Essays in Idleness

I boast, shamelessly and perhaps unreasonably, of being a man of the thirteenth century; but if gentle reader finds that a little too progressive, I reply that the twelfth was too exciting for me. It was a “renaissance.” We’ve had five, six, or more of them in Christendom, depending which we count; and as ever happens during one of these rebirths, experiments are tried to improve things. The thirteenth century had plenty of excitements, too; but on balance, in my view, it was a period of consolidation. It was the century in which the still-reigning master of modern thought, Saint Thomas Aquinas, committed his great act of intellectual re-assembly, pacing through Christian philosophy over the broadest possible base; and other Schoolmen worked in parallel ways. A century is a long time, by earthly measure, and an Idlepost is ten minutes, so we will leave it there, as a crude generalization.

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Paris is much in the news. Recently I touched on the foundations of the modern university, including the celebrated one that was established on the Île de la Cité. I stressed the dangerous freedom that this university offered, once detached from the religious houses in which learning had previously been nurtured and supervised; but allowed that something important was gained for the loss. The autonomous university was a typical invention of the mediaeval mind: growing in its place organically, and like an organism finally coming of age, and thus to independence.

Ah, to be in Paris, in the thirteenth century, with her church spires and palaces; her convents, hospices, and many other specialized monastic establishments; her magnificent buildings at the peak of the Romanesque; her schools, including the incomparable school of polyphony in Notre Dame; her ars antiqua and its echoes in the sung poetry of the trouvères; the prospects along her rooflines to her walls; “her river, her gardens, her vineyards”; her warm comfortable houses; her hives of industry, on the Left Bank, where monk artists copied and illuminated gorgeous codices in remarkable numbers; her markets of the Right Bank with their enchanting smells and the musical cries; the shops of her artisans; her goldsmiths and ivory carvers at work on reliquaries and crucifixes, to intricate Byzantine designs; her sculptors, painters, glaziers in stained glass. Look for depictions of mediaeval costumage, and consider the cloth-weavers and tailors who could deliver such work: to this city blossoming in every season. And then hear the bells.

Already by the dawn of the thirteenth century Paris had more than a hundred thousand souls and was, among cities, the indisputable Queen of the North. She was more cosmopolitan than today’s drudgery-ridden city (with more “multi” but less “culture”). By her reputation for learning the students came from afar, settling into their national colleges in the island Cité, and spreading through the Quartier Latin — as they had done long before the formal establishment of the university, or the college of Robert de Sorbon.

What fascinates me just now is the matrix of autonomies, by which the independence of so many institutions was sustained and guaranteed; the rights, corresponding to duties, which pertained to persons in each station; all the mutual relations that had grown through the evolution of custom, and not bureaucratic imposition. Minor conflicts could be resolved by precedent, if necessary through the courts and lawyers; the largest were settled in appeals to Rome. In their replies, the Popes intervened like a supreme court, to preserve one party from the tyranny of another. It is a heritage we have lost, or are still losing: this explicitly Christian vision of the City of Man aspiring to harmony with the City of God; of autonomy in subsidiarity; of self-governing guilds. I don’t think the modern “democratic” mind quite begins to comprehend civic freedom, mired as we are in a conception of freedom that reduces to the Hobbesian tyranny of all upon all. Our ideal instead is “free and equal” — a direct contradiction of terms, and therefore never imposed without hypocrisy.

The man who pays the piper calls the tune: students had real power. We had in the colleges of thirteenth-century Paris (as elsewhere in schools across Europe) the wonderful consequence of “full tuition.” A lecturer could be fined if he arrived late for class; or if he funked when asked to explain a difficult passage. Iustitia, justise: those students had the right to the teaching they had paid for. Or think about a law that prevented the very Chancellor of the University from blocking the appointment of any professor qualified to teach. The mediaeval mind considers many angles; the modern demands “one size fits all.”

Autonomies within autonomies: they are such little things as these which persuade me that mediaeval, “feudal” man was no pushover. It was why, in the end, he was able to withstand such huge challenges as the violent expansion of Islam. (It would be tasteless, today of all days, to draw a comparison to that ocean of slobbering Charlies, having their Princess Di moment in Paris as I write; who think evil can be stopped by posting a mass selfie, and are in fact providing the Muslim fanatics with exactly the attention they expected, and craved.)

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Put this another way. To our modern, revolutionized, “secular” imagination, an institution is a team, with a captain. Followers need “leaders.” There are “policies” which the captain may change, or he may change the personnel to improve “performance.” If the team fails, the captain may be replaced, for there is a collective interest in “success.” But even with incompetence and failure, the point is to get paid. (It is not an absolute value, however: “how much” is always an issue.) The good, the beautiful, the true are acknowledged, as being like God: irrelevant, because of no cash value. On the other hand, it is widely understood that sentimentality sells (like mild pornography); and that wealth has correlatives in fame and power.

Life is a game, and a game needs rules: the purpose of “rights,” in this secular view, is to level the playing field. All loyalties are conditional; each player answers only to himself, for his “lifestyle choices.” There can be no ineffaceable criterion of judgement, no stakes not transient.

Given the assumption that there can be no enduring purposes, an institution can serve no enduring purpose. It must exist only for those of whom we may speak in the present tense. It may come, go, or be “repurposed,” according only to immediate need — as currently “perceived” by whoever is in power. They are answerable only to those who keep them in power. Those who once built or belonged to the institution are dead and gone: the dead can feel no injuries. Only the living can feel pain, when those elected decide they should do so, for opposing the latest iteration of “progress.”

To the old Christian mind, the analogy for an institution was instead the family, which has a ruler to be sure, in the husband and father, and is thus “paternalistic.” But each member is of absolute value, and obedience is commanded by an authority that can be justified only by Love (see Catholic marriage sacrament; compare sacrament for holy orders). Members cannot be arbitrarily assigned to new roles, nor casually dispensed with. Each exists for the sake of all the others in a divine plan, accommodated in goodness, beauty, truth; denied in their opposites. There are no institutional “performance” values, nor any others that could be charted or quantified; indeed, the pursuit of money as an end in itself counts as sin. What is served is ultimately no man, nor material function, but God, and success or failure is in the sight of Him.

There can thus be, in the Christian institution, no publishable criteria for winning or losing, no scoring card or cost-benefit analysis: not where martyrdom may be recognized as victory. There is no way for man to level any playing field. We cannot even know the extent of the field on which we are “playing.” Nor can rights exist severable from duties, nor duties severable from rights, any more than a coin can have only one side. Loyalties are not conditional; everything has that flavour of “till death do us part,” and then some. Not only do the institutions perdure, but the founders and members never cease to be alive; they must still be prayed for. Even they who are buried have rights, and the reciprocal duty to pray for us. The end is not a game, but a Day of Judgement, in the prospect of Life Everlasting; the stakes are never less than everything.

I think it may be seen that there is a contrast between these two analogies, as between these two views of life. I think it would be fair to say, that in terms of the former, the latter is inefficient; that in terms of the latter, the former is worthless.

At foot and crown of that now ancient, unambiguously Christian “social and economic” order, was indeed the autonomy of the family; its legal status compounded by its sanctity.

How beautifully this is taught through the liturgy of the Feast of the Holy Family, celebrated in the Old Mass today: in which the Kingship of Christ is beyond question, the Queenship of Mary on Earth as in Heaven — but too, the sanctity of that home wherein not Christ, nor Mary, but Joseph the carpenter was master, under the Law of Love. More is involved in the matter than this; but in this alone volumes are sung and spoken.

