraordinary learning, he embodies for me the phrase with which this Idlepost began. And more, the starch of the ancient Christians. A man in his position today will inevitably be deprecated by the “progressive” mob; he has the courage to resist intimidation, and the grace to persist as a champion of what Holy Church teaches, and has always taught.

I lack both his charity and his genius. At close quarters I can report that he is all-of-a-piece with what I had seen at a distance. (I once met Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, and would say the same of him.) A gentleness, a creature kindliness is at and below the surface of his nature; a humour that is likewise gentle, often subtle, but consistently affectionate. And his learning is communicated in answers to questions entirely without pretence, in terms wonderfully adapted to the limitations of his interlocutor. He is thus a fine teacher, as I could also know from friends who once studied Canon Law under him, at the Gregorian in Rome, for each of whom he is a living inspiration.

He has all the marks of a great Christian teacher — for instance the constant excursion back and forth between principle founded in the life of Our Lord, and the particulars of a modern occasion; or the answering of questions always directly, beginning usually with a “yes” or a “no.” There is nothing of the politician in him, that I have discerned in most of our bishops; there are no cheap phrases, there is no “playing to the gallery” for applause. There is only straight shooting.

I am inspired by the knowledge that we still have such men with us, preaching truths that can still be known, that are still known, that will remain known. God will provide them.

But that is not enough. What must we do?

His Eminence very kindly sent me from Rome an edited text of the talk he delivered to the NET ministries dinner. He made remarks which I think help us to get beneath the surface arguments for the restoration of the Sacraments in their deeply reverent Tridentine form, to the cause they so adequately served, serve, and will serve. Rather than paraphrase, I shall take the liberty of quoting directly from Cardinal Burke’s speech:

*

“Addressing the challenge of Christian living in a totally secularized world, Pope John Paul II called us to a new evangelization. A new evangelization means teaching the faith, celebrating the faith in the Sacraments and by their extension through prayer and devotion, and living the faith through the practice of the virtues, as if for the first time, that is, with the engagement and energy of the first disciples and of the first apostles to our native place. Before the grave situation of the world today, we are, Pope John Paul II reminded us, like the first disciples who, after hearing Saint Peter’s Pentecost discourse, asked him: ‘What must we do?’ Even as the first disciples faced a pagan world which had not even heard of our Lord Jesus Christ, so we, too, face a culture which is forgetful of God and hostile to His Law written upon every human heart.”

*

“Once sexual union is no longer seen to be procreative by its very nature, human sexuality is abused in ways that are profoundly harmful and indeed destructive of individuals and of society itself. One has only to think of the devastation which is daily wrought in our world by the multi-million dollar industry of pornography, or the incredibly aggressive homosexual agenda which can only result in the profound unhappiness and even despair of those affected by it, and in the destruction of society, as it has always done historically. Fundamental to the transformation of Western culture is the proclamation of truth about the conjugal union in its fullness and the correction of the contraceptive thinking which fears life, which fears procreation.”

*

“It is the conscience, the voice of God speaking to souls, which is, in the words of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, ‘the aboriginal Vicar of Christ’. …

“Conscience does not set each of us apart as an arbiter of what is right and good, but unites us in the pursuit of the one truth, ultimately Our Lord Jesus Christ Who is the only arbiter of the right and good, so that our thoughts, words, and actions put that truth into practice.”

*

“The hostility and the even more pervasive indifference to the beliefs we hold most dearly tempts us to discouragement and even to avoid the more public witness to our faith. But the martyrdom to which we are called and for which we are consecrated and fortified by the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, requires us to offer tirelessly our witness, confident that God will bring forth the good fruit.”

*

“The life of the martyr for the faith finds its centre and source in the Eucharistic sacrifice, in Eucharistic adoration, and in all forms of Eucharistic devotion, especially visits to the Blessed Sacrament and Spiritual Communion throughout the day. Through Eucharistic devotion and all true devotion, we extend our communion with the Lord. …

“Frequent confession, including confession of devotion, is essential to our growth in the truth and love which we know in Christ. Essentially connected to it is our nightly examination of conscience and Act of Contrition, by which, day by day, we turn once again to Christ in our heart and prepare ourselves for the sacramental encounter with Him in Confession. The integrity and courage needed to be a martyr of witness in the world today demand the intimacy with Christ, which can only come through the daily examination of conscience and Act of Contrition, and the regular meeting with Him in the Sacrament of Penance.”

“God’s final word is called Jesus and nothing more.”

The quote is of Pope Francis, from a homily during Mass in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, at Rome last Tuesday. I became aware of it through reading Father Hunwicke’s blog, yesterday. The purpose of this Idlepost is only to cry it from the little rooftop I occupy. Those on other rooftops please copy.

The context from which it sprang was typical of the manner of His Holiness. He was in the course of disparaging people — by insinuation, the Marian visionaries of Medjugorje. He did not name them, but his allusion to “the seers who will tell us today about the letter that Our Lady will send at four o’clock in the afternoon” was quite obvious.

Perhaps I should make clear that I am not, as the pope could not be, disparaging the genuine Apparitions of Mary. We should however be clear that the apparitions of Medjugorje have been consistently (though not yet definitively) categorized by the Church authorities as non constat — as “not confirmed” to be of supernatural origin.

More generally, in these hard spiritual times, when home truths of basic human psychology are slipping from our grasp, we are plagued by visionaries. Perfectly sincere (perhaps), but not perfectly sound proselytizers for the Christian faith, imagine themselves in direct communication with the heavenly powers. The phenomena of “enthusiasm” were well catalogued by Ronald Knox. We see the whole range of them in such as the contemporary Pentecostal movement. But we also find them within the Catholic realm.

I know this at first hand from minor examples: more than one young woman who has spoken to me of Our Lady as if she has her email address, and is cc’d on various saint-lists in Heaven. Typically these girls (and a few boys) are “traditionalists” in the extreme, and nothing but trouble for parishes in which traditional forms are being restored and rekindled. They may also consider themselves to be profound scholars, after reading a few fanatical tracts, and on this basis like to challenge their priests on minute points of liturgy and doctrine, throwing fits when ignored.

A closely allied phenomenon has the effect of subverting pro-life campaigns. This is the enthusiasm of a class of volunteers whom I would characterize as childless, single, female abortion survivors. They do tireless work, much of which is rendered counter-productive by hysteria.

There is a broader problem in volunteer social services, from men and women who are childless, and usually single, but eager to take on parental or even priestly mentoring roles, for which they are untrained, inexperienced, and unsuited. The fatherless and sometimes motherless young may respond to them; then find they aren’t there when they are desperately needed.

They — all the above — are seeking emotional rewards that may simply not be available; and are certainly not available except on at least three absolute conditions: personal humility, emotional stability, and unvarying commitment. Our mantra, “faith is not feeling” applies to them all. When the emotional rewards do not come, they may suddenly abandon the cause entirely, leaving people who have come to depend on them in the lourche. (Fine Hudibrastic simile, don’t you think?) Again, I am speaking only from first hand.

Unstable people leading the unstable; the blind leading the blind. This is inevitable in an unstable society, especially in ours where the cult of “sincerity” confers authority upon the batty but frightfully sincere. More drama is not what we need. Instead: the fidelity of slow but reliable consolidation; the methodical restoration of the partial to the whole.

