Essays in Idleness

Recently I attended the wake of an old friend, a certain Randall Telford, who was so unwise as to predecease me. He was a labour lawyer, and usefully so from my point of view, for he brought a charge of “constructive dismissal” on my behalf before a former employer, so nicely that it never went to court, and ended in pints all round. After which he failed to send me a bill. And when I asked after it, he said that paperwork bored him, and that he made too much money anyway, would I be so kind to forget about it.

Randy was a bad Catholic (by his own admission), and to be perfectly frank, a bad poet. On the other hand he was a first-rate motorcyclist, and a contant reader of fine literature. He was also a rather gifted “mate” — from the old school of male companionship, that dates back even before tree-hugging. He taught law, too, in some kind of college, to innumerable pretty young female admirers, and indulged many other agreeable hobbies, including a recent one of growing his hair, a beard, and dressing like an ageing hippie. He hadn’t been a hippie in youth; it was “ageing hippie” that appealed to him. It has begun to appeal to me, too, though the term I prefer is “rubby-dubby.”

Much else was mentioned by an interminable succession of perfectly charming eulogists at his send-off. I think I’d sat through thirteen of them when the em-cee mentioned just five more left until the buffet, and I resolved to brave the winter for an extended smoking session. None of these mawkish elocutions had, however, mentioned Randy’s membership in a secret society to which I also belong. It is informally called the “Borborygmatic Society,” but at formal gatherings, “The Old Fart’s Club.” One is inducted by invitation only, and has no right to refuse. Resignations are also neither permitted, nor advisable. The society consists chiefly of lawyers and effete literary types. We quietly control everything you never hear about in the media. Please never mention the existence of this society to another living soul.

Alas, Randy was one of those health freaks, given to jogging and jumping and eating his salad and not smoking and hardly ever drinking to excess. He was a few years younger than I: none of those people ever makes it to sixty. I wish I could have made him see sense.

Requiescat in pace. The only reason I mention him is from grief, and to justify my headline. For as Randy once said, labour law is the most boring subject ever devised by man. It attracts its practitioners for no reason at all. Nothing could deter a reader more effectively than putting a title like “Labour law” over the top of it. He recommended that tactic, for hiding the most extraordinary revelations in plain sight. Dear Randy. Ave atque vale!

*

A priest writes, apropos my column today over at Catholic Thing, that he is still waiting for a papal social encyclical that expounds II Thessalonians 3:10-12. He is not expecting it any time soon, however.

Gentle reader will recall what Saint Paul had to say:

“When we were with you, we gave this command: that any man unwilling to work should not eat, either. For we hear that some of you are meddlesome enough, but doing no work at all. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and earn their own keep.”

On a sour note of feigned optimism, I post this upon the vernal equinox, a cold blustery miserable overcast day in Parkdale, under plausible threat of blowing snow, after the coldest winter in memory. Spring is not yet in sight. But one must take the longer view, in which these parts were for millennia under more than a mile of ice — so that life on the surface would be the colder for the altitude — and note that the accumulation towards the next glaciation remains quite modest. For all we know the summer may still take it away. Eventually a summer may come which fails to do so, and at the first of those we’ll start moving south. (Our agent Barraco Bammer has done a fine job of Canadianizing the territory we shall eventually occupy.) No one in his right mind up here at this latitude ever feared global warming. Which isn’t to say a plurality are not in their right minds. But the sales pitch for further massive public globalwarmalarm and environmentalcase funding has been undermined.

Simple, but irrefutable, is my own theory of climate change. The Weather Fairies were monitoring the hockey stick diagram and other spuriosities and shams from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, various third-rate redbrick universities, the London Met Office, &c. Human hubris has long irritated them, and that was the last straw. They decided to punish us so unambiguously that no intelligent person could pretend it was “chance.” We may not be in the cusp of a new Ice Age — no such thing is humanly predictable — but take note when the Weather Fairies tell you to chill out.

My other concern, just now, is that sooner or later interest rates must rise. This comes from inattention to the Economy Fairies, with whom we should never toy, for they can become spiteful quicker and on less cause than the Weather Fairies. Everything I know about USA and the West tells me the mild recovery is fake, that the stock prices are illusory, that it all hangs on very cheap money, and that government accounts everywhere seriously understate the aggregate debt. Add a few points to the interest rate, which the Economy Fairies could do in a blink, and the game is up. It could only be played for so long, and I can’t see bottom when it is over. (But then, bottom is usually what we don’t see.) The most worrying part is their delayed action. This most likely means the Economy Fairies have moved beyond routine spite, and are saving for a bigger catastrophe.

I have consulted several reasonably successful investors on this, asking for the upside. None could provide one. Their suggestions range from purchasing shares in gold and silver mines, to stocking up on tinned food. There was also some advice on guns and ammo. This would not be for self-defence, alone. Hunting skills will also be important in the new economy.

Which takes us to the loss, this week, of two of my favourite living people. One was Clarissa Dickson Wright, an advocate of the hunt, indeed a magnificent woman who consciously sacrificed her media career, once she had stored up enough eating money, by outraging every right-thinking, gliberal person in the United Kingdom, right across the field of political incorrectitude. Dead now, at the tender age of sixty-six. (Her health had been impaired by the quinine in the tonic water she poured to excess into her harmless gin.)

I met her many years ago in her cookery bookstore in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh: it was love at first sight. A woman of formidable girth, and heroic appetite, she could drink even Scotsmen under the table. She had, too, one of the sharpest minds of her generation, and easily the sharpest in the British media. A life-long indifference to nonsense had led her from one adventure through another, including the inheritance and purposeful dissolution of a large fortune. Her work on behalf of red meat, butter and cream, as one of the “Two Fat Ladies” — along with her devoutly Catholic colleague Jennifer Paterson, also of sainted memory — will stand as one of the two great accomplishments of the BBC. (The other was of course Monty Python.) I imagine them ascending Mount Purgatory together in Miss Paterson’s motorcycle with double-wide sidecar. “Fat, loud, outspoken,” according to one of the more respectful obituaries, they were both examples of what I adoringly call “insolent women.” (An essay on this topic may follow, in due course.)

Meanwhile, in India, and at the tender age of ninety-nine, we have lost a delightful opponent of the hunt, in Khushwant Singh. He was as vociferous against the shikaar, or princely pursuit of big game, as Ms Dickson Wright was champion to the fox hunt. His column in the Hindustan Times, entitled, “With Malice Towards One and All,” will be missed up here in the High Doganate. He kept it up to the eve of his death; it was always entertaining. I had also the honour of meeting this man in passing, and found him as most vicious satirists, a kindly and empathetic soul.

His books are all readable, for all are light and slight, especially his celebrated two-volume History of the Sikhs, in which the scholarship is almost indetectable. Khushwant (my apology for this familiarity, but India is over-supplied with Singhs) was an agnostic, and nearly a vegetarian. He subscribed to the ancient subcontinental notion of Ahimsa: that we should not kill people or animals gratuitously, and should by preference go about most tasks in a non-violent way. But then he supported “euthanasia”: in the Jainist or Eskimo manner, i.e. oldies who have become a burden should find a way to push off. Fortunately, except a bit of wheezing, he never found himself in that situation, and remained a profit centre to his extended family. Verily, all of his views were mistaken, on everything, so far as I could make out; he even supported Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency.” But notwithstanding, what a lovely man.

Well, I can come out of the High Doganate now, I think St Patrick’s Day is over. Toronto, or as I prefer to call it, the Greater Parkdale Area, was once well supplied with essentially peaceable, law-abiding bona fide Irish immigrants who went to their jobs in the morning, and to Mass on Sundays if not other days, and you knew where you stood with them. Owing to the passage of several asteroids, they have been replaced by a new species of surely fake Irish, wearing silly hats and putting green dye in their beer on the 17th of March, and while the great majority of these are entirely non-violent, you’d best not go near a pub that day. Any pub: for on that day even Outer Mongolians seem to think they are Irish, and behave according to some unedifying national stereotype. Best to stay home, and drink tea, and read Dostoevsky.

A correspondent kindly favoured me with a collection of Irish sayings for yesterday’s occasion, which I of course deeply mulled. In reply I offered this quick batch of Scots proverbs:

He has a hole aneath his nose.   