Though I am generally opposed to tabloid journalism, and fondly nostalgic for the days when broadsheets, at least seventeen inches wide, covered their front pages with “smalls” (classified ads in agate type) — I concede that the tabs have their moments. “Literate” people (and I mean that term broadly) often read them in addition to The Times, to gain insights into the minds of the common people, which would help them prepare defences against the next seething mob. Or, they might take low-class literature for light entertainment on long train rides. (Detective thrillers are more rewarding, however.) It should be said that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, much of what appears in tabloids is actually quite amusing, if rather coarse. Today, alas, we have nothing but tabloids, across a range of media “platforms”; and in our public life, nothing but mobs. But we have opinion polls, to provide the governing authorities with their “hedz-up.”

There are myths about old times. One of them is that we turned to tabloids to get the dirt that had been politely omitted from the broadsheets. This was never true. All the best dirt could be found buried in the latter, on an inside left-hand page below the fold, beginning about the third paragraph under a discreet headline. The learned knew how to search it out, without help from screaming banners. They knew the tabs would have only half the story.

Today, we have rightwing and leftwing tabloids, as we did before, but the choice is between them instead of between either and something else. A law of the universe, which provides that no two things will ever be precisely equal or symmetrical, still operates. In roughly the proportion that humans themselves are right- or left-handed, we find little truths blazoned in the tabloid media of the two sides. These truths are invariably partial, but sometimes one slice can be more enjoyable than the whole pie.

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My prize this morning goes to Brian Lilley, of something called “Sun News.” I do find him a remarkably astute and well-informed journalist; and credit Sun News for being the Canadian media outlet which most frequently gets something right. This is because that something will, in almost every instance, be politically incorrect, and Sun News is about as politically incorrect as Canadians can hope for. Too, this television station makes a specialty of rude attacks on a competitor, the taxpayer-subsidized CBC. And with a target like that, you can’t miss.

Mr Lilley observes that most media handle with kid gloves and vocal gestures of awe, anything to do with Islam. We know that already, and even the reason for it: pant-wetting cowardice. But the example he gives is still rather priceless. It is their habit of referring — even after declaring that they are Charlie Poseur — to “The Prophet Muhammad.” Having given the sage of desert Araby that honorific, why do they not also refer, for instance, to “The Prophet Jeremiah”? Or to the founder of another long-established religion as, “Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”?

The gentleman only calls attention to this routine example of shrieking hypocrisy, but perhaps we should treat it as an “action item,” accepting no glib or sophistical excuses. Space considerations cannot apply, for this last honorific may be abbreviated to “Our Lord.” Or, if the journalist does not, miserabile dictu, accept Jesus as his personal saviour, he could show the same respect as to Islam by referring consistently in a hushed, exalting tone to “The Lord,” or “The Messiah,” or “Jesus the Christ.”

It would be unChristian, I think, to threaten journalists with death if ever they failed to do so. But we could shower them with formal complaints.

Those drawn to the cirque médiatique in Paris — and let me confess I’ve been checking the news sites over-often the last couple of days — may both remember and forget how often we have been here. There is a certain ghoulish fascination from which journalists have long been making a living; a craft now well-adapted to the Internet. Backward-looking by disposition, I sometimes examine old newspapers, in which the horror of modern life acquires that “camp” patina, otherwise obtainable in the flea markets from old tins and cereal boxes. It is another way both to remember and forget, what has been achieved since the Enlightenment.

We have thirty casualties, including twenty deaths, with which to construct the “war” in Paris. Compare Baga, Nigeria, where over the same forty-eight hours the local Muslim fanatics (“Boko Harum”) have slaughtered perhaps one hundred times that number. Amnesty International now use satellite photographs to estimate death tolls from Boko Harum’s ministrations in rural Christian districts; the Guardian today cites an estimate of two thousand dead at Baga, once a quiet fishing village on the western shore of Lake Chad. (The lake has been shrinking.) Most of these were women, children, and the elderly, according to reports: unable to run fast enough.

Sharia Law is now imposed right across northern Nigeria, by the democratically elected authorities, in states where Muslims enjoy a plurality. Messrs Boko Harum go somewhat beyond their rescript. They are the latest expression of a violent “Islamist” movement that may be traced (in Nigeria) back to the 1950s.

Connoisseurs of British Imperialism will recall, from much earlier, the effort to distinguish the more from the less violent and barbaric emirates within the old, Arabized, Fulani caliphates, and assist the latter in establishing a system of civil law; in suppressing Sharia; and more generally in protecting the lives and property of religious minorities. But this is not a history that can be told without running directly afoul of the censors in current, politically-corrected Western academia.

Slaughter is not quite the same as war. Call me a stickler for English usage, but I think a “war” requires engagement from (at least) two sides. The Paris authorities who use this word guerre so casually at the moment should be asked, persistently, what they mean by it.

In my view, conditions in Nigeria also fall short of what I require in a war, though they get closer. The Nigerian army is engaged, occasionally, though like the police in France their role is almost purely defensive. Boko Harum strike, and they try to slow the accumulation of casualties. Sometimes their well-armed put poorly-trained soldiers go on killing rampages of their own, and defenceless Muslims instead of Christians and Animists become the targets. But an exchange of massacres is still “slaughter,” not “war.” Even in Abuja and Lagos, we have sad examples of linguistic imprecision.

I am sorry to say, that I have never visited the necropolis of the French kings. It is in the “commune” of Saint-Denis, now a northern suburb of Paris. The basilica was founded around the corpse of Saint Denis (or “Dionysius”) of France: the first bishop of Paris, martyred on Montmartre in 250 AD. In the VIIth century, Dagobert I (a contemporary of Mohammad of Arabia) was buried there, and after him, I think all but three of the kings, and most of the queens of the Franks and of France.

The basilica and its associated abbey — now “administered” by the French state — are also of tremendous significance in Western art. One could fill pages and pages with this cultural heritage, through all the intervening centuries, but one fact stands above all others. Under the great Abbot Suger, the abbey church was reconstructed and refurbished, 1137–48. It became the first of all the Gothic cathedrals. It could be fairly said that Gothic architecture — which is to say, the highest and noblest reach to which the art of building ever attained anywhere on the surface of this Earth — dates precisely from that singular edifice. (I have on my shelves the text of a symposium in which two dozen leading contemporary art historians affirm this plainly, from each of their respective angles of expertise. See here.)

More, so much more, could be said. No place in all of France can have such resonance, for genuinely patriotic Frenchmen, or for all who, like me, love old France with an overweening passion. By which I do not mean some “republic,” for I refer to the sons and daughters of a France that was murdered in the French Revolution; and has risen and been murdered again, many times; and will be restored when Christendom is restored — that France which is the eldest daughter of the Church of Christ.

One might say it was murdered yet again yesterday: not only by some gunmen in the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, but also in the sight of great crowds, morally preening by candlelight in response to that event, who think their heritage is liberty alone. (I shall have more to say on this in Catholic Thing, tomorrow.)

A friend writes:

“Have you ever been to Saint-Denis? I was stuck at Charles de Gaulle airport for half a day a couple years ago, and calculated that I could go down by train to the cathedral and still make my flight home. The train lets you off near the Stade de France. There’s a highway, I think built deliberately, between the stop and the cathedral, one barrier against enabling the French to visit the tombs. No Metro stop is nearby. (Another barrier: the Communists are not stupid.) The whole neighbourhood is Muslim, not particularly threatening in daylight, but the tombs of the old kings of France now lie in Muslim territory. Most of my French friends — usually Catholic and conservative — have never visited for various reasons.”

Common sense can have a calming effect, I have found, when engaged in various controversies. It does not necessarily come from me. Usually it is a remark contributed by some “innocent bystander” — a term I should use cautiously, for as a veteran policeman once explained, “There is no such thing as an innocent bystander.” But there are those not guilty of specific crimes.

This morning’s issue will be anthropogenic global warning. It comes naturally to mind on a day when the temperature in the Greater Parkdale Area is zero (Fahrenheit), yet with a significant “windchill,” blowing from dead north. This produces what the weathermen call a “feels-like” of around minus twenty, which might be considered “balmy” by an inhabitant of, say, northern Manitoba. But I note there are very few inhabitants in northern Manitoba.