One might interpret the pope’s aspersion as a shout-out to all of them. I have criticized Bergoglio, the man, not for any heterodox intention, but for recklessness; in particular for filling the buzzing electronic air with dangerously flip tweets and sound-bites. Spontaneous remarks such as, “Who am I to judge?” disseminate, shorn of context; or sometimes there was no reasonable context. This is not a time when we can afford “erratic” from our highest office.

Yet often, too, Pope Francis hits the nail on the head squarely, and it is breathtaking. It is unfortunate that such wonderfully authoritative papal remarks get no media coverage at all.

This was surely one of those occasions, when the remark was so astute, and so concise, that we should shout it from the rooftops. It had a context, but resounds beyond it, communicating to all who can hear the root principle of Catholic Christian teaching:

“God’s final word is called Jesus and nothing more.”

Or expressed in a corollary: the Holy Spirit has nothing new to say. Not little, but nothing. To think otherwise is rank heresy: it is to assume that Our Lord was incapable of anticipating the range of human experience; that He was a fallible man “conditioned” by his time and place in history; that He was thus “just a man” — one charismatic prophet among others (Muhammad, Buddha, Zoroaster, et cetera). Christ is Very God or He is nothing.

We may understand the Deposit of Faith better or worse; there may be “doctrinal development” in our own understanding; but the teaching does not change. The saints extend the message by example, the Doctors of the Church expound its implications by contemplative reason. But they don’t change the message. They extend by application, and in extending they confirm: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”

Anything we “discover” will be entirely consistent with what we have already received from the inerrant Source. Indeed, it will be discovered within what we received. Or else it is false. This is something one either does, or does not plainly understand, and those who come to us with a new message or a new twist — whether bug-eyed visionaries, or sophistical modernizers — are simply leading us astray.

The dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years. This was impressive, but Christ is forever. He certainly does not “evolve” in a mere two thousand. Nor will the central Truth of the Christian revelation evolve in the next two thousand, nor the next 135 million years. Forever means forever, and like it or not:

“God’s final word is called Jesus.”

Saint George’s Hall in Elm Street (1891–present) was among the first ethnic institutions in the Greater Parkdale Area (aka Toronto). It was built to celebrate and promote our English connexion. Not, be it noted, the Scottish connexion, or the Welsh, or the Irish, or the French, or any other ethnicity. The title remains, cut floridly into the stone mantle above the entrance. So too, inside the Great Hall, we find the accoutrements of English baronial domesticity: the huge hearth, the raised dais, the minstrel’s gallery, the timbered ceiling higher than the room is wide, and when required, the long oak refectory tables. For a man of the thirteenth century, such as myself, it is like coming home.

It has been in the charge of the Arts and Letters Club since early in the last century. The “Group of Seven” met and dined here — after they were evicted from the Brown Betty, and some other long defunct commercial establishments — as, too, odd abstract-expressionists from the mid-century, and a host of formidable English-Canadian names: Robertson Davies, Vincent Massey, Marshall McLuhan, Eden Smith, Wyly Grier, Ernest MacMillan, and Mavor Moore are listed in the propaganda. All the arts have been represented, and Healey Willan, among other composers, once played the house Steinway. He set the club’s constitution to plainsong, so it could be remembered after the text itself was lost by Augustus Bridle. Every estimable English institution requires an unwritten constitution.

Kitchen, buttery, and pantry lie off somewhere, and most usefully, a bar. But what is most English about the place was added after it was built, by J.E.H. MacDonald, quintessentially Canadian landscape painter and graphomane; and by the painter and portraitist, Arthur Lismer. This consisted of self-mocking heraldry and banners for the place, and caricatures of the members.

For in my view, the greatest contribution of the English to the politics and order of this world, has been a streak of aristocratic self-deprecation. They do not take themselves entirely seriously, and their magnificent fustian pomp is relieved by little jokes at their own expense, hinting at their unworthiness, the fraudulence of their claims, and the general ridiculousness of their situation. This is how a ruling class should behave. It is the opposite of the Teutonic tradition, and thus to some degree, shared with the Italians.

*

Now, that was a long preamble to an event last evening. We held a highly secular memorial for the late Richard Lubbock (see here), with the usual drinking, canapés, and speeches, and it was all very fine. His little brother, the English art historian Jules Lubbock, flew over the pond, together with his brilliant son Benji, and various of Richard’s surviving octogenarian contemporaries straggled in, along with many of his younger admirers, now pushing into or beyond their sixties.

For me it was a delightful opportunity to catch sight of old Idler magazine regulars, now of the upland generations, even if many are (understandably) no longer conversing with me. We could still exchange pro-forma greetings consisting of lies about “looking well.”

The Lubbocks, in their several branches, have been a remarkable Semitic tribe, settled within the Anglosphere — like our beloved Richard, brilliant even at their most dysfunctional. The penny dropped when I was speaking with Jules, that his big brother had done something perhaps unprecedented in history. On purely scientific grounds, he had convinced himself of the literal veracity of Christ’s Resurrection. But then, failed to become a Christian. I cannot help but think this an accomplishment so unique, that God must smile upon it.

Old friends, and later enemies alike, in that manorial chamber, gathered in celebration of a death. I reflected on one of Richard’s favourite phrases, his constant reference to “the crooked timber of mankind.” All these strange, irreproducible people, on the analogy of trees, some of them pollarded in the most exquisite ways. Each his own universe, within the “multiverse” Richard also adumbrated;

Our Revels now are ended: These our actors,
(As I foretold you) were all Spirits, and
Are melted into Ayre, into thin Ayre,
And like the baselesse fabricke of this vision
The Clowd-capt Towres, the gorgeous Palaces,
The solemne Temples, the great Globe it selfe,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantiall Pageant faded
Leave not a racke behinde: we are such stuffe
As dreames are made on …

Judging from email alone, some of the remarks made in this space are impenetrably droll. The more because these are mere essays, squibs: each glancing at a topic from a confined angle. But that is the way things are in this world. It is the blind man with the “ephelant.” (That is how one of my children first pronounced it, so that I still long to misspell and mispronounce, that along with “ekmergency,” “ensaurant,” and while driving along the highway, “Gurger King!” et cetera.)

Too, there may be an element of the transgressive. My Chief Texas Correspondent forwarded this morning an item from Breitbart, in which a long-practising homosexual reports how bored he is with “gay.” It just doesn’t offend people the way it used to. Looking around, he has decided to “transition,” to straight white male.

Perhaps that explains me. Transgressive, anti-bourgeois, Traditional Catholic. I tried “High Church Anglican” but it wasn’t offensive enough.

God comes into this, however, and I believe my orientation is sincere. I am rather in possession of a quasi-theological belief, that God isn’t “nice.” Of course, one needs to explain what one means by that.

Words, English ones and other ones, may have several opposites. “Nice” may oppose “nasty,” but it may also oppose “good.” It can further oppose, or more often adjust or twist, many other notions, depending upon context. I use it in many other contexts; but in the main, I use it as a term of abuse.

Indeed, I don’t even see “nice” and “nasty” as opposites, in many contexts, but as different soundings in the same animal. One is the overlay for the other: “nice” is the fake form of good, “nasty” what this artificial skin is intended to conceal. Test it, just a little scratch, and you will find out what lies underneath the surface.

But sometimes one finds instead an almost innocent puzzlement. For “nice” is then just yesterday’s clothes: the decayed remnant of some better teaching. It is worn out of politeness, because convention demands we still not walk about in the nude. Christians were taught to be good, in some past age. This turned out to be difficult. Today we are neither Christian, nor good, but “niceness” preserves a tattered, informal covering of decency.

