Apophatic

There is a book on my shelves, its spine somewhat light-faded, bought many years ago at a time when its title excited me; packed up, unread, before a move; unpacked and re-shelved afterwards, the gold lettering still able to raise a frisson of promise and excitement – an undiscovered country awaiting the leisure to explore it. Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain. I kid you not.

Middle-age presents temptations and sins unanticipated or imagined in youth and frequently, nowadays, I find myself bringing “boredom” - by which I suppose I mean accidie - to the Second Plank after Shipwreck. It is a crime to be bored, a sin against all three of the theological virtues – far more pernicious than the unsubtle misdemeanours of vigorous early manhood. The thought of Art and Scholasticism brings it on in topmast-high, unconquerable waves.

It is dispersed somewhat, for a while, in the hortus conclusus of the Divine Office (Deo gratias) but also by kindred spirits, among whom I number Philip Larkin. This sometimes surprises friends, who imagine I’d find the black thread of godless despair running through all of his work repellant and indigestible. Not a bit of it. He’s indispensible to me. My wife knows why.

“Happiness writes white” he is alleged to have answered, confronted with the accusation of wallowing in gratuitous, whinging miserablism. The accusation is of course, false. Only eupeptic souls who lack, in Alan Bennett’s phrase (Bennett being himself the perfect reader of Larkin) that “fully developed capacity never quite to enjoy oneself” of which all three of us became conscious very early in life, could ever be so obtuse and fundamentally humourless as to bring it. I relish the music of his lugubrious misanthropy (“mug-faced wives, glaring at jellies”), the exquisitely placed provincial middle-class locutions (those who produce the word “ironic” here are the same people who call Gregorian Chant “relaxing”), the cold-eyed refusal to admit that there’s much else for it in an empty universe but to “flay thy neighbour, as thyself”. Larkin’s godlessness is precisely that, having very little to do with “atheism”; today’s shrill proponents of which would, it’s absolutely certain, have bored him rigid. In this he’s a far better representative of his age than a Richard Dawkins or a Christpher Hitchens. Who, after all, but a preposterous bore would waste his time propagandising for the banal and self-evident?

And yet, as with Wilfred Owen, “the poetry is in the pity”. Pity is everywhere, and it's perfectly genuine:

The Old Fools

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petaled flower
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines -
How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous, inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.

Dementia, of all the manifestations of human suffering, presents perhaps the greatest challenge to Christians. I mean this in a double sense: most obviously that my (mostly) non-practicing wife, having spent her nights lavishing inexhaustable patience and compassion on people whose illnesses frighten and repel the majority of us, will have a great deal more to show on the Last Day than me, with my finely-honed theological principles; but more: where is the immortal soul, with its irreducible personhood in all of it? What answer can one make to epiphenomenalism when it’s so obvious that integral personality disappears in precise proportion to the disintegration of the tissues of the brain, turning (in the words of a friend) a beloved and vivacious grandparent into an unrecognisable old sinner?

Art, like real theology, exists for the truth. My faith tells me that the soul of a demented man remains intact and inviolable, its operations no longer mediated, but impeded and suppressed for a while within the purgatory of a failing organism; but Larkin’s poetry is true, too. It’s a true representation, unmarred by any puerile polemic, of a godless universe. I need, periodically, good, strong doses of it.

Liturgical Movement

... My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you that put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me

from Donal Og, anonymous 8th Century Irish, trans. Lady Gregory.

Please, please, if you haven't already done so, read these two posts of Fr. Stephen:
How much is too little? How much is enough?
Another Gospel...
If your parish has moved, or effectively dropped, the Feast of the Ascension, read them twice.

Lex orandi, lex credendi

For Hilary

GABRIEL SYME was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self‑realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left— sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side street at the instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment, and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding faces. After that he went about as usual—quiet, courteous, rather gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.

He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste‑paper baskets a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he...

GK Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday

Animula

'Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul'
To a flat world of changing lights and noise,
To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm;
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,
Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,
Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,
Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,
Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure
In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,
Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea;
Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor
And running stags around a silver tray;
Confounds the actual and the fanciful,
Content with playing-cards and kings and queens,
What the fairies do and what the servants say.
The heavy burden of the growing soul
Perplexes and offends more, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more
With the imperatives of ‘is and seems’
And may and may not, desire and control.
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Issues from the hand of time the simple soul
Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,
Unable to fare forward or retreat,
Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,
Denying the importunity of the blood,
Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,
Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;
Living first in the silence after the viaticum.

