Essays in Idleness

We suffer, up here in the High Doganate, from moments of acute eco-mania. Perhaps we have confessed this before. We were having one just now on our balconata, as an ice cream truck that works Inner Parkdale came by, too early in the morning. Its repulsive jingle is endlessly repeated from a short & cranky tape spool, amplified to skull-cracking volume. That the driver — whom we have pointlessly confronted on several occasions — appears also to be the wild-eyed Afghan terrorist from central casting, may contribute to this mania in some ineffable way. The man seems to be working on the theory that he can scare children into buying his ice cream. About thrice daily, through the summer months, I must fight the temptation to drop a brick ten storeys onto the source of the noise.

In my last confrontation, the amply-bearded gentleman dismissed my suggestion that he should turn down the volume & use his jingle more sparingly, on grounds that he’d never received a complaint from anyone else in the neighbourhood. While I knew this to be a bald lie, it would nevertheless not have surprised me were it true. Many Canadians still live in the municipality — we are among the larger visible minority groups — & as a class we never complain about anything. An American visitor once observed, of the ice cream vendor in question, that he could drive over a Canadian, dividing him in two. And the surviving upper half would pull himself up to the truck window, to say calmly & reasonably: “Watch where you’re going, eh?”

In other news, I see that U.S. oil exports have overtaken imports, & that our less peaceable neighbour is well on the way to overall energy self-sufficiency, despite every effort by the Barabbas administration to exclude human enterprise from federal land. I hardly know what to think about that. I get a little thrill of schadenfreude in considering what happens to the OPEC cartel. But gentle reader will be aware of my dislike for cars, & other powered machinery. The environmentalcases raise (incomprehensible) moral objections to any bumper harvest; my own objections tend to the aesthetic. I haven’t the slightest objection to oil drilling, per se; nor burning off the product in the hope of contributing to a warmer, more carbon-rich atmosphere, that will benefit the world’s farms, gardens, & forests. I just can’t see how cheap oil helps us get rid of cars.

Meanwhile, yet another new species of animal has been discovered, to designate “endangered.” Evidently, every newly discovered species goes straight on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. No wonder their list keeps growing: for we discover new species almost every day.

Our latest friend is a warbler, & let us call him Orthotomus chaktomuk. Verily, a tailorbird — among those which weave the most meticulous nests, of leaves sewn with gossamer. Very pretty little fellow, with his own distinct song & morphological nuances, to distinguish from his relations; but very much the tailorbird as one may see from the pix: the short rounded wings, the pert querulous tail, the strong legs, & exquisitely droll slight downward curvature of the beak. Darzee, as we call him in Urdu (meaning, “tailor”), was first described (to me) in Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.” This fresh Cambodian model comes with a fine rufous outcrop on the top of his little head.

“Cheer-up, cheer-up, cheer-up,” sang the tailorbird in the tiny swamp woodlot, over the wall from Nedous Hotel in Lahore, whenas I & my little sister would climb over it, half a century ago. He had every reason to be happy, with the supply of damselflies in there.

Our new Cambodian tailorbird was discovered at a construction site in downtown Phnom Penh, incidentally, “hiding in plain sight.” He managed to evade recognition until the census-takers came for the avian flu. Now he, too — poor little fellow — will be a client of government programmes, after millennia of freedom in the Mekhong floodplain.

Principia essentialia rerum sunt nobis ignota. … Or, as we might put it in English, “The essential principles of things are unknown to us.” The quote comes very early in the commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, by Thomas Aquinas. The same or like point is made, passim, through the latter’s works, but I’d been looking for the clincher to make my point that Saint Thomas was not a “systematic philosopher,” against several email correspondents who allege that he was, one of whom claims to be “a Thomist,” & has a few more degrees than I have, to push his opinion home.

But Saint Thomas held Groucho Marx’s (& Karl’s, & Leo Tolstoy’s) position on clubs that would have him as a member. He would have denied, rather forcefully, being a Thomist himself. Indeed, we forget that for all his tranquility & sublimity of spirit, he could be quite forceful in explaining what’s what to the scholastic, soi-disant “Augustinians” of his day — who thought Christian teaching had already solved the philosophical puzzles; & to the Latin Averroists — who thought it could solve nothing. (These latter were in effect our first “modern philosophers,” insisting upon the detachment of philosophy from theology, of reason from faith. But as Thomas realizes, the truth is not divisible, & as one grows out of the other, they cannot be detached.)

The magnificent architecture of the Summa Theologica is, in the best sense, childishly simple. The First Part deals with God, & what we must know of Him. The Second Part, of Creatures, thus that for which we pray. The Third Part, of Christ, therefore what we must do. The whole thing is presented as a tract “for beginners.” In every part, reason is used to carry us through what can be known, to the edge of rationally impenetrable Mystery. The work itself breaks off, incomplete, in practice. But it never attempted completion, “in theory” — from the clearest possible understanding that that could not be done. What can be done is to detach mere puzzlement & confusion from genuine Mystery. And, this Thomas does like a very able soldier.

There is happily not yet an English word, “reactionism.” The appeal of the “reactionary” position, at least to me, is that it eschews system or Ism entirely. This would include Progressive Ism of course, but also Conservate Ism, along with Thom Ism. They may mean something as vague tendencies, but are nothing in themselves except fanciful orchestrations of illusion. Likewise, Christian Ism should not exist, any more than Islam Ism, except as the description of a tendency, towards Error. Ism Ism is like the upholstery mentioned in a recent post on “The invention of comfort.” Perhaps the softest upholstery of all is Nihil Ism, with its fairweather partner, Scient Ism.

Christ, in His Gospels, gives us no help at all with the political & economic & other Ismic questions. He leaves us totally at a loss where to begin with these things — & goes out of His way to do so. Thomas, along with the Fathers of the Church, including Augustine, will not supply the intentionally missing pieces. In politics, it is interesting that Thomas writes, when requested, “On Kingship,” not on how to construct or manage a kingdom, the way Machiavelli does. Augustine went so far as to contrast the City of God with the City of Man.

But more fundamentally, the essential principles of things are unknown to us, & will remain unknown, so long as the history of this world continues. Faith in every Ism is misplaced. I should think a lot of people will agree with this proposition, including me; but it takes work to pick all the sour little Isms out of our breakfast cereal.

To which end, it strikes me that Catholic Ism is a tendency, too; & perhaps in its nature a tendency to Error, just like Protestant Ism. The Church is real, & also Mysterious; all heresies, to be understood, must be rejected. Our calling to be Christian is clearly Revealed, & reception into Holy Church follows necessarily from it. All the Christian virtues enjoin humility & obedience, to say nothing of fortitude within this Institution which Christ founded, & continues to endow. If Catholic Ism means getting to Mass, I’m for it. But where it is presented as an alternative to Christianity — as alas it sometimes is, by the fanatic in each of us — being Catholic paradoxically requires the rejection of Catholic Ism.

Likewise I think it worth considering the abandonment of Evangel Ism, in favour of evangelizing; & a few other anti-Ismic gestures.

Only 184 shopping days to Christmas, as we were reminded last night in the Eve of the Feast of Saint John Baptist. I love priestly drollness.

That this other Nativity is celebrated at all; that it has been since the earliest times; that it was placed opposite in the year to Christmas, as it were baptising & overwriting the old pagan Midsummer feasts; that the Baptist’s martyrdom is also commemorated (29th August) in liturgical witness to his significance; that he is styled the Precursor or Forerunner or Light lighting the way to Christ, & that the mystical significance of this is clinched in all the Gospels & through the Fathers of the Church; that his embryonic stirring in his mother’s womb, & the special Grace attending upon it, is among the catechetical particulars of Christian belief across all cults & confessions — these facts, & a few more, have been present to the Christian mind these last twenty centuries or so.

We know his mother, Elizabeth, first cousin to Mary Immaculate, was barren & aging, having prayed with husband Zachary for child; & in this tradition we find the cultural meaning of Saint-Jean-Baptiste to Quebec — or as it was formerly called, “Canada.” The festivity was celebrated throughout old Europe (with lights including bonfires on the hills), but especially in France under the ancien régime, & the more when transferred to her New World colony. We trace this through the Jesuit Relations, Canada’s most extraordinary historical documents — in which we find the true meaning of our country, & of the cause for which she was conceived. The symbolism explains itself, to a little contemplation, & ties in further with various ancient legends, ambient in the human psyche — of a sage carried through age to wisdom in his mother’s womb. (One thinks, for instance, of Lao Tzu in China.)

The desecration of this feast in Quebec began around the time of the uprising in 1837. It developed into the, by now, commonplace modern story of the appropriation by nationalists of what never had belonged to them. By increments it became what it is there today – the fully secularized “Fête nationale du Québec,” associated with demonstrations of power & aggression, riot & ugliness, violence & satanism. Nationalism, & its handmaid socialism, became the new “religion of man,” again overwriting the most ancient customs. Its own defining light is that which glints from the blades of the guillotines at Paris: the secular rite of purification through slaughter, continuing today through the child slaughter of our Carthaginian abortion mills. Those acquainted with the profoundly corrupted soul of Quebec, in her national apostasy, will realize the impossibility of “turning history back.” Christ alone can save them.

