Essays in Idleness

Propter incredulitatem vestram, “because of your unbelief.” This is why, Christ patiently explained to his disciples, they were unable to cure the little boy of epilepsy. “If you will have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, Move: from here, to there. And it will move.” But then, on the little matter of demon removal, He explains nonchalantly: “This kind is cast out by prayer and fasting.”

Mad, totally mad, I can remember once thinking. And if He hadn’t just cured the little boy, no one would have taken him seriously.

A fortnight ago, NASA released the sharpest pictures yet of the Andromeda Galaxy, only a few hundred kiloparsecs away: the nearest spiral to our native Milky Way. Four hundred and some high-resolution snapshots from the Hubble telescope were assembled in a mosaic presenting nearly one-third of Andromeda — from part of its galactic bulge at the left, to the outskirts of the disc at the right. About one hundred million stars are in the frame, a representative sample of the brightest. (What can you expect with less than two billion pixels?) Gentle reader is invited to go look, on the Internet. I especially like the dark passages: the intricate “dust lanes” that reveal structure, within structure, within structure.

Children love to ask how many stars there are, and tend to press until you tell them, “Forget it, kid.” We cannot even count the galaxies: perhaps half a trillion? Not that galaxies are the only things we see. But this is large, and travelling around the speed of light, only to the next galaxy, we would need about two-and-a-half million years. “No need to hurry,” I once told a dear little boy. “We’re going to collide with it in another four billion. You’re young yet, you have to be patient.”

Now, all of this exploded from a single cosmic egg, infinitesimally smaller than any grain of mustard seed. Or rather, that is the most plausible current account, consistent with what we can measure. Again, I refer to that Hubble mosaic for some context. (And wonder what could explode from a cosmic egg the size of the full grain.)

No human brain can possibly wrap around this; the nearest I’ve seen come is that of Saint Thomas Aquinas who, as gentle reader may know, signed off on trying to describe what had been shown him, saying, “All that I have written now appears as so much straw.”

Straw: blowing from the tomb of Lazarus.

The older I grow, the less I know; but the better I understand that Christ was not exaggerating.

*

Domine, salva nos, perimus. The little fishing boat, awash in the tempest, and Christ is sleeping through the whole thing. With these words the fishermen awoke him: “Lord, save us, we are perishing.” To which Jesus yawned, “O ye of little faith,” then rose and calmed the sea: Tunc surgens, imperavit ventis, et mari, et facta est tranquillitas magna. (Everything is better in Latin.)

I haven’t met anyone else who could do this; I would have remembered if I had. There have been saints, however, who have performed miracles. The explanation is obvious: it would be their great faith. In moments I have imagined how it might be possible; in dreams I have even hovered above the ground. In waking life, I have not faith enough to make the pot pour me another cup of tea. This is inept, and I confess it.

We are constrained within the various mechanical “laws,” I would suggest, only because of our bad living. We are right to feel a certain frustration with them; wrong not even to try busting out, from this abject condition of slavery. But what it will take is not an organized rebellion.

Sanctity alone can lift us out of this place; sanctity alone by Grace, in faith receiving — it is the only way out. In this, it seems, we may begin to see, that in a perfect faith would be a perfect freedom.

Today is a special day up here in Canada, worth remembering for a long time: the last day in our public life before our Supreme Court ruled on what the psycho faction likes to call “euthanasia.” The pagan mind thinks suicide is an option, but after tomorrow, every life in the monopoly public healthcare system is worth whatever the death committees decide. With the passage of time, their budgetary constraints will weigh ever more heavily upon them.

There has been no debate, and could be no debate, as I muttered recently about abortion: all decent humans being on one side. The Canadian media, on the other, buried the story as hardly worth their time. In the extremely rare circumstances in which ethical arguments against killing people were allowed to creep onto an op-ed page, the comboxes quickly filled with vile locutions from that psycho faction. I use the word advisedly: one must alas read such comments to appreciate what I mean.

Unless, of course, our Supreme Court should elect to surprise us. But when one looks down the row of men and women who warm that bench, hope is not indicated: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate. Their adherence to the Culture of Death has been consistent; their respect for the ancient usages of law, whimsical at best. Madame Justice has been on record for years, explaining the nature of the decisions they render, as a College of Vestals sweeping before the Sacred Flame.

As any death sentence, their decision should be taken quietly. There is no point in crying out. The ideologues of “progress” are ruthless, and the old, the frail, the disabled, the depressed, the mentally afflicted, the terminally ill, must never look to them for “mercy.” They have their own definition of this term, and among the stipendiaries of Eugenics and Auschwitz, the short way is best.

____________

Next morning update: The Supreme Court has ruled as predicted, and unanimously. There was a cosmetic limitation to hard cases, and special requests; but as we know, and they know, from the legalization of abortion, this will be ignored. Later, when the rhetorical cover has served its purpose, it will be formally rescinded.

One thinks of the illustrious G. Gordon Liddy. Asked once by a judge if he was trying to show contempt for the court, he replied: “No, your honour, I was trying to conceal it.”

In addition to, “Can’t anyone here play this game?” I have many favoured quotes in Stengelese. Indeed, one of my several motives for getting into Heaven is to hear Casey Stengel chatting with Thomas More. Both were talented managers.

“The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”

“Now there’s three things that can happen in a ball game: you can win, you can lose, or it can rain.”

“Been in this game one hundred years, but I see new ways to lose ’em I never knew existed before.”

“You got to get twenty-seven outs to win.”

“I couldn’t have done it without my players.”

“Nobody knows this yet, but one of us has just been traded to Kansas City.”

“That boy couldn’t hit the ground if he fell out of an airplane.”

“Wake up muscles we’re in New York now.”

“Being with a woman last night never hurt no professional baseball player. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.”

“Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice-versa.”

“You have to have a catcher because if you don’t you’re likely to have a lot of passed balls.”

“If you’re so smart, let’s see you get out of the Army.”

“They say some of my stars drink whiskey. But the ones who drink milkshakes don’t win many ball games.”

“I die the king’s faithful servant, but God’s first.”

(Readers are invited to guess which quotes were Stengel’s and which were More’s.)

*

But it is, “Can’t anybody here play this game” that keeps coming to mind when I observe developments in the Middle East. As I hope gentle reader will soon discern, each of the quotes is relevant to the current situation.

The response to it in the West, and particularly from the United States government, is incompetent on a scale so breathtaking that I sometimes miss my slot as a daily news pundit. (And by inviting Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress, Boehner proved himself as dumb as Obama.) What distresses me is not that characters like Obama and Kerry say “terrorism” has nothing to do with Islam. They are politicians: of course they spout drivel. Rather, I am appalled by the evidence that they actually believe what they are saying.

This goes beyond noticing that the terrorists cry Allahu Akbar! after every strike. To understand current events one must notice the war being fought within Islam. And this is not as hard as it might seem. It is a war between not one, but two radical factions: Shia fanatics, and Sunni fanatics.

“Al-Qaeda,” “the Caliphate,” “Hamas,” and some other groupings, though rivals for the leadership, are united in their aspirations for the Sunni side. Revolutionary Iran and its proxy Hezbollah provide the united leadership for the Shia side. Every formerly Western-allied government in the region, including that of the Wahabi sheikhs in Saudi Arabia, fears both sides; but they fear Iran more. And after Iran, they probably fear Turkey, which has the potential of becoming patron to the fanatic Sunnis on the analogy of Iran.

