Steinberg, Leo. THE SEXUALITY OF CHRIST IN RENAISSANCE ART AND IN MODERN OBLIVION. 2nd Edition, revised & expanded. University of Chicago Press 1996. 417 pp., 300 ill.
"2nd edition" is mildly misleading. Professor Steinberg has had reprinted the text of his original work (1983) with a new second part (RETROSPECT 1995) of equal length and substance. In this new part, Prof. Steinberg adds further discoveries, illustrating his topic and takes up the objections raised to the first. The whole is more agreeably and better printed.
Although (perhaps, because) clearly stated in the title, the topic has been widely misunderstood. The book treats of one aspect of the major Christian theological matter: the claim by and for Jesus Christ that He was God - in the Person of the Son of God - in the flesh: that for the saving of His human creatures, and in fulfillment of the promise made to the chosen people, He submitted Himself to becoming one of those people: that He subjected Himself to the limitations of the flesh and to the rules laid down by Himself for those people from babyhood to death.
The "sexuality" of the title is a modern academic genteelism. In older more thoughtful days, the first part of the title would have read something like "Observations On The Depiction of the Masculinity of Christ In Certain Paintings and Sculptures of the Renaissance". Prof. Steinberg's title, as his subject, indirectly contrasts such depictions with those of the more and more effeminized depictions of the 19th Century and later. Hence, the "Modern Oblivion" of his title.
Following publication of Prof. Steinberg's first volume, the subject - the iconographic theme - has become so readily apparent that it is now widely and casually accepted. In her book on Manet, Beth Brombert, unoffended, writes of "the visibly masculine male" of Manet's Christ Surrounded By Angels, [in Baudelaire's more accurate language : Christ ressuscitant, assiste par les anges].
[The discussion of this painting (no. 74) in the catalogue of the big 1983 Manet exhibition makes an interesting coda to Prof. Steinberg's observations. The author of the entry goes on and on about contemporary opinions of the painting, with many exact citations, and learned reference to Renan's Vie de Jesus. The anatomical innocence of the writer, and of the critics cited, is apparent in the references to the figure depicted as that of a "corpse". A full-blooded and muscular corpse, after some 36 hours in the grave! The aquarell by Manet after the painting emphasizes even more the masculinity of the male. The whole discussion in the catalogue - contemporary with the publication of Prof.Steinberg's thesis - is a lovely example of the habit of art historians or critics to write all around the painting, while the painter is going about his business: often in the other direction. Manet was no fool. He did not accept Baudelaire's suggestion to make the "easy" change of the lance-wound from the wrong right side to the correct left side. Possibly he had a reason, of which he would not speak. Tabula ipsa loquetur.
The painting has also been criticized for its citation of John 22:12, as being en desaccord with the scene depicted. The writer apparently believes that there exists a text describing the scene before that recorded in John 22:12. Manet's superb picture could well be taken as an answer to Renan's insistence on the sole humanity of Christ. And in line with the mockery of aestheticism which is the "psychological" topic of his Dejeuner sur l'herbe. I include this little excursus as a demonstration of the fecundity of Prof. Steinberg's thesis, when it is correctly taken as a theological discussion].
As is his custom, which has given us many interesting studies, Prof. Steinberg insists on beginning with paintings and sculptures themselves; he insists on looking at them. He does not search for a topic; he allows his eyes to do their work of looking. These eyes will occasionally note some "discrepancy", something going on, some visual problem which the painter is attempting to solve. Or in the case of the better painters and sculptors to discover the problem they are attempting to resolve. The result has been a series of studies - in excellent prose - of such works as the great Michelangelo Pieta which depicts a mother with the face of a 17 year old; and across her lap the vigorous body of her dead 33 year old son. (How do you depict the Virgin Mother?). Similarly, he has solved what Leonardo calmly called the mathematical problem of The Last Supper. Had the subject of this study been the baby "Hercules", or a little Medici or a little Sforza, or of Francis of Assisi, it would not have stirred the vehemence of the responses. Theology is alive and kicking.