As He alone can save us.

In the story of Saint John Baptist we find the prelude of that Gospel, & the tiny embryonic stirrings of the Light unto the Gentiles (Luke, echoing Isaiah); or if you will, the DNA of our Christendom. The feast provides a day to rededicate our task, of restoring Hope. This is the Hope that is in the singular, & requires the capital, & is not concerned with the glib plural “hopes” of worldly & material advancement. For it was from the beginning the genius of Christianity to acknowledge a Hope that extends beyond the finitude of this world, along the path of forthright escape from its evils.

This is what every religion has offered; what Judaism itself offered before the arrival of the Messiah, & still offers; & what, beyond it, from my own travels, I became best acquainted with in the “theology” of the Theravada school: the Lord Buddha, in his serene images, enlightening a path of escape from the snares of this world of death, & all the anxieties attending upon it.

In the popular mythology of the West, in our times, this Buddhism has become associated with a kind of religious, environmentalist atheism; but as I learnt from the lips of no less than the venerable Phra Prayudh Payutto (Thailand’s foremost interpreter of the ancient Pali Canon), & from my own guided reading, it grew as the embodiment of an explicitly divine revelation, through a supermundane Insight into the Four Truths & the Eightfold Path. (It would be truer to say that the Theravada way distils a cautious modesty towards the Godhead, in a reform of Brahmanism, but this is a large topic upon which the honour of Buddhism, not Christianity, depends.)

To my own understanding, religion came to appear the primary good of this world; the fount of a Good not ulterior in purpose. And in Buddhism, first, I saw its operation upon society through monastic institutions; for I was living in Siam when I noticed. Indeed, part of my original appreciation of the Western “Middle Ages” was from this pre-Christian model, & my appreciation of John Baptist himself was acquired by the arcane route of the Buddhist-inspired “Wisdom of Balahvar,” applied to the solution of a literary puzzle in Shakespeare (the three caskets in the Merchant of Venice). Too, a fascination with the Prophet Elijah, & his avatars in seemingly all religious traditions. But here I am straying wildly into material for the ramble of another day; my point today being only the “fittingness” of this precursive figure, who stands as if designed by God in the very scheme of the Creation, before all worlds.

Religion is the primary good; Christianity is the religion par excellence; & Catholicism the authoritative form of that religion. Some readers will dispute this, to whom I can only say it took me half a century to get that far, perhaps they can get there quicker. It is hardly the end of the road. It is a milestone on the Royal Road, where by-ways & tributaries are collected, & the road leads ever onward, from Earth towards Heaven.

I am worried about the disposal problem presented by all this glass. It tends to blow out of the highrises from differential air pressure over time (rising suddenly inside over outside a building under certain storm conditions), & then smash when it lands. This will make the area formerly occupied by cities inconvenient & even dangerous to hike through, for glass doesn’t degrade biologically & may require millions of years to be geologically recycled. And if you’ve ever had to clean up broken glass, you’ll know what a pain it is.

Worse, so much of our prime farmland is directly underneath these cities. Though come to think of it, our Upper Canadian pioneers didn’t have it much better clearing rocks & pulling tree roots. One must, I suppose, take it one acre at a time; then choose the succession of crops wisely to restore the soil. And avoid moaning that when the glass is ground up — again, patience is required for the manual operation — all you get is sand.

Whereas, bricks make good rubble for re-facing with stone, & cars can provide useful metal when they are melted down. Some could perhaps be beaten into ploughshares. There is also plenty of wood in furnishings & interiors to keep our descendants warm through the winters; paper & upholstery to light it; & the odd delightful trinket with which their children may play.

Better to look on this brighter side.

Telegraphy is as old as the hills, or not quite, but the use of hills to convey fire or other optical signals from one station to another, quickly over considerable distances, goes back to ancient Egypt & Mesopotamia.

Reading Sir Aurel Stein’s wonderful archaeological memoirs as a boy, I recall my thrill at his description of the signalling system, which conveyed messages from the T’ang Dynasty’s wild west all the way back to the capital at Chang-an, along such as the towers of the Great Wall. Barbarian savages would attack & overrun a remote position, but hooo! Their assumption was, dead men tell no tales. So imagine their surprise when soon after they are faced with a disciplined Chinese army, assembled seemingly out of nowhere.

Civilization can usually win, if it wants to. To this day, I am charmed by the idea that our security forces use algorithms to spot suspicious behaviour on the Internet, specifically Islamist cells plotting terror hits. Even drones appeal to me, as a means to promptly reach & annihilate these devils in human flesh. Gung ho!

So I was being a little facetious on a television programme yesterday when I lamented the invention of the electro-magnetic telegraph, thanks to which, from about the middle of the century before last, we began to get remarkable things, such as same-day breaking news:

“This seriously disturbed the peace of the world. Perhaps the invention should have been suppressed, along with all the other magical & dangerous forms of action-at-a-distance. Or just put on hold until the human race became mature enough to handle it.”

This world’s very last telegraph offices are to be closed in India next month — that blessed country where the last manual typewriters were being manufactured only two years ago. Really, I felt a little sad about these losses. One becomes attached to old technology. I admit this is a sentimental, merely conservative tendency, & not the more defensible reactionary position just staked. A day will come when a tear is shed for the Internet & email; when they are rendered quaint by even more frightening technology, from which there will be no re-tweet.

As recently as 1997, despatched as a hack to cover the funeral of Mother Teresa at Calcutta, I was able to fall back on old-fashioned telex when fax & laptop failed. But after one awkward round of that, I fell farther back on the even older method of bribery, to get my hand-written reports to the front of the queue for a Government of India fax machine. (Returning home, I met the young editor who had never received hand-written copy before, & was still in a state of trauma from the experience of deciphering it.)

I do not accept bribes myself, but as an Old Asia Hand never felt much compunction about giving them. They are among the more innocent bureaucratic transactions, usually accepted like tips in a restaurant. But as the old epigram goes,

One cannot hope to bribe or twist
The honest English journalist;
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there is no reason to.

The notion that I must be getting old is advanced when I recall telegrams sent & received, decades ago: the messenger arriving as the embodiment of Fate. They were expensive little things, not used except by the very rich for casual communications; one selected “night letter” whenever possible to get the lower rate. A telegram meant good news, or more likely very bad. It arrived folded & sealed in a little envelope, so that the man delivering it could not know if he was announcing a joyous birth, or a death in the family. He had one of the tougher underpaid jobs.

It is really that envelope for which I pine. Diplomatic cables were secret & encoded, but for the rank & file of citizens, the envelope provided the seal. The breach of an envelope by anyone other than the addressee was — still is to some extent — considered a very low act, almost on a level with a breach of the Confessional. It could be done by authority, on reasonable suspicion of a crime, presented to obtain a court order. It was unthinkable without that authority, or rather, could be justified only as a crime of passion.

Yet someone had to receive the telegram in a public place, & perhaps transcribe it. The message could be electronically intercepted. In exchange for speed & efficiency, the world’s correspondence was already being opened to view by the inventions of Samuel Morse, & others — who did not at first realize the “privacy” implication. Morse himself (1791–1872) claimed to be motivated by his grief on having been notified too late of the fatal illness of his wife, who died alone. He’d been away in Washington, on a portrait painting commission.

An enthusiast for the institution of slavery, & advocate for the persecution of Catholics, Morse was celebrated in his day as a great exponent of “the American way.” His scene paintings extol the austerity of the Puritan pilgrims to America’s shores; his portraits are a gallery of Patriot heroes. The modern inventors, in England & Europe as much as this side of the pond, were for the most part cut from such cloth. The Industrial Revolution was stamped by the enterprise of Calvinists, Quakers, Huguenots. It was most certainly a Protestant triumph (see Max Weber); pyrrhic in the sense that it has since contributed mightily to the extinction of Protestantism.

Or rather, as I’ve come to think, to the transformation through technology & enterprise of that “Protestant ethic” into a new & different kind of religion, which I have been ever so subtly critiquing in these electronic pages (if gentle reader can bear present participles of that sort, & paragraph breaks in mid-sentence).

The technology itself is a matter of indifference, as a correspondent recently insisted. Anyone can use it, to a variety of purposes. Catholics bought into telegraphy as fast as they once bought into the divine right of kings, or into the Crusades on eye-for-eye principles. The purveyor of worldly advantage will always find purchasers, in all camps, & as McLuhan taught, the medium becomes the message. I do not think, in the end, “privacy” is the most important issue, though I will grant it some importance.