A penny hained’s a penny clear, and a preen a-day’s a groat a-year.
 
It’s past joking when the head’s aff.
 
Twa blacks winna mak a white.
 
Sodgers, fire, and water soon mak room for themsels.
 
God help the rich folk, for the poor can beg.

The first step to virtue is to love it in anither.
 
Nae man can thrive unless his wife will let him.
 
An idle brain is the deil’s smiddy. …

Gentle reader is requested to memorize them. All will prove pertinent to the disquisition ahead.

Only the first of these came from my mama (may she rest in peace), the rest from perusing the Scots literature, such as it is. And I have a cheat: a book of Scottish Proverbs (compiled by Andrew Henderson about 1805, rev. James Donald; Glasgow, 1882) with which, should battle ensue, any number of additional may be pressed into combat. (“Another for Hector,” as they say.)

*

We were discussing marriage the other day, from the sacramental angle, as it has been disintegrating in Ireland, Scotland, England, America, across the European continent, and elsewhere. To a Catholic mind, the sacrament stands apex to a wide range of human experience — that between a man and a woman — but the human experience in itself comes to something, and has been worked with, in itself, by every known culture and through all religious traditions. It can be considered, as Thomas Aquinas would consider it, in its philosophical as well as its theological aspect, by the light of the human reason, with which we were by our Creator endowed.

Why do so many marriages fail, once the social and religious pressure that used to help hold them together is withdrawn? For if the full problem is to be properly addressed, it must be considered, too, from this low angle.

My late wise mama, from whom I should have been taking notes, once provided the formula: “Never get married because you want to be together. Only get married because you can’t be apart.”

The advice was of course not original to her. It had belonged to many generations, in the free countries, among their free classes, where marriages were not strictly arranged. But from my own generation down, it seems to me that it is now omitted. It is often nevertheless understood, and what seems like “luck” may operate, but the idea in itself is not consciously taught, not driven into the young until they cannot forget it. The alternative idea, rather scientistic in the sense that it honours “experiment” as an end in itself, is that we should home in by trial and error. Sometimes we are invited to be fully rational: very poor advice indeed for the young, when they are hormonally challenged.

By now, among those young who are consciously Catholic, there is some unintended additional confusion. I will have my wrists slapped here for resisting what is now received as almost catechetical instruction. The young are exhorted to pray on the matter, a practice of which I wholeheartedly approve. Christ, and Mother Mary our Queen of Hearts, most certainly come into the judgement, and can be reached by earnest prayer. But their operation cannot be confined to the prayer stall. It must be put into service in the rough and tumble of everyday life. The mistake is to assume that marriages can be “arranged,” by miraculous cosmic forces — when these will only ever be discerned in retrospect, not in prospect.

Hence, to my mind, the high failure rate, even in marriages between “traditionalists.” They have put too much emphasis on the abstractly and externally “divine,” not enough on what is divine within, or in terms of, the human; on “rules” in the plural beyond rule in the singular. They are not living in a culture wherein “arranged marriages” are easily sustained. They should look every seemingly heaven-sent gift-horse in the mouth. They must instead go out in the rough and tumble and find mates for themselves. Or better, let the heavenly forces secretly find them, while they are not actively looking.

We are given to recall a very simple moral rule: so simple that anyone can remember it, and in any situation. It is the crucial rule, from which all lesser rules in this subject are derived. In a word, it is chastity. My own quite unCatholic mama would have affirmed this. The prospectively married couple are fatally blocked from discovering whether they might actually be compatible — through all the ages and stages of man — from the moment their “relationship” has turned sexual. And if this happens on the second date, they may never know each other at all: since first dates are, by surviving custom, given over to projecting illusions.

This has incidentally to do with why the Church must hold the line on contraception, as Paul VI did so courageously, even against the mockery that would be offered to him back in 1968. He had thought it through, not only from the divine angle, but from the human. That is what makes Humanae Vitae such a profound document: as I realized on carefully reading it, long, long, before I became a Catholic myself.

Almost any young, hormonally loaded couple can imagine themselves inseparable for a moment, while they are in bed. It is rather the aspect of friendship, within marriage, that they will overlook. And to make this more complex: the friendship that can exist between a man and a woman is itself different in kind from “friendship” in the generic; for it is in itself more in the nature of eros than amicitia, or rather, the two are mysteriously fused. It goes deeper than animal copulation; raising even that to a level that is not merely animal any more. Which is why, incidentally, the Church has always allowed marriage between those of years so ripe, that child-bearing can no longer come into the expectation. And why she has also smiled upon “natural family planning,” which unlike the artificial kind, involves conscious restraints between two persons, who have become one flesh.

*

On the other hand, I think the Church has always looked suspiciously, and rightly so, on the cult of “the single.” The world does contain natural bachelors and old maids, of no special religious calling, just as it contains other less mentionable kinds of loners. Luck, including bad luck, may come into this, too. “No one ever asked me,” was the response I used to get when, as a boy, I queried certain old ladies. The alternative reply would be given by the ancient photograph of a young man in uniform, atop the piano. “He died in the War.”

Christ can work with anything, but that does not make all stations equal.

There is, both in secular feminist life, and in traditional religious, today, a specific cult of single women. That is, the state of singularity dressed up as a quasi-religious calling. I specify the sex, for I have found nothing similar among men, who for whatever reason seldom ideologize or theologize their single status. My guess is that this is undermining marriage to a greater degree than anyone realizes. A great show is made of the spiritual opportunities available to those who live alone. But if there were a religious calling, I doubt that it would be to contemporary single life.

There is danger in being too much alone, which some may try carefully to avoid through church and acquaintance. Family life is full of distraction, but it is also full of spiritual opportunities not available to single persons; in a sense monastic life is also familial in nature. The aspect of Christian marriage: that intimacy founded not only between two united in mutual regard, but in the aspiration in each to get the other into heaven, is lost on our contemporaries; the daily mutual spiritual direction, even more lost: the masculine and feminine spirituality which balance and even mutually correct. As well, there is discipline in family life, from responsibilities that go beyond one person; for that person is required to put spouse and children and perhaps the surviving oldies ahead of himself. I think the Church has always looked upon those who are decisively “single” as self-indulgent, even self-obsessed; as laws unto themselves under no vows or regular external observation. And today, even if she had consistently good spiritual directors, she would not have enough to go round.

But “not wanting to be alone” is a very poor excuse for a “relationship.” However mild, it is a form of fear. Whereas, love is active, directed, positive, even in its most intimate stillness. We know that from prayer; it is also true “in life.” We are between Scylla and Charybdis here.

*

“Most men struggle more with being alone than women do,” according to one of my sage informants, a single woman now entering middle age.

There’s a fine essay topic, in itself. It is probably true, with the usual one-in-five exceptions. Speaking as the thumb in this digital arrangement — the male who finds himself living singly after the usual catastrophes of the post-modern era, and coping for all that reasonably well — I think of two things I knowingly sought, for having seen in my own parents, but did not find. One was the intimacy that could only exist between a man and a woman; the other the inspiration that comes to a man from the love of a woman. Both have been subtly marked as acts of selfishness on the part of the man: his need to love, and his need to be loved. In my sons’ world, both have been “moralized” by some version of the feminist ideology nearly out of existence, and I watch the young men wither from it.

Many are actually called to the celibate life, in both sexes, and I think in present circumstances the Church has great difficulty accommodating them; and they have difficulty accommodating themselves. Do women handle this better than men? Probably. But from the little I know, most are involuntary members of this class: for most truly wanted children.

It is probably easier for a man to find a woman than for a woman to find a man, under present circumstances: or so I am assured by many women. For a woman cannot be a woman with the post-modern male: he has had the “paternalism” — the good husband qualities — kicked out of him before he has even grown up, and so he stays not-grown-up forever. He is a Lothario, a “playboy,” and given his failure at that, more usually just a pornography addict. The women in turn become more masculine not only from the dictates of feminism, but from what those dictates have done to the men. Women are now stuck playing by men’s rules in “the economy,” with which only a power-hungry few feel comfortable; and as I’ve been told by more than one female corporation executive, who may never be married, it is wives these successful working women want, not husbands: someone to take care of “home.”

