Essays in Idleness

“I am double-minded, actually.” The expression is among my favourites in Delhi English. It is not as easily translatable into standard mid-Atlantic as might first appear. It does not mean, for instance, “I cannot make up my mind between two irreconcilables.” Indeed, it has nothing to do with making up one’s mind, for it describes an enduring philosophical position. And anyway, the Indian mind is almost incapable of self-contradiction. It moves too quickly for that.

If, from my frankly barbaric and alien distance, I can grasp the true meaning, it would be something like: “You are trying to reduce a both/and proposition to an either/or, and I am on to you.” Now, add to that some sportive and humorous Punjabi self-deprecation, which makes Indians of the north and west more lovable than any other people in the world, except of course Italians.

I am double-minded, actually, about our current pope, and equally about his critics. By now, we Traddies all know the rap. He is playing to the gallery: using street-media language in a reckless way, to make the sort of statements that will appeal to the masses, arguably at the expense of the Mass. He’s a showman who, by abbreviating “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” to “Blessed are the poor,” is letting the liberation theologists back in the pantry door. He says, “Who am I to judge?” when that is exactly what he is paid for. He seems to be appointing the very sort of people we thought we’d finally seen the back of; and generally encouraging, whether or not by intention, the happy-slappies everywhere. Having rightly condemned the phenomenon of “airport bishops,” making casual sound-bite pronouncements on the fly, he is too often being one.

Let us be more pointed. A man who plays to the gallery — speaking in applause lines to an audience easily pleased — may appear to be soliciting praise for himself. And the voluble praise he is actually receiving, from various rather worldly sources, is vitiated by deprecation of his predecessors, and mockery of faithful Catholics. I’ve seen enough at first hand to know the people he most pleases are not well-disposed to received Catholic teaching. In particular, Benedict XVI is frequently held up to invidious comparison. The pope cannot intend this; but should study cause and effect.

I am myself a Johnny-come-lately, of only ten years’ standing in the Church, but all my adult life I’ve had friends who were battle-axe Catholics, enduring with our Lord the humiliations to Him and to them that were imposed after Vatican II, through liturgical “reforms” that desecrated the Mass. For those with some culture and literary refinement, the awkward and illiterate translations of the ICEL committees made attendance at Mass in English exceptionally painful. Many, many were driven out of the Church, as the integrity and continuity of the Roman tradition appeared to have been compromised. But many others grimly watched it out, refusing to leave the Desolate City. Through decades, those seeking permission to sing the Old Mass, endured further humiliations from unsympathetic bishops, who looked upon their most faithful as rebels to the bureaucratic order, and upon jackasses with their clowns and guitars as the vanguard of fashion.

An outsider can only begin to imagine the joy that was felt, when Benedict published “motu proprio” his Summorum Pontificum in 2007 — freeing priests around the world to sing the Old Mass wherever it was wanted, and putting it on a par with the post-Vatican II vernacular — “two usages of the one Roman rite.” The notion that the usus antiquior was wanted only by geriatrics suffering nostalgia can be easily dismissed. After half-a-century most of those who could remember it as the norm were dead, anyway; it is actually the younger and the spiritually hungrier who thirst for restoration of reverence in the Mass, and for the recovery of the long and very deep musical, poetical, and artistic traditions which once held all the Roman peoples together.

The new pope’s off-the-cuff remarks to the effect that this thirst is a kind of idolatry, struck a savage blow against a wound yet unhealed. His prompt action to forbid the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate from singing the Old Mass — some eight hundred denied for the alleged extreme traditionalism of perhaps six members — set a precedent for actually rolling back what Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum had unambiguously promised.

Yet what the new pope is doing, in addressing the outside world, is to my mind actually a good thing. If he has the charisma — in the old sense — let him go out and sell. The Church is in the business of the salvation of souls, and not a club for the elect; and Christ is not King of a religious denomination, but in Eternity. His message is to every man and woman born, and if Pope Francis has the gift to communicate His message to people otherwise unable to hear, he is doing the work of Heaven. Christ himself sent off his Apostles to the ends of the earth; and the task of evangelism was never restricted to them. Every Catholic carries it as a duty, to spread the Word.

Moreover, the pope is quite right that this should not consist of proselytizing, in the narrowest sense. There is a place for apologetic argument, and of course for catechizing those who come to us. There is a place for compelling language and gesture, directed personally to those whom we love. But banter and argument will never win over souls prejudiced from the start against the Church and her teachings. It is the power of prayer and holiness, instead — in more worldly terms, the power of example — which alone can break through. And here I think Pope Francis is exemplary; and the spontaneous way in which he sets his examples is thrilling, at least to me. There can be no possible question of his sincerity and earnestness, as a player upon the public stage. Moreover, he is joyful: a very sure sign of Christian integrity. He loves, and he wants to tear down obstacles.

One focused point I want to make about this pope. It seems to me he understands that gallery he is addressing, in a rather subtle way. He knows the issue is faith, not belief, and he knows this at a specific wavelength. He knows that people are troubled. He knows, as they often do not in their own self-understanding, that they fear God in their hearts. He knows that, behind outward show of empty pride, they are seeking forgiveness. He has actually been pointing, not first to the Mass, but first to the Confessional. I don’t think my traditionalist friends have given him their hearing on this.

So I am doubly double-minded.

There is an inside and an outside to the Church in this world. Conceive this as a Gothic cathedral, in which the two are communicating by light. The world is outside, but inside the Host. The spaces are communicating, but not interchangeable. The whole narrative of the creation and the salvation is arrayed in the statuary of the outside; on the inside the line of sight is conducted towards the altar. The teaching and “belief” of Christianity are subsumed in the mystery of the Cross. As in the ancient Temple at Jerusalem, and its orientation towards the Holy of Holies, our universe enfolds, turning from the large outside into smaller and smaller spaces. We are looking from the expansive finitude of this world, as if towards and through the eye of a needle, to an infinitude beyond. We are looking from our mortality into immortality.

Too much from the outside came inside after Vatican II. Too little inside has gone out again. It was not simply the Old Latin Mass that needed to be restored, but as Pope Benedict plainly said, the very reverence to the sanctuary it taught by its example. The New Mass itself needed reforming by juxtaposition with the Old, and the “reform of the reform” of the New he set in motion has indeed been bearing fruit.

There is no room inside for a gallery to play to; the homily itself is not meant to preach like that, but rather to explain in the simplest possible terms. Exhortation belongs to the commotion outside; we, the people who have come to participate in the Sacrifice of the Mass, no longer need to be exhorted. The pope, to this way of presenting the matter, has a two-fold rôle, in his evangelical part addressing the world, in his priestly part defending that altar. This is not an either/or proposition. Outside, he must turn to the people; inside, he must turn, with us, towards our Lord.

If there is one use for the calendrical New Year, it is provided, unintentionally, through the media, and through the accidents of social life. Towards the end of the old year, and bleeding into the new, we are exposed to a higher density of “signs of the times” than at any other time of year. Partly this is a by-product of the media habit of looking backward and forward: precisely twelve months back and twelve months fore. It is an arbitrary thing, but usually their cycle is twenty-four hours, or less with the advance of consumer electronics. Christmas, now for many years an essentially secular holiday, with little pretense of Christian thanksgiving but a modicum of “traditional” good cheer, adds more to this density. In some moments, even for those whose Christian affiliation evaporated before childhood, there are juxtapositions, contrasts.

In the media, or if you will, at a Christmas Party, or on New Year’s Eve, a lot of human experience can be compacted into a very small space, and much quickly passes before our eyes and ears. One has glimpses of the radical opposition between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, the true and the false, exhibited as if on signboards that anyone can read.

There is, especially in cold northern countries, a kind of post-partum depression that sets in after the holidays have passed. The weather plays some part in this: we who live in the vast conurbations do not look with relish on the next few months. In the countryside, a fresh snowfall can be uplifting; can be the making, for instance, of a “white Christmas”; in the city it can only mean service delays, traffic hell, dangerous sidewalks. The let-down after excessive eating and drinking comes into this, too: the sense that the party is over, and it is back to work for us.

But I think something deeper also contributes to our sense, however mildly it is taken, of emptiness, loneliness, hopelessness.

Even if we were not looking, we saw something in passing, and it haunts us still. Perhaps it was a vision of old age, in a season when long past memories were rekindled, and people were remembered who are no longer here. For that memento mori becomes a part of the “twelve days of Christmas,” as the years pile on. And with the summoning of memory comes the summoning of sorrows, especially sorrow in irretrievable events. (A woman weeping outside the nursing home, six months ago: “How many stupid last words I said, when all I wanted to say was, ‘I love you’.”)

But for the present the experience of “density” is enough. Something has passed by that we did not act upon. Something happened that we did not prevent. Something didn’t happen we had the power to make happen. Somehow, we missed it, when we had our chance. I would call this a form of “survivor’s guilt,” that exists within us at the metaphysical level, though confirmed in events, day after day.

To put this most plainly: we have seen good and evil, and not chosen the good; we have seen beauty and ugliness, and not chosen the beautiful; we have seen true and false, and not chosen the truth. We have chosen instead, with a grieving resignation, to “get on with it”; to play it safe; to avoid any kind of overreaction. Or as Christ put it, with spectacular poetry: we have taken our places with the dead, and are the dead, burying their dead.

It wasn’t a choice, according to most people. Just what were they supposed to do? “Most people” (the phrase itself makes me think of an ethnicity) did their bit, exactly as required. They weren’t late for work, even in the snowstorm. They did their shopping, bought their presents in time; they did not overlook anyone. Did not get hammered at the office party. Did not say anything to seriously regret. Suffered a few indignities without freaking. Blew the diet, perhaps, but they’ll soon be back on it.

How many people have said, “I am basically a good person,” without noticing that no one ever asked? And it is true that real monsters are a small minority, though I often think they are closer to being saved.

What we haven’t confronted, is that very emptiness, that loneliness, that hopelessness — together with the self-pity that explains it all away. For the modern man is a childless orphan, and the modern woman is a modern man, and this goes double when they are married to each other.

It is not that we did not see. I don’t think that excuse will hold for anyone. A policeman, from a former generation on the mean streets of New York, put this very nicely with his pet aphorism: “There is no such thing as an innocent bystander.”

And what is true with any subtlety is true in the overt, as I’m reminded by a video from the New York Daily News. It shows people stepping over the expiring body of a man freshly shot in a shop doorway, and the cashier continuing to process his sales, through the five minutes before some Good Samaritan decided to call emergency services on his cellphone. …

But what of that? Such events elicit attention only because they turn up the volume on our background noise.

And that is anyway not what we saw, or even if we did see it, only part of what we saw. Instead, there is something larger: how can it be described? For we saw it as if in fragments, glimpsed it as if through pickets in a fence, somewhere to the side of where we were looking as we went along our way. Our mind was elsewhere, and it remains elsewhere: saddened, and yet we don’t know why. (For there was light there, too, it wasn’t only darkness.)

I had a dream like this, the other evening. A baby was lying in the snow and slush. He’d been left there, accidentally discarded. People were busy, they were passing him by. I thought, he is cold, he has fallen on the sidewalk. Some woman must have dropped him on her way home. She’ll want to have him back, I must get him to her. But it was Christmas, there were legs on all these shoppers; the baby on the sidewalk kept sliding out of reach. I was trying to tell them, but no one could hear me; I could not even hear myself. Why can’t these people see there is a baby? A living baby, right at their feet? Why does no one stop for this baby, why doesn’t someone pick him up? And I awoke, thinking, “Jesus!”

But what I refer to is not a dream.

The question in my title is rhetorical. Of course democracy is not Christian, how could it be? No system of secular government, no Caesarean Constitution, could possibly be Christian, except insofar as it tries to reflect divine and natural justice (which are not finally detachable from each other). Are a bad people more just than a good king, or a moderate junto? Are a good people better than a bad king? Et cetera. These are meaningless questions. The Church herself has had to cope with all regimes, and will not be replaced by one or another. Justice is as justice does, and in the complete absence of any instructions at all from Jesus Christ, on how we should organize ourselves politically — it is really quite astonishing, the lengths to which he went to avoid this question — we might almost stop our thinking there. And yet, thanks to democracy, we can’t. We are obliged to vote on it. We are asked for our consequential opinion on something most of us know nothing about, and which does not touch on the most important matters. Tyranny comes in this door.

Or perhaps we can and do ignore the issue. The number of people genuinely interested in political questions is itself, from what I can see, a small proportion of any population. Many of these few are obsessive, however, and so make their weight tip far above “equality” on the scales, enlivened as they are by the aphrodisiac of Power. For the great majority, politics are not something in which they participate, but something that happens. What does democracy really mean to them? They receive unearned money, or have the money they’ve earned taken away; but also, there is a huge and constantly increasing burden of form-filling to do, plus security checks, body searches, elaborate signage and warnings, and in cities especially, the occasional sudden take-down.

If the diktats came down from kings and royal courts, rather than from politicians and departmental bureaucrats, it would make no difference to the citizen’s level of “empowerment.” In either case the influence of the “man in the street” rounds out to zero. The State expects him to do what he is told, promptly; and to take his punishment should he hesitate, or talk back to any government official. In a small kingdom, or a small town, he might represent perhaps a visible power of inertia. Perhaps even in a vast people’s republic there is cellular resistance to being pushed around. But to say that the citizen of a democracy, today, is governed by his own consent — when items of legislation fill ten-thousands of pages in Kafkaesque obscurity, with serious penalties for non-compliance, to be enforced or not enforced at the government’s whim — is at best silly. Should the citizen be charged with any crime, the conviction rate, at least in the United States, approaches that in Stalin’s Russia (to be fair, it is far lower in Canada and Europe), and his only hope is to “confess” and agree to a plea bargain.

This is the normal working of democratic government today. Anyone who has had his taxes audited knows how much power he has against the State, and what kind of people the tax department hires. He knows that his very livelihood depends on their “judgement calls,” and that he had better adopt a cringing subservience before his masters. He knows that “innocent until proven guilty” is a pious fraud, and that unless he has millions in his war chest, no court will help him. Such abuses are of just the sort the old Common Law served to prevent, standing for centuries against the arrogance of power on behalf of the common man. Today, in his terrible anxieties, he can only turn to prayer.

