IMAGINING EVIL (series)

Note: In the Imagining Evil series, I challenged the reader to consider the question of whether people (you,me) presently have the capacity to imagine the existence of evil in our world, and especially (as the question was urged differently in the Mole series)or to imagine (see) what may be coming or, in fact, may already be here. As I look back on this series, I think it could serve as the basis for a semester course, except for two problems: (1) no university will allow me to teach it; (2) the class would vaporize after the first session, the innocents running for the hills, leaving behind only a few goths and wackos hungry for the evil itself, man.



Imagining the Horror of Evil PART ONE


In about 1988, during my years in the Washington bubble, I took a class in creative writing at the Bethesda, Md., writing institute. In a short story class, I wrote a story which imagined that in the near future, people over fifty would be required to report yearly for a “life” evaluation. The evaluation added or subtracted points on an ID card. The evaluation looked at every aspect of a person’s life and assigned a point value that represented the person’s present worth to society. If the point value fell below a certain number, the person was summoned to a “session” in a public school building or other such facility where they would voluntarily submit to euthanasia for the good of the society.

My hero in the story had been doing reasonably well, keeping his job and bank account, but one day he went to a large urban public library to get a well known classic. The classic no longer existed on the shelves, but my protagonist noticed that there were ten copies of the latest romance steamer by (let us say) Jezebel Daniels, whereupon he began screaming violently at the librarians and the sick culture that had produced them and so forth and so on. That, plus several other instances such as regular non-appearance at community social functions for older singles, earned him a failing grade and a summons to the next “event” at Wade Elementary on Saturday morning.

The rest of the story (I regret that this brilliant fiction has been lost) involved the hero’s daring escape into the hills of West Virginia. Given present day technology (this story was written in the earliest days of the internet and before GPS) the escape would be highly improbable now that we have achieved much more of the Orwellian nightmare than Eric Blair could imagine. The most interesting part of this episode from my past life was the sequel: according to the rules of this class, the writer of the story was not permitted to speak while the rest of the class, provided with photocopies of the story in advance (“photocopies”: see Wikipedia) criticized the offering. What ensued was an almost hysterical reaction from twenty or so pseudo-literati, mostly over 40, from the DC beltway culture.

Quite simply, they bypassed any literary merit the story might have and went for the author, who was immediately judged to be a cultural throwback and reactionary, something on the order of a preliterate pterodactyl with devious political views. It was difficult to tell what made them angrier, the prescience of the story or their fears that it could be true, so they finally dismissed it as passé and outré while they insisted that elders were now more appreciated than ever. It was as if I had unmasked everything by suggesting the unimaginable.

In terms of science fiction, my story was really old hat. Soylent Green had covered some of these themes and more a decade earlier, but the emphasis had been on the horror of cannibalism. And I had not heard of the earlier Logan’s Run (due for a remake next year). My story went for the unthinkable center, that a compassionate government would assess the value of individual lives and dispatch those that did not serve the needs of society.

You can bet that my reviewers, all of them card-carrying liberals who viewed the world outside DC as an uncharted territory of stupidity and religion (“here be dragons” as some of the medieval maps say) knew that what I was saying was entirely possible. The year after Soylent Green brought us Roe vs. Wade, which became within minutes the philosophical centerpiece of modern liberalism. It wasn’t new, it had been there all along, but now it could become the very foundation of the new America we were, it was said, creating as we “moved forward,” the mantra and battle slogan of the new era. At its core, of course, was the idea that the state assigned value to individual life and legitimized murder to demonstrate its power.

Now, twenty-some years later, the liberals have their greatest moment since the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And within months of the election of Obama and his myrmidons, we have the following: the admission of a Supreme Court Justice (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) that she thought Roe vs. Wade was about preventing the birth of undesirables; the creation of a Health Care plan which envisages requiring elderpersons to submit to health evaluations every five years for “end of life instructions,” and makes abortion a part of regular health care in all hospitals, including Catholic ones; the insinuations of the President of the U.S. to the effect that old sick people need to suck it up and take a pill; and his blatant statements to the effect that opposing abortion is something “that we are now past, like the culture wars”).

The message: a new day has dawned for the whole world. Obama may not be a smart man, but he is the man in whom the terrible tendencies of a century have found their latest prophet. Nazism, socialism, Marxism, fascism: all agree on the central doctrine. The State decides what human life is and eliminates all who do not fit into the perfect society. Had Pope Paul VI been able to put “future notes” into Humanae Vitae, he could have documented his prophecy that the acceptance of artificial birth control would lead inexorably to abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, body engineering, and—what shall we call it?—endless medical manipulation to create perfect urbanites without souls. They won’t even have to vote. The system will know what they want and need from their chick-like twittering.

If my reader is responding with the same tush, tush, “alarmist,” it couldn’t happen, and all that I received from my story in 1988, I don’t know what to say. How do I read the times? My bellwethers are mad women like Hilary Clinton who can visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe one day—“who painted that?” she asks of the miraculous serape—and attend a conference on Margaret Sanger the next, where she proclaims that genocidal Eugenist a secular saint. Or Senator Barbara Boxer who, when asked by a journalist, “just when does a foetus become a human being, Senator?” replied, “why, when the parents bring it home from the hospital.” At that moment, you see, the state has conferred humanship upon the child. These are not leading minds or instigators, they are the kind of people, like Obama himself, who have no thoughts, only steady tendencies is a certain direction. The progenitors of their thoughts may be found in Architects of the Culture of Death, one of the most helpful books of our time, a philosophical blueprint for where we are now. In the brains of people like Clinton and Boxer it is no longer horrible but perfectly obvious and rational.

The imagining of complete horror is difficult because we cannot believe it. Yes, the movie audience flocks to every imaginable horror movie, but there is always a barrier in the mind that says, no, not to me, not to us, not in our civilized time. The million people who lived in Budapest felt that way in October and even in December of 1944. When their newspaper told them that the worst battle of World War II outside Warsaw and Stalingrad was nearly upon them, they cooked their goulash and sausages and played their concerts and believed otherwise; least of all did they grasp that the worst civilian massacre of WWII was coming to this beautiful, ancient, cultured city on the Danube. So they did not believe and did not prepare. By Christmas day it was upon them, a million civilians, including the 100,000 Jews in the ghetto not yet shipped by Adolf Eichmann to the concentration camps, trapped between the German Nazis and their Hungarian allies and the Russian communists and their Hungarian allies. All the mass graves have not yet been found.

The full story, insofar as it can be pieced together from military records and eyewitness accounts, may be found in The Siege of Budapest: 100 Days in World War II by Krisztián Ungváry. It is not easy reading, particularly the detailed accounts of the battles, but the author has included many photos and eyewitness accounts that help us imagine the horrors. His line of vision is merciless and unwaveringly objective. Permit me one picture:

After Christmas a number of motherless babies were left in the maternity ward of a hospital, where it was becoming increasingly impossible to feed them for lack of mother’s milk and other nutrients. In despair the nurses clutched the babies to their breasts so that they might at least enjoy the warmth of a human body before fading away. After a while, the nurses found themselves producing milk, and the babies were saved from starving to death.

During the recent political campaign, we learned that Barrack Obama supported a law that would permit doctors to take infant survivors of botched abortions and place them on a table to die without such care. Even in the worst of the Budapest nightmare, the civilians of Hungary could not imagine allowing such an atrocity or thinking of it as “health care.” But many of them had been sold another eugenic monstrosity, the anti-Semitic lie, which the new Fascist Hungarian government of the Arrow Cross was prosecuting with increasing ferocity as thousands of Jews were line up on the embankments of the Danube and machine gunned while the mad monk, Father Alfred Kun, shouted “in the name of Christ, fire!”

There is no link between that horrible world and this, you may say. Particularly if you are a young reader and have no sense of modern history, you might think such horrors are the stuff or period pieces. The question now, in 2009, is can you imagine the horrors that are here now? If you are attached to a dozen electronic instruments a good part of the day, it may be that you can’t see what is front of you or, if you do, pronounce it boring and go back into the haze of fantasy. Eichmann? Buchenwald? Hitler? Mass graves? Evil doctors?

Consider this: President Obama’s new “science czar,” John Holdren, once floated the idea in a textbook that forced abortions, compulsory sterilization, and an international authority that would control all population levels and natural resources would become necessary to save the planet. No questions were asked, and John Holdren— MIT, Stanford, and an expert at the Kennedy School of Government— was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate in 2009.

The Eichmanns are among us. The Nazis are here. At your elbow.

The ordinary citizens of Hungary, Protestant and Catholic, prepared for Christmas and prayed while they were caught between the rockets and flamethrowers of the Fascists and the Communists and between Hitler and Stalin. Both sides agreed with the modern doctrine that the state defines human life and decides who us worth living. Both sides ordered their armies into suicidal strategies even when they knew it was worthless, when Soviet tanks were already only sixty kilometers from Berlin.

So who or what won the war? Can you imagine?




Imagining the Horror of Evil: The Apocalyptic Imagination: PART TWO


A friend who has read some of my musings wrote me that I have an apocalyptic imagination. Well, not me, really; it’s the imagination of the Church, which is inherently apocalyptic, that is, focused on the “lifting of the veil” (Apokálypsis) at the end of time. In this sense, not to be apocalyptic is not to be Catholic at all, which is the dire risk many run today by being focused only on this world and this time.

I believe that the inner soul of the Church is a desert soul, the soul of Christ in the desert, not the faked-up community soul of the Novus Ordo liturgy manqué. Those priests who fan the crowd hoopla forget that Jesus, like his forerunner John, was of the desert, and that St. Paul spent two years there. They forget that Jesus always left the crowd and returned to the desert to pray. They forget that true retreats are always into solitude, silence, and contemplation, not the sort of party nonsense that now falsely claims that name. Whenever the Church has been on the edge of complete surrender to the world, like the Jews who turned to Baal and the golden calf, the voice of God is heard by Elijah and the Desert Fathers and the hermits of Ireland and Italy and St. Romuald and Blessed Charles Foucauld.

When St. John the Apostle saw the “lifting of the veil,” tradition says he was a hermit living in a cave on the isle of Patmos. I picture him leaving the cave at night and walking the Mediterranean beach, listening to the waves rustling the pebbles. There he saw the astounding vision, the final revelation of the New Testament, in which the Gospels reach their staggering climax. However dizzying this vision, it cannot be explained away by German exegetes or witty seminary professors. The victory over the beast is the last act of the story, toward which all is moving. That victory must inform all our imaginings of history and all our theology.

Students of today, examine your imaginations. When you think of “history,” what images come to mind? A kind of slow upward oozy spiral from the dark days of lizards and medievals into the bright bursts of revolution and the rise of present day kindergarten twittered civilization? If you do, the odd thing called liberalism and its relativism factory—public education and the media—have succeeded in shaping your imagination for happy, mindless living.

What is the story we are in? Present day academic prattle is all about “narratives,” as if we were all living in tiny self-manufactured stories or off-the-shelfs from the academic Wal-Mart. St. Augustine first understood the absolute Christian story of history as beginning with Creation; reaching its eternal fulfillment in the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection; and achieving its full revelation in the Last Judgment. He also had some powerful things to say about the nature of time, pretty much to the effect that the liberal version in the previous paragraph is hooey.

