Essays in Idleness

Ronald Knox said, of The Imitation of Christ, that anyone who claims to be “fond” of it is either a saint, or he is lying. This most formidable of late mediaeval spiritual guides — to call it a “devotional book” is to set out in the wrong direction — was meant as an acid bath. It strips off the skin of one’s vanity, then claws at what lies underneath. The charm in the writing lands like salt. There are no “happyface” moments, unless one counts a surprising chapter, whose number I won’t give lest some innocent try to start there. That chapter can be read as a transcription of mystical experience, along the unitive way. But I take it not as “encouragement” but as grounding and orientation, for the book is deadly serious beginning to end, and the point of it is to point the reader where the Christian must go: on a path that unavoidably includes “the dark night of the soul.”

It would seem that the ancient Egyptian “Book of the Dead” had the same purpose of instruction to the dying (we are all dying), but by comparison it is glib. It is magic spells the reader must memorize, for when he passes through the underworld and “comes forth into the light.” To a reader not in ancient Egypt, with ancient priests to flesh the thing out, it will remain largely incomprehensible. I don’t trust explanations from another day and age, for a religion that can only make sense from inside. Even the projective imagination requires some parallel, first-hand religious experience.

Perhaps a day could come when the Imitatio Christi is as befuddling as that Book of the Dead, but this is hard to imagine, for while spare the style endeavours clarity. There is no drip of arcane theological terms in the original Latin, and needn’t be in any translation. The author has an urgent task; he has no time for obfuscation, secret messages, autobiography, learned asides. (Or, “the authors”: I will hardly dip in this short space into who they were, but cite the book itself: “Do not ask who said this, but listen to what is said.”) It starts with a warning. Only the reader who has already decided to take Christ for his model will find it any use. Here is no Pascal proposing that we try his Wager.

The book has stood the test of changing times: about six centuries of them. The modern mind, addled by a false concept of progress, can only return to the 14th century as a kind of voyeur or tourist. But the modern mind is too heavy to carry a distance like that. Leave it behind. Likewise, discard any later non-Catholic interpretation. This Thomas of Kempin was pre-Protestant, and attempts to make him into a “mere Christian” require conscious meddling with the text.

Another Thomas — Aquinas — had similar habits, though what he had to explain demanded much more space. It is, among other things, a difference between philosophical texts written before Descartes, and those written after. For Descartes was the pioneering liberal, who used old, once reliable words, in subtly tricky new ways. The spokesmen for the Middle Ages are on guard against such tricks; they write to be understood, plainly. Our Moderns are by nature gnostic: one can’t read them without a specialized, “professional” vocabulary. They conceive themselves as members of an élite. They do not address Everyman, but a closed camp of initiates. Their jargon is meant to repel outsiders.

What makes the Imitation of Christ hard, isn’t complications. It is instead enduring the pain of self-exposure; the difficulty of the pilgrimage itself. Getting to Heaven will not be easy. But unlike the vague and contradictory destinations of our insipid “progress,” we have an unmistakable place to go.

[This rant slightly extended overnight.]

*

There are sterile factions on both the Left and the Right of the current ideological spectrum; but the thinking heart of the “pro-life” movement is, in defiance of human physiology, mostly to the Right. (The human heart is a little to the left of centre; the brain is at the top, incidentally.)

All my life, it seems, and especially through my arguably adult life, which began with the legalization of abortion and a clot of “social” legislation around it, the cause of sterility has been gathering force. That is to say, every demand from the politically active has advanced this cause in some way. Killing babies was just the start.

The public embrace of homosexuality, and now transsexuality, with interventions from “gay marriage” to the latest hormone “therapies,” is an obvious part of this massive “trend.” But there are many more subtle developments, and by no means are they all political in the strict sense. It could be said that the bulk of efforts are commercial. Governments (in places unlike Venezuela) adapt to them, rather than setting the pace, with parasitical policies designed to capture tax revenues and secure borrowing.

While the endless demands for “reform” and “progress” are made by a small minority of activists, who infiltrate our bureaucratic institutions and covet all positions of power, the sleepy majority play along. We snore through the latest innovations. The governments we elect are as spineless as we are. They are not themselves radical. The politicians would rather avoid a fight, in which they would be smeared and demonized. They surrender every fort to the Enemy.

But why wouldn’t they, in what I characterize as our pigsty of consumerism?

I notice this in all my walking about, and wandering through media. Everywhere one is confronted by the triumph of mass marketing — a form of salesmanship by demographic in which the lowest common denominator becomes the highest, and the purpose of business is not to fulfil needs, but to create wants on vast economies of scale. “You deserve a break today,” might serve as the background slogan (no you don’t, incidentally); all products promise “the easy way out.” Nothing needs to be done the hard, rewarding way, for the Mass Man requires a life of ease. He eagerly embraces wage slavery to obtain it.

How is this anti-life? Because it extinguishes every aspiration of the human soul to what is higher and better. Raising children isn’t easy. But grooming dogs is a glide, when there are shops to do it for you. Cooking is hard, but our urban world is now full of restaurants. All entertainment becomes passive. All goods become disposable, and essentially generic. We have an economy built around convenience, or more precisely, the propaganda of convenience. (Whether commuting for hours every day to one’s repetitive work is truly convenient, is another question.)

While heredity may remain the determining factor, in distinguishing one human being from another, environment is hugely powerful in making us all the same. Hardware has been in my sights lately. When, for instance, one looks for something that was once available as a matter of course in any family-owned hardware store, one finds that it is no longer available, only things in “bubble” or “blister” packs. For everything is now made handy for the home handyman to do a quick, botched job.

