Essays in Idleness

I am surprised how much heat I am taking from correspondents for the little joke from Auden I planted in yesterday’s Idlepost. In a couple of cases, I seem even to have incited an anti-Semitic upswell, of the sort that makes me pleased that I no longer have a combox. New Testament quotes were offered (Peter in Acts, chapter 3, for instance; Paul in I Thessalonians 2) by way of insisting that “the Jews killed Christ,” as if this were an article in the Creed.

It is a happy day, when I get to play the liberal.

My guess is the humour takes it over the top, for these people who have it in their power to make me cringe at being a Christian. Worse, the worst offender announced himself a Traditional Catholic, with breathtaking pomp. He applied his full weight to my lightness.

I have encountered this attitude before in my co-religionists, especially for some reason in women named Janice. In my experience of being a Roman, these last 135 months, I have found that the self-appointed guardians of our faith can be very clear on the need for Catholic apologists to match the standard of tedium established by our secular opponents. It is hardly the first time I have been excoriated for wit, or some related misdeed. (A Frenchman reminds that witch trials are an American convention.)

But I will not be called a “baby Catholic” again! … Not when I am so nearly a “Catholic adolescent.”

Recently a seasoned ecclesiastical observer recounted some of his experiences, with the thicker sort of bricks. He was trying to explain, for my benefit as a pauper, why the paid, Catholic speaking circuit consists mostly of heretics. This is because orthodoxy scares people: bishops especially.

“Yet it isn’t heresy they want, per se,” he said (or I paraphrase). “Rather, it is safety. And the only guarantee of that is to have speakers not merely ignorant of the faith they are exploiting, but earnestly leaden, dismal, and dull.”

In the vulgar, but nevertheless lively idiom of the contemporary world, we are with today’s Mass entering the phase of Christ’s ministry on Earth when it begins to go pear-shaped. Only last week we were recalling a happier moment, with the loaves and fishes. Jesus was being mobbed by admirers. The tone of that passage, I discussed last Sunday. I stressed the drollness in a couple of remarks, the “irony” in the moment when Jesus looks up to see the adoring crowd approaching, and must realize they are the same sort who will be, very soon, howling for His blood. I detect this irony not because I am always looking for light comic relief when reading Scripture (only sometimes), but because I think it is necessary to understand the passage.

Jesus Christ could see what is in man. And He could see it in a human way: from the inside, as a man himself, subject to every human temptation. He could understand that the people in the crowd, surging towards him enthusiastically, hadn’t really come to honour Him as very God of very God. They had come because they’d heard that He cures people of incurable diseases, that He performs other miracles, and might just do one for them. I should think nine in ten, minimum, had missed the part about, “Unless ye have faith.”

It should also be said that He loves those people, with a love beyond human understanding. I, for instance, wouldn’t have loved those people, even if they were coming to celebrate moi. I’d be secretly thinking, “Buncha monkeys.” I’d be summoning the will to smile. I’d be praying, “Why me, O Lord?” In other words, I’d be among those whom Christ loves, for no plausible reason. That Christ can love, or even stomach any of us, is among the divine Mysteries.

While there are, as Christians should expect, parallels in the world’s other “great religions,” there is nothing in any of them quite like this, where God, the very One who created the universe, and made Man, looks at it from the creaturely point of view. And from our human, creaturely view, that is the grandest of His miracles. It should bring home to us that extraordinary assertion in Scripture: that God made Man in His own image. And Christ is the very guarantor of that, clinched in his human pain and temptations.

This week we may consider His very human desire to cut and run. “Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from Me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.”

The Gospel today, from Saint John, chapter 8, verses 46 and forward, puts us in the thick of the action. The charge against Jesus is blasphemy; blasphemy against the very God. It is, though this is no longer funny, a charge of blasphemy against Himself. Those who make it know not what they do; but they are doing it with constantly increasing vehemence.

I find the passage very eerie. The crowd is pressing on Him, it will soon be throwing rocks. I don’t think it is my imagination: it is as if Saint John was there in person. Perhaps he was, and that explains it. An observation seems implicit in the text, that he saw something as he looked upon Our Lord: another transfiguration. Jesus speaks one moment more as a man, another more as God: to human eyes almost toggling back and forth. The faithless mob of course sees nothing but a mortal enemy: one helpless and surrounded small human person, by whom it has chosen to feel utterly threatened; two sparkling eyes to be put out; flesh to be pummelled into mincemeat. Their rage makes them blind, makes them swine.

For Jesus is a threat to more than public order. It is far worse than that. He is a threat to their smugness, their self-regard, their bourgeois spiritual comfort. They are, as we say, “losing it”; they now hurl charges that are self-refuting, such as that He is a Samaritan. Those who are smarter than their family pet should realize that in promising “everlasting life,” Jesus has been preaching the diametric opposite of Samaritanism. He has the bad taste to point this out. And as I note, Saint John — oddly enough, the most factual, or “journalistic” of the Evangelists — flags their literalism. By wantonly construing what Jesus has said about the Prophets in the most obtusely literal way (“Abraham is dead!”), his accusers display the human mind working at its least sentient level.

I called them swine: they are down to animals now. But of course, I have been unfair to swine. No pig could be so evil. For when humans behave like animals, they are so much worse than animals, and capable of acts the most ferocious predator is incapable of intending. That is why even the thinnest veneer of “civilization” is holy.

Forget gentle reader; it is time to remind myself that Jesus loves them.

It is curious that these passages have inspired men in a hundred later generations — men who call themselves Christians — to echo and reprise the very form of the malicious idiocy we see condemned in this passage, finding new ways to crucify, again and again. I refer to such phenomena as the anti-Semitism, the pogroms of Christendom; the allegations that, “The Jews crucified Christ.” (This was, incidentally, never the issue in the use of the misunderstood Latin word perfidius in the Old Mass.)

As W.H. Auden pointed out, only a bigoted and ignorant person could say that. “The Jews did not crucify Christ,” he explained. “It was the Romans. … Or to bring it up to date, the French.”

Or drop the wit, and make it plainer still: we, every one, would crucify Christ, and howl with the mob in the same situation, if only to save our own skins. Unless we wouldn’t: but to feel sure of it involves more of that bourgeois, smug self-regard.

I have been in mobs; the first time as a child of seven, being driven through a riot on the cross-bar of our family servant’s bicycle, trying to get me home safely from school in Lahore. (“Bill” was his name: a Punjabi Catholic.) That is when I first saw human blood trickling, quite literally in a gutter. It is still with me: it may be why I am squeamish about mob rule, or “democracy” as we call it today. The memory comes back: of what happens to the people in the crowd when the Devil takes them, and they become inebriated with their own collective power. Hell is no illusion: mine eyes have seen it.

And the alternative is to stand, and maybe hang with Christ. This will be — in the last day, in the last analysis — the only alternative. (Only through Christ; only through His Church.)

Lent has been long, and we have no doubt failed to observe it adequately. We always fail; we are weak, pathetic little humans. But in this final fortnight, it is time to take penitence seriously. We know what is coming, and can’t pretend we don’t. Gethsemane is no illusion.

Those who raise the Cross, yet omit the Man nailed to it, do not properly teach Christianity. For this will be a glorious, not a happyface Resurrection; for it involves the human race actually being saved. Meanwhile, something stands between here and there, that blocks our road Home. And we must deal with it, if we are going to get there.

Post-modern Western man has lost his religion. This we all know, it is hardly a controversial statement. But he has a closely-related difficulty that is not so widely appreciated: he has also lost his mind. This is a more serious matter than may first appear. One cannot get by for long without a mind. Sooner than one might have thought, one will lose one’s independence, too; and then be subjected to many other inconveniences.