Elsewhere I have written about the inevitability of the Nanny State, once the “ideal” of democracy is established. It is as socialism has proved, when proposed as a programme for economic efficiency: for it is not something that seldom works, but something that can never work at all. Democracy, in its modern, representative form, appeals to people at the level of what they want, or are told they might get by voting in blocks together. In that lies the divisiveness which Thomas Aquinas and other mediaeval critics of democracy foresaw, long before anything like modern democracy emerged to illustrate the points they were making. Democracy factionalizes a society that might otherwise have remained contented and peaceful; it keeps class envy and the hope of retribution constantly upon the electoral table, and eventually they get out of hand.

Yet the real significance of a citizen should not be what he wants, but what he is. As an ensouled human individual, he is an irreducible thing. His natural liberties begin with his right to life, and corresponding duty (not right) to defend himself. Insofar as they were recognized under previous systems of government, rights corresponded generally to duties — duties which can never be identical, from person to person, until Procrustes has finished his savage work.

This, I allow, is no longer understood, and therefore cannot be said without wide misunderstanding. The entire conception of human liberty, with which Western man started, has been trickling away, along with the religious order which gave it meaning, and the foundation of human within natural and divine law.

The laws must be obeyed. But we cannot understand this concept unless we also understand that the moral laws will be obeyed — as surely, in the end, as the laws of physics. Human legislation itself may err, and ultimately any law that is written in defiance of the divine and natural order will, necessarily, perish — for in the end, evil does not triumph. The true law, written into nature and men’s hearts, was never created by men. Rather it is discovered by them, often by means of trial and error, and thus over long periods of time. Yet in a coherent system of doctrine, internal contradictions are eventually exposed, and mistakes and misdirections corrected.

Hence, the Scottish jurisprude who said: “We do not break the law. We break ourselves upon the law.”

The contrary notion that law is whatever the government decides, and therefore in a democracy what the people decide their government should impose, produces law that becomes progressively more and more incoherent, and thus ever more arbitrary and unjust. My rightwing friends like to point to hypocrisies they find in leftwing schemes of social engineering. Examples are very easy to find. And yet these hypocrisies did not require malice to come into being (much though they may be enhanced or compounded by ill-will). It is sufficient to have a system in which decisions are made not in light of precedent, and gradually settled by experience; but according to the passions of the moment, expressed in electoral fluctuations, manipulated by polling and publicity specialists.

Parliament itself has changed in its nature over time. Outwardly it has been transformed from a gentleman’s club of the landed and privileged, in which members were well known to each other, and by inclination resistant to change. By increments it became something genuinely responsive to paid lobbies and current fashion trends. The quality of thinking and debate has been in consistent decline, and Parliamentary declamation now consists almost exclusively of playing to the gallery. Envies and resentments are openly exploited, by Members who themselves could not hope to be elected except with the help of big party machines, and by going huckster. Much depended, in the past, upon the dignity and prestige of Parliament. Little of that survives.

This was not some natural decay within the institution itself. Institutions may be organic in the sense that they develop historically, but they are not biological entities fated to grow old and die. Like buildings they survive so long as they are competently maintained and repaired; are kept in proper use. What happened to Parliament, gradually over the course of the 19th century and more quickly after the Great War, was an ideological transformation. Abstract demands for “equality” and “democracy” and “liberty” amounting to licence, transformed a gentleman’s debating club into the cockpit for crude factional battles. The franchise was spread without qualification, and in the strictest sense, Parliament became vulgar. In appearance it is now a circus or professional sports arena: the party leaders prancing before the cameras, and their competitively ranting fans.

*

Somewhere or other I once described modern representative democracy as, “England’s poisoned gift to the world.” By this I did not mean to criticize the legal and political institutions which had evolved in England — from unambiguously mediaeval roots. Nor was I necessarily referring to the notion of “rule by the people” in itself, for that kind of nonsense has arisen independently in many other countries — is endemic within barbaric tribal cultures, and is everywhere the cause of gratuitous bloodshed.

Rather I meant to denounce a peculiarly English success in packaging. The English genius, first clearly exposed in the Industrial Revolution, and now copied around the world, was for making shoddy goods seem temporarily respectable. The trappings of the (ancient and reasonably impressive) English constitutional order were used to frill and decorate something quite opposed to its spirit. “Representative democracy” emerged as a new industrial product, associated in the dreamy public mind with the delivery of abstract incompatibles — “liberty” and “equality” being the most obvious mutually contradictory terms.

It was a most remarkable development, in the end much like the gimmicks used by property developers and manufacturers of cheap goods. They use poetical terms from a vaguely-remembered past to brand products utterly unlike their descriptions. I remember as a child looking at a fresh suburban street sign which identified “Mountainview Boulevard,” and asking myself where is the mountain. Soon I learnt that the whole point of mass advertising is to associate a product with what it is not; and that “honesty in advertising” is not really obtainable. It is against this background, but also contributing to it, that “representative democracy” has flourished. For in a real democracy, the electors vote directly on public issues which they themselves have framed; whereas, in a “representative” democracy, they do not.

Products must be sold aggressively. Any salesman can tell you that being shy about it won’t land the contract; that the whole point of salesmanship is to push the customer a little beyond where he wants to go. The abstract “democracy” in the venerable “Parliamentary” box, whether or not it was an organic development in its land of origin, was sold abroad with chutzpah.

English-speaking chauvinism — whether it comes in British, North American, Australian, or other provincial forms — has been a moral danger to ourselves, but a source of tyranny to others. We present ourselves as a “chosen people” when in the event we were never chosen, except by ourselves. The arrogance has come to be embodied within our English language, through four centuries of special pleading for what I will call the Protestant State; and the chance success of British colonial and imperial endeavours. Today the mindset has degenerated into atheist and State post-Protestant posturing, yet the myths behind the propaganda endure — supporting the rather quaint assumption that we, who acquired our English from the crib, are “the best and the brightest,” with much to teach and nothing to learn. The word “exceptionalism” could be bruited here: a received term for the “American way” that seems to have floated over on the Mayflower, and still communicates the Puritan’s “holier than thou.” Yet the whole scheme originated earlier, and in England, not in some exalted “separation of powers,” but in the State’s appropriation of the Church.

Nowhere is this idea of “exceptionalism” better expressed than in the notion that the English-speaking peoples were trained through history and social development in the functioning of democracy, and in its various components — civil society, rule of law, individual responsibility and all that. In other words, we do not affirm our luck or our unworthiness, but a conviction of our own superiority. And if democracy fails elsewhere, as anything suddenly imposed will tend to do, then this is because those foreign peoples were not ready for it. (Or in the extreme: might never be ready.) When we look at what we have actually achieved — the features of the Nanny State that I was ticking off above — our claim to maturity is not only proud, but risible.

The people cannot form a government, and never could, in England or anywhere; democracy did not even work for long in ancient Athens, where only a small part of the adult male population had been enfranchised. It is not physically possible for “we the people” to do such a thing. We can elect our rulers, or even at that, a tiny proportion of them. Under any system of government, the great majority of office-holders will be appointed, to sinecures often outlasting those who appointed them. The calibre of appointments depends ultimately on the character and astuteness of the men or women who make them. Who can seriously believe that people voting in the mass, to choose between demagogues known to them only through sound bites and the glaze of mass media, will alight upon candidates whose judgement of persons and policies is sound?

And then we must consider the decadence of public religion. I am using the word “religion” not in a mystical sense, but in the classical, as the bond of common belief and assumption, that holds a society together; which governs man by custom, and by the education of his conscience teaches him to govern himself. Christianity has been almost consciously discarded as our common ground, and replaced by a secular religion on whose tenets man will write, as opposed to discover, what is the law. Spiritual qualities have been transferred from divine to human agencies, in the false belief that they were being abandoned. Magical properties become associated with words that once had specific meanings, chiefly “democracy” itself. We come to think that simply by introducing “democracy,” to a cesspit of conflict, every problem can be solved; and then we are utterly puzzled when the conflict is exacerbated.

Let me draw this together, for today if not for the year, by quoting that fine old Austrian sage, Eric Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–99). A broadly learned man (who travelled everywhere, and read in twenty-five languages), his political thought became focused on the rise of the Left — which, since the Enlightenment, has been filling the vacuum of a retreating Christianity. He grasped that the Left (or to my view, “politicization”) flourished precisely in a modern environment where political thought has become abstracted, and religious teaching is replaced by “ideals.” The book from which I will quote is, Leftism: from de Sade & Marx to Hitler & Marcuse. I select this early passage because I think it brings home, at a practical level, the consequences of democratic smugness, both in ourselves and in our imitators abroad:

“It is precisely the unwarranted identification of democracy with liberty which has caused a great many of the recurrent tragedies  of American foreign policy (as well as a number of internal American woes). We have to remember all the wars, all the propaganda, all the  pressure campaigns for the cause of democracy, how every hailed and applauded victory of democracy has ended in terrible defeat for personal liberty, the one cause really dear to American hearts.

“This is by no means a new story. Even Burke welcomed the French Revolution in the beginning. Eminent Americans praised it. But it all  ended in a forest of guillotines. Mr Woodrow Wilson enthusiastically welcomed Alexander Kerensky’s government which was to make Russia  ‘fit for a league of honour’. But how long did it last? The Weimar Republic, the near-republican Italian monarchy, the Spanish republic,  the ‘decolonized’ free nations from Haiti to Tanzania, from North Vietnam to Indonesia, Latin America from Santo Domingo to Buenos Aires — all have been grievous disappointments to ‘progressive’ Americans, all terminating in dictatorships, civil wars, crowded jails, confiscated newspapers, gallows and firing squads, one-party tyrannies, sequestrations, nationalizations, ‘social engineering’.”

One might redundantly add the Arab Spring, developments in Burma, or within the last few weeks, the fruit of our attempts to impose “power sharing” and “democracy” upon the new nation of South Sudan — thousands and thousands of unnecessary corpses, and we, through our pink filters, unable to see the blood on our own hands.

*

It is important to be clear, however, that for all these objections to the actual operation of democratic “ideals,” I am not against elections and Parliaments per se. Elections of some sort are among the many ways to choose a government, or have one chosen, without the need for succession massacres and routine civil wars. I am against unqualified “democracy” because it is what Doctor Johnson called a “canting term.” But I do not propose to overthrow the government (at least not until I have my ducks in order); and I recognize that we must start from where we are, and make the best of what we have. Even where we have made terrible mistakes, we should find ways to reverse them gradually and through existing law, carrying the common people along with us, as even monarchs in the end must do. And while the restoration of the principles of mediaeval monarchy in a revived Catholic Christendom would be a good thing, I do not anticipate this in the foreseeable future.

The limit of my instruction is therefore: “Stop using ‘democracy’ on banners.” Start thinking the consequences through, including the consequences to our own souls of excessive participation in politics.

There is a Frenchman named Jean-Luc Marion, student of Derrida, who wrote a book entitled God without Being. It is one of those horse texts (er, “hors-texte,” or outside-the-text) we rightly associate with post-modernism, and gentle reader may be aghast if I don’t run it down. Marion himself is celebrated in all the wrong ways, in all the wrong circles, from my seethingly provincial point of view. He has, to my uncertain knowledge, never been quoted with approval by a single member of the Tea Party. On the contrary, he was elected an immortel to the Académie française (taking the seat of the late Cardinal Lustiger), and that should be that: … Dismissed!

Some fifteen years has passed since I first acquired a copy of this book and attempted to read it. I found it exhilarating. In my nutshell, it argues that if God is Love, then in some sense “Love” is prior to “Being.” The theological implications of this mischievous notion are then teased out. What begins as apparently a wildly irresponsible, deconstructionist attack on the received Christian theological tradition, turns persistently on dimes, until we find it merely attacking Heidegger. Or, put another way, by the time Marion is finished with the modern conception of “Being,” there is nothing left standing except God. As I say, exhilarating. Had I been working in that publishing house, it might have appeared with the title, “The Incredible Caducity of Being.”

We then discover that (the more ferocious Catholic traddies should avert their attention for a moment) — Marion is also a disciple of Danielou, Bouyer, de Lubac, von Balthasar, under each of whom he seems also to have studied. And that, in God without Being and subsequent books, he seems to be trying to square his doctrines with those of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and other scholastics. His presentation of Christ as “pure gift” is moreover a hinge between what we imagine to be plain traditional teaching, and what might otherwise appear to be “no longer in Kansas.” His dangerously Neoplatonic notion of the “saturated phenomenon” — let us say for shorthand, truth so dense that it overloads truth — wends us back to Saint Augustine. Marion is an unfamiliar train taking us through some very familiar stations.

Would I put him on the Index? … But of course, I would put everyone on the Index for at least fifty years. To rotate Marion, I think that love should precede being, for authors spouting novelties. We may be able to see, in another half-century or so, whether Marion was a flash in the pan, or if another generation entirely can find some use for him. My own suspicion is that there is something in the love-before-being thesis, of real value to Christian faith.

Let me put it this way. In juxtaposing e.g. Thomas Aquinas with Martin Heidegger and the boys, on the question of Being, I find they are not speaking quite the same language. On the other hand, when moving from Saint Thomas to, say, the Vedanta, or to the Bible itself, I find that they are speaking the same language. “Being,” including that which presents as I-Am-That-I-Am, is a kind of action. By contrast, in the modern philosophers — and by this I mean almost everything since Descartes — “Being” is a kind of lump, or physical solid, described abstractly. It doesn’t really do anything, it is just there. Whereas, to oversimplify Marion, it is not there at all, it is instead doing something.

But Christ is there, to be sure, as what have you — let us say, “pure gift.” And His there-ness, we are to understand, was from the beginning, before all worlds. “In principio” means not only in the beginning but also “in principle,” or “prior” in the philosophical sense. We might also supply “at” or “on” as alternative prepositions of place. I am not writing this to restrict the meaning of the opening of Saint John’s gospel, but rather by way of opening the star-gate. Our temporal notion of before and after may be viewed as a trap. To say of God, that He “was there, in the beginning,” i.e. the beginning of time, might lead us into a very confined, or constrictively modern, and finally atheist, apprehension of the Creation itself.

Or if you will, it will lead us back into the fatal Cartesian bifurcation, by way of various post-Cartesian imbecilities, in which God winds up this clock, then leaves it ticking till the end of time, perhaps dropping in Christ as a kind of daylight-savings-time mechanical correction. The machinery of Nature is allowed to be miraculous, on this view, but only just barely. For sure, it is something, or if you will, “not-nothing.” Being, against the atheistical background of non-being, comes as a surprise. Something appears to come out of nothing. (To which the atheist adds, “ho-hum.”) …

Observe, that it is “pure gift.”

