Essays in Idleness

The idea would be, just as the world is shaking off its holiday binges, and heading out for the Boxing Day sales, we of the Midnight Mass and perhaps the three Christ-Masses march back to the church, with our wee mites (if any) in our entourage. And this, for the celebration of the first Christian martyr: the hallowed Feast of Stephen. And, take half the money we would have blown on things we didn’t need and only slightly wanted, adding it instead to the Christmas collections for the poor; or for the priests so they may commission new and more glorious vestments, and continue to upgrade our worship in God-facing Latin from the ancient rite; and perhaps, fix the bleeding roof.

Verily, for today, the day after Christmas, I am trying to imagine what it would be like to be a good Catholic. I mean, of course, a serious one; not a monk or nun, but living in the world. And of course, my list is just starting. (There are commandments in addition to the giving of alms, and church attendance.)

Now, I’m not a very good example of a Catholic, myself. It is among my failings that I get churched-out, from a deep past of inobservance, whose habits will not die quietly. Often I must kick myself out of Sunday-morning torpor; and my confessor knows what a strain it is, to remind his dragging penitent that there is — to give but one example — a Mass every day. And that it is the very place to go, for strength to lift such burdens as have fallen to one’s lot.

Though I fail in the positives, I can supply some of the negatives readily. For I am allergic to the shopping malls, and feel no temptation towards the Amazon addiction which has replaced it in many of the worldlings, according to their media. Rather my partiality is to the knowing work of human hands: the artist’s hands, the surgeon’s hands, the priest’s hands. I love the low Latin Mass in its whispers; the raising of the chalice; the moment when everything else is stripped away. I hate crowds, alas, even those of my fellow Christians. I crave peace and quiet; the music of good order.

There are sins I have entirely given up. Not, however, because I am so holy, but because I got sick of committing them; and tired of the associated self-loathing.

But that is just me, and each other person is his own peculiar bundle of dim light, and of recalcitrant sinning. Each has failures of his own to work out, and while every one of us has earned a hanging, who has had some opportunity in life, there is still time. The “worst Catholic in the world” can still try for a little improvement before his number is called in.

Saint Stephen’s feast is a kind of test; as it always was — beginning for Saint Stephen. It is true: God “led him into temptation” — the very real temptation to disavow Our Lord, in the hope of cheating death. But death, in the end, will not anyway be cheated, and we each owe a life. And Saint Paul checked cloaks for the men who would stone this first of innumerable obstinates, who through the centuries have stood in his position; have stood their ground against the pleasures of this world. A “test,” yes, but the word “temptation” follows on its heels. The standard to which we are held is high, but Grace and Mercy shall be there to catch us.

Every day, remember you must die; that there is nothing in this world that you can take with you. Those are the terms, and it really does not matter if you don’t like them; if you think they are unfair. It was unfair that you were ever born. But you got used to it somehow, no? … God is Love, and Love is no mere fairness.

The Cross had nothing to do with “fair.” As neither did the birth in Bethlehem; there was no possible way we “deserved” it.

That is what I keep telling myself, and if I seem a tad forward in telling others, too, you will have to forgive me. For among my obnoxious habits is, thinking aloud.

And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

My favourite “modern” Christmas song is, “Fairytale of New York,” by the Pogues. (Yes.) I have it not on disc, but listen every Christmas Eve on YouTube. If I had to explain why I so love it, the spell would be broken. Suffice to say, it is perfect in its kind. There are people, even in New York, and these days even in Ireland, who can make no sense of it. This is their constitutional right. But there ought to be a law to prevent it from being “covered” or re-recorded.

Well, that is my salute to pop music for the year. There is not much else I find bearable; though compared to the happyface commercial jingles, I’d prefer ring-in-the-nose punk. There are rings in Hell, as we are reliably informed by an Italian poet; there are rings beneath rings, lower. The song I mentioned could perhaps be described as punkish, though disturbed by joyous “celtic” lilt. It has a Catholic sensibility. As much could be said for François Villon. And Dante is that sensibility, in shock vertical.

As the infamous Oscar Wilde famously said (or shall we make that vice versa?) Catholicism is a religion for saints and sinners; for respectable people, Anglican will do.

This spoken from a Paris dive, while the balladeer of Reading gaol was perishing from meningitis, after a life that could not be said to have ended well, by any bourgeois standard. Yet from the Catholic view, a tremendous deathbed recovery.