We could get into blaming Islam itself for the mess, but that won’t be necessary for today’s purpose. It is only necessary insofar as we must understand that the words Allahu Akbar are not uttered lightly, and are not insincere.

While both sides look forward to murdering us next, their attention is first focused on murdering each other. Attacks on Western targets must be understood in this context: for neither party is so naive as to think they can out-gun us, or even out-gun Israel. Moreover, many of their stunts (including video beheadings) are designed to manipulate Western public opinion — against themselves, in order to win allies within the region. The “Je suis Charlie” demonstrations in France, for instance, were a godsend to the Sunni fanatics: they triggered massive anti-Western demonstrations among less fanatic Muslims across the Middle East, and thereby magnified their claim to represent Islam.

A good general knows better than to be manipulated by goads. He keeps his eye on the chessboard, and thinks several moves ahead. He acts in apparent indifference to his opponent’s last move, and may even invite more of the same. He is looking for checkmate, not to trade pawns. But in the words of a gorgeous Israeli paratrooper I once chatted with (she was female, incidentally), our leaders are trying to play chess with checkers pieces.

So note the disposition of the board. The Iranians, on the cusp of obtaining nuclear weapons if they do not have them already (I would bet they have), are the party that other regional states most fear (except Syria, the Iranian client we should be trying to lure away). And this for very good reasons. They also fear their domestic Sunni radicals, but they know the Shia party is much better organized and armed, and has the more realizable ambition to destroy them. This view is the opposite of senseless.

Now, fools, or let us say those too clever by half, will next suggest we play one enemy against the other. Let Hitler bleed himself mooshing Stalin, or vice versa. This is crazy, in addition to evil. The winner of that conflict then becomes our much more powerful adversary. Our task is to defeat the Sunni “terrorists” — by military means where necessary — without giving the slightest advantage to the ayatollahs. To negotiate with the latter, semi-secretly seeking their help against their worst enemy, is the stupidest course available; and it is the one the Obama administration is banking on.

Do I have to explain more?

Hard “realpolitik” would recognize both threats, and propose to defeat them respectively by quite different tactics. The allies we require are just the sort the Bush administration was cultivating, but which the Obama administration alienates with batty lectures on “human rights,” and other empty pieces of performance art, intended to undermine them. Our common interests are not permanent, and therefore they can only be allies, not friends: but this is war. In the first place we must communicate to such as the Egyptian and Saudi governments that we understand the game, know how to play it, and are once again (like Bush) as good as our word. Negotiate with your allies, not with your common enemies, or you will find yourself without allies pretty fast.

Our common interest with the Israelis — who are friend, not ally — is to move attention away from them. Our obsession with solving the insoluble “Israel/Palestine” conflict plays directly into our enemies’ hands, by enhancing an issue that galvanizes their existing supporters, and can only win them more. (Nor do you win allies by selling out your friends.) Quietly help Israel get ignored, which is exactly what our regional allies are doing, and exactly what Boehner wasn’t doing.

Beyond this: never try to solve an insoluble problem; you have better things to do than make it worse.

I dread attending Mass on the Feast of Saint Blaise. This is because I am superstitious. It is the day when, by tradition, we get our throats blessed with the crossed candles. Experience tells me I will get a sore throat, just after. (A blaising sore throat, no?) Perhaps this has not always happened, and I omit from memory the times it has not, but it has happened more than once. Thus my delight in reading Father Zed this morning, who reports the same experience. As a priest he also mentions that every time he blesses a car, it gets in an accident. On the other hand, one of his customers re-assured him: “Imagine, Father, what would have happened had you not blessed it.”

Do blessings work? My fear is that they do, invariably. This is why I hesitate to pray for the virtue of courage. No sooner have I done this than it seems the Holy Spirit has put me in a spot, where courage will actually be necessary. That was not precisely what I asked for, I might think; but of course, according to Thy Will, not mine. And one forgets the part about practising the virtues.

Now, it is good that I disabled Comments many months ago, for otherwise the global village explainer would show up to say the reason people get sore throats around the beginning of February is that it falls in the dead of winter. He would then add that I should get a flu shot; after making some patronizing remark about his toleration of Catholics. … Plausible, plausible. … I get so sick of plausible.

Of course, it was worse for Saint Blaise himself, when he prayed. He had his head sawed off with steel combs, if I have the story straight, from the early fourth century. (Hence his patronage of the wool industry.) I believe Marco Polo passed his tomb at Sebaste in Armenia, on his way to Cathay. But it is hard to see Saint Blaise, through the accretion of legend that became associated with his name, as his reputation spread, in death as in life for “medical interventions.” Peasants everywhere swore by him, to judge from the huge number of Saint Blaise parishes, raised throughout Christendom East and West within the first thousand years of his leave-taking.

In life, he was said to have saved a child choking on a fishbone. He effected many other miraculous cures, of animals as well as people. Indeed, he seems to have been a kind of precursor to Saint Francis of Assisi. Whole flocks, afflicted by some pestilence, were led to him for his restorative blessings, and individual sick animals were drawn to him for help. They would mysteriously obey him. In my favourite of the stories, a poor woman came to Blaise, because a wolf had made off with her piglet. The holy man had words with the wolf, who returned the piglet to the woman, unharmed.

Thinking, “What could I say about Saint Blaise?” last night, I then woke this morning from a dream I imperfectly remember. But one phrase stood at the top of my mind: “The fish commands it!”

I have used this for my heading, in the belief it must have some secret meaning. Gentle reader may not easily see the point, but really, I can’t do everything for him.

The Armenians still celebrate “The Coming of the Son of God into the Temple” (i.e. Candlemas) on the 14th of February. Terndez, as they call it, is older than our Western celebration of Christmas. The “forty days” were once counted from the Epiphany, according to the Lady Egeria (more below), which might explain that date. Later, upon the establishment of a fixed date for Christmas at Rome, by counting nine months forward from the Annunciation, the new date for Candlemas (today, February 2nd) was established by countiing forward forty days from that. We glimpse the reasoning in an old arithmetic, working from traditions in approximate agreement.

Knowledge of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, as of the ancient Hebrew ritual that lay behind it (the purification of Mary, forty days after childbirth), came to the Armenians by a different route than that to Rome through the Greeks. Information travelled also to Persia, India, Ethiopia — by other routes, now lost in the sands. It travelled at different speeds: to us in the West rather slowly, in this case. The more one looks into ancient liturgical practices, the clearer it becomes that the apostolic tradition — or “Tradition” as we write in the Catholic Church — is as real as Scripture. The same accounts travelled many routes; the same letters were carefully transcribed, and themselves sent on many journeys. Everywhere men already Christian sought the best possible information. The truth was winnowed out.

That God’s hand was in it, we cannot doubt. Yet we can also understand this from a human point of view: that the process of establishing authority cannot be controlled by any one man, or committee. As in courts of law, or even disputes on the Internet, the true can defeat the false because it makes sense: is internally and externally coherent. The false account fails because it doesn’t make sense: is contradicted by facts already known, or falls apart in self-contradiction. By prayer, but also by diligent inquiry a consensus emerges, which can withstand any blast. From this great distance in time, we cannot reconstruct the whole process, but we can still see it at work, the more clearly when we are not encumbered by our modernist baggage.