Atomic bombs are morally indifferent, & I have no objection to them, per se. “Only a problem for people with bad nerves,” as Stalin put it. It is when we drop one on Hiroshima that it acquires apparent significance in that moral line. But “Little Boy” itself had no will, no bad intention. It was never rigged to do anything but explode. Similarly, the equipage of electro-magnetic telegraphy, & each of its successor technologies, may be cleared of every allegation of ill will. It is what we do with these things that counts, & therein I part ways with the Luddites, sympathetic as I might be with their overall approach.

I’d prefer a more Catholic form of resistance. Unless men can be brought to maturity — made to consider the consequences of each act — the technology will rule. And it will rule with the same moral indifference.

I have been reading that Angelic Doctor again, as part of my continuing Mediaeval binge — hunting hungrily for Thomistic advice on the nature of Beauty. Though large, & potentially vexing, this is not a subject on which most people consult Saint Thomas. One might almost say he writes as if there were only two Platonic transcendentals, the Good & the True. Yet there are enlightening, even startling passages (I may give a brief list later, in footnotes), scattered randomly through his works. Had we asked him to compose a treatise on Aesthetics, I’m sure he would have done so. But it’s too late now.

In the course of my hare chase, a very simple point came home to me. I realized why Moderns, including those who appear to be trying, cannot get much thrill from “the philosophical system of Thomas Aquinas,” nor even a purchase on it. This is for a fundamental reason, which has nothing to do with the presence of Catholic doctrine, per se. The Thomist “system” is not a system. It is open-ended. From the light of what is known, it attempts to cast on what is not known; to extend knowledge. The project is to answer reasonable questions as they arise.  Nota bene: “as they arise.”

Thomas does not “solve problems.” That is what system builders do. He answers questions, which is a much different thing. The “problematic” — I think but am not sure — is an invention of the modern imagination. It presupposes a neurotic condition, on which I will comment shortly.

The Modern Mind cannot cope with open-ended things. It requires system in a formal schematic sense; “pure” theory; a consistent & undeviating method. It demands perfection — everything, or nothing. It wants watertight divisions between subjects, & cellular divisions within each. It requires jargon, & all the rest of the machinery of abstraction. This it does not find in the Summas, but instead, brilliant rambling from one question to another, & idleness of a very high order. (As Josef Pieper is my witness, there is no jargon in Saint Thomas, at all; just as there is no mistake in reasoning, or after all these centuries surely one would have been found.)

A formal system is supposed, from the outward appearance of the Summas, but there is no such thing inside. Therefore the Modern thinks Thomas must be cheating. But the architecture of these immense treatises, beautiful to first sight, is different in kind from modern intellectual architecture. They are built “generationally,” like mediaeval cathedrals. This does not mean each did not start with a plan. It starts with a plan that is then constantly adapted, but with a view to the whole. Whereas, the modern building is delivered to a contract, & the slightest digression from the drawings may involve lawsuits.

That part of the opera which is most “purely” philosophical (as opposed to theological, though no more than math is opposed to physics) — not the Summa Contra Gentiles, but the Commentaries on Aristotle — has no structure at all. Thomas follows the text of The Philosopher, & expounds it. To the reader of modern commentaries, this is extraordinary. Years ago, in my earnest youth, trying to follow Thomas following the Metaphysics (& it was the most useful commentary I found, by far), I was amazed that it never occurred to him to question the integrity of the text, the compositional order of the books, &c. To my recollection, he did not propose a single textual emendation. And thanks to this curiously unmodern habit, he found all kinds of sense in passages which left the modern commentators utterly baffled. The text looked good to him. It seemed to have been left in a comprehensible order. It repaid study, just as it stood.

Another way to put this, is that the modern scholar is — not entirely of course, but in the main — a malicious idiot. If he cannot understand what is before him, he changes it to what he can understand.

If we can get to Heaven, one of the things we will discover there (I feel fairly certain), is that not only the Bible, but other surviving ancient texts, came down through the centuries reasonably intact. This was for the simple reason that those transcribing usually knew what they were doing — or they would not have been transcribing. It stands to reason. There were many little flaws, to be sure, but even those tended to be shaken out when one manuscript collided with another.

Faith involves trust; & in the Age of Faith, trust was more common. To the Modern Mind it was much too common. We pursue scepticism over the boundary into neurosis. They, although sometimes downright naïve, were less inclined to become insane.

As Saint Thomas realizes, from sudden start to sudden end (the Mediaevals hardly ever finished anything), final perfection is not available in this world. A Modern might allow this in theory, but cannot possibly abide it in practice. We don’t start what we can’t finish. For Thomas, whose way of thinking must necessarily appear backward to a Modern, the way forward is the other way. We should rather proceed with what we have, than with what we don’t have, & see where it will lead. And on this strategy, we immediately discover that we have more than we realized, to be getting on with. And that, more of it fits together than we had any right to expect. And that, what we have begun, another may continue, as God may will. For the universe isn’t “all about me.”

The basic Thomist, or High Mediaeval philosophical approach is, What makes sense? It is not “how can we know” but “what can we know.” Faith gets them past that first turnstile, in which the Modern Mind is permanently jammed. They could believe what they could not know with certainty. We can’t believe what we do certainly know.

*

And so to bed: Beauty is objective.

It is not “in the eye of the beholder,” but dwells in the heart of that which exists. It is revealed to those who look for it. It may be found, at least to some slight degree, in everything that actually exists. Conversely, it cannot be found in things that do not exist — which is just where we look for it today. An artist might thus, in a sense, “create” beauty. (Here I long for Saint Thomas to treat at greater length of the defect of ugliness as untruthfulness or “fakery”: the canker of an unreality within the real.) Reality is the ultimate source of beauty, & the degree of beauty in a thing is proportionate to its perfection in its own kind. There is thus a hierarchy in beauty which accords with gradations of being within the Creation, & which leads beyond this world.

The analysis of the Beautiful reveals three necessary constituents: First, the carrying into this world of the divine perfection & completeness, though in a representative if finite & mortal thing. Second, the display of harmony & proportion in the parts. Third, the presence of a splendour that is irreducible, yet knowable in degree through analogy & likeness.

Curiously the triune personality of the transcendentals is reproduced within each transcendental, so that in this case we have been referring respectively to the truth, the goodness, & the beauty, within Beauty. We can know what Beauty is when we see it, but this analysis can actually help us to see. Also, to distinguish the components: for example, goodness is appetitive, but beauty is cognitive. (Each intimates of Heaven, while offering the consolation of a means of satisfaction within this world.)

Reading & trying to plumb such observations, I reflect without surprise that when he was not engaged in prayer, philosophy, theology, eating, sleeping, exchanging pleasantries in the street, or walking across Europe — & perhaps even when he was — Thomas Aquinas was an extraordinary poet. His eucharistic hymns are poetically sublime, & of an almost superhuman craftsmanship. If we turn to him on questions of “aesthetics,” we turn to the accomplished master of an art, not to some voluble, well-meaning amateur.

There is a great deal that Thomas could say, but does not though he implies & suggests pregnantly. His account of Truth provides rich parallels. For Beauty is a source of knowledge or insight into beings & things, & thus the nature of nature. It is also a source of delight, & of rest. It is relational in a way parallel with Truth, where the relation is between the thing & the intellection of the thing by the knowing subject; the Truth requires intelligence. Likewise, in the Beautiful, we find a binding relation between the thing & the perception of the thing; & the Beautiful requires perception. We are taught & through teaching transformed in the contemplation of each, by which God draws us nearer — just as He does through the virtuous actions that attend upon the Good. But note, please, that the relational does not mean “relative,” for in each case an absolute is enjoined.

And more, & more. How I long for a leisure even greater than I have.

Augustine (in De Vera Religione) did not wobble on the question whether beautiful things are beautiful because they please us, or please us because they are beautiful. The latter is true. The former proposition is nonsense, & can only seem to be true because our apprehension of beauty is itself variable, & defective. Thomas Aquinas gives the same answer, in his dispassionate way.

Because we are blind, or make ourselves blind, to reality, we do not see the beauty in things. One might call it “cultural conditioning” to blindness; & what we make is made by the blind, leading the blind. We will only accept Beauty itself as a thing; as a separated quantity. But it is not a thing, not a quantity, nor even “a quality,” & decidedly not a theory. It is rather in things — dwelling in the very heart or essence of things — to be seen or not seen.

Alas, the Modern Mind, deprived of that reverent silence which makes contemplation possible, can no longer grasp something that has no theory, because it does not require a theory, because it is self-evident. We do not see what is directly before our eyes. Notwithstanding, to see again, we do not need a Doctor. We need instead to open our eyes.

“We stand today at a crossroads. One path leads to despair & utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.”