“Home” is here a very large concept. It includes that sense of place, also overlooked in the rush of our economic and social “progress.” It includes many, many other things, which are now disparaged. We live in urban caravans, always ready to move. As a person who has actually “travelled the world,” and therefore feels homesick for quite a few places, I can only triangulate to the original condition, and see it in old photographs of a certain farm near Louisbourg in Cape Breton — where my mama’s people once settled, and to which they were rooted for a century-and-a-half. (Nothing left of that now but a collection of fading tombstones overgrown by woods.)

Against this, we pose the attraction of working nine-to-five, which is I think no one’s natural calling — male or female.

Christ is Christ and this earth is transient. We will all be dead soon enough. But I do feel wistful for what has been lost, and desolate for the terrible spiritual cost of what has been lost, and could take centuries to recover. In particular, that outwardly recognized hierarchy of Love, which made among other things the Church more sustainable.

One of the most useful passages in the Bible is in Saint Peter’s second general Epistle (3:16, if I may be so pedantic). There are quite a few parallel passages, but in this his second “encyclical,” our first Pope says explicitly that there are passages in Scripture hard to understand. The ignorant and the unstable are inclined to twist these, and it is sad because they do it to their own destruction. It seems a fair remark to me, for I have often seen this happen, and as an ignorant and unstable person myself, to say nothing of immodest, I have sometimes felt I knew better than the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church could know through twenty centuries of careful exposition. In other words, I still have Protestant tendencies: though I find with age they are fading away.

“I don’t know” is a good answer, especially when it is the truth. This is more often than one might at first suspect, for in what appeared straightforward questions of Biblical exegesis, I have often discovered that I were a fool. So is everyone dependent upon translations, and too, those who believe they know the original tongues quite well, for each contained traps enough for their native speakers. Language provides a gloss on experience, but often the gloss is on closer examination less clear than the experience to which it refers. Trying to reconstruct the experience from the gloss — or as we might say, the full reality of Christ from the Scriptures — may require more than the linguistic and archaeological knowledge supplied even through our drive-in post-secondary institutions.

I was thinking this when some members of my Commentariat were discussing the passage, “And I say to thee, that thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The question was about what the gates of hell would be doing — surely they will not be attacking anyone. For what it’s worth, my first two cents would have been to observe that πύλης could mean “gates” quite literally, but in the Greek of that age meant also by extension some power or authority. Also, that in my Peshitta, or Aramaic version of the Scriptures (and Aramaic was, apparently, the language in which Jesus was originally speaking), the verb equivalent to the Greek κατισχύσουσιν which suggests “prevail,” comes through to English better as “withstand,” so that the whole clause may be translated, “the doors of Sheol may not shut upon it.” Now, the Greek verb was itself future, indicative, and active. We would thus indeed be discussing what happens to the gate, and not what the gate will be doing.

The whole passage, somewhat mysterious by the time it is rendered into English, and perhaps a little philosophical and abstract at the edges of the Greek, becomes crystal clear in the Aramaic. Or so I am given to understand: for I am frankly unable even to give taxi directions in that language.

Scripture may be twisted, but the Church cannot be stopped. And Christ, whose Church she is, may go anywhere He pleases, even into Hell, as he demonstrated. This — and please correct if I am wrong — is consistent with what the Church has taught through all the intervening centuries: that there is a hole in the Enemy’s defences. Verily, the Enemy’s defence is finally one big hole; but now I am going a little beyond Scripture, into scholastic territory.

Sometimes we may find that the hole has even wormed into our Church. But I wouldn’t panic: holes have a tendency to close over time. They lack structural integrity. And it is best to avoid arguing with a hole, or otherwise jumping in. For in Christ’s mysterious words, “Resist ye not evil.” By doing good instead, we fill the ground around and assist the hole in collapsing. On the better days, true Authority arrives with the plug.

*

The paragraphs above were not inspired by Scripture nor Tradition, incidentally, but by a couple of heretical (Mormon) missionaries who got into my building, ignoring the warning against solicitors at the front door. They have just been seen off by my magnificent superintendress, aptly named “Angelina,” who revels in her title as “the Scottish harridan.” (And did she put the fear of God into them!) My task was simply to keep them talking until Angelina arrived. Biblical exegesis was the trap.

It is true, today is the first anniversary of the election of the present Pope. Fortunately no one asks me to appear on talk shows any more, where, given as little as five minutes to blather, I’d be sure to say something wrong. God bless Pope Francis! May he become the very embodiment of our Scripture and Tradition, our lion standing guard, that not one jot nor one tittle shall in any wise pass from our Law!

Meanwhile my thoughts turn to Jonathan, a large tortoise to be found on the grass of Plantation House in St Helena’s Island. (They have also Myrtle, Frederika, David, and Emma.) According to the BBC, that unimpeachable source of daily news, Jonathan has now reached the age of one hundred and eighty-two, which must make him our oldest named land animal. Only one hundred and thirty-two of those years can be documented, however. He arrived, as others since deceased, fully mature from the Seychelles back in 1882. For a tortoise of that kind, “fully mature” implies about fifty years of age. Therefore he might be a little younger, or perhaps a lot older. It is speculated that the tortoises of this species — Aldabra Giants — can, under ideal conditions in which sailors never make them into soup, live to the quarter of a millennium.

Jonathan is well-treated on those grounds, even spoilt. The curious are kept at a reasonable distance, and he is conscientiously attended to. No Governor of St Helena could want Jonathan to die on his watch. Notwithstanding, the animal shows some effects of age. He has cataracts (but also a very powerful beak, so must be fed with caution). He may have lost his sense of smell. But his hearing is extremely sharp, and he doesn’t miss a meal call. He is also a perfectly affectionate creature, who loves to have the back of his neck scratched. More than affectionate, to the younger female giant tortoises, we are given to understand: a noisy and aggressive Priapus.

Thanks to BBC’s sidebar, I don’t have to count: Jonathan has outlived eight monarchs, and fifty-one British prime ministers. He was born before Victoria came to the throne. I pray that Elizabeth will live even longer. Indeed, any occasion is a good one for Loyalty, so let me add, God save the Queen!

According to some statistics, 6 per cent of the world’s Catholics live in the United States. They account for 80 per cent of the annulments granted in Rome. Add Canada into that, and I begin to wonder if the Church actually has a serious “annulment problem,” yet. She certainly would if she allowed our American decadence to spread. I sometimes think many of her other problems could also be solved, simply by excommunicating everyone north of the Rio Grande.

But then I look at Ireland. I was raised in the belief that it was a Catholic country. It had stayed that way through centuries of siege by my Protestant ancestors, who in the end did not even manage to take all of Ulster. By osmosis I learnt that the Irish were impossible. They could not even be killed off. Lord, we tried. Starved them out and they somehow found boats: started washing up everywhere else. No matter how poor, no matter how desperate, they clung to their Mass. That old Ireland: the pre-eminent scandal of the British Empire, so close to Home. Even the Scots could be co-opted. Even the Welsh understood threats. Nothing could be done about Catholic Ireland. Decades before their cut-and-run from huge unmanageable India, little Ireland had made the English give up.

Only the Irish could defeat the Irish, and now they have done it to themselves. In the space between the last two censuses the number of divorced people in Ireland has much more than doubled. The number attending Mass has plummetted, and there is every other indication of religious and familial collapse. In my now Catholic view, they have sold their souls for a mess of EU pottage, and got in addition a staggering bill. They have bought into the post-modern void, and are voiding all over themselves.

In Ireland, according to some item I read recently in the Irish Independent, applications for annulment, which had never been numerous, have sharply fallen: they halve, while divorces double. The truth is that no one can be bothered any more. It was a different situation to start with. In America, from what I can see, annulment applications are rubber-stamped. Often one party to the annulment is not even consulted. The only trial is waiting the requisite long time for the papers to rise to the top of successive bureaucratic heaps. From the blank application before me, I see it is assumed the applicant has already found — is probably living with — another squeeze. The only Catholic touch seems to be the assumption that person is oppositely sexed. I’m sure objections have been raised to that restriction.