We want to be liked, and well-treated. If we are nice, we will pass. If we are nasty, there may be immediate complications. Therefore be nice. Then if you don’t get what you want by being nice, try nasty. I’ve noticed this dynamic operating in myself.

The saints are not nice, and the burning charity we find in them is the opposite of niceness. Like their master, Jesus Christ, they are not inclined to compromise and show. Neither are they inclined to be boorish, for the sake of being boorish. They are not “transgressive” in our fashionable sense. They are not, come down to it, fashionable at all, except among the faithful.

To put this another way, my statement “most people are nice” was to be read in its context, as a mischievous suggestion that most people are not very nice: not under the skin. This I understand to be the Christian teaching, as before it was the Hebrew teaching, proceeding from the phenomenon of Original Sin. The motives we present are not the motives we have, a little beneath the façade of niceness. A little below that surface we are raging apes. If we could see ourselves in a true mirror, we would not like what we saw.

Pursuing the analogy, Christ came to us as a true mirror, against which to judge not others, but ourselves. Too, as an alternative to our own way of being: the human embodiment not of niceness, but of a perfect Love.

“Nice” is the opposite of “love” in this context. Love, even married love, is not chocolates and roses. Though let me say it does not exclude chocolates, or roses. True love is gritty stuff. It requires a loyalty that is in its nature quite unworldly; even a sensuousness that is radically different from the soft pornography that is sold in its place.

*

On this Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the old liturgy teaches many subtle things. As a private devotion it was very ancient, but as a public devotion of the Church it surfaced suddenly in the sixteenth century, as a response to Calvinism, and deepened in the seventeenth century as a response to Jansenism within the Church herself. Raised to the rank of “double of the first class, with octave” by Pius XI in 1928 (but cut back among the first Bugnini reforms, in the 1950s) — it was a further response to the twentieth century.

It can be taken, strangely enough, as a response to “niceness” — to a niceness which maintains outward forms of charity as a mask of etiquette, yet inwardly consigns huge sections of mankind to inexorable damnation.

In the First Vespers we find this extraordinary line of Christ’s, via Saint Luke, cast as antiphon at the Magnificat: Ignem veni mittere in terram, et quid volo, nisi ut accendatur? …

Which is to say, “I am come to cast fire on the Earth, and what will I, but that it be kindled?”

True love is not nice. It gets up each morning with the world on fire. It must save people.

*

A note from another correspondent, learned Perfesser Smith from the old Commentariat, is so good and so apt that I will simply quote it as the means to further contemplation:

“If most people are nice, does being Christian then mean to be extra nice? Do we conceive the supernatural as the natural souped up? More of the same?

“Wasn’t this de Lubac’s point: that we think of nature as self-contained and the supernatural as over-and-above; whereas man, as created and fallen, in fact straddles both? That we think we can be naturally complete, and then, as a sort of reward for achieving this, God will add the supernatural dimension? Whereas, in truth, any ‘natural completion’ is only ever relative to the terms of this world and without reference to the next; and seen in the light of man’s true end, such ‘natural completion’ is not to be viewed as a mere stage on the way, but as actually inimical to the achievement of our true end. The ‘nice’ person is a gnostic at heart who would, if not explicitly, then technically and by default, regard the part as the whole, and so distort his relation to both the part and the whole.”

Food is important. Mark and inwardly digest. Chew your food. Taste it. Swallow what you have put into your mouth before reloading. Your mouth is busy, give it a chance. Indeed, pause from time to time, to think it through. Converse with your neighbours.

My mother taught me as much. Would that she had taught some others. Americans eat very fast. Our franchise establishments actually advertise their serving speed. (This is barbaric.) They also put signs, when their “outlets” are in downmarket locations, specifying the time you have to eat before your presence is interpreted as “loitering.” Woe to the diner not wearing a watch, for they have not the courtesy to place a clock by the sign, to let him adjust his swallowing to the time available.

My own advice would be, don’t dine where you’re not welcome.

Yet, even in Parkdale we have good restaurants. There are now seven Tibetan chop shops (yak stops?) along Queen Street. I think this qualifies us to be called “Little Tibet,” and get special street signs from the the municipal multicultural patronizing bureaucracy. Though when I accompanied an excessively white friend into one such establishment, he was filled with anxiety. “I sure hope the food isn’t authentic,” he commented.

It was, earlier today, starting with the salted butter tea. Or rather, it wasn’t. Everything tastes different, this close to sea level.

The same remark can be made for chillies, as can be made for wine. Except, chillies often grow well in the mountains. But this depends on the mountain face, in relation to the sun’s course; on the soils, and temperatures; on the rains in their seasons; on luck, and the art of the chilli farmer. Gentle reader will guess I am about to pump Tibetan Tiger Chillies.

Now, Tibet is no country to grow chillies, overall. Some katabasis is usually required. Go south, down the mountains, perhaps to Bengal; then east, to the hills behind Chittagong; or into the lower hills of Assam; and there, I solemnly believe, you will find the finest chillies in the world. The Naga Morich, grown there, have been attempted elsewhere, always with dispiriting results. The conditions can be reproduced artificially, and hybridizations can be tried to square the circle, as it were. Some gentleman in England topped the Scoville table, a few years ago, by triangulating from the Naga Morich, the Bhut Jolokia (or, “ghost pepper,” closely related), and the Trinidad Moruga (or, “butch scorpion,” with linguistic variants). But the hybrid was unstable and he lost the competition the next year.

I love very hot chillies, and those above 1,000,000 Scoville units are much appreciated. (The hottest Habaneros get only half way there.) But I also love chillies, in themselves, and this includes quite mild ones. You see, as chilli-haters refuse to be taught, there is more to them than capsaicin. Even the heat is produced by compounds: the scientists, always counting, don’t know where to start. The customer who wants only pain can hit 16,000,000 with the synthetic chemical in its wax form. … Go ahead. … I’ll watch.

A Canadian (white) may say, “How can you taste your food with all those chillies?” There is no polite answer to this. It’s a typically Canadian passive-aggressive stance: to ask the unanswerable question. You just have to shoot them. The truth is that chillies have flavours (note plural); that I am partial myself to the most fruity and aromatic varieties, which bring out other flavours, too, in a cooked dish. As a general rule, the hotter the better, but there are exceptions to general rules.

And one of these is the Tibetan Tiger Chilli. I mention it because for lunch today, I had an aloo khatsa. Well, okay, the restaurant is “Tibetan/Nepali,” and aloo is Hindi for potatoes. Shogo khatsa would be more correct: full Tibetan for “spicy potatoes.” The cook, bless her heart, must have incorporated dozens of these expensive chillies in the sauce. It was a mothering thing to do. To the Tibetan mind (and here I intend to stereotype), chillies mean “eat up.” They tend to subvert the body’s filling signals, enabling one to eat more. And if you live high on the Tibetan plateau, where nothing very much grows, and you don’t know where you’ll find your next meal — imagine yourself a bonze on pilgrimage — you eat what you can.

Potatoes are “nice” (see yesterday), but it is the distinctive flavour of these chillies that makes the dish. Other ingredients should, after a slight bow, get out of the way. I have not the vocabulary to describe it, but it rolls across the tongue like the flowers of an orchard in paradise. And then delivers a gentle caressing back-kick, like an affectionate mule. A professional wine taster might be able to imagine what fruits were in that orchard. I’ll mention guava, walnuts, and loganberries; but just to be pretentious.