It would not have been possible for “redactors” to operate in the way that modern biblical scholars like to assume, on the basis of no physical evidence. They imagine editorial habits that belong not to antiquity, but to their own time. No one was in a position to play God with widely disseminated manuscripts. The Canon was discerned, as received. Likewise, the traditions were discerned, as received. In both cases, the process was rather to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Four Gospels are a proof of that: they contain minor contradictions, that were not smoothed over; had that been tried, variant readings would even then have given the game away. They were selected for their pedigree, and for the ring of truth, in light of many other factors unknown or only darkly known today. We have every reason to trust the sincerity, as well as the high intelligence, of those who chose each “this” over “that.”

The belief that everyone in the past was stupid, and that we alone are smart, is one of the conceits passed down from the Enlightenment. It is expressed with great smugness among progressive elites, and gives a fair indication of their own intellectual limitations.

Candlemas (though not yet with candles) is described in the travel memoirs of the Lady Egeria, making her pilgrimage in the Holy Land in the fourth century. She writes “hic celebrantur,” indicating that the feast was then unknown where she came from (Galicia, in north-west Spain). I mention this because I have so often been irritated by the dismissive tone in reference works, when a Christian feast is dated to some pope who formally proclaimed it in such-and-such a century, as if he had invented it on the spot. Our Candlemas, for instance, originates in the Church of Jerusalem, and must go back many generations before Egeria witnessed it. It has nothing to do with the much later Pope Gelasius, or the pagan Lupercalia or … other common rot.

The focus in Egeria’s time is not on the purification of Mary, but instead on Christ through the eyes of Simeon and Anna. The “forty days” are not mentioned in Saint Luke, but are nevertheless taken for granted. This is because the Hebrew rite of purification after childbirth, specified in Leviticus, was understood. We can still retrieve that, but if we couldn’t the biblical scholars would have had a field day. This is a point about old sources that we neglect at our peril: writers tend not to bother repeating what everyone already knows. It does not follow that we must reject everything not attested in a literary source that happened to come down to us. (In addition to making best efforts to explain away what is directly attested.)

“On that day,” Egeria writes, “there is a procession into the Anastasis [the original Church of the Holy Sepulchre], and all assemble there for the liturgy; everything is performed in the prescribed manner with the greatest solemnity, just as on Easter Sunday. All the priests give sermons, and the bishop, too; all preach on the Gospel text describing how on the fortieth day Joseph and Mary took the Lord to the Temple, and how Simeon and Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, saw Him, and what words they spoke on seeing the Lord, and of the offerings which his parents brought. After all these ceremonies, the Eucharist is then celebrated, and the dismissal given.”

The Itinerarium Egeriae is an invaluable account of liturgy and ritual that descended within that Church of Jerusalem directly from the life of Christ. The Christians in those parts knew exactly where Golgotha was, exactly where the Nativity occurred — exactly where to dig on sites the pagan Romans had covered with landfill during their persecutions. There had been humbler shrines on those sites long before the Byzantines built great churches over them. The archaeologists have gradually discovered, sometimes to academic chagrin, that these were not “urban legends.”

Our authoress had lived in Jerusalem continuously for at least three years, with wide contacts among guides, priests, and the Christian laity. As well, she had travelled everywhere in that land, and from Sinai through the Levant. She was a learned and inquisitive lady, who checked every assertion she could against physical evidence, readily at hand. When sixteen years ago I filled a Christmas newspaper section in the Ottawa Citizen with a very long article entitled, “Looking for Christ under stones in Israel,” I found a modern edition of Egeria (edited Gingras, 1970) extremely helpful. It was an aid in slicing through much twaddle and confusion in secondary and sub-secondary guidebooks. I had in my hand the work of a predecessor who had done what I was trying to do, but had years at her disposal, not the couple of months I had for my assignment; who was more than sixteen centuries closer to events, with that long-perished world still everywhere around her.

In an age of “irony” and malicious scepticism, it is best to go to the sources. Lady Egeria is of course just one. Far more existed in her time. Some wash up by happenstance, still; many others would have been found in monastic libraries had they not been so extensively rifled, torched and trashed during the Reformation, the French Revolution, and subsequent explosions of “secular humanism.” But we do probably have today enough copies printed of the Migne series to reconstruct what we need to know after the next grand conflagration; and innumerable copies of the Bible. It will thus be practically impossible to erase:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace / according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen / thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared / before the face of all people;
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles / and the glory of thy people Israel.

Unless gentle reader had the misfortune to be only in range of the Novus Ordo, it was Septuagesima today. I am spoilt in Parkdale; my heart goes out to those who have suffered “the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time,” the liturgical significance of which seems intended to escape us, unless it is to affirm the “hermeneutic of rupture” that is crackling once again.

With each passing year it becomes harder to understand how men who were outwardly sane could have done what was done to our Mass, nearly half a century ago. This hardly followed from anything decided at Vatican II. There, the integrity of the Mass was affirmed, and what was done less than five years later would have been unthinkable to “progressives” and “conservatives” alike.

Pope Saint John XXIII had himself re-affirmed the importance of Latin, in the Mass of the Ages, and throughout the Church, echoing many popes before him on the importance of a well-educated clergy (not merely taught Latin, but taught in this universal language). He reminded that none must graduate from the seminaries whose Latin is so weak that they cannot celebrate the Mass in its fullness, its beauty. Too, he reminded that our clergy must be able to read the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, her canon law and all her other documents, from all centuries, without difficulty. All of this is necessary to priestly formation: for the priesthood is not a low calling.

Here is a paradox that every intelligent, perceptive, and observant Catholic, of a certain age, should already know: that wherever the Novus Ordo has advanced (the quicker in its most happyclap iterations) vocations have disappeared; that wherever the Vetus Ordo has survived or returned, vocations are plentiful. Restore that Mass and the Church herself begins to be restored; young men hear the call and come forward. They will never be attracted to a life of sacrifice by a daily ritual that is trite. Undermine that immortal reverence, discard what at first glance looks “out of date” — because the “liturgist” does not understand it — and the Church dies, in ignominious surrender to passing fashion and fads.

Yet even while Pope John’s apostolic constitution, Veterum sapientia (1962), was still wet in the ink, the ecclesiastical bureaucrats and “reformers” were at work in the opposite, “modernizing” direction. I have spoken with more than one seminarian from the early 1960s who recalled how, from the end of one semester to the beginning of the next, as Latin was replaced with the vernacular, the floor fell in. The atmosphere was dramatically changed, in a way that had not happened in two thousand years. How, now, John XXIII must weep over what was done, and is still being done in his name.

The loss of Latin in the seminaries signalled the collapse of all other academic standards. To my mind the nauseating sex scandals in the Church followed, too, from that “liberalization” — for vocations plummeted, and the bishops began to take anybody. Whole orders within the Church evaporated. In so many convents discipline was forsaken, and we had the spectacle of “radical,” politicized monks and nuns abandoning their habits and their vows, shrieking about in demonic helter-skelter.

What was done in “the spirit of Vatican II” was done against the express direction of the Council itself; its documents cited, when cited at all, in a selective, sophistical, deceitful way. To descend into the details is to be drawn down into the mystery of evil: for again, the question becomes, How could men in their right minds be doing things like this? How could they not see the terrible consequences to the Church they purported to love, and to the souls of their fellow Catholics? Why was it allowed?