The objectors to the thesis of the emphasis on the presence of the membrum virilis seem to have little experience with babies and their gestures. Interpreting that all too common habit of children to reach for the chin of a parent as "a chin chuck" seems to me to be leaning a bit heavily on a small gesture. But that's as may be. But the very notion of the masculinity of the particular male involved does indeed touch upon the first sense of shame felt by the first humans. Of all the possible answers to the Lord's question "where were you?", Adam replies that he was "naked". He did not say that he was busy planting and wanted to wash his hands, or wipe his bottom, or that he was otherwise distracted. He was avoiding the Lord. And gave as an excuse his nakedness.
But these are heavy matters. Discussions of the nudity of our ancestors, or of their failings, are not matters lightly to be undertaken. The second commandment is quite specific. Prof. Steinberg does not begin with this account. He begins with several depictions of Christ and uses them to expand and further clarify his reflections on the major iconographic theme of Christian art: the depiction of God Incarnate, as is recounted in the Gospels.
I remark upon this at the beginning as an aid to keeping in mind what might be called the psychological stance to which the visual arts in Europe were arriving in the period in which the works examined by Prof. Steinberg were made. It is a stance which was beginning to accept the world about us as good; one which was slowly disencumbering itself of allegorical interpretation; one in which a tree is a tree and not The Tree of Life; a lamb is a lamb and not The Lamb of God; and a baby is a baby and not the Redeemer.
Carrying his observations further, Professor Steinberg looks to the representations of the membrum virile in the depictions of the life of Christ, at those other times of life when the body would be depicted naked or near-naked: the baptism, and the crucifixion and its suite. He begins out from the period (misleadingly) called the Renaissance, and that part of its effort to get back to factual depictions of the natural world. "A cigar" Freud is reported to have said "is just a cigar". Like the many intellectuals in the earlier years of this century who got caught up in the possible sexual significance of ordinary objects, or the economic interpretation of every act and institution, so did the waning years of the great medieval effort get caught up in an excess of metaphorical and analogical and allegorical interpretation. A lamb may represent the Lamb of God but lambs are just small woolly creatures, acting according to their nature. It is one of the glories of the period of the Renaissance that it recalled us to this greater meaning, the actual existence and presence of the multiple creations and creatures of God, wie sie eigentlich sind. They may be said to have taken as their charge the words: "Consider the lilies of the field". "Truth" as Chesterton observed "is stranger than fiction because we make up the fiction".
II
Professor Steinberg's study touches upon several issues of major importance in our European - our Christian - civilization. Among these is the fiercesome topic of iconoclasm: the matter of the "graven image" and its hold upon our visual senses. He touches also upon the difficult topic of the depiction of the naked body. And particularly of the depiction of the naked male body. And more particularly of the depiction of the "uncontrollable" member, which is also that which distinguishes the male from the female. This is a highly complicated matter; it lies at the core of our human morality and our European theology. It is after their disobedience, that the first parents become aware of their nakedness. (This discovery is also the occasion for the first particular act of the Lord as a mark of His concern for His now fallen - His disobedient - human creatures: He makes clothes for them).
In only one period of our civilization - the Greek - was the matter of male nudity made a great matter. But it was the nakedness of an idealized young male body, at the time of life - the doctors tell us - at which the body reaches its peak and from which, with the growth of the beard ("Your black souls pushing through your faces every day", as the lady had it), it begins its decline into the cares of maturity. It was to this period that the visual artists of the Renaissance turned in search of an answer to the problem of the depiction of the naked male body as a creation without shame. So might one depict any other male animal. But the naked male body comes in two states: the membrum virilis is either in repose or engorged. It is a characteristic of our civilization as informed by the Bible and by the works and writings of classical antiquity that it contains in ovo possibilities of explanation and explication: of articulation and further clarification.
Pius II, on his journey through the German lands, commented on the shamelessness of the inhabitants as evidenced in the communal baths. Walther von der Vogelweide's "Deutschland ueber alles" is the refrain of his account of the women of different countries: a medieval (and anticipatory) version of Don Giovanni's "ma in Espagna ...". It was a problem for the Church, not to suppress this sexual raging, but to refine and strengthen those moral practices of our ancestors which helped to direct it and contain it and domesticate it. As in all matters orthodox, or radical, the difficulty is the avoidance of the extremes: licentiousness and puritanism. Human nature cannot long abide the one or the other. Insisting too much on the one leads quickly to the other, as we see in our own time.