Of course, Nature invented chillies to protect birdfeeders. Mammals such as squirrels hate them, as humans hate pepper-spray, but birds either can’t taste them (according to these “scientists,” who have simplistic ideas based on counting taste-buds), or actually like them (according to me). Note that “bird-peppers” were so named because avians gobble them by choice off the bushes.

I have taken to feeding my finches millet, enlivened with a modest sprinkle of crushed Ancho chilli. We both like it, and we both like it hot. In their case, also dry, and raw: they keep coming back for more. Whereas, a Tibetan would probably like his millet made into chang, and thus very wet. This is among their many delightful alcoholic beverages, which keep them warm in the mountains. And their food is salty, which improves the thirst.

Very catholic and monastic they are. (Scientists call them “Buddhists,” but this is misleading.) It is a great pity they weren’t numerous enough to fight off the Maoists, for they make very good soldiers, too. But I’m rambling, it has been a long day, and I almost missed my final Idlepost deadline.

“If, as you say, the world is going to Hell, how come there are so many nice people?”

My paraphrase does no justice to the acquaintance who asked. The original was rather more involved.

She is, by her own account, “not a bad person.” At least, ditto, she has never done anything very bad, though she admits that by the catechistic standard, she is quite the rogue. But that is a standard she rejects; she has her own standard.

Old, now (in her seventies), she is probably better informed on the teachings of the Catholic Church than most current Sunday churchgoers. This is because before she left, nearly half a century ago, she had been properly instructed, by nuns. For they had nuns in those days, who knew what they were about. (We still have a few, but not many.)

And this lady is sharp: her mind is not fading. She can even recite the titles of all the Books in the Bible, in the correct order. This was one of the things the nuns drummed in. And the ten commandments, and the seven deadly sins, and the four cardinal virtues, and the three theological ones, and the eight beatitudes, and the five sorrowful mysteries, and the five joyful mysteries, and the rest of it. Memory work, and her memory is still working.

She is one of those people who hated the “Old Church” before Vatican II, and welcomed the changes that came in the ’sixties. But when they arrived, she left. And she is candid about that, saying that leaving might not have occurred to her, otherwise. The “reforms” exposed the Old Church as a sham, in her opinion — for suddenly what had seemed immortal, and immovable, and unchangeable, was shown up for what it was: “a deeply flawed human institution.” And the priests who had the mysterious powers were shown to be just old men — celibate males, like old maids or spinsters.

There was a moment in the 1990s when John Paul II held her attention. She even attended church a few times, alone, for her husband was never a Catholic, and her two children were raised “free range.” That Pope seemed to be speaking of things that she had overlooked, or forgotten. But the Masses she attended were trivial: they reminded her it was “all a sham,” and so she drifted off again. When the Pope died, she could not explain to herself why she was heartbroken. It was almost as if her father had died.

“But it is all a sham,” she insists. “A nice place for funerals and weddings.” Or, funerals, since she hasn’t attended a wedding in a very long time. The services are unnecessary, “They should rent it out like the old Crystal Ballroom.” … For weddings, funerals, concerts, fashion shows, bingo, floor hockey.

The Church was priests, and the priests failed — according to this lady. Her relationship was with these old men. She recites some filth from the sex scandals, by way of dismissing them as utterly corrupt. While nothing so bad as what she’d heard on TV, she had a few bad memories herself of priests (and nuns) who were “slimy.”

And no, she hasn’t met or spoken to a priest in many decades; or to any other religious, male or female. “What would we have to talk about?”

I mentioned that the Christian’s relation is with Jesus Christ; that the clergy, from the Pope down, are intermediaries. That they are human, and sometimes fail. And sometimes they fail catastrophically. “I can understand you have nothing to say to some old priest. But let me be hypothetical here: what will you say to Jesus?”

That she has been a good person. That she has never done anything very bad. It began to sound like a mantra.

It is true, most people are nice. This includes Catholics, but also Protestants and Muslims, Hindus and Jews and Agnostics. (Most would rather be liked than hated.) Why just last week, I dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the floor while struggling at a cash-point, and the man behind me picked it up, and gave it right back. He didn’t run off down the street with it. What a nice man; I thanked him. In Parkdale, here, we have lots of nice people.  I think of them as “the church of nice,” and of all the “mercy” my Church of Nasty is currently dispensing on them.

I wonder if Christ will ever be understood. For it’s not just the priests and nuns: Christ Himself comes across as nasty, if you read the Script — judgemental, strict, confrontational. And when people dishonour his Father’s house — perfectly nice people for all we know, just trying to make a living — he becomes downright violent. Fashions a whip, turns over their stalls. No table manners at all. Garish talk about body and blood.

“If thy brother sin against thee, reprove him: and if he do penance, forgive him.”

Note the qualification; and that it continues through seven times, and would continue through seventy times seven.

We don’t give people what they don’t want. (That wouldn’t be nice.) And if they don’t want forgiveness, we don’t give it to them. We offer it up instead to God. The martyr on the stake does not say, “I forgive you,” he asks God to forgive them. This is a subtlety I don’t think nice people get.

Jesus Christ to priests who fail, catastrophically: “But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged around his neck, and that he should be drowned in the uttermost depth of the sea.”

Now, that is nasty.

“Fate dominates the lives of men,” — I have this from Hilaire Belloc this morning — “though Will is a corrective of Fate.” In the item I was reading, Will is employed to escape the Fate of conversing with an excruciating bore, whom Belloc (gratuitously) suspects is Hungarian. Some clever manoeuvring in a railway eating car, and they are soon separated by “two commercial travellers, a professional singer, and a politician,” terminating the recitation of an improbable tiger-hunting story.

Belloc had some Will, to be sure, and so had various others in history, including a fair proportion of the Christian martyrs, or rather I should think, all of them. In the end, death is certainly a way of concluding an interminable conversation — the death of either one or the other — though of course, it is an extreme move. Accede, instead, to the wishes of one’s interlocutor, agree to obey his Will at the start, and the conversation can go on forever. I mean this literally, for in Hell it may continue in perpetuity.

Several of my correspondents have begged me to comment on the latest developments in the “gay agenda.” I must confess that I find that conversation boring. In this Province of Ontario, for instance, we now have a new scheme for “sex education” to be imposed on our little ones in the public schools, beginning in September. They will be instructed from an early age, in addition to what they learn already, not only that every imaginable sort of lubricity and coupling is “natural” and “good”; but too, that anyone who denies this is a “hater,” and therefore potentially eligible for punishment under our constantly evolving laws. Various parents’ groups are resisting, with little effect against the forward march of the homosexual and now “transgender” alliance — activists who have come to command a nearly closed camp of government, bureaucracy, academia, the media, and the courts.

Defeat, we are facing, on innumerable fronts, as the Gnostic powers advance against us, to consolidate their previous victories, and then conduct their mopping-up operations.

Example: I see from my inbox this morning, that Toronto is soon to host a massive public orgy for the disabled, to coincide with the Parapan Am Games this summer. (It is not yet an official Olympic sport.) In a news report, from a nominally “conservative” newspaper, this is presented as another “barrier” about to fall. An organizer, who is a “disability awareness consultant,” herself bound to a wheelchair as well as to the rubbish “science” of sociology, moans in the usual way about past oppression. Non-disabled people have been guilty of denying accessibility to sex among the disabled, she speculates, owing to the reactionary assumption that they have less libido. All this must change.