All of the post-conciliar popes till the present one have struggled to restore what was taught at the Council, consistent with the teaching of the many centuries before; all worked, often heroically, against the Zeitgeist, and to contain a Fifth Column metastasizing within the Church herself. It is the solemn and particular duty of each pope to defend the deposit of faith against every effort to corrupt it, and to keep the practice of the Church consistent with her doctrines. What a priest must know, a pope must know, to his fingertips, restored every day in the Mass. He must never have his own “agenda,” his own cheering section. His job by its nature must be very lonely, as Paul VI once said in a moment of desolation; it is to serve — servus servorum Dei, to be servant of the servants of God. We should pray the more earnestly for Pope Francis who, though he might have the best will in the world, is himself our first papal product of the seminary environment, post-Vatican II.

*

Today we have entered into Shrovetide, with much of the living Church unaware that this has happened. It is from this point, in the tradition, that the Alleluia is no longer sung, until Easter. In an old Gallican liturgy I once saw, metrically sung, the ancient explanation of it: that we fallen men who live on Earth are not worthy to sing the Alleluia unceasingly.

The succession of Sundays, from Septuagesima to Sexagesima, Quinquagesima, and Quadragesima, is the ancient countdown to Lent. (Tomorrow’s Candlemas, on the fortieth day of Christmas, will be the last echo of the season of Christmas and the Epiphany, mirroring the forty days of Lent.) The vestments change to violet, and the great readings from the Book of Genesis begin, expounding our banishment and exile from Eden, as we renew the task of repentance. The Gospel in the Old Mass today was the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, “unto this last” — a detailed affront to every modernist sensibility, for in it Christ showed that human ideas of “fairness” are rubbish; that justice and mercy are compact in opposition to them.

We are turned at this moment towards Easter, and our preparation for a Lent which was once taken by the whole Church — and is still taken in the hearts of the faithful — with spiritual gravity. In the Greek Triodion, we find parallels to every action in our old Latin Mass, and the same gravity in preparation for the Great Fast.

This entire season of Septuagesima, in which so many strands of Christian teaching are woven together, is omitted in what is now called the “Ordinary Form” of the Mass, with its succession of inconsequential “ordinary Sundays.” Yet it remains the birthright of every Catholic, restored to us unambiguously in Pope Benedict’s motu proprio of 2007, and not to be denied to us any longer.

It is for we the laity to demand the return everywhere — in every church, on every day — of our Mass in its “Extraordinary Form.” For even when poorly-educated clergy have forgotten, we may be inspired to remember: that our Church must be like unto her Founder, and that Our Lord was not an “ordinary man,” but invincibly Extraordinary.

Thanks to a typo (“inox” for “inbox”) I found myself blathering this morning to a correspondent in email about steel. My mistake was Freudian, I’m sure: “inox,” from inoxydable, is what they call stainless steel in France. Everything is Freudian, once one has become a Freud. Or as we discover in perusing such as Partridge’s learned glossary on Shakespeare’s Bawdy, there is not a word or topic in the world that will fail to carry some sexual or scatological innuendo, if it is worked carefully enough. This, I suspect, is because we are animals, and subject to decay.

I know little about this subject (steel; I’m fairly well-informed on bawdy), but perhaps enough to make a couple of points.

As my father the industrial designer used to say, “Stainless steel is so called because it stains less than some other steels.” But give me, by preference, wrought iron from a puddling furnace, for I don’t like shiny. Unfortunately it is not made any more except on a small craft scale: but I have, in the kitchen of the High Doganate, a pair of Chinese scissors that I’ve owned nearly forever, which have never rusted and whose blades stay frightfully sharp (they were only once sharpened). They cost me some fraction of a dollar, back when forever began (some time in the 1970s).

Too, I have an ancient French chef’s knife, nearly ditto, made I think from exactly the steel that went into the Eiffel Tower. It holds an edge like nothing else in my cutlery drawer, and has a weight and balance that triggers the desire to chop vegetables and slice meat.

And there are nails in the wooden hulls of ships from past centuries which have not rusted, after generations of exposure to salt sea and storm. Craft, not technology, went into their composition: there were many stages of piling and rolling, each requiring practised human skill. (The monks in Yorkshire were making fine steels in the Middle Ages; and had also anticipated, by the fourteenth century, all the particulars of a modern blast furnace. But they gave up on that process because it did not yield the quality they demanded.)

What is sold today as “wrought iron” in garden fixtures, fences and gates, is fake: cheap steel with a “weatherproof” finish (a term like “stainless”) painted on. These vicious things are made by people who would never survive in a craft guild. (Though to be fair, they are wage slaves, and therefore each was “only following orders.”)

However, in the Greater Parkdale Area, on my walks, I can still visit with magnificent examples of the old craft, around certain public buildings — for it was lost to us only a couple of generations ago. These lift one’s heart. I can stand before the trolley stop at Osgoode Hall (the real one, not the Marxist-feminist law school named after it). Its fence and the old cow-gates warm the spirit, and raise the mind: if the makers sinned, I have prayed for them.

Almost everywhere else one looks in one’s modern urban environment, one sees fake. This, conversely, leaves the spirit cold, and lowers every moral, aesthetic, and intellectual expectation. To my mind it is sinful to call something what it is not — as is done in every “lifestyle” advertisement — and to my essentially mediaeval mind, the perpetrators ought to be punished in this world, as an act of charity. This could spare them retribution in the next.

Craft itself has a penitential aspect. I have a friend, since childhood, whose name he would never permit me to mention. In the last moments when Latin was mandatory in Ontario high schools he won an international prize for a translation from Horace. The lyrics were also very clever, in the songs he wrote. He was and remains a fine string musician, with a voice that can animate a sleepy choir. As elder, now, in an old Anglican parish, so backward it still has a congregation, he has the opportunity. He was raised in poverty by an old widow-woman, who taught him his prayers. He is a doer, not a talker like me; though like me, he grew into a religious nutjob. He aspired to become a farmer. We cannot always accomplish our dreams, and his fell by the wayside. Instead he found employment in what can only be described as a blacksmith’s shop: a specialist manufactory of antiquated steels, on a very small scale. It has thrived, because what it makes has high-tech applications.

His work necessarily involves continuous exposure to what is, for humans, an extremely high-temperature environment. He is the last man still willing to go in there, for hands-on operations that can be done in no other way. He could retire, and collect a good pension; or get another job with his skills. But he will not think of it. The livelihoods of eight or nine other people depend on what he does; most of those have families. Too, he loves his work. The penitential aspect is quite real — he would not choose to spend his days sweating, except to some purpose. He has that purpose, and will sacrifice for it.

As for his family, and the high-school sweetheart he married, and whom he loves rather to distraction, and who bore him more children than I could count. And she is a wonderful craftswoman, especially in the culinary line; and I have the happiest memory of drinking a little too much with her husband, then following him home to a resplendent table, where the Angelus was said before Grace; and so much good-hearted laughter followed.

This is how we should live, in penitence, and likewise in joy. The farmer, too, sows and reaps in all weathers, and every other craftsman knows of pains different in kind from the boredom of the modern office. And even without craft, there are weights to be lifted, by the fragile human frame.

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Or as Guiderjus sings in Cymbeline: “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” For Shakespeare was not a romantic.

All of our technical “progress” is geared to taking the pain out of our everyday lives: the unnecessary pain, but also the necessary and painstaking. We have a societal obsession with finding the easy way out, reflected even in the usurious financial instruments I touched upon the other day, now leading us to ruin. We have come to be boxed by fakery on every side, so that we no longer feel it: until we discover that the scheme cannot work. We think of our ancestors today as hunchbacks; not of what compromise has done to the shape of our own immortal souls.

