Essays in Idleness

There is so much said in the six short chapters of the Epistle to the Ephesians, that we cannot pretend to understand it all. Yet in outline, and essential message, it is plain sailing. There is an intense prologue, in two extremely long and involved Greek sentences, amounting to a hymn. This recounts the Blessing brought with Christ into our world. Cumbersome in translation, I once came close to hearing how it sings in Greek.

The hymn then segues into a kind of narrative solo: of Christ’s servant, Paul, apostle or “messenger” to the Gentiles, ending in a fervent prayer.

Tone and style change abruptly and quite purposefully, at the beginning of the fourth chapter, while remaining lyrical. We have an exhortation, in the unity of the Church, to the calling and duty of each member. This begins doctrinally, presenting what resolves into a schematic description of that Catholic, or universal Church; which is, “one body and one Spirit, … called in one hope; … one Lord, one faith, one baptism; … one God and Father of all, above all, through all, in all.”

This in turn devolves to relations between persons within that Church. The verses memorably include the central tenet of Christian matrimony, relating wives to husbands as Church to Christ. Paul invokes, here as everywhere, simplicity of heart, carrying into the reciprocal obedience and love owed between all children and parents, between servants and masters of all kinds. All share membership in their parts within one body of Christ.

And then, the clarion of true spiritual warfare, and the fight each Christian must fight, all for one and one for all. “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.”

To which end: “Put you on the armour of God.”

From the salutation at its beginning, to its postscript commending Tychicus, Paul’s messenger and his old companion of the road, it is like the structure of a Bach Cantata. The Epistle to the Ephesians has provided the materials for a thousand commentaries and a million sermons. Most significantly, it does not merely “make an argument” for the claims of the Catholic Church. It unambiguously requires “the unity of Spirit in the bond of peace.” (That extraordinary line, which a recusant sonneteer from Warwick so tellingly inverted to: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”)

That the Epistle was written at Rome, during Paul’s first captivity about anno 62, comes from the Tradition, much attested and nowhere contradicted. It also comes confirmed, by statements in the text; a text which echoes in allusion through the earliest Christian literature: in Justin, Ignatius, Hermas, Polycarp, Clement of Rome; and too, in the Didache, since it was rediscovered. Origen and Jerome have not the slightest doubt of its authenticity or its authorship; even Marcion the heretic takes this for known.

There is a fair question whether the Church at Ephesus was the addressee, or rather more likely the point from where the Epistle was disseminated to the farther reaches of Asia Minor; for we know from Basil and other sources that the words “at Ephesus” were missing from the earliest manuscripts. But this is not a mildew question; it invites an understanding that is fresh, of a doctrinal authority that is unmistakeable.

Was Paul the author?

I have, on my shelves up here in the High Doganate, though perhaps not for long, a modern (1998) commentary on Ephesians of more than 700 pages, on each of which this is taken as an open question. Rather than dare say “Paul” the writer diligently substitutes “AE” (for “Author of Ephesians”), in deference to modern textual scholarship, which takes everything as an open question, and can make any factual assertion, however plain or innocently made, into an issue for perpetual, unresolvable disputation. By this means we are distracted constantly, and at tremendous length, from the Scripture itself; as ultimately from the chance of our Salvation.

Indeed, almost any modern commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, whether nominally Catholic or Protestant, heads straight into the weeds from the first word, which is, “Paulus.” The same who (at 4:25) puts lying at the top of his list of sins his Christian readers must avoid. Are we to take it the Epistle was written instead by some pretender, whose first word was a lie?

Yet even to state that is to invite another journey through the weeds, the more tortuous because it must be in the company of tin-eared scholars making confident judgements on Paul’s vocabulary, syntax, and style.

The Epistle was from the earliest times paired with that to the Colossians. The two seem sometimes to play one theme together like a pair of violas. From that ancient useful hint, one may solve almost any puzzle that comes to mind, about the relation of Ephesians to the rest of the Pauline canon.

And if we read it on the assumption of Paul’s authorship, we grasp immediately the reason for adjustments in voice from Paul’s other Epistles: for he is writing here not to a local church he knew at first hand, but to new Christians he has never met, in the Church Universal beyond them; and condensing, poetically, what elsewhere he had once had the opportunity, more prosaically, to spell out. Thus, in a sense, he is writing even more directly to us than in his other Epistles.

That we would shoot the messenger of bad news might be understandable in some circumstances. But why tamper with the messenger of Good News?