Nothing easier than to change public assumptions on sexuality, as we have observed over the last decade or two. There is little left to shock the bourgeois, and we cannot expect the avant-gardes to encounter much resistance, as they proceed on the remaining fronts of paedophilia and bestiality.

I used the term “Gnostic” advisedly, for that is precisely what we have faced, as many alert Catholic and some other Christian writers have begun to realize fully. Go read Making Gay Okay, by Robert Reilly, for a summation of the recent history; then go read Eric Voegelin for the deeper history. Verily, there is nothing new under the sun; and through history, those who have denied the natural and supernatural order, have not rested until their own attempts to change reality itself, have blown up in their faces. In the end, the revolution always eats its own, and already we observe the conflicts between e.g. advanced feminists and the latest “transgenderism” — which denies that “women” have any standing at all.

To the Gnostic, in his quest for self-justification, material reality itself is the oppressor, and therefore material reality must be altered. We say that God made us male and female, and in an objective sense, He did. In effect, the Gnostic does not deny that a quick glance at the newborn’s genitalia will sort them nicely. His (or her, or its) critique is directed ultimately against God. The response is, How dare He? How dare He imprison us in our bodies?

We are gods ourselves, imprisoned in human flesh, according to the basic Gnostic thinking. We must act as gods, and correct Him. We shall impose Our reality over His, and this must necessarily involve the destruction of all those taking rearguard action on God’s side. In the end this is not materialism, at all — an innocent creed compared to what we are facing. It is finally an extreme form of spiritualism, demanding the triumph of the “spiritual” over the “material.” More exactly: the triumph of something purely (and viciously) spiritual, over the combined material and spiritual of God’s creation.

And as Saint Paul taught — and as Christ taught, before him:

“Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers; against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in high places.”

It is not a new fight, and we are wrong to imagine there is anything novel in the present contest of Wills. Look back to earlier centuries to find glaring examples of Gnostic antinomianism. This has instead been a Christian fight all along — the essential Christian fight, all through the centuries, against the powers of darkness, surrounding and often penetrating into Holy Church. Consult the Scriptures, and we are given fair warning of what happens the moment we let down our guard.

We know that the assault will not end voluntarily. The activists will always want more, and more. One cannot reason with them, because the very premisses are disputed, on which we might argue. As we have discovered in practice, there is no “debate.” Every word, from “tolerance” forward, has a different meaning for us and for them. The battle is not even a dispute about ends, but over reality itself.

Prayer makes perfect sense in this battle, personal prayer and the aggregation of prayer, for against a spiritual enemy we must summon spiritual allies. In material terms, we must stiffen our spines.

It is a little-known fact that the Devil is a colossal bore. He began the present round by querying contraception, asking us in our charity to “tolerate” this and that, and even begging for what he presented as minor concessions. Now we have a taste of the Devil’s toleration, on the minor concession of leaving our children alone. We made the mistake of allowing the conversation, and letting him incrementally advance, from one tedious little demand to another.

At the beginning, we could wisely have done as Belloc suggested. It was a simple matter of putting between us “two commercial travellers, a professional singer, and a politician.” We are beyond that now, fully fixed in his trap. Greater acts of the Will, will be required to avoid him.

On some farm in the Gatineau Hills, last week, in retreat with an old buddy of mine, I was given a wonderful opportunity to rest, and gaze over a puddle. It had collected by a fine old maple at a low point of a rolling lawn, and at midday dragonflies hovered above it. And these not any dragonflies, but Vernal Bluets, which is to say damselflies, actually, whose blues — porcelain between black lacquer stripes — are of a sky lightness evocative of Heaven.

Now, this was exactly what I had come to see, though I did not know what I had come for, beyond the general aim of stepping out of the city.

I possessed but one field guide to regional Odonata, and that was foolishly left behind in the High Doganate: The Dragonflies and Damselflies of Algonquin Provincial Park and the Surrounding Area, by Colin D. Jones and a few others. Notwithstanding it is a paperback, full of glossy pix, I can recommend it to any reader within a million miles of Ottawa who may wish to fill his heart with hope, beauty, and joy.

Yet even so, of limited technical value, for my location was above the limestone plain, washed flat with fertile farming soil by the ancestors of the Ottawa River. Rather I was looking over it from the Precambrian, metavolcanic upland to the north, just beyond this field guide’s range.

We do not yet appreciate, I believe, the extraordinary variety of creatures on this Earth, not only from one order to another, but like religious, within each of the orders. The closer they are examined, through magnifying glass and even down farther into the genetic structure, the more distinctions we can make that are joyful and beautiful in themselves.

I am thinking here specifically of our northern Bluets, my favourite damselflies in the Coenagrionidae genera. Consider for instance their sexual parts, which interclasp by an irreproducible feat of minute mechanical engineering.

Two may seem in costumage the same species at a first glance, or a second, or a third: the similar colour pattern set out vividly in the median and humeral stripes. They overlap in range; show like habits, in like micro-environments. Individuals may be distinguished in subtle ways: for instance the shadings of the contrasting browns in the eyes of the females make each unique. Or, more dramatically, females may show brown instead of blue on their bodies, in a delicious “polymorph,” for the brown hue is the perfect poetical match, or simile to the blue hue (now a little more yellow; now a little more green), as if from the brush of a great artist, who understands colour from the inside out.

Now look to the cercus on one male, then on another. Not polymorphism here, but a decisive boundary between two species. The knob at the distal end — look closer — is a different shape. The Vernal Bluet has a black tooth, set into a basal depression, entirely missing in the Boreal Bluet. Unless I am wrong (and gentle reader should be warned that I lack an advanced degree in Anisopteran Entomology, to say nothing of the Zygopteran), the two kinds may hybridize, and often do. But thanks to this little trick of Design, they don’t do so easily, or for long. The Designer has made it awkward for them, and by this stroke, assured us that the two species will not meld or homogenize. He is in no doubt: He wants them to be different, and to remain so, and for a purpose that will be immediately apparent to no one.

Having fixed our attention on the cerci — for we are Catholics here, and no prudes — we may then reflect upon a world of sensual experience, extending beyond our reach and ken.

As we know from observation across the phylum Arthropoda, the cercum may have multiple “functions.” It may be the organ for copulation, but it may also be a complexly unified sensory organ for quite other uses; or a pinching weapon, or a means to carry or drag. It may be some combination of all these, and we cannot guess what else besides. Our reductionist science, or scientism, glibly assigns a function, adds this to a chart; then moves along to the next creature, and the next chart, to fill more blank spaces in a tedious database, which may then be manipulated by our dehumanized cyphers.

But as William Blake has observed, the senses are the inlets to our souls — to our immortal human souls, as also, to the mortal dragonfly souls. And, “how do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”

Or, as Ezra Pound asserted: “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, Paquin, pull down.”

The allusion here is to the intensely lyrical, “Libretto” passage, late in the Pisan cantos — among the most memorable flights in English literature — which itself has many converging functions within the movement of the larger poem, including the presentation of a vision of Nature that resonates with that of Alexander Pope, in a mischievously droll way. From beneath it upwells a grand moral contrast that Pope would easily recognize. The smug, complacent, idolatrous orbitations of the transient fashion world (Paquin was a Paris dress designer, who flourished before the Great War) has been set against the humility, contrition, atonement — and upwelling Love — in a live religious tradition. It is Pound rising towards Dante:

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace.
          Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry …

Indeed, a dragonfly is a wonder of exquisite Design — material and mechanical but simultaneously artistic — this little roving Eye of nature, that first appears, fully-formed with incredible precision, in the fossil records from more than three hundred million years ago.

