Doctor of Controversies

 Today is the feast of St. Roberto Bellarmino, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons on the Eucharist:

...a man's last will and testament should surely be drawn up in the straightforward speech of everyday life. No one but a madman, or one who desired to make trouble after his death, would employ metonymy and metaphor in such a document. When a testator says, 'I leave my house to my son John,' does anybody or will anybody ever understand his words to mean 'I leave to my son John, not my house itself standing four-square, but a nice, painted picture of it.' In the next place, suppose a prince promised one of you a hundred gold pieces, and in fulfilment of his word sent a beautiful sketch of the coins, I wonder what you would think of his liberality. And suppose that when you complained, the donor said, 'Sir, your astonishment is out of place, as the painted crowns you received may very properly be considered true crowns by the figure of speech called metonymy,' would not everybody feel that he was making fun of you and your picture ? Now Our Lord promised to give us His flesh for our food. The bread which I shall give, He said, is my flesh for the life of the world.

[Quoted in James Brodrick, S.J., The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., 1542-1621, Volume I, Burns Oates and Washbourne, Ltd. (London: 1938), p. 84.]

Sibyl of the Rhine

 Today is the feast of St. Hildegard von Bingen, Virgin and Doctor of the Church. From The Book of Divine Works:

God's power is joined to the supreme strength that consists in the perfection of shining justice, for God's power and strength cleave to one another. God's power indeed is rounded by balanced equality, because it lacks beginning and end.... For no mutability, no vicissitude touches God with increase or loss, nor does any unit of time ever divide him; rather, he remains ever without beginning, inviolate and immutable, granting life to all that is and gathering to supreme blessedness those who purely worship him.

[St. Hildegard von Bingen, The Book of the Divine Works, Campbell, tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2018), p. 420.]

Verbal Disputes and Facts

 A purely verbal dispute is of course a dispute that arises solely from a misunderstanding about the meaning of words, where there is no difference of view as to facts between the disputants: the sort of dispute which the Scholastics sought to avoid by enforcing the maxim, Initium disputandi, definitio nominis. Logicians have held the most widely divergent views about the extent of such disputes, some maintaining, with Locke, "that the greatest part of the disputes in the world are merely verbal," others, with De Quincey, that "they have never in the whole course of their lives met with such a thing as a merely verbal dispute." The truth lies much nearer the latter extreme than the former, for when different people attach different meanings to the same term the cause of such difference of usage will almost invariably be found to be a difference of view about facts. In fixing the connotation of names, in attaching meanings to terms, people are guided by what they consider to be facts..., and by their interpretation of the latter: and it is just precisely because all do not agree in their admission of alleged facts, and in their interpretations of admitted facts, that differences in connotation and definition -- leading to ambiguity, equivocation, and so-called verbal disputes -- arise.

[ Peter Coffey, The Science of Logic: An Inquiry into the Principles of Accurate Thought and Scientific Method, Volume I: Conception, Judgment, and Inference, Peter Smith (New York: 1938) p. 103.]

Fortnightly Book, September 14

 I'm running behind on this, of course.

Walter Wangerin Jr. (1944-2021) was a Lutheran pastor and a professor of English at the University of Evansville, eventually ending up teaching at Valparaiso University. He was a prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction. Most of his works are religious, but perhaps his best-known work is a fantasy novel published in 1978 called The Book of the Dun Cow, which is the new fortnightly book.

Men have not yet come, and animals protect the world from the terrible Wyrm at the center of the earth. Chauntecleer is a rooster, and as such a lord of his domain. But to rule brings grave responsibilities, and there are terrible monsters, not least of which are the evil basilisks who seek to free the Wyrm who will destroy the world....

J.-K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas)

Introduction

Opening Passage:

'Then you are so convinced by these new theories that you plan to jettison all the cliches of the modern novel -- adultery, love, ambition -- in order to write a biography of Gilles de Rais!'