It is not generally acknowledged, at the present day, that man is in a fallen condition, and that men (including women) can behave very badly. There are moments, however, when we are reminded, “Yes we can!” But also moments when the worst sinners (and Wilde had a fairly good run) turn to Christ. And this because, there is no other place to turn, when you have seen through the Devil. Money is little use to the dying. Prospects for concupiscence are grim, … though I’ve seen at least one old perishing customer, tied down like Gulliver with hospital tubes, still valiantly trying to seduce a nurse. And (I don’t expect you to believe this, gentle reader), nearly succeeding.

But, heroism alone cannot get you to Heaven.

I have a friend who calls himself, “the world’s worst Catholic.” That, too, is a nice try. He’s actually quite observant, by contemporary tests; a faithful and diligent husband and father; who to my knowledge has yet to do anything that could earn him a prison term. But he has some insights, and probably some secrets he would only tell a priest. Whereas, I’ve known some real baddies in my time, several of them Catholic. I’ll leave God to decide which one was worst. (Imagine my surprise when I discover that I was.)

The prim live in a world of illusion. Parkdale, for all its little faults, isn’t prim. It is, I suspect — compared to the more prosperous neighbourhoods — fuller of people freed from illusions about themselves. And too, of people who have done prison time. But that, in itself, will not get them to Heaven.

On the altar, tonight, we will see the Christ child. He comes at midnight, the perfect Sacrifice; the most astonishing Gift to fallen human nature. He comes as the most paradoxical Thing.

He hath come, and will come, to shew strength with his arm; to scatter the proud. “He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.” The most unlikely people see it.

Merry Christmas to all of those, and to all the others.

Walking into a bookstore on Yonge Street, I had one of my flashback experiences. I reported it immediately to my friend Paul, whose store it is (or soon, once was):

“Here I am in Toronto, back in the days when Eliot’s Bookstore was still open. As the hippies used to say, ‘It is all so real’.”

Paul is among the few who could understand what I was saying. After forty years in the second-hand book trade, he understands exactly. (I witnessed about thirty of them.)

His property taxes had been doubled, and would soon be quintupled, putting him out of business. Three floors of books were being sold off, basically for free, to diminish his immense disposal problem. Most other bookstores closed when their rents were driven up, as part of the universal “gentrification” process. Paul had survived because, by reckless sacrifice, he had come to own his uptown building — a narrow Edwardian shopfront which had once had seedy flats above it.

Were he younger, “I would have found a way to fight the bastards.” Now he could only put up signs, calling the mayor names.

He had turned down multi-million dollar offers for this building, with its cracked plaster walls and uneven floors and irreproducible charm. He’d told the real estate agents to go to hell — he intended to remain a bookseller till death.

“Don’t bother doubling your offer, I’ll only tell you to go to hell again.”

When one of them looked politely puzzled, he repeated it in Greek.

But now, with the help of the municipal politicians — who blather on about the importance of family business — they’ve got him. Sell and be rich; don’t, and you go bankrupt. Soon the whole block will be more glass and steel, because you can’t pay the property tax in that neighbourhood unless you go up thirty storeys.

I have flashforward experiences, too. The most memorable was the last time I visited London, England, and was touring one of my old neighbourhoods, much changed by glass and steel from the sooted brick I fondly remembered. My thought was, “Here I am in London, in the distant future. Here I am among all these people, who weren’t even born when I lived here. Here I am, the ghost of Christmas past.”

The old working-class types used to wear ties, out of respect for themselves and their neighbours; the shopkeepers wore aprons and never forgot your name. The millennials now dress “casual,” at perhaps twice the cost. Only the losers have to work in retail. Winners work in “networks.”

I read on the Internet where a Salvation Army bell-ringer was beaten up for wishing someone a “Merry Christmas.” The Sally Anne are being driven out of the shopping precincts, not only because they are explicitly Christian. They are also déclassé.

The stores all play the Christmas music, because it is good for business. It has been tested: it makes people buy. (I wonder if it worked on Skinner’s rats?) But the tape spools must be carefully edited to eliminate all traditional carols, which have Christian references. Instrumental versions may, however, still be heard in some of the more cultured, upmarket places.

Money is like Dettol. It has a sterilizing effect. It gives you the choice between cash and character. And if you choose wrong, it phases you out. It cleans up your neighbourhood: polishes away all those biologically-scented human peculiarities; functions like a high-tech, perfumed latrine. “Identity politics” cleans out any remaining personal identities. We have incinerators for the corpses.

Poverty was our past; money is our future. In the future everything will be clean.

But I have faith in the human ability to make things dirty again. I feel confident that some inconveniences will survive.

Mother Cabrini was a little ball of holy fire. Standing five foot, from her heels to the highest ridge on her cape, and softly spoken, she was not formidable until you crossed her. God had given her a mission, and by God it would be done. It was not the mission she had selected for herself: to be some sort of teacher in China. Rather, with a most unexpected but very useful letter from the Pope, she had been sent to America.