Twice each morning a huge, very loud garbage truck comes to my apartment building, to remove the mountains of consumer packaging that come with modern life. (One truck is for “recycling,” the other for unrecyclable grunge.) I am indifferent to the environmental impact of landfills and the like. (They may some day make rich harvesting.) Rather I am distressed by the human environment that follows from this way of living. Our souls are being discarded piecemeal like the trash. And when they’re done, our bodies are sent, with minimal fuss, to incinerators.

How do we bring moral focus to what Belloc called the “Servile State”? In which nothing holds still, and everything blurs as it passes; and heads choked with advertising jingles lose the capacity for consistent thought? In which Freedom has been redefined as the right to pursue brief physical pleasures, and Love is reduced to inconsequential sex?

A revolt, against the “Culture of Death,” would necessarily involve the rejection of almost everything that has been standardized and sterilized around us. Let’s not wait until tomorrow morning.

The good thing about brain injuries, and associated forms of mental illness, is that they are painless. The victim does not know that anything could be seriously wrong. There are moments of awkwardness, but we all have them, and perhaps there are fewer when half your brain is missing. Even those who are, as it were, intact, form the habit of blaming everything on “the others”; it is just another step to giving up. Some become violent when the world tries to stop them, or may at unpredictable moments, but most are freed of the anxieties that a man with more than half a brain is bound to feel, during his progress through life.

Madness comes in many kinds; I have my preferences.

Through the years I have admired the extraordinary poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. We are lucky in English to have had so fine a translator as Michael Hamburger, and the successive editions of the collected Poems and Fragments have been among my most treasured possessions. Hölderlin’s German and Hamburger’s English are on facing pages. As someone who has been struggling with German (and losing) for a long time, I compare them and spot little miracles all over.

In lieblicher Bläue blühet mit dem metallenen Dache der Kirchthurm. …

“In lovely blueness with its metal roof the steeple blossoms.”

This, among my favourite lines on earth, is from the far end of the book. It describes, I suppose, the view from an attic window in a pretty German town — Tübingen, two centuries ago. Hölderlin had gone completely mad when he wrote it. He was being kept as a boarder and discreetly minded by a kindly carpenter named Zimmer. Or by an angel, I’ve forgotten which.

Details, details: gentle reader may find Hölderlin’s biography elsewhere. I prefer poetry to life, and am happy with only the most skeletal outline of an author’s background. Academics commonly believe, that things can be explained that have no explanation. Why did Hölderlin go mad? He had reason enough to go out of his mind. We all do.

Even as a child he was moody and over-sensitive: now there’s a clue. He was tense. He had a unique understanding of Pindar, and of the inner structure of the Greek ode, and of ideals that underlay Greek tragedy. These may have been wrong, but they were brilliantly so. He is consistently lucid, always to the point, especially when incomprehensible to the modern reader.

From the (later) poems of his madness, his talent never parts. Only his tensions go away. For if there is no point, there is no tension. But consider:

The lines of life are various; they diverge
Like footpaths to the mountains’ utmost ends.
What here we are elsewhere a god amends. …

(It is even better in German; and could have been better in English had the translator not felt the need for accuracy, as I have not in my excerpt.)

There was a strange wisdom in Hölderlin’s madness. Unlike most, he seemed aware of his condition, but looked upon it as a reward. All the storm and stress of his early life, had lifted. He did not even write poems any more, except when people asked him to. In his serenity, he would oblige them. Zimmer kept them for us.

Alas, the people in my neighbourhood of Parkdale do not seem so happy. Perhaps they have been given the wrong drugs. They shout obscenities in the street, instead of softly reciting poems; and never wait to be asked.

[This piece kicked forward from six May Days ago; and then fussed with.]

*

“Civilization begins,” according to the poet Ezra Pound, “when people start preferring a little done right to a great deal done wrong.”

Like the capacities for speech, art, music, and sanctity, this is written somewhere in our DNA, deep down where it can be forgotten. As Pound decried, that “great deal” comes out in the popular star system, and every other way of pandering to the masses; in the replacement of what is local and specific with what is general and plugged in. Whereas, a concert of music by Dufay, for instance, or the filling of a niche with an item of carved stone, would be a little deal.

To my mind, as a religious nutjob, tyranny begins with the abuse of talents, with turning God’s gifts (or Nature’s, if you wish) to purely personal account, as the means to wealth and power. The modest, who may also have talents but perhaps not for making big fortunes or winning national elections, must nevertheless try to get by. They become enslaved on various levels. They must agree to accept certain terms of employment, or starve. They agree to serve: not God, except privately, nor their neighbour, except abstractly. Tangibly, the modest are compelled to serve the “men of vision,” the “nation builders,” and other wilful cranks — whose talents are for plausible rhetoric; for moral and material posturing; for ruthless appropriation and the seizure of the main chance. These great become our paymasters. Money speaks, we obey.

Which is not to say tyranny is a modern invention. But I do think the technology for it has been vastly improved.

*

The late George Grant once explained to me that the Volvo in his driveway was “a modern irony.” It was in fact a mode of conveyance, which he could afford on the salary of a “philosophy professor”; mostly the wife drove it. But we spent a pleasant morning in Halifax once, thirty-something years ago, discussing the amount of human art and science, focused skill and moral discipline, subtracted from Civilization and added to The Economy by the invention of such things.

It was, we agreed, a superior car, a fine piece of engineering. (A Volvo, well kept, might last almost half as long as a passenger airliner.) But one was like another, and ten-thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, lived out their lives for the sake of Volvos — starting from the poor wretches digging the iron out of the ground, or drilling for the oil; and ending with the slick advertising agents and the showroom salesmen. And then there are the other car manufacturers.