In principle, the mind could be recovered first, and that would lead to the recovery of religion. In practice, I don’t think so. Something more like divine intervention may be required. This is because the madness is quite advanced. It is cocky and blithering. It will not be disabused of its illusions or, more fundamentally, it will not listen to arguments. One sees this in the academy, which is as close to an asylum run by the inmates as one could wish to get; and one sees it especially where “science” is at issue. It was brought forth vividly to me this week when I saw a video clip of a man who is obviously insane — a certain Al Gore — not merely talking nonsense, but frothing in his demands to have critics of his nonsense punished.

Consider his (perfectly commonplace) notion of “settled science.” It is not merely that no such thing is currently available in the field to which he refers, but that the one term contradicts the other. What is settled cannot be science. What is science cannot be settled. Granting the contemporary belief that science is empirical, there is nowhere else to go. Even by older definitions, in order to be scientific, a proposition must be open to inquiry and challenge. What requires the silencing of critics, isn’t science. Have I made myself clear?

Surely not, for there is more involved in this. We would have to begin with some realistic, and in a sense positive understanding of what “science” might be. This discussion, if conducted on a typical university campus today, would immediately lapse into hysteria, shrieking, and the vapours; yet it continues in some quiet places. Science is knowledge, as we might at first agree. This is etymologically correct. The word could be used broadly in this way, but we want something less general. It is a particular kind of knowledge, different from other kinds. As a man of the thirteenth century, let me tell you that scientia est cognitio per causas. It is a search for the causal explanation of things. It must therefore necessarily be grounded in epistemology, and ultimately metaphysics. One must know what a cause is, to look for one.

“Modern science” is not like that. Not since David Hume; arguably not since René Descartes who, with his asinine little thought experiment on a ball of wax, overturned scholastic reasoning without bothering to refute it. The whole idea of empiricism is that man cannot come to a knowledge of causes. The best we can do is to gather and correlate “data.” This necessarily precludes the possibility that we can obtain certain knowledge of anything at all. In the Humean analysis, there can be no such thing as “settled science.” And yet as we see from, for instance, Mr Gore’s puffy and gaseous presentations, assertions are made on behalf of modern science as if we were working from a knowledge of causes. Frankly, my dear, this is on a level with, “I’m a little teapot, short and stout.”

In the very face of historical experience, which has for instance wiped away every single “certainty” of empirical scientists in the Victorian era, certainties are claimed. And they are claimed as if we understood causes. Moreover, they are claimed on the basis of an arbitrary “scientific method” which, quite possibly, no scientist has ever followed, and which has never been described twice in the same way.

Up here in the High Doganate, the mug of tea from which I am currently drinking levitates twenty-nine inches above the floor. I know why it does this. It is because it is resting on a solid wooden table of that height. I also know that the floor hovers one hundred feet above street level, and why. I could explain a whole series of hierarchical relations, touching on the altitude of my tea mug, with a certainty that might frighten gentle reader, but would be more likely to bore him. I could also retrace a linear sequence of events which gives a powerful, even irrefutable explanation of how the tea mug came to be there.

Given time, we could take this back to Aristotle, the great master of the principles of causation, and of the search for answers to the question, “Why?” We could return finally to the cause of causes, and put our Western world back together again, under God. Indeed, I recommend we do this, and better still, it is being done. People are working on it.

One of the primary workers in this field — of what science can and cannot be, in truth as opposed to self-serving phantasy — was William Wallace, OP. His two volumes on Causality and Scientific Explanation (Ann Arbor, 1972/74) rest on another secure wooden surface up here, at a height I could measure and explain. It may not even have been his most important work, but has the virtue that it helped me understand historical alterations in “scientific paradigms,” in a way that freed me from the speculative vagueness of the once-popular Thomas Kuhn. Forty years later, it stands up (with its extensive source notes) as a fine work of reference on the history of science over the last eight hundred years, and as an excellent resource for the recovery of the philosophy of science, or might I even say the philosophia naturalis.

Philosopher, theologian, palaeographer, physicist, historian, engineer, and inspiring priest and teacher, Father Wallace was a living reminder that the game isn’t up yet. He died March 3rd, in his ninety-seventh year, as I have just learned. Requiescat in pace.

Readers on Svalbard, or in the Faroe Islands, will be enjoying a total eclipse of the Sun this morning, on its path of totality sweeping towards the North Pole. (Need I provide you with the usual warning against looking at it directly?) It is “upsized” with a supermoon, happily enough (the moon is at perigee). With the Earth’s magnetic field reverberating from the coronal mass ejection that hit us on Tuesday, we have all these gorgeous auroras to go with that, some showing even in broad daylight. And as today is also the vernal equinox, we have ingredients enough for what the poets who inhabit our weather channels call a “Freaky Friday.”

Meanwhile our galaxy would seem to have expanded considerably, courtesy of some woman in China. She is the brilliant astronomer Yan Xu, and by a collation of observations she and her “team” seem to have established once and for all that the Monoceros Ring — floating 15 kpc off the fingertips of what we took for our Milky Way’s outermost arm — is actually a continuation of the spiral. (A “kpc” is a kiloparsec, equal to about 19 quadrillion miles, and not “Kentucky poached chicken” as one might think.)

You see, what we didn’t know until the day before yesterday is that the spiral arms of our galaxy — weird enough already for their wobblesome braiding habits in response to who-knows-what dark invisible gravitational forces — are corrugated. The mass of stars rise up and drop down in these helical waves from our galactic centre; and from our own position, part way up one wave, the next wave was blocking our view outward, and from all directions tending to omit much of the stellar flotsam in the troughs. Careful analysis now lets us see through the blockage. There’s more stars down there in the dips, as well as up and over the extra wave, and thus our galaxy turns out to be so decidedly more populous. Add another hundred billion stars, easy. Hell, add two hundred billion. Give them Obamacare.

And there could be another ring or two beyond the “new” one. And the dwarf galaxies or star-clusters glimpsed off farther still, that must exert their own shepherding influence as they stream round or even through our starry stir-pot — riding like errant comet-balls above and below the galactic ecliptic — may not be or do what we think. They had anyway turned out to be fewer than they should have been in theory.

Verily, the whole architectonic must be reviewed in light of this insolent failure on the part of the cosmos to act in accordance with human expectation.

More, there is more! … But we are already approaching the limit of my ability to translate astrophysical mumbo-jumbo into reckless and inaccurate layman’s terms. Suffice to say, if gentle reader was taught that our Sun is about two-thirds of the way out from galactic ground zero, he must now adjust his whole life to the fact that we are only half-way out, if that. For the Milky Way is rather like the Greater Parkdale Area. Every time you look the suburbs have spread, and there’s more condominiums downtown. The commutes must be getting horrendous.

True, none of this quite makes the threshold of breaking news on the Drudge Report. But we must take the long view. We must work harder to fill the world with our news, instead of their news. Idleness must compete with industry: we will need tremendous energy to win this fight.

God knows, even if we don’t, that a boy needs a father. A girl may need a father even more, I would add from my limited life experience, of fatherless girls, and those with weak, failed fathers. There is, in addition to the obvious “rôle models,” a special relation between fathers and daughters, and parallel, between mothers and sons: one knows instinctively when it is missing, or one is not surprised to learn the principal explanation for a person who acts just as if he were half-abandoned, or half-orphaned. The more heroic are struggling spiritually in themselves to find a balance that was not established in childhood — except when it was, by an uncle or an aunt, a step-parent or grandparent who understood the need, and came to love the child as his own. And the single parent — usually a single mother in present society, and often one who must hold a job down, too — has more than I can imagine on her plate, to fulfil all rôles. It would not be too much to say that her situation is impossible, that she cannot help failing. Yet against all the odds, she must try.