The quote is from Woody Allen, & was supplied by one of the commenters to my column yesterday over at Catholic Thing. It was a side-splitting, but accurate paraphrase of what I’d just said about the nature of our politics:

“We have two positions I called, for shorthand, ‘capitalist’ & ‘socialist’ — both worshipping false gods. The first, in my humble but obstinate opinion, worships the Money God, & the second worships Satan more directly. The first thinks Christianity is a waste of time. The second thinks it is something to be destroyed, from both without & within; along with industry, enterprise, & anything else that smacks of human freedom.  …

“Another way to caricature the two positions might be, ‘the culture of desecration’ versus ‘the culture of death’. Democracy gives us the right to vote between them at approximately four year intervals.”

I can’t honestly call Woody Allen one of my favourite filmmakers, for I’ve never actually seen one of his films. (Indeed, I’ve hardly ever seen any movies.) However, I’ve heard many quotes from him that impressed me as translations of ancient prudential wisdom into a post-Yiddish, Brooklyn atheist dialect.

Atheism is only interesting for so long as it can maintain some religious associations, after which it becomes a void. Woody Allen had the wit to stand his ground as a Jewish atheist, just as my atheist mother stands the cultural ground of Gaelic Calvinism. Both rollick in a deliciously dark humour, from actual historical sources. Neither would be funny if they abandoned tradition entirely; & in her nineties, my mama still lisps the old hymns which once she sang in confident mezzo-soprano. (“One needs air just to whistle in the dark,” she confessed recently.)

Woody Allen depends on the Hasidism he mocks. And so he mocks it lovingly. One thinks of his own reversion to Rabbi Raditz of Poland, “a very short rabbi with a long beard, who was said to have inspired many pogroms with his sense of humour.”

One of his disciples asked, “Who did God like better, Moses or Abraham?”

“Abraham,” the Zaddik said.

“But Moses led the Israelites to the Promised Land,” said the disciple.

“All right, so Moses.”

Woody Allenism is among the many things implicit in the rich Hasidic teaching. But Hasidic teaching is not among the things implicit in Woody Allen. He was born merely smart: smart enough to cling to his guns & Talmud even while abandoning the hereafter.

There is another, less amusing side to him, that was cumbersomely presented in a French television interview, decades ago. Woody ranted about the barbarization of America, the aesthetic degeneration of New York, the septic materialism of the film industry. From the bits I saw transcribed, he was forgetting to make a light joke of it all. The truth, I suspected, was that there was nothing in it to joke about. He was watching the encroachment of the actual void; the disappearance, into the black hole of post-modernism, of everything that made life tolerable. One cannot be a connoisseur of sex & death, without noticing their evacuation. One needs air to whistle.

*

Should anyone happen to read my column on “Ends & means,” let me add here a point I found no space for. Its absence was immediately spotted by a fine latter-day Schoolman, who is Deacon to St Patrick’s in the capital of our Dominion. Strictly speaking, the phrase “end justifies the means” is empty; so that, “the end cannot justify the means” strays into Error.

“A good end cannot justify a bad means; nonetheless, most means are indifferent & cannot be just unless justified by a good end. ‘Guns don’t kill people; postal workers do,’ to quote a recent script I heard an actor read.  For an act to be moral, all factors must be just. Indifferent means, such as the use of a gun, has to be justified. In the concrete, there are no indifferent means, inasmuch as the end either does or does not justify a means that is abstractly indifferent.”

True, though I stuck my ground with the colloquial, having dropped a hint that while everyone “knows what we mean” by the phrase, we really don’t know what we are talking about. It was from Thomas Aquinas I lifted the metaphor of “reflection,” of the good end in the good means. Along with this, a Thomistic notion at which I incompletely hinted, that sides with Aristotle as against Democritus: that when “ends” are kept from view, “means” begin to take on the character of a necessity, that belies human freedom.

Or to put this in fighting words: there can be no morality without teleology.

Given world enough, & time, I should love to apply this to the determinism which most “libertarians” vest, both consciously & unconsciously, in “market forces.” (Or if you will, they worship the Money God.) Market forces are held to allow this, to deny that, & one must acknowledge & finally obey them.

This is like saying you can’t get out of bed in the morning, because the “gravity forces” are working the other way. Anything worth accomplishing in this world must, to some degree, resist market forces.

We (my soul & I) are back in the High Doganate after our short wander. Dr Clarke’s book (see last post) proved worth the price of purchase, but her concluding scheme for re-archaizing our schools is disappointing: for it involves turning from, rather than towards classical Latin & Greek, & substituting Milton for Homer. Also: Burke for Demosthenes, Gibbon for Thucydides, & so forth, in the English-speaking realms. I almost wish I hadn’t read that chapter, for while my love for English letters is ardent, the term “English major” fills me with horror. Too, I am sick of pagan nationalism & racialism & tribalism & Stalinism, & just want Christendom back. And while Milton is grand, he is very English, & not quite Catholic (although, by the largeness of his spirit, much of his “music” is as Catholic as J.S. Bach’s).

En route to her rather grim conclusion — redemption through EngLit — Dr Clarke however establishes a big point to which I will surely return. It is the superiority of the narrative to the syllogistic in the education not only of children but of people, generally. Christ taught in parables, & by example. The Bible is an exemplary storybook, which has obvious use in the moralization not only of our pallid race, but of all races. And the technical foundation, in Latin & Greek (perhaps even a soupçon of Hebrew), is best advanced through the delight of the Classics. (The real Classics, the classic Classics, that take us back to the ground conditions of civilized human experience & language.) I think the mediaevals had the syllabus basically right, till they themselves blew it up — with, as ever, the best intentions. Now, hold that thought.

In our present view of the whole planet, we begin to insinuate the Oriental into the Occidental Classics — to absorb the kind of material C.S. Lewis put at the end of The Abolition of Man. I mention this because our spiritual prehistory today has spread beyond the Greek & the Roman, & the highest expressions of Oriental paganism are also worthy. Yet we must be on our guard against teaching more than any student can absorb. Dr Clarke & all wise pedagogues have always known focus & limitation are required, or the net is stretched so wide it can’t catch fish any more. This is a major unacknowledged problem in our schools today: the curriculum as a catch-all compost, & the catch including poisons so that nothing much can grow.

An effort was made in the High Middle Ages, of great consequence down to the present day. “Philosophy” triumphed over “poetry” (Plato would have been pleased), & more to the point, Theology over Scripture & Tradition, & the Doctors over the Fathers of the Church, as the basic study. We may date this transition fairly precisely, from the foundation of secular universities, outside the older cathedral schools. Today, we count the mediaeval invention of universities as an unmixed blessing; I am not so sure it was. For it involved the invention of a supercilious student body, freed from clerical discipline & responsibilities, exposed to urban fashions & the money economy, living wild & suffering the consequences of over-education — the very mark of which is the habit of piling abstraction upon abstraction. Thomas Aquinas was constantly on guard against this; lesser Schoolmen & many of his interpreters were not. But gentle reader will guess this is a Very Big Topic, on which Dr Clarke touches.

Consider alone, this aspect of the fallout. The Latinity of the earlier Middle Ages is fluent & attractive; that of the later, awkwardly over-precise, stilted & jargon-ridden. Towards what we now call “The Renaissance,” intellectuals rebelled against the kind of Latin that emerged in translations from Aristotle, & reverted to smooth Cicero with a vengeance.

They thought they were turning back the clock more than a dozen centuries, but were only really turning it back two or three. The reaction against the Schoolmen was combined with the transmutation of the achievement of Thomas Aquinas & company into “modern philosophy” via Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz & the boys. We have a fissure, a schism if you will, as if between soul & body. The good & the true continued to be sought, but in an increasingly technical & mechanistic way. Somehow the beautiful, the Gloria, came off the cart. And the Schoolmen were not without blame for this accident.

This is what, incidentally, a certain Hans Urs von Balthasar was dealing with, in his own life work, when, without necessarily disparaging the Schoolmen, he turned the light of interpretation back upon the Fathers of the Church, & the warmth & range & poetry of their teachings. He sought to escape the dryness of intellectual abstraction, & with it the reduction of the faith itself to the mechanical, to unthinking rote — to the wrong kind of reactionary sensibility, which progressively ignores planks, & magnifies motes, & is more concerned with killing things than bringing them to life.

As we all know, towards the end of his life, Saint Thomas himself had a vision from which he learnt that all he had written was as straw. He had reached the point beyond which no man could reach, not even perhaps the greatest intellect of the ages. We can climb only so high with our minds & hands, & still the Eagle flies over. All the Mysteries remain intact, & no man can explain them away. To know more, we will just have to ascend to Heaven.

But the road of ascent begins in the parables, & on the hard ground of Everyman’s Hebrew spiritual ancestors. (For God did choose them, among all the races of the Earth, to make clear the path to Our Lord.) The finest theological points are not for normal human minds; we must start from basics. And they are best implanted by stories. On this much I feel a kind of certainty. The highest rational flights are for the two or three or whatever percent of any population who might potentially benefit from attendance at universities. The rest of us would do better to acquire the very basics, as Christ taught, & get on with our several trades & callings.