Whereas in Ireland I learn, as a holdover from the past, only a minority of applicants get beyond the application. Some 40 per cent are rejected outright, as showing no prima facie case. More than half of the remaining applications are then withdrawn, under cross-examination. The sheaf reaching Rome is very thin. Of those finally rubber-stamped, some 80 per cent contain prohibitions on any further marriage by one or both parties — the “defect” that was cause for the annulment being judged still present. In other words, Holy Church does not propose to be gulled again.

Now, this is a holdover from a culture in which marriage was not a joke. Clearly, the judicial vicars for the Irish tribunals are “behind the times”; understandably, given the speed of “change” in their country. In the secularized world that Ireland has suddenly entered, the whole idea of Christian marriage is inconceivable. Here in America, this has been the case for some time. For nearly half a century, every marriage has been contracted in the knowledge that a divorce (then, if wanted, an annulment) could be easily obtained if it did not work out. And even in Catholic churches, as I have noticed from attending a few “old fashioned” weddings in the last few years, the concept of “man and woman” is being discarded. Instead the word “persons” is discreetly insinuated, and the vows made identical, rather than risk confrontation with the Zeitgeist.

The large question of divorce and re-marriage is currently before Rome. In due course we will discover whether our current pope is like Paul VI — who wrote Humanae Vitae on his own, courageously in defiance of most of the advice that had been given him — or whether he is not.

His predecessor believed and wrote that we must expect a much smaller Church. The choice is to adapt the Church to “trends,” or breathe that defiance. I am in no doubt what Christ would do given that choice: for the Christ of mass-market publicity is not the Christ of the gospels. His “mercy” was very unlike our “tolerance.” He never said, “Who am I to judge?” and the Church that acted in Christ’s name never said it either. (She taught: “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” a dimensionally different idea.) But here we are in a new world where, as Walter Kasper says, the Church finds herself vexed:

“Today we find ourselves in a situation similar to that of the last Council. At that time as well there existed, for example on the question of ecumenism or religious freedom, encyclicals and decisions of the Holy Office that seemed to preclude other ways. Without violating the binding dogmatic tradition, the Council opened doors. We can ask ourselves: is it not perhaps possible that there could be further developments on the present question as well?”

In his “secret speech” which opened the Vatican’s consistory on the family, the cardinal is said merely to have “asked questions.” The quote exemplifies how leading those questions were. The pope himself praised Kasper’s speech, before anyone could read it, as an example of “profound theology,” of “serene thinking,” of “doing theology on one’s knees.” Now we have the whole text, thanks to the secular newspaper Il Foglio, which obtained a copy and published it on 1st March.

Cardinal Kasper alludes to conditions in the first centuries, when the Church confronted the pagan customs of the ancient world, and gradually amended them. He then admits that conditions are not quite the same today, while nevertheless looking back to the early centuries to inspire a “radical … paradigm change.” This is a cant phrase, itself deserving unequivocal contempt.

His most signal failure was to take matrimony itself seriously; he only considered the demands made against it. He addresses what we call today, “the problem” — people are not obeying the rules, so something must be done about the rules. It is easy enough to see the solution towards which Cardinal Kasper’s leading questions lead. Through one of his soi-disant “questions” he proposes to take the Sacrament of Penance less seriously, and then the Sacrament of the Eucharist less seriously, in order to facilitate the quick fix that will take the Sacrament of Matrimony less seriously.

It happens I would myself be a beneficiary of any foreseeable relaxation of Church discipline in this area. Long before reception into the Catholic Church, I contracted a very unhappy marriage, the worst mistake of my life. It would be lovely to be free of it, in exchange for privately confessing what I have just publicly confessed. I am writing, thus, against my own interest; and this because I take the third petition of the Lord’s Prayer seriously. (“Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”)

We are trying to accommodate the outside world: that world in which marriage has become a joke. This is the opposite of what we did in the first centuries, when we were trying to make the outside world accommodate Christ. But the world to which we now bow is fluff. It is “redefining marriage” even as I write. Our answer, to the greater challenge in that pagan Roman environment, was defiance. This led to martyrdoms and many other unpleasant developments; and concluded with our triumph. But now we seem embarked on a course to avoid unpleasantness, by accepting defeat.

A score of years, at least, has passed since I had my last glimpse of Richard J. Needham. This was in the old Harvey’s hamburger franchise (since bulldozed) opposite Varsity Stadium along Bloor Street. It was where we met for our dinner dates, at his insistence.

Needham was once a celebrated columnist in the Globe & Mail (once an important Canadian newspaper). It was he who renamed it the Mop & Pail. The Wicked Paedia entry on him says, “humour columnist,” which is a euphemism for any writer of serious intention appearing in the mass media. His heyday had been in the 1960s, when Richard Doyle (the last of the Globe‘s talented and courageous editors) had saved him from immolation by a staff mob. He did this by moving Needham’s works from city news to the lower right corner of what was then unquestionably Canada’s most distinguished editorial page.

According to highly probable legend, Needham had been caught, as a reporter, making up news stories from scratch: ludicrous, satirical stories in which every name, title, place, and institution had been invented. At least one of these creations had made it into print, under a stone-faced headline. The entire editorial horseshoe was calling for his head. Doyle observed that the man had been miscast as a factual reporter, when he was an imaginative and entertaining essayist. Rather than fire him, the answer was to promote and move him to the more exalted slot. A man who, as most great journalists, had no college education, Doyle was widely and well read. He was thus acquainted with the higher journalistic traditions.

The droll and refined George Bain, who presented himself occasionally as a hayseed from Saskatchewan in his sometimes versified and ridiculously lyrical “Letters from Lilac”; or wandered into considerations on fine food and wine; or provided telling vignettes from forgotten history — anchored the lower left corner on that page which, with its op-ed, maintained literary standards unimaginable today. Bain was by designation the chief commentator on national, or as we used to say, Dominion affairs; the doyen of the country’s most august Ottawa bureau. The op-ed often carried essays, including quite scrurrilous ones, by major cultural figures. Letters from readers aspired to the old Times of London calibre; and as only those with something penetrating to say, and some wit to express it, were published, it was a delight to read them. (The now long-defunct Ottawa Journal was then the principal competition, for editorial-page class; but there was some to be found in most major broadsheets. Today there is none, anywhere.)

I was briefly in a Canadian high school at the end of the ‘sixties, when I was reading those pages with close attention, and Needham and Bain became heroes to me, and to my delectation for their very conceits. I’d distrust my own juvenile judgement, had I not gone back much later to look over them again. Such writing, well-informed about the world and not just the affairs of municipal departments, was what had made me think that journalism could be worthwhile as a trade; too, the reason why my first full-time job, at age sixteen, was obtained as a copy boy on that newspaper.

Needham was already a model to me, and the honour of meeting him and even fetching him coffee is unforgotten. Once abroad in that newsroom, I found that he, along with that editor, Doyle (“Dietrich Doppelganger” in Needham’s published allusions), were among the few who could actually find time to talk to an earnest sixteen-year-old about matters of importance, and provide some thoughtful guidance. I noticed that the mediocrities on staff were always too busy, and anyway too self-important.

Needham’s columns were often cast in the form of comic tales, often traditional folk tales re-cast in modern urban environments. Other columns, under the continuing title “A Writer’s Notebook,” consisted entirely of aphorisms and asides. His “beat” was modern man, and human freedom; the modern woman and her unhappiness, owing to the decline of men; the ages of man, from infancy to codgerdom; the raw philosophical questions. It would be too simple to call him a libertarian or an anarchist; he was radically opposed to falsehood, and allergic to all schemes of social organization, and a connoisseur of personal eccentricity and aloofness.

After each night’s shift I would leave a sheet of my own proposed aphorisms, anonymously, in Mr Needham’s mail box. Upon guessing I was the source of them, he summoned me into companionship. Though he posed in his columns as rogue and reprobate, and tried modestly to dress the part (kept bottles of whisky in his office from which he never actually drank; pretended to be paying a tart as his secretary), I discovered that he was secretly respectable, patriarchal, an attentive husband and father, utterly reliable and fastidious on the finest conventional points of honour, and many other paradoxes. Accused by feminists of misogyny, for instance, he had perhaps as high a regard for women as I have ever encountered in a man. Marked by leftists as a shill for the established economic order, his contempt for large corporations went vastly beyond theirs. (It was just that his contempt for “government” went farther.) And old as he was becoming, he was an inspiration chiefly to the young, and the genuinely sceptical in all walks of life. Dismissed as “the first hippie,” he was at close quarters quite the opposite to that; rather a disciplined old soldier. Indeed he was a pioneer of sneering at hippie conformity.