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand
And almost thence my nature is subdu’d
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. …

But the work of the dyer is also exalted.

A wise lady who reads this Idleblog — I think her wisdom began in a fear of the godless, back in her native Prague — mentioned confusion while reading my last post. Words confuse us, and such quickly interchanging phrases as “rich in spirit” and “poor in spirit,” with negatives and double-negatives buzzing about, may leave one’s intellectual tendons aching.

“All I know is that God made us all rich, very rich by the gift of life. Rich or poor (in a material sense), if we know this we are rich, if we don’t know it we are poor; and most of us have experienced both states in our life sometime.”

Further puzzlement is obtainable by comparing the eight Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount with the four paraphrased in St Luke (chapter six). Luke clinches the metaphorical nature of them by recalling that Christ also listed four corresponding Woes.

The poor are blessed, for the rich have consolation in this world.

The hungry are blessed, for the full have their consolation.

The mourning are blessed, for the laughing have their consolation.

The persecuted are blessed, for the celebrated have their consolation.

God will console, and those who found their consolations in this world — who boomed while you busted, ate while you starved, laughed while you mourned, and piled on humiliations, will regret their arrogance. Meanwhile love your enemies; and pray for them, they desperately need it.

In Roman Palestine, incidentally, a person of superior rank who slapped you in the face would expect you to respond by crawling in the dust and grovelling before him. (Or, her.) To remain standing, instead, and turn the other cheek, was a little more edgy than we may nowadays appreciate. Similarly, a Roman soldier could lawfully require you to carry his gear for one Roman mile, but not farther. This was a tax in kind, a short-term enslavement. By carrying it for two miles, you were turning the tables. You were now portering in friendship as a free man — and showing him how to do his job. This, too, was edgy. Similarly with him that commandeered thy cloak: give him the coat also, as the charitable act of a free man. Jesus was not counselling passivity, let alone gestures that are “holier than thou.” He was proposing quite practical — and edgy — stratagems for the slave to free himself from the bondage of this world.

It is very easy to become confused in a field of multiplying negatives and positives; but I think the preferential option for the word “poor” was one of Our Lord’s most delicious paradoxes. Our first instinct is to think “rich in spirit” must be right. Most would rather be rich than poor. This would have been all the truer in Jesus’ time — which was, after all, before the spread of Christianity. People would think, “rich good, poor bad,” and wonder what on earth He was saying. All eight of the Beatitudes in Matthew seem designed to pull the magic carpet of received attitudes out from under His audience. In doing this, Jesus was forcing people to think, which must therefore be a good thing. (I know, I know, thinking is painful.)

Most who address crowds are not so demanding. They don’t want people to think, just cheer. This is among the thrills I take away from the Sermon on the Mount, and each one of those eight Beatitudes: for throughout Christ subverts commonplace opinion. He is the opposite of a demagogue; He methodically cancels every possible applause line. As a man — as some candidate for public office — he’d have no chance of getting elected. For that, you must be not only willing but eager to tell self-serving lies. The Crucifixion is what the man Jesus of Nazareth actually got for his persistent and wonderfully confrontational truth-telling. Christ was no politician: “King of the Jews,” perhaps, but not in any sense Pilate would understand.

To this day, despite all the best efforts of the Church through the centuries, we continue to crowd-source our virtue, and seek mere popular applause. (I have been made desolate recently, each time a certain Bishop has played to the media gallery in this way, attacking things no one is defending: the sure sign of a compulsive politician.)

At the Reformation, the very idea that worldly success betokens divine approval came back into Christendom with a vengeance. At the Enlightenment, even the idea of divine approval was tossed away. A glib and over-literal use of Bible texts was the populist Christian reaction to that (for “fundamentalism” is also a product of the Enlightenment: the irrationalist flip side of an overbearing rationalism). The “power of positive thinking” soon followed. And even within the Catholic Church, today, the wholesale retreat from the sacramental involves an equal and opposite advance of preaching that is downright obtuse.

That is why I insist on using the fuller phrase, “poor in spirit.” Christ was not obtuse. He was teaching “the mystery of the faith,” not announcing a political action programme. I think T.S. Eliot explained the meaning of this phrase very well in “East Coker”:

In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

It is that simple.

The halcyon days were not in our fondly remembered past, but occur in the dead of winter, according to the best ancient and mediaeval sources. They are named for the bird who nests on the sea. That bird — which we might mistake for a kingfisher — has the power to calm the waves while brooding her eggs. The Indian Summer of the north — or I think it is Saint Martin’s Summer on the Water’s other side, or Saint Luke’s — may last a week in December. But in the Aegean, Halcyon (or Alcyone as I like to call her, daughter of Aeolus), may take a fortnight from the mariner’s busy schedule.

But here in the Introduction à la vie dévote, of François de Sales, I get further information. Halcyons make their nests like a ball, he says, leaving only a small opening at the top. They build them on the sea shore, and they are so strong and impenetrable that should the sea wash over them, no wet comes inside. Even should they be swept to sea in a storm, they will float upright.

This spiritual director counsels his penitent, Philothea, to be like that: open only to Heaven, and impervious to things that pass. Specifically he refers to the riches of this world, for he is expounding to her that first beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Saint Francis of the Château de Sales (ruined by politics) is famously the patron of writers and journalists. A nobleman, from the old Savoyard aristocracy, he had in addition to his classical education good instruction in riding and fencing, and knew how to dance. He was born a gentle soul, in the full meaning, for memories of him before he took orders were of a young man strong and tall, with piercing blue eyes, but reserved and modest. Not all the saints were like this; some, like Saint Vincent de Paul, were short, squat, bulbous of nose, cantankerous, and pushy. (Also ridiculously selfless, and kind.) Francis himself tells us repeatedly, it takes all kinds. But he who retrieved ten-thousands of souls from the Calvinists around Geneva, had that “halcyon” quality.

By the time this man, with a law degree from Padua, was made Bishop of Geneva, he was living almost on air. Without ever making an issue of it, he adopted habits of extreme simplicity, tirelessly visiting his parishes like a pilgrim. He needed every sou for his urgent mission. He could establish his episcopal palace in a gardener’s shed. It was because he conducted his mission cor ad cor, and from the pulpits of little village churches — not as the Calvinists in preaching before huge forcefully-assembled crowds — that he achieved a success finally shown in great numbers.

I have before me my copy of that Introduction to the Devout Life: the Everyman edition translated by the late Edgbaston Oratorian, Michael Day. It fell into my hands many years ago, in some foreign city, when I was looking for something “improving” to read (long before I became a Catholic). Since, I have been unable to say enough about the translator. He adapts and modernizes for the “common reader” without any discernible impairment of sense. (The typical paperback translator makes wanton sacrifices and reckless paraphrases in the vain hope of “popularizing.”) It is the presence of author, not translator, that grows upon one, as if four centuries had left nothing in our way. For those whose French is as bad as mine, this is the perfect crib.

Is it a book only for girls? That was, as I recall, my first impression, but it was corrected as I went along. The brilliance of the book is that the soul to whom it is addressed is feminine, yet in that unearthly way in which all souls are. In the male reader, something is summoned that is feminine, too, yet in no way “girlish.” Quite apart from its high authority as a source of Catholic teaching (Saint Francis is a “Doctor of the Church”), there is a poetry in it which conveys a quality once familiar to men: not fey in the slightest but rather gallant, even “brave” in the older meaning of that word. It corresponds to the masculine ability to cherish. We retrieve it by reading, as it were, over the shoulder of Philothea; it recalls us to all our protective instincts for everything that is beautiful, and chaste. It is opposite to the coarseness and vulgarity we associate with masculinity today; for it is stalwart, tenacious, redoubtable; trusting, and trustworthy, and in itself, truthful and chaste.