Denizens of the continental interior, more generally, could spend half the year praying for global warming, and the other half fearing that their prayers have been answered; add or subtract by isothermal latitude. So it goes. I live near the southern extreme of Canada, on land “normally” under a mile or two of ice, if one looks candidly over the known climatological history of the last few million years. So far as they are intelligent, I think most of my countrymen would express a “preferential option” for as much carbon as we are capable of spewing. It is in our national interest to sustain the present interglacial. And should this leave a few low-lying tropical islands under water, well, we have a generous immigration policy.

Now, while it is true that I became bored with this topic, years ago, I was nevertheless on record with my view that “globalwarmalarmism” is a public-funding fraud. It is based on claims to knowledge that humans cannot have, and more pointedly, on methods of computer modelling that cannot reliably predict if it will snow on Saturday, let alone what will happen in another hundred years. It is not my business if people spend their lives playing computer games, but I do not think they should demand trillions for a contrived result.

The reason for their influence should be clear to any political observer not born yesterday. Grand schemes to “reduce global warming” are a godsend to the bureaucracies of states already drowning in debt. They provide an excuse for massive extension of those bureaucracies, and ever more detailed control and supervision of our daily lives — regardless of cost. They could also provide a check on the kind of frontier capitalism that has raised too many Third World countries out of abject poverty and starvation. We need to cut off their fossil fuels, to keep those economic rivals in their place.

Paradoxically, I am myself in favour of brisk technological retreat, but for different reasons. I think people should live simpler lives, and restore attention to the moral and spiritual verities. However, as a Catholic, I also think this should be voluntary; that it can be achieved only by conversion of souls. I do not think much “regress” will be made, in the long run, by scaring people with big lies. But that is not to say my position is pragmatic.

The Church has every right to address questions of the common good; but as she has consistently reasoned through the last couple of centuries in the face of Marxism and other revolutionary and “progressive” movements, she is bound to oppose “collectivism.” Climate-change environmentalism is simply the latest try-on from that diabolical end of the political spectrum. Pope Francis is quite orthodox when eschewing, in principle, “ideologies” of every kind. Would that he had, himself, a better comprehension of what this must entail.

The news that he will take a big stand on “climate change,” along with rumours of whom he is consulting, has added to the heap of desolation felt by many “traditional” (i.e. serious) Catholics who, regardless of their views on the weather, and of human sway upon it, do not think a pope should concern himself with subjects he knows little or nothing about, or go about strutting like a politician. We have, in this opinion (which I am incidentally inclined to share), got beyond the point where “the media” can be blamed for misrepresenting what he says. Of course they do that, but if one persistently plays to their gallery, one must reasonably expect them to play back.

Yet here is where common sense comes in, and we should feel less goaded. It is supplied in this case by Rachel Lu, the imperturbably calm and sensible columnist in Crisis magazine. I would have made this point more forcefully, but instead, tip my hat to her composure (displayed here), and leave this morning’s final word to her:

“We should probably be grateful if the talking heads chatter a lot about Catholicism and climate change. After the recent, literally scandalous debates over divorce and family issues, it might be a relief to see the Holy Father devoting his energies to environmental concerns, rather than stirring up doubt and division over central doctrinal or moral questions.”

It would be now the Twelfth Day of Christmas, and this evening coming up our Twelfth Night, and Eve of the Epiphany: which is to say, twelve drummers drumming. I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but in my carefully considered view, I think we should bring on the wassail.

The traditions associated with this conclusion of the first round of Christmas celebrations are of bewildering variety, across old Europe and, too, old colonial America (North and South). But I had a grandmother who contrived to be born in Devonshire (Mabel Henrietta Warren, née Jevon, of beloved memory, 1898–1969), who made clear to me the foundation of wassail upon good cider — mulled, if you will. Cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, anise, pomegranate and some part of a vanilla pod: these are all judgement calls. Clementines come bobbing up to mind. Honey; or better, add it in the form of mead.

Over this side of the Atlantic Sea, it is very hard to find good cider. We need to begin making it ourselves. Fresh apple juice is all very nice — but it is not cider, whatever the pretence of the label. What comes from the licker store is invariably carbonated: a kind of alcoholic soft drink, not meant for Christians. The old ciders of Normandy and the West Country of England were flat beverages: more an apple wine. Ditto for perry (made from pears); and much followed from the many varieties of apples and other fruit, including their respective brandies. As ever, modernity has imposed a cruel compression, all production geared to the ignorant masses and reptilian economies of scale. Orchard by orchard, Christendom must be restored.

Indeed, the Twelfth Day of Christmas was associated, at least in my grandmother’s mind, with visitation of those orchards. The trees must be blest, and God’s bounty renewed through prayer. Bread dredged in cider was spread on the branches for the spirits of the woodland, i.e. the birds to carry away. Dancing and carolling were indicated.

The tradition of the boar’s head, too, is mysteriously involved. The wild boar was once a terror of the northern woods — though not the apex predator, being itself hunted by packs of grey wolves. But one on one it was Death incarnate. The swine could outrun a horse, swivel on a dewclaw, and slice you up with tusks like knives. Razor-sharp teeth, and razor-sharp mind (far smarter than a bear); six-hundredweight of unpredictable menace. Delicious, if you managed to stick it before it stuck you: so much that in England they ate them down to the last one. For Englishmen are even smarter than pigs, most days.

If memory serves, the feast of the boar’s head begins, as so much in our Western intellectual tradition, with Aristotle. A scholar was walking through the woods, on his way to Mass, reading his Prior and Posterior Analytics. He was confronted by this wild snorting boar, in a pique from some unknown cause, and soon charging. The clever schoolman thrust his book into the creature’s maw. Unequal to such a volume of logic, the boar choked on it. Later its head was presented in the refectory, “decked with bays and rosemary” — though whether with an apple in its mouth, I cannot say. One also wants to know if the book was repairable. (There is a fine macaronic carol in honour of the beast, from this culinary angle.)

Do not grieve, gentle reader. The first twelve days may be nearing their end, but truly, there are Forty Days of Christmas, which, before the Bugniniman got at it,  extended to Candlemas on February 2nd (unless, I suppose, preceded by Septuagesima). … But thanks to the Summorum Pontificum of Good Pope Benedict, old “Buggers” will eventually be forgiven and forgotten.

In the meantime, Saint Telesphorus (pope and martyr, AD 136) … pray for us.

It is amusing, or perhaps not, to discover while reading Newman that he directly contradicts something one wrote oneself, recently. This was in (the eleventh of) his Discourses to Mixed Congregations, during a lively discussion of what faith is — as distinguished from what it is not. The Blesséd gentleman says plainly that “two plus two is four” is not an act of faith. I said it was, t’other day in my Catholic Thing column. So I take it back, over here.

It is a belief, and to my mind, a reasonable one, based on considerable evidence; enjoying, too, a consensus among mathematicians and scientists, greater than that for anthropogenic global warming. I myself have, quite frankly, always believed that two plus two will make four, and never come across an exception. Would I go to the stake for it, however? … Nah.

Whereas, Faith (let’s give it a capital sometimes) is different in kind. It involves a “belief” in God, so to say, and in the truth of God, and in the truth of God’s revelation, and of God’s chosen messengers of that truth, and thus the truth of His Church, all following from the absolute assurance: that God would not lie to us. He would not tell us one thing one day, and another on another. He is not, for instance, the God of the Koran who changes his mind and contradicts himself from one surah to another. God, for our weakness, even goes so far as to explain what might appear a contradiction to us, as Jesus does in the Gospels. (“Moses for the hardness of your hearts,” &c.)