In the first part of this midnight musing, I suggested that our imaginations may be at fault because we do not see the history we are in, for the simple reason that we do not see. As St. Augustine himself learned at the hands of the Manichees, it is possible to see everything upside down and backwards. If that is the case, one will be like the narrator of Apocalypse Now (or The Heart of Darkness) and not see “the horror, the horror!” I will also suggest that Novus Ordo Catholicism, the Church Somnolent, does not see it because it is obsessed with various imaginary theosophies that deny real evil.

The true apocalyptic imagination is the Christian imagination. The first modern liberal, Martin Luther, wanted to remove the Apocalypse (or Revelation) from the Bible because he could not find the Christ of his imagination in it. Not finding it, he jettisoned the book as “neither apostolic or prophetic,” an act not fully appreciated until W.H. Auden’s poem, “September 1, 1939,” in which Auden unearthed “the whole offence/ From Luther until now/That has driven a culture mad,” thereby linking the madness of the Nazis to the birth of Protestantism. Madness, in just about any psychology, derives from a disordered imagination, as superbly analyzed by William F. Lynch, S.J., in Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless, a classic. In it, Lynch saw the deep connection between a disordered imagination and a disordered theology, which is also a disordered vision of history. The twentieth century spawned dozens if false utopian visions but two triumphed in Germany and Russia, each with its own version of history and an apocalypse: a super race ruling a thousand year Reich, and a transformed human nature ruling a classless worker’s paradise.

Just the other day, a friend alerted me to the fact that a nearby university history course on the Civil War includes the following text: Intimate Matters: History of Sexuality in America, by John D’Emilio. The book promises this sort of fare: Today's commercialized sexuality, promising personal fulfillment through intimate relations, is contrasted with the family-centered, reproductive sexuality of the prudish New England colonists who nevertheless produced bastards and engaged in adultery, sodomy and rape. The authors cram into 400 pages balanced discussions of racial sex-stereotyping, Chinese slave rings, abortion, same-sex relationships, women's rights and AIDS-engendered conservatism. The Civil War, or more properly, The War of Northern Aggression, always stirs my imagination, but I was not prepared for phallic symbols in cannon and balls, nor had I thought that gun carriages were fraught with family symbolism.

Ah well, whatever that course teaches, it is not much worse than the fare most students in American colleges and universities are getting in their humanities courses. This I know from my recent teaching experience in the same university which, by all indications, is much more conservative than most these days. Parents who send their sons and daughters to such places for economic reasons should be forewarned, but most will not care. The fact is that we live in a decadent, disordered, “post-Christian” society that increasingly has more in common with the Nazi and Marxist utopian visions than with anything sane, even good pagan societies. But now, you see, there is the 21st century utopian vision: a kind of bastard amalgam of the Nazi and Communist versions, but with the promise of a complete departure from nature and natural law: the transgendered society, with its final elimination of marriage, family, and children produced by natural means. Courses like the above are catechetics for the future glimpsed by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, by which he meant the abolition of human nature.

From the perspective of such a society, what is the apocalypse? If not Nazi, Communist, or Christian in its teleology—that end point toward which it is moving—then what is it? Science fiction has toyed with this for a century from H.G. Wells to C.S. Lewis to Blade Runner and The Matrix.

I would suggest there is a commonalty to these and many other such fictions: the endless building of machines and the intelligence behind them is right out of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the same tune, many variations, but all ending in the same gnostic prison: a brain hooked to a computer. “Everything is possible,” says Neo in The Matrix, which in the end means that nothing is possible, that there is no end, no purpose. Just an endless video game. Let’s play it again! Until Matrix XCVLIII comes out, and then again. “Virtual reality” means there is no real reality. If everything can be imagined, nothing true can be imagined. Neo’s pitiful rebellion is pointless, Nietzsche’s rebellion against sanity raised to—no, not the highest or next level, because with the destruction of all purpose comes the destruction of all hierarchy. No one thing is better than any other thing. So, why not marry a spineless sea slime? This is truly horror imagined from the Christian perspective. But in the transgendered trans-species society, there is no horror, only febrile repetition of arbitrary will. “Whassup, man?” Nothing.

The desert calls.



The Imagination Dead: The Church Somnolent: PART THREE: Imagining the Horror of Evil

In 1914 the Parliament of England passed a conscription bill that would draft the Irish to fight in the trenches of France. Immediately, the united Catholic Bishops of Ireland issued a manifesto declaring this "an oppressive and inhuman law which the Irish people have a right to resist by every means, consonant with the law of God." The Irish had been oppressed, a mild word for what took place, since Oliver Cromwell had invaded Ireland and slaughtered the clergy and destroyed the churches and convents. An excellent way to learn about this period is through Walter Macken’s excellent Seek the Fair Land, in which we meet a heroic Catholic family and a saintly priest caught in vicious slaughter by Protestant armies. According to the New York Times of that day, the conscription act had driven the Irish people into the hands of Sinn Fein, the party of independence, and kept Ireland out of World War I.

I was struck by this immediate and direct action of the Bishops of Ireland against a political tyranny. Contrast that with this: In the early part of this century, I was writing weekly columns for a site called Peter’s Voice. Through I was made aware of Bishop Macram Gassiz of the Sudan, who came to this country to wake up the American bishops and people to the massive murder of Christians by Muslims in the Sudan. And I was aware that Bishop Gassiz’s pleas were being met with indifference and the kind of halting smiles people give when they are not going to give.

There were two problems with the good bishop’s campaign. One, it is now politically incorrect in the Catholic Church to acknowledge the true nature of Islam and the absolute irreconcilability of this religion with Catholicism; two, it is especially politically incorrect in the American church to think that Muslims should be converted to the True Faith; and third, the Church American has entered a long, slow, deathly sleep of mind and conscience.

The essay today is about the Church persecuted, militant, triumphant, and a new category, the Church Somnolent, which should just about eliminate much of the very audience I said last time I am trying to reach. But give me another few sentences.

Using firearms and explosives, thousands of Muslims destroyed the Christian village of Korian in the province of Punjab in eastern Pakistan. A Christian family in the village had been accused of blaspheming Islam.

A distillation of testimony from survivors and former guards, newly published by the Korean Bar Association, details the daily lives of 200,000 political prisoners estimated to be in the camps: Eating a diet of mostly corn and salt, they lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they age, they hunch over at the waist. Most work 12- to 15-hour days until they die of malnutrition-related illnesses, usually around the age of 50. Allowed just one set of clothes, they live and die in rags, without soap, socks, underclothes or sanitary napkins.

Following an August 1 attack by 800 Muslims on Christians in the northeastern Pakistani city of Gojra, Bishop Joseph Coutts of Faisalabad led a protest against government tolerance of anti-Christian violence. Bishop Coutts charged that “a banned Islamic group which wants to ‘purify’ Pakistan by making it a strictly Islamic, theocratic state” wants non-Muslims to “either convert to Islam or leave the place … They want a sort of religious cleansing.”

Paramilitary troops patrolled the streets of a town in eastern Pakistan yesterday after Muslim radicals burnt to death eight members of a Christian family, raising fears of violence spreading to other areas.

Hundreds of armed supporters of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an outlawed Islamic militant group, set alight dozens of Christian homes in Gojra town at the weekend after allegations that a copy of the Koran had been defiled.

They threw stones, burned homes, and pursued those fleeing, firing wildly. In the end, nine people were dead. Seven of them have the same last name, Hamid, and belong to the same family clan as Fr. Hussein Younis, a Franciscan. They include two children (in the photo by Saqib Khadim, the coffins). Their only fault is that they were Christian.

It took place in Pakistan, in Gojra, in the province of Faisalabad in eastern Punjab. There are 1.3 million Catholics in all of Pakistan, and the same number of Christians of other denominations, out of a population of 160 million, almost entirely Muslim. But the intolerance against this small, poor, peaceful minority has become a fact of life, exploding at times into bloody aggression.

MADISON - As Gov. Jim Doyle was telling Wisconsinites on Aug. 17 that he would not seek a third term as governor, the Catholic bishops of Wisconsin were letting the faithful know of their "deep concern" about the recently approved state budget that requires them to provide contraceptive services to those for whom they provide health insurance. "This mandate will compel Catholic dioceses, parishes, and other agencies that buy health insurance to pay for a medical service that Catholic teaching holds to be gravely immoral," the bishops wrote.... "This mandate violates not just our religious values, but also our constitutional rights. The right of conscience established in the Wisconsin Constitution protects the minority from the majority..." the bishops wrote. Insurance coverage in two dioceses - Superior and La Crosse - is not affected by this mandate because self-insured entities are exempt from the contraceptive provision. The statement, released through the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, noted that "as Catholic teachers and pastors, we strongly object to this blatant insensitivity to our moral values and legal rights."

The bishops said that as they deal with the mandate the budget has placed upon them, they will "continue to affirm and communicate the teachings of our faith." "No legislation can repeal or annul our commitment to upholding the dignity of human life and the means by which each life is conceived," they wrote.

And now--April 2010? Consider the behavior of Cardinal George and the NCCB in the case of Obama's socialism. What utter rot.

Can you imagine?

The Mole Series (Underground Missives)

Note:

Again, from the now vanished TrueWester blog, the Mole series. A new mole post will be forthcoming from the post-Obama NSRUS (National Socialist Republic of the US).

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #1
Note: The following sad piece of cultural detritus washed up on my leaf-strewn lawn in the mouldy, mouldy month of October. Soaked through with tears and small rice beer, it was encircled by Chinese rubber bands, and apparently tossed onto my premises by unseasonably heavy rains occasioned, no doubt, by global seething.

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #1 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

By which title you are to understand, dear happenstance reader, that I am a mole of the burrowing, semi-blind kind, a group of which is called by common tradition a labor, which is an apt description of what we do: we labor blindly. Our particular clan, the Mouldywarps of Yorkshire, once migrated to White County, Tennessee, and there let that matter rest.

Here, fallen upon hard times, I labor in a bureaucracy of the State, for vole crumbs and roots. My great great something Grimm-Molus, Viscount, said it all: "We are obsessed by the idea of regulation, and our Masters of Requests refuse to understand that there is an infinity of things in a great state with which a government should not concern itself."

Not any more. As my cousin the philologist, Warpus Root-Searcher, informed me, a bureau is a French desk covered with baize (yum!), and a –cracy means power. A bureaucracy is a power desk that seeks to dominate everything through rules, and a bureaucrat, no matter how mild in appearance, is nothing put a power addict seeking to devour. Satan, my grandfather Luminous Mouldywarp declared, is the supreme bureaucrat (cf. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters).

These missives from a mole are meant to deepen and understand exactly what it means to live in a State dominated and constituted by bureaucracy. Max Weber, the supposedly great (but very important) founder of sociology, said several prophetic things about a society under bureaucracy. One, he lauded a supremely efficient system based on hierarchy and rules that would supplant the traditional hierarchies composed of highly individualized (and therefore unpliable) human beings; two, he realized that bureaucracies could become inefficient when they tried to deal with individual persons and cases, which tend to become troublesome, have elbows and other odd characteristics, and often rebel against those who are only trying to serve their greater good.

Though only a semi-blind mole, I was once able to stay behind after closing hours in the Smithsonian and view an extraordinary exhibit of 19th century photographs of West African chiefs. I was, simply, stunned, and at first I did not know why. Then it came to me as I stood staring at photo after photo of chieftains staring directly at the camera: these men know exactly who they are, without self-doubt or irony or insecurity. Take any lineup from modern times, prisoners or welfare seekers or employees or students, and one can immediately see the contrast. Right away there is the fear that “I don’t really stand in my own shoes, I am waiting for definition from the system which I inhabit or clues from the passing scene of opinion; in fact I am a walking hunger for identity and what I am about, what so many of us are all about, is that desperate hunger, that erasure of the fear that my entire life—if I dare to think of all that in one moment—might amount to nothing after all.”

