Words for All Seasons No. 4

Latin, v.:
To interlard with Latin.

"The unlearned or foolish fantastical, that smells but of learning (such fellows as have been learned in their days), will so Latin their tongues, that the simple cannot but wonder at their talk, and think surely they speak by some revelation."
From footnote 16 of Frederic Wheelock, Latin (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963) p. xxii.

The OED definition is even better than the word itself.

True Myth

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VII: "He led me away to the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back. There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness."

The Gospel of Matthew, 4:16 "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, And upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death Light has dawned."

Thought for the Day No. 6: Walls and Ring-roads

This is the seed of a larger essay on the nature of modern cities.

In multitudinous days passed of political uncertainty, distributed political authority, and armies without air-power, cities built great walls to protect their citizens' lives and capital, and to increase the income of the local government. This act of ownership marked them off from the countryside, and so symbolised a distinct mode of life. Today our cities build ring-road highways for much the same purpose and with much the same symbolism. The fortifications of the past are grand, familiar, and local, and the men who walked them watched the land. The fortifications of the present are rarely more than brute, distant, and identical, and the people who drive along them watch only the road ahead.

Boothman Bar, one of four great gatehouses of the city of York

Belloc Wednesday - The Shotgun Approach to European History

From Belloc's Europe and the Faith, New York, The Paulist Press, 1930.
The book has a motto appended: 'sine auctoritate nulla vita'
The introductory chapter is entitled 'The Catholic Conscience of History'
The introductory paragraph made me laugh in admiration:

"I say the Catholic "conscience" of history - I say "conscience" - that is, an intimate knowledge through identity: the intuition of a thing which is one with the knower - I do not say "The Catholic Aspect of History." This talk of "aspects" is modern and therefore part of a decline: it is false, and therefore ephemeral: I will not stoop to it. I will rather do homage to truth and say that there is no such thing as a Catholic "aspect" of European history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all of these look on Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe from within. There is no more a Catholic "aspect" of European history than there is a man's "aspect" of himself.

[But I must carry on recording his bold and glorious riposte]

Sophistry does indeed pretend that there is even a man's "aspect" of himself. In nothing does false philosophy prove itself more false. For a man's way of perceiving himself (when he does so honestly and afer a cleansing examination of his mind) is in line with his Creator's, and therefore with reality: he sees from within.

Let me pursue this metaphor. Man has in him conscience, which is the voice of God. Not only des he know by this that the outer world is real, but also that his own personality is real.

When a man, although flattered by the voice of another, yet says within himself, "I am a mean fellow," he has hold of reality. When a man, though maligned of the world, says to himself of himself, "My purpose was just," he has hold of reality. He knows himself, for he is himself. A man does not know an infinite amount about himself. But the finite amount he does know is all in the map; it is all part of what is really there. What he does not know about himself would, did he know it, fit in with what he does know about himself. There are indeed "aspects" of a man for all others except these two, himself and God Who made him. These two, when they regard him, see him as he is; all other minds have their several views of him; and these indeed are "aspects," each of which is false, while all differ. But a man's view of himself is not an "aspect:" it is a comprehension.

Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from without, he understands it from within. He cannot understand it altogether because he is a finite being; but he is also that which he has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith."

The Strange Consequences of Berkeleianism

When Decartes divorced the mind from the body, metaphysics split into two basic schools, those who thought that the evidence revealed that we could only be sure of the mind, and those who thought that the evidence revealed we could only be sure of matter. Most of what you know about the post-Cartesian history of philosophy comes from the second school. But the first school was for a long time equally dominant, the father of which was George Berkeley. He thought that 'matter', rather than 'mind' was an abstraction, since all perceptions as experienced (and therefore truly known) are mental states, not physical states. (To actual historians of philosophy, apologies for my gross simplification.)

In and since the nineteenth century tumult of scientific discovery, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, his ideas have been rather lost to the respectable public. But, though I don't know enough to trace their particular history, they pop up in an extraordinary place. In 30s and 40s Oxford, amongst the Inklings, no less, who were steeped in questions of parapsychology and elevated consciousness, and took oriental philosophy very seriously. Some of even C.S. Lewis' shorter stories are explorations of these psychic questions. I had always thought it strange that the most clear-thinking of the twentieth Christian apologists and poets should be fascinated with such an obviously unchristian and moreover absurd idea, but I discover just today that Anthony Flew (of There is A God) lived and studied at Oxford at the same time, had the same psychic interests, explicitly attributes his early philosophical ideas to Berkeley, and strange to say possesses precisely the same clear-thinking argumentation and prose style I find in the Inklings. It can't be a coincidence.