It was, however, only half a century ago, that as a boy given to hiking wherever he could get, I had my own first “quasi-religious” experience of watching a dragonfly nymph emerge from a pond, and undergo its metamorphosis into glory. I saw it emerge from its dead larval skin, and crawl tenuously onto a log. Under the dazzling sun, it was pale, crinkled, utterly feeble. And then, in the space of minutes, its abdomen extended, its veinous wings unfolded and filled out, its colouring began to appear murkily, then solidify in sharp, unmistakable pattern. This new angelic creature pulsed, stretched to its fullness, took its first flight — knowingly, towards the safety of the woods. It was a miracle I had witnessed from beginning to end, and to this day I find it useful to recall, when contemplating the mysteries of Creation and Resurrection.

[Those who say I write faster than they read, are hereby granted a week
to catch up. This is because I am going upcountry, without my computer gear.
Daily idleposting will resume when (and if, God willing) I return
to the High Doganate. Which is to say Monday, June 8th.]

*

Write each squib as if it were your last, and sooner or later it will be. For many years, going back to pre-Roman, I have been trying to follow this advice. It does not require the writer to be grave and serious. Among my heroes, and patrons, is Saint Thomas More, whose last words (for human consumption) were a little joke to the axeman. The point is rather, even when addressing the vexing matters of the day, to view things sub specie aeternitatis — “under the aspect of eternity,” as Baruch Spinoza would say. (Not one of my greatest heroes, but he has delicious moments.)

This hardly means one will succeed.

Vexation is the alternative aspect (sub specie afflictio?). Not anger, as commonly thought, for the indulgence of Wrath is itself a cause and condition of vexation, and must thus be considered philosophically prior — vexation being, as it were, among the wages of that sin.

And so, for all the others. Each deadly sin offers vexation — real unavoidable vexation in one’s life — and with it the slave chains of this world.

Consider Envy, for instance: what vexation it supplies. (Pause, as gentle reader considers.) … Consider what Lust can get one into. (Pause.) … Consider the vexations that follow each slide into Sloth and task avoidance. (Pause.) … And how Greed goes and comes around. (Pause.) … And then Gluttony, in all of its misunderestimated ramifications, some of which may involve the excessive consumption of alcohol. (Pause.) … And the queen bee in the hive is Pride. …

Lately (see under the heading “Saint Philip Neri”), I have been considering what may be one of the hardest passages in all Scripture to digest, because on the surface it looks silly, in the slapstick-ironical line:

“My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

But there are moments when this truth can be seen; moments for the Catholic which follow from Absolution, available exclusively through the Sacrament of Penance. Lift that burden of sin, and what remains to carry?

Of course one might starve, develop cancer, be imprisoned and tortured, have one’s head lopped off. All these may be occasion of heavy weather. And yet they require no effort on our part. Everything is taken care of: the Enemy does all the work. And you should see his wages.

There again More steps forward, in lightness of heart. His example left no excuses. It wasn’t just the scheduled prospect of his own execution that might have made for a bad day. He had already tried the rack on for size; beheading is comparatively painless. But think of the implications for his family. And then think, with him, about the fate of England, and of all Christendom, given what a certain monarch was doing, and other monarchs elsewhere, inspired by his example. Things were not looking up for the Christian world, as More was perhaps in a better position than anyone to appreciate.

Still, he was leaving it, and in the conviction that Christ has triumphed.

Vexation, or hapless desolation in its more extreme form, “would be indicated,” as the lawyers say, in view of many things now happening around us, over which we have no power. I could start listing them. But if I listed instead reasons to be hopeful about current worldly trends, “in spite of all that,” the hope would be as false as the desolation.

Faith is not feeling; and neither theological Hope, nor Charity. They are not “upbeat.” You can get upbeat from drugs.

“Detachment” is the word, both Catholic and Buddhist, for setting down the burden of sin. This hardly means giving up the fight, as More exemplifies. It only means not letting the Enemy get us down.

To be now Catholic and not Buddhist, we must be happy soldiers. We do not have to effect our own salvation, or achieve Nirvana by our own transcendent efforts. We can get help. As C.S. Lewis mentioned in The Great Divorce, there is a bus to Paradise, leaving every day. And the ticket, which costs everything, is entirely refundable in either direction.

“The truth of God will compass thee round about with a pavice from the arrow flying in the day.” … More refers here to the arrow of Pride, which high though it fly, has “an heavy iron head.” He didn’t say not to enjoy the journey upward. On the contrary, enjoy the journey downward, too, when we return to “every beggar our fellow.”

On Earth they rise and fall. Choose life, choose Christ, and rise above it.

It was all explained to me on a bridge in London, some thirty-nine years ago, yet I still find it an unplumbable mystery, this “Holy Trinity” of Whom Christians speak. It makes sense, it is biblically and theologically explicable to anyone sufficiently patient, and yet it is so far beyond normal human reach and comprehension that we must consider it a miracle in normal, historical terms: how people have continued to believe it.

When, in the early sixteenth century, the whole of the Western Church began to split apart, almost all of the splinter groups took away with them the trinitarian “concept.” Though it was not “rational” to the conventionally “rationalist” mind — which is reductionist to a (grievous) fault — the brethren who were separating themselves wanted to remain Christian. They realized that without this bold conception of the Trinity — inferred throughout the New Testament, and often hinted in the Old — they would cease to be Christian.

The Socinians, and others of that ilk (Arminians, Remonstrants, Unitarians and so forth), quickly demonstrated what happens to Christianity when trinitarianism is abandoned. We do not go from “three-in-one and one-in-three” to “one-in-one.” Instead, in the effort to retrieve Christ from a rapidly condensing theology, while avoiding dualism and pantheism, we go to something like “one-and-a-half in one,” or perhaps, “one-and-a-quarter in one-and-three-eighths,” bouncing back and forth off gnostic walls long before erected. It is a fascinating history, from the remoter reaches of Poland and Transylvania to points west, and through psilanthropic and ebionitic bat-flights, as quite intelligent but pathologically unwise people (like my abandoned hero, Coleridge) try to construct plausible Christologies in their own brains, with important bits missing.

Islam had long before offered the truly unitarian “option,” a heresy more natural to the East. Here the fascination is in the first century after Mohammed had transmitted some part of the Koran. (Scholarly inquiry into the actual development of the Koranic texts is suppressed today, in both East and West, with the threat of violence.)

The best minds of the Islamic conversion went right to work developing a unitarian theology, and soon discovered that if made self-consistent, it must also be incredibly boring. For it made the “otherness” of Allah too complete; so complete that it keeps batting back the question: why Mohammad? Why any prophet at all? Within that century the better Muslim minds turned all their attention instead to Shariah. Why vex themselves with truisms that keep going circular on them, when they could be indulging the far more agreeable pastime of bossing people around?