I am sure that there are other lineups that would yield the same impression as those African chiefs: saints, for instance; and occasional persons in our world who do in fact have complete affirmation down to their toes. One sees them occasionally, even from down here in the grass and roots where true moles dwell. Even a mole can be secure in moleness, as can that wretched cat that comes hunting me. But even being hunted can be wholly authentic because the fear is real, not neurotic.

But now, dear reader of this desperate missive, I am, as the poet said, losing myself, piece by piece, or so I fear. What I try to hold onto just now is my very moleness, which I have brought from the garden and am trying to reprise in the bureaucratic office to which I am confined many hours a week.

More to come.


UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #2 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

. . . take time to marvel at his adaptations. Most transfixing are his front paws -- large, powerful things with claws perfectly designed for digging. That's one shown at the left. After the mole's paws, the most interesting adaptations are those you don't see. For example, underground animals wouldn't want dirt clogging their ears, so mole ears, while present, aren't to be seen. And in the tunnels' perpetual darkness, of what use are eyes? Moles do have eyes, but they're tiny slits covered with thin skin. Moles also have nostrils, but they open sideways, not forward, so dirt doesn't plug them as the mole tunnels forward.

So reads some website or other. And I am sure by now you have done your own googling or yahooing and found that my name, i.e., Mouldywarp, is the ancient English name for the common mole. Also called a “dirt-tosser,” which is an apt description of what we burrowers do. We dig tunnels underground and are not particularly particular about what we do with the soil. We are perfectly suited to the task of burrowing into the bureaucracy. From our appearance, we look like useful drudges that can serve the purposes of a being that depends upon endless systems of tunnels, and that cannot see or hear much of what is going on inside the bowels of the bureaucrat beast.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! In fact, when we are not suspected of seeing and hearing and sniffing about, regarded merely as a dumb species, that is when we know the most of what is happening around us. How think thee we have survived nearly everywhere on the planet, friend, when gardeners and farmers spin out endless methods and theories for gassing us, trapping us, grinding us, choking us to death?

So let this be a warning, bureaucracies. There will always be moles. There will always be Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs and outraged citizens using their wise claws and snouts to see what you really are and what you are really about in your GULAGS. Respect us, dear reader, remember that we are not the species killing our own young or undermining our own existence with debt and taxes.

Take, for instance, a minor moment in the office where I burrow about. I appear bored and stupid during a conference call of excruciating mindlessness when suddenly I hear this from a county supervisor of something or other: “It has come down from Obama [always here spoken with a tone of hushed reverence] that there will not be a single corner in the nation that is not served by free or cheap public transportation.” This stunning piece of news was followed by an announcement of opening new routes of public busses that will network across the state and even connect with Amtrak. Drivers are to be hired. Routes are to be GPS-ed. Computer programs will be “enhanced.”

Now I ask you, have you learned of this from any other source? A major policy slipping down through the bureaucratic system, unnoticed even by the Foxes of the earth. A fait accompli, no less. A tentacled extension of the fabled Stimulus monster. Ah, you see, there is much going on underground that only moles can detect. A shiver in the earth’s crust, a seismic quake, a tectonic shift. Something is going on: realities are coming into existence of which the country is not aware until it sees them already operating.

When no one is looking at work, I read and ponder the new edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, now uncensored and published in a new translation. If you want to know how bureaucracy worked in Soviet Russia, read this book. If you want to know how the same kind of bureaucracy is coming to this country, become a mole in the system Obama is creating. What you will learn is that what most people take as reality is being redefined daily. The Soviets did that so successfully for seventy years that the unwary simply no longer knew anything.

You object, and rightly so. The mole writing this works in a pleasant office with (mostly) pleasant people, mostly women. Like all bureaucrats they process endless stacks of paper, write down information, and file it in folders or computer programs. What could be sinister here? The secret is that in a bureaucratic universe nothing looks sinister: the maidens who filed index cards on the concentration camps looked sweet and talked of their weekends. On the surface it seems benign enough. But moles know that “on the surface” is a very incomplete picture of the garden. What is distinctive about bureaucracies—from ancient Sumeria on—is that they are non-teleological. The one question one never asks in here is “why?” If one (foolish as this writer) does, he meets with shrugged shoulders, sighs, uncomprehending stares, or censorious looks.

We will come back to this in Missive # 3. But permit me a digression. In my humble view, the two greatest writers of the twentieth century were Sigrid Undset and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They are now mostly unknown and dismissed in the American university, passed over for third-world and minority-culture scribblers no mole would allow in the garden. In 2005, I talked about Solzhenitsyn for an hour in my Utopia/Dystopia class and then asked if any of the 35 students had ever heard of him. No. I returned to my office which I shared with other part-timers and expressed my astonishment, only to have four teachers, ranging in age from 25 to 55, say “who?”

Undset, a Catholic who opposed the Nazis with her life, and Solzhenitsyn, who opposed the Communists with his life, are both great writers whose works . . . well, no need for panegyrics. Read them yourself. In 1985 Solzhenitsyn was one of the most well-known people in the world. His works were read and taught from high school to graduate school and his life was well known. What happened? He was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard. In it he said, in a nutshell, that though the Communist world was intolerable, the West was no model to follow—corruption, moral decadence, homosexuality, pornography, hatred of religion. The next morning the New York Times and the Washington Post flushed Solzhenitsyn into the lowest sewers of history, and he became an unperson. No one taught him any longer—what are you, a fascist reactionary? One still finds his works at the Good Will, but not in the university.

Here, read his speech for yourself: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html


I’ll be back.



UNDERGROUND MISSIVE # 3 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

The roots get all tangled down here. I’m used to that in unweeded gardens; fie upon them, as my friend Hamletish Mouldywarp mought say. What I mean is, things get crowded and it’s hard to see what’s what. The whole point of gardening and making good lawns is to keep things separate like, and not all muddled up so they can fruit and flower as they might serve the needs of moles and men. Here at the Department of Human Resurfacing, the point is, if I can find a point in it, is to take the radicals and either strangle them or distort them beyond recognition.

As I said in # 2, my first job here was to learn how to be an un-mole by not asking any questions that start with why? Whenever I see an A that looks as if it might connect with a B, scotch that, strangle that, stuff it down a deadend hole right now before it leads somewhere. If a mole could scream so human ears could hear, my existence down here would sound like one long Dostoevskyan howl. Now, you may say, if it’s all that godawful, why do people want it? Why do they feed and fertilize it with unnatural chemicals to keep it going?

Take this, for instance: my co-worker Candace Mouldywarp, a cousin, slams down the phone the other day and says, “people get so nasty when they’re getting everything for free.” See, a good root system is meant to nourish things, not choke them to death. Here, in the Department of Human Refamishing, things appear to be what they aren’t, and when that happens, all is lost. Consider: in this and a thousand places like it, lies festoon the walls. Love that word, festoon, a string of flowers (yummy!), but these are all fake flowers, pictures of flowers and natural scenes with messages attached about DESTINY and SUCCESS and MOTIVATION and THE ESSENCE OF TODAY and such. Like the poison literary candies artificed by the Soviet Writers Union in Stalin’s (and Obama’s?) times, they are meant to lie, lie, lie.

The overwhelming message is that we are here to help you! Why if Great Grandfather Benedictus T (T for terrafirm) Mouldywarp could see these verbal atrocities tacked onto sentimental scenes, he would erupt above the surface and cry out plagues! Dig deeper and hide from the surface lies! We can smell lies, you know, we moles, they smell like strychnine laced with cyanide and sweetened with almondine syrup. Gophers go for them every time, but moles know better, and that is why I am here with these missives, dear readers, to sniff out the lies.

The fact is that the Human Refashioning workers are not here to help people but to process them. And the processors are eaten up by the process. End and means are muddled to the point that one worker exclaimed just the other day, “I don’t know what I’m doing!” Caution, love, we’re not supposed to know that. Verge on vertiginous truths such as that and you will be in danger of becoming human again.

Wait, wait, you cry. How can you confuse evil bureaucratic systems such as the GULAG and the Nazi concentration camps with the benign, beneficent human servicing agencies of our beloved system, which feed and clothe and employ people? The answer is that there is no confusion here, the confusion is structured into the system itself through two means: distancing and expansion. The law of love left by the Divine Yeshua is the opposite of a bureaucratic system which is designed to distance the deed from the doer. When I respond to a needy or beggar mole, I give to that fellow mole and I join him in a recognition of our total and mutual dependence on . . . well, you know Who I mean. Bureaucracy distances the hand and the gift more and more until I and love and gift and giver become root-jumbled. A lie: that the State is God and on him do the poor depend exclusively.

And expansion: the lesson of Communism and Hitler’s National Socialism is that the secret to mass murder is expanding the bureaucracy to include more and more people as murderers. The Hitler jugend and the Communist Young Pioneers both enlarged the state machine to include youth and children who were taught the lies and committed to telling them. When everyone is part of the bureaucracy, everyone is a slave and everyone becomes a liar. When denouncing your parents becomes a patriotic duty, then the State has become God. And from what I hear from the mole network, denouncing ones parents for racism, sexism, and non-political correctness has become daily fare (not tasty) for the educational bureaucracy.

You see, the rootlet of the great bureaucracy I work in is only a tiny offshoot of the main tree. Even the Congress itself is an offshoot. The main tree is the educational system, and to find out about that, I listen at night to the tales of fellow mole Woody Mouldywarp, named for a president who brought in the federal income tax and the concept that the people is a dumb mob to be led—sort of like landless peasants—which they were rapidly becoming. Woody works underground in the school system

Woody says that all you need to do to know the secret lies that power the culture is listen to the students and the teachers in the schools. Nearly every standard phrase they use is a betrayal of something good. Of course the chief nutrient fed to the roots is relativism, which appears in nearly everything they say. The ritual of relativism that teaches the students is conducted as follows: a controversial topic—say abortion—is introduced for discussion. All the students are invited to express their feelings and opinions. Arguments based on reason are immediately dismissed as “ideological” (Bill O’Reilly, former high school teacher, you learned your lesson so well!) The teacher carefully guides the class to the overwhelming conclusion: no-one has the answer, all opinions are equal in value, there is no truth, and school is a place where you are turned into a slave. “Don’t go there” is the new motto of anti-reason.

So as I shuffle the papers and do the intake forms, I ask clients (as they are called) to sign sway their rights, their views, their human inheritance, the last shreds of their southern culture, pretty much the way they sign away their right to farm rationally at the Department of Agriculture Office a block away. “What is to constitute good behavior? For that question obviously carries its own answer on its head. Steady, hearty allegiance to the policy of the government they serve will constitute good behavior.”—Woodrow Wilson

As a mole, I watch and wonder. In the 1930’s it was a matter of taking over farms. Now, in the Department of Human Re-organ-izing, it’s a matter of taking over souls.



UNDERGROUND MISSIVE # 4 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

In which the Mole turns Distributist and reveals his darker purpose.