By the later ‘seventies (when I wasn’t around in Canada) he was being hounded out of the Globe by the swelling progressive faction within, alternatively mocked and demonized as “a dinosaur.” They were almost rid of him when they realized that he sold a lot of papers, and would have to be brought back and “phased out” more carefully. Finally, with the installation of an entirely new generation in the editorial suite, the Globe had editors willing to get rid of him regardless of cost. After years of fighting to hold his trench, he gave up and went away. By this time he must have been the last journalist on the Globe of any substance or integrity, and his own audience was finally drying up.

That was when I began meeting him for hamburgers at Harvey’s. I had founded a magazine entitled The Idler at the end of 1984, specifically to supply what had gone missing from Canadian journalism — the intelligence and the style. He noticed it immediately, and sent letters of encouragement. I was determined to land him as a regular contributor to the magazine. He made polite excuses about being old and senile, belied by the sharpness of every uttered sentence. I persisted in my begging, from meal to meal. He seemed flattered, and remained affectionate, but finally gave me his definitive response. It was an unforgettable tirade, touching upon his whole later experience of Canadian journalism, and the encroaching sleaziness of all our public life. It concluded:

“I have nothing to say to this city any more. Nothing!”

There was real fire and brimstone in the declamation; I could give up my begging. Needham’s only concession was that, “Those who remain curious about my views on contemporary life, may read my silence.”

It is not good to end in bitterness. It is not Christian, and so far as I could tell, Needham was never a Christian. He was an old Stoic. Christ for him was another Socrates; the parables were astute but the “mythology” was expendable. I had, both before and after my own Christian conversion, asked him about such things. The more direct my question, the more evasively he replied. On the Church, and churches, from bishops to televangelists, he did have clear opinions, along the lines of, “pigsties of self-seeking hypocrisy.” His pleasures were simple, and founded in people and in nature. There were no “invisibles” to him. He had never craved power. A pigeon in the park was worth feeding, the more if there was a sign that read, “Do not feed the pigeons.” Truth and love were fleeting, but worth clinging to, as he did to wife and family. Nevertheless, in the memorable words of his own proposed death notice, left years before in the obituary files at the Globe: “Richard J. Needham’s tiresome and repetitious column will not appear today, because he is dead.”

Call it a mood: one which can be maintained by the true Stoic over decades. I can easily understand it, especially at this moment, having been in a mood like that this past week or two, with nothing whatever to say to my own tiny shrinking public, or to the world at large, beyond, “Go to hell.” But of course this won’t do. If one is a writer one must never agree to shut up; not so long as there is one more reader. Force the smug, “enlightened” bastards to silence you.

“Faith is not feeling,” as a correspondent reminded us a fortnight ago. It is not a good mood. It is not a bad mood, or any kind of mood. Hope is not a virtue that requires circumstances that are hopeful. Nor, especially in this season of Lent, is Charity an option. It is instead the right kind of defiance. In the words even of the pre-Christian, but more than stoical Wallace Stevens: “Place honey on the altars and die, you lovers that are bitter at heart.”

For the moment, at least, it appears this website is functioning again, which I mention for the benefit of my Commentariat. They may resume fire.

The season of Lent has interposed since my last effusion. Several readers had wondered if I’d fall silent for the duration of it. I will not, especially as I have been reminded by recent attacks that keeping this website may not be a pleasure. Generally, in the last few years, I have been more often punished than rewarded for what I have written; writing itself, or at least, writing honestly, becomes the ordeal. Silence, in the current “media environment,” might by contrast be the real pleasure. So giving up writing for Lent would be a cheat. Better to give up the meats and sweets, the snicker and licker.

For Lent this year, I should like to call gentle reader’s attention to a wonderful passage in the works of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), that French bishop and theologian and magnificent dinosaur from the Antediluvian, before the French Enlightenment, when very much less “modern” sentimental nonsense and “feeling” had attached to the Catholic faith; when it was often much sharper and cleaner.

He is quoted at the end of an excellent piece by his translator, Christopher O. Blum, which appeared on the Catholic Thing website, upon Ash Wednesday. And here is what Bishop Bossuet had to say in his own Meditations on Lent:

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“And you, whoever you may be, to whom Divine Providence should bring this book, be you great or small, poor or rich, wise or ignorant, priest or layman, monk or nun: go now to the foot of the altar and contemplate Jesus there, in the sacrament where he hides.

“Remain there in silence. Say nothing to him. Look upon him and wait for him to speak to you in the depths of your heart.

“I have died, he says, and my life is hidden in God until I appear in my glory to judge the world.

“Hide yourself in God with me, and do not think of appearing until I appear. If you are alone, I will be your companion. If you are weak, I will be your strength. If you are poor, I will be your treasure. If you are hungry, I will be your food. If you are afflicted, I will be your consolation and your joy. If you are bored, I will be your delight. If you are falling, I will hold you up.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. (Rev. 3:20)

“I do not wish for a third: none other but you and me. …

“So may it be, O Lord, who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, world without end. Amen.”

Really there is no truth in the allegation, made privately to me by a woman who may have known me too long, that I am, like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, fatally attracted to ballerinas. It would be more accurate to call them coryphées.

The cat can look at the queen, as my mother used to say, and I will surely look in admiration upon she who rises to the station of ballerina — a term which, gentle reader should know, is parallel with diva in the opera. It is not a job description. It is an acknowledgement of genius and high art. The job description in English is merely, “ballet dancer.” At the top you have your prima, then your first soloists, then your second soloists — in our own (estimable) National Ballet. Eventually you come down to the corps de ballet, the footsoldiers of the outfit. (There are male dancers, too. Let us just ignore them.)

The coryphée, to my understanding, is somewhere between the soloists and the corps de ballet. At worst she may perform as a drill sergeant for the latter. In the gymnastic, athletic, almost football atmosphere of contemporary ballet, this is what it looks like. A cruelly limited popular repertoire focuses the attention on the play-by-play, as in any spectator sport. And this is the age of feminism, when our leading ladies of the dance present as tom-boys. I hardly ever go to the ballet any more; I used to when there was still some possibility of enchantment. But today the eternal feminine, the spookily erotic, has been replaced by “sex appeal” — the slab of meat laid out on the high-class butcher’s counter. Or shrink-wrapped by photography for the masses. I don’t like that.

Old-fashioned ballet was shapes and patterns and musical progressions; the new stuff is more like football, plus sex, right there on the field.

But it is true, all my life, or at least since I can remember (for even as a boy), I’ve been enchanted by coryphées. (Please do not say I am shallow; of course I am shallow, for I am a boy.)

An amateur of this business might call them “pretty girls.” There is more to it than that, however. Graceful movement comes into it: not so much a defiance of gravity, as a studied indifference to it. There was a time when mothers, in every known culture, taught their daughters how to walk; taught them how to bear a bowl or platter to the table; how to lift a vase of flowers. Perhaps no one today will know what I am talking about. But if I make any feminist good and angry, I will at least have accomplished something.

A prima ballerina assoluta I have never wanted, never needed: those you have to share with the world. My own aspiration never rose above a coryphée.

I would not have read through the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline had I not found them entertaining. They are supposed to be “difficult”; they are so only until one gets the hang of the technique and style. It is the opposite of Proustian (and Céline hated Proust with all his demonic passion, called him “the Homer of the perverts”), yet I love Proust and have lived with pleasure in his own “alternative universe.” But then, my idea of entertainment marks me out as something of a non-participant in my own generation. I do not “couch-potato” well; even at my advanced age I suffer from too much energy. I want a participant sport. My natural attraction is to “difficult” authors, because I get my thrills from wrestling with them, and a pleasure that is different in kind from, say, receiving a sun tan.

Read him ideally in the original French, but failing that in the earlier translations. (This is a tip not only for Céline.) The flavour leeches out over time; a contemporary translator cannot help catching things that are in the air of his period; a later translator must think everything through; and as Céline said, “There’s no tyrant like a brain.”