These relations are profound. A dead father, or a dead mother, still lives in the child’s soul. The loss is unthinkable, but the influence of a parent will be always there. If the man was good, if the woman was good, he or she, will see the child through to adulthood, by the example that was left. Parents must remember this in every moment, for in the next they may be gone.

Two mothers do not make one father, nor two fathers one mother; the distinction of the sexes is absolute, as we can know, for God has made that distinction. It does not come down merely to the genital, as those with working minds must see. I was impressed, very impressed, by the courage of those gay fashionistas, Dolce and Gabbana, for the public stand they took recently against gay child-rearing (see news). I am always impressed when I see men and women rise above their own interests, or their social “identities,” or even their own sinful histories, in acknowledging what is right.

Even more was I impressed by an open letter the child of gay parents wrote to U.S. Justice Kennedy, confuting the same-sex propaganda (Katy Faust, here). There are facts of life that do not change, even when stating them becomes painful; for one will endure ostracism, at the least. But as we know from the histories of the Third Reich, and the Soviet Union, there will always be those prepared to do that: to witness the truth even in the face of the Big Lie.

The Joseph of the Gospels is a shadowy figure. He is there because he must be there: and I mean in reality, not as some “myth.” Jesus Christ was to be raised, on Earth, with a human mother, and a human father, or rather foster-father, needing both. Likewise, in the society in which He was raised, Joseph wasn’t “optional.” But we do not see him so vividly as Mary in the lens of Scripture, and what we know of him seems actually to come more from Sacred Tradition.

He is for instance identified in Scripture as a tekton, which could refer to a variety of trades, metal as well as woodwork, even an itinerant tinker, or odd-job man — certainly not a landowner, and therefore quite unlikely to be rich. But the early Fathers are in no doubt that he was a carpenter, and while we don’t know how they know that, we can know that they know. He was probably much older than Mary, possibly a widower: it all shades into the dark. As Matthew and Luke both make plain, he was of noble ancestry, though one tracks his genealogy from one son of ancient King David, the other from another. I do not know, and I should think no one can ever know the full story behind this, until God chooses to reveal. The truth is we don’t need to know, and the Bible is notorious for not telling us what we don’t need to know.

From both Scripture and Tradition we can however know something of his character: that he was honest, conscientious, kindly, upright, faithful, modest. God addresses him in dreams, thrice in the Gospels, and it seems in each case he responds without question, obediently. From all this we can see he was an extraordinary man, and I begin to appreciate his qualities when I think of several men I have known, married to very talented wives with public careers: who took their places out of the limelight. And each was, unknown to anyone not an intimate friend, the rock upon whom his wife depended. In no way were they emasculated by this. Indeed, the opposite was the case: for their very masculinity raised them above the cheap egoism that we have come falsely to associate with masculinity.

“Real men” are usually unknown, as I have seen in many other situations. They do not make spectacles of themselves. On the contrary, I have met quite a few who strutted their supposed virility in public, their machismo, but were at close range, or under actual pressure, quite shockingly hapless and effeminate — retiring to the bathrooms to “make themselves up.”

Joseph, as we can know, was not the kind to “assert his rights,” for to put it coarsely: real men are not rapists. They are in control of themselves, and they do not do what they must not do. This pertains of course to everything, not just “sex,” which is the first thing everyone thinks of in our disgracefully sexualized culture. The chastity we may assign to Joseph was of a kind reflected through his whole character, and underlies that profound sense of duty and calling that defines the genuinely male psyche. It is for the man who is paterfamilias to do what he must, like a soldier, and for the greater good he will sacrifice all. He makes decisions for his family, and with this goes the duty to put every single member of that family ahead of himself.

That is why, in traditional matrimony, the woman is told to obey her husband, and the man to love his wife. The relation isn’t equal, nor is it symmetrical: the bond is far deeper than that. The example I would give is on board the Titanic. There is no time to argue, and when the husband tells his wife to take the last place in the lifeboat, she must damn well obey.

We might say the feminists don’t understand that; but they didn’t understand because men didn’t understand; and by now almost no one understands it. That is because we are depraved.

In the Bible we learn almost nothing about the upbringing of Jesus, and after the scene in the Temple when Jesus is twelve, Joseph disappears entirely. We can only assume that he died, “some time after,” and must certainly be dead when, from the Cross, Jesus commands John to take care of His mother, and His body is collected by Joseph of Arimathea. Were his earthly father still alive, he would have had charge of both functions.

That Joseph was Saint, we have taken for granted, through two thousand years. He trusted God. And we may trust that his trust was well founded, as we turn to him in holy recollection, today.

While digging through old files in the High Doganate, with the intention of creating space (at the expense of time), I discovered notes and doodles for one of the innumerable projects I conceived in my early Anglican days. This was when I was young, naïve, and ambitious. Perhaps add stupid to that list. But my hand was steadier than it is now.

Here were comps for the typography of one in what was imagined as a long series of books — hundreds in the same basic format. The design shows the heavy influence of the Swiss typographer, Jan Tschichold, still a hero of mine for his uncompromising traditionalism — the gentle symmetries and elegant classicism of his mature style (after his own wild, sans-serif youth). Thus my page grids much resembled Tschichold’s for the “classic” Penguins of the 1950s — e.g. no boldface ever, all headings centred, carefully spaced small caps without showy drop-letters, sharp simple emblems, et cetera. I was also at pains to specify a thin, cream, “bible paper”; the manner of stitching; the buckram for the cover boards, gilt letterings for the spines. Et cetera. …

But the content was also important. My thought was that, it would be a mitzvah if some publisher would contrive to make the Fathers of the Church available to the modern reader — in durable volumes of pocket size. The sample volume I’d sketched was for Cyril of Jerusalem, his twenty-three Catechetical Lectures, which I’d projected for about six hundred 40-line pages.

These lectures were delivered in the middle of the fourth century, in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem — the first eighteen to adult candidates for baptism, through Lent, ending on the night of Good Friday; the last five, “mystagogic lectures,” for Easter Week, after they had been fully received. They make an enthralling read, from the personal warmth and wit of an amazing teacher; or at least I thought they would if put in sharp modern English, with background supplied, and all references explained — for then the “intelligent general reader” would be freed to appreciate flashes that might make him think of a Lewis or a Chesterton. These lectures give us the actual instruction to ancient catechumens, directly, and not the indirect instructions to catechists we read in other Church Fathers (including Augustine). This alone makes them more accessible. Moreover they are delivered in the very setting of Christ’s earthly life, and at a glorious time when the shrines had been recovered, and the first great Byzantine churches were being erected all over the Holy Land.

As a child, Cyril had witnessed the physical removal of the Temple of Venus, which the pagan Romans had built purposely over Golgotha and Christ’s tomb; and then the laying of foundations by the Empress Helena (mother of Constantine the Great) for a basilica of “wondrous beauty.” Parallel work was proceeding at Bethlehem, a few miles away, on the Church of the Nativity. But Saint Cyril lived, too, through the great age of the councils (Nicaea and those following), when the Church was struggling within, against what would have seemed a “modernizing” wave of Arian and similar fashionable (as well as dark, gnostic) heresies. Cyril was himself a major figure in the recovery of Christian orthodoxy, through frightening challenges.