The Mole worketh within the bureaucracy, but not always. On Thursdays he flees the maze and hitchhikes to Cookeville, where he joins his fellows in the Chesterton Society of Middle Tennessee, a small but hardy band of fellows currently reading G. K. Chesterton’s An Outline of Sanity and attempting to plumb the meaning of GKC’s “Distributism” or Distributivism,” as it is sometimes called. We have tossed (note the mole tie-in!) the topic about for several years and lately have been trying to understand it in depth and ask the question, is it feasible? Or as some critics suggest, is it merely a romantic fantasy, of no application in the world of Wal-Mart and Obama socialism?

When Chesterton and Belloc first talked of Distributism almost a hundred years ago, England had already been wracked and transformed by the evils of modern industrialism, and The Servile State (as Belloc called it) already seemed to have won. To us moles, hammered by tractors and under siege from new poisons, traps, and incessant attacks by the new industrial farming, so it seemed. Besides, Karl Grundsow Marx, who holed up in the British Museum and wrote cloudy words that plunged millions into a new slavery, had determined that all was determined in history, so what’s the point of chattering about it like nutty squirrels?

At root, Distributism visualizes a society in which individuals possess spiritual and economic freedom through the ownership of private property, preferably land. Its vision is akin to Jeffersonian agrarianism, and that is why Chesterton and Belloc wrote for The American Review in the 1930’s, along with the Southern Agrarians. Down deep, this is a radical vision of what society ought to be, and we moles, relishers of roots and radishes and radicals, understand. We also know that radix malorum est cupiditas, for where real freedom exists for the right thing to be done, the freedom exists for the seven deadlies to flourish like weeds.

Critics of the Distributist vision complain that it is impractical, unrealistic, romantic, etc. In The Outline of Sanity, Chesterton takes those criticism head on. First, he says, there is a vast illusion in society that the freedom talked of by Distributists already exists in society and that it is threatened by Socialism and Capitalism. People really believe, he says, that private enterprise is really in our lives and in the society around us. People who speak this way—“those people are so blind and deaf to all the realities of their own daily existence.” “We have already accepted everything that anybody of intelligence ever disliked in socialism. . . .Capitalism has done all that Socialism threatened to do.”

Here, the Mole applauds his webby paws and chortles like a whistle pig. What did I tell you in the last missive? That bureaucracy works by expansion, that its genetic goal is to include more and more within its power, which is a blinding, controlling power, a bit like chemical fertilizer. Bluntly, the bureaucracy of the society in which you live now has already absorbed and enlisted you as “a servant of the State.” For such as person, “from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep again, his life is run in grooves made for him by other people, and often other people he will never even know. He lives in a house, that he did not make, that he does not want. He moves everywhere in ruts; he always goes up to his work on rails. He has forgotten what his fathers, the hunters and the pilgrims and the wandering minstrels meant, by finding their way to a place. He thinks in terms of wages, he has forgotten the real meaning of wealth. His highest ambition is concerned with getting this or that subordinate post in a business that is already a bureaucracy.”

That world exists, says GKC, and it is this world. Distributism is a philosophy that challenges it by insisting that a person should be more than a function of the State. So our first task is to rid ourselves of the enormous illusion that we are free and independent persons gaily living our lives outside the 9-to-5 grind. The grind is everywhere we are and we are slaves to it now. A mole already in a trap raving about Socialism encroaching on his freedom is a bit of a, well, fool?

So, a frustrated Chestertonian asked in our Cookeville enclave, what are we to do to re-establish the right proportions in the State? A fair question. If we are blind, how shall we see? And what things can we do? I will explore this question more in Missive # 5.

I think GKC is urging us, first, to take off our blinders and peep, at least like us moles, at the light above. We are already slaves of the State, and each day we become more and more unfree. Second, stop talking tommyrot about Socialism. We are already imprisoned by global Capitalism and its offspring, a socialist State created by regulations and governed by a bureaucracy. The question right now is, not IF we shall have a Socialist Healthcare system, but HOW MUCH MORE of one than we already have?

The relentless expansion of bureaucracy I talked about last time has included us in the most radical way: as diminishing persons. Not only unfree, but blind to what is happening to us. Here in the bureaucracy I burrow in at the moment, no one knows quite what I am and what I am for. I am asked to perform tasks that could be given to a sixth-grader. Performing such tasks is not the problem; I am happy to follow in the humble tracks of saints and servants. The problem is that we do not call things by their names and delude ourselves into believing that the purpose of a bureaucratic society is to help persons be free and fully human.

It is not. It is exactly the opposite. Any opossum or concentration camp prisoner could tell you that. Check the tatooed ID on your arm or cellphone..

After the Swamps, the Sacred Caves

Note: As I continue reposting from the TrueWester blog, I am struck with this Good Friday thought, which is really the theme of the post below: that the Church is always in crisis, that we always need to return to the Cross in the Desert, and while it is true--as we love to say--that "there are no easy answers"--a Chestertonian turn to this should be, yes but there are always hard answers, for the truth is as hard as the hard sayings of Our Lord. In Luke (20:17-18), Jesus refers to Himself as the stone the builders rejected but adds "Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be bruised: and upon whomsoever its shall fall, it will grind him to powder" (Douai).

After the Swamps, the Sacred Caves

“This is not a good time to be a Catholic,” I mused aloud over the very small fire where I, a very small fry, cooked my very small fish on that great Chestertonian tool, a very small stick.

“First the Notre Dame mess, then the new Irish scandal, then that monstrous book by Archbishop (retired in disgrace) Rembert Weakland, known among the faithful as ‘archbishop weakmind.’ And him a Benedictine! What would St. Benedict think? Then there’s Father Soft and Father Smooth. . . and all those sniveling so-called orthodox apologists counseling ‘be friends with Obama and he’ll change into a friend’ . . .”

“Enough,” said the gray-bearded hobo who had sat silently while I swatted swamp mosquitoes and tried to stay in the smoke. I had thought he was a mute beggar from a nearby shack town under a bridge, drawn by the smell of the tiny trout I had managed to scoop out of a shallow of the Caney Fork River.

“Enough,” he repeated, and looked me in the eye with eyes that knew suffering and truth, a surefire combination for catching my attention.

“Exactly what does all this scandal you speak of mean for you?” the old man asked. “For you personally, as they say in the sick salons of Antioch?”

“Well,” I said as I shifted uneasily and wondered about Antioch, down near Nashville, “for one thing I’m embarrassed in front of my Protestant friends. I’ve been spouting off for a long time about the timeless Rock of the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church and how we Catholics can depend upon its indefectibility and true teaching in a time of cultural confusion, and now it looks as if . . .”

“As if it really isn’t?”

“Exactly. I feel like a . . . fool.”

The old man laughed softly and drew forth a small pouch of bread and dates, which he offered.

“As if that great indefectible Church is full of heretics and governed by shepherds who have lost the way?”

I let my silence be my answer.

“Probably you will tell me that well over half of the so-called Catholics in those churches don’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist? That the catechists are teaching a wealth of Arianism and all the other heresies that grow out of it? That the priests are playing patty cake with the Divine Liturgy? That the people fear the priests are doing more than playing patty cake with their children? That the Church Christ founded looks as if it’s foundering?”

“Well. . . I . . .”

“Embarrassed! My friends in the desert up this way say that if you do not weep for your sins, you have no hope of salvation. My dear fellahin, embarrassment about the Church is one of the steps on the road to hell. Do you think my friends in the caves up this road in Thebaid would not laugh you to scorn? If you cannot endure embarrassment for the Faith, then you will be like Peter warming his hands over the brazier in the courtyard and denying Christ for fear a serving maid might think him one of His followers. Embarrassed! You probably don’t like to admit to your urban friends that the altar of the great sacrifice contains the actual bones of martyrs. A bit savage? A bit uncouth? Maybe a bit Catholic?”

“Sir,” I said as we still say in Tennessee, “who are you? Where is Thebaid? And I don’t think there is a desert in Tennessee. Caves , yeah, we got aplenty, but . . ."

“My name,” said the old man as he reared up tall and gaunt, and striking his crooked ash staff into the limestone shelf (I thought of Gandalf), “is Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and I have not seen the seat of my diocese for many a year.”

For a moment I thought he was mad, but his manner told me I had better think again.

“But, Sir, Athanasius lived in the fourth century in Africa.”

“No, Sir, Athanasius, and I am he, lives in eternity, or have you bought the teaching of Arius that the Word of God is not Eternal, and that we live only in the relativistic fogs of time?”

“No, Sir,” I cried indignantly, I am one of the faithful, the remnant, the Thomists, the ones trying to hold onto the truth. Like you, I . . . .” and I was about to sound like the traditionalist ranter I sometimes am.

Athanasius laughed softly. “Here, here, man, sit down and listen a moment. I am on my way to the caves up country and I do not have much time. A Roman legion send by the Emperor Julian is thrashing its way through this swamp behind me and they will be here within a few hours. Listen, the True Church is always pushed back into the swamps, the desert, the caves. Peter and Paul found it so, and every time Catholics forget how marginal and tough is the existence of the faithful, it runs into heresy and founders like the boat the apostles feared was sinking.”
“But you are a Doctor of the Church.”

“Yes, and doctors are called to the sick, which you are in danger of being, my friend, if you sit fretting about your pitiful state of embarrassment in front of your Protestant friends who may, after all, be the pre-Catholics we need to save our sinking boat. Heresy comes like a thief in the night and feeds on the rich foods we fancied we needed for our larders in the end times. It is like the mists over the swamps. When I was on the Nile in a small boat escaping from Emperor Julian’s plans to re-paganize the Christian world, an Imperial Galley nearly caught me and my few companions. I told my friends, ‘row toward the galley.’ The soldiers cried out, ‘have you seen the traitor Athanasius?’ My friends called into the fog, ‘he’s close. He went that-a-way,’ and so we escaped. Dear friend,” Athanasius chuckled, “I am a shepherd of the Catholic Church but I have been banished five tines and this is my seventeenth year in exile, and just now I am on my way to the caves where the followers of St. Antony dwell, where I will prepare my arguments against Arianism—again—for the next Council, which will come, yes, it will come, for the True Church will always recover. ‘My soul is troubled,’ Our Savior said in a troubled time. Do you think that your troubles are different from the trouble that He suffered in the desert and on the way of the Cross? Troubles, man, how do you think we felt when the Emperor Julian died and his successor revoked our banishment and then his successor—that was back in ought-365—banished all the orthodox bishops all over again? Excuse me, I must hurry, the hermits will be gathering for their weekly Mass.”

I stirred the ashes of the fire and looked downstream at a bird swooping to catch a small trout.

When I looked up he was gone and I, poor fool, was renewed in hope and courage, as we always can be, when we go to the saints, the doctors, the martyrs, and away from the nations furiously raging and the pundits, Catholic and non-, telling us how to think.

THE CROSS IN THE DESERT

NOTE: As I re-post old files from the TrueWester blog, this one seems best for Good Friday. Previously published in ORIENS in Australia.

THE CROSS IN THE DESERT

"To the Sojourners in the Dispersion."—St. Paul

February 18, First Sunday of Lent, Sultanate of Oman 1999It's February, and the winter weather is sweetly warm, the night desert smells toasty, and The Church of the Holy Spirit is beginning an earnest and devout Lent in the Sultanate of Oman, near Saudi Arabia, where tiny islands of Catholicism flourish like desert flowers behind compound walls. Driving to Mass, I ease my Land Rover past a broad stream of Catholics entering the narrow gate into our parish.