Ralph Manheim was a fine chameleon of a translator, of modern lit from German and French into American English, and his versions of Céline’s triumphant final trilogy of novels (Castle to Castle, North, Rigadoon) are wonderful and should remain definitive, just as they are redolent of the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties. On the other hand, Manheim’s 1966 re-translation of Mort à crédit, from 1936, is too clean, too “thoughtful.” I much prefer the nearly contemporary version by John Marks which appeared under the much better English title, Death on the Instalment Plan. Marks takes more liberties with the text, but gets the pulse of it. His translation benefits tremendously from having been done pre-War; anything after that War may be subverted by anachronism.

For everything published in the 1930s was written before Auschwitz. The reader after Auschwitz will not be able to keep it out of mind, yet if he does not try, he will misread everything — not only big things, but little things. “The War” for those writing intra-war, is the Great War, the shadow of which still darkens and highlights everything from its own angle. And perhaps more significantly, the pre-War for them is the world before 1914: a world almost unimaginably displaced from the “pre-War” of a later generation.

This is indeed much of what Céline is getting at, as chronicler of his age — a chronicler who has nothing but contempt for “the masses,” and the mass history that is laid down with a slather of “great events.” He is intensely personal, and history for him is intensely personal. It is written in pain, by souls who have been thrust into Hell.

I mentioned in my last post what seemed to me a significant fact: that Céline’s horrid anti-Semitic tracts began appearing shortly after he’d had his heart broken by a Jewish girl. To our way of thinking, this fact must be rejected, and I notice all interpreters looking the other way. For how could he be so petty? Surely a little personal misfortune in love could not be so great a trigger. We are trained to think big. Little things like one single human’s birth, life, and death do not count with us: after all, mere people die by the millions; are so many aborted foetuses in the hospital bins. Yet I think that little event was a trigger in Céline, for bigger things; just as the murder of a well-dressed man in Sarajevo touched off a much wider explosion. Neither “justice” nor “proportion” is the issue here.

In this post, let me mention Céline’s persistent habit of dating the collapse of Western Civ to some moment in October 1914. Many things happened in the course of 1914: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand occurred in June; the serious fighting began in August. But it was on the 25th of October that Céline himself was grievously wounded, during an action which incidentally earned him the médaille militaire, and had him cited for bravery all across France. That is the date he chooses as the boundary between “then” and “now” — when he is himself “invalided” or as he also put it, “invalidated” out of the conflict. The world before was the world before; the world after he summarizes later in the single word, “Stalingrad.”

Gentle reader must fully take this in, should he wish to make any sense of an author who makes no concessions whatever to the “objectivity” we require for our own mental peace. Céline does not care for your mental peace. He has permanently lost his own. As he puts it, “People don’t deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.”

He has been “victimized,” and the world he depicts is of his fellow victims: the little people. The closest he comes to making a speech is when he expounds little home truths to them:

“I tell you, little man, life’s fall guys, beaten, fleeced, sweated from time immemorial, I warn you, that when the princes of this world start loving you, it means they’re going to grind you up into battle sausage.”

Or when he explains:

“In olden times the fanatical fashion was: Long live Jesus! Burn the heretics! … But heretics, after all, were few and voluntary. Whereas today, under the flags of Europe, …”

Or when he gives his advice to the lovelorn:

“Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself, and the surer you are of your rights.”

Or when he provides tips on how to get out of a fix. For when the executioner has you staring at the blade of his guillotine, it is time to shout:

“Hey, you lazy bastard! Don’t you have anyone sharpening that thing?”

Céline is with the victims. But that, too, will be misleading to our post-modern reader who has come to understand victimhood as a mass phenomenon, as a political position; or if reduced to the personal level, as a way to extract money and retribution through the courts by means of malicious posturing and lies. These are not real victims, but the exploiters of the Left-progressive “system” for the bureaucratic arbitration of victimhood — of a “system” imposed, for all practical purposes, by agents of Satan.

In a parallel way, “indignation” has been whored by the Leftists (and their mirrors on the Right). The very possibility of “righteousness,” therefore “righteous indignation,” has been whored: for us, individual righteousness can only be self-righteousness, for righteousness has been put to work in the streets by our liberal and progressive pimps.

And I say this with some warmth, not only because it is true, but because it will give the reader some insight into the world this Céline is describing; this Céline who absolutely refuses surrender to anybody’s stinking party line, and is therefore easily labelled as “a fascist.”

This same Céline who writes vile and vicious things in pamphlets, and shouts obscenities in his sleep at night; but in his private waking life would not hurt a fly. And who, during the War, in France, refused to play the game of a Sartre or Picasso, both of whom lived well and comfortably under the Nazis and then manoeuvred to pose as heroes of the Resistance after. Céline had no idea how to be a whore; not that he was good, but because it wasn’t in his repertoire.

He identifies exclusively with those “on the run,” and in his last magnificent trilogy, with those on the run who can enjoy no one’s sympathy; on those with whom he is running himself, from castle to castle, ever north, away from the “liberators,” in a fine rigadon (it is the name of a Baroque dance). Running, gloriously and without excuse, through the smashed remains of the old Europe — itself appearing now to be nothing more than a knocked-down Hollywood set. The reality he describes is poetic beyond words.

Those who specialize in condemnation, may surely condemn Céline for many sins. I would not myself volunteer to advance his cause for Catholic sainthood.

Our Canadian sage, George Grant, tried to defend him by suggesting that Céline’s vision — which he once naughtily (and brilliantly) associated with Simone Weil’s — was also to be associated with a Platonic conception of justice and the Good. With characteristic unctuousness, the Canadian professoriat dismissed this as eccentric and naïve. I have read a couple of papers in which essentially Marxist professors diminished Grant, and by extension Céline, for advancing an “art” of precisely the kind that must be censured and censored by the wise elders enforcing Plato’s immaculately sterile Good. Needless to say they knew nothing of Grant, Céline, or Plato. (Or, nothing but a few “facts,” which put them on a level with journalists.)

Céline wears his vices on his chest, instead of the médaille militaire. My only defence could be, that they are necessary to his virtues, and that for the reader, they must be borne together, because in some deep sense they are married — they “cannot be apart.” He provides the vantage to see a tremendous truth about our times, which no other vantage could supply; and in doing so perhaps Céline himself provides a poignant illustration of why God might permit evil in this world.

Finally, to complete my own perfessorial instructions, Céline like any author worth the time, should be read through, chronologically. He will train the reader in how to read him as he goes along; stock us up with what we need to know along the way. And while a few paragraph’s worth of author biography, or better, naked chronology in the French style, may be essential orientation from the start, stay well away from long, later author biographies. They will fill your head with prejudices, misdirections, and stupidities. Céline is to be read on Céline’s terms, not on those of some filthy self-serving bourgeois.

The most disturbing thing about Louis-Ferdinand Céline was not the monstrous aspect, in his writings, but an odd saintly quality in his private life. This was most evident in his private practice as a medical doctor in the Paris slums; but there seem hints of it in almost every passing anecdote I have heard about him. Life and work can never be disconnected, though neither should they be wantonly confused.

Céline’s apparently fascist and certainly anti-Semitic rancour remains on the record, in pamphlets he wrote before the Second World War, and mildly diffused through the novels. The pamphlets would be easy to dismiss as incomprehensible and insane; except they were comprehensible, and Céline was not insane. Madness is his conceit, and his confusions are everywhere affectations. For instance, in his tirades he persistently names as Jews people who quite obviously were not even slightly Jewish. There is a monstrously intentional humour in this: he is being droll at a very high level of malignity.

These pamphlets, which his later wife and widow tried to keep out of print, could I think have been easily republished if in every place that Céline wrote some variation on les juifs, an editor substituted some like variation on almost any obscene common noun. Or alternatively, “the Swiss” might be substituted by the bowdlerizer; or as Baudelaire preferred, “Belgians.” It wouldn’t change the sense; but it would lower the temperature, whereas Céline was always trying to raise it, writing as he was about Hell. Indeed, one might say the intensity of his anti-Semitism spoils an otherwise perfect misanthropy: puts a wart even in that, as it were.