Help was needed for the Italian immigrants in the ghettos of Boston and New York — and of Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St Louis, San Francisco, and so forth. Help: not only spiritual but material. They had nor priests nor even bread, sometimes; just a surplus of bedbugs and cockroaches in their crowded tenements. The “American dream” hadn’t hit them yet. Most would probably have been better off, had they never left home.

She arrived herself with six sisters in tow, and the usual nothing; and was, by the first bishop she met, told to get back on the ship that brought her. She paid no attention to him, of course. (“I have a letter from the Pope.”) Even within the sprawling, mostly poor American Catholic community, circa 1889, Italians were considered a nuisance; a pain in the gluteus maximus. Even the Irish looked down on them. They tended to be dirty and sickly and hapless. Mother Cabrini looked the part: herself weak and usually ill, all her life. But she paid no attention to that, either.

Her mission, to start, was to those beloved Italians. Finding them was no trouble at all: “just follow the smell.” The mere sight of the little woman seemed to change everything. She, and then her growing cohort, would walk past Italian bakers and grocers and be loaded down with gifts of food; with medicines donated by Italian pharmacists; with whatever they needed: carpe diem! Within a couple of decades they had founded hospitals, schools, orphanages — each by the dozen.

We forget that Christian missions were the “welfare state,” until they began to be appropriated by the Servile State, only a few decades ago; and that although Catholics remained a fairly small minority, and relatively skint of resources, they provided services out of proportion to their size in every American city, and to all comers, whether Catholic or not. Look at any large-scale map of an inner city from a century ago, and see the truth of this inscribed in the titles of the many, often large, and unmistakably religious eleemosynary institutions. Even today, the prefix “Saint” continues to append to so many of the buildings they erected on their widow mites — with donated labour to build, and volunteer staff to operate, and daily offerings of cooked food and hand-sewn clothes and nickels and dimes from anonymous parishioners, in the face of real prejudice. (We forget that e.g. the Ku Klux Klan was founded to persecute Catholics and Jews; Blacks were an afterthought.)

And the Protestants copied them, when they saw how it was done. … And yes, yes, there were scrooges who gave nothing, and there always will be: making the argument for bureaucracy and taxation and the Servile State. Who give nothing and whose slogan is, “Make the rich pay!”

Everyone remembers Mother Cabrini today, not only Italo-Americans. Or rather, everyone should. For the works of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus were soon extended much beyond the Italian community. They spread like the works of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, all around the world.

There is no such thing as an economist who can explain this.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first USA citizen to be canonized (she got her citizenship papers in due course), was an easy call. The number of miracles witnessed in her person, and accomplished in her name, overwhelmed the “devil’s advocates.” But these, merely additional to the grand miracle of the life of this gentle, tiny, very obstinate lady, who took no for an answer only to sin. (It is unfortunate that her name is currently being used in the dishonest political propaganda for illegal immigration: for that had never been her mission.)

I mention Mother Cabrini today only because it is her one hundredth anniversary. She was struck down by dysentery while wrapping Christmas presents for the poor; died the 22nd of December, 1917. But she is still at work, praying for us, and we ought to thank her occasionally.

For Christmas this year, at the United Nations, the USA will be “taking names.” The vote comes tomorrow, on a resolution to condemn the United States in the General Assembly for moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital, which is Jerusalem. With her characteristic charm and candour, Nikki Haley mentioned this yesterday. She’ll be taking the names of those who are naughty or nice, to my favourite superpower.

For years, decades, centuries it seems, the United States has been serving not only as sugar daddy to NATO and the like, but as meals-on-wheels to most of the world’s nasty little third-world despotisms — governed, almost invariably, by Leftists of some sort. And, getting abuse in return, instead of gratitude, for all this “foreign aid.” We might want to refer the matter to the ACLU, which objects to Christian displays in public. By comparison to any other world power, the USA has been downright Franciscan. Too, the Americans not only host but generously fund UN operations, at cost not only to their national Treasury, but to the municipal services of the City of New York. And again, they get all this lip in return. Why, Santa, why?

The fear, of course, is that if the Americans don’t pay, the Russians and Chinese will step into the breach. But this is just what we should want. An important part of the late Mr Reagan’s strategy, in winning the Cold War, was to assist the USSR in piling up expenses. The arms race also helped. As the brilliant George P. Schultz explained, much that Washington could afford, overstretched Moscow. Thus the military spending spree, until they said, “Uncle.”