Journalists should seek this masculine honesty (to be found, too, in every fine woman), that distinguishes between holy and unholy things. Saint Francis is patron to a journalism that would not be tabloid and crass. It would be one with the spirit of the Confessional, asking at every turn, “What is going on here? What does it look like, and is it really that? What is it quite apart from my own interest in the matter?”

And so the writing proceeds, in the next paragraph of Saint Francis on the virtue of spiritual poverty. He explains what it is, and what it is not. He uses the metaphor of the chemist, who stocks many poisons on his shelves, but does not take them into his body. Each has a purpose, not poisonous in itself, yet which can be turned against its purpose. It is not material wealth that makes us “rich in spirit,” and therefore damnable in some way. It is the ingestion of that wealth into the spirit. Those who are poor, and covet such a wealth, are rich in spirit. As well: those who make a virtue of their wealth, and the risks they have taken to obtain it, until they become insensible to their fever, and to the rapacity with which they commandeer what justly belongs to others. As well: those too distressed by what they have lost, in a season when they lose their old possessions. For everything we have here is only for a time.

Perhaps these points could be made plainer with a practical, contemporary application. Let me provide one.

“Liberation theology” was from its beginning an invention in the spirit of the Great Lie. It is a vicious and an ugly lie — this nonsense about “Christ’s preferential option for the poor” — to the stench of which we have been too long subjected. It still reeks, through almost all “engaged” contemporary journalism, and poisons every clarion call for “equality.” It dishonours the poor. There should be no surprise that there are few vocations, and that the Church withers wherever it is taught (as she has done throughout Latin America). For it is not to make the rich poorer, nor the poor richer, in any worldly sense, that Christ came to us. It was instead to teach the rich and poor alike, from that first Beatitude, to be poor in spirit. Unless this teaching is made clear, our Christian leaders turn their backs on Our Lord, and defraud us of our true heritage — giving their children who ask bread of Heaven, the stone of an earthly avarice and resentment.

Saint Francis of Sales pray for us, and for the restoration of our Christian heritage. Pray for us who write, that we will serve the truth, and expose the lie.

The plight of refugees, fleeing the hell-holes of North Africa to reach Europe in whatever boats will take them, is sometimes in the news. The Pope has often drawn attention to their needs, and chastised the unnamed for not helping them. The shocking truth is that Europeans have shown a diminished enthusiasm for Muslim immigration.

Traffic across the Mediterranean was formerly different in kind. For at least seven centuries, constantly, and sporadically through four more, the life of southern Europe was disturbed by violent raids. There are stretches of coast in France and Italy that were not repopulated until the nineteenth century, because of these razzias. The Saracens, as we once called them, had an economy based on plunder. All Christian lands within reach were scoured, not only for portable wealth, but also to replenish their stock of slaves — both for domestic use, and trade. The Christians got into the act, too, taking captives for exchange when they could; but except some happier years during the Crusades, remained basically on the defensive. (I tired of apologizing for the Crusades about thirty years ago, which is why I stopped doing it.)

Students of American history may recall that the first foreign adventure of those United States was against the Barbary pirates. Indeed, one of the first acts of the new U.S. Congress in 1784 was the appropriation of money to pay tribute to the Barbary princes, to secure safety for American sailors and shipping. Thomas Jefferson, when U.S. minister to France, tried to negotiate a “coalition of the willing” — which at the time included Portugal, Naples, the two Sicilies, Venice, Malta, Denmark, and Sweden — to put an end to depredations all had suffered. Gentle Yankee reader may know the hymn of the United States Marine Corps, which begins, “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.” Yes, it was that Tripoli, in Ottoman Tripolitania, where they landed in 1805. They and their mercenary allies marched hundreds of miles through desert to Derna (recently back under Islamist control) in what we might take as the first dry run for the march to Baghdad. (Shout-out to my USMC buddies: Semper fidelis, and Deus vult!)

To those of broad mind towards pirates — for after all the Elizabethan English economy was based on piracy, too — at least some grudging admiration may be offered to the other side. In their mediaeval heyday, Muslim raiders struck as far north as Iceland; and in earlier modernity, as far west as Brazil. As Osama bin Laden used to say, people are attracted to the winning horse.

Home-grown terror is also nothing new. One thinks of Jack Ward, a.k.a. “Birdie,” a.k.a. Yusuf Reis (1553–1622), the Briton who assembled a sparkling little fleet, starting with the capture of a few French vessels — one reputed to be carrying the belongings of English Catholic refugees. He sailed to Tunis, converted to Islam, and did much lively business thereafter. He taught his new colleagues the latest navigational arts, which gave them a new lease on life. They’d been falling behind the European competition in this department, so that “asymmetrical warfare” — a traditional Muslim specialty — wasn’t working so well for them any more.

Where am I going with this? Ah yes, Saint Peter Nolasco (1189–1256), whose feast is today in your usus antiquior missals. (I look forward to celebrating Saint Thomas Aquinas on the anniversary of his memorably good death, March 7th; our Calendar in the High Doganate being state-of-the-art 1962.) It is a pity the former was trashed in the liturgical “reforms” of the hippie era, for he is so relevant today.

The founder and first commander-general of the Mercedarians — the Order of Our Lady of Ransom — was an old companion of Simon IV of Montfort against the Albigensian heretics. Tutor to the orphaned child James of Aragon, the king whose protection he later enjoyed, Peter proceeded to Barcelona, and lent his formidable organizing skills to the gathering Reconquista. The new order, fully patented in Rome by 1230, consisted of a heady mix of muscular lay monks or knights, with choir monks to prayerfully support them. In addition to the usual three vows they added a fourth: to lay down their lives with joy, or willingly become prisoners themselves, in exchange for the freedom of their brothers in Christ held by the Moors.

The order spread quickly through Europe, and later through the New World, to found convents and perform acts of mercy on behalf of the afflicted faithful. I am told it is still busy in seventeen countries. My thought is that with a little imagination, it could be put back to work on its original task: the ransom, or better still, straightforward liberation of Christian captives in the Middle East.

Saint Peter Nolasco, pray for us, and remind us in our lethargy of how things are done.

One generous reader put it best: the reason I’m a “complete idiot” is that I’m panicking about inflation when everyone else is panicking about deflation. We need to “print” money faster so people will spend. (It’s now done electronically, I’ve heard.) We ought to fear a downward spin through the drainhole: unemployment leading to less spending, leading to unsold goods, leading to lower prices, leading to lower production, leading to … more unemployment, even lower prices, and so on. We did that once before, in the 1930s. It cured the inflation of the 1920s.

We have gone into withdrawal from the heroin of inflation, and the answer is to get back on heroin again. Central bankers argue about the right dose, and scold us for not taking our meds.

Larry Summers: “We need to move beyond the Calvinist idea that more savings is always good and borrowing is bad because what we have right now … is a chronic excess of saving.” He accuses Calvinists like me and the Prussians of fostering the “green eyeshade accounting mentality.”

A note for the ages: when someone is lending, someone else is borrowing. … And did you know money saved in banks is lent out? … And can you guess who is borrowing? … Or what a “bond” might be? … And have you ever wondered where all the money that goes into stock markets comes from? … Or why people flip shares, when they used to live patiently off the dividends?