One of the greatest pleasures in life, for those who were taught to read in childhood, is falling upon an unread book by a much-loved author. This happened to me, and if I add the scrupulously bibulous celebration of an old friend’s seventy-fifth birthday (now ten years retired as the last competent drawing master in what, before name inflation, was called the Ontario College of Art), I may explain the omission of posts on Tuesday.

The author was Bill Tilman (Major Harold William Tilman, CBE, DSO, MC and bar, 1898–1977), renowned mountaineer, pilot-cutter yachtsman, and raconteur, whose fifteen ridiculously understated memoirs of voyages and adventures supply something that went missing around the time of the Great War.

The book, entitled China to Chitral, is an account of wanderings up and through the mountains of Chinese Turkestan, especially about Urumchi and Kashgar, with his old climbing companion Eric Shipton in anno 1948. It could be praised at many levels, both for what it describes and what it ignores. Tilman crossed China westward when Mao Tse-tung and his Communist Revolution were sweeping the other way. But not once does Tilman mention this news, restricting his remarks on China and Chinese either to the timeless, or to the exactly particular. We hear more about a T’ang Dynasty general who led an army across the Pamirs against an alliance of Arabs and Tibetans, in anno 747.

He spreads learning almost in spite of himself: “My theme is mountains, unsullied by science and alleviated with Chinese brandy.” A culinary anthology could be constructed from Tilman’s passing mentions of food, drink, and hard tack. From his climbing descriptions a reader may find the whole jargon of mountaineering self-explained. He minutely discerns birds and animals, glaciation and geology, without the slightest pretensions. He makes sharp anthropological observations on Kirghiz, Turkis, Kazakhs, Wakhis, Sherpas, Tungans — of a kind that could be made only by a man whose survival depended on getting them right. Yet he observes with a drollness that would be severely reprimanded today, by professorial experts who know nothing at first hand, and little true at second. And his way is lighted with innumerable aphorisms, both original, and derived: for he was a man of very broad reading, able effortlessly to insert the perfect, jaw-droppingly apt quotation, then improve on it with a light touch.

The inward joy is fully derived, from a view of life that is totally incompatible with that of the modern world. He is traveller, never passenger, and so he tramps or sails, compulsively taking the hard way over or around each obstacle. Several other twentieth-century English travellers shared in that attitude (Wilfred Thesiger is another of my heroes, Freya Stark among my heroines), but Tilman exceeds all in the gratuitousness of his assaults upon the world’s least habitable places.

He ascended Everest, for example, without oxygen and in weekend hiking boots and a tweed jacket, to an altitude of 27,300 feet, in 1938. He and Shipton were the first human beings to physically penetrate the inner Nanda Devi Sanctuary, similarly ill-equipped. There is a long list of such accomplishments, for which he was half-prepared at best. His soldiering in both World Wars, whether behind enemy lines or leading frontal attacks, was the stuff of legends.

And at the end of China to Chitral, upon hearing a false rumour that, during his absence from civilization, another World War had been declared, he says:

“There was no time to be lost. Modern wars are such long drawn out affairs that it would not be easy to arrive too late to take part, yet it would never do to commit such a solecism. In a terrible stew, hot-foot and resolved to march double stages, I set out for Gupis and the beaten track which I could no longer shun.”

The man writing that was already past fifty. He undoubtedly meant just what he said. Carefully read, the short passage communicates a masculine nobility almost gone from this world — a form of incorruptible flippancy which we correctly associate with those knights of old, who dared without hesitation, and laughed at everyone, especially themselves.

“We are using our own skins for wallpaper, and we cannot win.”

This was among the quotes we had on our office wall, in the old days at the Idler maga. Since media mediocrities are currently obsessed with issues of attribution and plagiarism, let me quickly admit that I knicked this line from John Berryman (1914–72), the American poet. (Dream Songs, no. 53.) Now, Berryman said he took it from the German poet, Gottfried Benn, and my fact-checking department has traced this to Benn’s essay, “Artists and Old Age” (of 1954, translated in Primal Vision, page 206):

“Your art has deserted the temples and the sacrificial vessels, it has ceased to have anything to do with the painting of pillars, and the painting of chapels is no longer anything for you either. You are using your own skin for wallpaper, and nothing can save you.”

Benn was in turn mischievously interpreting a remark by Thomas Mann. And, Mann was commenting on a very old theme which, arising within the trunk of the Classics, branched through every European literature. Artists, according to this ancient meme, must be tough, not least on themselves.

Or as I might explain this to a fact-checker: “We can never be free of the ancient world, unless we become barbarians again.”

That’s another quote, from the same wall. It is from Jacob Burckhardt, in his Historische Fragmente. (Do you want the original German? I have it here.) Though truth to tell, I had nearly attributed it to Emil Staiger. (Shows you the importance of checking.)