Since the Muslim day of worship is Friday (Saturday and Sunday were already taken), and many Catholics, especially those who work in Muslim homes, are off on one of those days, the Bishop permits Catholics in Arabia to meet the Sunday obligation on Thursday evening, Friday, or Sunday. It's Thursday today, but the liturgy is for February 21, the First Sunday of Lent.

Where are we? At the Church of the Holy Spirit, in the Vicariate of Arabia, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, where Bishop Bernard G. Gremoli, a Capuchin from Rome, shepherds the countries of the Persian Gulf. Here, unlike Saudi Arabia, where any but Muslim prayers are illegal, Christianity is permitted behind walls in Oman, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar (Kuwait, which also permits immured churches, is in a Cypriot diocese). Here, eight priests (seven Capuchins and one Jesuit) minister to some 40,000 Catholics in two churches in the Muscat capital area, Ruwi and Ghala, and one each in the port cities of Salalah and Sohar. On land generously donated by the head of state, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos, churches rise from the contributions of people who give their hearts. Here also, teams of priests and charismatic laymen carry the sacraments to thousands of workers in the interior cities of Nizwa, Sur, and Ibri, where Mass is often celebrated in private homes or hospital rooms, and to thousands more in some twenty oil field compounds. It occurs to me that many of the sheep of the dioceses of the West could be heartened by a modern epistle to the beleaguered, from the Churches in the desert, in the sign of the cross.

February 28, 1999 Second Sunday of Lent

In the desert, there are no troubling grays, deceptive ambiguities, hermeneutical confusions. Like the jar the poet Wallace Stevens once placed on a hill in Tennessee, which immediately organized all the countryside around it, the cross, if placed on any dune in Arabia, becomes a stark statement of Gospel fact. Stevens, who called for a priest on his deathbed, would have understood our ways here, where Catholicism is plain in doctrine, and rich in sound, image, and touch.

When a friend new to the country accompanied me to his first worship here, we stayed through the English Mass, for which we were late, through the next, in Konkani, sweet and beautiful in tone and music, the rhythms part Latin, part Indian. The sheer power of many hundreds of people bent in deep reverence was like something from our youth in the 1950's, something at once majestic and simple, like the house of Peter on the Sea of Galilee, where fishermen, tax collectors, and slaves prayed together with psalms and hymns, their workaday world at bay.

We are in an ocean of such simple fervor. At Christmas, children carol outdoors under palm trees in eight languages—English, Marathi, Konkani, Malayalam, Arabic, Tagalog, Sinhala, Tamil. Since almost all expatriates speak some English, the major Masses on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday are in English. Many show up for as many Masses as they can get to, and prayer groups often pray for the maids and serving boys whose Muslim families will not permit them to attend church, hoping to convert them to Islam through higher wages and less pleasant suasions.

At the back of both the Ruwi and Ghala churches, there are mosaics of St. Anthony of Padua together with plaques giving prayer instructions. The people line up after Mass, each lovingly touching the mosaic before they kneel in prayer. Many of these parishioners, I know, are praying for a new job before they are caught with an illegal visa, or for just a new job, or for home.

Whether Sri Lankan or Filipino or Pakistani or Indian, they are the mass of the three-quarters of a million expatriates that serve the 1.75 million Arabs of Oman. Like their compatriots in the other Gulf countries, they are happy to have jobs, even at the 125 dollars a month that many of them earn as domestics and laborers. Many will do anything to get to church, and when I see them striding gaily in groups up the highway, I think of Jesus among them, happy to be with men who work with their hands, Jesus of the desert, dust on His feet.

March 7, 1999, Third Sunday of Lent

I'm just a few minutes early for Mass in Ghala. Hurrying across the courtyard, I see a hooded Capuchin severely eyeing the last-minute arrivals. On the other side of the parking lot, Protestants and Greek Orthodox gather on their side of the enclosure. In the compound with Saints Peter and Paul twenty miles away in Ruwi, there are also Indian Orthodox Christians who trace their conversion to the visit of St. Thomas, and Buddhists and Hindus under tents furious with jangles and hot clouds of incense, all in the same walled compound, where liturgies and languages sometimes fly fast and furiously together, "Amazing Grace" floating above "Holy God We Praise Thy Name" and Tantric chants.

Near the chapel attached to "our" Church of the Holy Spirit, the largest in the Ghala compound, people cluster around the Lourdes grotto, some of them kneeling on the stone, some bowing foreheads to the ground, some praying with arms upraised like gaunt figures from Fra Angelico. It's only nine AM but the sun is at full blast and the sky stretches a thin, cyanotic blue over Arabia, the temperature already eighty as winter collapses into summer. Later, the second prayer of the day, Dhuhr, will thunder awake the Friday worshippers as Allah Akhbar! ricochets around this mountain basin. Never quite synchronized, the muezzins bounce their electronic calls to prayer off the barren rock faces of the towering Jabal Akhdar. Since the first prayer call at about five AM, Fajr, Islam has slept.

We are allowed no bells to answer the insistent chorus of the mosques, but we have a wooden cross, our foolishness, as St. Paul calls it, carefully tucked behind shrubbery to prevent it being seen from the roadway. It is, indeed, a scandal in this police state, permitted but enclosed by law. Where we enter from the main road, a road sign reads "The Church" in English and Arabic. To the Muslims, we are all the same. At the entrance, scrawled Arabic signals that the compound is haram, forbidden. Though the Basic Law of Oman promulgated by the Sultan guarantees freedom of religion, it excepts anything that will give "offense," which for the Ibadhi, Sunni, and Shia Muslims who live here, is much bigger than the eye of a needle.

March 17, 1999, Feast of St. Patrick

I merge with the flow going in the merciful blast of air conditioning, dipping my fingers in one of many heavily used holy water fonts. The church is nearly full, I have to scout out a pew where I can squeeze in at the end. Like everyone else, I genuflect, all the way down, not a tap at third base, and make the sign of the cross full, not a signal to the pitcher. As before every Mass here, the parishioners are booming out the rosary in dialogue between left and right sides. Hundreds of voices ring out each prayer, exactly and firmly, the English Indian-Victorian. Most have their rosaries. At the end, we say the Memorare, the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, and the Litany of the Sacred Heart and Consecration of the World to the Sacred Heart. After the rosary, as after Mass, and as always in this church, there is the delicious quiet I knew as a child, complete with the occasional bird fluttering in the apse, the soft shuffling and coughing, the distant murmur of someone praying at a shrine. The church is a place of peace, a place to come to, a place to be in prayer with the One who went away to pray in the desert.

The sanctuary lamp burns always, the church is open during the day, and people make frequent visits, many of them walking great distances to do so. The Tabernacle is beautiful, ornate in a starburst of carefully designed silver, backlit and centered in native marble directly behind and above the altar, on which an altar cloth reads, "Come Holy Spirit and Fill Us With Power." Above the tabernacle, there is a large mosaic of the twelve apostles at Pentecost, hands lifted in various attitudes of prayer, a tongue of flame over each head. Mother Mary is at the center, kneeling. The faces are individual, as are the hair styles, and very Eastern, each expectantly in awe. The line for confession stays busy right up until the Mass, sometimes afterward. The sign by the many booths reads, "Do Not Delay Your Conversion!" They have been much used today, the climax of a heavily attended three-day retreat for married couples, many of whom attend without spouses because their monthly earnings don't earn them the privilege of bringing a family into the country. When there is Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, as with today's conclusion of the retreat for couples, the congregation lustily sings Tantum Ergo Sacramentum and other Latin hymns.

Here, the war is against Satan and the horrible blankness that appears when the Gospel is gone. I try to imagine a world without the Roman Catholic Church, to imagine these crowds without the revolutionary declaration of Peter that the Holy Spirit is pouring itself on all the peoples of the earth. I try to remember what my life is like when I despair or run away: a desert without the cross.

It is the Feast of St. Patrick, the bold saint who civilized Ireland under the Celtic cross, farming the barren ground at the (then) last frontier of the West, where the Faith had retreated from yet another culture war. Historians tell us that the Celtic Cross stood at every crossroads and wayside signifying that the traveler has entered Christian land. On the post-Christian West's monotonously one-dimensional horizons, sports domes, office marts, and the Golden Arches define the new landscape, as crosses and bell towers now fast disappear into the materialist wasteland in which—except for the calls to prayer from Muslim minarets that now rattle England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and parts of America—religion is merely an anachronistic embarrassment.

For many in America, including in the church, the cross is now just another symbol in a Jungian pantheon, found more often as jewelry on tattooed teenagers and satanic rock stars than on priests and nuns. In America, many orders refuse to wear habits, they say, because the Church must now be modern, and they walk pants-suited, cross-less, and habitless through airports where young people dress—often with crosses—as Nazis or transvestite ghouls. Having forgotten that the church is not supposed to look like the world because it is set over against the world, we now face the ridiculous prospect of living among barbarians who wear the cross as a mockery or a trinket while Christians surrender the thing for which martyrs in Japan died horrible deaths rather than spit upon. When Father Varghees preaches on vocations, he says we all have a vocation to follow Jesus to the cross. It is the sacred irony of history that the Romans nailed Jews and Christians to the cross for hundreds of years until it became the sign of life.

Whether mocked and banned or mocked and travestied, the cross, hated by Islam and modernist Moloch alike, can arouse fury. In Kuwait I witnessed a wealthy Kuwaiti lady harangue an Indian jeweler for having some small gold crosses on display. "We do not want such things here in this country!" Muhammed had such a repugnance for the cross that he smashed everything brought into his house that had the symbol upon it, and according to his close follower, Abu Hurairah, prophesied that Jesus would come among the Christians and "break the cross and kill the swine." Perhaps for this reason, some Imams say that the theft of a cross or crucifix from a church does not incur the usual punishment for theft, amputation. Crucifixion is a punishment some Muslim authorities decree for highway robbery, others for blasphemy. When Desert Storm entered Saudi Arabia, a young American soldier told me in Kuwait, a whole village surrounded her white-cross marked ambulance and pounded on it, pointing at the cross and screaming with anger.

March 28, 1999, Passion Sunday

The fourth prayer call of the day has just sounded as the first Mass of the evening begins. The heat is on the rise, only the late evenings are pleasant now, and the suspicion awakens that the hottest country on earth will soon live up to its reputation. The parishioners fill the night with some hymns already known and loved, alternating politely between Filipino singsong and Indian stateliness.

As we consider the Passion of Our Lord, we know who we are, members of a body which began in the Middle East, where the Jordan flows through the desert, but which moved to the heart of the evil empire and grew in prayer, fasting, and martyrdom. As Bishop Gremoli reminded us on the Feast of Saint Joseph, Rome is the center and home of the Catholic Church, and the Pope is the Vicar of Christ and successor of Peter, the first shepherd of the flock. If we are to be Catholics, we must follow Rome in all things, he says. When I ask young Kerlalites, Goans, and Sri Lankans in Oman what religion they follow, they say "Roman Catholic, sir."

Roman Catholics all, at the passing of the peace, we bow to each other with palms pressed upward together, eastern style. At communion, flocks of sareed, unmarried Indian women throng forward, each praying for a good husband (a practice complemented by advertisements in the local English-language papers seeking suitable brides for “good Catholic boys”). The Eucharist is received on the tongue, and except on weekdays, when tincture is practiced, in one species only. During the consecration, everyone kneels. People kneel and pray in various postures, like some medieval tableau. One almost expects Saint John Foucauld to enter and hurl himself onto the floor, Islamic style. Not everyone receives, some hang back in prayerful penitence. A half hour after Mass, there are still young men kneeling and standing in adoration, their arms uplifted, finger and thumb touching, like yogas.