Within Catholicism, there is the old joke that we do not read the Bible, the priests do that for us — only Protestants read it for themselves. The very real & present danger for the first Protestants was that they read it in an atmosphere of theological controversy; that they were, as it were, reading with imperfect understanding, through sectarian translations, & from ulterior motives. This was another unintended consequence of the Schoolmen, the original “pointy-headed intellectuals” with their “trickle-down effect.”

A Catholic re-evangelization, to my mind, must necessarily focus on re-teaching that very same Bible, through all the media of literature, music, & art, resolved & choreographed in the Liturgy. As much as possible, we must find a way to approach Scripture & Tradition on their own terms, & not through the blinders of faction; to be bravely “catholic” or “universal,” to say nothing of humble in our approach to this magnificent inheritance.

And back we must go to Augustine again, & his own deep insight into the “rhetorical” (in a sense of that word we only partially retain), in his own age of religious chaos. Our job is to retrieve the lost sheep for the Sacraments — starting with our own persons — & by a route which cannot start from where it ends. It must start in the cold “real” world of our post-modern chaos. It starts by telling the story, all over again, of how Christ came into our world; then gradually expanding upon this until our world is again filled with Christ’s story, & we are kneeling again to learn at His feet. For God has given us a very large story, which embraces everything & happens to be true. And we are as children to Him, who need teaching.

I am off to places where the Internet does not glow, the next few days, & will return to the Greater Parkdale Area not until Tuesday night, Deo volente. Therefore remarks from the Commentariat must wait for approval & posting until then. To compensate, gentle readers will not be afflicted with new Essays, & those of truly retrogressive ilk may wish to reprise the older ones. Comments have continued to wash in beneath those, including some by me, so you may find things you hadn’t read yet. Or, although I hesitate to suggest, you might find better authors to read than this one.

On the subject of Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, &c, a delicious beuk has fallen into my hands by an Australian lady, published 1962 (the year before the discovery of sex). It is entitled, The Archaic Principle in Education. The authoress, Margaret Clarke, taught “moderns” in English & Continental universities (Heine, & Rimbaud, were the subjects of two previous beuks she had written, the former in French).

I shall be reading it on the train, but from a quick perusal I see her thesis is that modern schooling entered its tailspin in the 1870s, & had been wrecked even before John Dewey. Indeed, Dewey was only made possible by the thorough obliteration of “the archaic principle” (Dr Clarke’s term) which had governed all educational practice, primitive & civilized, Oriental & Occidental, religious & secular, conservative & progressive:

“The archaic principle was the teaching of youth through old stories about the beginning of the race, frequently epics written in verse. An idea both of dépaysement & of essentials was involved. The aim was to impart to youth the ethico-intellectual tradition of the race; for the moralizing of youth was considered to be tremendously difficult. It was the whole task of education.”

Its rival she calls “the technical principle.” The Sophists of ancient Greece were the first to attempt a revolution — to replace moralization with a demoralized or Machiavellian “how to” approach to everything — but they were overcome. Our modern sophistry, which provides the ground condition for the ignorance & criminality of our masses, has by contrast been so successful that it is taken for granted today as the only possible way to raise children.

Dr Clarke surveys the entire planetary history of education, in brief but extremely intelligent compass. She then proposes a scheme for re-archaizing, which I look forward to reading.

Perhaps I am not an expert, on anything, but like a good journalist I compensate by having lots of opinions. Many of them are on oeconomic questions. It is part of our fate, as members of this species living on this planet, to participate in something called an oeconomy. The meaning of this word has been subtly modified over the years, so that it means something different to us than it did to, say, the ancient Greeks. For them it was household arrangements. For us it is millions of pages of bleary statistics with bar charts & diagrams & pie charts & ranking tables. The Greeks, who preferred geometry to arithmetic, would not have been impressed, nor interested.

I love their attitude to farms. It appears to be entirely free of romanticism; a farm is a business. You have to be living in a big ugly city to romanticize farms. They are full of pigs, that get diseases — pigs without wings — & as I recall, cows that want to kick you when you’re just five minutes late to milk them. They have fields that attract locusts & other insect pests. And beautiful birds, who instead of usefully eating the insects are helping themselves to your olives. And so on. The ancients generally were given more to stoicism than romanticism, & up here in the High Doganate we like to read Cato the Censor on Farming. One may see how it builds character. One cannot see how it would be much fun. And that’s before the barbarians descend upon you, very hungry.

To eat, we must find food. That is Warren’s First Principle of Oeconomics. I do not start from “consumer choice” the way various experts do. In my travels I had glimpses of the “old world” where most of the population were farmers, & among those who weren’t, fishermen tended to predominate. Most of this labour is now supplied by machines, & cumulative research has made the harvest plentiful, but at the bottom of things there is still the hard earth, & the wine-dark, gale-ridden sea. And as we get away from that we rise into fairyland, & by increments away from the joy of mere survival.

Turning now to the history of furniture — a field in which I am also not an expert — I have long been intrigued by a chapter heading in one or another of the books by John Gloag. It was, if I remember aright, “The invention of comfort.” Reviewing the history of English furniture, he placed this in the 17th century. That is when our chairs & sofas began to be upholstered, & we started to live, as it were, in padded cells.

Visitors to the High Doganate have sometimes noted that, while the walls of our cell are padded with printed books (all of Gloag’s have passed to other owners, however), the chairs are of hardwood, strictly. So was the throne of the Chinese Emperor, & the Mughal one, too, if I am not mistaken — although Oriental luxury began, early, to infect that latter regime.

To outward splendour of palaces, & tombs, I make no objection. To the “ivory” encrustation of the Taj Mahal (in fact white marble, picked with details in jasper, turquoise, jade, sapphire, carnelian & the like) I have raised no objection, so gloriously does it rise from the mudbanks of the Jumna, in the pulsating heat, & does it turn towards its Moonlight Garden. It was a worthy employment for many thousands of artisans & craftsmen: this “teardrop in the eye of the Lord,” who hates death, as we hate death. It gives comfort of a kind, assuaging grief.

But it is not “comfortable” in our glib & modern sense; & a corollary of my First Principle of Oeconomics is that we must slip out of the comfortable.

Whose side are we on? Hezbollah’s? Or al-Qaeda’s? That is the choice in Syria, & I do not wonder that our politicians have hesitated to make decisive moves.

The choice for Israel is a little simpler. Hezbollah — sponsored by the Iranian mullahs through their Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad, is the more immediate enemy. However, the Israelis cannot wish, by helping to depose the Syrian regime, to advance the cause of Sunni Islamism; nor can they leave that threat to later. For Sunni Islamism, embodied by Hamas — in occupation of Gaza & claiming the allegiance of a likely majority in the West Bank — is not an enemy for tomorrow. But Hamas, too, takes sustenance including arms from Iran, & cannot immediately benefit from an Iranian setback. In the balance of risks as the Israelis assess them, Assad goes.

A worrying thought, for the thinking Israeli, is that his interests in this conflict may not coincide with the larger interests of the West.

The current situation is more complicated than first appears. The Muslim world is factional, & while Islamist fanaticism is advancing on all fronts, more & more of the fronts are between Islamists. It is usually a mistake to associate Islam with Arabs. At the moment it would be a big mistake. Persians hate Arabs. Turks hate Persians. Arabs hate Turks. Vice versa, & ditto. And there are numerous smaller ethnicities, before we consider doctrinal divisions within each racial camp, & each naturally tends to hate most viscerally the enemy that is nearest. The doctrinal divides between Sunni & Shia & others is aggravated by the ethnic rivalry, everywhere; & compounded by fluctuating alliances across the field.

Israel is thus not alone, as a rôle player in the general carnage. Nor is the “Zionist entity” without sympathizers in the Muslim world. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, according to a very old adage, & Kurds, for instance, tend to love Jews. It is not, however, an abstract brotherly love. It is rather because they share exactly the same list of enemies at the moment, together with the historical experience of being deprived for centuries of an independent homeland. Like Israelis, the Kurds identify with the West. Or with anyone they think might help them. And Kurds are just one of the ethnicities wading in the Syrian quagmire.

The Assad regime is & was always, from its Baathist, nationalist & socialist origins, vile, murderous, unspeakable. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the lesser evil, when compared with any imaginable alternative. Assad’s allies are incidentally winning the battle against their domestic opponents — which is why Europe, especially Britain & France, want to supply those opponents with weapons. The idea, hidden behind humanitarian posturing, is to keep the battle raging until some genius thinks of a solution better than living with Assad.

For there are four Western options. Supporting the monster Assad is unthinkable. Supporting his monstrous Sunni Islamist opponents, who would surely come to power if he fell, is unthinkable. And staying out of the fray is unthinkable, given media publicity for human suffering in this particular war zone. The fourth option, which is thinkable, but only to persons of cruelly limited intelligence, is to blunder in without knowing what we’re doing. This is the option that has been selected, with the Europeans showing the leadership from which the Americans have, perhaps wisely in this case, recused themselves.