Pray for Guiterriez, avid of speed and power,
For Boudin, blown to pieces,
For this one who made a great fortune,
And that one who went his own way.
Pray for Floret, by the boarhound slain between the yew trees,
Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.

TS Eliot

Breathing Together

COMING TO CONSCIOUSNESS in the wake of some catastrophe, a man gropes his way amidst the rubble and the fallout. His memory has been disrupted and his senses impaired by a recent, unrecollected trauma; he recognises, hears, sees little with any clarity. Guided, though, by some profound instinct, and sustained by unreasonable hope, as he stumbles he becomes aware by degrees of the presence of fellow human beings. Each stops and listens; each hears the breathing of the others. Are there two – or three? Hands are extended in the darkness, and the slow, painful journey continues. None asks, nor does it occur to him to ask, where the others are bound; each has recognised the same instinct, the same hope in his fellows.

As their journey advances and their solidarity develops the man admires and grows to rely upon this one’s sharper eyes, that one’s clearer head; one’s strong arm, or strong sense of structure to discern which masonry, seemingly substantial, will shelter their passage or crumble at the touch; another’s kindness and calm. After a seeming eternity of struggle during which the instinct has appeared to fail, the hope to flicker and the solidarity to dissipate amidst inevitable quarrels, desertions and defeats, the little company (no longer so little now) finds itself on open, rising ground. The air has cleared and suddenly there below them, in sharp relief, is their city - their patria – her hills, her river; the broken towers and shattered ramparts; the great, half-ruined dome.

Reconstructing Roman Catholicism
It has been my contention for some time now that what is going on in the Roman Catholic Church is not reform but destruction...

Such criticisms against this are not new, and they are formulated by a small minority in the Church known as traditionalists. Often, however, this so-called traditionalist rhetoric is embedded in its own positivist and authoritarian narratives of what the past was like and how the present should be. It is not enough to preserve in some sense the forms used in the past. One must go deeper, into the very foundations of these practices that were dismissed as medieval, baroque, and decadent. Traditionalism, as it has appeared as a movement since the 1960's, is not radical enough, in the sense that "radix" in Latin means the root of living things. Traditionalism tends to ossify liturgy, theology, and the Catholic ethos into an agenda that did not exist prior to the changes.
- Arturo Vasquez

To "breathe together" - conspirare - is the meaning of "conspiracy". It's what like-thinking, like-loving human beings do as a matter of course. It implies necessarily no organisation nor formal statement of intent; no plan of action nor party line. It’s no more than the normal and natural way of things. It’s what we all do. The wildest and most radical of all conspiracies is of those who seek to breathe together with the Man-God in His Mystical Body.

This ignorant and infirm straggler offers thanks to all friends and co-conspirators, and begs for their prayers.

Latin Passions

Among the wealth of rare and splendid things at The Sarabite, this jewel glitters especially brightly:


You

You are the sonnet
That the morning utters:

Silent, singing,
The incessant rustling
Of birds in the branches.

You are the song
That lifts up my feet,
Period of longing,
Period of sighs-
Sweet blade that
Plunges into memory
And cuts away all
That bends in sorrow.

You are the hue of
The sky in spring-
The light that glides off
The streams that
Gallop over stones.

You are the muse,
The recitation,
The singer,
And the tear-

All of this you consume
In your gentle eye-

And I fade away,
Lost and lifted up
In morning's prize.

Arturo Vásquez

Meanwhile, at The Muniment Room, TTony reflects on his missed Spanish wedding.

The parish church of St Eloi, Andernos, on the Arcachon Bassin, where Mademoiselle became Mrs Moretben according to the traditional rites of the Roman Church. In the foreground are the ruins of an earlier Gallo-Roman basilica.

Ignatian Retreat

"I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today depends in great part upon the collapse of the liturgy"
- Josef Cardinal Ratzinger

"If we consider the bimillenary history of God's Church, guided by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, we can gratefully admire the orderly development of the ritual forms in which we commemorate the event of our salvation (...) The Eleventh Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, held from 2-23 October 2005 in the Vatican, gratefully acknowledged the guidance of the Holy Spirit in this rich history. In a particular way, the Synod Fathers acknowledged and reaffirmed the beneficial influence on the Church's life of the liturgical renewal which began with the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. The Synod of Bishops was able to evaluate the reception of the renewal in the years following the Council. There were many expressions of appreciation. The difficulties and even the occasional abuses which were noted, it was affirmed, cannot overshadow the benefits and the validity of the liturgical renewal, whose riches are yet to be fully explored..."
- Pope Benedict XVI

“What seems to me to be white, I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church thus determines it.”
- St Ignatius Loyola

Monet, Monet, Monet...