Indeed, the late Ivan Illich — half mad to be sure, but I could never tell which half — demonstrated that if we take the total of man-hours devoted to making, fuelling, fixing, insuring, and otherwise accommodating cars (highways, garages, traffic cops, &c), then divide by the grand total of passenger miles driven, for any fixed period, the average actual speed of a car may be calculated. It works out to just over three miles per hour. Which is to say, the same as walking, but considerably slower than a horse. To put this another way, the entire monstrous effort produces a null result.

Really, it is much less than a zero, as we see when we look at the matter more in the round. Let us tackle, for instance, the crowding issue.

The world, since I was born, has more than doubled in population. The human race, according to the environmentalcases, takes up too much space. We have a “problem” today, of “overpopulation.” Yet even they, no friends of big industry, seem to have overlooked a simple fact. We, humans, have increased by a modest two or three times (since anno 1953). But those, cars, have increased by twenty times or more, in the same period. And each one of them leaves a bigger carbon footprint; especially when you remember that the newly arriving humans are just little ones.

Why this emphasis on getting rid of us?

Why don’t we get rid of them, instead? (The cars, not the babies. Or the greenies.)

For consider, the average car is nearly defenceless.

Now, cars give the appearance of moving very fast, to those who do not think analytically, and for the sake of having nice shiny cars in loud solid colours, the masses are happy to exchange not only the direct cost in human labour, but such “intangible” costs as may be associated with making our cities ugly, filling the air with pollutants, constraining souls within metal boxes, and turning the streets where children once played into killing zones.

Include this, too, in what we mean by “a modern irony” — that cars make every city spread, until one needs a car to get around it. Owning one has ceased to be a luxury, and become a necessity instead. One can hardly keep a job without one. And one needs that job in order to pay for such things, as cars.

Cars are not everything, of course. There is so much more on the same basic scheme: the sound and fury of modern industry, signifying the nothing it all works out to. Yet let me not suggest that the lives lived, minding the machines, are wasted. The work is wasted, goes down the black hole. But there is something irreducible in the experience, even of industrial desolation.

In one of my many perished posts, I considered instead the real estate industry. In another ramble, a couple of years ago, I reviewed a study by some Californian, linking cars and real estate together. The thesis, easily proved, is that the allocation of automobile parking spaces had, by the 1920s, determined the shape of every North American town and city, and the disposition of all human habitation within. The little Stalins, called “city planners,” have since that time been using this allocation of parking spaces as their basic “planning tool,” to micromanage the Kulaks.

Movement along the actual roads and highways is only their reserve tool.

That, in turn, leads to a larger observation about the way of our world: people constantly moving, houses constantly changing hands. We have become nomads again, high-tech nomads, while eviscerating local and regional culture, and eliminating almost every prospect of what Illich called “conviviality.”

But that is just where I stand confuted. One can hardly conceive of an evil that does not add a few fiat dollars to the GDP. Say what I like about the collapse of Western Civ, the truth is it was good for the economy. And this can be easily proved, by the numbers, for they get bigger every day.

*

It will soon be nine hundred years since the White Ship went down in the English Channel (November 25th, 1120), drowning, among several hundred mostly drunken passengers, the only legitimate heir to King Henry, thus setting the stage for “The Anarchy” and everything that has fallen out since. It is barely a century since the Titanic went down (April 15th, 1912), also with huge casualties including many quite respectable, well-dressed people.

Bernard Berenson somewhere contrasted the different public responses to these two events. The first occasioned not the slightest indignation, but a great cry of woe and contrition. The second triggered a series of public inquiries, as the politicians sought to identify those responsible for the disaster, on the assumption that something contractual had failed. (The iceberg, curiously enough, was never called to testify.)

So it goes, or so it has gone, for Western society. The awe that is commanded by a great disaster, is frittered away. The large fact is quickly absorbed by many small. Moreover, so far as the awe persists, it tends to be expressed with maudlin sentimentality — with grief poured over the individual victims — unctuously, as it were. This is another way in which the large is absorbed by the many small. We find ourselves weeping for individuals whom, in the course of our natural lives, we would never have met, nor heard of. One might almost call these “virtual” tears.

Today is of course “May Day,” itself somewhat transformed from mediaeval antecedents. By modern European tradition, it is the day on which we celebrate international organized labour, or in a word, Communism — in both its socialist and capitalist forms. Indeed, everywhere I look about me, in the Greater Parkdale Area, I see new condominiums being raised, to extraordinary heights, to provide comfortable dovecotes for the New Soviet Man (capitalist version). For this New Soviet Man demands to live in a “condom”; demands not only to pay his mortgage, but some rent on top of that; in addition to his demand for ever higher taxes, “daycare,” and so forth.

Alas, apart from being human, I find little in common with this New Soviet Man. He shares none of my enthusiasms, I wonder at his. Yet we celebrate so many of the same events, knowingly or unknowingly: childbirth, passages, meals together; ageing, illnesses, deaths. He, with his demands for fresh public inquiries. I, with awe and contrition — for I am so impressed with the scale of our disaster.

Perhaps I could be accused of Christian tendencies, or at the least of a religious frame of mind, in my view of the Oeconomy, and the “science” of Oeconomics. To start with, I don’t think it exists; for I cannot locate it in the metaphysical scheme of Aristotle the Stagyrite, where I can easily find the eternal sensible of the heavens, the perishable sensible of our sublunary sphere, or the divinely insensible. It is not a thing, in other words; just some boring talk about money. (The Metaphysics, Book Lambda; gentle reader should peruse all the chapters.)