Humans may fail, and that most certainly includes the humans embedded in the hierarchy of the Church at any given historical moment. But we can know they have failed: when they begin to preach what is contrary to God’s Revelation. Men can be faithless, as (Newman points out) most men who claim to be Christians are faithless, and therefore stray from the same Holy Church, or remain within her but neglect her demands. For there is nothing in Faith that is or could be conditional.

Given our finitude, and God’s infinitude, when we are puzzled we must assume that we are puzzled, and not presume that God is puzzled, or is puzzling us. Our doubt is for our own understanding, and fear is for our own Faith: that it cannot withstand even the slightest challenge. Faith thus cannot even entertain the “scepticism” that validly applies to any act of reasoning.

“In the ordinary course of this world we account things true either because we see them, or because we can perceive that they follow and are deducible from what we do see; that is, we gain truth by sight or by reason, not by faith.”

Faith is of another order: the order of Hope and Charity. For neither of those is conditional, either.

“Faith is not feeling,” as I like to say, but it is also not reason. It goes beyond reason, to what reason cannot prove (much though it may be consistent with reason). It may also be said to precede reason, logically. It is not founded in Nature, but in what transcends Nature. “The heavens and the earth will pass away, but my Word will never pass away.” Faith is in the eternal, not in the transient; from which I would say it follows, that the Eternal is reflected in Faith, rather as we are ourselves to be understood as existing “in God’s image.”

Newman is quite right, and I was quite wrong, except, words are words, lower case. Even the word “faith” requires some context, and it was in a particular, analogical context that I said “two plus two” requires faith. Rather, I should have said, for clarity: it is like faith, insofar as we do not doubt it. Yet it is also unlike Faith, for it is the product of reason.

By another analogy, getting up in the morning requires faith, and even more, going to bed at night. I was saying, or intending to say, that reason itself rests upon Faith, and very much not the contrary.

Faith transcends reason, though reason may sometimes seem to be catching up. In the same Catholic Thing column (which is here, incidentally) I touched upon the finitude of the universe. We know it must be so from Faith; and through centuries Christians believed it to be so, even in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus that the universe in which we live must be infinite. We could not know the how and why of it, only that our universe must have a beginning and an end — for God had actually told us so, and God does not lie. However, we could not know this by reason, until Georges Lemaître’s “cosmic egg” hypothesis (a.k.a. “big bang”) made the fact of its beginning accessible to reason. And as I added, there, the more recent discovery that the same universe is expanding at a constantly accelerating rate, points us towards some ultimately calculable end. But that remains “just reason,” and is not Faith (as Monsignor Lemaître himself made quite plain).

“Good faith,” as opposed to “bad faith,” is similarly analogical: for the man of good faith does not even consider — or if he considers, immediately rejects as sinful — the possibility of acting in bad faith. He does not, like some utilitarian, reason that good faith will work out better for him and for everyone, than bad. Rather the Christian, from his Faith in God, does what God requires of him; and does it without question.

Needless to say, this subject is not exhausted. Yet I would rather gentle reader were in Newman’s hands, than in my own, for a fuller explanation. His tenth discourse sets stage for the eleventh, and the whole of the book to which I alluded (some eighteen discourses on fundamental propositions of Catholic teaching, and a marvellous catechizing experience for any intelligent reader) is especially worth attentive study for anyone today who is losing his way through the Cafeteria of Catholic decadence, and not much helped when he turns to Rome. He needs to take the Theological Virtues seriously. He needs to put himself in a position where he will not be prey to heresy and rubbish.

God sends His messengers, and in a way more miraculous than we can begin to conceive, He sent as His messenger, in addition to angels and prophets and signs, Himself. “I Am that I Am” came down from Heaven and on His eighth day among us, He took a Name. He became, incredibly, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Which mystery of Faith is embodied in today’s Old Mass: a truth beyond reason, and any worldly understanding.

In Nomine Jesu. …

Yesterday’s rant was a little on the long side. I look back over it this morning, and fight the temptation to add more and more. Instead I cut it back a little. On the one hand, there are things to say. On the other, one might wish to show connexions between one thing and another. Between any two paragraphs, it often seems to me, another paragraph demands to be inserted, revealing the strand of gossamer that bridges the canyon.

Meanwhile, a correspondent complains that I’m writing faster than he can read. (Maybe he’ll get lucky and I’ll die soon.)

Old man with unsharpened pencil, and grubby fingernails, inscribing an exotic abecedary, deeply incising his strange symbols; furrowing the paper, sheet after sheet. He sits at a table in the public library. The tangled hair; the smell like Camembert.

The word “graphomania” sometimes comes to mind.

Perhaps the second of January is the most dismal day in the civil calendar. Some may get it off, or take it off; but for your average Salaried Sisyphus it means: “resume pushing.” His (or, her) holiday is over, even though it is only the Ninth Day of Christmas, and we haven’t celebrated the Epiphany yet; nor Candlemas. And if, in addition, he (or, she) lives at this latitude in the northern hemisphere, the worst of winter is still to be faced, glumly in cities where a beautiful snowfall becomes a traffic nightmare. Sometimes one feels almost cheated, of that ride in the sleigh.

Take heart. It doesn’t have to be like that. You could be unemployed.

While I find penury more fun at the beginning, than as it wears, there is much to be said for it. As the French observe, the rich man is free to sleep under the bridge; but for the poor man this freedom is more likely to be realized.

Better yet, something in the middle, well short of slave consumerism, but sufficient to maintain life and limb, could be had with a little enterprise and cunning. Some even manage to do better, without a dayjob than with one: by applying themselves to a trade in which demand seems always to outstrip supply. (Plumbing comes to mind.) I am writing here of the independent tradesman, who makes his own hours, and finds his own customers, chiefly through the reputation of his works; and was once the irreplaceable breadwinner of something called a family, living in something called a home.

I am thinking even of “family practitioners” such as doctors. These used to be, and are still wanted, but those who graduate today as MDs are likely to become mere employees, albeit highly paid. House calls are a pain: better to have the customers coming to you, waiting in line at a large institution. And better if they don’t sign your paycheques, for paying inevitably gives a man the idea he has rights. Of course, you may still treat them as if the preservation of their lives were important to you, out of Christian charity or a good mood.

Do you know that, in Canada anyway, doctors once came to the back door? This was because they were tradesmen. Now the customer comes to the doctor’s figurative back door. There are advantages to exchanging a “trade” for a “profession.” One gets all this additional respect.

Gentle reader already knows I am backward; that I will be thinking of so many other trades that became fully-credentialled and bureaucratized professions; journalism being on the long list. In each case, the pay went up considerably, and the problem of collecting on piece-work went away. In return, one sacrificed all of one’s personal independence.

*

Don’t get me wrong: “If you like your job, you can keep it.” I can understand why some people might wish to retain their corporate employment. Those old-fashioned males, with families to support, are especially in my heart, though it would be invidious to explain why, in detail. I think of one job that I particularly hated, which I nevertheless held for more than fifteen years, in exchange for good, regular pay. I had a family to support. For in the world of old-fashioned, a man hadta do what a man hadta do.

On the other hand, in a DINK household (“double income, no kids”) the rules subtly change, or rather change overtly, and no need remains for any sort of manliness. Indeed, should the woman make a substantial income, perhaps the man should live off her. She can claim him for a little break on her taxes, after all. Consider: housework, without kids, is a snip. And when his “partner” gets home, physically and emotionally exhausted from work, burning with the little humiliations she has suffered out there in the “real world,” and seriously hungry into the bargain — he can remind her that they are a “modern” couple. Tasks such as cooking should be shared equally.

But of course, this is old hat. For the most part it also applies where the Red Chinese “one child policy” is obeyed, as across most of urban Canada.