The Creation is not like that clock, and cannot be like that. The temporal “in the beginning” continues as we speak. God has created, is creating, and will create and sustain in every moment, in perfect transcendence. I would add, too, in perfect immanence, except that notion is too easily misunderstood — thanks, I would say, to our received modern notion of Being as an abstractly-described physical solid; or if you will, that blockhead notion that comes from drinking too much empiricism and not vomiting enough.

For conversely, the very somethingness of God eliminates the possibility of nothingness. That somethingness may be beyond comprehension, but cannot be denied. I think of a mukhya Upanishad — composed long before Jesus, before even Buddha — in which I once read: “He is not a male. He is not a female. He is not a neuter. He neither is, nor is not. When he is sought he will take the form in which he is sought; but again he will not come in such a form. It is indeed difficult to describe the Name of the Lord.”

And the Messiah came in a form we were not expecting.

It will be noted that Christmas begins tomorrow night. In the crèche, in the holiness of the Nativity, we contemplate an astounding metaphysical fact. Our Lord has come to visit us “in person.” All the prophets have arrived in Bethlehem, in the humblest of rock-solid caves, with the animals, the sheep and shepherds of the fields, and too, the angels of the Creation. Not “elsewhere” but in the order of our own Being. Unbelievers may make of this what they will — some sweet little fairytale I suppose — but for me it cracks open that whole order of our Being. For everything that could be said about this world, it was not as it appeared.

The Love, the “pure gift”; the mystery of fatherhood in the person of Joseph, and of Mary the Mother of God; the fulfilment of all prophecy “from the beginning” — it is all there, in the crèche. The “ideas” that will be presented in due course, in the Life, the Teaching, the Crucifixion, and Resurrection, will be of necessity perfectly astounding, as they follow from this. But really I find even more astounding the bottomless simplicity of this question:

What child is this?

Once upon a time, when I was still employable in the Main Stream Media, or at least by the newspaper chain which owned the Ottawa Citizen, I had the pleasure of attending to the whims of a very public-spirited Publisher. An enthusiastic partisan of “enlightened self-interest,” he led each year our corporate campaign to promote Literacy. We, his editorial serfs in contractual bondage, were not directly ordered to sell subscriptions to the paper on streetcorners for the duration of this event. That was a “voluntary” activity, which I quietly avoided. Nor were we ordered, but rather “advised” to do, each in his (or her!) own station, whatever we could to promote the ideal of universal Literacy, if not literacy itself.

By way of acknowledging this advice, I contributed an annual column, either opposing Literacy, or extolling the virtues of illiterate people. If that didn’t help the cause, nothing would. The subtlety of my attack on compulsory education — for it reflected Alexander Pope’s dictum, “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring” — was ignored by my usual counter-attackers, focusing as they invariably did upon my own illiteracy and “one-figure IQ.” As I explained to this Publisher, when queried, I was doing my part. For what could I write that would more effectively inspire his goons to go spread the gospel of Literacy among the unlettered masses of Ottawa, Ontario?

My argument often consisted of memoir. It would be of one or another encounter with illiterate farming peasants or hill tribes from my earlier days of wandering in Asia. In them I had found happiness and purpose in life, and a supporting contentment with family and possessions, that in modern city life I had not detected. Also, I had found intelligent full attention: a capacity for observation and learning that was not characteristic of our urban slums. But most of all, I was impressed by their memories.

This last point was brought home to me by an old lady in a village of north-eastern Thailand. By chance I came to visit that village twice, at a remove of some years. My “central” Thai never rose to the level of “appalling,” and my command of the tones was winceingly comic, but here I was trying to make myself understood among speakers of another dialect of Thai.

The old lady in question — something of a sooth-sayer, but that is another story — greeted me on my return with what could have passed for affection. I listened while she delivered some kind of welcoming address. But as she spoke, other villagers began giggling softly, then more loudly, until they would split their sides. Whereas, I remained good-naturedly puzzled — wearing, I’m sure, that gormless, gently grinning expression which nice liberal people wear when they are out of their depth and beginning to be fearful for their lives.

Gradually it dawned, what was so funny. It was not what she was saying, but the way it was said. The old lady had remembered, it seemed, every word I’d spoken, or rather tried to speak, on my last visit — so precisely that she could now do an elaborate parody. The sun shone when I heard what sounded like my own voice, played back as if on a tape-recorder. She had my number. I did not have hers. Her mind, uncluttered by the impedimenta of literacy, had taken everything in.

One of the delights, in reading the old European travellers, as well those so recent as Redmond O’Hanlon, is to follow them into territory where all the “advantages of civilization” disappear, and they are now at the mercy of the natives. Perhaps only in such circumstances, in the natives’ own environment, can one hope to acquire the kind of respect which they in turn will require of their visitors. This would include respect for their technology, insofar as it may consist of things like blow-darts, or jungle traps for the most alert animals. But some modestly graduated version of this experience is available to any city boy, who drifts away from his own social and ecological niche.

I could rehearse here other parts of an argument that will already be familiar to the more than half-educated: e.g. the astounding range and subtlety which the anthropologists and linguists have found, embedded within languages never committed to writing, unless by some industrious Protestant missionary turning out elaborate parodies of the Bible. And here I am not referring to old clichés, such as how many words the Eskimos have for “snow.” (About the same number we have in English, but with a much greater range of modifiers.) And of course not to such tropes as the one about the New Guinea tribe that gets by on a word-list of less than two hundred. (For as I recall, the next visitor found they had more than that in their ornithological vocabulary alone; that most of them also spoke five or six other tribal languages; but that they restricted themselves to a kind of tribal Esperanto when dealing with visitors from farther away.) Modern, urban people are easy prey for almost any nonsense about “primitive tribesmen” — or anyone else not modern and urbane.

Rather I am referring to the scholarship that has accumulated over the last century or two on the extraordinary range, complexity, and grace of oral literatures. This began with the realization that the Iliad could not have been composed by a literate man, nor the Odyssey nor, once the lesson sank in, the Vedas, the Eddas, or any of the formative “texts” from ancient civilizations. Yet these works show every sign of having been “composed” — as opposed to the narrowly literate idea of “redacted.” To this day, one is compelled to smile (contemptuously) at “biblical textual scholars” presenting the Hebrew Genesis as if it had been assembled in drafts by a college committee.

Plato knew better, and though himself a sophisticated cosmopolitan, warned against the dangers, moral as intellectual, of literal-mindedness. The sincere man does not write, but teaches; the wise write only as an amusement, or for the sake of laying down a few reminders in case memory fails them in their old age. Aristotle, likewise, does not assume that the “cultured” depends on the “grammatical,” since the former is in every sense prior. And among my own Gaelic forebears on my mama’s side, there was a clear understanding that the content of books is only “known of.” What is actually known, can be recited.

They were unfortunately the first victims of a Literacy Crusade, sprung in Reformation Scotland, by Calvinist fanatics animated by the demonstrably insane idea that everyone must be forced to read, so they may then be forced to read the Scriptures, then forced to subscribe to the Calvinist interpretation of them, and finally forced to declare that they had come to these Calvinist conclusions entirely on their own. Scotland became the first benighted country in the history of this galaxy to achieve universal literacy, from a system of compulsory state schooling that, in its descendant form, remains an affliction upon every North American child. It is the great enforcer of dark ignorance and servile conformity — or, “democracy” to use the more common term.

A progressive lady of my acquaintance has characterized my statement in the last post, that “a certain minority of talented women have always flourished outside the home,” as — and I quote — “Baloney!” She notes that prior to the Great War, women were not admitted to British universities, or practically anywhere else in the English-speaking world.

To this, one must inevitably reply, “Bologna!” — alluding of course to the ancient Italian town, whose university, developed from a law school, has been admitting students of both sexes from across Europe for at least one thousand years, and rather more if we take it back to the foundation by Theodosius in 425. One remembers among its professors for instance the learned (and very beautiful) Novella d’Andrea in the 14th century; or Laura Bassi, the illustrious mathematician and physicist; or Signora Mazzolini, the incisive anatomist; or Clotilda Tambroni the poetess, philologist, and Greek classicist.

It is true that a major feature of the Protestant Reformation consisted of closing women out of academic and other areas of public life. One thinks of John Knox, and his pamphlet, First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and other expostulations of that kind from the old anti-Catholic propaganda. But as Catholics we can hardly be held accountable for it: his was the very sort of narrowness we were fighting.

As the former prime ministrix of France, Édith Cresson, pointed out to reporters back in 1991, there has always been something of a problem with “Anglo-Saxon men.” Asked what she meant by an American reporter, she explained that, “They aren’t really men, they are all homosexual.” (As there was some surprise at this remark, she then qualified it by saying, “Well, not all the Anglo-Saxon men, of course. Perhaps only 35 or 40 percent. But you know what I mean.”)

My first encounter with “demography is destiny” was as an adolescent, reading The Estate of Man, by Michael Roberts. This remarkable poet, mathematician, philosophical thinker, and mountaineer, died young, leaving the book as an uncompleted manuscript from which his (also remarkable) wife, Janet, salvaged seven chapters. It was intended as a general survey of planetary husbandry, and built upon his own earlier works, including The Recovery of the West, written in reply to general discussion of “the decline of Europe.” Roberts was a member of the Auden generation, in the 1930s — among the fashionable young Leftists in the decade before they all grew up and became reactionaries. But Roberts himself had a mind strangely unbefuddled by contemporary vogues, trends, and manias. He was able both to join and then get expelled from the British Communist Party during a single term at Cambridge — perhaps the record for quick learning. It is a pity we lost him, for he would likely have continued growing, into a fine complement for Christopher Dawson.

The statistics cited, from that antediluvian age, before the Baby Boom winked in the eye of the Blitz over London, seem oddly familiar today. Or rather, the trendlines are familiar, and public moaning in the ‘thirties about everything from falling European birthrates, to overpopulation elsewhere, the depletion of oil and coal reserves, the arms races, impending environmental ruin and the like, provide a useful reminder — that all statistical trends are Malthusian, and will show from any point in time that we are going irretrievably to hell. Roberts was an unusual public intellectual, for while he had an uncommon mastery of statistical methods and processes, he was not enslaved by them. Twenty years after his death, he became my teacher for the proposition that “all trends are reversible,” and for the insight that they tend to conceal rather than reveal their own causes. Most interesting, Roberts had a mind not only quick, but by disposition also faithful and chaste. Thus he was endowed with the power to see through momentary excitements and distractions.

He was beginning to see, like Dawson, the extraordinary role of faith itself in the sequences of history. Faith is the great life-giving force, and the loss of faith is death-dealing. By this we do not mean only Christian faith, for the same principle applies in all cultures, and has applied since time out of mind.

The classical example is “the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.” As the pagan Romans lost faith in their own civilization, they stopped having babies. They rehearsed almost all the features of our modern West in their own later decadence: the sophisticated rejection of religious observances; the confident smugness of the half-educated; the degradation of family life; the acceptance of public pornography, and openly perverse liaisons; couch-potato obsessions with circus and professionalized gladiatorial sports; the shift from pride in productivity, to a shameless consumerism; the aesthetic decline in all manufactures; the spread of dishonourable trade practices; the inflation of money, and in all other kinds; debt crises; the growing dependence upon immigrant slaves and other cheap labour for all unpleasant work, including everything required of the Roman armies; the appeasement of enemies, and extravagant buying off of the tribal savages, now being let inside their frontiers. In a word, “individualism,” or in another, “atomization.” Stage by stage, we watch the implosion, until finally we have that wonderful spectacle conveyed in the painting of Delacroix: “Attila the Hun, followed by his hordes, trample Italy and the Arts.”

A more careful historian would not present this decline as continuous, however. As we focus, we see the Roman hesitation. After taking steps back, they take steps forward. There were decades of recovery, when one could imagine the sage pundits of Rome saying, “What were we so worried about?” and boasting of the new Roman hyperpower after winning obscure bush wars. The sense of invincibility would seem to be returning, along with faith in Roman institutions. Then it falters again, because in prosperity the old Roman chests had been emptying out. They no longer believed in their own future, let alone in their gods. They had no mission any more, and could barely cope with even minor disasters. Still, they put off their fate for centuries, until the last legions scattered or ran home.

But here is the mystery of our human history, in which nothing is inevitable, except in retrospect. The modern West will not go the way of Rome. It will go some other way; perhaps even to a restoration of sense, and recovery of faith — in our own Lord, and by extension, in our own future as a civilization. For after all, not everyone has stopped having children, as the faithless diligently weed themselves out of the garden of genes. All the symptoms of decline are there, but also symptoms of the Western “exceptionalism.” The Catholic Church, for instance, is not dead in the West, by a long shot. (See the millions of kids at those papal “youth days.”) She wins converts regularly among the best-educated, and that regardless of what is done in Rome. In the balance the Church is wanting, but she has always been wanting, in a world that has always been in a mess.

*

What was the cause of the Baby Boom? The standard answer is, it came from the War: that after a good war, the population is restocking. There is some truth in this, and after the First World War I think the birthrate rose a bit. But not for long, and as I learnt from Michael Roberts, in countries like France it fell and fell. After the Second World War it kept rising — a phenomenon that extended into the early 1960s. And then it reversed itself, at the very height of our post-War prosperity, and has continued falling, mostly, since. What can explain this?

From what I am able to understand, faith explains it. There was a remarkable revival of Christian faith, and of all the trappings of it (including “family values”), which began in the horror of that last War, and persisted right through the ‘fifties. The phenomena are of course statistically complex, and cannot be reduced to some smooth curve. Nevertheless, a trend was reversing that had reversed before; and for centuries now Christianity in the West has been on its way out, and then improbably returning. The Catholic Church has, by now, been beaten into the prospect of extinction many times. The obituaries for her were being written a hundred years ago, and throughout the 18th century, and at key moments in the 17th and 16th as well. In the United States, evangelical revivals have been a repeating surprise. And today we have the unprecedented luxury of watching Christian converts from Africa and Asia, returning as missionaries to the countries from which missionaries once proceeded.

All trends are reversible, and I do not think the West can be counted out. Without the Christianity that formed it, and gives it meaning, it is of course stone dead. But we have, itching under our skin, a religion that is better than we are, and for all evidence to the contrary it will not simply go away. We evict Christ by the front door, but our servants keep letting him in the back. And in our hearts, and our worst misfortunes, we still instinctively reach for Him. Secretly, we don’t want to die.