The Church was at heart of the settlement of Europe in the millenium after the crack-up of the Roman empire. Its work included the absorption of wave upon wave of tribes of invaders, each with its own culture, but none with a civilization. A culture can develope into a civilization only within fixed boundaries, which may be cultivated to bring forth the fruits of the earth to satisfy the elementary bodily needs of our race. That done, we turn to the other more purely human occupations which are our arts and sciences.
But a civilization will not long continue without a coherent religion as its core. This core of European civilization is Christianity. The core of Christianity - its heritage from the Bible - is the clear distinction between the natural and the supernatural. And from that core the faith in the fulfillment of the promise of salvation by the incarnation - the enfleshment - of God as a human being. The Jews had long borne the burden of being the Chosen People. They had held out against all the Mighty Empires and Great Conquerors and Movements of History and other such mirages which our minds project out to explain the world: or which are sketched out for us by the great tempter.
So great has been the faith of the chosen people that it continues today, suspicious of the claim that the promise was fulfilled. In their history, they had seen come and go Isis & Osiris and Apollo and Dionysius and Baal and other such forms of heathen imaginings. Gods and godlets and nymphs and satyrs numbered in the dozens: all projections of the human mind, like the "constellations" in the heavens. All now discarded and forgotten, their monuments become the toys of archaeologists, the base of idiotic claims of a National Heritage, and the mild pleasures with which to build a tourist industry. Against this fiercesome faith and the magnificent history of their submission to the laws written down in the Bible, the claim of One of them to be the very person in Whom they had placed their faith and Who had given them the laws is no light matter. This is the topic - this claim - of which Prof. Steinberg investigates one aspect: "What would God as a human look like?".
III
The question has inflamed the sensibilities of those too easily roused; a sensibility, which unexplained, unaccounted for, gives rise to that near universal sensation of (a false) guilt which is the mark of the blushing adolescent. Our bodies seem to take a life of their own; our members go all out of control, growing in a few months as quickly as they had grown in a few years. We become slightly hairier, and more greatly pimplier. Our friendships become infused with a dollop of the sentimentality of adolescence. And a touch of the terrifying awareness of our singularity in the world. The alertness of the child is turned around upon itself to that stage called "consciousness of the self", and philosophically, to our singular presence in the world. We blush at our own existence.
In treating of the subject of the sexual nature of God become Man, Prof. Steinberg touches this buried sensitivity, and the Christian accomodation of it. In his religion - which is the core of ours - the first ceremony is that of the circumscission. It is the painful mark in the flesh of membership as one of the Chosen People. As it marks the body, so also does it mark the mind. To the glory of having been born, is added a reminder of the pain of the world.
Several of the critics of Prof. Steinberg's reflections have responded with no particular answers of their own; they demonstrate little knowledge of the import of the theological question. The Manicheean ambience, the puritanism, which continues to suffocate the academic world, in refusing to speak the name of chastity, can only respond with the sneers and snickers of adolescence. Or a horrified pulling away into prurience. There comes to mind the tale of the 19th Century aesthetitician who was shocked to discover that a woman's body was not as hairless as a Greek statue. This horror of female hair not on the head is everywhere present in our world. It is part of the horror which attempts to remove or cover all carnal aspects of a woman's body; it is that same horror which objected to the topic of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe. But I leave this subject. It is too vulgar, too large a subject, our ladies will tell us, for men to handle.
The male critics - curiously anglican in tone - snicker, and wish the topic away. To these, Prof. Steinberg is courteous, attempting to control his intellect's recognition of their folly. Here and there he senses that the tone of his writing reflects an exasperation; he apologizes for this, much as one would scratch an itch. The critics, chiefly professors, fail to recognize their own duty to their readers and students. The matter of the Incarnation is the central matter for a Christian, as distinct from a Jew. Those who would keep to the teachings of the Bible must be one or the other. (Those who in our European, or "Eurocentric", tradition, would treat the Bible as just another collection of stories and myths are swimming in too shallow a creek. Synagogues and churches crowd our landscape. What is the address of the Temple of Diana in Athens, Georgia?).