I’m not even sure that money exists, except as printouts. It is at a level of philosophical abstraction that defeats me. It is assigned a “value” that it cannot have except by means of an illusion: a kind of con game writ large. We agree to pretend that it has real substance until the day comes when the only bits anyone could want were those minted in gold and silver. Now those are things.

All other kinds are, as it were, minted by sorcerers and magicians. Or, as we call them today, bankers and central bankers. A bank has deposits of, shall we say, one hundred dollars. This entitles it to lend out a thousand, or two thousand; three thousand might seem “excessive.” And then charge interest on the higher sum; and even collect it sometimes. Whenupon, it can lend out twenty times more. For years I’ve thought I must be missing something, but 816 moons have passed, and I still don’t get it. To my mind, if you have your grubby hands on one hundred dollars, the most you can lend is one hundred dollars; and you’ll be needing at least some of that for lunch.

I don’t mind if you charge a fee to the borrower. Neither did (nor does) the Catholic Church, by the way. You have not the use of that money while it is lent out, something should be owing for the service. Too, you are taking a risk. Maybe you have your customer over a barrel, and you are charging too much. That’s bad, but the rates are negotiable, and sometimes the law steps in.

Real usury is something more fundamental, in my view (and I have stated my qualifications frankly). It comes closer to paying for things with play money.

Once upon a time, when I participated in the imaginary oeconomy, I witnessed transactions that seemed fairly large, to me. Capitalists, using banks, were assembling huge possessions, by means of what appeared to be accounting tricks. In one case an immense (and very ugly) shopping mall emerged from the (figurative) top hats, when I was expecting a rabbit. Large numbers of persons with immortal souls were to be enslaved, building and staffing it. But the whole thing was a confidence trick: “We pretend to work and you pretend to pay us.”

Nobody really owns anything, except the things that they buy in the shopping mall, whose resale value tends to be zilch. Call me a materialist, but I whine that there’s hardly any “stuff” any more. Just “product.”

A lady I know has thrice, in the last year or two, bought a security chain for the door of her apartment — from a hardware store galaxy that enjoys a local near-monopoly, from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. Every time, the chain breaks, from her own modest use. She is an old lady, not very strong. Even at my age (816 moons), I think I could break the bronze-painted “product” with one good pull. It looks quite dinky. I marvel at this lady’s optimism, in buying the same thing over and over, for $11.95 plus $1.55 of sales tax on her debit card, when she could get the same from a dollar store, and pay only 13 cents of tax. (They come, after all, from the same prison camp in China.)

Confidence in the oeconomy — that’s what this lady has. Or to put it another way, she is a victim of usury.

The world is (have you heard?) full of injustice and corruption. It extends even to me. But I’d rather focus on other people.

Greed and self-interest are often given as explanations. Violence is explained by passion and a cause. Crimes that appear to be pointless, actions that seem remorselessly perverse, invite the question, “Why? Why?” We will do anything except confront the question of evil directly, and would rather consider sin as exceptional. We are told, in the face of bitter evidence, that people are naturally good.

And there is good in them, even virtues often corresponding to their vices (and vice versa). A delicate point, in the old Catholic teaching about human weakness, is to acknowledge sin to oneself and to a priest in persona Christi — the same who sings the Mass. The concept is plain enough, and for the sceptical and distrusting, the psychology makes sense, too.

Confessing to yourself is only a preparation. No Absolution can come of it.

But from those who do not recognize sin as a category, much oppression can be expected. For those who disbelieve in divine justice — who think that if they escape discovery they are home free — there can be no restraints. There is the voice of one’s God-installed conscience, but this can be tampered with, twisted and inverted. We are, for the most part, governed today not by those haunted with faith, but by self-proclaimed “idealists” — those whose ends are essentially totalitarian, and for whom ends justify means. They are invariably haunted by the lust for power.

My view on this topic is unmodern. It includes the phenomenon of demonic inhabitation. I do not think Christ was kidding, throughout the Gospels, when he mentioned this phenomenon, too. We make our little deals with the Devil, and some make big deals. We may even thank God for the Devil’s help, in our moral confusion. Our criterion for virtue becomes worldly success.

To make a stand against the Devil, first in oneself through self-examining humility, then by extension through love of one’s neighbour, is a challenge before each. Evil must be confronted and the occasions of evil avoided when they can be avoided. With Christ’s help, the Devil can be defeated. This has been the teaching for a long, long time.

“Censorship” of many kinds is necessary to this end, both of oneself and at large. Practically, there is much that cannot be stopped, but can at least be discouraged, and ought to be condemned. There is no society in which censorship is not practised, as evidence our present in which, more often than not, the good is censored (not only by governments), and where miscarriages of justice have become commonplace (not only in courts). Often it seems the Devil is in charge, and his servants have captured all of the administrative positions.

Hence the old (and reasonable) liberal saw, “Who will mind the minders?”

This will always be “a problem,” so long as we live in this sinful world. We will always find corruption in high places, even as we now find it spreading like a fire, at the top of our Church. The thoroughly corrupt make poor censors, and worse law-givers.

Everything in this human world is a mess, and so far as I have read, always has been. Still, we cannot give up the struggle to be good ourselves, and put men both good and competent in charge of what needs doing. That task begins with knowing what the good is, and loving instead of fearing it.

There is no way around this: repairing what is broken and maintaining what is not. And so we must get on with it. Pray for angelic guidance.

*

(See my Thing column today, here, also promoting censorship.)