As for Nikki Haley, well, I have been half in love with her since the day, four Christmases ago, when a friend showed me a Facebook post by the Governor of South Carolina, as she then was. “I must have been good, Santa gave me a Beretta PX4 Storm,” she boasted, with a picture of this elegant little firearm, which fits so nicely in a lady’s purse. The sort of thing a woman needs, I now reflect, while escorting Harvey Weinstein to the police station, in his pajamas. (After calling the tabloids to come and take pictures.) A very pretty pistol indeed: the Italians sure know how to design them. And engineer them, too: packs an even bigger punch than Saint Nicholas of Myra.

I love it when the Americans go John Wayne. It bodes well for the peace of the world. Or perhaps, Clint Eastwood in his Spaghetti Westerns (I don’t know much about movies). For now that Hollywood has gone over entirely to the dark side, we need better theatre from Uncle Sam. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And some of the best men are women.

The idea that ideas have consequences has had many unfortunate consequences. They were never the intended ones. Disciples are a pain. They understand little of what their master is saying, and go off on tangents. This is why schemes for brotherly love always end in fratricidal warfare. The means to the end become the contention; the end quickly fades from view. Reductionist “prophets,” such as Marx to the Marxists, contribute only by getting the main point wrong. Anything they happen to get right will be twisted.

Schemes to eliminate oppression by “class,” “race,” “sex,” or whatever, lie behind most of our violent convulsions — which continue until there is no blood left to be shed between contending parties. Then we get a tentative truce.

A friend forwards an item from UK. It seems the authorities at University College London, in the course of promising that the campus would stay open despite snow, mentioned some prospect of a “white Christmas.” As Rod Liddle reports:

“Oh, the furore. Oh, the anguish and outrage.”

He quotes one of the deranged undergraduates: “You know who else dreamt of a white campus? Adolf Hitler, that’s who! Disgusting!” Another demanded an immediate retraction and apology, accusing the college of purposefully overlooking the whole history of suffering and oppression. Et cetera.

“And what did UCL do? Oh, come on. You know what it did. The cringing apology. …”

I blame George Steiner. He was the white man who, half a century ago, wrote Language and Silence. It became the standard account of how the German language and culture had led to Auschwitz; about how men who could enjoy Shakespeare and Goethe, Bach and Mozart in their leisure hours, could murder millions without compunction in the course of their dayjobs. Moreover, language was inadequate to describe the horror of it all. In order not to acquiesce, we must all (except Steiner) remain perpetually silent.

My mildly satirical précis is meant to emphasize that the book was nonsense. The idea that the German language carried some special virus was later expanded by Edward Said to indict all Europeans, then the chargesheet was spread to all whites. The cultural “evolved” into the genetic — an exact parody of Nazism — and now we are all instructed to shut up and be punished in the “narrative” of payback. The rest of the Indo-Europeans are being diligently added to the target list, by the academic crackpots who have noticed that the Sanskrit classics are also “supremacist”; soon someone may notice the Chinese. And it is true: every literature of which we have record contains the bitter seed of fallen man. Only those who can claim a cultural history that is completely blank, have some chance at exemption.

Rather, why blame Steiner? I only dismiss him as a posturing self-promoter and unscholarly buffoon. The trahison des clercs is an old story; there have been men like him on campus for centuries. The reduction of the welter of events to a single dominant intellectual absurdity was, after all, the theme of the Reformation. (That is my current single dominant idea.) Beyond, it is the blame game of the ages.

It is to be regretted that when Language and Silence came out, the majority of critics were obsequious. Some grumbled that in the area of their own expertise, the book was silly, but assumed it was solid in other respects. So far as I know, only Anthony Burgess had the guts to suggest (respectfully, of course) that the whole thesis, from beginning to end, was unrelieved bullshit.

Even then, fifty years ago, we lacked a janitorial infrastructure of the educated and courageous; and the disciples followed as a great wall of muck.

Towards the end of the Elizabeth Anscombe edition of remarks Ludwig Wittgenstein collected in a shoe-box (entitled, Zettel), there are some glorious oddments. My eye just cast upon one of my old favourites:

“Numbers are not fundamental to mathematics.”

It is a long time since I first obtained, then wrestled with this book. Yet I distinctly recall my laughter when I came to this phrase. It was not mocking laughter, of the sort cultivated in our modern academic asylums; the strange mad sarcastic laughter of dissonance. It was what I would call “the laughter of hope.” Suddenly an obstacle to understanding is removed, and one laughs in surprise at what one finds under or behind it. It is the eureka laughter.