It is thrilling for intelligent readers (and there are some) to realize as they go along that Saint Cyril is teaching exactly the faith in which orthodox Catholics have been raised through all the intervening centuries; and to students who would risk their lives to maintain it. Though Bishop of Jerusalem, he was driven out of his patriarchate for a time, and hounded through years when the Church liberals of that era — devils in human flesh like our own — enjoyed their season of triumph and depravity. For decades it was touch and go; the contemporary faithful could not know whether the Catholic Church, in her moment of delivery from pagan persecution, had not disintegrated in warring factions. But in the end, such voices as Cyril’s (like an ancient Cardinal Burke) rose loud and clear, repeating the words of Christ we still echo in the Gospel for today’s Old Mass (from Matthew, chapter 10):

“Fear them not; for nothing is covered that shall not be revealed; nor hid that shall not be known. That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light; and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the house-tops.”

My thought, those years ago, was that the Cyril of Jerusalem volume would be enhanced, after a life of the author by a leading scholar of real cultural breadth, with an illustrated archaeological essay outlining the recent and continuing spade work that had brought us back into sight of the environs of Jerusalem in the fourth century; and which had confirmed the factual veracity of many little things Edward Gibbon and the lads had been sneering at since the later eighteenth century. When, for instance, Cyril speaks of the house of Caiaphas, and the praetorium of Pilate as still standing in his day, in desolate ruin, it is good to know that he is not speaking figuratively.

Also, an historical essay, with perhaps a chronological table, that would put the reader in the swing of events, happening all over Christendom in Cyril’s lifetime. It would focus especially on the active relation between the churches at Jerusalem and Alexandria, giving a vivid picture of a world that was not static but intensely in motion, full of personalities and “breaking news.”

John Henry Newman’s remarkable Preface to the Cyril translation by Dean Church, in the old Library of the Fathers (1840), should surely be reprinted in the volume, together with excerpts from other great authorities writing on Cyril through the centuries. Indeed, that old Tractarian translation would serve as the first draught or groundwork for the new version — carefully revised under an editor who understood that the English language lives and breathes, and must move with grace and poetry; as did the Greek which it must re-embody.

There would be notes, too: some dry textual, but most fascinating expository notes, at the back of the book, with longer “additional notes” on points of special interest. Example: Saint Cyril’s dexterous and almost winking avoidance of certain “politically incorrect” theological terms, that were likely to be contested by the Arian thought police — while supplying exactly the same meaning in other words. And what this costs in misunderstanding, when it comes to the attention of the habitually grumpy Saint Jerome. There is lesson within lesson here, for Christian rhetoric in every generation.

Too, a good glossary, explicating all the key Greek terms, with cross-references. And, a thorough English general index, that has been carefully checked and proofread.

Fine typography I have mentioned, but also the commission from, say, a leading engraver (I was thinking at the time of the Frenchman, Pierre Gandon) of an iconic frontispiece, perhaps in three or four colour layers. And perhaps a signature (16 pages) of crisp black-and-white photographs to go with the archaeological essay. And a couple of fold-out maps. And a few sparkling plates reproducing great works of art associated with Cyril and his themes.

For as every other in the series, the book would be something beautiful to see, and hold in the hand; something to be prized in more than one generation. Portable, to be taken on walks, and read on voyages. From every angle it should draw the reader in, opening its wings to say, “Read me, read me!”

Of course all this attention to detail would make it a little expensive, but the costs could be partly defrayed, first by consolidating the “overheads” for the entire series, one department helping to carry another. Second, wealthy Christians, who might care for the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, would provide generous subsidies when they saw how wonderful these volumes would be. Third, we would pray: for all good works involve a mendicant activity, and all such flourish with prayer.

No book is complete without a colophon, and for this we might commission our engraver to impart, within a decorative flourish:

“Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, pray for us.”

We live in flatworld; we are the grandes horizontales. I would almost advance this as the ground condition for Enlightened man. It can be experienced in the flatworm existence of contemporary conurbative life, or it can be expressed as a dogma. Richard Lewontin has expressed it well:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

The quote fell out of some article in the New York Review of Books, from nearly twenty years ago. The author has elsewhere made the same point in other words, and with formidable consistency. He is a (self-styled) Marxist and a Darwinist. I like him, because he puts his premisses plainly, and because he acknowledges the facts. This is exactly why the great unwashed — the plurality of the demographic atoms that Lewontin has so profitably studied in relation to evolutionary biology — accept “science” so naïvely. It is because they are all Marxists and Darwinists, on the surface or a little under the skin. This would include, of course, the Libertarians, and most proponents of “Intelligent Design.” They are indoctrinaires of evolutionary materialism. Most of them don’t even know it.

There is another considerable group, however, into which that group smears. It consists of evolutionary theologians. These buy into all the same rubbish, but from a slightly different premiss. They “believe in God.” They think that God works through evolution. Few feel any need to think this through. At the highest, “theoretical” level, they have Teilhard de Chardin: the ingenious Jesuit charlatan whose works had such a powerful hold on the minds of liberal churchmen around the time of Vatican II, and contributed mightily to the post-conciliar “spirit.” (For them, Church doctrine was necessarily “evolving.”) In Teilhard’s tendentious philosophy, Christ did not create us, so much as we are creating Him: for God works through evolution. We might offer more detail on another day, for I’ve noticed Teilhard has come back into fashion; and in my humble if rather caustic opinion, we are getting him now through Rome.

We are, tragically one might say, both on the “scientific” side of the divide, and on the “religious,” dealing with intellectual flatulence. Forced hypothetically to choose only between Teilhard and Lewontin, I would pick Lewontin. Why? Less deceit, less guile, less stupidity, less evil. But what they have in common is imprisonment in Time.

This is only the squib for a squib. (I’ve been quite busy: no time to write long Idlepostulations.) It is a note as much to myself to get back to this, in light of remarks by Saint Augustine. We all know what they are: the passages in Book XI of the Confessions, which touch on being, time, the creation, and eternity. They provide an unforgettable depiction of a man of extraordinary genius, and total sincerity, reasoning as his life depends on it, with ideas passing beyond the far edge of human comprehension. It is a place where all Catholic (and most Protestant) thought pauses, in fascination with the outcome.

And in a sentence, for our present purposes: God does not create through evolution, and could not possibly do so, for that would mean creating in time. God, who created time, cannot be confined (except by His own kenosis) within what He has created. Rather, God creates through time.

To begin to understand this is to begin to understand, among many other things, the inerrancy of the Bible. The account of the creation in Genesis has truly nothing to do with any popular, or unpopular conception we may have of “evolutionary processes.” It is not in itself “primitive,” in any sense. It is as “advanced,” conceptually, as anything ever written. In its penetration and exposition of “how things really are in this world,” it is downright miraculous — incomparable with any other “creation narrative.”

Moreover, the observed “material” features of that creation — including the irreducible complexity of living creatures, and their unmistakably hierachical division into radically separated classes, orders, genera, species — are compatible with Genesis, but not with evolution.

I can easily understand if people do not get this: I have had so hard a time getting it myself. I look back, here, on a paper I wrote, and delivered to an “International Conference on Space and Time,” a quarter-century ago. It was a “keynote speech,” meant to be cute and entertaining, and mischievously speculative — but also to pass before a sophisticated audience of specialists (physicists chiefly, but also chemists, biologists, historians of science, even space engineers from NASA) without sounding cheap, foolish, or poorly informed. It cost me a lot of effort, and I see now that the effort was wasted. And this was because, throughout, I accepted the evolutionary premiss. That is to say, I expressed everything in implicitly evolutionary terms, as if no others were available. (Evolutionary, not Darwinist, I must specify. Even when an atheist, I was never a Darwinian.)