MONET - ROUEN CATHEDRAL

My modest collection of recordings includes almost none of the Romantics. I mention this gratuitously, to reassure those who detected a whiff of something incongruous and unsavoury about the Evil Denizen of the Undercroft weeping like a milkmaid under great waves of Richard Strauss as matter of routine. I make an exception for the Four Last Songs as a kind of sublime summing-up of something that ought to be kept mostly in quarantine, for all of the reasons ably presented by the visitors to my combox on the posting below. There. I'm glad I was able to clear that up. A pint of milk, please barman - in a dirty glass.

I mentioned similarly ambiguous feelings about Duruflé, organist and choirmaster of the great Cathedral of Rouen in the period just before the Council, whose characteristic ouevre, exemplified in his Requiem, is liturgical plainsong tastefully re-clothed in exquisitely respectful orchestration and subtle polyphonic variations. Duruflé himself provided two scores for the Requiem - one for choir and orchestra, another for choir and organ. It is therefore eminently useable liturgically, as its composer, a genuine lover of the liturgy, had intended.

So far so good. Like the high altar and canopied cathedra of Rouen Cathedral itself, reconstructed after war-damage in fine, minimal late-Liturgical Movement style (infinitely preferrable to the baroque monstrosity squatting in the chaste sanctuary of Chartres), but now a mere repository for the dust stirred by rarer visitors to that abandoned cul-de-sac east of the cuboid People's Altar under the crossing, it represents a kind of culmination, abandoned almost in the instant of its appearance; a sad, evocative glimpse of a discarded vision.

I loved - still love - the Duruflé Requiem; but along with related manifestations of the pre-Conciliar Liturgical Movement I have begun to regard it with a certain resentment. The feelings of longing and wistfulness it conjures are not, I fear, related to that holy fire kindled in the soul by the Gregorian originals; more a kind of fuzzy, naturalistic, emotional mirage or impression. And now, whenever I hear those Gregorian melodies in their proper liturgical context, my mind involuntarily fills them out with Duruflé. I can't quite get rid of him, and I'm not pleased. He's interfering with my prayers for the departed, and wafting me off somewhere quite remote, I suspect, from the Rex tremendae majestatis.

TTony wonders whether Duruflé has enhanced or merely adulterated the plainsong setting of the Requiem Mass, superimposing a dubious romantic sensibility on its gothic austerity. I don't think that's quite right. I think he's Monet-fied or Debussy-ficated it, which might be something even worse.

The Third Last Song

...requiring no superfluous comment from me.

Letters to a Fundamentalist Friend - II

PART TWO - THE HEART

FATHER STEPHEN FREEMAN, whose blog I recommended to you last time, describes himself somewhere as an “ignorant person”. I must warn you that I am not only ignorant but retarded, partially as a consequence of having mistaken apologetics and arguments (of the type in which the internet abounds) for real theology - which is, as he reminds us, only ever about a Person. If you and I are shipmates, though, that's a privileged relationship: we've come aboard at quite different ports - on different continents, with utterly different cultures, I daresay. Meanwhile, our destination remains a possibility merely, a place of the imagination, until the moment when straining eyes glimpse through early morning haze the sunlight on that dome, these ramparts. Meanwhile with nothing between here and there but wide-open sea, we can be frank in a new way. So let me tell you what I think I see already:

Here is something that has tantalised and fascinated me for years: “orthodoxy” is not, in the first instance, “right belief” at all – but “right glory”. That’s what the Greek words mean. Of course a modern Greek will also understand “orthodoxy” in the sense more familiar to us; but when the choir chants Doxa Soi Kyrie, doxa Soi, he certainly doesn’t hear Doctrine to Thee, O Lord, doctrine to Thee.

Does this perhaps go to the heart of what has gone wrong with “modern” Christianity? This submerged sense of the word “orthodoxy” seems baffling to the western mind, habituated more and more, from the late Middle Ages on, to thinking almost exclusively in terms of “correct doctrine” as first in the order of precedence – to the point at which almost everything else is up for grabs. What has troubled me most of my adult life is a nagging sense of deepening divergence between the Catholicism of the Catechism and Catholicism as it actually presents itself to the believer today – as though, provided the “theory” continues to be asserted and officially upheld, it doesn’t much matter about anything else. If true, it's madness, as the most basic analogy will tell us:

How do we go about understanding our mother? Having first drawn life from her, do we begin to place the greatest emphasis subsequently on having a firm, correct theoretical understanding of the notion of maternity, childhood and the governing principles that ought to determine the interaction between them? Is the quality of our relationship with her a direct function of our having acquired a theoretically “correct” apparatus? Having done all that, do we then advance to “loving“ her – as defined essentially by approaching her in the way that seems most “correct” to ourselves (punctiliously formal or offhand and matey, according to taste), while crooning sentimental ditties at her? Would that make us good children?