The Russians, who have a large & important naval base on Syria’s Alawite (Assad’s tribal) Mediterranean coast, huge financial interests in Syria & Iran, & a general commitment to harm American & other Western interests whenever they can do so without harming themselves, have also resolved to resume shipping arms — to the Assad regime, thus banking on its survival. Let us hold our breath until we see what the Israelis will do about that; & if they do what they might do, let us scout for another planet to live on.

In a perfect world, or rather, one in which self-interest could be advanced with indifference to consequences, the Israelis would simply bomb all parties. But this world is imperfect even in that sense. The number of triggers they must not risk pulling is frightfully large. Iran’s mullahs boast that they are deploying missiles within Israel’s range, as well as to all major U.S. bases in the region. Assad has offered similar threats, which may or may not be convincing, to retaliate should the Israeli air force take out another of his likely WMD installations. And most Muslim parties would dearly love to restore the Israeli distraction. Given the Hezbollah connexion, Lebanon is also going back up in flames, so that all paranoid allegations about who may be behind it are plausible.

Several million Christians are caught up in these events; & many of those have already become refugees. In the old days, of European Imperialism, this would be a public issue. The European power with the biggest local stake — formerly France in the northern Levant — would certainly intervene to protect them. Indeed, the problem would not have begun, for France would have intervened to quell any Syrian uprising, with the blessings of her European neighbours. It has however been observed, that these are not the old days.

In one way, however, they still are. The boundaries drawn across the Middle East, as across Africa & elsewhere, bore little or no relation to racial, linguistic, cultural, & religious realities. The modern nation state was imposed on the colonial maps gratuitously. The borders haven’t moved, chiefly because ersatz nationalists succeeded the European rulers, to create power warps in each of the spaces. Note that the Palestinian problem corresponds to the one unsettled border — & that this has contributed as much to the international focus on that conflict, as the fact of Israel’s creation. That is, I think, the secret explanation for the endless diplomatic posturing about an otherwise fatuous “two state solution.” It amounts to, “Please, guys, let’s draw a boundary.”

Salvation, of a temporary & illusory kind, may thus be within Israel’s reach. It would consist of the sudden erasure or movement of other boundaries around the region, taking the focus off Israel’s. In the present state of general volatility, this is not impossible, may even be likely. For with Islamism has come reversion to an earlier, & more Islamic notion of statehood: the resurrection of the idea of a Dar al-Islam, or pan-Islamic empire, among all Islamist factions. But it cannot be realized, for it remains confused with Arab chauvinism, whose appeal to Turks & Persians is nil. This is why, I think, Islamism will prove an unambiguously destructive force, within the Islamic realm much more than outside it.

And the Syrian conflict exposes all the fault-lines, not only within multicultural Syria herself, but as they extend beyond, throughout the region. This in turn is why, as a few of our better-educated diplomats understand, the Syrian conflict is so important. But it is also why it cannot be managed. It is like an explosion in a munitions plant: they are reduced to watching for the “secondaries.” (The mass media, on the other hand, no longer employ the informed or educated, hence their focus entirely on the pictorial aspects of the conflict within Syria itself, & then those of the other regional conflicts in discrete “packages.”)

To the person who — like the old Tory souls who relished a fight between Stalin & Hitler — looks forward to the violent “mutual assured destruction” of all Islamist camps, against a background in which the Arab oil weapon is rendered harmless by fracking technologies — my instruction would be to shut up. No conflict, in which millions are killed, ends well for the “bystanders.” The whimsical notion that we might hermetically seal the region is belied by both the incredible power & reach of widely-available modern weaponry, & by the fact of massive Muslim emigration to Europe & America. We may think we have “no horse in that race,” but will inevitably discover we have several, none of which are going to win without our help.

The convention of punditry is to propose a way out. What can we do to retrieve a situation that is getting entirely out of hand? Or as the technological mind tends to formulate this question: “Whom should we bomb, & why?”

There is no answer. Or rather, the answer will emerge, in all of its unpleasantness, from events that happen the day after tomorrow. There are deep historical reasons why the Middle East is blowing up, & there is blame to scatter over many generations. We can no longer even begin to make an inventory of sins & sinners. The best we can do is pray for the Christians, Muslims, Jews, & all others caught in the latest “historical mistake,” & ask God to lead them, & us, out of the Inferno.

One of the most frequent complaints I receive — in email, much more than in Comments — is that I propose a return to the Middle Ages. Variants include “living in the past,” & “fighting battles that were lost five hundred years ago.”

In the first case, were the tables turned, I would wish the pundit, “Bon voyage!” In the second, well, I’d be happy to return to the 14th century, or even the 7th for an extended vacation, but am unable to find a flight, or book accommodations with my debit card. To the third objection, let me suggest that all the best battles were lost five centuries ago, & what better time to fight them again, than now that our enemy has been lulled into complacency.

The battles I have in mind are on points of principle. While it is true that I have an aesthetic preference for centuries anterior to my own (or let’s spell that “anteriour” in the obsolete manner), battles are seldom fought on aesthetic principles; more often on doctrinal ones. (Except, some of the aesthetic issues may also be doctrinal.) “It would be nice” to build cathedrals again in the Gothic style (or better, Romanesque), but as gentlemen discovered in the 19th century, it can’t be done in the same way, without the same centuries of preparation.

Consider the organ, for instance. Let us suppose, for sake of argument, we could build a new organ on genuinely Gothic lines & install it within a church built ditto, with so much attention to detail that no technology later than, say 1450, were insinuated into the works. This would still give us an instrument with a three-octave range or better, & keyboard sharps & flats; & there is music enough to play on such an instrument. Let us then devote tireless efforts to restoring the finest defunct acoustic & musicological desiderata.

Lost cause.

What we cannot reproduce, is the background silence of the Middle Ages. The auditor of that organ, in 1450, walked into the church from a world without background mechanical noise. In that time, birdsong was explosive. The human sounds — the sounds for instance of the London Cries that Orlando Gibbons set in a montage for voices & viols — dominated the town market. Not the motor but the creaking of the cart was audible, & the beautiful clop of horses. Noise enough could be heard in the towns — often it was singing, for before the ghetto blaster, everyone sang — but there were in all Europe very few places where, by walking one mile, one could not be in open country, away from all that. Imagine, on such men, the effect of the church organ. We cannot share that. Imagine, for that matter, the effect of the bells, as when they sounded from every belfry across Christendom of an Easter morning.

It is not the design of the organ, but the background silence that interests me here. What was the consequence of giving that up? What has been the effect on men’s souls of surrounding their ears, minute by minute, day & night, with the throb & clatter, fracas & din of our vile mechanical devices? We shut this out to remain sane, but even in small towns, even on the modern, industrialized farms, open your ears to apparent quiet & you will only become conscious of background irritations in a lower decibel range. To which bird-slaughtering wind turbines are now being added.

Example: the whine made by a television signal, which I have detected three floors away in the quiet of night, though I could not hear the programme. It must have been part of the diurnal soundtrack all along. Or more obviously, how the motor-boat discord plays in cottage country. And here I do not mean motor-boats within rock-throwing distance, but those many miles away, detected only when no boat is nearer. The ear picks all this up, but the mind deletes, or runs it together into an ignorable sludge. At what cost to hearing?

At what spiritual cost, do we suffer constant sensual irritations? For the audio deprivation, of holy silence, is matched by deprivation for each of our other senses. The sights, smells, tastes, & also the tactile qualities of the modern, viciously ugly environment, have an aggregate effect. We are brutalized, sensually & materially, & this in turn has moral consequences.

Among my motives, in walking decades ago through some of the more backward parts of pre-electrified India, was to hear & see what human life had been through the ages of silence — & real darkness to view the stars at night, when the first thin fingernail of moon arrives as something astounding. And before mass literacy, when people could remember stories & tell them word for word; & lullabied their children to sleep. Before news arrived hourly.

It was a hunger I had already developed through canoeing, in parts of Canada where the noise gives out (till one is alerted to the passage of an airliner, thirty thousand feet up, & a full day’s rowing away). In the Canadian wilderness, once portaging a canoe more than a thousand paces, I recall a moment when I felt my life suddenly restored — for I had finally made enough distance for that. And the bark of the birch trees through which I was struggling suddenly declared what “whiteness” is, & why it is important. Too, I could suddenly recall a Bach fugue, note by note; & realized that this musical composer had understood a principle of growth in living things: the Lazarus principle, in A minor. My ears & eyes had suddenly reopened.

Now, none of this has much to do with the Middle Ages, for I am touting virtues of any low-tech society, that were indeed available all the world over before Gutenberg started making his infernal racket, or rather, some idiot put a steam-press to the thing.

So let us try to get this argument back on the old Roman road by noting, first, that the word “mediaeval,” in the form medium aevum, goes back to the early 17th century, & the concept a little before that. The intention was to demarcate a great blank space between the ancient & the modern; to indicate a period that no longer required to be studied or understood — the historical equivalent of “flyover country” for seaboard liberals in today’s United States.