But here’s the rub: “evolution” does not explain anything; and cannot. It can’t even serve as a “working hypothesis.” It is an empty concept, a vacant shell. Whether or not it may look that way, there is not one particle of proof that any species ever descended from another, and there is no prospect of any such a proof. It is not fact, but the purest imposition upon the facts. On the question of the “origin of species” we can say, with assurance, absolutely nothing.

The world Augustine describes is not flat. That is why man has such trouble understanding it. It has a vertical dimension as well as a horizontal. In slices, it makes pretty patterns, but we cannot understand it in that way. Nor can any line drawn through that plane lead anywhere, but ultimately in a circle, back to itself. Evolution is the snake eating its own tail.

Indeed, in this human condition, we cannot honestly begin to consider what scientism proposes as the task of “science”: which is to understand, on explicitly material terms, how we came to be. The very existence of this universe and of ourselves is a bottomless Mystery that cannot be “solved.” Reason may worm about, and make its observations on our plane, but Revelation provides the only possible access to that vertical dimension. It offers the only way we could ever comprehend, within the limits of our faculties, what was in the beginning, is now, and ever will be — not flat.

Have you ever had your question patriotismed? I mean, your patriotism questioned? I gather (from Fox News) that happens a lot, south of the border; but it can even happen up here in the slowly melting North. Why, only yesterday I was patriotismed for a remark I’d made the day before, on this very Idleblogue.

Of course, “patriotism,” as we all learnt from Doctor Johnson, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” But it is a little-known fact that scoundrels seldom advertise themselves as such. Instead, they are likely to pose as patriots, “nation builders” or some such thing. Or as we say up here, “nationalists” — who are like American patriots, only worse. Most of them anyway began, in my generation, as American draft dodgers, who should have been delivered in Canadian paddy-wagons to the nearest U.S. Army recruitment centre, for shipment to Vietnam. (I’m totally opposed to conscription, incidentally; but this was a special case.) They did not so much love Canada, as hate the United States, and it makes no sense to take immigrants like that; even less sense to set them up as tenured perfessers in our universities, to interjaculate their toxins among our young.

My offending passage will be easily found. It was where I suggested that the once-inhabitants of Newfoundland, and before them those of our Maritime provinces, had been suckered by their late politicians into Confederation with the Province of Canada (as it was, 1841–67).

For good measure, let me add some more sheep to that lamb. I think the good citizens of Lower Canada (Quebec) were wrongly hounded into union with Upper Canada (Ontario), in 1841. … And vice, as they say, versa. … Too, I regret what was done to absorb Manitoba (1870), British Columbia (1871), and the various fragments of the Northwest Territories (Saskatchewan, Alberta, and so forth), confederated after that.

I should also like to say that some of these provinces are far too big, and Ontario in particular needs breaking up into much smaller pieces. For instance, everything beyond the Greater Parkdale Area needs to belong to some other province, for its own good.

And lest you Americans are feeling smug, may I remind you that I was (or rather, my ancestors were) entirely opposed to the union of the Thirteen Colonies; and that I bear a particular resentment for the incorporation into those United States, of the Vermont Republic (in 1791). Some of my mama’s people, who first ran there to escape the armed lunatics in Massachusetts, were compelled to remove again after Vermont was pincered. The Vermontanists (Green Mountaineers?) had clearly stated that if push came to shove, they would rather join the Province of Quebec (whereas, the Continental Congress wanted them eaten by the Province of New York).

One darn thing led to another, as Stetson Holmes put his trunks on the cart, and made for the coast of Maine. He, and his wife, and no longer all of his sons, were now bound for Cape Breton, as they did not yet know. (Beggars can’t be choosers.) The next generation found themselves opposing the forced merger of Cape Breton into Nova Scotia (1820), then another after that the forced merger of Nova Scotia into Canada (1867).

This last mulchification was thoroughly opposed by her people, as evidence the first Canadian general election, in which eighteen of Nova Scotia’s nineteen seats were taken by the Anti-Confederation Party. Awake they now were, but the Colonial Office at Westminster ruled that there was “no going back.” (Three of my least favourite words, when spoken in that order; and have you noticed? … the three favourite words of our current pope.)

So do I not love Canada?

I have long recognized this as a trick question. It depends: Which Canada do you mean? I love some, and really hate others. Moreover, which layer of history are we discussing? I will not be tyrannized by those chronological bigots, who demand that we live only in the present. The Canadas I love are mostly now dead; but this has not diminished my affection for them. I’m a Jacobite, after all, who nevertheless sings, “God Save the Queen.” I declare my inalienable human right to adjust my loyalties, in delayed reaction to events, every century or so. As a reader of history, I have observed little that turned out as I’d have wished. One must live with that.

Do I not then love, “The Dominion of Canada”?

Ha, Correspondent! … Forced you to say it! … For there is no other way to describe the current Canadian federal regime. That communist Pierre Trudeau (not really a Communist; he was too arrogant for that), tried to change this with legislation in 1982. His Liberal Party predecessor, Louis St Laurent, had already had a go in 1951. Both, and many others, argued that the term “Dominion” is untranslatable into French. Nonsense: I like “La Puissance du Canada” even better. And the old long form still exists, and cannot be made to disappear, from various unabrogated constitutional documents. So stick it, as we say in our national sport (le hockey sur glace).

If what he means is, however, “Do I love the federal government?” the answer is, “Are you crazy?” Of course I don’t. I don’t know anyone who does.

“There is a boy here who has five barley-loaves, and two fishes.”

Given the size of the crowd Jesus had attracted, this did not look good. The Apostle Philip, who seems to have been the accountant of His outfit — this true proto-Church — estimated their requirements. For five thousand people, give or take, two hundred pennyworth of bread — as an absolute minimum, “that everyone may take a bit.” (About $325 by silver weight in pre-inflated Roman denarii, or rather more if we compare daily wages.) And that’s if you can find a bakery, on the far side of Galilee, with Passover approaching.

There are passages in the Gospels which I believe to be droll. This would be one of them. As I read it, Jesus is winking at Philip, who is doing the math. For really, the math doesn’t matter, in the circumstances on that hill.

Andrew, brother to Simon Peter, then chimes in, with his helpful note about the little boy, whose picnic supplies are sufficient, perhaps, for the apostles themselves. Someone, at least, was thinking ahead.

Nobody invited these five thousand people, by the way. They just came. News of Jesus’ miracles was spreading, and in particular, rumours that he could cure people of various incurable diseases: even first-hand testimonies. Then as now, inquiring minds wanted to know.

Our Lord had “gone up the mountain” (actually, a grassy hill) with his disciples: for what I’d guess was a quick, proto-Ignatian retreat. That was where you went to get some privacy, in those days: out of the village and over the hill. From the account in Saint John we get the flavour: they were actually trying to get away from the crowds. But you know how it is with “the people.” The crowds found them. Sometimes you can’t shake people off.

Cum sublevasset ergo oculos Jesus: that’s how the dialogue began. “When Jesus therefore had lifted his eyes,” — from prayer I would assume — he saw them coming. The crowds. There is drollery even in this, according to me. And it is a profound drollery. For we have reached a certain point in Christ’s ministry on Earth: the point at which the end is near; as the end of our Lenten Fast is also nearing. We are half-way there.

Laetare, Jerusalem! … “Rejoice!”