Children give “right glory” to their mothers because they first of all suckled them and lived with them and loved them before it ever occurred to them to think of the relationship in terms of what was correct and what wasn’t; when a child runs to his mother in love, or joy or distress; or tries to please her with some little gift; weeps when she weeps, laughs when she laughs; or, years later, carries her to the lavatory, cleans up her vomit, closes her eyes, lays her in the earth and weeps out his heart in gratitude to and for her – does he do this because he got it all out of a book? And having done it, could some other person who’d studied the book more assiduously claim to understand the whole mysterious business better, nevertheless?

How does this apply to the way we live our lives with the God we claim to love? Do we really live with Him - or are we content merely to study Him and scrupulously measure the quality of our continuing interaction with Him according to approved theoretical models?

Prosper of Aquitaine, a pupil of St Augustine, in the fifth century provided the West with a famous axiom - one it has all but forgotten- condensed in the phrase lex orandi, lex credendi : “the law of prayer establishes the law of belief”; or to put it more directly, “as you pray, so shall you believe”; or “if you habitually approach God in a way that really isn't consistent with what you believe in theory, your beliefs will gradually conform themselves to your behaviour”. It’s obvious really - we are not angels, but men.

Correct doctrine is fundamentally important – but the manner in which we aquire and maintain it is more important still. Just as we know and love our mother as a consequence of living intimacy with her, so our sensus fidei, our instinctive “feeling for the faith” develops as we meet and live with Our Lord in His Church, and especially as together we follow Him, fasting and feasting, from cradle to Cross and beyond, in the Liturgy. “The Church is Jesus extended in time and space in the souls of those united to him.” It is the Mystical Body visibly incarnated. Christianity is not, and never can be a “home alone” affair; neither can you do it “by the book” (Fr Freeman); nor is the Church, in contradiction to the Incarnation, a purely invisible entity without a tangible body or a distinctive, audible voice. Does it speak to us of “truths” that contradict Scripture? Impossible. Truth is Truth. On the contrary, in the Divine Liturgy, all Scripture finds its true and proper context as the very voice of the praying Christ.

The central, defining, foundational act of the faithful soul is prayer. "Correct doctrine" merely, will not "transform us in Christ". Worship which, whatever we assert about it, is in reality no more than "a dance around the Golden Calf that is ourselves" (Cardinal Ratzinger) will in any case degrade it. Instead of growing into fuller personalities, by participating in the life of the True Personality, we will become the brittle, neurotic, inhibited, fearful, spiritual hypochondriacs and hygiene fetishists you described. To paraphrase Father Freeman again: pray, go to Church, receive the Sacraments, forgive and ask forgiveness, give stuff away. Stop pretending we can ever know all the answers. Then we’ll begin to know Him. Everything else will follow.

Letters to a Fundamentalist Friend

PART ONE - THE HEAD

Dear T.,

You will notice from my address* that I am presently at sea. The voyage is arduous and uncomfortable and there are no guarantees it will ever make port. I am, nevertheless, queasily embarked; twenty-five years of haunting the quayside are at an end.

The sea is a kind of desert, so the opportunity is presented to make a better Lent than usual. If the condition of orthodoxy in one's faith is "to think with the Church", the Christian must in addition learn to "think with the heart". Christianity is incorporation into the life of a Person – it isn’t an argument or an ideology. I am for the time being persuaded that the preoccupation with proofs and demonstrations of proofs, of controversies and their logical resolution, is radically prejudicial to “thinking with the heart”, in addition to being practically futile. "Internet religion" is, moreover, a very poor substitute for the real thing, and it's highly doubtful that the hours most of us spend strutting and fretting on this cold little stage are in any way pleasing to God, or helpful to our salvation. We could – therefore should, probably - have been praying, or just playing with our children instead. So, in addition to bodily fasting, a few weeks' retreat from cyberspace is probably all to the good. Kyrie eleison!

Another advantage of the desert, of course, is a certain enlargement of perspective one gains from being temporarily apart from the fray...