In six words this Wittgenstein has eviscerated not only Russell, but possibly Frege. Or rather, he has exposed the mental blockage, by which “logical” and “scientific” man constructs a world, and peoples it with objects, described by their “properties” — confusing what lies glibly on the surface with what has lain profoundly, “underneath.” We think, for instance, that math is all about numbers. But no, the reverse of this is true. We only use numbers as a means to understand math. They are like tags or labels in a museum collection, things tied or pasted to the sui generis exhibits themselves.

We glimpse conceptual unities, not with numbers but through them. Yet we only begin to describe what we have seen, and can never make an end of it. There can be no analogy to an absolute; no metaphors to do it any part of justice. And this we must remember in giving it a name.

Similarly, we imagine the “infinite” from a projection of the “finite.” In fact, we can’t see it, because we have confused our multiplying counters with real things. So we become accustomed to talking nonsense. “Infinity” is a word we made up, as is “zero,” as are “one,” “two,” and “three.”

“Two and two makes four” is confidently asserted, but cannot be proved. It can only be demonstrated. “Four less two leaves two” is hardly proof. It is instead a circularity.

This is to my mind why such a concept as the Holy Trinity is lost upon the moderns. Presented as God, Christ, Spirit, it can make some sense to any peasant; but the “threeness” of it only leads us astray. It is a quality in the Divine that has nothing to do with number; it is indeed an impenetrable Mystery. Or shall I say a mystical fountain, gushing forth: “I am that I am.”

The ancient Hebrews were rightly reticent of naming what could not be named. Only, I think, in the Messiah did God, for our salvation, “name Himself.”

He would come, He has come, He will come: now there’s a trinity. But there is no three in it. Past, present, future are not three separable things. We cannot describe Time from within Time, nor understand it any better as an infinite recession in two directions from our own “fixed” point. In the moment we begin to apprehend it, it passes away.

Towards Christmas, if perhaps Advent is observed, the Gift comes irresistibly into view. It is nothing like a box with ribbons; nothing like a package with a present inside. Nothing in the womb of Our Lady is reducible to “an item” like that. It is Gift in the absolute, as our own lives are absolute Gift: a totality that cannot be reduced to pieces. It is a mysterious Event, that transcends events. We can only pretend to accept it or reject it, for it simply and immortally IS.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. … I am already in receipt of correspondence expressing alarm that I may be endorsing the view of Antonio Spadaro (the progressive Italian Jesuit), who says that in his (appalling) theology, two plus two may sometimes equal five. This is not anything like what I meant above. Some things are so absolutely [bad-word] obvious that the joke is, they cannot be proved. They can be demonstrated, however, and work every time, and must therefore be accepted by those who have not gone mad. But there is no deep philosophy here. It’s only, 2+2=4.

We might take this a little farther and assert that, by extension, all “mathematical proofs” are essentially circular, but this would require more energy than is available to me today. This does not mean the “proofs” (actually demonstrations) are wrong. Quite the opposite: a proposition is shown to be inevitable, by extension from the very first and simplest numerical postulates; i.e. it is shown to be “as true as, 2+2=4.” Thus, it must be accepted, on its own terms, by everyone who is not insane.

Of course, there is mad and mad. Some people go off their nut from biochemical causes. These can sometimes be treated with drugs. But some others go off it by choice, and meds cannot help them.

Hell, from what I hear, must be a paradise for interior designers, as there are so many special places in it. There is a special place for people who prey on children, according to the theologian, Ivanka Trump; and another special place for Republicans who didn’t support Roy Moore, according to Steve Bannon. I am more with Ivanka on this one; though I did want Moore to win, for reasons quite unrelated to his sex life in the 1970s, whatever that was. (I am partial to his sort of lunatic.)

On the other hand, I should like to point to the special place in Hell reserved for women who falsely accuse men of “rape,” or “sexual assault,” or “sexual harassment” (terms now used almost interchangeably) — even if the man were guilty of some drunk and blundering lubricious act. (That’s when you slap his face, to sober him.) And then another special place, for men and women alike, who fail to speak up when they know that the facts of some case are being misrepresented. And these in addition to the special places for actual rapists, and psychopathic goons — accessible by noose under our auld arrangements.

(This is one of my arguments for capital punishment, incidentally. It helps us distinguish between the serious and the frivolous; wakes the jurors up.)

Oh, there are lots of places in Hell, and in the course of a life now extended into a seventh decade, I have watched so many make their selections. I have also had occasion to be drunk myself, and though I don’t recall sexually assaulting anyone, I have been decked by a jealous boyfriend. Surely I did something to deserve that.

I’m prepared to believe almost anything said about the denizens of Hollywood, on the evidence of their movies. I haven’t watched one in a long time, but I’ve seen a few trailers. (They show them on the Internet, whether or not you ask.) These are stewing in sex and violence (have you noticed, gentle reader?) and when the makers affect to be prim, I cannot help chortling.