It is because Jesus has attracted so many, that trouble is coming His way. He is beginning to disturb the order of old Roman Palestine. This, to those who made themselves responsible for its order, was not “good news.” If, as the politically correct of that day must have said (shrugging knowingly to each other; rolling their eyeballs as they do) — if He’d just kept His doctrine to Himself, none of this would have to happen.

Or even if He had disciples, that would have been okay: so long as they practised their religion in the privacy of their own homes.

“It’s a free country,” after all. Everyone has the right to his opinions, so long as he keeps them to himself; so long as, when they are in public, they bow before the public gods (Caesar, say; or, Same Sex Equality). If only Jesus had been discreet, if only He could have watched His language, it wouldn’t have had to end like this. Instead, He just had to preach. And perform miracles: that was utterly over the top.

But it was worse than that, from the point of view of Palestine’s progressive elites. People were listening to Jesus. Something would have to be done.

And being the Christ, He knows that. He knows it, when He looks up, and sees the approach of the crowd. He has taken the road of no return, — the Via Dolorosa, — the road that leads only to the Cross. They will hail Him today; they will nail Him tomorrow. This were a dark “irony”; and who could appreciate it better than Jesus himself?

But let us get back to the story.

“Five barley-loaves and two fishes.” This has got to be a joke. I daresay Andrew himself, as the future patron of Scotland, was smiling when he said it. (I imagine him in Palestinian qumbaz, which can look a little like a kilt.)

Then Jesus said: “Make everyone sit down.” Which is as much as to say: “So, let’s eat!” (I can almost hear the apostles giggling.) Jesus thus began the distribution of the bread and fish; but first He said grace to the Father. Or more correctly, the apostles, being clergy, distributed after Jesus blessed.

Gentle reader is, I sure hope, familiar with the rest of this story. The leftovers filled twelve baskets. And as Saint Andrew could tell you, God does not like waste. It was Jesus who told them to gather all the fragments:

Waste not, want not.

Repent, while you still can.

And, rejoice! For the Kingdom of God is at hand.

Before adjourning my discussion of trains, let me append a note on Bullets. There are, or have been in this world, to my knowledge, two “bullet trains.” One is the famous Shinkansen, which opened between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964. The current express, the Nozomi, makes the journey either way in two hours, twenty-five minutes. (Japanese never take the plane, I am told, because the train is so much faster; only foreigners fuss with the airport protocols.)

The other, known affectionately as the “Newfie Bullet,” opened in 1898 between St John’s and Port-aux-Basques — an approximately equal distance, as the crow flies — and was making that journey, until the autumn of 1988, in (give or take) twenty-three hours. The crow was not consulted in both cases, however, and while the (standard gauge) Japanese track was laid fairly straight, the contractor for the Newfie Bullet, a smart Scotchman from Montreal, not in any particular hurry himself, was, notoriously, paid by the mile.

When the guvmint took it over, an effort was made to change the name of this latter train to “The Caribou.” Newfoundlanders were not fooled, and retained the old, somewhat ironical expression. It was a congenial, narrow-gauge train (three feet, six inches: the same as throughout pre-Bullet, mountainous Japan), and thanks to its meandering route, offered a fine tour of the immense island, including parts of its interior never visited by man since the demise of the autochthonous Beothucks. (The original “redskins” of European report, thanks to the red ochre insect repellent with which they cleverly painted themselves.)

That would be, of course, the Canadian guvmint, which took over the Newfie Bullet, from the failing guvmint of the old Dominion of Newfoundland. (The sorry souls voted in 1948 to join Canada, in return for a mess of potage, repeating the mistake made in the previous century by Nova Scotians, New Brunswickers, and Prince Edward Islanders, as each electorate in turn agreed to be suckered by their respective megalomaniac politicians into surrendering their instruments of independence and enterprise, thereby turning their children’s children into welfare clients of an obtuse bureaucracy in Ottawa, far far away. See: Joseph Howe, who foresaw the whole thing.)

After extravagant “upgrades” of this and that, the new proprietors eventually bit the Bullet, first replacing the steam engines with “environmental” diesels, then the whole system with “environmental” buses. For you see, another arm of guvmint had meanwhile laid, at extravagant expense, mostly to the taxpayers of Ontario, wide asphalt highways. Newfoundlanders could now acquire cars that could whip across the island in twelve hours or less. They were now mainlining on speed.

A lawyer, who commutes locally by train, wrote me yesterday to suggest a mediaeval quality of the railways, incidentally comparing their contemporary state to that of the post-conciliar Church:

“After all, the railways at their finest seemed analogous to the Catholic Church. Aesthetically, a passing steam train — the bells, the steam, the “all aboard!” — was about the closest thing to attending Mass one could find outside a church. While there were various local operating companies (like the rites of Christendom), they were part of one great interconnected whole that reached into virtually every community, where the huge city stations served as cathedrals, and the little village stops with their lone station attendants were like the parish churches. …

“Consider the act of boarding a train, paying your fare and entrusting your self in humility to its crew, to take you to your destination, particularly when you contrast this with the arrogant individualism of travelling by car.”

Idiotization prevents contemporary man from appreciating how this situation came about. Prosperous railways were put out of business by tax-paid roads. “The people” in their burning, craven lust for material possessions and speed, soon themselves demanded this progress towards a hell-on-earth, where everything of tranquil beauty is destroyed to provide automotive access to it, and as I once explained, vast conurbations are shaped by the bureaucratic allocation of parking spaces. A human population no greater in bio-mass than that of the ants, is now outweighed five or six times by resource-gobbling private cars. And the idiots now think the solution is to reduce the mass of the humans. O Lord!

Trapped sometimes, as a pedestrian at an intersection, I have counted twenty or thirty consecutive cars going by, each containing only its driver; and every one of them, if I could catch a glimpse of the face, frazzled by the (now continuous) “rush hour” traffic. There are no words for the bottomless idiocy of contemporary, progressive man.

People, who should serve God, instead serve “the devil they know.”

Awake! Awake! Rise up, O Jerusalem!

*

Now, I was intending to effuse this morning upon the opportunities presented by “external combustion” engine designs more intelligent than the old steam boilers, and infinitely more intelligent than the “internal combustion” engines to which we became addicted (for other than rational reasons, but anon). In particular, I wanted to call attention to the possibilities for onboard generation of electrical power by Stirling engines — which can work on any fuel, and exploit principles of air compression through heat transfer — expounded in e.g. the Pneumatica of Heron of Alexandria, and largely overlooked through the last two millennia. Engines which, because they do not accumulate internal carbon, could be designed to operate continuously without significant repair for decades, even centuries — on corn husks, whale oil, popsicle sticks, whatever. But I’ve distracted myself, through wrath.

Make a note: God willing, I’ll get back to this. I do intend to solve all the world’s problems, before I push off.

*

Another correspondent, in Tripp, South Dakota, calls my attention to one of the Tarzan movies of the 1930s, which he recalls as follows:

The Players:

— Tarzan, the Ape Man (Johnny Weissmuller).
— Englishman, the first.
— Englishman, the second.
— Crowd of native Africans.

The Scene:  Crowd of native Africans seated on the bare earth, watching a film. A steam locomotive comes straight at them. Shouts go up! They panic and scatter into the near bush.

First Englishman: “Well Tarzan, what do you think about that?”

Tarzan: “Why train go so fast?”

Second Englishman: “Why Tarzan, that train will travel from Boiling Kettle to Tea’s Biscuits in two hours!”

Tarzan: “Why?”

Second Englishman: “Why, to save time, Tarzan.”

Tarzan: “What do with time saved?”

First Englishman: “He’s got you there, Old Boy.”