I became fully aware of the new arrangements in a visionary experience, twenty years ago. It consisted of attending a “bake sale” for the public school in which my sons were enrolled (temporarily, I assure you). I got to meet the whole “sorority” in my new liberal neighbourhood. (Kingston, Ontario: never go there.) This was mostly an “audio” vision, I should explain, though it had a video component. I’d never before encountered so many organic whole-earth, leftwing, squeaky-voiced “house husbands,” all in one place. The immediate revelation was that spiritual emasculation actually changes a man’s voice in the same way physical emasculation does.

Among other discoveries was that the men had done most of the baking — which was good, for men often make better bakers. And we turn to the castrati to hit the highest notes.

The women, on the other hand, I could hear roar. The tone in which they addressed their squeakers was beyond instructive. I reflected that if a man spoke to his wife like that, in public, he’d be courting arrest. The feminists had now got exactly what they wanted. (See: The Wife of Bath.)

There was more. The “gender stereotypes” had reversed at every other level. These women were now the sexual aggressors. I recall one in particular — an executive in a local “arts” operation — who had previously called me “fascist” as well as “sexist” in reference to something I had written in a newspaper. That she hated me still, I could take for granted. But right in front of her lamentable husband she was, unbelievably, “flirting.” (The term is over-refined.) The wee fellow looked harmlessly outraged. He made sounds such as I imagine a gerbil makes when his mate shoves him aside. On his fidelity, I’m sure she could rely, for no other woman could want him. But she, for her part, was trawling for something a little more masculine.

Feminism alone could account for the collapse of the birth rate (which does, incidentally, have economic repercussions); for it operates at so many levels, from the neutering of males, to making females so extremely unattractive. It turns upside down the natural order: turns both sexes against themselves as well as each against the other. (As a friend observed at the time: “There is no blood left to be shed in the battle of the sexes in Ontario.”) And feminism can account for many other things; but it cannot account for the rise of feminism. On that, I’m with Marx: one must look for an economic causation.

*

Which returns us to this troubling matter of “employment.” The great majority of people today, who earn any kind of income, are “employees.” This holds for everyone from the humblest office go-fer to the CEO. There may be some “one percent” who live entirely off investments, or in some strangely surviving handicraft trade; but whether well or poorly paid, the other ninety-nine are wage slaves. Our whole modern economy, high tech to low, is built around corporate, as opposed to human, persons.

For this reason I see very little difference between nominal capitalism and nominal socialism, even in efficiency. We’re all working for someone else, and therefore to the rules they lay down for our employment. While the guvmint may seize much of that income, and add gratuitous extra bites into the time we have left between work and sleep, there is little to choose between working for a government department or a large corporation. In either case one is a meaningless, easily replaceable cypher. A small corporation may be a little different, until it either grows or dies, but the regulatory matrix ties “the system” together. Small but genuine freedoms — so small as lighting a cigarette after supper, or upon taking Berlin — are gradually “phased out” owing to the corporate need for totalitarian conformity (or, “diversity” as the publicists for Big Brother now call it).

Let me admit, I become more and more Distributist, as time moves along. The world from which we came — in which the overwhelming majority of men, from farmers to town tradesmen, were “self-employed” — was a world in which individual responsibility was unavoidable, and men and women could not be interchanged. It was also an environment more under the stars, where the continuity of human society could not be abstracted: we stood exposed to reality itself. There was no question children would be raised. There was no question that the price of raising them would be paid, including the sacrifice of vanities. We did not look on posterity with indifference.

The technology of “the pill” and so forth comes into this, but only tangentially. For the shape of that technology is itself an artefact of the social and economic order, and not, as mindless fatalists believe, vice versa. For our machines are designed to facilitate our way of living, and provide us with what we might plausibly want. The technology is not randomly developed, but market-driven and purpose-built. We wanted, for instance, to detach sex from pregnancy. (You mean we didn’t?) This was a technical issue, and so the “problem” was solved. The moral issue was not somehow overlooked, but deemed irrelevant. Nothing “just happened.”

And so, on the larger historical scale. We were tired of taking risks to make a living, and having to depend for survival upon ourselves. Men became tired of being men, and women tired of being women. There was too much responsibility. We longed to “return” to the soft life of slavery: to the child’s experience of being taken care of, by creatures much larger than ourselves. We designed all the “safety nets” — not only technology like “the pill,” but the laws to make contraception available and encourage its promotion. We were tired of our painful personal independence, in which we’d had to make moral choices, and face the consequences of our acts. And so, that “problem” was identified and solved.

We created the Nanny State, which is much more than big guvmint; for it is big business, too. We created the legal order in which the “joint stock company” — i.e. the faceless corporation — was transformed from a widely-recognized evil, into the normal way of conducting business. We gave individual owners laws to hide behind: “limited liability” even for the dumbest of their investment mistakes. The “mass market” was an invented thing. And we all bought in, to the convenience of indentured labour — to “freedom” from our old, very personal independence. This was what we wanted.

Given this, it should be seen that the “sexual revolution” follows; for among slaves, sex can be free. They have no real families, whose claims might be enforced by law. Willy-nilly, the couple, and their children, may be split up. This is sad, but one gets used to evil. While the slaves must do their master’s bidding, when he is watching, licence is theirs once out of his sight. And the occasional roll in the hay is a consolation in the slave’s life. What, after all, is the danger? Chance pregnancies provide master with extra slaves: he needn’t impose himself as a moralist. Or may, if he wants: it is all up to him. I trust gentle reader begins to see the parallels.

The “liberated” man (playboy), and the “liberated” woman (feminist), and the “liberated” trans-sexual for that matter, don’t have to worry about the consequences, either, whether to society or even to themselves. It is their master who must do the worrying, about the demography and all that; and now he’s just a big faceless machine. And he rewards and punishes, as one might expect from a machine: with an indifference to the fate of individuals that a human slave master might consider unconscionable.

Beginning some time towards the middle of the XIXth century in England, and other quickly urbanizing places, then moving forward through every other country, like a cancer at whatever speed, feminism happened, in a new form, unlike that in any previous society. (Those who think some “second wave” sisterhood began with Betty Frieden and Gloria Steinem should be better informed: for there has been generational wave after wave since the 1840s.) It spread wherever it had become economically possible; and everywhere a new fecklessness in men was the flip side. It arrived, in other words, with the factories: with the new economic arrangements and the hourly wage, promising a freedom which is actually the opposite of independence; and to provide for families in a way that would ultimately destroy them.

It arrives, not as the front slicing edge, but as the final mincing dicer of modernity. It becomes indistinguishable from that modernity. It completes the destruction of each “traditional society,” with its networks of personal relations: gravels it down. It replaces time-honoured customs with picayune rules and regulations. It assembles people into arbitrary groups, and governs on the basis of statistics. It expresses the reduction of the whole human condition to the equality of warm bodies in a “labour force.” But nowhere is this an accident. The world we have is the utopia we wanted: the world of our dreams.

*

My comparison of modern workers to slaves may seem unreasonable to some readers; I should add a qualification. Traditionally, slaves were delivered into captivity by slave-dealers; we, as a people, delivered ourselves. And while a slave may, spiritually, detach himself from his fate, and feel inwardly free even while outwardly enchained, our slavery is more fundamental. We have taken our material circumstances as our vocation. We are as much enslaved to the consumerism on which our economy now depends, as to our wage-paying employers. And while the traditional slave might be hoping for someone to come and free him from his bondage, we hope any such do-gooder will stay away from us. The slave knew that his estate was the opposite of freedom; we think our enslavement is freedom itself. And so forth. I wouldn’t want anyone to come away with the impression that I thought our slavery an improvement on the older arrangements, bad as they were.

Everyone loves a countdown to a bomb or a rocket launch, and who am I to get in the way of such simple pleasures? We (in the sense of, I, together with a selection of my personae) went out to what proved a “New Year’s Party” last night, for the first time in years. I was under the impression I’d be dropping by after the first Mary Mother of God Mass, to wish well upon two old lady friends (one visiting from Funcouver), only to discover all these young persons there. They appeared to be Christians, so I felt safe.