…

I WILL BRING OUT those passages of scripture which speak to me with perfect clarity of Our Lord’s promises to His Church, and you will decline to accept that these passages ought to be understood as the Church has always understood them. So which perspective is, on a balance of probabilities, the authentic one? No-one ever came to Scripture without some sort of hermeneutical “key” – it’s impossible. The only question is, then – which “key”? The Fathers, to whose witness I defer, acclaimed by the Church within their own lifetimes for clarity of teaching, purity of doctrine, and – most importantly of all – manifest holiness of life, reveal an unbroken, continuing tradition of interpretation from the very birth of the Church. I will therefore always strive to understand Scripture in the same sense as them. This is vitally important for me. God does not change; no jot or tittle will pass away. There is no value or point whatsoever in Scripture admonishing us to hear something called “the Church” as the “house of God and ground and pillar of Truth” if this “Church” cannot be identified with any certainty. Where, then, is this Church? There is no point in appealing, circular fashion, to Scripture, because it’s precisely the interpretation of Scripture on which we disagree. Secondary sources then - witnesses to how the first Christians themselves understood the Church and the Gospel:

The true knowledge is the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient organization of the Church throughout the whole world, and the manifestation of the body of Christ according to the succession of bishops, by which succession the bishops have handed down the Church which is found everywhere.
St Irenaeus

One quote, plucked from among innumerable others, by different authors, all in the same vein. Note that Irenaeus, writing in the second century, already speaks of the "ancient organisation of the Church".

This Church, then, was, and must remain, visibly constituted: go to any second century town, as the Fathers again bear witness, and ask “where is the Catholic Church?” You will - now, as then - be directed to a people gathered together with presbyters and deacons under a bishop in the Apostolic succession; who teaches, governs and sanctifies each local or particular church in communion with the Universal, “holding-all” Church whose unchanging, integral faith, order and sacramental life all of its members, united to its Head, maintain. The oft-asserted notion among the “reformed” communities, of the myriad modern “denominations” being equivalent to particular churches, the sum total of which constitute the “catholic church” despite the absence of any meaningful unity of faith, sacrament or constitution is, I’m sorry to say, a fanciful and anachronistic absurdity which can’t survive a moment’s honest encounter with the first few centuries, during which the Church asserted her catholicity precisely as the note distinguishing her from schismatic and heretical sects. Nothing has changed.

Where, then, is the record of holy souls in the first centuries, raising their voices and shedding their blood for the sufficiency and pre-eminence of scripture against the rise of usurping “Catholicism”? Where are their writings? Where are their witnesses? Where, for that matter, is any indication that Our Lord intended New Testament Scripture (which He never mentions) rather than, and apart from, the “teaching Church” (of which He speaks in the most exalted terms) to provide the sole, sufficient, infallible rule of faith? From my point of view this complete absence of any “parallel tradition” is itself sufficient to render incredible the Protestant account of Christianity, before even beginning to address the hopeless internal contradictions inherent in sola scriptura itself.

On the other hand, if catholic Christianity which alone can lay claim to a historically verifiable, continuing tradition from the Apostles to the present day is a human fabrication, then everything is rendered definitively uncertain – especially Scripture, the contents of which were discerned according to the tradition and by the authority of the Church. If what Christians took for fifteen hundred years to be the “House of God and ground and pillar of truth” was never anything of the sort, then Scripture has proved an unreliable guide throughout most of the Church’s history. What use is a scripture that insists I “hear the Church”, and then leaves me uncertain about what and where the Church is? How reliable is a scripture in which God promises to lead us “into all truth” and to be with us always, prior to abandoning us almost immediately to all sorts of ruinous, fundamental errors?

Perspective, again - mine versus yours - on the subject of false “triumphalism” and the gates of hell not prevailing: from the very beginning the Church has to struggle to distinguish herself from those errant and self appointed “pastors” - the wolves in sheeps’ clothing who “gather apart”; then the terrible Arian crisis when it really did seem for while tht all was lost; the constant threat of subjection to secular authority; the schism between East and West; the Great Western Schism; the administrative and juridical chaos of the late Middle Ages; the Protestant revolt; Jansenist rigorism versus Jesuit casuistry; the Deists and rationalists; religious nationalism; Revolution, ultramontanist reaction and the disorder and degradation following Vatican II’s ill-conceived and incredible attempt to synthesise them; the long martyrdom of the East under Islam and then atheistic Communism – well yes, I agree: it would seem as though “crisis” were indeed the “fifth mark” of the Church, and that Hell has come perilously close to prevailing throughout two millennia. There she still is, nevertheless – with the same unchanging faith, the same sacraments the same constitution, the same essential unity, miraculously preserved – unless the whole of what we call Revelation is a deep and disastrous delusion.