My title is perhaps misleading. The main railway discussed below was standard gauge (four feet, eight-and-a-half inches), and another to which I will refer is actually two-and-three-eighths inches wider. Under cross-examination I will have to admit a cynical ploy to lure narrow-gauge railway enthusiasts in the search engines. Shameless; but these are desperate times. And I have seen even more brazen attention-grabbing devices on the Internet.

George Stephenson, who did not design the first steam locomotive (that was the Cornishman, Richard Trevithick), did build the Liverpool and Manchester, which when it opened in 1830 was the world’s first inter-city railway. I believe he is credited with establishing the standard gauge, through his many pioneering works in this genre; and that he was also on record expressing a regret. If he’d had it all to do again, he would have added an extra couple of inches to the space between the insides of the rails. There was a “sweet point” that he had slightly underestimated.

Thousands of lives might have been saved on unnecessary derailments of the fast steam trains, from a slightly wider gauge and the moderation of the railbed curves that would have necessitated. Ah well. One engineer copies another, and most of the world’s railways are now “1435mm,” as most of the world puts it. (That is, Stephenson rounded by one-tenth of a millimetre.)

The ancient Romans, too, had a standard gauge for their cart ruts, within half an inch of this later railway gauge. Their carts were pulled by men and horses, like the early hoppers in the collieries of north England, which may help explain the coincidence. The early mining engineers were, for the most part, not classically educated, so we may doubt they consulted the archaeologists.

Now, I was courting controversy with my remark above, about the derailment slaughter — which is, after all, so modest compared with the slaughter on our unrailed, asphalt roads. Gentle reader will appreciate it is not only the breadth of the rails, but the solidity of their construction, and the speed at which the train is travelling, that determine the point at which “liberation” occurs. Cross-winds may also come into it, the carrying capacity of bridges, and too, whether or not a Saracen has planted some explosives. (As we were reminded recently by some Canadian arrests. It seemed a pointless terrorist exercise, however, as our VIA trains so often go off the tracks of their own accord.)

*

It is true, all my claims to be a Luddite must now be dissolving before gentle reader’s eyes. I love railways. Every normal boy loves railways, and my own propendment to normality began with a maternal grandfather I never met. I would have, had he lived a few years longer, but that was not to be. Oliver Holmes was an engineer (i.e. train driver) on the old “S&L” — the Sydney and Louisburg Railway (“Louisbourg” misspelt, to flout the French who founded it). The company carried a few passengers and a lot of coal around “formerly industrial” Cape Breton, until as recently as 1968. Counting branches, it had more than a hundred miles of track, a considerable yard at Glace Bay, port connexions at each end, and arteries into the heart of the grand steel mills at Sydney (also now defunct).

Best of all, with coal so plentiful locally, the S&L used steam engines exclusively almost to the end. “Environmental” diesels were only brought in when the government took it over, as part of a larger scheme to turn industrial Cape Breton into a permanent welfare colony of the Liberal Party. (Gentle reader should ignore this malevolent aside.)

My father, for whom anything to do with my mother was holy, left me a substantial file on the S&L, and more generally on my grandfather’s railway career. Thus, I could go on, for ten thousand words at least. I have information here on all the locomotives, from the 1890s forward. And more: the wooden hoppers, the steel hoppers, the air-braked steel hoppers, the wooden and steel box cars, the steel gondolas, the Koppel dump cars, the flat cars, the cranes and derrick cars, the passenger cars, the “hobo cars” (for the pit workers), the tank cars, the baggage cars, the snow plows, and ah! … the sublime cabooses. (All built locally.)

In earlier life grandpa had also driven passenger trains between Halifax and Sydney. This became a matter of significance on his deathbed, in 1945. Gentle reader will now gird himself for an item of family lore.

My mother was then a young nurse at Halifax. Old Oliver knew he was dying, in the hospital at New Waterford (since defunct), in the moments when he was in his wits; but there was some question how long he would take. His wife, Annie, and his elder daughter, Mildred, would sit with him, and by the account of the latter (died 1989), he was something to see when out of them (his wits). He would pronounce on various matters, “like an Old Testament Prophet.” In his delirium one day he suddenly demanded that his younger daughter, Florrie (my mother), be summoned from Halifax. A trunk call was placed, to her ward matron, and up came my mama on the day’s last train.

My Aunt Mildred, church organist and oecumenical saint, whose every word could be absolutely trusted, stayed by her father’s bedside that evening. Grandpa remained awake and extremely alert. In the course of the evening, he became the train that was carrying his little girl. He would take her home. He could remember the whole route, every signal and station, every cutting and bridge — the whole ten hours. He could count off the times by the minute and the half-minute, following the clock exactly.

She was in the swish of Antigonish.

She was on the ferry to Port Hawkesbury.

She was skirting the shore of the Bras d’Or.

She was by Sydney Mines! She was at North Sydney! And finally, she was pulling into Sydney Station.

“She’ll take a cab, she’ll be right over.” And to the minute, she walked in the door.

Mama: still dressed in her nurse’s uniform, and cap, and cape. She’d run from the ward to catch that train, packing nothing. They embraced, and old Oliver, looking strangely well and almost youthful, said, “You girls go home now, get some rest. We’ll talk tomorrow. Florrie’s had a long journey. Tell your mother I’m well, I need some rest, too.”

It seems almost redundant to add that he died that night.

*

We have trolleys still, in Toronto. For decades the bureaucrats have been trying to get rid of them, and replace them with “environmental” buses, but praise the Lord, He has always put something in their way. I mentioned gauge earlier, and I wanted to explain what makes the city so special. It is the unique gauge of our trolley tracks: four feet, ten and seven-eighths. Our new, articulated, “environmental” streetcars — high-tech and incredibly expensive, compared even to the last round of million-dollar cars — had to be specially adapted to this gauge. It was selected in the nineteenth century by the city fathers, and for good reason: so that no other train in Canada, or on the planet for that matter, could ride on our rails. They were prissy, these fine old Orangemen: they didn’t want freight trains shunting downtown, the way they then did in Hamilton and elsewhere, with their steam and coal-dust billowing everywhere. They wanted electric, “environmental” streetcars. The Greater Parkdale Area has been under the tyranny of the do-goods for a long time.

*

Only fast trains require wide gauges. At the Stephenson breadth, we once had steam trains doing 125 miles per hour on the stretches. I notice from the Beeb that a new species of inter-city train is now arriving in Britain. The latest models are from Hitachi in Japan: they are “environmental” to a fault, and pulsatingly high-tech, and unbelievably expensive. They will “cut travel times substantially” to Paddington on the western lines, and King’s Cross on the eastern — by whole minutes! I laughed when I read their top speed on the stretches: 125 miles per hour. The ad men say they will be much more comfortable than the trains they are replacing; then let slip that the carriages (of the same length as the carriages they replace) will fit “18 percent more seats.” (Progressive people demand to be lied to.)

My point was going to be that the world hasn’t changed. We could, for a tiny fraction of the price, still build narrow-gauge trains, that are low-tech and travel rather slowly — ascending and descending and bending and turning with short carriages this way and that — following the lay of the land. All our early trains through the Rockies were narrow-gauge; my father also left me files on trains that still climb through the world’s mountain ranges, on tracks little more than a yard wide. Except the odd avalanche or mud slide, they are quite safe. This is because their engineers know better than to race them.

I have been aboard several narrow-gauge trains, on three continents. Every one of these rides was memorable, for the opportunity it gave to drink in the passing landscape, while making new friends; stopping here and there for an hour or two, at some remote inn for a meal.