I’m trying to make these Idleposts shorter, I’m not going to write an economics textbook today; maybe I never will. Suffice I say that deflation and inflation are twin heads on the same beast. And that the Japanese have pioneered a system in which we can enjoy both at the same time, and thus have perfect economic stasis, through generations of demographic collapse.

Curiously, as a man of the thirteenth century, I “believe” in the price mechanism. (You know: wheat crop fails, price goes up; too much wheat, price goes down.) As a visitor to the twenty-first, I believe it is no longer working. Nearly one full century into the experiment of unlinking money from things, and linking it to “policy” instead, not one person is left on the whole planet with the fondest idea how our system works.

Some years ago I assembled a little team to study what had gone into the price of a loaf of bread. We had to give up. It was too complicated. Bread was officially “untaxed” in the jurisdiction; yet about the only thing we could establish with any confidence, after looking through the production process, was that more than half the price was cumulative direct and indirect taxes.

*

And did you know that William Shakespeare lived for several years in Southwark, in the Liberty of the Clink? This was the ward of the (Anglican) Bishop of Winchester, named oddly after his famous prison, not his pretty palace. The Globe and other theatres were also in it, and too, a “red light district” populated by ladies known colloquially as “Winchester Geese.” (Their unconsecrated graves lie under the urban asphalt today; the expression “goose bumps” survives in our language, though no longer with reference to venereal disease.) We also have it, on more than the authority of the Puritans, that bull and bear baiting was also going on.

Gentle reader will know I think Shakespeare was a closet Catholic, but that’s not the only thing I admire about him. He was also a serial tax evader. The beauty of this Liberty of the Clink was that it lay outside the jurisdictions of both the County of Surrey, and the City of London. It was thus a tax refuge. If you owed taxes on the other side of the river, as it seems Mr Shakespeare usually did, the sheriff couldn’t arrest you there.

From what I can see, we lack exhaustive documentation, but have enough to get the gist of the story.

On the subject of usury, I see the Greeks have voted to owe the Germans less money, in the latest triumph of democracy. They were a brilliant people, as we all learnt in school — further improved by South Slavic immigration, and honed through centuries of enslavement to the Infidel Turk. And good luck to them: for surely one way to undermine usury is to ignore debt. Why wait for a mortgage-burning party until after the last instalment is paid, in an age of instant gratification? The Germans invaded in 1941, but circumstances were different then. I doubt they’d have the nerve to invade again.

Any sangfroid which remains in the EU, ECB, and IMF (the leading institutional creditors) should disappear as the Italians, Spaniards, French, and finally the Germans themselves wave their national wands. Each in its own way is maxed out on usury — according to the international department of the High Doganate — and this explains the rise of all the new parties in Europe, which liberal media characterize as “rightwing” and “neo-fascist.” Actually they are populist. In fiscal matters, they are invariably on the Left. They understand that once given a taste of free money, no electorate can be weaned. The hand-outs are not merely expected; through political rhetoric they become first “entitlements,” and then “human rights.” It is because they can’t do anything about the majorities in their respective countries, that they turn attention to the minorities, instead.

Note that the Leftists who triumphed in Greece weren’t campaigning about the debt. You don’t score a landslide on a downer like that. Instead they were campaigning for relief from “austerity.” The defeated government had tried to keep agreements with creditors. It was for maintaining the national honour, that they were annihilated at the polls.

As History hath reported before, hyperinflation is the answer. Give the people everything they demand, and see how it works for them. Restore the paper drachma: let them have all they want of a worthless currency, since they can’t handle the hard stuff. (The modern drachma had quite the history of decimal-place adjustments, as I recall from stamp collecting. It is almost as if Greek governments were incontinent in some innate way.)

The bloody stuff comes later, when the people realize they have been cheated (by themselves). That is when they go looking for scapegoats. (Any more parentheses on modern Greek history and this could become invidious.)

Here is an old-fashioned banking idea: grab every Greek asset you can, and hold a fire sale; apply the proceeds to the principal, and write off all the rest. Then don’t ever lend them money again. (If they’re starving, we can send them food at no charge, the way we do to Haiti.)

No politician will think like this, however — nor any banker now that banking operations throughout Europe and America have been methodically politicized. Rather they will go back to the conference table, and resume their efforts to square the circle, until the roof falls in. It is like the Two State Solution for Peace in the Middle East. Because it is both impossible, and irrelevant to every real problem, it will take a lot of time.

For this is the world. It is how the world works. “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality.” This is why the truth is offensive; why genuine humour is in very poor taste: because, like vinegar, it cuts through the grease. But this is no argument against brewing vinegar.

*

Vinegar is also useful for fruitflies, by the way. In the kitchen of the High Doganate we had, recently, a bowl of plums, which weren’t very good, and so weren’t being eaten. Fruitflies collected. Gentle reader may know that all species of Drosophila can be irritating. Their brains may not be large, but are cleverly programmed to elude most commonplace smooshing tactics. The plums had to go, but in their place I put a dish of cider vinegar. To this I added a few drops of dishwashing liquid, to break the surface tension. Within hours, my fruitflies were all at the bottom of the dish.

(Please do not tell the animal rights activists.)

To more than the usual degree, the other day, I found myself puzzled by comments on an article I had written (here). For a change, I wasn’t annoyed. Most had missed my point so widely that I could retreat into my private phantasmagoria, secure in the knowledge I had covered my traces with impenetrable gobble-de-goo. The topic was anyway what is called “technical.” In a moment of potential financial meltdown, on a global scale, it seemed worth mentioning that Church teaching on usury, as expounded in Thomas Aquinas, might be somehow relevant to, even mildly explanatory of, “events.”

What I thought my most interesting point was ignored. It was that in studying the articles on usury in the Summa, I found the Angelic Doctor had anticipated a modern economic idea. This was how money might be created, out of nothing, as a function of lending and borrowing with interest. His critique of usury might be more sophisticated than is usually assumed, the more so since the institution of pure “fiat” currencies, untied to gold or any other anchor. Too, that quite beyond the classical distinction in Roman law between commodatum (a moveable property to be returned intact) and mutuum (something fungible to be returned in kind), Thomas was adeptly distinguishing between what is for investment and what is a consumer loan — relating the latter to beggary.

I may return to that point, or not; perhaps I hallucinated the whole thing. For the moment I am only interested in the nature of the responses to my broader insinuation that usury is a morally destructive economic force — which could be a problem when the whole world’s economy is built on it. Now, the possibility that I was taking a longer view of the matter than, say, what had happened in Zurich last week, was missed by several observers.

Too, I had not mentioned “just price theory” or various other things that happened to be in the minds of readers, who then assumed they must be in my mind, too. It is surprising how wrong one can be, when arguing with what an author has not said.

Naturally, I stood accused of great naiveté: of offering simplistic remedies to complex problems; of demanding commie-style interventions in the markets; of not knowing that the current foreground worry is about deflation, not hyperinflation; and of not realizing that fiat currencies are now here forever. To which I reply, that I wasn’t offering any remedies at all, and my thickness consists entirely of suggesting that we might get a better view of present economic arrangements nearly sub specie aeternitatis, from the serene distance and elevation of a mediaeval platform. And anyway, consult Euromoney (the magazine): the banks are now totally regulated and micromanaged by agencies of the State down to the sub-molecular level — so hey.