Prof. Steinberg takes more seriously the objections of a "feminist" scholar. The thin puritanism of the schools has exasperated many women. The horror of the body, the horror of the sexual nature of the body, translates into a horror of the female human body. Prof. Steinberg avoids discussing the powers of a woman. Like all of us males, he can but observe and reflect on the effects of this power, on men and women. He can know it only from the outside. But he recognizes the difficulty in which women find themselves if men are affrighted and can find no purchase, no method of articulating the passions, no ritual and ceremony to give order to the passions and to the responsibilities which their satisfaction will entail; and of the degradation of our human nature below that of other copulating animals when the satisfaction of the passions becomes but a sterile relief.
To whom would a Christian woman turn if a Christian man refuses the implications, the responsibilities, of being a man? Might a Christian woman not, in the manner of Sarah, laugh behind the door, at the promises of men who do not keep promises? Is it to be wondered that a Christian woman would look to Christ as something more than a male? Prof. Steinberg attempts to reply to the objections raised by Prof. Bynum. It is an unending job, far beyond the powers of a man. It is like drying off one part of the body while standing in a hurricane. In discussions of the body, women's experience and knowledge and interest is of a different degree. They are more aware of the body, of its movements and characteristics and needs. And of the importance of the body in our compound human nature. Their five senses are far sharper and alert.
Prof. Steinberg does not treat of this difference. He rather attempts to consider the problem by considering the arguments offered for the notion of Christ as an "androgyne". But there can be no arguments offered for a creature not known to us. What would an "androgyne" look like? Depictions of "androgynes" are depictions of eunuchs: male bodies cut off from the action of the male hormone. The discussions of Christ's pectoral muscles as being somehow like breasts denies the sense of the muscularity of the male and the purposes which it can serve. And denies the far greater purposes of the breast. Women are as ignorant of the movements of the male psyche as men are of those of the female. And both are as ignorant of the sexual stirrings of the other, which in a male is centered upon the membrum virile. The movements and stirrings of that member, its power to divert the conscious mind, its almost independent obedience to the Divine injunction "to increase and multiply", is unknown to women.
It is a dangerous human fantasy, this androgyne business; it would reduce men to the status of lap-dogs. Perhaps there is a master's thesis to be written about the source of this notion: the experience of women with males in an academic, or hot-house, atmosphere. The arguments proposed by Prof. Bynum are not arguments but musings. Prof. Bynum looks about for texts which will support this imaginary creature: this feminized male who will not be epicene. Naturally, there are texts for any occasion. The human mind is fertile with its imaginings, as a garden more readily produces weeds than plants. There is just that touch of the gentleman farmer in academic writings about the doings of men in the world. The tendency of "feminist" writings is to belittle men; it is a curious thin echo of the male tendency to boast, which is itself but a whistling in the dark.
Prof. Steinberg does discuss the texts proferred by Prof. Bynum: the writings of women describing an experience: of women condescending to write down a description of their experience. He does it carefully, and he does it fairly. His clarity and courtesy - rarities in the neurotic atmosphere of the academic world - make for one of the most interesting sections of his book. He refrains from pointing out the contempt contained in Prof. Bynum's phrase: "medieval people". And her speculations about what this "barbarous tribe" - our illiterate, ergo ignorant, ancestors - will have felt and thought. To such musings, one can but note the origin of the word "speculate": to see, as in a mirror.
IV
The most valuable part of his book is his discussion of certain of the writings of St. Augustine. In the attempt to "reform" the Church, they became the ammunition depot of those who look to find comfort in the easier Manicheean concept of the world. The lazy school of "as we are not responsible for the world, so we are not responsible for our actions in the world. Nothing we can do will make any difference".