I have further noticed that a lot of movie stars are content to be packaged as tarts. I find it especially amusing when a woman who puts her “sexiness” on aggressive display — in the absence of any other memorable quality — whines for being taken as a “sex object.” (It is an old adage that those who do not want lodgers should not advertise for them.) … Or, for that matter, when an utter sleaze of a don-juan poses as upholder of women’s rights. (Surely hypocrisy could be better concealed.)

The same industry that is currently awarding itself for a movie that celebrates man-boy sodomy, pretends to be horrified by child molestation. Similarly, participants in films wherein bystanders are cut down by the dozen, pretend to be scandalized by gun violence. I think there must be a special place in Hell just for movie producers.

Some of these special places must be here on Earth, for police departments in all the big towns are getting cloyed with sex investigations of the rich and famous. (Useful tip: avoid “success” and you will never be sued.) As the feminist rage swells, we will need prison camps, whole Gulags and Guantanamos, to house all the accused. And nine in ten of these will be the formerly self-adoring progressive types.

That’s the good news. The sexual revolution has now progressed to the stage when it eats its own. Thousands of scorpions in that “special place” bottle, but every day a few less.

Lately I find that the choice before those who populate the former Christendom is reduced to two paths: 1. To go Christian. 2. To go mad.

I realize there are non-Christian readers who will disagree with this assessment. But notice how ecumenical I was. I didn’t say “Catholic,” I said “Christian.” As someone who took fifty years to find the One Holy (from a standing start), I am sympathetic to those who may be dawdling. Let me also concede that our Roman Church is in such an extravagant outward mess, that conversion is presently discouraged. (But that’s all the more reason to come aboard. We need your help.)

Recently in Idleposts I have touched, from several successive angles, on what might be called “problems of translation,” and “good sense.” The pope in Rome pushed the discussion along with his extempore proposal to destabilize recitation of the Lord’s Prayer — some last freeboard against the mounting waves. He is an accomplished boat-rocker, determined to rock the Barque of Saint Peter as she struggles to level in the modernist storm.

This is … “not done,” as the cultivated used to say, over tea. … Still, it must be grasped that the elevation of Bergoglio to the captaincy was a symptom, not the cause of our terrible disorder. It showed a loss of judgement.

For the rôle of the Catholic Church, within a world that is not entirely Catholic, must be kept in view. In my humble but unalterable opinion, held even before I was received, the steadiness of her doctrinal position is of some moment. No other institution — whether gentle reader considers it to be divine or not — can sport her two-thousand-year record of maintaining, or repeatedly recovering, a coherent body of thought and teaching. This is sanity, par excellence. She has thus a responsibility towards all the non-Roman confessions, including to my mind the Eastern ones, to act as lodestar. Even those who disagree with her positions, benefit from keeping them in sight.

She has another function, that we are rediscovering, and must never again discount. In a world going or gone mad (as the world is inclined to go on its own cognizance), she must be the last monastic refuge of the sane.

Oddly enough, to the moralists, I care more about this than I do about whether remarried divorcees are illicitly taking Communion, or the many other instances of what tea-drinkers call “bad form.” The crucial thing, in  a time of convulsion and catastrophe, is to maintain Christ’s self-consistent course. If the law is breached, the breach can be repaired; rescind the law and everything is lost. And I mean everything, for in addition to the Barque, all lesser ships are lured towards the shoals.

It was possible in the past to be, as I think my own parents were, not Christian and yet not mad. I think that can be done for one generation, at most two. That was certainly the case with the Victorian sceptics, who lost their faith but remained stiffly moral, dispensing with anything beyond a vague theism but hardly questioning the biblical commandments. Their children, however, lost the rest of the connexion. They took everything into their own hands — and lived shameful self-destructive lives. They kept some of their parents’ (irritating) earnestness, but their judgement went haywire.

The sublime Fr George Rutler, whose homiletic works I try never to miss, made this point last Sunday. Insanity, he explained, is not a loss of brains. It is a loss of judgement. This is a point often made by apologists for Christianity. The madman may reason perfectly well. He may indeed be a teapot short and stout, on his own phantastical premisses; or a “trans-sexual,” or whatever pleases. It makes sense if you can be anything you decide. As Chesterton put it: “The madman is not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything except his reason.”

For better or worse (i.e. for better), the Christians in their rise and creation of “Western Civ” carried off everything of value from the cabinet of ancient, “secular,” Greek and Roman Civ, carefully assimilating it into what they now knew by divine revelation. They achieved, in this way, a kind of monopoly on sanity. After all these years we can’t detach again. We would have to start over from scratch, but even scratch has fallen into chaos. The only game in town for the sane is the old Christian one. But look around: not everyone is playing.