* i.e. "Sailing to Byzantium" - the beginnings of a serious and "heart-thinking" encounter with Orthodoxy.

PART TWO - THE HEART

Sent to Coventry

DEAR Friends and Visitors

I'm presently working away from home (and PC) on a short-term contract until the end of February. Exchanging family life in rural Sussex for a Bed & Breakfast in the industrial West Midlands four nights a week is not without its compensations, though: material is accumulating for a return to active blogging in March. Meanwhile, my sincere thanks to wellwishers, friends and visitors, and apologies for the enforced vacation.

Suspended amidst a riot of discontinuities, living and working in one of the most radically disrupted areas in Europe, I suppose, I find the theme recurring in my B&B reading: Francois Mauriac, Ian McEwan and Joseph Conrad so far - all informed or preoccupied by rupture at one level or another, or so it seems. Perhaps it's a symptom of projecting, monomaniacally, one's own preoccupations onto the world at large; or perhaps discontinuity, like paradox, is intrinsic to the music of life, and deafness to it is more or less equivalent to being mad.

The picture? Coventry Cathedral, as re-ordered by the Luftwaffe.

With prayers and best wishes to all; see you after the motu proprio - or perhaps sooner...

Ben Donald

Rorate caeli desuper !
Heavens distil your balmy shouris,
For now is risen the bricht day ster,
Fro the rose Mary, flour of flouris;
The clear Son, whom no cloud devouris;
Surmounting Phoebus in the east,
Is comen of his heavenly touris;
Et nobis Puer natus est.

Archangellis, angellis, and dompnationis;
Tronis, potestatis, and martyris seir,
And all ye heavenly operationis,
Star, planet, firmament, and sphere,
Fire, erd, air, and water clear,
To him give loving, most and least,
That come in-to so meek manner;
Et nobis Puer natus est.

Sinneris be glaid, and penance do,
And thank your Maker hairtfully;
For he that ye micht nocht come to,
To you is comen full humyly,
Your saulis with his blude to buy,
And loose you of the Fiendis arrest,
And only of his awn mercy;
Pro nobis Puer natus est.

All clergy do to him incline,
And bow unto that bairn bening,
And do your observance divine
To him that is of kingis King;
Ensence his altar, read, and sing
In haly kirk, with mind degest,
Him honouring attour all thing,
Qui nobis Puer natus est.

Celestial fowlis in the air,
Sing with your notis upon hicht;
In firthis and in forestis fair
Be mirthful now, at all your micht,
For passit is your dully nicht;
Aurora has the cloudis pierc'd,
The sun is risen with glaidsome licht,
Et nobis Puer natus est.

Now spring up flouris fra the root,
Revert you upward naturally,
In honour of the blissit fruit
That raise up fro the rose Mary;
Lay out your leaves lustily,
Fro deid tak life now at the lest
In worship of that Prince worthy,
Qui nobis Puer natus est.

Sing heaven imperial, most of hicht,
Regions of air mak harmony;
All fish in flood and fowl of flicht,
Be mirthful and mak melody:
All GLORIA IN EXCELSIS Cry,
Heaven, erd, sea, man, bird, and beast,
He that is crownit abune the sky
Pro nobis Puer natus est.

William Dunbar OFM (1460-1530)

Wishing a very happy and holy Christmas to all visitors and friends of the Undercroft. Apologies for the light posting schedule of late; I expect things to pick up in the New Year.

In Christo Domino

Ben Donald

Here's tae us!

HOME, CIRCA 1960

"WHO, THAT HAS a feeling for warfare, would fight with a Scotchman? Such a one, I hope, does not breathe; the plain fact being that if a Scot beats you, he beats you; whereas if you begin to beat a Scot he will assuredly bawl, in the King's name, for the law. “Hech, sirs, rin for the polis. A'hm gettin' whupped!” Let us therefore continue our discourse amicably.