The countdown to Midnight is now choreographed, I see, from a computer screen on a side table. Our kindly hostess fills glasses with prosecco, and we prepare to down them at 00:00. One flinches, of course, from the fear someone may start singing “Auld Lang Syne” — but no, I was the only person of the Scottish genetic persuasion, and safe from starting it myself thanks to my pathological hatred of Robbie Burns.

Instead — assuming the young assembled at this party are a representative sample of “these young people today” — you raise toasts to Charles Martel, Godfrey of Bouillon, Don John of Austria and the like; dwell lovingly upon a few defunct Catholic dynasties, and then burst into the Kaiserhymne.

*

This morning I rise, a little later than customary, to an inbox full of oldies with their medical problems. In light of rather tedious discussions of a pharmaceutical nature, I am coming to prefer these “modern youff.”

Please, you poor old gits, refuse your medications. Since metrication, Canadian doctors are bound to make decimal-place errors, and if they think you’re statistically “at risk” of, say, heart disease, you’ll get some rat-kill blood thinner, at ten times the dose. I’ve seen so many turned into vegetables that way. Whatever they give you, dump it in the toilet. And if you fear “death in the afternoon,” as my little sister says (she being, like me, the child of a good nurse), “Don’t fret it. There’s still stuff you can do in the morning.”

We are all “at risk” on this frigging planet. Get over it. Follow my advice and you will stick with simple herbal remedies such as tobacco. (It helps strengthen the lungs, and is the only known cure for neurosis.) Wine and whisky are also good, and of course beer for earlier in the day when you’re working. (“Small beer” for the kids at breakfast, before sending them out to work in the fields.)

It is the first of January. New by-laws in the Greater Parkdale Area; and no one with the guts to defy them. You can’t even smoke on the roof any more (while you’re looking for those goose nests). The Ford brothers are gone from our municipal government — foreign readers will be appalled to learn — and we have instead this wussy new mayor, John Tory. A misnomer if there ever was one. I am a Tory, after all: I know what a Tory is. This guy is pixels.

Gott erhalte Franz, den Kaiser, / Unsern guten Kaiser Franz! …

It is the day of the year when I request a special Ave of gentle reader, because it is the anniversary of my own reception into Holy Church — in the chapel of the Fathers of the Toronto Oratory, here in Parkdale where I still live, purposely to be in their parish. Eleven years have now passed. No longer may people call me a “baby Catholic.” (I am thinking of one woman in particular, who called me that perhaps a dozen times, a few years ago, in the course of a five-minute harangue.) I must now be acknowledged as a growing boy.

The choice of the Feast of Saint Sylvester (also last day of the civil year, &c) was not mine. It was suddenly proposed by Father Robinson, the priest who, after several months of catechizing me in delightful, broad-ranging conversations, suddenly decided: “You’ll do.” I was the more surprised by the date he selected, when I reflected on a long personal history of New Year’s Eve events.

The Father couldn’t know about them, for I had never thought to mention: that in my wild youth, through the early 1970s, every single New Year had brought with it some unforeseeable adventure (not always edifying). It was a string: for each year found me in a new country, where I didn’t really know anyone, and was expecting to spend the evening alone. But again and again, “something came up,” and I was swept up in that something. In one case I was lucky to see dawn, New Year’s Day, for with an Australian companion-of-the-moment, I’d come close to being murdered the night before. (Should Peter d’Abbs ever read this, please drop me a line.)

Most memorably, it was on this day in anno 1969 — the 31st of December — that I had finally and irretrievably “hit the road,” leaving my childhood behind me at age sixteen. For that reason, it was already a significant date in my personal calendar. My father, and his father, also left home, to go off in the world, age sixteen; I had already resolved on my sixteenth birthday not to slip behind them. I had secretly prepared my leave-taking, from the security of a good home: forming habits to toughen myself, putting money aside, and carefully studying guides to “the roads of East Asia.” It shocks even me to think back and realize, that I knew exactly what I was doing.

And now I remember the face of my poor, weeping mother. I had travelled alone some distances before, but only “to and from.” I had played “pilot” to my mother and little sister, when we’d been travelling without my father, in the same Asia: she knew I had some sense of direction. But now I told her I was leaving for good, and would not be talked down. Papa usefully interceded for me, saying: “He’s a man now, Florrie, he makes his own decisions.” Poor mama just wept and wept; but also started an old family joke by saying, “I keep seeing you lying in a ditch somewhere, with your little feet in the air.” (She was repeating this line for laughs, even on her deathbed, forty-three years later.)

How did the priest choose such an auspicious personal anniversary? It was the sort of “Jungian synchronicity” that Catholics have understood for a long time.

*

Sylvester I, the Pope we commemorate on this Seventh Day of Christmas, reigned 314 to 335 AD. He was contemporary with Constantine the Great (reigned 306 to 337). Sylvester did not attend the Council of Nicaea (325), but sent his delegates and concurred in the Creed that declared the Son fully one in substance with the Father — “very God of very God” — thus distinguishing Catholic teaching from the Arian heresy. A shy and retiring man, from what I make out at this immense distance, I have thought of him sometimes as a kind of “Paul VI” in that Nicaean era — maintaining orthodoxy at least to the letter as well as he could, while surrounded by wilfully destructive powers of which he could not get the mastery. (Reader may take this, as all my other speculations, with a truckload of salt.)

We who still live in the dark shadow of Vatican II, might remind ourselves of the plight of the faithful Catholics who lived in the shadow of the Council of Nicaea. They endured much. For several generations it appeared that the Church — suddenly liberated from external persecution by Constantine — was now being overthrown from within. The Arians may not have prevailed at the Council, but they acted just as if they had, and were triumphant not only in schismatic movements, but among the Church’s own “liberal,” “broad-minded” bishops. Worse, in a sense, “moderate” factions arose, playing games with words and offering the confused new dimensions of bewilderment.

Rather as today, it was an age of the rhetorical “but” — the “but” of humbuggery. See Father Hunwicke’s blog through the last four days (starting here), to discover what I mean. A perfectly orthodox statement is made, then qualified after a “but” in a way that sounds plausible, but is actually deceitful. This is among the world’s oldest sophistical sleights-of-hand, for the “but” privileges the statement that comes after, thus undermining the statement that came before — while leaving the dishonest man who uttered the whole sentence an escape if he is challenged. To expose his trick, one has simply to reverse the statements. (Hunwicke provides an extreme example from the recent Extraordinary Family Synod in Rome, in which the “both/and” of doctrine and compassion is thus sleazily turned into an “either/or.”)

The Fourth Century is of exceptional interest, for parallels to our own situation. Once again, faithful Catholics find themselves in the quandary of having bishops to obey, whom they cannot fully trust. We have heretics in high places who play games with words, to alter Church teaching while pretending to follow it, “in the Spirit of Vatican II” — where, in fact, what they are now preaching was never proclaimed, and often explicitly condemned. We find ourselves in these circumstances often abandoned by our shepherds, or worse, led towards the wolves rather than away from them, with that shrugging attitude of, “Who am I to judge?” And our task, as faithful Catholics — both lay and ordained — is now as then, to pray, and keep Our Lord’s genuine teaching alive in our own devoted hearts.

Or as John Muggeridge often put it: “Don’t let the bastards drive you out of the Church!”

For in time, now as then, the Church will be righted, and the old Gnostic swamp gas will once again disperse as if it had never been.

Read: The Arians of the Fourth Century, by John Henry Cardinal Newman; and also I should say his very telling essay, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.” Then consult his motto, from out of the Confessions of Augustine: Cor ad cor loquitur, “heart speaks to heart.”