As my Chief Argentine Correspondent (this guy) likes to say, “I can give you the simple answer; but for the correct answer you will have to consult other sources.” A certain modesty in declaring the limits of one’s knowledge is just what we don’t find, almost anywhere we look on the Internet. (Not even here.) And the truth is not even in the hands of the admitted experts, although their carefully qualified opinions are likely to be more interesting than those of the [insert bawdy epithet here]. For these experts are all men, including those who are women; and there are strict limits on what such creatures can know. Put not your trust in them.

Notwithstanding, I have a simple “theory” of exegesis, which begins with Holy Scripture but may also be applied in every other realm of human perception. It is called “common sense” in English, and corresponds to sensus communis in Latin, κοινη αισθησις in Greek, and phrases in many other languages. The bon sens of French sounds prettier to my ear, for it is among my insights that what is “good” is not necessarily held in common. Too, I like the parallel we might draw between “good sense” and “good taste,” along with all-round goodness, preferable to badness in almost every case.

Aristotle had a word or two on this, and he says “common” (the koinos thing) in an uncommon way. His whole account in the De Anima is superbly teleological. Things work in a certain way, because otherwise they would not work. He does not mean by “common” that we take a vote. He means that something makes good sense when there is a coalescence of impressions in the soul. In my understanding, this is something like facial recognition. Everything fits together in such a way that we confidently hail the familiar, even when it is obscured by such accidents as wounds or advancing age. There is this “all of a piece” quality which is actually transcendent of sense impressions, much though it may begin with them. We have a “good idea.” Or we have a bad idea and get everything wrong.

We get the “gist,” and that gist is not a “whatever.” It is something specific, that does not continually “morph” into something else. Changes can be explained, but as the old man discovers, he is not a different person than he was at three. Nor is anyone not that.

Good sense begins with the recognition of realities that are outside us. The baby emerging from his mother’s womb may at first be in some confusion (I know I was). But in very little time he discovers that his mother has a face; that for all the profundity of his relation with her, she is someone else. It is the beginning of “good sense,” and with the passage of time other discoveries may be added to it, and answers found to such deep questions as, “Who is that other person?”

Good sense (or “horse sense,” perhaps, in honour of the wise Houyhnhnms) proceeds from known to known, and tends to avoid the leaps of “theory.” Which is to say, it does not follow rules. Instead the rules follow the knowledge, and no rule is ever quite secure.

I mention all this because I have the sense impression that modern man, especially in Greater Parkdale, lacks good sense. His development is less and less experiential. “Science” — or scientism, as preached in our schools — has taught him to be cowed by authority, and he is chiefly moved by the authority of opinions that are not his own. He believes the strangest things. To him, the world is full of djinns: spirits who take care of things, and make the most absurd demands, such as that he put his trash into different coloured boxes. He has the “cargo cult” mentality towards the State, and does not realize it is made of other persons. He is extremely easy to manipulate and fool.

Two things I miss from my Anglican days: the King James Version, and the Book of Common Prayer. My friends who remained Anglican also miss them, for both have been removed from church services by the Anglican bureaucracy. As the priest who received me into the Roman Church said, Anglicans make ideal converts. We already know at first hand what happens when liturgical, scriptural, and other received norms are “progressively” abandoned: the church itself disintegrates. Thus no one need hold our hands when we discover e.g. Roman bishops much like the cowardly, patronizing Anglican ones we left behind. We are ready to face them.

The deliquescence is everywhere; why would it not be here, in the Catholic Church, too? All the once-familiar markers of Christian teaching and prayer are in the process of demolition, by revolutionary forces within each denomination; and those who long for consistent order are denounced for “nostalgia.”

As we are reminded in daily mutterings from Rome, the Swinging Sixties aren’t over. The swinging balls are still crashing through the ancient glass, and the sacrifices are still being made: of manners, dress, comportment, modesty, custom, courtesy, propriety, decorum, form, taste, decency, reasoned argument, logical consistency, &c. Parousia may now be interpreted as, “let it all hang out.”

But returning to my topic, it was the beauty and poetry, the precision of phrase in the named works that appealed to me. Stable, as they had been for so many generations, and breathing elevation, it was possible to memorize extensive passages; to absorb something timeless, in its nature and in its aspirations. Almost every phrase in KJV and BCP could be read and prayed as catholic. One was drawn out of oneself; lifted. One learnt the language with the gestures, and in the dance of tradition, did not have to think where to step. For the dancer who must think is always stepping on one’s toes.