Your proper child of Caledonia believes in his rickety bones that he is the salt of the earth. Prompted by a glozing pride, not to say by a black and consuming avarice, he has proclaimed his saltiness from the house-tops in and out of season, unblushingly, assiduously, and with results which have no doubt been most satisfactory from his own point of view. There is nothing creditable to the race of men, from filial piety to a pretty taste in claret, which he has not sedulously advertised as a virtue peculiar to himself. This arrogation has served him passing well. It has brought him into unrivalled esteem. He is the one species of human animal that is taken by all the world to be fifty per cent cleverer and pluckier and honester than the facts warrant. He is the daw with a peacock's tail of his own painting. He is the ass who has been at pains to cultivate the convincing roar of a lion. He is the fine gentleman whose father toils with a muck-fork. And, to have done with parable, he is the bandy-legged lout from Tullietudlescleugh, who, after a childhood of intimacy with the cesspool and the crablouse, and twelve months at “the college” on moneys wrung from the diet of his family, drops his threadbare kilt and comes south in a slop suit to instruct the English in the arts of civilization and in the English language. And because he is Scotch and the Scotch superstition is heavy on our Southern lands, England will forthwith give him a chance, for an English chance is his birthright. Soon, forby, shall he be living in “chambers” and writing idiot books. Or he shall swell and hector and fume in the sub-editor's room of a halfpenny paper. Or a pompous and gravel-blind city house shall grapple him to its soul in the capacity of con-fidential clerk. Or he shall be cashier in a jam factory, or “boo and boo” behind a mercer's counter, or “wait on” in a coffee tavern, or, for that matter, soak away his chapped spirit in the four-ale bars off Fleet Street."

TWH Crosland – from The Unspeakable Scot (1902)

More Hermeneutico-whatsit

A SLIGHT and rather querulous post of mine last week provided the thin compost from which a truly illuminating crop of comments sprang up. I am deeply grateful to all who contributed – particularly to Daniel Mitsui for articulating so effectively his “Hermeneutic of Recovery” (to coin a phrase) to which I also subscribe, and which makes it possible for me to remain a Roman Catholic while conceding almost all of the points addressed with such devastating effectiveness by Orthodox brethren. I’m provoked to return to it today by the speculations of my friend Tony at The Muniment Room, on the reception the fabled motu proprio is likely to receive at the hands of the English (and not just the English) hierarchy – of which more subsequently.

This whole “Hermeneutic of XYZ” business originates, of course, with that famous address the Holy Father gave to the Roman Curia almost exactly a year ago (I say “famous” in the sense that every Catholic blogger of traditionalist and conservative stripe has been over it with a toothcomb in the intervening year; beyond this and its immediate audience, I suspect it might as well have been played on a dog-whistle). It has been adopted as a kind of “mission statement” by conservative Catholics, something that provides both a key to the upheavals of the recent past, and a modus operandi for the future.

But does it? Almost every post on this blog that deals directly with the crisis in the Church is an exercise in elaborating a single idea – that Catholic belief and Catholic practice have become dangerously bifurcated as a consequence of an unbalanced ecclesiology, the origins of which are to be sought far further back than the Second Vatican Council. The hermeneutic of Continuity sets out to draw things back together by insisting that they were never legitimately loosened, far less separated, in the first place: that the discontinuities actually experienced by real live Catholics – those who approved, those who disapproved and the majority who remain absolutely indifferent because they "follow the Pope" – are the consequence of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, misapplications. In other words, another theoretical apparatus is proposed, to cover practical discontinuities that remain self-evident nevertheless to very nearly every adult in every diocese of the Catholic world.

To return to the burden of Tony’s post, then: this “Hermeneutic of Continuity” - can you touch it? Can you smell it? Can you sing or pray it? Can you make an icon of it? Will it lodge in the imagination of a five-year-old? Will it enable her to grow up understanding why we have to drive past four Catholic churches to attend a Mass thirty miles away?

So long as the answer to any of these questions is “no”, I’m afraid it’s of absolutely no earthly use.

Yper tou agiou Oikou

THANKS TO JOHN for this beautiful image of the Great Church, accompanying his poignant commentary on an article by Rod Dreher:

"Benedict has a clearer eye about Islam than his predecessor... [and] he is not prepared to pretend that it is of no matter that in Europe Muslims are free to worship as they please and to build mosques at will, while in Turkey and the Muslim world, Christians are generally not permitted to build churches and face state-sanctioned discrimination. It is better, says Benedict, to speak frankly about the world as it is, rather than about the world Western elites wish we lived in."

Log on to the Aghia Sophia site, to demand restitution and an end to Turkey's century-long ethnic cleansing of Christian minorities, as a precondition of EU membership talks.

In paradisum deducat te Angeli

OF YOUR CHARITY

"Please pray for the soul of Fr. Michael Charles Crowdy who passed-away mid-afternoon to-day in the care of the Bevan Family in Dover.

Fr. Crowdy was born on the 21st. November 1914, a solicitor by profession; an Anglo-Catholic convert he was Oratory-trained for the priesthood in Italy.