At so great a remove in time, we are unlikely to have a sense of the import of much of such of Augustine's writings as have survived for our reading. We no longer speak the language. We have only some germanized notions of how it was pronounced, which unsurprisingly we are told should sound like lingua romana in bocca tedesca. We have no feel for the rhythms; we impose our own. We have little sense of the specificity of the problems he was addressing in his writings. [Of the difficulties of such understanding, I give a modern example: in the 1950s, the governor of a mid-Western state was resisting the federal troops sent in to enforce the court's decision about desegregating schools. An English editor wrote, in an exasperated tone: "why doesn't the president just recall the governor?"].
It is said of Augustine that he was a Platonist, or a neo-Platonist, or some such academic label: as though he had caught a disease. This seems to mean that the terms of the science of philosophy used by him were those derived from Cicero's translations from the Greek. He worked in the language available, and within the limitations of that language. He had great respect for its achievements, but a greater respect for the achievements of the Romans: of Roman law and Roman engineering. The early chapters of his Civitas Dei are the work of a patriot, proud of the achievements of the republic. And disdainful of those who would make such works and triumphs of the human genius the mere inspiration of ridiculous godlets and their consorts, the nymphs and satyrs of the Roman pantheon. He strongly felt it not befitting the dignity of man conjure up tales which end with Jupiter being his own grandmother. His discussion of these tales is as humorous as Anna Russell's recounting the story of the The Ring: "Siegfried was astonished at the sight of a woman who was not his aunt". C.S. Lewis put it well in describing this part of Augustine's work as the sweeping away of all these mystifications into the garbage can of history: the carrying out of the injunction of the first commandment. Augustine labored mightily to put some order into the developing science of theology. The terrifying clarity of which our reason is capable does not establish the facts of the world; but it can burn away the fancies and fantasies conjured up by our too vivid imaginations.
Augustine was a most masculine man, a most virile man. He displays this in his disgust at some Roman religious ceremony involving the phallus, in which an honorable Roman matron is expected to crown an image of an erect penis. Such ceremonies belong to the horse-play of adolescent boys in a locker room. They consist chiefly of boasting about (non-existent) sexual prowess. They know nothing yet of the responsibility and the respect which the act of copulation entails. It is the very strength of the sexual passion in Augustine which makes him roar against its degradation in such spectacles as the phallic procession. A grown man may look with indulgence on adolescent boasting, knowing the confusion from which it arises. But what patience can he be expected to have if the boasting be that of grown men, with their thinning hair and thickening waists? For a man as serious as Augustine, the strong secular Roman tradition, the demand of growth into and acceptance of civic responsibility, was demeaned by men not "acting their age".
Augustine's instinctive re-action to this - the instinctive human re-action - is the phenomenon known by various names in history, and to us generally by that of Puritanism. Calvin's long-term interest may have been the salvation of souls; his short term purpose was to bring the drunkenness and whoring of the Swiss - the furor teutonicus - under some control. As it was Luther's purpose; as it was Savanarola's. When a baby, before the full establishment of its thermal system, developes a high fever, the recommendation is the application of cooling wet towels to bring the temperature down to a level which its body can handle. Calvin and Luther were still Augustinian enough - which is to say, Catholic enough - to realize that throwing the baby into an icy pond is not the answer. Just as Origen's self-mutilation was not the answer. But they alas cut themselves off from the balance provided by the development of dogma since Augustine's days. Their descendants have gone further and further away.
Augustine attempted to find an explanation for the excess of fever. Prof. Steinberg discusses Augustine's theorizing about the state of the first parents before the disobedience. And such unknowable matters as the manner of pro-creation. The answer to such speculation is simple enough: we have no information. Prof. Steinberg comments (unfavorably) on Augustine's rough handling of Bishop Julian. Herein, I believe he goes wrong. Augustine's main effort was the attempt to hook up (I use a metaphor from electricity) that which he knew to be good and valuable in the normal human condition with the central power from which it derives. Bishop Julian, like Siger of Brabant later, wanted the benefits without the costs; he was offering the same old goods which had led to the Pantheon.