After a pause, he contined:

'It is not the obscenity of Naturalism I detest -- the language of the lockup, the doss house and the latrines -- that would be foolish and absurd. Let's face it, some subjects can't be treated any other way -- Zola's L'Assommoir is living proof that works of tremendous vision and power can be constructed out of the linguistic equivalent of pitch and tar. That is not the issue, any more than the fact that I have serious reservations about Naturalism's heavy-handed, slapdash style. No, what I really object to is Naturalism's immorality on the intellectual plain -- the way it has turned literature into the living incarnation of materialism, the way it promotes the idea of art as something democratic!...' (p. 3)

Summary: Durtal is a writer who has been increasingly dissatisfied with the Naturalistic literary style that is in fashion; he was set on a different path by an experience with Matthias Grünewald's Tauberbischofsheim Altarpiece. His current project is working through a biography of Gilles de Rais. He often talks about it and related matters with his friend, Des Hermies, who is a doctor who (possibly) has considerable writing talent but has never published anything because he realized that, whatever his ability, he was never going to write anything genuinely original. Through Des Hermies, Durtal meets Carhaix, the last bellringer in Paris; Carhaix, unlike Durtal and Des Hermies, is both Catholic and married, but they forgive him such relatively minor faux pas because Mme Carhaix is delightful and Carhaix is an interesting conversationalist, if a bit obsessed by the dying art of change-ringing. (Carhaix is so obsessed with bells, in fact, that one suspects, despite his obvious commitment to the faith, that he's Catholic in part because it makes it easier to be a bellringer.)The three, I suppose, are misfit artists -- Durtal, the artist who has broken off the fashionable style and is struggling to find his own; Des Hermies, the over-curious and ever-restless failed artist; and Carhaix, devotee of an art that is almost extinct and generally no longer appreciated.

Durtal's work on Gilles de Rais is the unifying thread of the story; as we go, we find out more and more about this man who once was a fellow warrior beside St. Jeanne D'Arc and then became a Satanist executed for raping and murdering children. Des Hermies, who in his capacity as a physician has an extraordinary number of connections and acquaintances, recommends that he consider looking at how Satanists work in present-day France. The most notable Satanist of modern-day is Canon Docre, an unfrocked and excommunicated priest; Des Hermies has never met him, but he knows that the Chantelouves have connections with him. Durtal happens to know the Chantelouves, in a somewhat interesting way, since he and Mme. Chantelouve have been carrying on a correspondence affair. Durtal uses this connection to try to learn more about Satanism and, eventually, a Satanic Black Mass that Canon Docre will be holding when he visits Paris. As the progress of the Gilles de Rais research increases, and we follow Gilles de Rais in his descent into evil, Durtal seems to undergo an opposing transformation, as he increasingly comes to regard his affair as a sordid and repulsive matter and finds the Satanists, and everyone and everything associated with them, off-putting. He doesn't believe any of it, but even he is shocked and made uneasy by the intensely petty sacrilege at the Black Mass and the malice expressed toward the Eucharist; he doesn't really know why, but the sacrilege just seems repugnant. Durtal accepts none of the dogmas, and yet the sacrilege and blasphemy just seems wrong.

That's more or less where it's left. Human beings are myth-makers, and when we speak of the modern age we weave a myth -- a myth of progress, of the banishment of superstition, of clear-eyed regard for reality. And Durtal's brush with Satanism has shown him what he was already beginning to recognize in the very modern style of Literary Naturalism: it's entirely fiction. Many of the things that make the modern age bearable are just slightly new versions of things that have always been, like having a nice meal with friends. The progress of the modern age is sometimes fake -- not always, perhaps, but a lot of it is only surface deep, and some of it is covering losses and deteriorations, like the loss of the art of change-ringing. You're free, of course, to think it's in some way a good trade, and Durtal (although not Carhaix) might not criticize you for it -- but it is a deterioration being spun as progress. But even when genuine, some of the progress is really just the old enduring into the present day -- basic points of chemistry were discovered by Renaissance alchemists, and the beauty of modern Paris is partly built on the Gothic and the Baroque. Nor has the modern age banished superstition. There are astrologers, alchemists, magicians galore. There are Satanic Black Masses going on under the secular age's nose, and a few of its shining lights are closely linked to them, and modern Frenchmen are terrified of Satanic curses. Durtal and his two friends find that there is an entire movement of heretical Catholicism going around, headed by a messianic prophet named Dr. Joannes, that is opposing, with magic, the Satanic curses of people like Canon Docre. It doesn't matter whether any of this is true or not; it is there. It is very obviously not banished, and it all has exactly the same right to be called 'modern' as anything in the myth. Certainly the myth does not let the Middle Ages off for the fact that magic and Satanism were disapproved then, and indeed disapproved more harshly than they are in the modern age; the myth of modernity simply points out that it was all there. And here it is again. It exists in the same calendar year; it is fomented by the same social causes; it interacts with the same cultural context. And far from being clear-eyed about this, people tell themselves fictional stories of how it's all in the past.