In latter years, to all intents and purposes, he became an itinerant priest and as late as August of this year travelled on his motorcycle...some 60 miles or more to take The Mass to outlying locations. He returned the next day, fully caped, having ridden through inclement weather.

Attempts to restrain him were to no avail, both cancer and Parkinson's notwithstanding, he said his last public Mass in Taunton on All Saints Day. On one occasion he was persuaded not to travel to a Mass Centre, but it was later discovered he had taken Communion to a sick parishioner even further distant."

May his soul and souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.

(Thanks to Sixupman for this notification)

Respectable

MGR RONALD KNOX, somewhere, illustrates a salient difference between Protestantism and Catholicism by means of an “umbrella test”: if a man leaves an umbrella behind in a Catholic or a Methodist chapel, in which of these can he be confident of finding it, just where he left it, on the following week? We know the answer – or at least we used to: if you leave an item of property behind in a Methodist chapel, it will remain untouched until you retrieve it, except insofar as some kind soul may have set it aside for safekeeping until your return. Anything left in a Catholic Church will be nicked - full stop.

Knox’s point is also mine, and that of Arturo Vasquez; far from wringing his hands over “what this says” about the degenerate condition - as compared with their respectable counterparts in the Protestant sects - of those nurtured with the rational milk of Holy Mother Church, Knox rejoices in this certain indication of the presence of sinners within her bosom as yet further proof of the authenticity of her claims.

In Great Britain we were used to this dichotomy. Here, the Established Churches (Anglican in England, Presbyterian in Scotland), except for their more remote rural parishes, have always in modern times been identified with the middle-classes at prayer. The “Non-conformist” Protestant sects (Baptists, Methodists, Wee Frees etc) were a button down on the cuff perhaps, but still solidly bourgeois for all that. Catholics were the rabble – inbred recusant backwoodsmen, dubious bohemians and wayward aristocrats, together with the lowest of the immigrant urban poor, ten-to-a-bed in the tenements of Glasgow and Liverpool. This was one of our chief glories and, as Knox suggests, an apologetic all on its own.

Not any longer: a pincer movement of what passes for “prosperity” and the surrounding post-Protestant culture, avidly assimilated as part of the aggiornamentist project and apotheosised in smug, inverted, bourgeois liturgy, has sliced deep into the Catholic soul. Leave your umbrella in a suburban Catholic Church today (an ugly-on-purpose cinder-block affair, self-consciously tricked out in that tell-tale conjunction of low kitsch and middle-brow minimalism) and somebody in nice knitwear, wearing a strange facial expression known in Protestant circles as a SWEG (Sickly Weak Evangelical Grin) will make a point of handing it back to you. It makes me sick to my stomach.

Are “Traditionalists” immune? Not a bit of it. The dominant influence in English-speaking Traditionalism, as in English-speaking-everything-else, is American. In an astonishingly prescient piece posted at the Lion and the Cardinal, HL Menken anatomises the baneful influence of American Protestantism (a stupider, louder, more saccharine-puritanical mutation of the Anglo-German original) on US Catholic clergy two generations before Roncalli’s Folly made assimilation of it obligatory. To this, modern US Traditionalists have added their own dreary distillation of Maynooth Jansenism, so that wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of the ancient faith, the conversation is less likely to tend to the recovery of liturgical spirituality than whether or not we ought to read Dante (who condemned several Popes) or Chaucer (who wrote about toilet matters and immoral liaisons); whether or not every picture since Fra Angelico (with the exception of low charismatic kitsch) is cunningly concealed filth, the work of some unspeakable heathen degenerate; whether or not an honest wife and mother doing a bit of gardening in her jeans runs the risk of falling into trans-sexual lesbian breadwinning...

Puritanism is not Catholic. It is not even human. Prudery is not purity. Respectability is not holiness, but if anything, an actual impediment to holiness. The Church of Christ is home to saints and sinners; the merely respectable are quite welcome to shift for themselves.

Rover's Return

Pseudo-Iamblichus, the Thinking Man's Maverick, is back on the block following a sojourn among the Saxon; but if you think he's going to cease lobbing bricks through all the right windows, you're in for a shock.

This decision will not affect how I write nor my criticisms of Catholicism, of the Pope, or of Catholic history in general. So do not hold me accountable for being inconsistent with the ethos that dominates the Roman Catholic Church or the traditionalist movement within it. I am going back to being a plain old Roman Catholic (with heavy unorthodox Lefebvrist sympathies), and not joining the Pope Benedict XVI Fan Club nor the Church of Pope Pius XII Re-Enactment Society.

Link bar amended, Arturo.