Evangelical fervor, one of the pastors tells me, is intense. Charismatic prayer meetings and retreats flourish. I attended one given by a Filipino priest from a large (several thousand) charismatic community in Manila which lasted for four days, filling at least ten hours each day, in which people from many countries worked hard together to learn Catholic truth. Guided and taught by well instructed priests, this charismatic movement does not conceive itself in opposition to the official church or liturgy, possibly because the official church and liturgy here regard Satan, not Rome, as the enemy.

Missions come and go to accommodate the many tongues and sensibilities of the people. English, it occurs to me, is the mysterious liturgical language here for many, and they participate respectfully; but as much as possible, missions, retreats, confessors, and special feasts honor the dozens of cultural families. One priest, an Indian who speaks Arabic and says Mass in the Eastern Syrian Rite, ministers to the Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians. Other priests rove through the diocese ministering to the smaller groups and tongues. There are, one of the priests leading the charismatic groups tells me, many, many healings and, he adds, "Jesus told us that even greater things would be done in His Name!" During a conversation with a pastor who heads the charismatics, a young high school student comes in to beg Father's blessing and prayers—he has an examination today. Father rises and the boy kneels to receive a long prayer, hands on his bowed head. Some of the fervor, Father says, pours in from Kerala in India where most Gulf Indians come from (the other source is Goa). There, Father explains, a giant retreat center in Potta receives every week between twenty and twenty-five thousand people in a five-day retreat, "irrespective of class, caste, language, or color. Here they become one, here they experience true conversion to Jesus Christ!"

Many of these people save their money to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem, which the Capuchins lead each year. In the latter chapters of Ralph McInerney's The Red Hat, an African is elected Pope, and Rome begins to fill with yellow, black, and brown peoples who, much to the displeasure of the Romans, cook their meals over charcoal in the streets and roar with pleasure when the Pope appears to bless them. The Church has shifted from the neo-pagan West to Africa and Asia, from which missionaries now come to minister to Cleveland and London.

April 1, 1999, Holy Thursday

I'm late. I have to park out near the highway as about five thousand gather for the Feast of the Institution of the Eucharist. The church indoors is full, the crowds sitting in front of huge screens. Outside thousands more fill the courtyard by our new outdoor altar. Father Jesus gives a sermon on the Eucharist, the Real Presence, and the Paschal Sacrifice that any Church Father or Doctor could sign without hesitation. "If there were no Real Presence," he says, "which is unimaginable, our churches would be empty and we would have nothing." After the basic theology, he leans over and shares his conversations about the Eucharist with Capuchin Padre Pio, the witness sent to tell us this sacrament is our eternal food. Three priests and ten Eucharistic ministers distribute communion to the five thousand. After Mass, the choir sings O Salutaris Hostia as the priests process to return the sacrament to the main altar inside for Exposition and Adoration until midnight. An hour after this begins, the church is still packed.

As I walk across the courtyard, the moon is full, the air full of smoke from outside the walls as thousands of Arab men cook evening meals by the roadside, part of the weeklong Eid celebration of their widespread belief that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice their ancestor Ishmael, not Isaac, though the Q'uran is obscure on this point and commentators divided.

The cross is alien here because even on the natural level, as Chesterton noted in The Everlasting Man, it contradicts all the East. The symbol of the East is the O, the circle, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, the enclosure of eternally struggling yang and yin. Including everything and going nowhere, it comes to nothing, Chesterton says. The sign of eternal recurrence, it spins its cycling wheel. The Wheel of Buddha, which takes the form of a swastika, spins away from being a cross into being a hoop in an endless game of illusion. "The cross breaks out of the circle that is everything and nothing." It breaks out of the eastern gnosticism in which everything is mind because Christ's broken body, stretching into eternity in the sign of the cross, dies, as poet David Jones wrote, "not on any hill, but on this hill." Today, on Easter, we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, dead on the cross and risen to the Father. When the women came to tell the disciples that Jesus was not in the tomb, they could not believe it. Everything had ended the same old way again, they thought. No, as in the Celtic Cross, the + had cancelled the O. "Behold," Jesus said, "I am doing a new thing!"

April 2, 1999, Good Friday

Today is filled with Stations of the Cross, from eight to five, in each of the eight languages of the parish. I missed the English version, so at 10:30 I squeeze in to the Malayalam service. I grab the end of a pew and hold on for dear life; our subcontinental ushers are experts at packing, and before it's over, I'm nearly off the end and into the floor in the arms of several men who are peering around a pillar. By the time Good Friday liturgy begins at 11:30, the church is chock-full, as an Indian journalist would say, and hotting up. The altar table has been removed, and behind a curtain, there is a bare cross some ten feet high, a ladder leaning against one arm. The children used this in the morning for their re-enactment of the crucifixion. The ushers have spread colorful cloths on the floor below the sanctuary, and they now pack some fifty women, of all ages, here at the foot of the cross, where they will kneel and sit for several hours. The ushers then fill all four major aisles with men until the crowd flows out into the courtyard. We are at Calvary, quiet, attentive, prayerful.

The service begins with extraordinarily haunting and beautiful Malayalam music. Malayalam is a Dravidian language, one of mankind's oldest, and the rhythms of the music are solemn and strong, some of them familiar from Indian classical music, floating above organ, sitar, and tabla. The congregation prays with palms pressed upright before the face, or with palms lifted, some of them fluttering. When the priest enters to read the Gospel and prayers, the women cover their heads.

I don't know the language but I am deeply moved nevertheless. I've heard this Capuchin preach in English, and preach well, but now in his native tongue it seems the wraps are off. The sermon is very long and passionate, rising and falling in clear patterns of dramatic parallelism, and he carries the people with him to the foot of the cross. He would give any Protestant evangelist stiff competition. The music for the Stations, obviously a translation of Stabat Mater into Malayalam language and music orders grief and fastens our meditation on the events of the Via Dolorosa, as such music should. Many in the congregation have small Stations of the Cross liturgies in pulpy, tattered pamphlets. I notice two boys, 10 or 11, each following every word and singing each verse.

"We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called . . . Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." Outside our compound, the billion-plus Muslims deny the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Trinity, the Scriptures, Original Sin, and Salvation. "Unbelievers see in the Cross nothing but Christ's ignominy," St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, "but we see the instrument of our salvation representing God's power triumphing over his enemy: the word of the cross to those that perish is indeed foolishness but to those who are saved it is the power of God." Imagine what the Stations must look like to dwellers in either Arabian or cultural deserts: people following two crossed sticks on which is hung a broken body, repeating over and over that by this instrument the world has been redeemed.

April 1, Good Friday evening

When I was an altar boy at Sacred Heart Church in the coal fields of West Virginia, nothing haunted me more than the stripping of the altar on Holy Thursday and the bare, ruined sanctuary of Good Friday. Here in Oman, our worship has not become disconnected from what the soul needs for full recognition of what is happening in Holy Week. Under the devout and hard working Capuchins, who are always full of good cheer but never possessed of silliness, primal images open our hearts to the mysteries of the Faith. Here men and women instinctively and spontaneously follow the instructions of the Apostle Paul, covering at appropriate times and praying with upturned palms. Here true theology always begins, with the women at the foot of the cross, and here true worship always returns.

April 3-4, 1999, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday

At midnight Mass for Easter, as for Christmas and New Year's, it's best to arrive an hour and a half early, minimum, before church begins if one wants a seat. Outside, the mountains release stored heat that enfolds one in an oven. Hundreds of folding chairs are already full, and behind them begin vast rings of worshippers who can glimpse the Mass on a number of television monitors. People arrive in busses, vans, and taxis driven by curious Muslims who dourly eyeball the infidel hordes. Everyone is dressed in Sunday best. In the endless sea of blacks and browns dotted with white, there is the Church Universal, ethnically uncleansed and scorning no one, Chesterton remarked with awe, accepting not only coolies but even tourists. Under spectacular stars, Christian music floats over the wall, past the Toyota repair shop where cars are slam-banged onto lorries, and toward the neighborhoods of Islam.
The Easter Vigil precedes the Mass. The service begins at 9:30 and ends at 1 AM. I'm on deck at a little before 8 to get a chair. Our new outdoor altar is splendid, and the sight and smell of thousands of candles (we bring our own) during the blessing of the New Fire and the renewal of the Baptismal promises moves me to joy, the joy of the first recognition of Easter, that life is not what we thought it was, but something so inexpressibly wonderful that we can only sing Alleluia, Alleluia in the Church's full witness that He is risen indeed.

Today Father Jesus preaches on the Church. Only the Catholic Church, he reminds us, is the full and authentic voice of Jesus Christ in the modern world. He says it simply, forcefully, without equivocation. Today we are also reminded that the parish food fair will raise money for the architectural changes we are doing for the Jubilee Year of 2000, which will include two stained glass windows, one of the Resurrection, one of the Assumption. The desert sun will blaze the images into our souls. Despite our comparative poverty, we will have these made in Italy. While many in the West have imitated the Muslims in iconoclastic wrecking, and have confused penuriousness in architecture with zeal for the poor, the Third World, mindful of what St. Thomas Aquinas said about the need for sense-images in turning the mind to understanding, picks up the shards of the West and puts them back into the churches again. Neither does the Third World neglect the poor, regularly stuffing the parish poor box in the vestibule as well as the one marked, simply, Mother Theresa.

April 3, Easter Sunday morning, the desert

A few years ago, I camped on Masirah Island off the coast of Oman. Though most Americans have never heard of it, its British air force base served as a major point of departure for the bombing of Iraq. In camouflaged hangars, American planes and other equipment still await each serial crisis. Near the base, an amateur British biologist took me to an extraordinary sight. I thought I was seeing things. It was, indeed, in the rays of the setting sun, like a vision of Resurrection: a huge Celtic Cross, towering over a small graveyard. It is the only public cross in all the millions of square miles of the Arabian desert.

The story is that an ancestor of the present Sultan Qaboos, angry that the islanders had murdered seven shipwrecked British sailors, permitted the Royal Navy to erect the cross here, and then placed a hundred year curse on the island. Fourteen centuries ago, before the rise of Islam, all of Arabia was dotted with Christian and Jewish settlements. Killed, forcibly converted, or driven out, much of their blood was spilled into the sands, often by crucifixion, just as Egyptian and Pakistani Muslims are crucifying Christians today. Seeing on this Easter the signs of hope in my brothers and sisters, many of whose families are now persecuted in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Lebanon, and elsewhere, I pray that the Holy Spirit will renew us in the cultural desert of the West, and here as well, in the real desert, where we began, where He and the Apostles walked and preached as strangers in a strange land, and where, here and there, one can find crosses, the sign of the True West, the compass for all our pilgrimages.