Demography is not destiny, because the trends can change. In some parts of Europe the birthrate is such (Hungary for example, now below one child per woman) that a nation must surely go down the plug hole; in other parts, the numbers are beginning to rise again. As David Goldman (also known as “Spengler”) elaborately explains, something worse than what has happened in Europe is happening all around Europe. The birthrates in the Islamic countries (Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, Iran, &c) have plummeted to below Europe’s. In a single generation, Iran for instance has gone from 6.0 to 1.6 children per woman, and that birthrate is still falling. Similar drops may be tracked elsewhere in the “third world,” and in the “tiger economies” of the Far East. The demographic sepuku of Japan is stunning; but also through China and South-east Asia populations must fall; India is now following them onto the slide. By its comparatively gradual decline, Europe has been holding up relatively well, and over here in North America, we have held up a little better.

What was the cause? The explanation I will give is from my own experience as a traveller, and my habitual efforts to keep informed about the countries I have visited. It is, to my mind, a loss of faith: but a more profound loss than in the West. The particulars are of course different from location to location, but as a general rule, the alternatives to Christian faith have been found much less capable of surviving the onslaught of our so-called “secular humanism.” The raw materialism of capitalism and socialism has, even more spectacularly than in the West, hollowed out religious traditions everywhere. And this to such a degree, that the exceptions prove the rule: for wherever we find what looks like a revival, it is of a de-spiritualized religion, politicized in ethnic rivalries — almost entirely, from both sides, along what Samuel Huntington infamously (but accurately) called, “Islam’s bloody borders.”

Similarly, the violence within the Islamic world — proximately caused by “Islamism” — is the product of civilizational despair. That is, loss of faith. As I have written elsewhere, the cross-section of a Muslim terrorist displays religious fanatic on the outside, but atheist within. He is not killing people because he believes, but because he has nothing left to live for, having become inwardly convinced that his own civilization really is done for: that it has been badly beaten in a competition with the West that centuries ago it seemed to be winning, and that main force is all that remains. My clue in this has been, all along, the very calling of the suicide bomber. Traditional Islam in every sect condemned suicide unambiguously; condemned murder unambiguously. The people who claim to defend Islam by murder-suicide, cannot possibly believe its actual teachings. But it is not just them. The collapsing birthrates, in cultures that were intensely child-friendly, everywhere proclaim this abandonment of hope.

Whether in West or East, however, the mechanism of societal disintegration is the same. It could be described in one phrase as “the liberation of women.” The modern economy lures women away from home and family with (ludicrously false) promises of wealth, pleasure, and freedom. Industry required a more docile labour force, the State required revenues from double-income taxation. At a level more fundamental than economics, the times have offered atomizing ideologies — the promise of “democracy” in which everyone will be treated the same, whether man, woman, or some other thing. As Goldman has rather plainly shown (and Roberts showed long before him), we must cherchez la femme.

For women are, as they have always been, the bedrock of both family and religion. Men have, and will be by nature (whether this is recognized or not) the hunters and gatherers and bread winners. There is no point in debating this, for either one gets it or one is wilfully obtuse. A certain minority of talented women have always flourished outside the home, and perhaps a like proportion of men not flourished in the absence of any marketable skills — but the case is straightforward in the main. What we have been enduring, for a century now, is an attempt to change the order of the world by social and sometimes genetic engineering; with results clearly visible all around us, to say nothing of the grief and loneliness and self-pity that each of us is carrying inside.

Curiously enough, Goldman homes in on a statistical fact that Roberts elided. It is that a sharply increasing female literacy rate is a more or less infallible predictor of demographic collapse, in all non-Western countries. Or as I mischievously put it, on Twitter only last night, “statistically and objectively, the quickest way to destroy a nation is to teach their women to read.”

This remark would invite several gallant qualifications. The modern emancipation of women began in the West, where Christian teaching had always accorded women the greatest respect. The social changes were therefore slower and easier to assimilate, here. It is when what happened more gradually in the West, happens more suddenly in the East, that the transformation becomes catastrophic. The whole ancestral order of society comes down, in one generation rather than four or five. And they haven’t seen the worst of it yet, for the West had accumulated reserves of wealth, with which to pay some pensions and geriatric bills. The East will face a more dramatically ageing population, without the reserves.

It makes no sense to gloat, that “the other” is now perishing faster than we are. It should behove us instead to help him if we can. As prudent creatures, we should consider how.

Trying to think this question through, I have come to only one conclusion. Our attempts to export “democracy,” or “free markets,” or “socialism,” or our agnostic materialism whatever it is called — along the paths of rapine scythed by our ancestors — should cease forthwith. Our “secular humanism” has done nothing but undermine and smash, wherever it has landed in foreign cultures, at terrible cost in human souls. Carrying with ourselves a priceless treasure, we sold them what instead? And instead now of hoping we can buy it back, and somehow retrieve our old prosperity and domination, we should take stock of all we have achieved: Nothing. The virus of Christianity spread largely on its own: a few faithful priests tagging along with thousands of compromised traders and raiders; true Christian evangelists, often more repugnant to the colonial authorities than to the natives they first encountered. But that era is over, will not come again, and the circumstances now demand from us a new way of thinking.

Under these new circumstances we should, I think, throw all our resources, material as spiritual, first into re-Christianizing ourselves. And then, where any chance arises, throw what remains into helping our neighbours to Christianize themselves, against all the false promises of this world. For in my settled opinion, only Christ can help us; and at this point so late in the day, only Christ can help them.

*

And again, it strikes me, cherchez la femme. A woman comes into this in the figure of Mary, commonly venerated by the grace of God not only through what remains of Christendom, but also what remains of the Dar al-Islam. I think on Fatima, but more especially upon Our Lady of Zeitoun (near Cairo, 2nd April 1968, and multiple subsequent apparitions, before immense crowds, photographed and video-recorded from so many angles and by so many cameras as to obviate any possibility of a hoax). It is she, above all, in her own light as “Our Lady of Light,” upon the roof of her own church at Zeitoun — along with those “bursts of diamonds” and “explosions of incense” to which hundreds of thousands of witnesses attested — who calls upon this world. Before Muslim and Christian alike, she was seen standing, and kneeling, alone; then again and again, presenting the Child, cradled in her arms. It is she, to us all, who, I believe, points the only viable way forward.

For the last fortnight, not that anyone has noticed, I have been, as it were, enrolled in the Twitterversity, so that I find at the time of this writing I have ping’d some one hundred and sixty-nine “tweets.” I was put up to this by well-inclined people, at least one of whom argued plausibly that as I do still scan the Internet, as I once scanned newspapers and magazines, and I will make gratuitous comments on the sludge I am reading as I go along, I might as well post such remarks in a place where they can be a source of irritation to a wider audience — and a lure to these “Essays in Idleness,” where a fuller and more formal trial of gentle reader’s ability to withstand abuse can be administered.

Note that this my Twitter feed can be found here, and should be flagged or “bookmarked” by all masochists. I now consider it to be “my other website,” or if you will, a bonus offered to my subscribers — absolutely free! And whereas I largely eschew use of Uniform Resource Locators in the text of these essays, because they are crass, in Twitterdom they are much the whole point, and my tweets have been and will be full of them.

As an incurable old hack, this gives me an opportunity to point towards events the Main Stream Media are eager to avoid reporting, or to other items on the Internet that would not be to their taste; leaving the tiniest little space to explain what it is that I have found interesting. This makes an amusing exercise, given the limitation of individual posts to 140 characters, net. I am taken back to headline-writing days on the old dead-tree newspapers, where the trick was to fit, into an extremely confined space, as much honest mischief as one thought one’s superiors might allow or, since they allowed very little, fail to understand.

Truth told, I got constantly into trouble for the headlines I had written — usually the next morning, when some earnest colleague would explain the meaning to the publisher, with a comment such as, “Looks like Warren has done it again.” (Often I was charged with “obscurity,” when the problem was that my obscurantism had failed.) Between that, and my childish propensity to practical joking, I was not fated to rise in the journalistic world; especially in North America, where dullness is held among the categorical imperatives, along with conformity to the reigning ideological order.

That no one, under any circumstance, should stoop to reading or writing Tweets, might go without an argument. But like so many other things, starting with the practice of journalism itself, “the world’s second-oldest profession,” I do it anyway. (One must, after all, do something for a living, when one lacks talents or skills.) It seems a suitable medium to the age, in which everything is written on water, and I trust God to make the best of it. I, for my part, have only to disseminate so much of the truth as I think I may have grasped: not much, but something.

By way of belabouring my last post, and replying to an off-screen Texas correspondent, and other commendable tea-drinkers of his ilk, the “roadmap to Utopia” we are discussing at the moment could follow an itinerary like this: Henry VIII; Bacon, Descartes; Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau; Jefferson; Robespierre; Marx, Darwin, Freud; then Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, environmentalism, &c.  One could draw other squiggly paths — this list needs more Prussians, and adoptive Prussians. From American shorthand we are supplied with the term “Positivism,” in the sense of legal positivism. The word is in itself already an essay in reductionism, which involves anachronism, too. But it does give something of the Baconian bouquet, albeit with that ghastly Comtian finish.

When I defend USA to Europeans, I say they tried to get off the bus at Locke; but the bus keeps travelling towards the other camp destinations, often almost robotically. By now, a driver like Barack Obama is hardly aware that the road has two lanes; that one could, at least “in theory,” be travelling along it in the other direction. And this in turn is my excuse for Obama. I honestly don’t think he is “plotting” anything, beyond the commonplace political deceits which are the stock-in-trade of democracy. He just doesn’t know any better.

The same could be said about most of the somewhat-libertarian “conservatives” I know, whose purchase on what we have agreed to call “positivism” is Black-Friday reckless. For the background enemy position has been reinforced with centuries of tedious propaganda, and there they are in the Walmart.

And it is still coming. Having quickly perused the publicity blather for e.g. Daniel Hannan’s bestseller, Inventing Freedom (and on the other side of the sea, under the more explicit title, How We Invented Freedom), I can recommend it to all my “neo-conservative” friends. I can see they will like it. For it is a mishmash of all the tired old Protestant clichés, encrusting upon the stalk of Anglo-Saxon chauvinism. (Yes, Lincoln at Gettysburg was quoting Wycliffe, and that’s exactly what’s wrong with “of, by, and for the people.”) The old Whig pomposity survives, long after its historical account of itself was blown away by serious historical scholarship. People know so little history today, and these clichés are so flattering to their English-speaking ignorance, that Mr Hannan’s latest can be hailed as some boldly original Torch-of-Liberty blaze, when it is really the same old wet sawdust and a patient man with a Bic lighter.

I like him, incidentally. As politicians go, he is several cuts above mediocrity, and the fact he thinks at all is quite remarkable. Like Burke, he is of Irish Catholic descent, and comes to his British Imperial delusions as an immigrant. He has Hayek’s view that less government is better; along with Hayek’s view that some things ought to be against the law regardless of their profitability. I have chosen him for my example because he is the sort of political company in which almost any current political “conservative” would wish to be. I would certainly take tea with him myself, for “democracy” is what we have at the moment, and Christian irony requires us to enjoy what we have, with biscuits.

Notwithstanding, let me observe, that the “democratic” political battle today is between less-government Positivists who usually like foreign wars, and more-government Positivists who prefer domestic ones. This leaves little room for those against Positivism. I should myself have liked to get off the bus around the time of Henry VII, and would have been willing to walk home from there.

What I look for in a political order is all the usual mediaeval things: simplicity of conception, modesty of intention, stability, predictability, the fear of God, and the habit of staying out of our pretty faces. Texans may argue that the USA, thanks to some “inalienable rights” written into their Constitution, comes closer to delivering on this than, say, Canada or the U.K. or continental Europe. They are probably right, God bless them. But they have also missed the point.

The salient point is that the USA Constitution was itself triumphantly Lockean, or if you will, Positivist. It is the oldest such, and by now that Positivism has spread throughout the West, in many increasingly virulent forms, which incidentally wash back on the USA and get copied there. Healthcare for instance: no possible business of the guvmint’s on any soundly mediaeval scheme.

Killing babies: now that is the government’s business, because it is a form of murder, which ought to be discouraged by Law. Nor do we depend on medical expertise to discern that, though high technology has made the truth clearer to anyone who wants to look. Let me just presume that even libertarians might request State assistance against murder, occasionally.

The old States in former Christendom were generally concerned with the enforcement of the Ten Commandments, which they took as having unanswerably divine “thou shalt” authority, without the least need of an election. This is why, for instance, open atheism and heresy would have been a concern to them: because they were a direct attack on Everything. Atheist positivism has reduced those Commandments to maybe three, with qualifications; then added four hundred and thirty-two more, plus seventeen billion pages of regulations. My opposition to this depends in no way upon libertarianism, and I resent the suggestion that it ever might do. Please, if you’re going to use language like that, call me anarcho-feudalist.

The bus of progressive Positivism rolls on — over the Dantean tiers, if you ask me — and those who want to get off are themselves accused of “relativism.” That is because we keep asking to be let off the bus at different locations, whereas the desire is really perfectly consistent: just let us off your bloody bus! We find ourselves defending one or another status quo ante, each of which must be an ipso facto compromise with the prevailing direction of the bus. American conservatives, for instance, anxious for the honour of their own Revolutionary Constitution, want to turn the clock back only that far (“strict constructionism”), which would hardly be far enough back for a genuinely loyal Canadian. We sniff at all that Lockean and Jeffersonian madness.

The attitudes of my Loyalist ancestors, so far as I can discern them going back to the very first American Civil War in the 1770s, was itself shockingly “positivist.” Most had bought into the inaptly named “Glorious Revolution” in England, and all apparently into the Protestant succession. My ancestors were far from perfect, as I concede from time to time.  But they felt in their guts there was something wrong in pushing envelopes of “Liberty” and “Enlightenment” any farther. In that sense they were “conservatives” like Texans, saying with all its faults we’ll keep the constitution we have, which gives the colonial politicians scope enough (Texas today is a mildly rebellious colony of the District of Columbia); and wait for any solecism to be corrected in a constitutional manner. In that context, I would have been loading my musket with them.

What more interests me, however, is the Loyalists’ deeper “Crown and Altar” gut feeling, which one might characterize as a mediaeval survival: an instinctive reference to the anciently established order of Christendom. In Quebec this was gloriously Catholic to boot, and some of these modern “positivist” attitudes did not fully penetrate that province until well into the 20th century — whenupon the poor sods finally lost their courage, and went bat-feathering insane. Indeed, the remaining spiritual superstructure of French Canadian society disintegrated all at once in a specific year: 1960. That aspect is fascinating: for rural Quebec was, along perhaps with western Ireland and some mountain fastnesses in Spain and Italy, among the last of this world’s beautifully mediaeval backwaters.