Some meejah foon (the word is not a misspelling of “fool” but a contraction of “buffoon”) notes that Saint Anthony’s Shrine (and basilica) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, is a “multifaith” institution. At the moment it would be a closed multifaith facility, as it was bombed out during Easter Sunday Mass.

Hundreds were killed, but in addition more hundreds were maimed, there and elsewhere that day — scarred painfully for life, limbs amputated, &c — by young suicide bombers who kill themselves instantly and painlessly, in the expectation of an immortal sex life with the houris of the Islamic paradise. (Imagine their surprise!)

Anti-Catholic bigotry is normal among Muslim terrorists, but also among liberal journalists; more common still is their drooling ignorance on the subject of the Church (as well as on most other subjects). All churches, not only Catholic, are “multifaith facilities.” We (I will speak only for the Catholics) have, since our beginnings, let people of all other religions inside. They can’t (legitimately) take Communion, but they may attend the Mass, and use the church for silence, meditation, prayer. Well, yes, there have sometimes been “security concerns”; and visitors making an unpleasant scene, or performing property damage, have sometimes been discouraged.

Saint Anthony’s, as the BBC reporter learnt, was a magnet for Christians other than Catholic; for Buddhists, for Hindus, for Muslims, for “others,” and for the postmodern “nones” who are a growing constituency in Asia as in the West. From its 18th-century foundation under Dutch colonial rule, as an underground congregation (the Dutch authorities banned Catholic worship), it was taking in strangers.

Saint Anthony of Padua has a following through South Asia, and may turn up, in mudbrick or stone, in popular art and portraiture, in the least expected places. As a child I attended a Saint Anthony’s school in Lahore, Pakistan; on my reception into the Catholic Church I took his name as my religious moniker because, like the superstitious peasants of far India, I could recall his presence in many signal moments from childhood forward. It was an acknowledgement of grace.

The shrine in Colombo was itself founded in circumstances powerfully mysterious, and its patron draws even non-Christians as a miracle-worker and bestower of gifts upon all who approach him. I realize that this will sound absurd to the desiccated minds of our self-styled “rationalists,” but there ye go. I have respect for the simple people they have contempt for; I have contempt for the people they hold in respect.

When we say, “Saint Anthony, pray for us,” as they are now saying in such numbers through Sri Lanka, we are not merely uttering a formula, or invoking a “symbol.” We are speaking of a person, and to that person, whose presence continues in human life. Most of us are Catholics, to be sure, but many are not.

Saint Anthony answers prayers. He does not check credentials.

A week has passed since the fire in, or on, Notre Dame de Paris; let me be the last to comment on a story that is stale-dated by any meejah standard. It dominated international mindwaves for only two days, but left images that viewers may be able to recall many decades from now.

“The church is on fire,” is a commonplace thought, when a church is visibly on fire, and I who am commonplace was thinking that while turning to the news. As an old meejah hack, who happens to know a little about Gothic architecture, I was prepared to discount the “fake news” that would be disseminated in “live time.” For instance, when told that the roof had collapsed, with strong hints that the building was now a write-off, I reflected that the roof is a hat, only. Stone vaulting lies underneath it, except the circle much of the spire fell through (as burnt offering onto the altar). Stone doesn’t burn easily; and even fallen vaulting can be repaired, having been erected with technology we would consider primitive (if ingenious) today.

A spectacle: to see the ancient oak timbers, of great girth, burning up like matchsticks. But the craft masons of Notre Dame — far, far in advance of our modern Lego builders — expected fire and lived in a time so simple that they knew oak doesn’t burn without help. It isn’t big matchsticks. The idea that you need some serious accelerants to make it burn, and that only the accelerants would flame like that, was among my initial thoughts. We’ll see what comes of investigations. I also recalled two recent attempts to torch the cathedral, associated with terrorism. And that more than one thousand churches have been desecrated in France in the last year (and five hundred synagogues, and one hundred mosques).

Instead, the explanation of a clumsy accident by restoration workers was immediately accepted by the talking heads, and even Fox News hung up on a guest who had another theory. In favour of the politically correct, plausible account, for which no evidence was being offered, I learnt that a fire alarm had sounded 23 minutes before the blaze itself was first spotted. Paradoxically, this would show the ruinous consequences of depending exclusively on modern technology: the computers directed the first responders to the wrong place, away from the actual heat source.

I can easily believe in electrical short circuits as a fire hazard, especially since having had myself to flee a building where a cost-cutting landlord was having an elevator repaired by what I characterized as “a Romanian comedy team.” (They buzz-sawed through a live electrical cable, then themselves fled the scene of their handiwork as smoke shot up the shaft and spread through the building. Luckily this smoke warned all tenants to evacuate; the building’s fire buzzer alone would have been taken by everyone as yet another false alarm.)

*

“Things happen,” according to public lore; and even in the case of terror, such as the horrific strikes in Sri Lanka for Easter yesterday, I’m against keeping score. I noted that the police commander in Colombo had warned that a specific Muslim faction was planning just such a “thing,” days before it happened, and I have noticed that of the ten thousands of terrorist incidents through the last generation, a statistically anomalous proportion were performed by Muslim factions, but these are just facts. One needs to keep a cool head, not to be provoked into foolish retaliations.

War is war. But to win, one needs clarity, solid discipline, and courage. Weapons help, too. Inane, misdirected propaganda, and general hysteria, focused by scoundrels this way and that, are of more use to the enemy. Wrath is a moral substance that needs to be carefully applied. But God did create it for a purpose, as He did the other tools of victory over evil.

*

I am exhausted by the misdirected propaganda over Notre Dame — about its “artistic” value, its “symbolism” of France, its long history, the draw for tourists, &c. (When I last went in, more than twenty years ago, the slobbering tourists already outnumbered the faithful at prayer, by a large margin.)