I use the term myself with conscious irony, for to me this “middle” is like “Middle Kingdom” to a Chinese. That is to say, the opposite of peripheral. Nor is it a geographical term, nor ever was it. Instead, it is the norm to which we may return after a period of warring states, though it last centuries. The past cannot be repeated, but Christendom could nevertheless be restored. It survives in the hearts of men who remain Christian & civilized, who have not become pagan & barbaric again. Indeed, Mediaeval Man was ever trying to rebuild this Christendom, in endless waves of “reform,” so that we might say what defined the Middle Ages was a constant effort to restore the Middle Ages.

My interest in them began with perception of their formative importance to modern history. The West wasn’t discovered in 1492, just as Canada wasn’t invented by Pierre Trudeau. To understand what fell out in the 16th & 17th centuries, one must understand what it fell out of. But this is just an argument for intelligence over stupidity — albeit not an easy argument.

The ancient world has also faded from the consciousness of nominally educated people, along with the world of the Reformation, & when I look at most political history today I see that it is predicated on the assumption that our world began around 1750 AD, everything prior being relegated to a chaos before all worlds. That is part of the reason why “democracy” is taken so seriously, & why the State in its present bureaucratic form is accepted as inevitable; why even where the “prehistory” is taught, it is forced into anachronistic categories — even art history frozen into national cubes which could have meant little or nothing to the artists. At the cutting edges of political thought, we see the timeline further truncated, so that 1993 becomes the terminus ad quem, all human experience before the Internet re-allocated to the Dark Ages. But here again is nothing more than a catastrophic failure of education.

To those still aware that history exists, & that it might contain more than they absorbed by rote with grade-school clichés, history can provide a much richer sounding board, than can what is flashing past in mass media.

There was no moment during the Middle Ages, or none of which I am aware, when all was right with the world. There is no aspect of the Middle Ages — more than a thousand years of history spread over a very large geographical area — when some polity was realized ideally suited to the human condition. Indeed, mediaeval history, as all known history, is a mess of sin & error; an era of constant crisis, just as we have today. Which takes us to our boilerplate Catholic observation, about the fallen nature of this world, & man.

Grant & concede all such points, as I try to do, parenthetically on all occasions. Mediaeval Man, Catholic by disposition wherever Holy Church had weaned him from his pagan state, never abandoned this parenthesis. It is thrilling to see how discontented he was with everything he had achieved, & modest in allowing that others had probably done better.

“I cry, I cry, & I cry again,” writes Pope Gregory VII in 1084, to anyone who will listen. “The religion of Christ, the true faith, has fallen so low that it is an object of scorn, not only to the Devil but to the Jews & Saracens & pagans. … These keep their law, as they believe it, but we, intoxicated with the love of the world, have deserted our law.” … He goes on to catalogue the desertions.

It is a flagellation, even a self-flagellation, typical of that time, & to the twenty or so generations either side of it. But do not suppose his catalogue was over-hyped. Gregory referred to terrible things: blood & carnage, tyranny & perversion. And yet it showed, for that age, a degree of self-knowledge greater than our own. It also displayed the aspiration to be worthy of the Christian calling, to build better & truer on the Gospel model, not merely externally but in each human soul. That is what I find so attractive about the whole epoch, in which politics could often (but far short of “always”) be subordinated to a higher, divine cause; & the territorial states, in all their preening pagan pompa, themselves came to recognize & even defer to this higher authority. And did this because their princes feared God.

A single word, “feudalism,” is employed to consign everything to dust. How many of the “educated” living today, who use this word as a sneer, have the slightest understanding of the conditions in which it arose as a system of land tenure; or for that matter, of what it consisted? That men were forced to serfdom not by edicts of Church, or kings, but when freeholdings were smashed by fresh waves of pagan invaders. That it grew spontaneously as the only possible method of defence, against such as Viking raiders; that Christendom struggled for centuries against pagan enemies both external & internal, especially towards the northern frontiers. Or that the state system which emerged from Westphalia was itself a form of pagan recrudescence — the Church again compelled to submit, by violence, to secular lords.

The physical & historical circumstances of the Middle Ages cannot be replicated, which is a good thing; & the institutions, except the Church herself, were products of their time & place. I have never dreamt we could restore such things, any more than it is in the human power to raise the dead. But that is not the purpose of the historical inquiry. It is instead to see how the aspirations of Mediaeval Man — whom we remain, so far as we are Catholic — were operated upon. For these were men motivated as we would be, upon taking to heart: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It is in that sense a history more relevant to our situation today, in the deliquescence of pagan modernity, than is the dead end of modern history.

Which is not to say that modern history should be forgotten. That would be an act of stupidity comparable to neglecting everything between Alaric & Luther. It should go without saying that much can be learned, even of a non-technical nature, from the modern experience; especially from what was Christian in it, which by doctrine will include “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame.” Certain notions of human liberty, for instance, or of mercy, were better realized within modern times, & may be worth keeping as more Christian than what we did before, together with genuine advances in arts & sciences.

Our task is not to return to the Middle Ages, but to restore in ourselves the Catholic aspiration which animated men in those times. It is to live out our lives as Christians, in a land Christianized as much as possible; ideally to restore our earth to the worship of God’s glory. But of course, only God can do that, & we must fail, as men have always failed; as Mediaeval Man knew that he must fail. But by the grace of God he would fail nobly.

Perhaps the most shocking, & encouraging thing about Pope Francis, is his habit of calling out the Devil — by name. He does this daily, from what I can read in L’Osservatore Romano & other Vatican sheets; & as ever, Sandro Magister has taken note in astute commentary at his Chiesa website. Other media have largely ignored it, reacting for instance to the exorcism the pope apparently performed, spontaneously in St Peter’s Square after Pentecost Mass, with an indulgent, “How quaint!”

“Quaint” indicates a special exemption from fashion, granted by media on a day to day basis. It applies to acts judged reactionary, but harmless, & picturesque. It is assumed that an exorcism could have no effect.

In a similar way, the pope’s persistent naming of Satan in public homilies has been vaguely noticed, but dismissed. It is taken for a quaint way of speaking; the pope himself for just a sweet, harmless old man, out of touch with this Age of Science. Satan, on the other hand, is taken for non-existent, & talk of angels & devils for talk of spooks & fairies & elves & goblins. It appears so irrelevant to the concerns of modern life, as to need no refutation, beyond the occasional sneer of condescension. By all means, this attitude in the press should be encouraged. It will give us some extra time.

“Everyone believes in God,” as Charles Baudelaire observed, rather a while ago, “although they do not love Him. Nobody believes in the Devil, & yet his smell is everywhere.”

Trouble might arise should other people start speaking of the Devil the way Pope Francis does, as a real & present factor in human life — not only around churches. The habit would more likely rise from the ground up, than travel down from the bishops, I should think. Already my gut tells me, with respect to the intransigent still in her pews, that the Church has retreated as far as she will go. There are no social advantages to being Christian any more; & pretending to be Catholic would be quite ludicrously counter-productive to any person on the make, trying to steal ahead in business or politics. We are down to our core constituency: the people whom pragmatic arguments cannot reach. Priests survive, from a time when it was still an easy job, that came with house, meals, a maid, & job security. But it isn’t any more — there are safer jobs in government — & the young ones can’t possibly have been attracted by the perqs.

Even so, the notion of radical evil, or the radical notion of an evil that is personified in the Father of Lies — who needs therefore to be personally opposed — is far from being extinguished among the general population. Perhaps I notice it more than my old media colleagues because I move in circles quite different from theirs, among people they have effectively disenfranchised. I also notice that our new pope is speaking to these awkward footsoldiers of Christ, directly — in just the way their bishops hadn’t been talking, lo these many years, from under their crate-paper mitres.

I haven’t noticed, on the other hand, that he is saying anything different from the retired pope. Benedict XVI called attention to the transcendent nature of Catholic faith — in God’s working beyond & through the crimp of space & time — in everything he said. So has Pope Francis. The language is different, that of Francis rather plainer. But as Francis has been the first to say, the content doesn’t vary. And the existence of whom we call, by his title, the Prince of This World, is an ineffaceable part of that content. It is not a rhetorical flourish, not a decorative gargoyle projecting from some high corner of the edifice. The edifice itself is taken to be under siege, by that very gargoyle, & has always been so taken. (The more Church history one reads, the better one realizes there was never a moment when she was entirely comfortable or secure, not riddled by enemies outside her gates & also inside her chambers.)

The media perhaps could not understand what Benedict was saying, because he used long words with which they were unfamiliar. Francis uses shorter words, but they are equally unfamiliar.