*

These words, Cor ad cor loquitur, were written in the hand of the same John Muggeridge (1933–2005). He quoted them in a note to me, inscribed on the inside cover of a book he gave me at my Reception, eleven years ago today — an anthology, or synthesis, entitled, The Heart of Newman, arranged by the heroic Jesuit priest and philosopher,  Erich Przywara.

John Muggeridge — my beloved friend, example, and guide — was dying quietly of cancer. He, too, had been a Catholic convert. On the flyleaf, I find an inscription not from, but to John, written a generation before by another man (“Donald Neilson, priest”), citing the same phrase. Thus has our faith been handed down, person to person, and heart to heart, these last two thousand years — including, in prayer, cor-ad-cor with the man Jesus.

Often through the centuries we were up against the wall, at least outwardly in worse shape than today. Several times the Church herself came closer to extinction. Moments of victory (remember Constantine) turned to ashes; terrible defeats conversely to glory. The great ship of Holy Church has capsized, and been righted, many times, by the “hidden hand” of the Holy Spirit; saved when no men could possibly have saved her. And through the worst moments, some faithful have persisted, in obedience to the still small voice of a conscience correctly formed. We have been martyred, but also many times, we have been abandoned and left, uncatechized and unabsolved, to the wolves by unworthy shepherds. But we have never been abandoned by Christ, to Whom we may turn, always.

I knew what I was getting into, when I joined the Roman Church. I had watched from within the destruction of the Anglican communion, by their own liberal clergy, forgetting Christ in their eagerness to keep up with the Zeitgeist; and I was vividly aware that plenty of the same garbage would be found, littering the other bank of the Tiber. On balance, to my happy surprise, life in the Catholic Church has turned out to be easier than I expected. Which is not to say she isn’t in a very bad way; and honesty requires us to admit this openly. Yet I remain convinced, that even while the old “reformed” churches continue to the bottom, Christ will keep his promise. And the old, “unreformed,” Barque of Peter will stay afloat. For I believe that God does keep his promises.

*

From Newman’s mission prayer:

“I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.”

Saint Sylvester and Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us.

The gold rings we have received in chorus, and the colly birds (“colly” means black), the French hens, the turtle doves and verily: the pear-tree’d partridge. Moreover, we look forward to the swans a-swimming, the maids a-milking, the ladies dancing, the lords a-leaping, the pipers piping, and in their due course, the drummers drumming upon the Eve of the Epiphany of Our Lord. But for the moment we will be quite contented with our goose eggs. Take what you get, I always say.

In the year of grace 1979, we learn from the standard gliberal sources, Hugh Duncan McKellar, hymnologist of Petrolia, Ontario — who once offered a rather suspicious article to my Idler magazine — wrote an enchanting account of the origins of this “Twelve days of Christmas” carol. He said it was composed for the Recusants of the underground in the reign of Bad Queen Bess. Each of the gifts mentioned in the song is, with its number, an item in a secret catechizing code. God is the “true love,” the partridge is Jesus, there are two Testaments, three Theological Virtues, four Gospels, five Books of Moses, six Days of Creation, seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, eight Beatitudes, nine Fruits of the Spirit, ten Commandments, eleven faithful Apostles, and twelve, count ’em twelve, dogmas in the Apostles’ Creed.

That none of this could possibly have surprised an Anglican, was the first clue. The late McKellar (1932–2012, and God rest him for a sweet, charming man) had made the story up from whole cloth. He was happy to admit this. Unfortunately, it has since gone round the Internet a few million times, thanks to well-intentioned but rather simple-minded Catholic enthusiasts, and keeps coming back as eggs in their faces.

But wait. … Add all the gifts up, cumulatively through the twelve days, then add the True Love at the end and you have … exactly … the 365 days in a non-leaping year. I got this from the Internet, but have personally checked the arithmetic. (An old habit of mine, though nothing to do with my career in journalism. I just don’t trust people.) And I provide this as an absolutely useless, supplementary fact.

The carol does, however, continue to remind us that there are twelve (12) days of Christmas. All are to be taken as days of celebration. We did Advent already, when we were supposed to be abstinent in preparation for this big event; so that anyone who has now stopped drinking and eating to excess should be roundly condemned as a Cafeteria Catholic.

Please, people, remember your Obedience. When Holy Church says stop celebrating, you stop. When she says start celebrating, you start. And you continue until she says stop again. Surely this isn’t hard to understand.

*

Anyone for an omelette?

Geese lay the most delicious eggs, in my humble but irrefutable opinion. The yolks are marvellously rich. The whites may at first disturb the more inflexible hen-egg eaters, for a certain unexpected gelatinous quality, but might grow on them. They may also hesitate before the brighter colours, that suggest nuclear irradiation; but prejudices can be overcome. For a lifetime of eating only one sort of egg closes the mind and darkens the spirit.

Alas it is hard to locate the goose, in the grocery stores of the Greater Parkdale Area, let alone her eggs: I have found that one must order one’s Christmas goose in advance, from the Italians, who are not shy in charging for it. Towards spring, goose eggs may or may not appear in the St Lawrence Market. Ask patiently, and never give up.

In England, goose eggs could be found in season, but only with difficulty in pre-Internet London. In Cornwall, on the other hand, they seemed everywhere towards Easter (in 1977).

Before modernity arrived, with its economies of scale, and over-valuation of labour, a great variety of eggs were collected for the table: including fish eggs, which curiously counted as eggs not fish for Lent and Fridays. The birds were at least semi-domesticated, and were moved about as bee-keepers move their bees from one flowering to another. Methods of reaping, before the introduction of big horrible machines, left e.g. much for the “Michaelmas geese” to glean from the cornlands. Our ancestors did not countenance waste. Their vertical farming, on ropes up cliff faces by the sea, yielded huge supplies of somewhat fishy-tasting eggs from the sea fowl, and it would still be worth doing if only to induce a heart attack in any passing environmentalist. (To my view, and Shakespeare’s, it is always open season on killjoys.)

In principle, one might collect goose eggs oneself, from Lakeside, ravine, or park, but there is probably a law against that, and the birds themselves may try to enforce it. Swan eggs are also spectacular — I speak as a man of the XIIIth century — but trust me, you do not want to mess with an angry swan. Canada Geese, on the other hand, behave in so consistently an unpleasant manner, that it doesn’t make much difference whether they are brooding. They lay clutches of much less than a dozen; other geese lay a dozen plus, so when you’ve found one you’ve found lots more. City apartment dwellers might discover goose nests on the tops of their buildings. (Just saying.)

For what it’s worth, gull eggs can also make very good eating.

A goose egg may be triple the size of a hen egg, and given the usual trouble in making an omelette — keeping the surface from rubbering before the inside is done — it is wise to make one’s omelettes one goose egg at a time. It has also a shell that will defeat a butter knife. But where the connoisseur with hen’s eggs will beat the yolks and whites separately, before folding them together, the goose gourmand needn’t bother. Water is unneeded for the yolk, and its weight will spread yolk through white in an ideal way, with spatula stirring. As any eggs, they cook quickly, so do not begin until your guests are sat at table.

For the life of me, I cannot find a recipe for a goose omelette in any of the several books on mediaeval cookery I see on my shelves, but off the top of my head, chopped parsley, chives, shaved truffle, salt, ground pepper, and grated citrus rind, hammered together, will sprinkle nicely on the top, and perhaps a ricotta or soft cottage cheese melted around asparagus for the filling. Ham strands good, but fatty bacon perhaps over the top. Use plenty of butter, and finish quickly under the grill.

Over-easy, with similar dustings, will fill the whole breakfast plate, and need not be attempted without great confidence, a steady hand, and a Rabelaisian disposition.

The boiling of eggs is, incidentally, a contemptibly modern practice. The roasting of a goose egg in wood ash is, I am told, the proper backward-looking approach, and makes a sumptuous dinner course, but requires instinct or skill in timing and turning. Bear this in mind for the campfire, however, should you find negligent mother geese about.