But there was a more fundamental misunderstanding. Readers assumed I was giving my opinions, and thereby misconstrued my intention. Rather I was attempting what has been my hobby for some time now: guessing at what might lie beyond my own pettifogging opinions.

I might get things wrong, might misrepresent Church teaching, might myself misunderstand the subtle reasoning of St Thomas, or read something into it that isn’t there; but I wasn’t actually trying to do any of this. I was trying instead to expound something along the lines of, “Creating money from nothing to fund gluttonous lifestyles on mountainous debt cannot be good,” under the impression that Holy Church would agree with me.

Often I find myself at cross-purposes with readers. Commenters say not only, “This is how things are today, stop being quixotic and get a life,” but also, “I think this,” or “I want that,” or “this is how we should do it.” We have something called “freedom of speech,” and I am reliably informed that everyone has the right to an opinion. Not being in a position to take that away, I seldom even phantasize about it.

I think, want, and truth be told, have opinions, too. But since I can suppress them, I more and more find it is worth a try. This is because they get in the way. Another thing that gets in the way is my plans: I’ve wasted too much time trying to advance them. When I look back, I find that my thoughts were wrong, my wants selfish, my opinions vain, and my plans rather silly. The hole is deep enough, as they say: I can stop digging now. Perhaps walk away. “Let the dead bury their dead.”

I had, for instance, when I was younger and mixed up for a time in economic journalism, in Asia, many fairly “original” opinions about how things should be done. Most put me on the side of “free markets” against Statism in its various forms; my guru was Friedrich Hayek. I knew more then than I remember now, about how things work in economic theory and practice. Verily: once upon a time I subscribed to Euromoney, and followed big bank asset tables as if they were major league sports standings: cheering some banks, booing others. I had strong views on which methods of investment would cause “emerging markets” to emerge (I actually worked for the guy who invented the term), and bless me, I wanted the best for Asia. I wanted “economic growth,” which is to say, more wealth, and less poverty. I had in common, even with people who disagreed with my opinions, a certain basic perspective: that winning is the most important thing; that it is even more important than the second most important thing, which is to avoid losing.

I will not say this experience was worthless; only that it wasn’t worth much.

Habit alone makes me leap to conclusions, on news reports to the present day. I find opinions I held thirty years ago suddenly reviving on Pavlovian cues. Opinions wire one’s brain, and rewiring may require industry and patience. Of course one will always have opinions, but whose will they be?

Today I find the criterion for my thinking has changed. Winning and losing have drifted out of the picture: of course we will lose, we always lose. I am no longer trying so much to make up my mind on the “what to do” questions, as asking (if I may put it so crassly), “What would Jesus do?” Less crassly: what does the Church think; what has she always thought? For as Jeanne d’Arc said, “About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.”

This hardly means I would like to put bishops in charge of the central banks. Hooo, would I not like to do that. Bankers should run banks, statesmen should run states, potters should run potteries, and farmers run farms. It would help if they were all burningly sincere, faithful orthodox saintly Catholics, and none were “freethinkers.” I doubt, however, that that could be arranged. Still, it is interesting to compare notes with those writing in an Age of Faith.

Meanwhile we (you and me, gentle reader) are discussing premisses here, and establishing the ground conditions to think anything through. To work out more fully how to do something specialized, specialists will have to be called in. But the end to which we are all working is not a job for specialists.

My gradual embrace of something resembling “Distributism” is not premissed on the belief that it would be a more efficient economic order, that it would grow the GDP faster, or anything like that. (Inflation it would cure, but that is a side issue.) Rather, I am trying to imagine an economic order that would be compatible with Catholic teaching, and contribute to rather than detracting from the salvation of souls. That it would, in some practical sense, “work,” if we got it even half-right, I take for granted — and this for the same reason that in faith I take for granted that God knows what He is doing. My challenge is to find out, thus, not what I want but what God wants, even in the field of macroeconomics.

Indeed, I rather wish I could cash the cheque for one billion dollars a friend at my church gave me for Christmas. (He has a long beard and mischievous eyes and looks like a Scotchman.) I hesitate from the fear it may not be covered, and I really hate unnecessary bank charges. Still, I thought one thing to do with the money might be set up a Distributist think-tank, to which we might invite the more ingenious economic specialists to consider, “What would a truly Christian economy look like?” For I think many of our difficulties spring from failure of the educated imagination.

Not, be it noted, the economy we want, but the sort of economy God might smile on. If it would make us materially poorer, overall, then so be it. If it would restrict our freedom to acquire certain things, then we do without. If it did not deliver perfect equality of opportunity, so what? Yet a way of life that left everyone starving, and encouraged usury, hoarding, and theft, would not be acceptable. This is because God wouldn’t want that.

A secondary question would be, how do we get there? How, rather than waiting for agencies of the State to do things not necessarily in the interest of the State as currently conceived, could people who are, say, Catholic, work towards such an alternative economic order, entirely through voluntary acts on their own? … I am of course imagining an institution in which the Angelus bells are rung thrice daily, at beginning, middle, and end of shift, and all work pauses to consider the Incarnation, and everything that follows from: “Be it done to me according to Thy word.” (Here is a nice video.)

For the point in all this is to accommodate, both individually and in the commons of the Body of Christ, not our own plan but God’s plan for us; how we might live within His prescriptions, and not stray ever farther outside.

Yes, yes, perhaps I am naïve. … But so was Don Quixote. …

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What makes this scheme so ludicrous is that, not at the corporate but at the individual level, people who include most Catholics don’t think like that. They wake every morning with their own plans. And while it may be reasonable to keep appointments, and earn one’s bread from day to day, or even to save for retirement, the question is seldom asked: “What might God want me to do: today, tomorrow, and forever?” Or even, “What if the universe in which I am currently participating is not all about me?” For you know, it isn’t.

Deep inside lies the fear that God’s plans may not be congruent with my own. Yes, this is rather likely — as, too, that the fear of God might be the beginning of wisdom. We cling to what we cannot keep, in the nature of time’s passage; to what no one has ever kept. And we make ourselves sad in our aloneness.

Our plans presuppose things as they are, in the glib sense of what is all around us. We have no choice but to accommodate at least some of that, for the State has cops and tax collectors, and The People have rapacity. Yet even as mental exercise, the imagining of “things as they are not” has a certain value. It suggests possibilities that our environment does not of itself suggest: Beauty, Goodness, Truth, things like that. It might provide glimpses of the kind of social solidarity that would help to lift us out of ourselves. We might not feel so terribly alone.

Imagine a town whose primary collective economic wish were to build (in the words of some quixotic Spanish mediaeval architect), “Such and so great a cathedral that those who look upon it in the future will think that we were mad.” And then built it. (As they did at Seville.)

That “we cannot know God’s plan” tends to arise as the first objection; and it is true that we can’t begin to understand the full majesty. How could we, given the scale on which we are operating? But within that plan we can, like the miner with a lamp on his helmet that does not light the view around corners, know enough to be getting on. For the passage we walk is immediately before us, and the light on that works just fine. And it may still be working when we turn the corner.

And here I am thinking of another passage in Thomas Aquinas, his Questiones disputatae de caritate:

“In this life we cannot know perfectly what God is, but we can know what he is not, and in this consists the perfection of our knowledge as wayfarers in this world. Likewise, in this life we cannot love God perfectly so that we are permanently turned towards Him in act, but only imperfectly so that our minds are never turned towards what is contrary to Him.”