An age so self-deceitful cannot be anything but sick. But the story is not pessimistic; there is a sort of hope about the world that comes out of this, although only of a limited sort. If the modern age could not eliminate superstition, maybe there is something to religion. Maybe. If sacrilege and blasphemy still exist, we have not entirely lost a conception of the sacred. Not entirely. If the modern age could not banish Satan, maybe there is something to be said for Catholics worshipping God. Maybe, and maybe something. Durtal doesn't really believe any of it. What he does know is that the myth of the modern age is a lie. Whatever good there might be in modernity, the positivists and the Satanists are cousins, the priests are often blasphemers and the politicians often corrupt, and the world is full of sordid futility and evil. To see that is a sort of progress. Evil is a clue to what really means something. Durtal, however, has not gone farther than the beginning of that. Even Huysmans did not know where it all would lead; it's not even clear that, having published this book, he ever thought he would return to Durtal at all. But even if it all stopped here, it is something to have discovered that something might lead somewhere.

Favorite Passage:

Des Hermies rose and paced the room for a moment.

'That is all very well,' he groaned, 'but this century does not give a fig for the coming glory of Christ; it adulterates the supernatural and vomits over the other-worldly. How can you have hope in the future under such circumstances? How can you possibly believe that they will be clean and decent, these offspring of our fetid bourgeoisie and the vile times in which we live? Brought up in conditions such as these, what will become of them, what will life make of them?'

'They will turn out,' replied Durtal, 'just the same as their parents. They will stuff their guts with food and evacuate their souls through their bowels.' (pp. 264-265)

Recommendation: Recommended; I would say, 'Highly Recommended', but there are parts of the book that are definitely not for everyone. (The book is in some ways like Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but with cleaner and more unified structure, and Satanic blasphemers rather than Templar enthusiasts.)

*****

J.-K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas), Hale, tr. Penguin Books (New York: 2001).

Golden Mouth

 Today was the feast of St. John Chrysostom, Doctor of the Church. From Discourse 3 on Lazarus:

Do you not notice that workmen in brass, or goldsmiths, or silversmiths, or those who engage in any art whatsoever, preserve carefully all the instruments of their art; and if hunger come, or poverty afflict them, they prefer to endure anything rather than sell for their maintenance any of the tools which they use. It is frequently the case that many thus choose rather to borrow money to maintain their house and family, than part with the least of the instruments of their art. This they do for the best reasons; for they know that when those are sold, all their skill is rendered of no avail, and the entire groundwork of their gain is gone. If those are left, they may be able, by persevering in the exercise of their skill, in time to pay off their debts; but if they, in the meantime, allow the tools to go to others, there is, for the future, no means by which they can contrive any alleviation of their poverty and hunger. We also ought to judge in the same way. As the instruments of their art are the hammer and anvil and pincers, so the instruments of our work are the apostolic and prophetic books, and all the inspired and profitable Scriptures. And as they, by their instruments, shape all the articles they take in hand, so also do we, by our instruments, arm our mind, and strengthen it when relaxed, and renew it when out of condition. 

The Provincials and the Metropole

The conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10 on the campus of Utah Valley University while speaking to students at a large public debate event. I know very little about him, beyond recognizing his picture and knowing he was closely connected with TPUSA, but every coldblooded murder under any circumstances is a loss to all of us. The event has led to a massive degradation of relations across all the political parts of social media, with endless accusations and recriminations, and some people, including teachers, who are, as they say, 'too online', have made fools of themselves and put their jobs in jeopardy by speaking positively of the murder. One would think it would just be common sense, regardless of one's political views, not publicly to celebrate a murder on a school campus at a student event if you are a teacher, but I suppose it's not actually difficult to find people without common sense in the teaching profession.