The Orthodox Poetic: A Literary Catechism

Note:

As promised earlier, here is the Orthodox Poetic, the wisest and most potent statement of the traditional view of "poetry" or "literature," a way of seeing and knowing that has been virtually destroyed for several generations of modern students. I received this from the author during a graduate class in literary criticism at the University of Kansas in 1963. The class was co-taught by Arvid Shulenberger and Frank Nelick, both professors in the English Department. The document and the class brought about a slow war of attrition that lasted for some years between those who believed in perennial truths and those who were relativists, modernists, pseudo-intellectuals, and other sorts that charity prohibits naming. Arvid Shulenberger was killed a few years later in an automobile accident while he was returning to Lawrence, Kansas, from Leavenworth, where he was teaching a class to convicts in the Federal Penitentiary who, he said, were good to teach because they knew about life and evil, knowledge and experience often lacking among the cognoscenti of the English department. After his death, Drs. Nelick and Dennis Quinn were soon joined by Dr. John Senior and together they started Pearson College, a college within the University in which students were taught from the perennial perspective. The war continued and reached a usual modern conclusion when the University terminated the program, but not before thousands of students had gained in grace and truth at these teachers' hands. Some of these students made their way to the Fontgombault Monastery in France where they became Benedictine monks of the traditional sort. Years later they came to Oklahoma and established Our Lady of Clear Creek Priory, which has now been made an Abbey, and which promises to become a major influence in the remaking of American Catholicism.

The document below has been little noticed by many who know of Pearson College but I would suggest that it set the tone and the mood of that undertaking and that it is an antidote to what the humanities have become in the fruits-and-nuts literature departments that now occupy our universities. More of this story may be found in another of my writings here: http: http://catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0127.html


THE ORTHODOX POETIC: A LITERARY CATECHISM

Copyright 1963 by Arvid Shulenberger

Reprinted by permission of Eric Shulenberger, JD, PhD, the author's son.

The following notes are intended as occasions for dialogue, not as opinions to be merely endorsed or rejected. For anyone who may be interested in the present state of literary opinion, it can be noted here that a few theorists including Yvor Winters and Ayn Rand have been enraged by portions of this catechism; that a considerable number like Allen Tate have found themselves "nine-tenths in agreement" with it; and that others like C. S. Lewis have admitted to "sharing an intricate frontier," in their own theorizing, with the views epitomized in the pages following.

The process of knowledge at any level higher than mere data-collecting (sc. "research") is the process of dialogue. Knowledge occurs when questions are posed and answers attempted -- bad teaching (bad scholarship) being little more than any teacher's or writer's attempt to answer questions which no inquirer has yet raised. Such is the rationale, at any rate, for the brief queries and less brief replies which make up the pages following. These pages are a residue of dialogues with many students, and with at least two of the present writer's colleagues -- Professors Franklyn Nelick and Dennis Quinn, who deserve much credit for whatever value the present "catechism" may have, and no blame for its shortcomings.

The following remarks describe literature or poetry, as that art has been 1) traditionally viewed by critics and 2) perennially practised by poets. The views represented are entirely traditional; none of them are peculiar to the present writer.

A further prefatory note: Before attempting to understand the orthodox poetic, the reader should try to clear his mind of certain 19th century dichotomies which are nowhere found in the orthodox tradition. The following paired terms, although popular in modern literary theorizing, are in the traditional view useless and misleading (when employed as dichotomies) and may well be avoided: objective-subjective; man-nature; aesthetic-scientific; conscious-unconscious; emotional-intellectual; romantic-realistic; naturalistic-symbolistic; mind-matter. The orthodox poetic agrees with modern "existentialist" thought in holding that such dichotomies misrepresent reality.

Orthodox poetic?

By an orthodoxy is meant a "right opinion" -- such working opinions as have been held by the greatest artists and authors of the Western tradition. (Heterodox, it may be added, refers merely to "other opinion," not necessarily to wrong opinion; heterodox views have often in fact been experientially true in special circumstances, without attaining to any level of general truth.)

The literary critic or student, until he is familiar with orthodox views, cannot qualify even as a heretic but only as a barbarian. (A heretic is one who rejects a known doctrine; a barbarian is merely ignorant of such doctrine.)

Doctrine?

The notes below summarize the Graeco-Christian view of what is now called "literature" -- formerly called "poetry." This is a view in which all the major authors of the Western tradition agree: Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Jonson, Dryden, Johnson, as also undoubtedly those major writers who neglected to formulate explicitly their literary opinions.

The view existed as a dominant orthodoxy until early in the 19th century, and literary works written prior to that time can best be understood by its light. To the extent that the view is simply true, it has been shared by the major modern artists and critics as one strain of the (often unformulated) philosophy underlying Western civilization.

Although the doctrine is often called in a general sense Aristotelian, it is not a view which belongs to any one philosopher except in the sense that any person can make it his own by mastering it. The orthodox poetic is not a closed "system" of thought or of "aesthetic"; it is intended simply as a view coherent with common sense, and based on the findings of common sense. ("Common sense" is defined as the natural recognition of self -evident truth.)

Where found?

Although the orthodox poetic is represented centrally by two texts -- Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Art of Poetry -- it has always existed chiefly through the spoken not the written word, among scholars (teachers) and students. It exists in that conversation or "great dialogue" which has been carried on among educated Western men since before the time of Aristotle. Like all true scholarly knowledge, it loses much of its vitality in being reduced to print. (The notion that live knowledge can exist in books is the Erasmian or Renaissance heresy; knowledge can exist only in persons. A modern academic variation of this mistake is the notion that "scholarship" equals "publication.")

The doctrine has suffered much from the intellectual confusion of the 19th century and of merely empirical "scholarship." The student seeking the living voice of Aristotle may have difficulty hearing it in any text of the Poetics, and should probably avoid the renderings of such translators out of the 19th century as S. H. Butcher, Lane Cooper, and W. Hamilton Fyfe -- persons not competent in the philosophy of Aristotle. He should read instead some such rigorous and literal translation as that of Pitcher.

Beyond that he must enroll himself in the conversation of scholars, and practice philosophic thinking. (He should also recognize the fact that a "close analysis" of the Poetics will not assist him very much. "Close analysis of texts," in the orthodox view, is an incidental and in itself a minor part of literary criticism.)

The underlying axiom?

Art Imitates Nature. Translated: Making-things imitates things-in-process -of-change. A process imitates a process. Art is essentially a process, and secondarily a product or art-object. (The critic is often concerned with processes already completed, and tends therefore to think of art as a product.)
(Mr. C. S. Lewis, apropos of the above statement, has rightly observed that art can also imitate (represent) the supernatural or spiritual. But the axiom, in the orthodox view, still stands. Art imitates nature; the nature imitated, then, may in turn symbolize (imitate) the supernatural or spiritual. Dante first renders or imitates a rose; the rose itself then becomes the symbol of an otherwise inexpressible reality. This is a point of great importance; much of modern "symbolist" poetry represents the poets' attempts to slight or to distort nature itself, to achieve a "purity" which is not humanly attainable. Such attempts represent, as Maritain has observed of Rimbaud's poetry, "the end of a long apostasy," rather than an essentially novel modernism. The most trivial sort of "new criticism," failing to recognize the relevance of art to nature, wastes its energies on the "ambiguities" and "ironies" of language when it could be concerned with the multiple significance of those natural realities which are represented in art.)

Art?

Art is making, or if good art is meant, right making. The word poetry derives from the Greek for to make. Law, medicine, bricklaying, teaching are arts. Art (a making) is distinct from science (a knowing), although it presupposes science in the maker (artist).

Nature?

The present world made up of things changing. The realm of becoming. Whatever is not pure spirit. The merely universal as existing below the transcendental. Nature is characterized as 1) enduring and 2) changing; both characteristics are necessary.

The term "nature" requires careful definition, so that no "spirit -nature" dichotomy is posited. Nature (becoming) is distinct from pure spirit (being), but is in no essential sense opposed to it. Rather it may be said that nature exists within the realm of supernature (spirit, being) -- much as man and art exist within the realm of nature. Nature itself is a composite of both matter and form (or spirit); i.e., it is hylemorphic.

Nature, existing within the realm of being, and hylemorphic in itself, is nevertheless separated as by an abyss from pure spirit. So far as unaided human reason reveals, the relation of nature to spirit is simply that of analogy (i.e., nature may be "like" spirit in one respect or another).

The above considerations are most important with respect to poetic theory. The popular academic idea of a "great chain of being," for instance, is unorthodox, and is irrelevant to Western poetry except with reference to a certain crude and naive deism of Pope. This is true because in the orthodox view there can be no "chain" or "link" connecting the transcendental with the merely universal. No great poet of the Western tradition ever believed in any such concept as the "great chain of being"; the relation of nature to pure spirit, in the view of every such poet, is that of analogy only.

The term "nature" in another and strict sense may mean the essence of any changing (natural) thing or things referred to.

"Nature" in its traditional signification never means either "scenery" or the mere appearance of things. "Love of nature" as meaning "love of scenery" -- the notion that trees are nicer than billboard s and possibly nicer than people -- is a 19th century barbarism, the roots of which are traceable in earlier centuries.

Human nature?

Defined or described in the following ways, as that part of nature (and transcending nature) which most concerns man:

1) Greek view : Man is a rational animal : living by natural law
: seeking happiness : by knowledge
2) Hebraic view : Man is a free individual : living by divine law
: seeking righteousness : by obedience
3) Christian view : Man is a wounded creature : living by divine grace : seeking perfection : by love
4) "Modern" view : Man is a sensitive animal : living by social law
: seeking security : by adjustment

The above descriptions are made in terms of the traditional four causes: the material, the formal, the final, and the efficient, in that order.

The Greek, Hebraic and Christian views as schematized above are not considered to be contradictory of each other ; each succeeding view is seen as complementing and transcending (not contradicting or supplanting) the ones before.

The view marked "Modern" is the traditional view of man-considered only-as-one-of- the-animals. As a "modern" view, it is held by atheists, humanitarians, Freudians, Marxists, and other materialists.

The Graeco-Judaeo-Christian view of man -- the first three above, with the fourth as a co-existing subordinate view -- was held by all major poets in the Christian era until at least the 19th century.

In briefest summary: Man (human nature) is seen as a composite entity who is 1) rational and 2) sensual or sensitive.

Man, a composite being, is capable of knowing truth. Man in the orthodox view is neither merely a "thinker" nor on the other hand me rely a "feeler"; he is at least potentially a knower. (Man-defined-as-thinker is a post-Descartes phenomenon.) Man's knowledge is acquired 1) through the senses, and 2) by the light of reason. All natural knowledge arrives through the senses: "Nothing exists in the intellect which was-­not first in the senses." The orthodox view thus is not merely a "defense of reason" -- a notion out of academic "classicism" but equally a defense of 1) senses and 2) reason. Both reason and senses, in man, are seen as trustworthy though fallible; i.e., true knowledge is possible.

The poet?

The maker (Greek poietes) of forms, plots, or metaphors (essentially similar things). First he sees a form in nature, and then he makes a representation of that form. By the first process he is a seer (Latin vates) and by the second a maker (Latin poeta).

As a seer, the poet can work freely to the limits of his memory, imagination, and intellect; as a maker he is limited by his technical skill, the adequacy of his tools and materials, etc. An artist of major vision (a seer or see-er) who uses words clumsily for instance, may still be a major poet -- as Tolstoy was known to be "the worst stylist in Russia."

"Seeing" and "making" in practice are parts of one process in the artist; the poet sees as he makes, and makes as he sees. Making a poem is not only a way of making, it is a way of seeing-by-making.

Literature?

Making-with-words, a particular art. The art in this broad sense is defined in terms of the tools used in it, as the art of gunnery may be defined in terms of guns. If sufficiently well -written, a thing is often called in the above sense "literature." (Not until the 19th century did "literature" and "belles lettres" in the modern sense become standard terms. Johnson's Dictionary does not, for example, include the word "literary" at all.)

Sorts of literature?