All the most precious sacred artefacts were saved; humped over to the Louvre for care by experts. Much more physical damage was done to the irreplaceable art treasures of this church by the Huguenots of the Reformation, and the Atheists of the French Revolution.

God bless the firemen’s chaplain who rescued the Host from the tabernacle: the most valuable item in that Temple. To non-Catholics, it would be a dangerous waste of time.

Worse, aesthetically, will likely follow last week’s disaster, now that President Macron has invited the masturbatory elites of the fashion world to design a new spire, and install other disharmonies, to make the State-appropriated cathedral “more beautiful than ever.” The unity of the building, founded in sacred not profane vision, will be lost to assuage various modernist, anti-Christian, multicultural interests. The result is likely to be as vile as the self-promoting perpetrators.

But even the most sacred chalice can be lost. As Abbot Suger, the creative genius at the foundation of the Gothic style, explained plainly, all these objects have their significance in service to the Holy Eucharist — which is Christ. So far as they do not, they are just baubles.

To the genuine artist, the value of art is in what it is and what it does — how it acts on the human soul — not what it might be worth in the art market. This, if I may be so indirect, is at the sacred heart of beauty’s indivisibility.

*

Returning full circle to what we saw, projected on the world’s electronic screens just one week ago, I will tell you what I really saw. It was an image of our Church, on fire. Not from the bottom, but from the top. Those were the flames that corresponded to the “smoke of Satan” that Pope Paul VI saw entering the Church a half century ago, at the liturgical height of “the spirit of Vatican II.” And in Paris, the very mitre ablaze, falling through the hole it had made by its burning.

The spiritual task of rebuilding our Church and our civilization will not take the five years Macron specified. The time frame I have in mind is many centuries.

I was going to write a companion piece to the Thing I wrote on beauty (here), under the provisional title, “Beauty is indivisible,” but like so many of my optimistic projects, it floundered. Perhaps I will try again after Easter, for through this coming Holy Week I am going to lie doggo, go silent, shut up.

Often I wish that I were more articulate, as well as better disciplined. I think I can see something fairly clearly, but when it comes to sketching what I see in words, I am at a loss. One must keep trying. The airwaves are full of meaningless blather and bafflegab. Clarity is usually avoided. Often it is punished. The more reason, as through Lent, and the Triduum, to pursue the trial.

My best wishes to gentle reader into Paschaltide. Let there be no dedition, until we can surrender to Christ.

Gentle reader is invited to draw a square on a piece of paper. Let each side be about ten miles. Eight miles will do, or nine; eleven or fourteen would also be acceptable. It could be more of a rectangle than a square, but try to make the corners sharp. Or even a triangle, if the paper runs out.

You have just drawn an Ontario Township.

Now, make your grid. The line roads, north and south, should be 100 chains apart (one-and-a-quarter miles), and the east-west sideroads either the same, or different. They needn’t come out evenly; you may leave a fraction on whichever side you didn’t start from. The whole board may have to be tilted at the “front” (baseline) to parallel a lakeshore, or accommodate the “back” of the next Township down. If you’re in the mood, you might want to draw a diagonal road, right through everything.

Congratulations. You may now have a job as one of His Majesty’s surveyors in pioneer Ontario. It’s a much better job than down south of British North America, where the land is somewhat populated already, and everyone seems to have an opinion about where the roads should go. Up here, not yet any people in the way. But there is still the difficulty of slashing through the bush. You only draw “concessions” — future roads defining blocks, to be further subdivided into future farmlots. When the people granted land move in, they will be compelled by the guvmint to actually make those endless mud ribbons.

This will make the roads more interesting. Where the lines meet an obstacle, you get a little run around it. Or a big one, if the obstacle continues. Intersections don’t quite meet, so you get a jog. Or, you decide to put the jog in the middle of nowhere, instead. There were at least five major surveying systems in Upper Canada (later “Ontario”), and dozens of variations on each one. The line and side roads might be 66 chains apart, or more than twice that, depending on some local magnate’s whim. Or the surveyor may have been drunk that day.

Now, a Roman surveyor, though he had the classic preference for straight lines, took the deformities of the landscape into view from the outset, and thought his routes through. His lines would anticipate the obstacles; and even when he couldn’t have a straight line, he would be trying to establish the shortest “navigable” distance between any two points. And this, even if he was in a hurry, which surveyors and planners always are.

As a proponent of idleness, I praise those pagan Romans. It is surprising how many things take much less time, and turn out better, if you think things through before you start. Sleep, and experiment, could be factored in. Experience might also be consulted.

But back home, in the Ontario of more than two centuries ago, we were doing what we are doing still through our political process: creating problems for future generations to cope with. Currently, piling up debt. Formerly: using rulers to ignore the watershed boundaries; drawing farmlots that ignore the slopes and soil conditions; creating problems that, with thought, more attention, and divine patience, could have been foreseen; and would then have cost nothing to eliminate. For we were as we are: a people who think too fast.

In case she is curious, gentle reader was drawing the plan for Esquesing Township. It is now called “Halton Hills,” but we won’t go there today. The original name was borrowed from the Mississauga Indians, and probably misheard. Had there not been a shortage of poets at the time, it would have been transcribed, “Esquesan.” It meant something like, “The back of beyond.”

As a child, and as a youff, when we were home in “Georgetown” (the capital of Esquesing, surely), I hiked over a considerable portion of its 66,700 acres, uphill and down (on a bicycle sometimes), and (in soggy boots) through the valley of the Credit and all its tributaries. On Google maps, I can find the location immediately of everything in the human and natural landscape that once struck me as delightful or enchanting, and discover that most of those things are gone.