The (characteristically glib and fatuous) argument of the progressives was that the KJV translation had, in the course of three or four centuries, gone out of date. Many words had changed in meaning. (A good example is “temptation,” as in the Lord’s Prayer. It meant a testing then, as Jesus in the desert; it means a chocolate cake now.) And scholarship was marching. New manuscripts, fragments and palimpsests continued to emerge from obscure monastic archives and the sands of Egypt.

I once had on my shelves the massive Variorum Teacher’s Edition of the Holy Bible, edited by Cheyne, Clarke, Driver, Goodwin, Sanday — all once names to reckon with — anno Domini 1881. It contained the text of the King James, unrevised. But it also contained extensive notes, alternative readings, explanatory essays and other materials to help even the reader without Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or any dialect of Syriac, to see into the text. Books like Frederic Kenyon’s Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts (1895) keyed into this Variorum. That book I still have, and although it is now more than a century past its “sell-by,” it continues to offer a foundation on which an intelligent, independent reader may build an understanding of all the genuine advances in biblical scholarship, since — decidedly better than any later introduction I know of.

In my former life, when I entertained grand schemes, I dreamt of publishing a multi-volume revision of that Variorum, with the latest scholarship, but attached to the same old, resonant King James text. (This project could as well have been mounted on the explicitly Roman, and similarly magnificent, Douay-Rheims.)

There are now, in print, more than one hundred alternative English translations of the Bible, and the reader who buys, say, the top twenty, to compare them, is wasting time. He could actually save time by mastering the original languages. I rather think it was the Devil’s idea, to undermine the simple Christian’s confidence in Scripture by means of multiple translations, and innumerable petty and irrelevant distractions.

The New English Bible’s first volume, a translation into “modern idiom” of the New Testament, was published in 1961. It is dated now in a way the KJV will never be, and has in fact been succeeded by the many other “improved” — and desperately flawed — ever more “modern” editions, including those which intentionally misrepresent the original texts to keep up with the latest “gender” abominations. Yet even when it first appeared, T. S. Eliot could say that the new translation “astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic.”

That criticism holds, so far as I can see, for every modern-language “update” of scripture and liturgy. The hard truth is that the medium of contemporary language is incapable of conveying the substance we require.

Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set.

It is a nice question, what has caused more havoc in rush hour traffic this morning: a prematurely-exploded pipe bomb in New York City, or snow and black ice in London? At the time of writing, headlines from both sides of the Atlantic suggest a growing consensus on behalf of the pipe bomb. Either, however, could have a dampening effect on Christmas shopping, thus potentially inhibiting consumer confidence insofar as it is measured by the trend of daily sales: though by less than one dollar in a million.

Some snow in Greater Parkdale, too, but we’ve seen precipitation in this form before. Not enough to impede traffic. The merry bells of Christmas are ringing, or would be ringing at the cash registers all around town, except that new technology has obviated that delicious old “ching-ching.”

Now, if the North Koreans were to succeed in exploding an EMP device (that’s electro-magnetic pulse, I gather) high over our heads, I should think the consensus for “story of the year” would be overwhelming. The difficulty would be in reporting it, however, with the electrical grid out, and powered machinery at a standstill. This would be a serious inconvenience, and according to one frequently repeated estimate, 90 percent of the population would die as direct or indirect consequence of the blackout.

This estimate came from a science fiction novel, but entered media consciousness via USA congressional testimony nearly a decade ago, and has since become “a thing.” It is like the climate change estimates, though easier to trace.

My guess is that it would be good for the economy; perhaps even better than a hurricane or earthquake. The blackout would take days to overcome; weeks in some places. A certain proportion of electronic baubles would be knocked out, a proportion of those would be permanently fritzed, then consumers would be queueing for new baubles in EMP-hardened shells. Over time there would be very expensive infrastructure improvements. Add a few permilles to annual GDP.

This is a curious thing about economics. The “science” (a term that now connotes self-flattery) is amoral. The pornography industry, for instance, adds handsomely to our Gross Domestic Product; and much other enterprise that is gross indeed. Speculation conjures billions in “Bitcoin” with no backing at all. In the absence of (unquantifiable) moral considerations, the good is expressed as economic growth.

I sometimes wonder what a man of the thirteenth century, magically transported to the present time, would think of our fast-paced, high-tech “civilization.” The received notion is that he would be mightily impressed. This is not what I imagine, though. As a man at least sympathetic to what I can reconstruct of thirteenth-century mindsets, I think even without the pipe bombs and the EMP, our time traveller would be under the impression that he had died and gone to Hell.