Traditionally three: 1) "History" is any verbal presentation of unique facts, often though not always in chronological order. 2) "Science" is any schematized and theoretically stated knowledge. "History" presents particulars, "science" presents general statements. 3) "Poetry," the third sort, is the art now most often referred to as "literature."

Poetry?

Essentially metaphor, one thing seen in terms of another, and represented by means of words. A greatly extended metaphor for things -as-they-are (nature) is a fiction or story. Poetry or "literature" in the traditional sense, then, is metaphor and fiction, or in more fashionable terms "symbol" and "myth."

Strictly speaking, poetry is in its form metaphor and/or fiction.

"Poetry" as named here is not verse, nor is it a peculiar "aesthetic" feeling in the reader; nor does it matter whether it is presented as "'lyric" or "novel" or "drama."

Form?

The form of a thing is its essence that element by virtue of which the thing is exactly what it is. The most central defining characteristic of a thing, the "what -ness" of a thing.

The accidental or merely external form of a thing is its "what-ness" in terms of elements externally observable -- for instance its "form" as a narration, or as dialogue (a "play" or "drama"), or as narration-cum-dialogue ("novel" or "short story"). Classification of literature by such "genres" or "types" is not very significant.

True form -- "internal" form -- is the plot, fable, fiction, myth, or metaphor which is essential to the art work in question -- the one element without which the work would not maintain its identity.

It remains to be said of this "internal form" or plot -- which Dante termed the "form of the treatment" as distinct from the "form of the treatise" -- that it cannot be described with total adequacy in any rendering; it can only be indicated, partially characterized, and otherwise approximated. This is true because "internal form" is an essence, and essences cannot be known at first hand (except in so far as essential human nature can be known at first hand and immediately by a human being).

Literary form and "plot"? (Formal cause)

These are identical. The "plot" (Greek mythos) of a poem (story, fiction) is a whole action or process as observable in nature, and as then represented in the literary work. As a whole action occurring in nature, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end -- a "shape."

A valid plot is "'invented" only in the ancient sense of the word invent (from invenire, to find): It is found in nature by the poet (seer) who sees it there. The poet's essential gift is that of seeing in nature those "plots" or forms which anyone might see, but which everyone else has missed.

A poet does not make up a plot or a form out of his daydreams or by ingenuity; he finds it. Whether he then employs a common story as skeleton on which to mount it, as Shakespeare usually did, or goes directly to nature for all his materials (not at all to books) is a matter of no importance. It is only important that the artist does not pattern his work centrally on other works, rather than on nature.

It follows also that the merely literary sources of a literary work are of secondary importance; and of course that any work having only literary sources is a trivial work. (Art imitated from other art-works rather than from nature is "academic art.")

Finally, it is to be noted that "form" exists first in nature, and only secondarily in any work of art. Literary form derives from, or reflects or re-echoes, natural form. The Coleridgean notion of an "organic form" existing by its own principle within poetry is fundamentally unorthodox.

The materials of "literature " or poetry? (Material cause)


The subject matters of fiction are the processes of nature, especially of human nature, and oftenest of such major human activities as war (conflict), love (union), and death (dissolution and/or rebirth).

These matters involve characteristically the relationships among persons -- as for example man-woman, child-parent, and sibling relationships. (The Oresteia, the Odyssey, the Oedipus plays.)

Such matters also are depicted against a background of the traditional bases of belief or of "values," as for example, God, home and country.

The foregoing are among the subject matters of major poetry; minor and trivial poetry is concerned with things instead of persons -- with (for example) scenery, words, books, and art-works. The orthodox type of the minor poem is the pastoral.

The tools of "literature" or poetry? (Efficient cause)

The instruments or means which the poet employs are words, or language. By means of words he represents such matters as war, love, and death, as those occur in nature.

Words are the instrument of literature; the belief of certain critics that "Words are literature" rather than merely its instrument is usually not a heresy but a barbarism. An excessive regard for words or "style" is a mark of idolatry, the mistaking of the means for the end. To write or read for the sake of words or style only is a practice defended by the "sophism of Corydon," an argument that the end of an instrument is merely its use, for any purpose whatever -- a sophistry originally intended to excuse homosexuality.

The words as employed in a literary work constitute its "style." The choice of words is the "diction" of a writer; the ordering of his words is "syntax."

Language as the poet's instrument is the "efficient cause" of literature, in traditional terminology. The poet himself can also be considered to be the instrument producing poetry -- an "efficient cause" at a further remove from the art itself. At a still further remove, those forces which condition the poet -- heredity, environment, and historical trends or milieux -- can also be considered to be "efficient causes." "Historical literary scholarship" of the 19th century kind, still heavily represented in American textbooks and journals, is chiefly a study of literature in terms of its efficient causes only.

As language is of much less importance to a literary work (poem or fiction) than is either its form or its material, one criterion of greatness in a literary work is that it be translatable. The major empirical evidence that Spenser's The Faerie Queene is a minor work, for instance, is that it has apparently never been translated into a foreign tongue.

What is "literature " or poetry good for? (Final cause)

It has two major aims: 1) delight and 2) instruction. Poetry imitates nature; in so far as it imitates anything at all, it delights, for man is delighted by any imitation which he can recognize.

In so far as it imitates nature, it instructs, for it is representing the real, or things-as-they-are, and to do so is to instruct.

The notions of "delight" and "instruction" are popularly credited to Horace, who cites them as the aims of poetry. He was in fact, however, merely reciting ancient doctrine, known centuries earlier to Plato and certainly believed by Aristotle.

Delight?

The shock of recognition; a perception of the similarity ("metaphor") which the poet has already seen, and which the reader now sees.

This perception of similarities is the essentially human act (man being rational); it is the first step in learning anything, and is naturally delightful to human beings. The mind is essentially an instrument for putting things together, a catalytic agent. The traditional term for this catalytic power is wit, or knowing; Shakespeare and Homer are among the greatest catalysts or wits in literature, having seen more clearly than others what man-in-nature is truly like.

Needless to observe, an art-work cannot please one unless he can perceive also, in experiencing it, the original natural process which it imitates. Jackson Pollock's paintings cannot please those unable to see, in his paintings, something of what Pollock saw in making the paintings.

A definition of "literature" or poetry?

As drawn from the foregoing considerations:

"Literature" (an art) imitates nature (e.g., war, love, death)
-- by means of words (diction and syntax)
-- in the form of
1) metaphor and fiction: true or "internal form"
2) narration and/or dialogue: "external form"
-- for the ends of delight, instruction, and others such as "catharsis”

The above definition is in order of the four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final) and exactly parallels Aristotle's famous definition of tragedy. Aristotle's definition:

Tragedy imitates men’s action (serious, etc.) : material cause
-- by means of words (various sorts, etc.) : efficient cause
-- in the form of acting (not narration) : formal cause
-- to the end of purging emotions aroused : final cause

It is to be noted that Aristotle's definition is concerned only with "external" form; form in its higher and primary sense he discusses separately as "plot" or mythos together with its contributing causes ("qualities-of-character" and "thought").

It should also be noted that Aristotle's definition is not concerned to name all the final causes of tragedy, or even the major ones (delight and instruction), but only one socially useful end of tragedy -- that it "purges" from the audience those emotions which may well be got rid of. (Despite the obscurantism of many 19th century interpreters, catharsis is a word meaning essentially purge.)

Standards of excellence?

As art imitates nature, the essential standard by which any artwork is measurable is also nature. A knowledge of critical terms or "principles," or of orthodox views like these summarized here, can be only secondarily helpful to the critic.

Art and morality?

Art is right making. Morality (prudence) is right doing. Morality consists in doing good; art, in doing well. Art aims at the good of the thing made; morality aims at the good of the maker (and user).

A murder might be well committed, and thus be a true work of art. Whether it should have been committed at all is a question of morality. The moral question is both prior and posterior, but it is not a formal question of art. The moral question takes precedence; no murder is ever justifiable, no matter how fine an art it requires or displays.

Any poem or fiction which represents the actions of man, how ever, will necessarily be representing moral behavior. This is to say that morality is a material (not a formal) determinant and element in any considerable fiction. The critic of poems (fictions), in judging the rightness of a represented moral action, will necessarily make judgments based on his knowledge (or ignorance) of prudence or ethics. These will not be moral judgments of persons (Shakespeare's Lear is not a bad man; he is only Shakespeare's representation of a bad man), but they will necessarily b e judgments based on prudential or moral views. The critic of fiction (poems, dramas), in other words, cannot by any means limit himself to considerations which are merely technical and artistic (or "aesthetic").

Poets within the tradition have quarreled, not with morality itself, but with official morality whenever (as they would insist) such morality has degenerated into mere respectability, Pharisaism, and hypocrisy.

Nature and morality?

Nature, including non-human nature, exists in a moral order and hierarchy. The orthodox principle is simple enough, although any given exemplification of it in nature itself may be difficult to perceive and comprehend.

The orthodox principle can be indicated negatively:

1) Nature is not neutral, as 19th century science supposed it to be. Ruskin's notion of "the pathetic fallacy" for instance is founded on the supposition that nature is neutral; in the orthodox view, however, nature is not neutral, nature may in fact manifest pathos or feeling, and Ruskin's opinion is fallacious.

2) Nature is not simply evil, as Manichaeans and Puritans have asserted. The proposition that "Satan is the archon of this [natural] world" is true in a material but not in a formal sense. In so far as nature consists of unformed imperfect matter, Satan is its archon; in so far as it achieves form and being, Satan cannot be its archon.

3) Nature is not purely good, as deism and Leibnizian optimism have maintained. Pope's view for instance that "Whatever is, is right," is a statement traditionally considered to be a) formally true, but b) materially false. Pope's (or Candide's) deistic philosophizing is defective in attributing perfect form (pure being) to nature itself, ignoring the imperfections which are inherent in matter.

To re-state the principle affirmatively: Nature is mixed in varying proportions of good and evil. The moral hierarchy of nature, existing in accord with natural moral law, is to be found not only in human but also in non -human nature. Nevertheless, it is rarely within the range of human capabilities to recognize and understand the non-human moral order. Hemingway and other poets (fictionists) have seriously depicted a moral hierarchy exemplified at its lower level, for example, in sharks and hyenas as distinct from higher creatures. Such poets have perhaps proceeded as far as poetic moral vision can assist them in such matters. The orthodox view maintains that the whole of nature is indeed a moral order, although much of its morality must inevitably remain a mystery to unaided human vision.

Critic?

A judge. Any reader. A qualified critic is one who knows 1) nature, and 2) the particular art in question. Such a critic is only incidentally concerned with the parts of a literary work, or even with part-whole relationships; he is chiefly concerned with whole works in their relation to general reality. He is opposed to art-works conceived as having any significant being of their own-art-works conceived as really autotelic, as having an "ontological" existence, or as existing "for their own sake." (Such attribution of being to a poet's creations is an essential element in a heresy traditionally called demonism.) An orthodox critic holds that the greatest injustice that can be done to any art-work is to take it too seriously.

Knowledge of nature and of art can be acquired only by experience plus thought plus study. A knowledge-by-description of these entities is not sufficient.

Acquiring experience takes time; for this reason there can be no such thing as a qualified young critic -- such a person cannot have lived long enough. Critics become qualified, however, only by serving an apprenticeship as unqualified critics. Young unqualified critics, if they possess a minimum of courage, can qualify as heretics. Then, after repeated pseudo-martyrdoms (for style-worship, symbol-counting, "close analysis," and other such errors) they may find themselves transformed.

-- Arvid Shulenberger