Esquesing was large enough to make a country, with its own little Parliament and its own peculiar ways. Indeed, one could divide it “naturally” into seventeen parishes and a few town wards.

Over large expanses of magnificent farmland, there has now spread a circuit-board of suburban sprawl, and along all approach roads the strip-mall phenomenon, of franchise capitalism at its most ghastly. City planners and surveyors worked it all out. Fifty years, and almost everything I loved has been wantonly destroyed. But thanks to those Google “street views,” I can see that the same has happened almost everywhere else I have ever been. We’re still calling it “progress,” and it is still leading us by the straightest possible line, to Hell.

From an early age, I became a phantasist. I would put what was demolished back together in my mind. I would also design new things and place them in imagination where they seemed to fit — parks and creek-side woodland trails; shops for carpenters and every sort of craftsman; mills, millponds, barns; the quilt of fields and hedgerows surrounding; the steepled townscape rising from the fields; galleries, music halls and cosy theatres; chapels for the meditative types; chantries to remember the dead (catacombs to expand the graveyards); country houses with verandahs for the living, houses without but with balconies above; town courtyard houses with yard and balconies inside; the winding lanes between them, and children at play on the streets; public monuments, sculpture, murals; foundries, bronze casting studios; a covered farmer’s market downtown; pottery kilns and the like; quarries dug for building stone and not for gravel, later to be made into such as sunken Mary gardens.

Each edifice built once, uniquely, as if for all time, with repairs and adjustments made through the years, wearing its age proudly.

Try to imagine what could have been done — with what, for a native, should he open his eyes, is the most beautiful patch in all the vast Godly quilt of our planet — for each homeland, each sacred and precious domain.

I haven’t actually been to Hell, but I’m told it is full of surveyors and planners.

Give Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s, according to Our Saviour. I wonder how well this statement is understood, even when taken as quick repartee to an entrapment question. In that light it was an invitation to His persecutors, to think again — about God, about moral obligation, about human freedom, and many related things. Today, we cite the phrase to enforce, from the Christian side, the separation of Church and State. I doubt that could have been the original intention, for Jesus’ contemporaries never concerned themselves with the niceties of American constitutional practice. They had sixteen more centuries before they’d ever have to think about the Peace of Westphalia. Notwithstanding, the distinction between earthly and heavenly power, slurred in ancient paganry including the Roman, was, I think, already morning star on the horizon of Hellenistic thinking.

We can’t cease to be modern, or escape history, so long as we are breathing. Nor have we become again quite so barbaric that the past is lost to us. Even if unwilling, we are anachronists, and the ideas, both of Church and of State, do not go away. To our modern view, shot through with the vice of individualism, a man has connexions with God and with his neighbour that are different in kind. We hear an “either/or” when Christ had specified a “both/and.”

He was — and I am no theologian, don’t trust me — making a distinction between God and Mammon. (Now, what this term “mammon” means is a large topic; its reduction by childish translators to the word “money” is a sign of our times.) Both exist in the spiritual realm, both (by the Incarnation) in the material. The silver piece that Jesus was shown (foreshadowing the silver pieces to Judas), were of Mammon, on whom Christ made no claim. On justice and order He did, so that ultimately Christ claimed Caesar, but in no worldly sense. Caesar did Christ’s work, insofar as he maintained the lawful order of things; or he refused, and served only himself. That coin was his token, either way, and not for Christ to micromanage. It was not a sacred article.

Trade, though it should be honest, is in its nature profane. This does not mean that it is evil. Eating and drinking are not wicked things, in themselves. We are not Manichees. Insofar as a human is an animal, alive within the natural world, he is not a moral subject. Only insofar as he belongs to a supernatural order, does he participate in the absolutes we find there. We are not Animists, we are not Pantheists; the natural order we neither worship nor condemn. We give up the coin in taxes, or we give up our body to the lion in the Forum; at the material level, it is all one.

Although this world is a mixture of the sacred and profane, we need not confuse them. We ought not confuse them, and never in God’s name. The sphere of politics, on which I touched yesterday, is the sphere of Caesar’s coin. It is decidedly NOT the sphere of our neighbour, who is never abstract. The most seemingly charitable welfare or eleemosynary schemes are in the realm of Caesar.

Christians are called upon to be alert. With God or neighbour our relation is with a Person; the Church, for all her outward organization, is a vessel in which we find a Person, too. The vessel of the State contains, actually, a bottomless nothing.

Our contemporaries are bewildered by these. They think that Christ has called us to advance His Kingdom by political means; or that good resides in the empty vessel. This is spilt religion; the wine poured, as it were, into the wrong jar, and lost, immortally. That which is owed to Christ — a life — is instead paid into the emptiness.

I accused the Democrats of colluding to get Donald Trump elected to the presidency of the United States. How could anyone not see it? Everything they did during the last election campaign looks in retrospect, but also looked in prospect, as if it were designed to give people a reason to vote for Mr Trump. The conspiracy was larger, however. The whole Washington Swamp, as it is affectionately called, went to the wall to make Trump electable. The media were enthusiastically playing their part; still are.

It was a put-up job.

And now I accuse Theresa May and the Conservative “remainers” across the water — together with the civil service, the London Swamp, the rightwing media, &c — of colluding to get Jeremy Corbyn into power, for whom no one in his right mind could vote. Mrs May seems to work on this night and day.