As the Church took root in the European peninsula, manners modified. In the six and seven centuries after Augustine's work, tempers were tempered. [I have been astonished to realize that with all the works of feminizing historians, no attention has been given to the extra-ordinary success of the doings of Mathilda of Tuscany during the five decades of her reign. Take a map of modern Italy: draw a rough outline of the area of her "county". Note then the cities that are contained therein: Pavia and Padua, Mantova and Bologna, Florence and Siena, and a dozen others. Note then the period when these cities began to grow into the glories we know now. The Florentine Urban VIII Barberini - he who protected Galileo against his own foolishness - was no fool when he recognized the person ("the pious widow" as one of our germanized historians has it) who was at the origin of the glories of the Renaissance. And whose resistance to yet another uncertain "Emperor" allowed the beginnings of those glories to become firmly established]. Prof. Steinberg comments that St. Augustine largely determined Christian thought in the West. Perhaps so. What I believe he means is that it was Augustine's use of the limited Latin language which "determined" much of Christian thought, which is to say, the available vocabulary. To the controversy about the phrase "filioque" a Greek theologian remarked that the misunderstanding arose because of these limitations of the Latin language.
But Augustine was not a philosopher, in that precise sense of one who studies the working of the human mind, and the categories which that mind requires to function. Nor a theologian in that precise sense which arises from the study of philosophy. Augustine was a working bishop, one of many. He was not interested in saving the world; he did not write for "future generations". His job was with the souls of the unruly generation on his hands.
He saw - and to his great credit did not despair - the ruination of the great civilizing works of the Romans. He saw that the barbarians did not understand such seeming simple matters as the engineering triumphs of the aqueducts. However beautiful a temple may be, it does not bring water to the villages. Fifteen hundred years after the collapse of the Roman civitas, its aqueducts still stand; its roads are still in use; and its manners and morals and laws and vocabulary are still our own. And Augustine saw also the fatuousness and vulgarity of much of the poetry written in Latin. Da me basia mille: but what to do for encore? Juvenal may well write of the corruption of the morals of the Romans. But what had he to offer in their place? The emperor as a god may be a foolish notion; but it is less foolish than "Jupiter". Augustine was mightily concerned about the disjunction in humans between the sexual urge and the evident purpose of that urge. Prof. Steinberg treats of this conundrum, discussing Augustine's reflections on the text of Genesis. But it is a matter beyond our knowledge. Augustine left the discussion at the stage of "the corruption of the flesh".
What is all the talk about the "fall" of "man"? What is the talk about God's punishment of man? There is just that element of a Job's comforter in the writings of Augustine: a tendency to "justify the ways of God to man". A more reasonable attitude, a more tempered stance, is that of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas recognizes, and allows largely for, the seriousness of purpose in Augustine. But Thomas is impatient with that thinking which would tend to denigrate any single thing in the material world of God's creation. Thomas' stance may well be summed up in his glorious line, written at the end of his career:
Pange lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium.
Thomas' prosaic work was the further laying out of the intellectual boundaries, the refinement of distinctions, which would give sanction to such work as that of St. Francis. To those who would ask for miracles to demonstrate the existence of God, Francis pointed to the sun, whose daily rising without fail should be miracle enough. Like the stubborn insistence of a rose bush in producing roses rather than olives.
Thomas took the same great delight in the physical world as did Francis. Nil in intellectu quid non prius in sensu. He recognized that it is the work of the intellect to gather and sort and bring the evidence of the five senses into some coherence. Just so does a mother - our first teachers - teach a child to bring its body into some co-ordination, and into regularity of habits and manners, which are the beginnings of morality. Like Augustine (and like Maimonides), Thomas recognized the primacy of our individual actions. We are not a species; we are the specimens; each located in a Here & Now. In looking to grow a crop in Italy, there is no feeding to be gained by yearning for the rich soil of the Nile. Nor can the planting be wearily put off until next spring. That which befell the first parents as a result of not listening (disobedience) might be called a disassociation of the senses: the loss of the sense of proportion, of the balance of the senses called common sense, of the acceptance of the limitations of our powers. (Is there anyone who would truly like to accept the responsibility for getting the sun going every morning?). I have read that Maimonides considered the first sin to be that of substituting the imagination for the work of the intelligence. If wishes were hosses, beggars would ride.