Actually read those horrid pamphlets, and you will find that Céline’s definition of a Jew is fairly broad. He includes, for instance, all communists, and all capitalists; all English and American writers, and without exception, all members of the Anglo-Saxon upper classes. He also includes the Catholic Church, and all the popes from Peter forward (a list in which he includes “Karl Marx”), and the Jesuit order earns a special distinction. Also, all Freemasons are counted in, and all homosexuals. Also, without distinction, everyone who is black, or Asian. As I recall, somewhere he mentioned being Jewish himself. Had I been around in 1936, I’m sure he would have included me. And in his Bagatelles pour un massacre (wonderful title, incidentally) he does not exclude any of these from the impending slaughter.

Perhaps it is worth noting, as a biographical aside, that shortly before Céline wrote it, the (literally) Jewish ballerina who was his mistress, ran off with some rich American. Having myself once been dumped by a Jewish ballerina (again, literally), who also ran off with a rich man, I can empathise with the guy to a point, though not quite so far as proposing to exterminate most if not all of the human race. (Well, I say that now, decades later, but if you’d asked me at the time it would have been touch and go.)

There is no defending anti-Semitism, gutter racialism of any other kind, or the knowing publication of inflammatory material tending to incite the democratic mob. Whether or not illegal, this is morally wrong. It is further to Céline’s shame that his infamous pamphlets sold far better than his famous novels: that he had profited handsomely until they were banned (first by the free French authorities, who took a couple of years to get around to it; and then by the Nazi occupation authorities, who re-banned them quite promptly, because of all the rude language).

Monstrous, sick, dark humour, and no respect for authority: that is exactly Céline’s routine through his novels, from the beginning when Voyage au bout de la nuit first appeared: sick, dark humour wandering purposely and brilliantly over the line not of good taste (all genuine humour does that), but of a more basic decency — and to rub it in, for an apparently moral purpose.

It is this “prophetic” quality — a quality present in all great satirical writing — which explains, too, not merely the absence of sentimentality, but a revulsion against it. He will tell things as they really are and not as they might wish to appear; he will suck all the “niceness” out of our lungs. He will tell a story as it really happens in its disjointed way — abrasively not smoothly. And he will put everything into the language of the street — but “transposed” in some carefully disjointed musical sense. All the “Beats” and other frauds copied him, or copied one feature or another; only Céline knew what he was doing, in combining these dimensions and choreographing the full range of effects.

The Céline of real life is related to the author, but certainly not the same. Quite apart from the bohemian (but not dissolute) habits, the man does give an important clue to the author. He is far from unsentimental, towards his cats, dogs, parrots, as we see in almost every photograph of him in a domestic situation. Many hateful people prefer animals to men, and vegetarianism is often a symptom of this moral disorder. But Céline is as affectionate towards the poor and desperate he treats as a doctor — invariably refusing to be paid, even by people who could afford to pay something. He is ever going far out of his way to visit and sit vigil with the dying. It is not just the money: we know there were many patients who would only come to him, who only trusted him, and would court death rather than visit another doctor. It is this instinctive quality of mercy which I believe they detected in him that was in turn the key to his gift as an observer. For if we return to the novels, we see that the obscurely pitiful details he so frequently records are just those that would be noticed by the most empathetic observer. But with the sentiment extracted, to increase the horror.

It is interesting that the dissertation, for his medical degree, was on Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865), the Hungarian obstetric doctor (son of a German Jewish grocer, most likely) who made himself a pariah in the respectable medical community of his day. This he did in the course of deducing the cause of very high mortality from puerperal fever among new mothers in hospitals across Europe. The puzzle was that women giving birth at home with midwives, or even in the streets without them, had much, much lower mortality rates. And the explanation was that doctors in maternity hospitals were not properly washing their hands, even when delivering babies after performing autopsies. A generation before Louis Pasteur proposed his germ theory, Semmelweis proposed handwashing in a lime solution that would eliminate the “contagion” and save countless lives. For his trouble and persistence he was not merely professionally ostracized but finally driven into a mental asylum, where a guard murdered him.

The dissertation, written eight years before his first novel, is in itself a fine piece of narrative, full of unmistakeably Célinean personal flourishes, and with a moral object unusual for an aspiring medicine man. Céline argues that, from beginning to end, the extraordinary achievement of Semmelweis could be purchased only at the price of his personal misery.  “Nothing is free in this world. Everything must be expiated, the good and the bad alike, paid for sooner or later. The good is necessarily much more expensive.”

And it was his highly unprofessional emotional distress at the fate of these poor dying mothers that made Semmelweis the obsessive he became — so utterly obsessive that, even without sound science, and without the slightest deference to his professional superiors, or any other view to his own personal advancement, he finally tracked down the cause and the effect.

It is further interesting that Céline himself — who had made a good marriage that would, along with his genius, guarantee his rise to the top of his profession — began to abandon social respectability in the course of studying this hero. Then after the shocking divorce, he actively sought opportunities to participate in public health projects in colonial Africa and elsewhere overseas. He was, throughout his private life, in effect a medical missionary.

The money for this cause (usually small, and repeatedly impounded by his enemies) came mostly from his writing: the exact opposite of William Carlos Williams and other doctors who have taken to poetry as a hobby and recreation from their well-paid medical day jobs.

A lady in Canada’s far east, who shares my taste in Spanish mystics, writes something so apposite to and summarizing of my recent apocalyptic effusions (here and at the Catholic Thing), that I will just quote her:

“As far as signs and portents, … it is once again St John of the Cross who grounded me  as I was finding my way back to the Church. He said God gave us our intelligence for a reason, and we should not be petitioning Him for signs and wonders, not that God does not sometimes give them, but we can so easily misinterpret them. So it is best to leave them alone or take them to a spiritual adviser or let God clarify them in His way and time. …

“One other good thing St John taught me is that faith is not feeling.”

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Our difficulty begins with failing to perceive that even as things stand, there is nothing mundane. Nature herself is consistently miraculous, to eyes not jaded or gauzed; and the student of history should also be aware that no human chronicle develops along predictable lines. Were it not for Grace, we would all long since have been annihilated. Or rather, we would never have been.

Our task is to work with what we have; with what God has given us, already. We have enough to be getting on with. Even when what we face is death, we have enough to be getting on with; death is something to get on with.

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My apologies to gentle reader for silence prolonged these last few days. Just as I was getting into stride for some new quotidian irruption of my blather, some (figurative) truck hit me. Nothing to be concerned about; I’ll live. Routine, routine is important. We cannot have idleness without routine.

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And yes, if anyone noticed, after three months’ experiment, I dropped my Twitter feed.

With each passing day, I find myself more willing to consider a shocking, unexpected, counter-intuitive possibility. Gentle reader must indulge me on this point. Incredible as this may seem, reckless as I may sound, we should review the matter calmly. The evidence, for all we know, may be all around us. Consider, for example, this uncanny fact. Everyone is anticipating the end of days. Everyone — from the most materialist environmentalists to the most spiritualist collectors of “signs of the times” — and throughout the media, and even among the Commentariat on this website — everyone, including the present writer, is using apocalyptic language, rather casually. The weather forecasters have been using it through this winter, on both sides of the Atlantic. Specific schemes, derived from or inspired by biblical prophesy, are a commonplace among the Catholic devotes with whom I pray; and right across the Christian spectrum from most Evangelical and farthest Western to most Orthodox and farthest Eastern, it presents as at least a mild fever. We find some version of this resounding through Islam, too, and still farther to the East; likewise across Africa and the Americas, where catastrophes seem most often to occur. Those who look at the rapidity of change around them, the nature of the change, and its direction — although they may disagree entirely on each item of evidence — seem alike convinced of the conclusion, that the end of our world is at hand.

That is why I think it might not be. For in my experience, if there is a large majority for any point of view, we can know with near certainty that it is either false, or trite. (“The earth is round” is an example of a view that has been universally held, for some thousands of years by almost all educated persons, and it is, I confess,  true enough; but it is also quite trite.)

Now to be fair to the purveyors of amateur eschatology, much of what they say is understated. For instance, just today I was reading a prediction that the United States would collapse and disintegrate by the end of fiscal 2015. But so what? We have seen innumerable other countries collapse and disintegrate over the centuries; that can hardly be the standard for the end of the world. And as for little things, like raising the world’s sea level by a few hundred metres — yawn. (So we move uphill; downhill if it lowers.)