My Loyalists and these Frenchmen — and believe me, we did not naturally take to each other in a spontaneous way — joined forces for a last stand, and actually pulled off “Canada.” That was something that still gives me a bit of the goosebumps: beating back the Yankee invaders of 1776 and 1812 (with some thanks to the Royal Navy).

There is a book by one of those Frenchmen named Lanctot on the improbable loyalty of his kind to His Britannic Majesty at the time of the Revolution — to say nothing of later when the alternative to the Crown was the prim and rather shrieky little Catholic-baiting James Madison, Jr. It is really rather moving, the way those Habitants joined up voluntarily, in gallant numbers, to fight for our royal British cause — while the sleazy English merchants of Montreal, protective of their delicate sons, were cutting sorry deals with the Yankees.

But my point was going to be: subscription to the old motto of the fine Province of Ontario (Ut incepit fidelis sic permanet; “Loyal she began, and loyal she remains”). The cause to which this motto specifically referred is long lost, according to the conventional view. Yet one still stands, in solidarity with one’s own oddly Calvinist ancestors, in the deeper memory of a legitimate and Christian order that was simple, modest, stable, predictable, God-fearing, and out of our pretty faces.

Locke hardly read Hobbes, denied having read him when asked, and among Locke’s surviving notes which suggest serious attention to a wide range of authors, there would seem to be only one mention of Hobbes, and that rather dismissive. So that when I casually remarked, somewhere the other day, that Locke developed certain ideas from Hobbes I was, strictly speaking, uttering nonsense. I often do that, and feel slightly embarrassed later. Curiously, it was the mere sight of the spine of Laslett’s edition of Locke’s Two Treatises that sobered me, afterwards. (If I lived off e-books, I’d have no such prompts.) It has a long and, in the best sense, scholarly introduction I suddenly remembered having perused.

But I’m a hack, a mere journalist, wandering ignorantly through space and time, and people like me do not bother with footnotes. We find them too confining; raw memory will serve. (My hero Kipling refused even to keep notebooks.) What I think I meant was that Hobbes appropriated various ideas about the nature of politics and the human condition from the plein air, as it was circulating in his time; and Locke developed the same in the next generation.

Locke himself, pillar of our modern Gringo world, and the Anglo bits especially, is a slew of self-contradictions and vague sourceless references (see Laslett, again). Yet he was, too, a meticulous, if ignored, reviser of his own manuscripts. Charged, for instance, with having no intellectual appreciation of the foundations of Natural Law, he would become very snooty and fix the text in which he had left that impression. It was not his fault that all his careful corrections were dispersed unread at his death, only to be rediscovered centuries later. Others among his eccentricities incline me to love him as at least a fellow hack, ducking and weaving through the mudfights of his time, inching towards the celestial castle on its promontory, far far away.

It was in realizing my own, typically Twitterish mistake, that I recalled what made Locke, even more than Hobbes, novel and frightening and exhilarating to his own first readers. Hobbes’s nastiness, brutality, and shortness, is conducted in a full view of actual history. He sparkles with classical and biblical allusion, with his sense of the development of civil law, with an insistence on cumulative human experience. His prose style itself — among the most magnificent exhibitions of the English language — designedly throbs with such particulars, and is fretted with the old poetical renderings of beautiful words such as “warre.” To my mind, he is the enemy, but a fine and worthy one. I could close a pub, drinking with that man.

Locke is an enemy of a different, and rather abstemious kind. He writes almost exclusively about politics and the human condition “in principle,” and with an indifference to heritage that makes him seem sometimes to have been born yesterday. This was the revolutionary thrill he gave many of his interpreters: who felt, reading him, the power of his tabula rasa — his notion that the human child arrives in the world with a blank slate, upon which almost anything can be written. This was the kind of liberation he offered. Henceforth the old Aristotelian order was truly overthrown, and the work of Enlightenment could proceed. The American Constitution, to give just one example, could not exist without Locke, written as it was in the belief that we could throw out everything and start again. Rousseau and Revolution were, if I may make another of my irresponsible assertions, communicated by Locke’s key from England also unto France. (The French will deny this.) And history, uncoupled from its former drivers, could slide with a new, gravitationally-assisted speed, towards the Finland Station.

Is this a wild overstatement? Do I take Locke too seriously? Of that, my learned reader must decide. I, for my part, am content if I have found no more than a means to justify my absurd, almost perverse love for Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. For he was arguably the last of our literary, i.e. readable, political philosophers — those who assumed that the moral of the story must emerge from the telling of the story, as from the life lived; and that it does not descend from the sky as a species of sterilized gezo or manna. Even David Hume can be seen as something of a reactionary in this light, with his great concern for an actual British history, and his backward-looking habit of writing well. Even Voltaire (as I explained once in some review of a book by John Ralston-Purina) could be presented as a soi-disant Tory in this light, oriented to the past, by comparison to his self-styled “bastards.” Though if a Tory, Voltaire was, like Hume, a rather glib one.

To put this another way, I feel more at home in a house with furniture. And this, even if the furniture is a little tacky. I like to be able to sit somewhere: to find a chair, then maybe a pot to boil my lentils. I do not like to conjure them from scratch.

What follows, on this Feast of Christ the King, is the slightly edited and contracted text of a “talk” I gave four years ago, in the “Scavi” of Saint Patrick’s Basilica at Ottawa. It was a pleasant evening, as I recall. Not one heckler, for a change, though many young people out from the city’s several universities, who were aware of me as the token “conservative” columnist on the editorial page of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper: the one whose job seemed to consist of making nice liberal people, each morning, sleepily munching breakfast at the start of busy days, suddenly spit up their cornflakes. The questions I was asked afterwards were intelligent and genuine, and I was amazed to be so well received by these college students once I stepped outside. What a contrast to the brownshirt demonstration one must expect if speaking at, for instance, the University of Ottawa! Where, notoriously, the slightest deviation from the current official party line will be drowned out by the resident chorus of howler monkeys.

My motto for this talk, incidentally, came from Saint Thomas More: “For in man reason ought to reign like a king, and it does reign when it makes itself loyally subject to the faith, and serves God.”

*

Let me begin by warning my audience that some of the things I say this evening may be controversial. At least, I hope they will be. In the event, I take my courage from Pope Benedict XVI in Rome. He is said to have told a confidante that, “Whenever I make a public statement, and it is not criticized, I have to examine my conscience.”

Saint Peter, a pope in Rome before him, is reported in the Gospels to have failed not once, but thrice in this respect. He was put in a position where he would have to make a very controversial remark, to the effect that he did, in fact, know Jesus personally. But noticing himself surrounded by a howling mob, out for blood, he decided the politic thing would be to pretend he was someone else.

We gather from the same account that he was rather seized by conscience after employing this stratagem. The denial of Christ would not count in any Catholic view of the universe as a minor oversight, or venial sin. It would instead go to the heart of what our Lord is, in His Triune majesty — the fact that Christ is Son of God the Father, even while he is Son of Man; and Very God, even in the kenosis or self-emptying of his coming down from heaven.

This goes to the heart of what we are: God’s creatures. For according to the latest inferences of natural philosophy, this is the same Creator God whom we encounter in physics at a date currently calculated to 13.7 billion years before the present, in the “Big Bang,” from which our universe issues, and time itself. That is, if we are to take Him not as a “god of the gaps,” in the neo-Darwinian sneer, but more singularly as God of the Singularities.

It is the same who, from out of the primaeval muck of this planet, raised life, as Lazarus — just a few of those billion years ago.

The same who formed man out of the materials of His creation, mysteriously in His own image — the day before yesterday, in biological or geological  terms.

The same who sent his Son, within historical memory, to be born in humility at Bethlehem — to live, teach, work miracles, exemplify — to suffer and to die — in an act of cosmic condescension, and redemptive mercy, that we are still trying to assimilate, or even begin to comprehend.

The same who, in the person of the Son, deigned to be Crucified on the mound of Golgotha by Jerusalem — and at the crossroads of the world. Who descended into Hell, then rose in Glory.

In the prophet Isaiah is a passage about Our Lord that I take as a pendant to the entire Old Testament:

And to old age I am he,
And to hoar hairs will I carry,
I have made, and I will bear,
Even I will carry, and will deliver.

For our purposes, as we try to look ahead, towards the end of the time in which we have lived and had our being, this is the same Christ who is living still. The same who reveals himself in the Apocalypse, radiant, and in the sound of many waters.

As Saint John reports from Patmos: “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying, Fear not; I am the first and the last. … I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of Hell and of Death.”

“Fear not” is one of the most carefully repeated messages of our New Testament, and in this backward glance upon the Church which He founded, Christ tells us, “Fear none of those things that you will suffer.”

*

So here we have walked into our first controversy, by asserting that the Catholic Christian account, of God, man, and the universe, is the correct one, and that the guiding principle of heroic action, which is never to deny Christ, should be obeyed. Saint Peter himself knew it would not do to deny Christ, as ditto our Holy Father today, and we in our hearts.

A very interesting thing happens in the upshot of Christ’s crucifixion, and let us for a moment follow where that leads. In faith and works, Saint Peter proceeded to Rome; as did other original disciples, to Rome and to the ends of the earth — all now imbued with the certainty that they must serve “unto this last.”

Now, Peter could hardly have been alone, in wishing to make himself scarce at the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth. For alongside Mary, there is only one disciple in the composition, at the feet of Christ on the Cross, and that is Saint John. The rest have all cut and run, rather than risk joining their master, on the next tree. How is it that, in the end, many years after that trial and execution, and with innumerable intervening opportunities to run and hide, each one goes willingly to his fate — through interrogation, torture, and death, as required — to affirm the same Master?

Peter himself, our first pope, ends up tacked to his own cross at Rome, hung upside down at his own request, the better to see his Redeemer. We retained his relics right under Saint Peter’s Basilica (then forgot they were there, then suddenly remembered) — the earthly throne of our Church is built upon them. “Upon that rock.”

Other bones were scattered, so far as I can follow in traditional accounts. Matthew was slain by sword in Ethiopia. Mark, dragged to death by horses through the streets of Alexandria. Luke, hanged in Greece. James, son of Zebedee, beheaded by the Romans at Jerusalem. James, the Just, tossed off the south-east pinnacle of the Temple at Jerusalem, and when he survived that, beaten to death with a club. Bartholomew, flayed alive in Armenia. Thomas, run through with a spear in India. Jude, shot up with arrows. Matthias, stoned then beheaded. And finally Paul, our “twelfth man” — beloved patron of all converts — tortured then beheaded at Rome.

Yes: the refusal to deny Christ has long been controversial.

The exception, perhaps suggesting that martyrdom is not always necessary, is Saint John — by tradition, and I suspect in actual fact, the author of our Apocalypse. He, uniquely among these first evangelists, died peacefully in his old age, though after many scrapes. His affirmation of Christ never faltered, as we have seen, even before the Resurrection. Nota bene.

Something must surely have happened to explain why all the rest of those good men, with intimate knowledge of Jesus’ earthly mission, and their own various ideas about what the term “Messiah” might mean — went from trying to save their own skins, to offering them up. And that something was the Resurrection itself: the Archimedean moment, the lever, that moved the whole world.

*

This is where we start, ourselves, in considering our own place in the world, in our own time. I am stressing the Resurrection, because I think without its light, we can make little sense of our mission. For without its light, the disciples themselves could make little sense.

I am not sceptical of that event, and see no reason why any Christian should be. To my own reasoning, suggested above, it is proven fact. Men may kill for an illusion, but they cannot wish only to die for one, in obscurity and excruciating pain. If the circumstantial details are in order, the only possible explanation of that strange Christian custom of accepting martyrdom, in preference to denying Christ, must be left to speak for itself.

The alternative argument I find lax: that if God really exists he would never have allowed a whopping lie like this to pass down the centuries, and become the very touchstone of faith, in by far the largest and most widely spread of all the world’s religions. That argument is glibly reversible. For the God who allowed that might well not exist.

“Modern biblical scholars” — by which I mean a procession of mostly Protestant biblical scholars, down the centuries immediately behind us, and especially since what is called the Enlightenment — have scourged the faithful. The very premiss of their work was, that the Traditions of the Church cannot be taken at face value. And while they may have begun by disputing Catholic claims alone, they had tacked all Christian claims across their table, by the 19th century.

As Catholics, we ourselves long accepted, and should continue to accept, the rôle of the “devil’s advocate,” in testing for mistakes; just as we invite secular medical doctors to examine miraculous claims at Lourdes. There is nothing that our faith in God requires us to hide. On the other hand, we must remind that there is a distinction between honest scepticism, which seeks the truth humbly, and an arrogant and destructively posturing scepticism that proceeds in a Humean circle, from the premiss that no miracle can ever happen, to the conclusion that no miracle ever did.

In reality, biblical scholarship has long been infected with this Humean spirit, and biblical scholars have often and even habitually inserted their theories into every blank space within each narrative, and between narratives, for the purpose of reinterpreting the content of the Gospels in what they imagine to be a more “scientific” and “objective” way. They take, in other words, what presents the image of Christ, and amend it in their own image, having appointed themselves “the gods of the gaps.” Except, to be fair, there were also many believers, who found their faith rewarded with some of the largest discoveries in the same field.

But I am not telling the history of Bible scholarship this evening, a road too long and winding even for the dimensions of a big fat book. I am concerned here only with the large and obvious.

To this day, if you go online, to Wikipedia or any other common source of spotty, unreliable, heavily biased information; or into standard reference books, edited to reflect currently received opinion — you will encounter again and again this smug little term, “modern scholarship.” As in: “People used to believe X, but thanks to modern scholarship we now think Y was much more probable, if not Z.” As opposed to: “Here are the arguments for X, Y, and Z, respectively.”

Built into that smug term is the notion, casually taught in our public schools, then drilled into freshmen in college — including many of the formerly Catholic colleges — that the New Testament is to be read as a kind of children’s book, full of fairy tales only children can believe; and that faith itself is “naïve” in its nature. Likewise, we are supposed to have outgrown the Bible’s simplistic moral teachings.

I have myself greater respect for children, who, I have noticed, very early in life, acquire the ability to tell a statement of fact from a fairy story. Indeed, you have to become a very sophisticated intellectual, to lose this ability.