A significant portion of any electorate is, of course, not in their right minds, and as I’ve noticed before, they are now the majority; but even as a minority they often constituted the “swing vote.” This helps explain the technique of collusion. All those who are batty, start making demands; the rest of the population forms a closed camp to stop them. Their candidate, too, has the reek of madness; but they hold their noses.

Then the pendulum swings. But here I’m getting ahead of the plot.

To understand what I’m saying, gentle reader must realize that politics have nothing to do with government. A sane country (Switzerland?) would more or less govern itself. Changes would occur, but only from necessity. If they did anything at all, the politicians would be responding to the public will, though resisting it until a consensus were formed, to do the unavoidable. Peaceful government flourishes on consensus; on mom, and apple pie; on knitting, not on pulling at loose ends.

Government in nature works from the bottom, up. Government against nature works from the top, down. Modern politics is contra naturam — no matter which party wins.

Thanks largely to the abandonment of traditional religion, politics have assumed the power of symbol, of religious obligation and belief. Every government decision becomes a symbolic act, to please one faction and affront another. The actual effect of the policy is ignored. The electorate participate in what is essentially a religious war. Finally it escalates to the apocalyptic battle, between two parties that despise each other, psychopathically.

Only at this point can “real change” be accomplished: the country is destroyed.

Another way to put this, is that politics have been spiritualized. Differences between parties have been removed to some cosmic plane, where angels and devils contend. People seek personal transcendence through political action. (Mr O’Rourke in Texas is an especially sad case.) It is a Manichee struggle, in which worldly realities are pushed out of sight. The protagonist, in his heroic gestures, freed from the possibility of self-deprecation, will also lose sight of the fact he is a jackass.

Among my arguments for not voting, perhaps not even voting against the worst freaks, is that one endangers one’s soul. One becomes emotionally “committed” — i.e. fit to be tied. I speak with knowledge of the partisan entanglements in my own soul, but also of political policies that, though fought to the death over, don’t amount to much.

Example: the overwhelming support for stopping illegal immigration at all American borders (that with Mexico is just the most publicized). “The peeple” elect someone who, rather crassly, promises to do something about it — and three years later the problem is much worse.

Yet it was an administrative, not a political issue. No one in his right mind could oppose basic border controls, in the world as we have it. Suddenly it became “a symbol,” and now only crazy things can be done.

What is genuinely necessary, or would at least be helpful? These are things that once could be discussed. Now they are just “triggers.”

The world could live without Hegel’s philosophy of right, or his principles of logic, but I shed a metaphorical tear when I realized that his philosophy of history was no longer on my shelves, for it is full of juicy anecdotes. Give Hegel up? Personally, I’d find that one of the easier things to omit for Lent; though I know a man for whom it might be difficult. A Hegel quote in every email; one looks for it as for the Captain Midnight secret decoder ring in the box of Sugar Pops.

Was Hegel a serial groper? I don’t know; I’m just asking.

There is no truth to the often-circulated rumour that Germans are boring. Indeed, as I once argued to a beautiful German woman (who worked for the FAZ in Frankfurt, which aspired to be the most boring newspaper in the world, except for the NZZ in Zurich), the more interesting they become, the more dangerous. She retaliated by earnestly asking me to explain the English concept of “irony” — knowing full well that it could not be done. (She was a dangerous woman.)

In the subsequent conversation I held up the book, Horace, by the late great German philologist, Eduard Fraenkel. It is a breathtaking work of classical scholarship, which I still have on my shelves, though let me be the first to admit that I have never read the thing right through. Page after page one is arrested by the breadth of his knowledge and the subtlety of his reasoning; this makes it slow-going. Too, even though he was exiled to Oxford (same old story: Jewish in 1933), there are no jokes.

We don’t know if Horace ever groped anyone, but we can know that the poet was as full of sly ironies as any English schoolboy and, I would imagine, given to mischief. Fraenkel certainly knew this, but his reader might never guess. At the moment when Horace’s humour becomes slam-bang obvious, while his good taste seems to be taking a rest, Fraenkel falls mysteriously silent. He was not merely a brilliant German scholar, but an heroic one.

I mention him today to be topical.

They were letting women into the English universities in the last century and, according to quite a few who studied under him, Fraenkel was a serial groper. Verily, there were almost public warnings about him, in which it was conceded that he was a remarkable teacher, but you’d better come to a tutorial armed; because he had arms, and they strayed everywhere. He was the Joe Biden of classics professors.

Between Fraenkel and Biden, I think there may have been others. Someone with a lot of prurience, and patience, should compile a list of famous historical gropers. It won’t be me. I am much too prim.

In the olden times, to which I’ve been referring, groping — even by learned classicists — was a risk the learned woman ran. Some acquired husbands in this way; there is a vogue for #MeToo confessionals among prominent elderly female Latinists just now. I daresay the phenomenon was known in other branches of society. There were no laws against it. There was no law against a woman giving her assailant a crisp slap across the face, either; though I suppose she’d have to wonder what the effect might be on her grades.

But defending one’s virtue is a skill that must be acquired, like any other skill in the jungle of human life. Parents of female children used to teach it, and mother crow could give examples of how it was done to her chicks.

(I think of an unnecessarily attractive waitress in a beer hall I used to frequent. She had mastered the art of dancing with a tray of fully-charged beer steins, never slopping a drop. When male customers reached for her, she’d dance very slightly away, drawing them out until their chairs toppled and they’d be washed by their own beverages. She wouldn’t even look back. One night I counted four such “accidents.”)

Poor Joe Biden. How sad that he may never become President. My heart bleeds. But if he were a real man, he wouldn’t stop. He’d go right out and grope AOC. Turns out, he’s just a coward.