Prof. Steinberg's discussion of the sexual characteristics of God become Man as depicted by painters following the philosophizing of Thomas Aquinas does not give much space to Thomas' thought. Thomas followed the period which saw the introduction of the "Gothic" style of architecture with its light and lightness and colors and airiness, and an elaborateness greater than a wedding cake. They have stood solidly for near a millennium and are now chiefly threatened by the movement which would reduce their civilizing effects to the slop of a Cultural Heritage. [I find it entertaining that so many of the works of the Italian painters are now claimed as the National Heritage of England]. We have been taught by the sad souls of the Enlightenment to refer to the "Dark Ages" and have come hear in the word "medieval" a disparagement of that long period. I have heard tell that in more civilized lands - say, the Chinese - that respect, indeed reverence, for one's forefathers is the greatest mark of the civilization. "It's a wise child knows its father".
Prof. Steinberg notes that the thought of Thomas was more readily accepted in Italy than elsewhere. It is too easily forgotten that Thomas was sent from Italy to continue the civilizing process in the European peninsula. His task was to help the barbarians in the use of the Latin language, into one of whose branches their own was growing. And to protect them from attempting the more elaborate subtleties of Byzantium for which they did not have the language. Just as the stone of the cathedrals can take only so much filigree carving before collapsing, so our language can handle only so many fine distinctions.
Thomas' great achievement might well be said to have been that of having firmly established the philosophical (hence, scientific) and legal vocabulary of Europe. Pulchrum et verum sunt idem subiecto, sola ratione differunt is as a neat a distinction between truth and beauty as we are liable to put into words. It is in this same period that Dante wrote of the eloquence of the spoken language and composed one of its greatest monuments. By the time Petrarch came along, it was too late to go back. The efforts to "revive" Latin into a spoken language were fruitless. That which Petrarch considered his greatest work, his epic in "Latin" entitled Africa, is an unreadable learned curiosity. But alas! the learned occupied the schools and forced down the unwilling throats of many schoolboys the tiresome greekly Latin of Cicero's "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra?", instead of the more pithy and useful "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres". This latter was undoubtedly the way men did talk at the time; the way men adapted their language to their experience of the world.
Our own English language has been corrupted by such as the poetry of John Milton, and the too great sonorousness of the Gibbonian style. Like Cicero's orations (they can hardly be called speeches), the words and phrases give a mouthful for hortatory exercise. But the meanings of the words are out of focus, from the very beginning:
Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree
Whose mortal taste brought death into world and all our woe ...
Sing heavenly Muse ...
There is not a line of historical truth in the whole tiresome epic. It does not survive examination. "Man's first disobedience" or "the disobedience of the first humans"; "first disobedience" or just plain disobedience; was it the tree that was forbidden or the fruit? And so on and so on, in but the first handful of lines. In writing of matters truly divine, who is this "heavenly muse"? What is the origin of all the discussions in heaven except Milton's over-active imagination, stuffed with too much reading of literature, ending in an olla podrida mixing pagan mythology with Biblical history? Yet Milton's poems are quoted with the same reverence and nearly the same authority as the then recent (and misleading and provincial) English translation of scripture. Just so does most writing in English on matters theological and philosophical begin with and refer continuously to the writings of the 17th Century, as of the foundation time of these studies.