We are becoming barbarians again. And so we are using our own skins for wallpaper, as perhaps Berryman came to appreciate most fully as he leapt from a Minneapolis bridge, into the Mississippi River. (Fact-check alert: “He didn’t land in the river, but near the second pier on the west bank, then rolled fifteen feet down the embankment. But as the autopsy showed, he would have been dead by the time his body made contact with the river itself. Please correct.”)

Berryman was an alcoholic. (You cannot libel the dead.) He was arguably manic, but unarguably depressive. (“Bi-polar?”) He was a deeply unhappy man, in the grimly uncongenial environment of modern American academia (which had already hog-tied literature and art, and was working on music). He burnt through three wives (if we have counted correctly). He was even cast, by the fashion of his generation, into the sadly inappropriate role of a “confessional” poet, when he longed for escape from his own skin. (Confessional poets often kill themselves; Berryman, to his credit, outlived most of his contemporaries.)

A distressing ego he may have had, but there were other facets. Many students remembered him as tirelessly devoted, both tough and kind. As poet he was a painstaking craftsman, whose turns, breaks, and very gravid pauses, show him fanatically avoiding the easy way out. He’d worry himself sick about keeping jobs, and paying bills, and keeping the very families he was about to abandon. He’d drive himself to the border of his sanity; then crack, and hit the bottle; brag, womanize, fight, slather, lie; and make an excruciating ass of himself.

His last, posthumous book, Delusions, &c (far from his best, and burning out around the edges) was also his most interesting. In de-tox in 1970 he’d had what he called a “sort-of religious conversion.” Instead of an abstractly transcendent God, he came suddenly to think that God might be Personal; might be interested in each human fate; might be capable of interceding in individual lives. He hit the bottle again; quit, hit, quit; struggling, apparently, against this idea. And finally he left that garbled, fragmentary, versified witness to something partially understood.

O gentle reader, pray for him. He was one of the innumerable lost: men and women of huge gifts, able to sing, but given no song; given instead freedom without purpose. It is, if you will, not entirely distinguishable from that “American Dream” that we heard invoked too many times in two recent political conventions: the self-made man in the land of laissez-faire, where nothing is impossible and “history is bunk.” (Which is not to condemn a little entrepreneurship.)

The “dream” stands unknowingly opposed to, “gather from the air a live tradition” (Ezra Pound, plagiarizing Dante through Villon). The critique here is more fundamental than, “You didn’t build that!” (when the real horror is often that they did). Men cannot lift themselves by their own ankles; they need that current of air to fly. They need even to be pointed and launched towards the Heaven. They need pillars to paint, and chapels, too. More than a country, they need a civilization.

Forty years have now passed since his passing. I remember from adolescence the thrill of Berryman’s “Henry,” and the strange architectonic of his Dream Songs; the hard poetical pedagogy in Berryman’s Sonnets, and the high lyrical pitch of his Love and Fame. (Though, Mistress Bradstreet made no sense to me.) I remember him showing me to the door of Emily Dickinson, and cutting a new trail through the Forest of Arden. And then, how I puzzled in the crash of his Delusions, and how he lay crumpled in a vaguely Catholic heap, after his Icarian fall. (Let God alone judge him.)

Turning a few more pages through the Dream Songs:

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink
and cannot be arrested and pay no tax
and, in general, bats have it made.

Crows are very clever; laboratory bird testers, not so much. Here, a simple case of correlation is presented as inference of a hidden causal agent.

Crows have been acing correlation tests since the day God created them. (One indication of how intelligent they are: I have never seen a crow reading Discover magazine.) They can trace causal agents on a scale so microscopic as to be non-existent; and they can infer things so subtle, that people who realize scream and run away.

But ravens, hooo! … Knock the smartest crow into a cocked hat. … They conduct empirical experiments on all the other species, and hide the journals  in secret places where they will never be found.

I have lifted my title from Yoshida no Kaneyoshi, better known as “Kenko,” the fourteenth-century Japanese Buddhist recluse and bonze. At a time when the Emperor Go-Daigo was struggling with the usurping Hojo family, and the world about him was in flames, Kenko retired to a cottage in the hills. Armed with brush, and apparently some quantity of paper, he wrote down anecdotes and reflections on many subjects, just as they came to mind. He then “posted” these, or rather pasted them on his walls, in no particular order.

I might refer the interested reader to the original text, collected and edited by Nishio Minoru in the Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei series (Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1957). But as I myself read hardly a word of Japanese, I tend to refer to the translation by Donald Keene.