Up here in the High Doganate, we maintain Augustinian views on prophecy, on biblical interpretation, and especially on the apocalyptic writings. A minority of our personae are superstitious by disposition (the majority almost too sceptical); not one persona is a biblical literalist, except with respect to those Bible passages which offer factual report, or wherein the hairsplitting appears to be intentional. However, which passages those might be may also be subject to some dispute. A general rule in discussions among my personae is: do not feign certainty of things you do not know, and could not possibly know except on authority. Also: consult the authorities, sometimes. Also: do not obsess on matters that cannot be necessary to salvation.

I’m sure that is all perfectly clear.

Augustine, and by extension I would say the whole Catholic Church, is what we call “amillennialist.” That is, he wasn’t mesmerized by such an expression as “a thousand years,” and did not immediately enter it on his abacus. He could remember how the expression had been used in, say, II Peter — “One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” — and how indeed anticipated in the Psalms and elsewhere. More broadly, he has no inclination to play number games, or engage in other forms of calculation which become inevitable when symbols are interpreted as counters instead. He could see a larger structure of apocalyptic teaching running through the length of the Bible, that was not pitched entirely beyond human understanding, and would be dangerous to take beyond. And thus he put the highly symbolic Apocalypse of Saint John in its rightful place at the tail (and thinnest) end. As a literary master himself, he could understand not only what a symbol is, but also, what is a “conceit.”

The world began (as Christians and Jews always knew, through many centuries when scientists did not also know it). Therefore, it will end. We could deduce each from the other revelation. Necessarily, it begins and ends in a certain way. It began when God began it, and it will end, as each of us will end in respect to this world, and within an easily foreseeable period:

“Thou who hast foretold that Thou wilt come to judgement in a day when we look not for Thee, and at an hour when we are unaware: make us prepared every day and every hour to be ready for thine advent; and save us.”

When people look through news events, or even social trends to descry patterns of prognostic prophecy, I lose interest in what they are saying. This on the basis of a theological hunch. How is it possible that God would require us to be keeping up with newspapers and websites, in order to discern “the signs of the times”? I do not myself think we can discern even “the points of the compass” by such means. I am moreover increasingly aware, from my readings in history, that while not all generations are equal, all have been perceptibly going to Hell; and that a plausible argument could have foretold the End Time, in every recorded moment.

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There is a rather deeper objection to be made, not only to End Time calculations, but to every other form of what I call “Catholic fortune-telling,” and “the spirituality of the Ouija board.” (How many young ladies have grown tired of hearing me use such expressions!)

It is my view that Our Lord and Our Lady, alike, do not prattle. That they do not play Twenty Questions, or other parlour games. That they give no replies to questionnaires or surveys, do no interviews, and will not engage in chit-chat on the weather. The miracles we have seen, through Scripture and through history, were not especially subtle. Each seems to have come as a surprise. If you were there, you saw it; if you weren’t you did not.

And I am not being irreverent, incidentally. Those who think our relationship with the divine can be set on such a level of familiarity are the irreverent ones.

A Christian is surrounded at all times by little coincidences that wink at him, and to which he may prayerfully wink back; the world itself seems designed to be “knowing” in that way. But on my understanding it would be unlike God, or any of the angelic forces working for Him, to suggest action should be taken on the basis of a nice coincidence or three. For if it were, we would be saying that the Creator of the Universe made us to be easy dupes; that He created an order of things in which credulity trumps faith.

And, that is the very thing that separates the Catholic Christian faith (which is taken to include her Hebrew antecedents) from the Oriental mystery cults she unambiguously rejected. It is at the heart of our differences over the nature of human destiny — for by the same mental action we reject the fatalism of all gnostic cults, and replace it with the triumphant theological virtue of Hope. Our whole idea of human freedom arrived with Christ as something revolutionary. It had been formed in the detachment of the ancient Hebrews from the idolatries of other ancient peoples — as Christ taught, Christ was always there — but was brought into blazing clarity by Christ, at a certain demonstrable moment in history, with demonstrable consequences throughout this world.

Much else could be said, but here is enough excitement. At the core level of Judaeo-Christian teaching — breaking the chains of fatalism — we were freed from our bondage to ancient gods and goddesses, witches, goblins, spooks, and idols; and we were beckoned to rise and walk in a sunlight that provides, indeed confirms, the light of a reason also naturally endowed. The Catholic Christian teaching is self-consistent. Odd and peculiar as it may first appear, I believe it finally makes sense, in the course of providing the most articulate, and also moving account of human freedom and destiny. I wouldn’t have joined up if it didn’t.

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Mother Teresa of Calcutta comes into my view. Those who have studied her life — among the most famous and accessible of the last century — will be aware that most of it was lived in spiritual desolation. As an intelligent and well-educated young woman she had a calling to become a nun and go abroad (at first from Albania to Ireland), was sceptical of its validity, sought advice from intelligent Catholic religious, and tested it very carefully. (She was an extremely intelligent woman, in the plainest worldly sense: I can report that at first hand.) Everything she did for the long remainder of her life was premised on that one personal revelation.

As a character she was gentle as mercy, and hard as nails. She prayed, and prayed for answers to her prayers, in a condition of sincerity few have mastered. She asked repeatedly and explicitly for signs, and for instructions, to direct her through all the many hard passages and decisions she ever had to make. As she herself directly reported, she never received answers. Apparently, God had so high an opinion of her judgement, that He left her to make decisions for herself.

This I contrast with certain young ladies, and young men much like them in being rather girlish, whom I count as my sisters and brothers in daily prayer. They are not in any common sense bad people; rather they are often among the kindest and most thoughtful, especially among the young. But they have bought into nonsense, and sooner or later it must cost them.

I’m thinking of one in particular with whom I had awkward dealings some years ago. She seemed to receive (by her own ebullient reckonings) the equivalent of emails from Our Lady, twenty times a day, along with numerous forwards through myriad saints from the Persons of the Trinity, and divine assignations for Harlequin romance. Had I been her spiritual director (an unwelcome task, for she’d drop them as a high school princess dumps boyfriends), I would have instructed her to give up entirely on petitionary prayer for the duration of Lent, or maybe never again to say a novena.

An extreme case, but I became aware of many lesser cases, and a contagion in the Church, curiously more afflicting the traditional end, where sanity is under extra pressure. The ways of the old pagan world are being smuggled back in, as cute pets, and dolled up in sweet Traddy costume. (Well, there is worse to see at the non-traditional end.)

I think it is a mistake to leap to any conclusion — including that most rare apprehension of a truly miraculous “gift from God” — without serious contemplation, and patient testing, which requires time. (And the question is not only whether the gift is real, but what does it mean, and what does it require by way of thank you; divine gifts need opening very carefully.) The Church herself has always believed in testing, and one might add, paid a premium over any other institution for her lapses.

A truly Catholic life is in constant formation, and re-formation: and to be sure Christ must work both from without and within. We are creatures now operating in time, and need time and discernment to take His most genuine and precious teachings in. To my mind, we should pray in a spirit quite opposite to throwing the dice, or flipping a coin, or begging for the lottery number; we should never expect to receive quick answers to anything at all. On the contrary, we should expect to work for them. For the answers will emerge, over time, and in ways that can actually be tested — in our lives, and often through painful experience when getting it wrong. The answers are not delivered by Fedex, as it were. (It is more like the questions that arrive in that way.) If they did, human beings would have no freedom, nor Hell nor Purgatory nor Heaven any serious meaning; and there would be no real and teaching drama in our lives.

But I am no priest. Gentle reader should consult the great manuals of Christian instruction, written by the attested saints, and form his judgement from those. The limit of my claim is to have dipped into some of them, and found similar warnings scattered all through: sober cautions against the human propensity to leap, to believe what we want to believe, to accept just those answers we were looking for, to seek instant gratification at every turn, and take persistently the easy way out — all methods to evade personal responsibility and commitment.

And if this is the case in our own tiny lives, how much more must it be when it comes to discernment of events vastly beyond the scope of our personal capacity to see, let alone comprehend. Therefore let us attend to our business, and leave God to His.