The gruffness of Thomas Becket (saint and martyr, 1118–1170; feast 29th December) is something that might appeal to the adherents of our Halbbildung. (This is a beautiful German word that means “half-education,” and so much more.) Thomas came from a good family, with some money, and was a good lad by all accounts. (Many, many “instant biographies” were written shortly after his death, providing the modern scholar with an embarras de richesses.) But the money was lost, and after only a year of university (at Paris), Thomas had to leave. It is said his Latin was less than elegant.

We are not well-educated today, to say less than the half of it. I should perhaps speak only for myself in this matter: I did not even make it into the Sorbonne. (Though I did get to the Latin Quarter.) And though I once attended a pretty solid cathedral school (St Anthony’s in Lahore), it was probably not as good as the earlier ones Thomas Becket attended.

*

Now, perhaps I should explain that the late-adolescent Thomas went to the university before it was a university. (Do I use too many parentheses?) The University of Paris was formally established only later in the XIIth century than Thomas lived; but long before that, there were college-like guilds, congregated chiefly around the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève. Each was already, for practical purposes, a universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which is to say, a “community of masters and students.” As elsewhere, across Europe: for cathedrals, abbeys, and monasteries of all sorts were, in their nature, teaching institutions.

This certainly included convents, by the bye, where women were taught, often to a very high level — for in the Middle Ages we did not yet have the horror feminae, or shall we say “gynophobia,” that came with the Reformation. (The distinction between sexes is very Catholic. The depreciation of the female sex is very unCatholic.) Mary Becket, the sister of Thomas, who became Abbess at Barking, is worth mentioning in this respect. Barking Abbey, until its suppression by Henry VIII, was the greatest of England’s “universities” for women, alma mater to so many distinguished ladies of both Church and Court, including Saints and Queens. For nine hundred years it flourished, until the Tudor monster had it crushed. (But that was just an aside.)

It was the same in other towns, where the earliest Universities were founded — Padua, Naples, Salamanca, Oxford, Cambridge, and so forth. We had the thing itself before we had the thing as autonomous institution.

When, later and on his feet with ecclesiastical sponsorship, Thomas went to Bologna and Auxerre, he “graduated” not as theologian but lawyer — yet with a finer grounding in natural law, than would be available in any law school today. He had the reputation of being “not very religious” (but that would require another aside). …

Something was lost, as well as something gained, when the modern University — this entirely Catholic, mediaeval invention — came into being. One might, perhaps, write at length some day about that darker side, which appeared almost immediately in student rioting and much other disgraceful behaviour, reminding us of campus life today. By putting higher education at one remove from ecclesiastical authority, Newman’s liberal (in the best classical sense) “idea of a university” became possible. But it was also like putting a dam across the river. A certain kind of fish was excluded from breeding in the river’s upper reaches; a professorial cabal began jealously to guard and impound the waters. A new kind of authority was created, displaced from the ancestral cure of souls. An intense new flavour of academic smugness was dispersed in society.

One might even argue that the invention of the formal University was the launch of our modern “secular inhumanism”; or put another way, the launch of technocrats and pointy-heads to new positions of power and prestige, as specialist advisers to the princes of this world — soon enjoying the prerogative of the harlot (power without responsibility).

But Thomas Becket was a product of the old school — the church and monastic learning, focused on responsibility itself. His brief tastings of the learned life proved nutrient sufficient to his needs, and I speculate that his graceful strength came to his calling from that pedagogic background: his peculiar sense of the smallness in the largeness of the world; of the completeness of things, the hardness or tactility of a world intentionally created by a divine Maker. One reads this in his surviving Correspondence. He seems to have had, from his early manhood, like our later and more learned Saint Thomas More, a conception of civil society so hardily rooted in the Christian teaching that, almost without thinking, he could stand up to a king.

Becket and More each served as Lord Chancellor of England — the sovereign’s principal adviser in matters both temporal and spiritual, and thus something more than a Prime Minister today. (Becket, befriended by King Henry II for his obvious abilities, was appointed while still in his thirties; then went directly from Westminster to Canterbury in 1162.) Neither was a “mystic” in the fey understanding we have of that word today; both very practical men of affairs. And in the end, each found himself on the Church side of a bitter clash between Church and State; for which he was murdered.

In the case of Thomas of Canterbury, we should all know the story: the four knights of King Henry II coming to dispute with him in the Cathedral, first hiding their weapons outside; then retrieving them when the discussion had not gone their way. The Saint: still kneeling in prayer for them, as his brains were being splattered.

*

The pilgrims, gathered in the Tabard Inn at the outset of the Canterbury Tales, are en route to the Shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in the Canterbury Cathedral — which, through the two centuries to Chaucer, had become the epicentre of English religious life:

And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke …

It is gone now: Henry VIII had it smashed and swept clear, as part of his operation to destroy the old England, and replace God with a Man on the English throne — completing the work begun by his predecessor, Henry II. It was a piece of architectural surgery vastly more significant than the nail-holes Martin Luther left in the door at Wittenberg: for Luther was merely following a mediaeval custom by stating his theses in that way. The destruction of the shrine of Saint Thomas was, to men of that age, the great symbolic act announcing that the State would replace the Church, not only as the temporal, but as the supreme spiritual authority in each land. Henry Tudor had promoted himself from Defender of the Faith, to the legislator of it, and henceforth the True Church would have to go underground.

Or to put this another way, modern education had matured, and the full Reign of the Pointy-Heads was about to begin: the men who believed that they “knew better” than any previous men had known, … and about everything. Or if you will, the people who design Obamacare today.

Henry II had tried the same, before ridding himself of that “turbulent priest,” who faced him so gruffly, and stated his case in such plain language as anyone could understand. From his hunting lodge at Clarendon, Wiltshire, this Henry Plantagenet had promulgated legislation that anticipated Henry Tudor’s, making himself the supreme authority in all matters relating to the Church in England, trundling over her ancient independence and established legal rights with something like glee — in the so-called “Constitutions of Clarendon,” reverenced by the Whig historians.

Henry’s Latin was surely better than Thomas’s. He could read several other languages besides that, some English, and his court French; and then there was his famous ability to be morosely silent in a wide variety of tongues. Had Henry II prevailed, we might well have had something like the Reformation started, then and there, instead of so many centuries later. But the times were not yet propitious: the people understood that kings were not popes. So did other kings, who supported Thomas in his subsequent exile, finally compelling Henry to accept his return. But the clash between the two immediately resumed, for exile had not turned the Archbishop into a wimp.

Thomas Becket defeated Henry II, even in death. In the fullness of his mediaeval conscience, with the Will of God against him, and miracles being attributed, all over the place, to the man he’d had killed, Henry finally acknowledged his error, and had himself scourged for the crime on the Saint’s own tomb. For in the end Henry, too, was a man of his Age — of Faith, — lacking our modern swagger and smugness.

*

To the two Saints Thomas, and more, to Our Lady of Walsingham I look for what is greatest in the English heritage — as also broadest, for all three were justly famed across Europe. Indeed: I have just raised a wee tote to Becket, of Marsala wine — the Cathedral of Marsala in Sicily having been dedicated to our English, but also trans-European Saint, these last eight hundred and forty-ish years. (With difficulty they obtained some relics of the Saint, which later in the goodness of their hearts they returned to Canterbury, when the first post-Reformation Catholic church was allowed to open in that town.) Not even the great shrine-wrecking Henry could take all of that heritage away; and in the Anglican Patrimony, now returned to the Church, we recall much that was long missed from that old Catholic England.

On this Fifth Day of Christmas, we celebrate triumphantly this Saint of Christian truth and valour, against worldly cowardice and lies, and the foetid moral stench of secularism. In the face of Christ’s enemies, when they come to “debate” with weapons hid: Saint Thomas of Canterbury, pray for us.