Edit: What matters most here is the similarity in the argumentation and prose style. I'm pretty sensitive to the feel of the prose I'm reading - the intellectual sensation, if you will - and Flew's style reminds me of nothing so much as those essays I've read by the Inklings, and not just Lewis. It could be just that Oxford intellectuals from the 30s and 40s in general wrote in that fashion. I'd have to read more widely to know. But the connection to Idealism is very interesting. If it's real, it would be worth a semi-popular book.

On The Crossing of Fords

From Belloc, The Path to Rome, (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, [year unknown]), p. 283.

Just at this 'island' my guide found a ford. And the way he found it is worth telling. He taught me the trick, and it is most useful to men who wander alone in mountains.

You take a heavy stone, how heavy you must learn to judge, for a more rapid current needs a heavier stone; but say about ten pounds. This you lob gently into mid-stream. How, it is impossible to describe, but when you do it is quite easy to see that in about four feet of water, or less, the stone splashes quite differently from the way it does in five feet or more. It is a sure test, and one much easier to acquire by practice than to write about. To teach myself this trick I practised it throughout my journey in these wilds.

A Latin Mass

After reading John Senior's Restoration of Christian Culture this morning, where he insists that only communities and persons dedicated to work, prayer, and self-sacrifice will effect the named restoration, and defends his claim through excerpts mostly of the writings of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, I thought it would be fitting to worship this Sunday in the old way. I found a High Latin mass being celebrated in east Arlington. Until they raise enough money for a church of their own, they are borrowing the sanctuary of a Discalced Carmelite nunnery - so that was perfect, since SS. Teresa and John were the male and female reformers of the Carmelites in the 16th century.

The nunnery is off the beaten track, up a small drive on the edge of an old stretch of development along a large road that used to be a major highway into Dallas. It is absolutely serene, almost a paradise in the midst of this humid sparse climate, surrounded like a fortification by perfectly kept, tightly aligned, deepbrown wooden stakes, and guarded by a large gate with an angel perched on each white pillar. The gardens are full of statuary and sweet-smelling trees. The sanctuary is just as carefully and beautifully designed. There is nothing there of industrial life. There are modern materials, but all is put to the service of a true architecture; itself crafted better to serve the cloistered contemplative vocation of the women who spend their lives there.

The priest gave a discursive homily on the Catholic doctrines on indulgences. Some of it very strange, and I wonder whether he described it quite right, because some of it sounded as if it contradicted what little I've read in Aquinas. However, the imaginative background of the doctrines struck me as it had never done before, despite all I've supposedly learned about the body of Christ being one, and each being spiritually tied to each. There is an economy in the body of Christ, where good and evil are shared and felt between one Christian and another, not only in a general, formless sense which only has meaning in devotional rhetoric, but in a concrete sense. The disorder left on the soul by sin, even after repentance and forgiveness, calls out for redress. Scars must be healed. It is possible, according to these doctrines, that God has granted that the good work of one is effective to heal not only his own scars, but the scars of another, and that the recipient of such love is himself enabled to raise up his own prayers for the first. In the midst of this economy, the pope is able to open the storehouses of Christ's grace at his discretion, to the end that certain souls are blessed, and also that the whole community of the church is spurred to greater devotion. The church, in this light, is a spiritual princedom.

What most lifted my spirit, apart from the beautiful voices of the male choir and the people all singing the latin prayers, was the LIFE. Half the communicants must have been under the age of twenty-five, and hardly a missal in sight, they all knew the ancient words. Such life has many taproots, one of which is a sound theology of the family, a subject perhaps fitting for a future post....

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children

Our unlikeness from our ancestors calcifies yearly, as the egg-shell hardens in the womb of the bird. The grandeur of Europe is dead, in its place is a cynical establishment that celebrates a culture of the kitsch, the unmanly, the unfeminine, an abstractive, self-reflexive, self-parodic serpent, which will devour the world before it devours itself. Those uninitiated in this new Dionysian cultural cannibalism live in the entrails of the beast, grasping for dollars with which to buy unearned and dishonorable pleasure and power. In the periodic sufferings of the economic cycle, these acolytes are allowed to despair, perhaps commit suicide, shat into the void, thereby revealing themselves to be weak, and therefore unworthy of the secret knowledge, which is that the world is a Joke without a mouth or a face, that in reality (what is reality?) it is Nothing.