There may not even have been intellectuals that sophisticated, around the time of Christ, for in that ancient world every factual assertion of the Bible was noted and somewhere challenged — yet with no discernible confusion between facts and fairies. The notion that people were somehow like children then, and very easily fooled, collapses upon the slightest acquaintance with classical literature. The smartest of the ancients had minds as sharp as the smartest of ours.

Scepticism towards claims of divine authority was no more invented in the 17th century, than sex was discovered in the annus mirabilis of 1963. The claim that Christ had been not metaphorically, but actually Resurrected, was met with howls of derision and mockery, as loud in the ancient world as in today’s. Louder, perhaps, because the claim was more of a novelty then.

*

Those “modern scholars” — like the “modern scientists” who pretend to explain the whole descent of living creatures from random twists of chance — have done an unwitting service. Though irritation may prevent our seeing, they have been chiselling away at the barnacles encrusting the hull of our old Christian ship, in the absence of which she will sail the faster. In the course of attacking our “ancient myths,” they have re-exposed our ancient veracities.

The most modern archaeological research has, for instance, consistently moved the dating of the Gospels earlier; has progressively uncovered the circumstantial particulars of those Gospels, in the soil of the Holy Land; has consistently and progressively validated the integrity of what the modern, atheist, and reductionist mind fully expected to fall apart.

More than a century ago, in the time of Ernest Renan, there was serious argument over whether “the Jesus of history” had even existed as a man; and if he had, over whether we could learn anything more about him from the historical record than that someone by that name may perhaps have existed. Amusingly, Renan juxtaposed the life of Muhammad, which he considered to be quite historical by comparison. Today, the situation is reversed. We have a detailed knowledge of events and circumstances in the Jerusalem of the 1st century; and there is less and less of which we can be certain in the Mecca of the 7th century.

The testing continues. Even as I speak, archaeologists for the Israeli Antiquities Authority are publishing details of a synagogue recently discovered at Migdal beach, on the Sea of Galilee (the ancient Magdala). As these professional diggers themselves explain, it is among synagogues in which Jesus very likely preached.

Not far from there, at Capernaum, I have myself stood near the remains of such a synagogue, and over what is quite unquestionably — from both the Biblical account, and the dating methods — the House of Simon Peter, known to later history as “Saint Peter.” This is the actual house, as we know from the Gospels, where Jesus lodged, and in effect the headquarters for his early missionary work, among the fishermen of Galilee.

We may reconstruct the scene with great precision. For instance, we can see how a stretcher, bearing a paralytic, would have been carried down the short, narrow, and crooked laneway, to that house. We can then back out that lane, to the main street — which was also the road from Jerusalem to Damascus — and up the short distance of a block or so, to another synagogue where He preached.

One little detail of this excavation stabbed me to the heart. It is the solution to that problem of getting the paralytic, on his stretcher or board, down the laneway, to put him before Jesus. The angle is too tight and the door too narrow. But the wall would have been low, the roof section a mere lean-to, and the solution is to pass the stretcher over the top, or as it were, through the roof. Which is just what we read in Mark, chapter two.

Now, I happened to remember, while visiting this site, having read in a commentary on Mark that certain modern scholars had proposed an emendation to this very text, since they thought the “passing through the roof” bit must be a scribal error. They proposed to fix it: to have the paralytic carried through the door, instead — thus inserting an error in the text, where there had been none.

Remember this whenever you see other scholarly emendations, and pray: “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.”

This is a very minor point, one of the innumerable minor points in “modern scholarship,” and I’ve mentioned it only because it opened my eyes. As a journalist, I am ever looking for the telling detail, the unintended detail, that gives the ring of truth. Or alternatively, gives the game away. In this case, it was exactly the sort of minor detail that would have impressed itself on an actual observer of the event.

What I’m saying here is something that should not be controversial, and yet somehow is. I’m saying that again and again the outward particulars of the Gospels are shown to ring true. A lawyer could say, “all your evidence is circumstantial.” And of course it is circumstantial: as abundantly circumstantial as the evidence for the life of Augustus Caesar. For even in a court of law, circumstantial evidence can become overwhelming.

One more point from my little example, to press upon you. It is how the archaeologists spotted the House of Simon Peter in the first place, before they had done things like examine the shards of ancient clay oil lamps, and dated them decade to decade by their style. The house was revealed to them because it was surrounded by an octagon of stone. A very early Byzantine pilgrim church, itself forgotten, had been erected right over the house in question. Unknowingly, the ancients showed the moderns where to look.

What does that tell us? That Christians in the earliest centuries knew perfectly well where the relics of their faith were to be found, and made them into sites of pilgrimage, in times of which we have no other record.

This is how we have established the likeliest site of the Crucifixion — just outside the walls of Jerusalem as we now know they then were; and even the topography of ancient Bethlehem — and the probable cave of the Nativity. Beneath the present churches are earlier churches; we follow the evidence straight down the shaft, to within touching distance of the events themselves. We make a great and terrible mistake, as scholars, by assuming that the Christians of the earliest centuries lived in the same sort of abstract fog that the professors in our universities live in today. And indeed, archaeological and historical scholarship on the origins of Christianity would have proceeded much faster, had the good faith and careful veracity of both Scripture and Tradition been assumed.

But leave all little things aside. A big picture has emerged, fairly clear, to anyone who wants to look upon it, grown mosaically from its constituent parts, many of them only recently assembled. It is perfectly compatible with the traditions of the Church. And it is interesting, living as we are in this very material age, to see so many material relics from the Life of Christ emerging from the soil of the Holy Land, now. Our Lord knows what we need.

*

My point has been, to insist on the Resurrection not as parable but as fact. I insist that the fact of the Resurrection alone can explain other features of early Christian history. And by extension, I will insist that it is the only way to explain the ultimate triumph and spread of the Christian religion, of our Catholic Church, and all that follows from them. To my mind, everything hangs on this Resurrection, and without it, everything falls.

So when I say, “He is Risen,” I do not mean it only, or “merely,” as part of some abstract, mytho-poetical narrative, as the so-called “modern scholarship” tells us to pretend. Nor do I mean we must pretend the opposite, because the cost of not pretending is too high. Let the whole Earth go to Hell if Christ is not Resurrected: as it surely would. I mean that Christ was bodily Resurrected from the human flesh, and that the larger account given in Scripture and Tradition deserves to be taken as received.

For I am in complete agreement with my Calvinist ancestors; and alike with the Anglican minister who inducted me by baptism into the Christian vocation; and with Saint Paul whom they were quoting: “If Christ be not Resurrected, then our preaching is vain, and your faith is also vain.” As Catholics we take this from the same page in First Corinthians.

If Christ be not Resurrected, then our faith is not only vain, but stupid. We have been conned. If, as Saint Paul reasons, the dead cannot rise — and the man had a very clear, and very well Greek-educated mind — then Christ did not rise, and your sins can incidentally never be forgiven.

If Christ did not rise, the dead are just dead, and so are we. We, the dead, have buried our dead, together with the rest of our strange human race, that has been burying its dead instinctively and compulsively and mysteriously, for about thirty thousand years.

For as Saint Paul also notices — in a wonderful anticipation of the centuries to come — even if there is a God, but Christ is not Risen, the account we have given of God is false. For we say that God raised Christ, when God did not raise him. It follows that everything else we have said about God, might as well stand corrected by e.g. the Koran.

*

In Jerusalem, on the Dome of the Rock — sited very conspicuously right on top of what is almost certainly the Holy of Holies, within the ancient Temple precincts — is an inscription, in their earliest angular Kufic script, on what was also the earliest monument the Arabs caused to be erected in a conquered land, by impressed Byzantine labour. This inscription reads in its most significant part: “Praise to Allah who begets no son and has no associate in power and who has no surrogate for humiliations.” The point is sustained by repetition, together with the contrary assertion that Muhammad is God’s envoy and can alone provide intercession on the day when the Muslim community is resurrected; and the Muslim Jesus comes to throw all us stubborn Christians into Hell.

That is on the outside of the Dome. On the inside there is a further long inscription, which mentions Jesus and Mary by name; states that Jesus, too, was an envoy, and therefore no Son of God; declares that the religion of God is Islam, and that God will reckon with those who dissent. Nearly fourteen centuries have passed, since this direct challenge was laid down to the existence of Christianity; and indeed, we are living in the fallout of it today.

Yet we have today, at least in the more progressive and nominal Christians of North America and Europe, the curious notion that Christianity is compatible with Islam. That it is likewise compatible with all other religions. That it is compatible with a Darwinian cosmology, and therefore with atheist materialism. And that the Church becomes ever more “relevant,” the more we admit she is defunct. Defunct — and yet still outwardly turning over, and available at a discount, in the post-modern spiritual flea market. For she still has a certain decorative and nostalgic value.

The Church makes, for such people, a nice venue for a wedding; it may offer a bit of formal “closure” for a funeral. The building may be worth including on the architectural preservation list, since no one is ever going to build another like it. And that is all very nice, and it goes with sentimental thoughts on the teachings of that religion.

The whole thing may now apparently be reduced to a “bottom line.” It comes down to being nice to people, and trying not to notice if anyone is mean. It is about being open-minded, and accepting people as they are, unless of course they happen to be religious. Indeed, whatever else Christ may have done, according to this view, he reduced all the Ten Commandments to just One Commandment: that “you mustn’t judge people.”

I wish that were a parody, of what I am told in email almost daily by liberal critics, who describe themselves as Christians, who tell me exactly what I just told you — and then go on to judge me. I’ve been told these things not only by post- and quasi-Protestants, but by many self-described “cradle Catholics,” and even by several “modern” Catholic priests, one of whom was clever enough to add the word “misogynistic,” to describe my opposition to abortion.

To them, I dare say, Christ was not really Resurrected, and so it follows that He is not really Very God of Very God, Begotten not Made, and so forth. Not that he isn’t, of course, for we “should keep an open mind.”

And we ought to look with especially open minds at those who chisel the words of Christ off public buildings.

Or those who teach our children in school that the whole history of our Church comes down to the bloody Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition, and … let us not forget the Trial of Galileo.

Likewise, we are asked to keep open minds towards those paragons of art and style who, say, put a Crucifix in a vial of urine; or display a statue of Mary, smeared with cowshit. For these people are only  “expressing themselves,” and ours is not to reason why, or otherwise to judge them. Ours is just to hork up the taxes to pay for their arts grants. For Christ, I have been told condescendingly by a self-described art critic, no less, was all about “expressing yourself.”

There are quite a few places in the Gospels where He says things that are very hard to square with the smileyface icon, and one memorable place where he takes out a whip. But faced with any of the 99 in 100 Gospel passages that will come as a surprise to the post-modern reader, he can always allow that Christ had a right to his opinions. He was, as one droll atheist acquaintance put it, probably no more crazy than many of the people we see walking the streets these days.

I myself often ride the Queen Street trolley in Toronto, and there’s a man who regularly boards it proclaiming that he, in point of fact, is the son of God: not only on his way to outpatient services at Queen Street’s famous mental health centre, but also on his way home to Parkdale. Clearly, by analogy, Christ is to be tolerated, for his own unique “point of view.”

There are quite a variety of points of view, and it has become State policy in every jurisdiction of which I am aware, throughout the Western world, never to prefer one to another. For each is a valid statement of … a point of view.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself facing a leading “human rights” lawyer, speaking on behalf of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, which he feared was being persecuted in the media, by people like me. In one curious moment, he admitted that, in fact, there may be a certain amount of incendiary material mixed in with the religion-of-peace messages in the literature of Islam. In the context, I was gobsmacked by this concession — did he mean something Mark Steyn had written in Maclean’s magazine might actually be true? But he quickly recovered by explaining that you can find that sort of thing in any religious literature.

“Huh?” I asked.

For instance, those Evangelicals in the United States. You could easily make a case just as prejudiced as Steyn’s against the Muslims, if you were to pick through what those crazy Evangelicals have to say.

Gobsmacked again. Being unrecognized by the chair, I was unable to utter, except as a mild heckle, the remark, “No you couldn’t.” Not quite as loudly as, the other day, Representative Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at the President of the United States. My remark was anyway beside the point, for suppose, after smoking a lot of marijuana, we actually found the Evangelical literature was full of bloodcurdling calls for terror attacks on the secular humanists, and suicide bombings against mainstream Presbyterians, and pogroms against Muslims, Confucians, and Jews, the issue would then become: “But why are you defending the Jihadis, and prosecuting the Holy Rollers, if they’re doing exactly the same thing?” I mean, why don’t we have a level playing field here?

This is a question with which I will not detain anyone for long. Surely we all know the rôle hypocrisy plays in public life, and in the selection of victims by the exponents of progressive ideologies. That is to say, they consistently pick on the party that is less guilty, or the least guilty if there are three or more.

It simply is not possible — not humanly possible, and not possible in logic — to make every point of view equal to every other. So that if you have, as a governing principle, the proposition that “all points of view are equal,” and that nothing normative may be imposed — in other words, if you have the defining dogma of multiculturalism — you must perforce walk into a moral quagmire, in which that dogma comes into conflict with the elementary facts of life. And the more you try to wiggle out of that quagmire, the deeper you squelch in; along with all the persons you are holding captive to your one, ludicrous, moral certainty.

This is something I learnt from my own “secular humanist” and liberal parents, in the days before “liberalism” became what it is today; back when the law of non-contradiction was still given some lip-service, as a memento of our good old “Western Civ.” Today, I find it harder and harder to distinguish the reasoning behind ideas presented as “liberal” and “progressive,” from what I hear on the Queen Street trolley.

*

Ah, “Western Civ.” According to the counter on my laptop, at the time of first drafting, I had got 5,426 words into this evening’s talk without mentioning it yet. Except that, without mentioning it, I have been talking about nothing else. For when we clear away all the rubbish that has accumulated at the surface of our society through recent decades, what is left? Underneath it all lies the same old, same old, Western Civ. It is as much still there as the House of Simon Peter.

It is true that moral relativism is a threat, that multiculturalism is a threat, along with feminism, homosexualism, environmentalism, repackaged socialism, and various other isms of the past and future. Each constitutes an attack upon, and implied alternative to, the Christian civilization that tickles under its exponents’ feet. But the reassuring thing about all of these quasi-religious belief systems, is that they are asinine. They can be used to attack, and to destroy; to express anger, and demand redress; but they cannot be used to build anything. They offer no credible inspiration; no excuse for being good or brave or honest; and finally, no truly convincing reason to get up in the morning.