But isn’t Judaism essentially unitarian? To be sure, it is not doctrinally trinitarian, but that mysteriously plural quality, puritanically rejected in Islam, is implicit throughout Hebrew scripture, and necessary to the nature of God in His works. He is discerned by the Prophets in different aspects that a Christian recognizes as personhoods — but not as multiple gods. The “Sonship” is manifest throughout, in the chosen nature of the Israelites themselves; the Holy Spirit is constantly proceeding, behind, above, beyond the inscrutable transformation of a desert tribe into a universal expression of the divine will. God is not “one” like Moses. “I am that I am” lies unknowably beyond that, both immanent and transcendent.

Christian, and to my view, ultimately Catholic faith alone delivers to us this profound insight, of the unity of God in Three Persons. But once delivered, it reveals depths of knowledge not only of God but of ourselves. Most crucially: Love is a perpetual conversation within that “godhead,” to which we are ourselves ingathered. This is the mysterious human word to convey the infinitely divine quality that requires this “plurality” (co-equal, co-eternal, consubstantial) of ingathering.

In saying that “God is Love” we are already acknowledging a triadic “beingness of being,” as it were — a love for one to another from which Another can never be excluded. It seems to me from my weak understanding that this is echoed, too, in our human world, wherein the love of a man and a woman is sealed in the love of God, and open not merely to the biological generation of a child, but pre-existently to the love of that child — re-echoing in turn the Divine Love, which is absolute, which is not conditional.

This is all from a depth into which we cannot see, yet from which all that we can see is proceeding. We cannot know more about God than God; but can descry, in Revelation, enough about God to Love Him as our all-in-all.

Often it is said, by the glib, that there is no Doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible. This from people who either have not read the Bible, or have not understood anything they’ve read. For the Bible does not contain doctrines. It contains matter from which doctrines are construed. God does not Himself speak in doctrines, but in commands. The doctrines follow from what has been said, and are necessary to avoid misunderstanding.

And mostly they are dead obvious, as this one, forespoken in the baptismal formula of Matthew 28, to be uttered always and irreducibly: “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Perhaps I have already confessed to gentle reader the mischievous tricks I play on animals. On the purple finches, and finchesses, now accustomed to free lunch on the balconata of the High Doganate — or rather, early breakfast, then snacks throughout the day — I have played a good one.

Formerly, I was feeding them from a tray at some distance from my writing station; but now I arrange their preferred sunflower seeds along the outside ledge of my window. A screen alone separates the little one, just now crackling and gobbling, from your Idleposter, typing inside.

I am no ornithologist, able to judge the age of a bird at one glance, but am sure this fellow is young, quite young. Young, and therefore fearless, or rather, poorly informed. Even my more sudden movements do not drive him away. Catch him young and, I speculate, one might tame him.

They are melodious creatures, and my motive for luring them along the ledge to the screen was not only to see, but to hear them at close quarters: to learn, if it were possible, a little of the language in which they poetically delight, and the choral arrangements for the singing of their Hours, starting with Lauds about five in the morning.

Much is explained by circumstance. Just earlier, an older finch alone on my railing was chirping earnestly to unseen companions. It was easy to follow. In English translation, his soliloquy went like this:

“I want to crackle and gobble some seeds, but I’m not up to risking it alone. There’s a fresh lot here that The Monster has put out. Are any of you birds hungry? I need five or six for safety. Is Tommy the Guardsman there?”

Normally they feed in groups, and I have noticed one of the group — usually tall Tommy — will stretch himself up to his fullest standing height, and stare through the screen at me directly. He will tolerate me sitting still, but at the first sign of movement, he shrills, and all fly off instantly.

The little one (who has taken his fill, and now flown at his leisure), would flee, too, if he heard the alarm. But he doesn’t because there is no adult to sound it. He would if I came suddenly out the door: he’d flap off in wild agitation. But for the moment my body language is lost on him. He isn’t looking for it.

He will learn, as he grows, from obedience. Eventually the penny will drop for him; all the pennies — why the elders do as they do. And later, how to sound the various alarms, when he has his own hatchlings.

A liberal or other evolutionist would say the little one is smarter. By ignoring my movements, he got his fill. An adult, landing solo, would have taken one seed, to eat elsewhere. Then perhaps returned, for one more. He would do this from his mature calculation of the risks and benefits.

The old should learn from the young, the liberal would say, the way they do in Ireland. The birds should have a debate, and pass legislation, henceforth to ignore the peril. And then they can all eat, until they are very fat.

But no, my children, preserve the ancient ways.

You do not know the buzzard, which also alights sometimes on my balconata railing. You only know from trust the language of the elders; that you must intently listen, and obey.

For the language of alarm among these finches is complex, and crisp, but subtle. Humbly, they must learn.

When I move, inside the window, they fly off as one flock, all in the same direction. But as the buzzard is spied approaching, they fly off every which way. This is not mere panic. By doing so they confuse him, and provide such a choice of targets, that he must waste the moment in deciding which to pursue. They’ll be each under cover by the time he can react.

And the buzzard knows that, too. He merely lands on the rail, conserving his great dignity, as if nabbing a juicy morsel of finch-flesh were the farthest thing from his mind. For he is a proud animal, who’d rather starve than be made a fool of. He won’t give my tiny finches the sweet satisfaction of being chased, and getting away.

My beloved finches (and finchesses) know the game; they know the difference between The Monster and The Buzzard. From joyful play and long practice they know their signals, which are old and wise.

In order to have a cottage on a secluded lake, within several hundred miles of the High Doganate, one must now own the lake. I haven’t fact-checked this exhaustively, however. There may be a virgin, mosquito-infested puddle north of Sudbury somewhere, that no one has claimed. Parks are nice, but everything pleasant beyond them has been scooped up.

Find a lake of exceptional primaeval beauty, and you have found motorboats, monster homes, and an “infrastructure” being noisily installed and constantly repaired or upgraded; the peace once offered now draining or drained away. This includes the drive to the cottage, which becomes an ever longer horrible experience for the whole family.

The solution, as any businessman or free-market enthusiast will see, is to increase production of secluded lakes. Too, we could take existing, unused secluded lakes, presently in remote and inaccessible wilderness locations, and move them closer to the city.

On further inquiry it turns out this cannot be done. I could explain why, but I fear this would over-extend my patience.

Better, I could refer gentle reader to the works of Wilhelm Roepke, the German economist and social thinker who was the principal architect of the “economic miracle” achieved by Ludwig Erhard (under Konrad Adenauer) — which began three years after the Second World War. Roepke and colleagues were able to explain to this unusually intelligent politician why the continuation of Adolf Hitler’s economic policies — insisted upon by the American, British, and French occupation authorities — could only lead to the continuation of hunger, collapse, social disintegration. Erhard bravely followed Roepke’s “anti-plan.”

Overnight, a slew of financial and other regulations were rescinded, and a new hard currency was launched — more or less behind the occupiers’ backs. Then deeper layers of Bismarckian Nanny Statism were cunningly disassembled. Overnight, Germany began to recover, then prosper. In little time the German economy had overtaken that of e.g. Britain, where the very policies Germany had abandoned were being imposed by Clement Attlee’s “moderate Left” (the policies which Margaret Thatcher finally reversed to trigger a British “economic miracle” in the 1980s).

This, anyway, is the myth upon which the free-market, open-society, Mont Pelerin Society feeds. Like some other myths, it is essentially true. I used to hang about the edges of this club myself, years ago. Roepke was a founder and member until 1962, when a big fight with Friedrich Hayek led to his departure.