Who among us can walk through the halls of Blenheim, follow the silken melodies of Vaughan Williams, feel the intellectual passion of Rodin, pray in the pews of Notre Dame, ascend the steps to the halls of Congress, study the prudence of Madison, or, closer to our own day, read the grave optimism of T.H. White, and grieve at all for what is gone? We have not the power to feel, for we are cut off from attachment by a horrible bank of garbage, moral, theological, aesthetic. We may ascend the heights of our own side, and view what remains of Western culture with a pleasant detachment, but we lack a sense of belonging.

I believe this is extremely dangerous. At this time we lack a traditional high culture. The whim may arise at any time in our cultural leadership to destroy what relics remain of the old. At those times, and until we regain a confident aesthetic based in a Christian faith, we will have no defense other than our grief to protect these things. Architecture and landscape are clearly the most obvious victims, for they require upkeep and they use valuable land, which is always in demand in this world. But the other high arts are just as much in danger, though for a more subtle, more basic cause. Critical knowledge is easily lost. Taste and judgment and appropriate enjoyment of the good, the true, and the beautiful are not developed by accident, but by purposeful education. The aim to develop such appreciation has largely disappeared from the modern university. If it disappears utterly, then Beethoven and de Tocqueville will be just as invisible as a bulldozed St. Paul's.

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. We must carry on grieving. Teach yourselves, find teachers, to cultivate your taste for Western culture. Steep yourself in it, make the painful sacrifice of emotion necessary to take your place as PART of it. Remember your home with longing and love, so that when they come to destroy it utterly, you may tuck a memory of it away with you. Preserve it in your personal library, share it with your children. Information in books is not enough. You must learn it by heart, and cherish it as your own. Some day the modern world may forget its hatred of the past, and the children of our descendants will be allowed to play in the ruins of the old world. The monastic orders may again become significant. Even then the learning must be preserved. When the renaissance finally comes (and who knows how long that will be?), this knowledge will be valuable, and the grain of wheat that fell to the ground and died will bear much fruit. This is your responsibility to your inheritance, thrown as it has been to the four winds. Gather what you can, add to it if you will from your own soul, and wait for a better day.


Piero di Cosimo - Perseus Frees Andromeda (1513)

Thought for the Day No. 5: Ambition

Tucked inside the hope of greatness is a worm of discontent, slumbering. It will wake at the dawn of fulfillment and begin to gnaw, unless it is killed. How is such a worm killed? Must the soul be sliced from the soul? Would this be a good thing?

A Snippet of Praise

From The Death of Christian Culture (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1978), p. 164, by John Senior - the heir of Mark Van Doren, co-founder of the University of Kansas Integrated Humanities Program, and professor to David Whalen:

"Christopher Dawson, who tried to prove that medieval Christianity was responsible for the whole idea of progress, achieved an academic respectability denied to the cantankerous old Romantic, anti-Modern, and greater historian, Belloc."

The Future of U.S. Politics - An Irresponsible Prediction

The greatest political danger the United States republic will face in the coming decades is an alliance of libertarian economic and ethical logic (a means) with a progressive utopian vision of pleasure for all (an ends). The crowds loved President Obama's rhetoric - he talked about peace and harmony and well-being - but now they see what that costs, they don't like him. If the Democrats are smart, they'll scrap state socialism just like Tony Blair scrapped state collectivism. Who really cares about the poor, after all? Well, the poor care about the poor, and they have a vote in hand. So to keep their vote, what will be offered them in compensation for inequality of wealth and success? Equality of pleasure. Make pleasure the new dollar. Since the poor can produce sex just as well as the rich, give them sexual unrestraint, and everyone will be wealthy. The middle-class will have their money, and the rich will have their orgies. Everyone will be happy. High-five to J.S. Mill.

To this end, watch for signs in public education that children are being taught more and more about fulfilling their desire for pleasure, especially for sexual pleasure, and especially at the expense of the desire for public honor in the role of citizen or statesman. They will be taught to trade their rights as a citizen for their rights as a hormone factory.

Also watch for euthanasia defended on slighter and slighter grounds, so that a man who is merely chronically angry or depressed is given the option to kill himself. That will have the excellent effect, among other excellent effects, of staving off political dissent.

How should a virtuous person respond to all this? Invest in morphine production. You'll make a killing.