In any case, I was looking through a number of social media accounts this morning in a (futile) attempt to find more scholarly article and website recommendations for my occaional 'links of note' posts, and stumbled upon a debate about a particular case that pulled me up short a bit. It was about some positive comments made by a teacher in a high classroom about the murder of Kirk. That wasn't what made me pause. What caught my attention was that the high school was in Australia.

It's an old story. The provincials chat about affairs in the metropole in order to pretend to be cosmopolitans. What is peculiar about our moment of time is that the provincials deliberately make themselves provincials and treat the United States as the metropole even when there is no reason why they should. It goes far beyond what most people note on this subject, namely, that people pay attention to American politics because of America's global influence. This isn't like the Cuban Missile Crisis or trade wars. Rather, the domestic political issues of the United States are just copied. We saw this with George Floyd, in which you had people in foreign countries protesting a single policing incident in Minnesota, and here we have a teacher in Australia treating a political murder in Utah as if it were local politics. And it's become a joke on X.com and some other social media sites that the accounts most vociferously engaged with American politics always turn out not to be Americans. Half the world have volunteered to be an American colony, and treat themselves like the provinces of a metropole; there is a global tacit agreement for treating the US as the one place that really matters. All other political issues have to be shoehorned into American political disputes, otherwise they are treated as fringe.

It should go without saying, but perhaps doesn't, that this is bad for everyone. Most American domestic politics simply cannot bear that weight; most of it has no global significance at all. What is more, American domestic politics is weird. It does not work like politics in the rest of the world. Part of this is that we are an unusually successful republic, and republican politics always tends to be more paranoid and rough-and-tumble and tolerant of extremes than, say, the politics of parliamentary monarchies. The price of a republic is crazy people being the primary defense against crazy people, checks and balances carried to the point of a universal law, and we've been a prospering republic longer than most. We are also immense. There isn't really a single domestic politics in a population that's about a third of a billion people spread out from sea to shining sea in a federated system. There are lots of different domestic politics with fuzzy borders in a lot of similar-but-different political systems that work like capacitors, building up charge on particular issues that suddenly leap into national prominence; these suddenly-national topics then immediately start mutating on contact with new and different regional politics, in unpredictable ways. Local politics often makes a certain amount of practical sense, but in a system like this, at the national level there's not much rhyme or reason as to why at any given time we all happen to be talking about this topic rather than that. These topics get filtered through international journalistic institutions and arrive, in often highly simplified and distorted form, in other countries, where people naively take them up as a the topic du jour. 

And the discussions are often quite ignorant. One of the things that I discovered very early as an academic is that academics located outside of the United States often have really strange interpretations of American politics; this is not so much their fault as the nature of the thing. It's what happens when your conceptions of an exotic country are built mostly out of secondhand rumors about it. And make no mistake, whatever country you may live in, whatever politics might be like there, in politics the United States is an exotic land of strange customs. It's hard enough to follow and understand US politics when you are an American in America; outside of that, you have little chance at all. What actually happens, of course, is that the American topics get mapped, badly and inconsistently, on the domestic politics of other countries, so that people in other countries think that the disputes are about X when that has never been the point of the dispute at all. Sometimes these confusions bleed back into the United States, to the muddling of everything.

But the whole thing is bad on the other side, as well. There is just no reason why Australians should be treating themselves as a cultural appendage of the United States, with the political events of such a globally significant powerhouse as Orem, Utah having a centrality and importance on a level with things that happen in Melbourne or Sydney. There is no value for Australia, or any other country, in turning themselves into peasants troubled by rumors about intrigues in the royal palace. It doesn't matter how influential American politics is; it's not your own, and it's usually not that valuable or important. This doesn't mean that you can't have an interest in it, of course, nor does it mean that there are never cases of genuine global importance (but they can come from anywhere, not just the United States), but there's no reason why these issues of domestic America should be taking up valuable real estate in another country's political consciousness.

I sometimes wonder, though, if it's deliberate; perhaps people around the world talk American politics so that they don't (directly) have to talk about their own. In any case, it's an impoverishment all around.