Great human suffering may still be entailed, as the Age of Ideologies continues. More than 100 million were murdered by the precepts of atheist ideologues in the last century — many times the combined casualties from all the religious wars in history. And many more millions, or hundreds of millions may, for all we can foresee, follow them into the mass graves of this one. Yet at the end of the day, each atheistical ideology fades, in the mists of its own internal contradictions. A new one then congeals out of the aether. And one ideology must perforce replace another, until a solid religious civilization is restored.

*

Islam, because it is a serious religion, is a more credible rival and enemy to Catholic Christianity, and has been so through many centuries. My views on Islam — and if you call it a monolith I will say it is not; and if you say it is not I will say it is — are not universally shared. They might even be considered a little controversial, but I advance them confidently all the same — from an experience of, and thinking about, Islam and Muslims, that goes back to my early childhood in Pakistan.

To be shockingly brief, Islam suffered a major defeat some centuries ago, when it lost its superior military power. The religion has not been without real merits, and is still competitive against the atheist ideologies I have listed. Against an entirely de-Christianized West, it might well prevail, for it presents an account of the world, and a moral order, that is at least more plausible than anything the atheists have thought up. It has, for the moment, the demographic advantage of higher birthrates, and until recently fairly open immigration to a Europe which, for its part, has been intent on committing demographic suicide.

Unlike other observers, who have predicted an Islamic takeover of Europe — an ambition openly espoused by many on Islam’s most cutting political edge — I don’t think that will happen. I think it is one of those trends which, alarming as they may appear in their tide, have within them the principle of their own recession. Europe does not want Islam; many of Europe’s Muslim immigrants don’t want it either; and all demographic trends are reversible, as all trends generally. The Muslim ghettoes of Europe have become large, and are still growing, but they remain ghettoes, and the people within them exclude themselves, or find themselves excluded, from the power of influencing the world around them.

I feel sad for them, because they have in most cases escaped one dysfunctional society, only to land in another. Having lost a place in their old social order, they have found a place instead as exiles; as “guest workers,” and now as “guest unemployed.” They may very well riot under provocation, including the integral provocation of their circumstances, but like the atheist ideologues of the West, they have only destruction to offer. There is no staying power there.

We think of Islam as confident today, even arrogant and swaggering at its visible extremes, but in my view this is an illusion. I have read and heard very intelligent Muslim observers despair at what they imagine to be their own fatal flaw. This is not excessive violence, or on the other side any failure of nerve. It is instead that, wherever there is open competition, for the hearts and minds of a new generation, the Christians seem to win the battle. They are appalled by the rapid, mostly peaceful spread of Christianity in Africa and Asia; and by the enterprise and comparative success of the new Christian communities. They are aware that the Christian torch is no longer being carried by Western missionaries, but is now lit from within. It is no longer an external influence that could be somehow cut off.

In many ways they feel compromised by the Muslims in Europe, who absorb more Christian ideas by osmosis than Muslim ideas by instruction. They are distressed by the sight of churches in Europe, once nearly empty except for the old, now sometimes filling up with young people of obviously Muslim backgrounds. They fear that their own young are more attracted to the flag of a revolutionary violence, than to the spiritual heart of Islam; that old-fashioned imams have no influence on them.

And it is quite reasonable to argue, that in the longer view of things, the very existence of anarchically violent forces within Islam, such as the death cults of Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and revolutionary Iran, are a symptom of steep decline. When little is left to hold your religion together except the threat of death for apostasy, you are not, after all, in such a good position. There are diminishing returns as you hike up the threats; but if you withdraw them you may lose everything. Bad as things may seem for Christianity, when we look at the contemporary world from the least attractive angles, things look worse for the Muslims.

But again, I am not saying we can escape carnage, from people who have effectively lost their faith. Indeed, that is the very thing to fear — not believing and practising, loyal Muslims, often better behaved than common garden Christians. But rather, the post-Muslims, on the analogy of post-Christians. They cling to a bad parody of their ancient faith out of a faithless desperation. An atheist inside, who is a fanatical Muslim outside — that, to my mind, is the cross section of an Islamist terrorist.

*

Beyond the Islamic world, there is some life yet, even the odd flash of proselytizing zeal, in several forms of Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism. I am inclined to make the same remarks about these: that the motive power is no longer essentially religious, but has more to do with ethnic chauvinism, with communal antipathies and rivalries. Samuel Huntington famously said the Islamic world tends to have bloody borders, and that is chiefly where you will also find the phenomena of Hindu and Buddhist revival: in the very places where Islamist terrorism has become a threat, and as a mirror to Muslim nationalisms and ethnic chauvinisms.

But they have themselves subscribed to religions that are not fully competitive with Christianity; which did not create the modern world, for all its flaws, and which are therefore unable to explain it. What they face from the West may be a post-Christian “secularism,” but that very secularism carries within itself the Christian virus — an exposure to conceptions of faith and freedom, of purpose and self-improvement — founded in Christian attitudes of mind. What we call “globalization” is itself a suspiciously post-Christian phenomenon, and might, to grant the Leftists their deepest suspicion, be called the continuation of Imperialism by other means.

God works in mysterious ways. And from what I can see He has never been ashamed to grow a garden out of the devil’s own spadework — as He hung His own body on the devil’s own tree. Indeed: faith teaches us to watch, constantly, for just such transformations.

“Western Civ” did prevail, in the definitive clash of civilizations, which began about five hundred years ago. I am therefore not waiting for this clash to begin, nor even for it to end, for I think that happened when the Ottomans retreated from Vienna. What we see in our political and diplomatic foreground is superficially a clash of civilizations, but one in which we are pitted against opponents who are doomed. The worst they can do is kill us. And in the long view of things, we are used to being killed.

*

“Western Civilization” would be a hard thing to define, according to yet another of the persons I’ve had a verbal rumble with, recently. He added for good measure that the term appears to be a euphemism that white people use, to distinguish themselves from people who are brown, or some other colour, and that it is therefore an example of the vocabulary of “racism.” It also had something to do with sexism, as I recall. It goes without saying he was himself a white male.

Strange to say, I have no difficulty whatever defining the term, “Western Civilization,” and will attempt to do so in my next sentence. It is the civilization created in the wake of the Catholic Church.

Only by reversing cause and effect, can we make the definition difficult. The Catholic Church created Europe; Europe did not create the Catholic Church. This is a plain matter of historical fact, without subtlety. It therefore requires a remarkable diffusion of historical ignorance to refute it. The Europe that the Catholic Church civilized was — except for the collapsing civilization of Rome, which she in some respects re-animated — a continent of savages. Long before the Protestant Reformation, it had been raised to the condition of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims; of Rome, Florence, and Paris; of Saint Francis, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante.

A little more needs to be added, to make clear how much cultural or civilizational freight Europe was carrying when opportunity beckoned and we took to the high seas.

The civilization forged in the bosom of the Catholic Church had, to a remarkable and unprecedented degree, developed a power of assimilation, an inclusivity, that made it capable of weaving into Catholic experience the best it could find from all non-Catholic sources. It was from its beginnings, and on sound biblical reasoning, open to “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good report.”

The same was made the bedrock of our modern civilization, founded directly on that of the high mediaeval Western Church, founded in turn upon the rock of Peter. In our openness to every claim of truth, we have been repeating and extending the principles worked out in her monasteries, her universities, among her clerisy, and in the Catholic civil life of country and town. With all its ragged claims to independence and cultural neutrality, modern science is itself an artefact of the mediaeval, Western Christian, or Catholic mind, reaching out towards God along every available pathway.

I am not selling a nostalgia for the Middle Ages. That became woven into the Romantic movements of the late 18th and 19th centuries, which are themselves shopworn. To start with, the spirit of the mediaeval Catholic civilization was, to use intellectual shorthand, much more Classical than Romantic.

The outward face of the Middle Ages, the physical landscape, could we revisit, as we can in factual imaginative reconstructions, was extremely beautiful; but also poor, and technologically backward, by any modern standards, even those of rural India. Life expectancy was lower, and every other statistical indication of what we call prosperity today, is in our favour. But we benefit only from cumulative material progress, itself depending on civilizational continuities, and thus founded upon mediaeval antecedents. Spiritually, we are inferiors in every respect; intellectually they were broader, and it is remarkably easy for a person knowledgeable about the philosophical life of the Middle Ages to draw the whole post-Renaissance Western world as a narrowing of mediaeval vistas.

I do not want to discount cumulative material progress, for that would mean denying the Renaissance of the 12th century. One must be a formidable idiot, as well as an aspiring tyrant, to draw a line at some arbitrary point in the past and say, “that was quite enough technology.” The Catholic tradition has never been Luddite, any more than iconoclast. We have a very long history, not only of accepting technological developments, but of incorporating them promptly into our religious life.

Mechanical clocks, for instance. They were independently invented in both Europe and China, though on different schemes. In the East they were taken as toys, played with for a while then discarded and forgotten. In the West, they were hung on the steeples of churches, and made the centre of monastic life: a means to choreograph the Hours of Prayer.

No concession whatever is owed to the propagandists for the many sciences that, after all, we invented. For at the heart of all scientific enterprise has been, and always will be, that utterly Catholic doctrine of the self-consistency of Our Lord, and of His creation. Our understanding of God is such, that we expect to find causation and order and sense, wherever we look in nature. And having looked for it, we have always found it.

A Catholic Christian civilization of the future will be just like any of the past — Catholic at the heart — but outwardly and materially as different from the mediaeval Catholic civilization as our world today is outwardly different from the world of the 15th century. Moreover, it must in principle seek to preserve within itself everything of value from the intervening “Modern” period.

Many centuries from now, could we somehow fly forward, North Americans like ourselves might be surprised to find an extraordinary and flourishing Catholic civilization, centred chiefly in, say, Africa. And this would be no greater surprise for us, than it would have been for the first Greek and Hebrew Christians, to imagine a Christian civilization seated in the dark continent of Europe, even beyond the Alps. Catholic ideas created our high civilization, and not vice versa. And Christ himself goes where he is wanted, and moves on from where he is unwanted. Geography is not destiny.

*

That, verily, is what we must seek to recover, in our ambitions for this world: the practice and presence of Christ. We do not seek to discard this good in order to obtain that one; we are not iconoclasts or puritans. We most certainly do not seek the impossibility of turning time backwards. Rather we seek a way towards what we already know to be good, and true, and beautiful, that can again be assimilated and coordinated within the temporal dimension of the Body of Christ, in the light of his Resurrection. This is something different from a political task; for a civilization is built not within the city of man, but within his soul.

To my mind, it would be a terrible waste of time — an expense of spirit in a waste of shame — to pursue the ambition of a Catholic civilization by any political means. The purpose of politics should be entirely negative — to provide remedies against specific evils that afflict all men. We may need police, we may need courts, we may need defences against potential invaders, we may need a few by-laws, especially in towns, and some readiness to cope with natural disasters. We need laws to prevent men from enslaving each other. We most certainly do not need laws to tyrannize and goad us towards some crackerjack plan for an earthly utopia.

The politics in Christian societies of the past were minimal. They will be minimal again if a Christian society is restored. The basic scheme is to keep the government out of people’s faces, and let them get on with their lives; while similarly preserving the independence of the Church, and the sanctuary she offers. These are the politics of “live and let live.” In the well-ordered commonwealth, the State is reduced to something almost decorative, and the ancient Catholic principle of subsidiarity — that problems are to be resolved by the smallest, lowest, and least centralized competent authority — becomes a way of life.

There, I have said enough about politics.

*

“Christ,” wrote Cyril of Alexandria, “has dominion over all creatures, a dominion not seized by violence nor usurped, but His by essence and by nature.” This quote is lifted from the encyclical of Pope Pius XI, entitled Quas Primas, published in 1925. It was the encyclical that introduced the Feast of Christ the King.

The encyclical, in its day, was not without a political subtext. But this was transient. It served as a reminder to the people of Italy, at least, that their ultimate allegiance was owed not to the fascist, Benito Mussolini, but to Heaven. And this point is made while expounding references to the Messianic kingship, through both Old and New Testaments. Being no ecclesiological expert, and in an environment where several of them may lurk, I tread carefully while adding that this encyclical attests Christ’s reign, not only over what is left of Catholic Christendom, but also over the world that He made. It is to an otherworldly Kingship we owe our deepest loyalty; not to a nation, nor to a race, nor to an ethnicity, let alone some jackboot punk, “dressed in a little authority.” The Church in her nature can represent no particular worldly interest. She serves no Caesar, and answers to no Parliament — only to Christ the King.

In the Dominion of Canada in which I was born, there could seldom be any serious conflict between one’s loyalty to Her Majesty the Queen, and one’s loyalty to Christ the King. For I had the inestimably good fortune to be born in a free country, an open country; and in no mean city. Alas, that is not the usual state of affairs, on this planet, and where it exists it cannot be relied upon to last.

Through history the common people have often been vexed by tyrants; and in our time the ever-growing and ever-more-intrusive powers appropriated by the Nanny State have stripped us of many ancient freedoms. Each in turn is replaced with some novel, intrinsically dubious, and invariably non-Christian so-called “right” or special privilege: ranging from a mother’s right to kill her unborn child, to the pornographer’s right to corrupt public morals, to the fanatic’s right not to have his delicate feelings hurt. Indeed, all these new rights have required Orwellian inversions of language, to make an unambiguous evil smell like a plausible good. And, each is a “group right” — the essence of true fascism — designed to obviate hard-won individual rights, often going back beyond that very mediaeval Magna Carta.

As I hinted above, we face, for the foreseeable future, a variety of atheist, post-modern ideologies that are not only asinine in themselves, but are metastasizing through quasi-legal bureaucracies. Catholics are, for reasons we should easily understand, the primary target of these ideologues; though Evangelicals and all other sincere Christian believers are usually our fellow targets. That the bureaucrats themselves hardly know what they are doing, should also go without saying.

As a priest of my acquaintance put the matter: “We live in the golden age of the professional bureaucrat, of constant expansion of paper-pushers, especially in government, but also in private business and the Church. It is a mixture of a very few idealists, with careerists, manipulative ideologues, lazy and incompetent freeloaders, and pure charlatans. They regulate everything, in order to make a necessity out of themselves, bilk anything that financially moves, disdain those whom they claim to serve, and corrode the fabric that holds society together — while claiming to be indispensable to its operation. And most people actually believe their lies.”

They are the manipulative ideologues in this priest’s list that most distress me, because in my experience, not only of Canada, a large bureaucracy provides the ideal environment for such persons to flourish.