Germany’s “economic miracle” lifted all boats — for a while. It saved Germany from a revolutionary socialist implosion. But it was only a quick fix. Roepke, while he lived (1899–1966), tirelessly pointed to the limitations of laissez-faire formulas. The quick fix may quickly fix a few things, in a catastrophe; but over a longer period a longer fix will be required, involving ever less hocus-pocus. Values beyond those of economic necessity must be not only restored, but cultivated. They must survive in the hearts of the people themselves; religion is not “optional.”

I’ve been reminded of Roepke by a chance trail of Internet links, which led me to articles about him from the 1990s, by his disciple Ralph Ancil, which have resurfaced at an interesting website called The Imaginative Conservative. They may give my Hayekian readers some idea of what Roepke’s fight with him was about; or vice versa, for I gather Hayek picked it.

(Only “some idea,” however, and while I have shifted away from the “Austrian School” myself, to a broader and more catholic view of life and society, more like Roepke’s, I would not wish to depreciate Hayek’s economic insights, or cease to recommend him as an historian of ideas who traced positivist and revolutionist currents in social thought back to Descartes. Alas, Hayek’s flaw in all cases is that he is spiritually tone-deaf.)

Roepke described himself as “a Protestant who wished the Reformation never happened.” Much of his thinking was rooted in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, as well Hugo Grotius. He was committed unambiguously to a Christian society, in opposition to the prevailing statist collectivism. He was never kidding about liberty — not an abstract, ideologized liberty, imposed by state legislation, but a realized and practical freedom in large areas where the state has no business. He had gone to the wall against Nazism, against Communism, and against “social democracy,” too. But he was no starry-eyed libertarian: he knew that real freedom is grounded in cultural continuities, and reverence for enduring truths. Lose these “intangibles,” found society instead on competition, greed, abstract “rights,” libertinism — and man becomes a sick and vicious animal.

The problem of the secluded lake is just the beginning. The problem of Ireland will come into this as well, should we choose to indulge a little conservative imagination. There are “goods” no free market can deliver, because they are prior, in kind and in logic. They cannot be isolated, then quantified, and therefore cannot be transacted in market terms. The market is instead for what can be bought and sold; as politics for things that can be negotiated. We are fools to put everything up for sale; to vote on the most fundamental institutions of society. Past a certain “point of no return,” we can no longer understand what it is we have bartered away. And then we celebrate a new “liberation” after every irreplaceable thing we destroy.

Here is a point Roepke would have made, about the recent Irish referendum: that the issue was not homosexuality, per se. It was rather, Can we toy with such fundamental social institutions as marriage and child-rearing? To think that we can, that we could ever put such things to a vote, and thus remake the moral order according to our current whim, is bottomlessly depraved. It is worse than perverted, it is Benthamite. Yet moral degeneration on this colossal scale does not arise from a vacuum.

It is in the nature of rapid economic growth, as also in the nature of the welfare state (Roepke attacked both), to destroy both economy and societal welfare over the longer course. It is in the nature of “freedom” and “democracy,” as presently conceived, to eliminate genuine human autonomy and, over time, the possibility of human influence in human affairs. The very qualities which civilized men have always acknowledged to be humane, are sacrificed by our glib methods and criteria. We part with the greater good because the lesser good can be isolated, quantified.

Or put this another way. Our ancestors were wise to fear “too much of a good thing.” It can, and invariably does become a bad thing. Moreover, it becomes an evil that we have lost the ability to recognize, or resist; an evil that can thus spread like a cancer.

We want more of everything, and more for everyone, and in the course of getting more and more, we lose the very thing we first wanted. Secluded lakes were just one example.

It is a curious thing, an unaccountable thing, the ground sloth of our era.

Of terrestrial conditions in former eras I cannot speak with authority. Nor can any living man, of the gigantic sloths, which moved about the earth in the Americas. I never encountered one. The last of their descendants are hypothesized to have died out in the Antilles just before we were able to make their acquaintance. Nimble they could not have been, unless in slow motion. Some of their distant cousins seem to have made it up the trees to safety, in tropical South America, just as we were coming down from the trees, in Africa. But that only according to the Darwinoids, who weren’t there, either.

Xenarthrans, we may call them. That would be the super-order. Megalonychids are the family to which I’ll now refer: our fellow North Americans. Slow like molasses, we are given to understand, but some of them got as far as Alaska after the continents joined up (on an overlay of several hypotheses). For they were unstoppable, like tanks. Massive thick bones; even thicker bulging joints; and the thickest skin on a mammal, reinforced with unmammal-like bony scales. Big, very big and heavy: ten feet of creeping indifference, weighing perhaps a tonne.

Some (and we are piling hypotheses on hypotheses) lasted to the end of the last Ice Age, but I don’t see how we can blame the Indians for killing them off. Arrows wouldn’t work, nor spears of the conventional design and impulsion. You’d need explosives, or a pile driver.

Herbivores they were, almost certainly; fused, mulching teeth; fermenting hindguts like you wouldn’t believe. Foolish was the man who got behind one. I surmise that, like a certain class of Englishman, they (the Sloths, not the Indians) lived on wet cabbage.

And presidential: Thomas Jefferson famously named an excavated species, and told Lewis and Clark to look out for a live one in the American West. And there is a great plop of fossilized ground-sloth dung in the American Museum of Natural History, with the memorable caption:

“Deposited by Theodore Roosevelt.”

*

But that was not the Sloth I was thinking about, not Jefferson’s Megalonyx (“giant claw,” designed for stripping vegetation in the cabbage patch), nor anything to do with the large but quick and lively Teddy R.

The ground sloth I have in mind this morning is instead the condition of our current North American masses. They are hard to get through to — not because they are so well armoured, but for that related “dietary” reason, living as they do on the moral, aesthetic, intellectual and finally, spiritual equivalent of soggy, overboiled cabbage.

A mysterious Sloth hangs over our continent; over the whole contemporary world for all I can tell. It is the opposite of what I call Idleness, in fact it is working, functioning in a sense, without any perceptible imagination. It does not so much seek as expect to get things (flattery, titillation, good health, wide-screen TVs), in which it can nevertheless find little pleasure.

This Sloth, or slothfulness, persistently chooses the path which may or may not be safest, but is unquestionably the easiest and most boring. It avoids all sports which require participation, all enterprise which requires thought, confining itself to what it calls “no brainers.” It does not even try to justify itself, beyond stating that it is tired. There is a terrible slothful undefeatable yawn, that frightens me more than an armed enemy, who could at least be frightened in return. How to reason with, let alone inspire, a creature who appears in every gesture to be, if not sleeping, then nodding off?

This, I think, is the central challenge of evangelization for the Church in our time: How to awaken people from this ground, or background, condition of Sloth? How, as it were, to administer the Sacraments to a congregation that is apparently comatose? How to feed them anything else, when they seem perfectly satisfied with their watery cabbage pulp?

A Washington friend reminds me of W.H. Auden’s suggestion on this, in his “Aphorisms on Reading.” It does no good to tell them that what they eat is disgusting, it will only confirm them in their prejudices.

Instead, we might try to stir-fry their cabbage, with spice and oil in the alert Chinese manner; or advance in a flourish of sauerkraut. Put it under their noses, see if they will twitch. Tell them stories about steak au poivre.

*

Appropriately, today’s feast is that of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, monk of Mount Coelius, sent from Rome with a party of forty or so, to wake the Anglo-Saxons; first Primate of England, consecrated bishop in the year 601; stir-fry chef to the wet cabbage eaters.