For getting there will always be a portion of eternity — surely every faithful Christian pilgrim will know the joy in that. And how much more joyful life could be, if we could overcome our speed addiction.

It is hard to get past the first paragraph of a book by Josef Pieper (1904–97) without one’s head exploding. I was reminded of this last night after reaching for On Hope, a typically small book by this author, of five chapters with less than one hundred pages (Über die Hoffnung, 1977).

Consider the first paragraph:

“Pastoral melodramatics have robbed the reference to man as a ‘pilgrim on this earth’ and to this earthly life as a ‘pilgrimage’ of its original significance and virility as well as its effectiveness. It no longer clearly mirrors the reality it is intended to convey. Its original meaning has been overgrown with a welter of extraneous aesthetic connotations; it has been all but buried under a veil of discordant secondary meanings, the false sentimentality of which actually destroys the joy that contemporary man — above all the younger generation and, perhaps, precisely the best of them — would have experienced in striving toward the reality that is ultimately reflected in the metaphor.”

Notice, first, the plain modest clarity of this language, beautifully captured in the English translation by one of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur (Ignatius Press, 1986). Like his countryman Bach, or his master Saint Thomas Aquinas, Pieper gets straight to the point — and yet often from an angle that is not obvious, until it is boldly stated. We cannot understand the Christian, and theological, virtue of Hope, without understanding this concept of the status viatoris: that we are in this world “as pilgrims,” and in this sense through our whole lives on our way to something: to one destination, or the other.

“Rise, let us be on our way” (Mark 14:42) are the words of Christ; the status viatoris means the condition of being on the way. We are going somewhere, and it is God’s revealed intention, in the design of ourselves and the design of the universe, that this destination be Heaven. It is, or can be made, an arduous pilgrimage. Hope is in the completion of our journey; and in subsequent chapters, Pieper expounds the two terrible vices, the Scylla and Charybdis that stand in our way. One is Despair: the fear that we can never reach our proper destination. The other is Presumption: the perversa securitas of Augustine’s teaching — the glib, bourgeois, Pelagian certainty of a happy homecoming, no matter what. Within these vices are many false roads, which Pieper marks so that we may avoid them.

There is no certainty in this world, beyond the certainty of death — not for us. The virtue of Hope is entirely supernatural. It requires, absolutely, supernatural grace, and therefore must be prayed for, with all the earnest of which we are capable. It is in this sense, of a gift for which we pray, perhaps the most mysterious of the three “theological virtues” — of Faith, Hope, and Charity, the most incomprehensible to the worldly and indifferent. “Love” may seem self-evident to them; “good faith” will sound much like a virtue;  but “hope” seems to belong to some other category. Therefore, beyond even faith and love, it requires prayerful puzzling. It is indeed a fit topic for continuous contemplation with one’s whole mind: a serious inquiry into what Hope is, and just what it is that we are hoping. It is the opposite of something that can be taken for granted; it takes us to the core of who we are: of how we are to live and what we are to do.

Pieper’s fifth and concluding chapter is on “The Gift of Fear.” We were made of nothing, we remain for our whole journey proximate to, or on the precipice of, that nothingness. Neither the woolly liberalism nor the rigid stoicism, that see in fear a weakness, can help us in the final trench — as I have seen with my own eyes again and again and again. We are right to fear, and that fear is to be used: Pieper expounds this in a remarkable way.

I have not summarized the book, but danced across the stream on several slippery stones. The book is itself a summary, and for all its clarity, will require several readings to take its riches in, for they are set so close together: a harvest not only of Aquinas, but through and beside him, the works of Augustine, Bonaventure, Chrysostom, Dante, and so forth through the alphabet. The greatest minds in Christendom have applied themselves to interpreting for our advantage the bottomless mystery of our Hope, and Pieper re-assembles this teaching not for some quaint scholarly purpose, but expressly for the benefit of the modern man, whose need for relevant instruction is urgent.

This was incidentally the man who with his wife translated writings by C.S. Lewis into German; who prefaced his extraordinarily learned reader’s guide to Thomas Aquinas with the remark that G.K. Chesterton had done the job better. (I don’t agree with him, but defer to his expertise.) He exhibits the very best of German precision in thought, with none of the pretense of the Teutonic academy: a genuine humility and a regard for the Truth that is both passionate and chaste. He was a giant in the minds of our two great popes of recent memory — Saint John-Paul II and Benedict XVI — and to read him is to escape from the bewildering fog now blowing around them, within which horrible acts of destruction to our beloved Church are once again taking place.

For again, the very meaning of our pilgrimage is being “all but buried under a veil of discordant secondary meanings, the false sentimentality of which actually destroys the joy of contemporary man.”

Think on it.

Continuing on the theme of vain self-indulgence, a few more notes today.

A certain Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had never previously impressed me, except in a negative way, finally has, with her admission that for years as the foreign secretary of a neighbouring country — visiting the world’s hot spots and dealing with the most sensitive matters, including it would seem the channelling of huge donations to the Clinton family charity from some of America’s most dubious allies — was not using a government email account. And this, notwithstanding she was required to do so by law. As ever with the Clintons, the malfeasance is heroic, and the explanation of it (personal convenience) gob-smacking. But that is part of their charm, and in this case the aristocratic, or even royal indifference to government policy should be recognized with some kind of prize.

“L’État, c’est moi” is not quite a mediaeval principle, but half way there. The idea that the state’s agents should be responsible to the historical record goes, on the other hand, all the way back — so that really, Mrs Clinton is only being “early modern.” This is a topic I hope to revisit: the relative openness and honesty of government in mediaeval royal courts, and the freedom with which public questions were discussed — as compared with the thick, acrid smog that enhovers our modern, democratic regimes, wherein the Courtiers of the People must advance themselves by lying and misrepresenting the most elementary realities to their masters. Thus, anything that moves us backward should be celebrated, even if Mrs Clinton might take credit for it.

But why was she using email at all? Surely a woman of her wealth and connexions could afford private couriers, whose secrecy, under threat of death, would moult no feather.

A certain Senator in the same country, Mr Lindsey Graham, for whom I had also not previously entertained any particular affection, has gone a step farther. He admitted on television, Sunday, that he has never sent a single email, and wouldn’t anyway know how. I find this very impressive, in a man actually younger than I am — reminding of Harry Truman, whose only keyboard was attached to his piano, who hated telephones with an exhilarating passion, and was deeply suspicious of electricity. To be above not only government policy, but the demands of the technology on which it depends, passes subtly beyond heroism almost to sanctity.

Now, when Truman had something to communicate privately, he wrote on paper with a pen, folded it into an envelope, licked on a stamp with his own saliva — then walked it to the letterbox on Pennsylvania Avenue, just outside the White House gate. He paid for his own postage, too, and never submitted an expense account. Bravo!

As for me, what can I say? I am “on email,” as many of my correspondents have discovered, and thus a dreadful failure as a Luddite. The matter is on my mind because, on checking the account this morning, I see that I have messages unanswered since February 23rd. My most abject apology, if gentle reader is among those awaiting a reply.

Let me also take this occasion to express my heartfelt gratitude to Protestants and Evangelicals, who so far as I can see account for 50 percent of my current readers, and about 90 percent of the PayPal donations. I reflect that they have patiently endured my occasional lapses into jag-edged Catholic sectarianism.

I should also mention, as a latter-day United Empire Loyalist, the plurality of my readers who are Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution. (Indeed there are days when I think I have more followers in metropolitan Buenos Aires, than in the Greater Parkdale Area.) … I truly don’t deserve to be treated so well.