The tactics of our ideologues are quite similar to those of the Arab conquerors of the formerly Christian countries of north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Reckless pogroms were usually avoided. For centuries, long after the conquests, Christians continued to be very numerous within the Muslim domains; it thus made no sense to provoke them into revolt, especially after the Crusaders had touched down in Palestine. Instead, the policy was to ratchet up the cost of remaining a Christian, in a gradual but constant way, until the Christian community had finally been reduced to a small and cowering minority. It was the achievement of a thousand years. That is also the method of our ideological adversaries: to ratchet up the cost of remaining a Christian.

I am fairly optimistic, however, that they lack both the opportunities and the skills to prevail in this. Ratcheting requires the virtue of patience, and confidence in uninterrupted power. It requires that you never push too far or too fast: for the most complacent frog will begin to react, if the temperature of his water rises too quickly. Our tormentors today are too impatient. Their tactics are unsound.

*

Under which circumstances, all that is required of us, is to stand our own ground, with greater patience, and greater courage, than our tormentors. A Catholic Christian civilization can be restored, over time, by the same methods that were used to create one in the first place — not by violence, and not by usurpation, but by consistently refusing to deny Christ. That is the trick the disciples used, at a time when Christians numbered only in the thousands. They recognized Christ as their King, and served like soldiers.

And a Catholic Christian civilization can be built no other way, than soul by soul, until the balance tips. It is in this way, alone, that we allow Christ to build it. The alternative approaches inevitably fail; they are all merely squalid.

So that is what I propose we should do, to restore our Catholic Christian civilization; the only plan of action that can possibly work, or has ever worked. We must stop denying Christ in our lives; stop ignoring his Resurrection; stop recognizing any spiritual authority that is not Christ’s. Stop refusing to act at His command. Stop encumbering His way.

*

Let me conclude with a few quick hints: ten specific practical suggestions, on how to advance the Kingdom of Christ in this world.

The first is, absolutely refuse to give obeisance to the various idols which the “politically correct” specially define, and then demand that we worship, such as “equality,” “fairness,” “human rights,” and  the other specious abstractions to which they attribute a gnostic and mystical power. And symmetrically, refuse to worship in the temples of the gods of money and power and coolness.

Second, make conscious, reverent references to God — even to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — an audible part of our lives in the world, and love God in our hearts. Conversely, carefully avoid speaking of any divine thing in a cute or irreverent way.

Third, unfailingly attend the Mass, each Sunday, and daily where we can; and let the Mass do its work upon our souls. (Non-Catholics should likewise be punctilious in their own religious observances.) Let the enemy see our churches filled. Observe and participate in all other sacraments, which includes, for Catholic Christians, the crucial one of making a good Confession, frequently. In any event, prayerfully ask God’s forgiveness when we fail.

Fourth, defend our families, by keeping as aloof as possible from the bureaucracies of Nanny State. Do not neglect the needs of our parents in their time of sickness and old age; do not fail to instil in our children, by our own upright and sincere behaviour, the respect they owe to us as their parents.

Fifth, do not participate in any way in what a recent pope so eloquently described as “the culture of death.” Do everything in our power to streetproof ourselves and our children against its demands, and do not hesitate to spell out the basic facts of life, behind all life issues. Be sure our children understand them, and that they grasp the sanctity of all human life.

Sixth, reject sexual liberation in all its insidious forms. Do not even think about fornication and adultery. Truly respect and accommodate the opposite sex.

Seventh, be consistently honest and honourable in all business and social transactions, with everyone, regardless of race colour or creed, even when it must be at some cost to ourselves. Do not play with temptations to corruption. Yet, assiduously avoid being “holier than thou.”

Eighth, be truthful in speech, fair and even charitable in speaking of other people, and look constantly for whatever good we can find in them. Be encouraging rather than discouraging by habit, and most important, do not spread personal gossip and lies, even against our worst enemies, and even when we think they deserve it.

Ninth, be content with what we have in our family and religious life, make ourselves happy with the homes we have to return to, and do not look covetously upon the Joneses. Accept with humility our station in life; have ambitions, but make them unselfish.

Tenth, be content with our fate more generally, and trust in God to deliver His justice in the fullness of Eternity: “Thy will be done.” Take only what comes our way, including all knocks, and use what we have been given, including all talents and skills, generously to God’s glory. Indeed, give, according to our means, a little wildly. See and sympathize with need. And rejoice, always, in the life we are given, and in the knowledge that what we leave upon the face of time can only be our example.

There would be a very long post, if I tried to tell the history of second-hand book-dealing in Toronto, if only from my own temporally limited point of view. It is too early in the morning for whisky, however, so I will skip to the end.

Booksellers’ row along Queen Street West is now finished. There were thirteen of these “antiquarian” shops a generation ago, roughly in the stretch from University to Spadina. Steven Temple’s, now up steep stairs at 489 Queen West (pushed half-way to Bathurst), is the last. He opened in 1974, and will soon close forever. If gentle reader is currently present in the Greater Parkdale Area, he must go there immediately. The sell-off will end on St Andrew’s, next Saturday, during which any book 25 dollars and down will be 5 dollars, and those above, half price. Also, you must go to acquire one last loving glimpse of what a second-hand bookstore looked like — at how 50,000 mostly hardcovered books, many of considerable antiquity, could be fit into rooms without level floors, by the organic extension of makeshift shelving.

Steve himself is an old buddy of mine. He’s a crusty character, with a crusty wife: both magnificent souls. Modern book retailing, generally in decline, has no use for such people — who love what they sell, and know a great deal about it. Who work on guild principles. For whom competition is good news. Who take personal risks, and would rather starve than work in a cubicle. Who do not eschew hard physical labour: for endless lugging about of books, in big heavy boxes, is among the tougher proletarian vocations.

He’s an old Lefty, and Yank, from the Vietnam era, who kicked me out of his store for one good reason or another many years ago. I think it was something reactionary I said. Then meeting me a year later, gave me another tongue-lashing for not having visited his store recently. With advancing age Steve has mellowed some, and if I am not very mistaken, he has found God. (This usually makes a person easier to live with, but not always.) His wife Jennifer can scare even the people Steve can’t. She is completely lacking in hypocrisy, and allied soothing social qualities. Her scary ones are loyalty, truth, grit, fierce humour, and real charity. She neither speaks, nor listens, with the half-attention to which urban and suburban people are accustomed. Neither does her husband.

Steven Temple Books began a few blocks east, at street level. Four decades have suddenly passed. I think this has been his fourth location, as rising rents have pushed him westward ho, ever closer to the sunset. His specialties have long been Canadiana, and modern first editions. Neither is my bag, especially, but from his general stock in classics, philosophy, modern literature at large, travels and topography, I have always found prizes. One could spend hours making discoveries in any one section — at intervals dragged out on the sidewalk when Steve wants company for a smoking break.

He will retreat to Welland, Ontario, pension-free and laden with debt as all other retiring booksellers, and no doubt continue selling books through Abe & the Internet; but it will not be anything like the same. It will instead be “books for collectors.” (Spit.) It was that general stock — the presence of books for actual reading, including the obscure and the hard to find — that made second-hand bookstores what they were through the last many centuries. They were the meetingplaces of the literate — their agora, market and trading ground. In the strangest city, one would find such a bookstore, and it would be like an embassy from home.

“Anyone can translate Chinese,” according to the beautiful lady who was teaching the use of the brush. This was in a backward little British school in Bangkok, wherein I was enrolled at age eleven, almost half a century ago. The class met in a small, yellow-plastered room, that opened on the side of a narrow klong, or canal. Seldom used, this klong had become clogged with water lilies. It contained catfish, who were tumultuously grateful for the occasional modest lump of sticky rice. Like everything else in Bangkok, it is now paved over; but I remember it — the room, its decaying plaster, the low weathered wooden benches, the stone slabs they rested upon, the miracle of water and the bubbles from the tippling fishes — as a premonition of paradise. The elements assembled themselves in that way.

The name of this teacher has escaped me, and it is her own fault. She used different names in different situations, quite fancifully it seemed. This is a Chinese poetical conceit. But let me settle on “Miss Ping.”

I vividly remember her long face, her willowy and thus curving form, her extremely narrow eyes, and shy laughter (always covering her mouth when she giggled). The class was hardly mandatory, and was for the benefit of several Chinese students, but anyone could attend. One might call it a drop-in clinic for victims of Communism, which the parents of these children all seemed to be. It met once or twice in a fortnight. Miss Ping had regular employment elsewhere — I think as a translator in a bank. This, because I remember from her remark, that while anyone can translate from Chinese, the translation of commercial documents into Chinese was nearly impossible.

She engaged in calligraphy and decorative painting in order to maintain her sanity, I believe. She studied the old poets. She would carry around, in an Indian choli bag, cumbersomely large books, printed in Shanghai a long time ago and in advanced states of disintegration. These provided her with “text.”

Anyone can translate Chinese, as I learnt, thanks to the genius of the language. Or rather, no one from the West can hope to do it, until he has not only mastered a few characters, but thrown off some rather Western expectations of how they should arrange themselves. Greek and Latin made the barbarians of the far, far West instinctively attentive to grammar. But there is no grammar in Chinese. There are no tenses, either, nor number nor mood; or at least that is the first impression. Everything is contextual. One might construct a sentence in Chinese without realizing one had done so. But it would likely be a silly sentence, saying only one thing, at most. Miss Ping would giggle at it, and cover her mouth. A good Chinese sentence says something new every time you look at it. It does not need subsidiary clauses; they move along with it, as a train of ghosts.

Life at dusk, in careless quiet.
The tasks are done, my mind turned free:
No more career to plan for,
Only the hills have work for me.
Pine-winds blow on my loosened sash,
Moon lights upon my lute-plucking hand.
You asked about duty. All I know:
A fisherman’s tune drifts up from the river.

This would be the latest of many attempts to translate this reasonably famous poem by Wang Wei (701?–761?) composed, or so it implies, soon after his retirement from the court life of Chang-an. I tried it myself after consulting several previous versions, and looking up characters in Karlgren. I wanted to be sure that anyone could translate Chinese, before recommending this hobby to others.

For so I remember being told: “Anyone can do it.” But first he must put all the habits associated with not doing it at a distance from himself.

Gentle reader should not imagine I can read or write Chinese, and I’ve always been defeated by the tones when speaking. For the language is not spoken but sung. This eliminates the very possibility of rhetorical emphasis, or rather sublimates it, still deeper than French. For the words must be sung, while whispered. Only some kind of northern barbarian would pick words from a sentence and fling them in your face. Only a newspaper would desecrate a text with question and exclamation marks, to say nothing of those fiendish arabic numerals. It was my impression that Miss Ping was so gentle and soft because stepping through a world that was rife with barbarians; that she nevertheless giggled to herself, because we were so funny.

Classical Chinese is sung, and whispered, but also painted. The brush is the thing. “It grows from your hand.” Whereas, a pen is a crutch, held always at an angle. One must lean against the stalk of a pen. Step one: learn to feel the tip of the brush, as it dances on the paper; as the tip beyond your fingertips; as it stands, and kneels, and bows, and twirls, and leaps from one character to another. You are the mind and the brush is your body. But not in any Cartesian sense, since the mind and the body are one.

Perhaps it is only one of those falsely “recovered memories,” for I have just been looking at an old book containing translations from that Wang Wei, and it has suddenly reminded of the character, hsien. It is a visual portmanteau: framed with the character for a “gate,” with the character for “moon” inserted in the open space between the two “doors” and under the “bridge” of that “gate” character. It is one of several plausible words for “idle” in classical Chinese. The dictionary adds: “at ease, sauntering, leisurely, quiet, unoccupied.”

I love this word. I have always loved this word: Hsien.

I could even draw it with a brush. (Not here: I do not have the technology.)

I did draw it once for the benefit of a Western-educated Chinese scholar, who assured me that everything I explained to gentle reader, just above, is rubbish. I’m working from a “romantic” theory, he said — having bought into the sort of nonsense that could only be subscribed by e.g. Wang Wei, along with all the other poets. It is mere chance that many, if not all, Chinese characters are evocative. In reality, this PhD averred, they merely “evolved” in a random way, from bone scratches — like animals according to Darwin’s theory. There is no logic to them. All the meanings they have are arbitrary, and have been “assigned,” by chance.

“They are assigned, by Heaven,” replies my inner Wang Wei.

See the I Ching on “chance”; or Stéphane Mallarmé.

On this much we were agreed: that the moon, glowing through the city gate — beckoning the poet from the griefs of the city, in a Keatsian sort of way — is an idea containing no logic at all. Poetry does not work like math; though it would be true to say that math sometimes works like poetry. Both are essentially incomprehensible, because they reach beyond human comprehension. But I have come to the conclusion, alas contra Miss Ping, that there is a certain class of idiots who cannot follow language even to the poetical equivalent of two plus two. They cannot see the point, & thus, anything they touch comes apart in their hands.

*

Really I am responding to a criticism posted to some squib I wrote elsewhere last Saturday. A gentleman who signed himself Adeodatus — a name he chose meaning “gift of God” — complained that my columns always ramble. He repeated several of my points, with mild sarcasm, then said he could not see the connexions. “I’m just picking at a few threads that I see in this essay,” he reports, “but they unravel if I try to pull at one for a coherent progression of thought.”

One might reply that it is a function of prose, to ramble. Too, if one starts pulling at threads, any composition will come apart. This is equally true of silk gowns, whether of fine or coarse manufacture; and as Whitehead and Russell eventually discovered (to Russell’s horror and Whitehead’s delight), also of the Principia Mathematica. It is moreover true, that if you pull the legs off ants, they will be unable to make any coherent progression; and that if you pull the wings off flies, it will be seen that they are incapable of flight.

Sometimes we see things, according at least to Wang Wei and Miss Ping, by seeing them — and not by some other method. We see them, as it were, when they are shown — arranged, perhaps, in relations like a painting, where the eye moves from one thing to another, then returns upon itself. Not a syllogism, but what the Greeks called a “syndrome” — things that go together because they belong together (tautologically enough). Painters, like poets, do not argue but arrange. Of course, one may be shown something and still not see it. One thinks, for instance, of a moon in a gate.

The modern, analytical, reductionist mind is “just like that” — like the boy who pulls the wings off flies. It has no use whatever for literature, or art. Nor, I have noticed, for klongs and water lilies.

As Wallace Stevens — perhaps the most Chinese of American poets — openly confessed in “Gubbinal,” his own point of view could be easily confuted. “That strange flower, the sun, / Is just what you say, / Have it your way,” the little poem begins. And concludes: “The world is ugly, and the people are sad.”