Use even of the word “evil,” in circumstances to which it obviously applies, raises sceptical eyebrows among our chattering classes, our progressive elites. That bad things happen, including in some exceptional cases those embarrassing “me bad” things, is generally acknowledged. There are crimes & abominations which have yet to be redefined as prejudices surviving from the dark unscientific past. Murder in cold blood continues to earn disapproval, at least when it is combined with sadistic acts; & other sins may sometimes be acknowledged, by any word but “sin.” Still the worldly, including the more worldly priests, are on their guard not to be judgemental. The Church herself, as Sandro Magister reminds, has been exceedingly deferential to the feelings of the worldly, through the recent past. Her message has tended to omit direct references to Satan or to Hell, emphasizing instead the extra-Biblical qualities of tolerance & an icky sticky niceness. Whereas, Christ was not so nice.

Christianity has been under siege, in all of its traditional manifestations, & anti-Semitism is also rampant, but other religions are still granted dispensations. The doctrine of multiculturalism, embedded now in secular law, relieves all moral & religious “belief systems,” other than Judeo-Christian, from any obligation to justify themselves. Suicide bombings may, for instance, continue to be illegal, and are actually met with social disapproval (at least here in the West). But the condemnation of religious beliefs that condone, even promote that sort of behaviour is, strictly speaking, a “hate crime.” On college campuses & in other closed camps of the progressive elect, fanatic Islam has the edginess of a fashion statement. It is encouraged & subsidized — partly as a replacement for dour Marxism, but mostly because it is an ally of convenience for secular humanism, in its war on Christians & Jews.

It was to this last curious fact Pope Francis was alluding in his homily at Santa Marta in Rome, Wednesday of this week. Expounding a text from Mark’s gospel (9:38-40), he noted that all were called to do good, & to abjure evil, including non-Catholics. To kill in God’s name is a blasphemy, as he explained, in the fullest ancient sense of that word. It is a blasphemy that does not require Catholic belief to perform. Writers, including this one & the late T.S. Eliot, may have argued that without plausible belief, blasphemy is nearly impossible to pull off; that it reduces itself to mere cussing or bad form. The pope is telling us to stop dreaming. Even atheists, in his account, must be capable of real blasphemy; “invincible ignorance” can take them only so far. Conversely, the command to do good — not to “command the good” but actually to do it ourselves, voluntarily — is incumbent on all humans. And this because we are human, & because it is within our capacity.

The distinction is no casual one. “Command the good” is at the root of Shariah, & incidentally also at the root of the secular humanism that provides the theocratic, or rather “atheocratic,” substance of the Nanny State. We think, for instance, that good consists in taxing the rich to sustain the poor; in empowering the State to perform other acts of goodness in our name; in lacing the jackboots for the frogmarch of progress. Currently received “political correctness” is all about enforcing good behaviour (as defined by human ideologues), or being forced.

This is precisely the opposite of what Christ was preaching, in for instance the gospel text at hand. Our Lord goes so far as to suggest that the good does not require correct instruction, or proper accreditation; that it need not even follow the correct forms. The commands do not come from Kafka’s Castle, but rather from God & through nature; particularly that nature which is our own “human nature.” It is the still small voice of conscience that everyone who is listening can hear. Men in uniforms may not countermand this voice. Should they give evil commands, we need not obey them.

His disciples were in fact complaining that some unqualified person was casting out devils. Jesus told them not to stop him; that the man was doing a good thing. Permission was not required, & will never be required, to do a good thing.

There is more, much more, to the passage than this, & a man suffering under the crippling burden of a modern education will need a lot of time to think it all through. By the example of Christ, Pope Francis may say things too plain to be understood by our more subtle minds — things beyond the normal reach of intellectuals. But plain people can usually understand.

Satan, & demons, fall into this class; as do angels. I have met simple Buddhist rice farmers who know exactly to whom we are referring when we mention such beings. Indeed they are plentifully depicted in Buddhist temple art. I could give a longer list from my travels, to assure my reader that there is no culture unacquainted with demons, & much else any Christian would recognize from his own “cultural conditioning.”

And I have put that term in quotes because it is a lie. Knowledge of what I will call, for shorthand, “the otherworld,” precedes all cultural conditioning. A religion provides explanations for otherworldly phenomena; it must make some sense of things already discerned. The most primitive tribal cult works to the appeasement of spirits that are all the more apparent to the “primitive” tribesman’s mind, undistracted by the buzzing confusion of the machinery for settled life. (And again the quotes, because the most primitive men we have encountered have the same class of minds we have, with the same capacities, the same intelligence range.)

These simple & backward — tribals, subsistence farmers, hardscrabble types — function in the world of real particulars, facing realities from which the urbane are eager to detach themselves. They are the people to whom the mediaeval Church was speaking, in sermons, pageants, statuary, & stained glass — rendering the ineffable in comprehensible form. To dismiss them as so many superstitious peasants awaiting liberation by literacy & technology is to misunderstand: that we, ourselves, are superstitious peasants — voting in our masses for “hope & change,” & prone to belief in every other sort of magic. Every day I see around me in the city behaviour that exhibits a credulity no peasant farmer could afford to entertain in his hard, earthy sphere & orbit.

Christianity would not be a religion if it did not offer explanations, for what lies beyond the reach of material manipulation, the scope of eyes & hands. It offers warnings against the danger of invoking the spirits, against trying to establish communication with them, against becoming their agents, or trying to make them our agents. It offers means of escape from the influence of demons. It does not offer, it never offered, scientific dismissal of them — that hubris in which the voodoo of the primitive cult is replaced by the voodoo of technology.

I have met sophisticated intellectuals who get this. But only because they did not give up on the simple when they adventured into the complex; nor trade particulars for abstractions. An appreciation of the personhood in evil is innate to the human condition, including theirs. It is to be honed in wisdom, not foolishly discarded under layers of cheap linguistic persiflage. It is not inevitable, for intellectuals to be fools — for them to lose the ability to grasp the obvious, including the morally obvious, in their pursuit of knowledge-as-power.

It takes, for instance, an extraordinary blindness, to read the Gospels & not see what they say, or read into them what is not there. We stock libraries for these blinded. Yet we have a pope (inevitably an intellectual) who, rather like his predecessors, can actually read the Gospels. His attention is apparently riveted upon the very details that modern man overlooks, or overdubs, to his peril.

Example: Christ very often calls out the Devil, by name. It is not poetic licence. He uses terms plainly, so that they translate plainly into any other tongue. He takes his Opponent for an actual being, with a personal will. Jesus could not be kidding about demonic possessions, or he would not have been performing exorcisms, day after sunrisen daisy-blooming day. One does not perform exorcisms on intellectual abstractions.

Those who reject belief in the Devil must necessarily reject Christ. Verily, here is a circle that cannot be squared. To accept Jesus Christ as Eternal God & Saviour, then argue he needs updating for our times, is fatuous. That form of Christianity was unsustainable, & is therefore passing away. Pope Francis is teaching instead the kind that is here to stay.

We are fighting for our lives against a very real Opponent, & denying his existence guarantees we lose. The pope knows this, & expects every Catholic priest to know it. He also knows many of them don’t know, or are too shy to say. Therefore he resumes the normal activities of a priest — because he is a priest, & by way of encouraging the others. Look & see that he is not, in point of fact, some sweet harmless old man, except on the sweet harmless old occasions.

Look what happens, in that video, when the pope is told by a legionary that the man from Mexico, in the wheelchair, is afflicted by devils. See the smile disappear instantly from Pope Francis’s face, & note what immediately follows. Note the convulsion in the man, when the pope lays his hands upon his head, & note the sag of his face & how his jaw drops open, as the hands are removed. One is looking at something that does not fit into our glibly urbane little view of reality. So look hard.

Consult, if you prefer, the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (5th edition just published, & reviewed in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal). It is 947 pages, & a very sick joke from end to end. Comparison to any previous edition will quickly reveal the speed at which psychiatric disorders are invented & disinvented, in the complete absence of lab tests that can materially demonstrate the presence of even one of the mental disorders that have been catalogued. Then explore the fantasia of bio-medical “cures.” The pretension to science has created in this case an extremely profitable business — vastly more profitable than for the charlatans of old — in which millions of the spiritually afflicted are treated by fully accredited mad-doktors even crazier than they are. (The WSJ headline, “How Psychiatry Went Crazy,” is misleading because it was crazy from the start.)

Gentle reader might try to keep up with all the other mirages in the pop “science of mind” — available from the glossies alongside the mild porn & hobby magazines at his local smoke shop (or for the professional, in yawning learned journals). The grave seriousness with which the shamans of that cult, who think they have banished mind from the rest of the universe, go about banishing it from the human brain, is really quite risible. One must dig out old works on phrenology to match their confidence of tone.

It is good to cast out devils. It is bad to leave them in, quite bad; & even worse to medicate their victims into zombies. Not knowing how to help is the only excuse I can think of, but that ignorance needs to be freely confessed. With or without any formal permission, we must get back to working on the problems with which jackass “science” simply cannot cope.