V
It was, I say, the great achievement of Thomas Aquinas to have rescued Latin from the chaos into which it was regularly collapsing, without himself falling into the greekliness of Cicero. His great battle was against the philosophical one-sidedness (heresy) of nominalism, that which would give the precedence to words over things: to the imperfect tools over the purpose for which the tools were made. Prof. Steinberg continues in this line. He attacks the infection of "textism": the incoherent academic belief that a thing does not exist unless it has been written about. And that that which has been written about a thing is more important than the thing itself. In our too wordy world, Agronomics is more important than farming, Economics more important than business, Sociology than society, the History of Literature than the epics and novels and poetry, the Study of Language more important than speech. And the great difference, the great divide, in our race is to be reduced to the sterility of grammatical terminology: of "gender". And all this is proposed by writers who are ignorant of other languages. They work from translations. Locke and Hobbes wrote in English but thought in Latin. There is no understanding their works without a knowledge of the works of Grotius and Suarez. There is about the men who have attacked Prof. Steinberg's reflections an odor of bad faith, of The Faith corrupted. They attempt to attack the man; they do but project upon him their own uncertainty and prurience. Like a dentist with his probe, Prof. Steinberg has found the cavity which is temporarily filled with the sophistications and sophomorisms of iconographical studies, separated from a careful concern about the subject depicted. In concentrating upon one point, Prof. Steinberg reveals the extent to which the religious core of Europe was diluted into mere piety, the piety into mere sentimentality, the pleasures of the senses into mere aestheticism: Die Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders. This might well be the subtitle of Kant's efforts to execute "a Copernican revolution in philosophy". Kant attempted to do so while ignoring the fulcrum. His efforts to re-write philosophy in a tortured German gave rise to several "schools" of increasing incoherence, embodied in 50-volume introductions to the beginnings of a study of The Great Unknown, or some such. And ending in the despair of the Lutheran pastor's son, Friedrich Nietzsche. The passion of the Enlightenment, fed by aestheticism, soured into the sentimentality of Romanticism, to be controlled only by the brutality of Rationalism.
Prof. Steinberg notes the criticism of a well-known English writer on philosophy, Richard Wollheim. The writings of Prof. Wollheim are an interesting remnant of the Kantian "revolution". In his efforts to establish A Work Of Art as some sort of magical creation, separate from a mere painting, Prof. Wollheim posits a mystical viewer whom the Artist (as distinct from the mere painter) is addressing. Such desperate efforts have a certain charm, like hearing a clever school-boy talk himself into a web of words: "the dog ate my homework".
Bared of the accumulated bad rhetoric, the subject under discussion is the attempt by painters and sculptors, under the seeing eyes of their paying patrons, to depict the fact of the central mystery of the Church: the physical body of God, the second person of the Trinity, with all its attributes. And the physical presence of that body in the physical world. And in the aspect which is the topic of Prof. Steinberg's book. It was to be foreseen that any student who took up a discussion of this topic would be treated to that scorn and sneering which is typical of those who refuse to argue. Thus, the attitude of Charles Kingsley to Cardinal Newman in the matter of a "permissible lie". Like Newman, Prof. Steinberg attempts to reply to the points raised. But he finds himself in the same position as Newman: to every reply is profferred a counter-reply which drops the first point and brings in another. To the critics who are continually changing position, Prof. Steinberg can but say with Newman, "Away with you, Mr. Kingsley, and fly into space". Newman was discussing the serious matters which touch the very core of our being.
The discussion begins with the simple historical fact of the appearance of God to Moses and the promises there made. If this be not accepted as the first premise, we might as well go on to talking about Buddhism or Confucianism (having first courteously studied the languages of those religions). Or discussing the iconography of Hercules & Antaeus, or some other antiquarian's delight: a sort of superior crossword puzzle.
But if this be accepted as a first premise, we move on to the second necessary premise for this discussion: that Jesus Christ was the promised savior - the Messiah - and not a high-class prophet or a super-man: or androgyne. It is in that sense a family argument: are the followers of Christ also members of the Chosen People? Is Christ One with Him who created the world and laid down the laws and gave the promise of a Redeemer? And as that Redeemer, does Christ have the same authority, to revise the laws and practices and extend the family membership?
Prof. Steinberg does not discuss these difficult matters. He limits his discussion to the most sensitive physical part of Incarnation. God could certainly create a creature somehow combining the aspects of male and female. But would not such a creature be beyond our comprehension?
There is great difficulty in the discussion of the "shameful member". In his considerations of this topic, Prof. Steinberg turns to the more serious thinkers, and especially Augustine. There is a difficult question of emphasis. The use of the adjective "sinful" to describe the sexual member carries with it the remnants of Manichee. How can it be that the unwilled actions of that member are to be called "sinful"? Are the unwilled rumblings of the stomach also "sinful"? Or are those rumblings but the clamor of a part of our nature - our divinely created nature - to be attended to, as is intended by our Creator? "Man does not live by bread alone". We do not live to eat, but we must eat to live, as we are enjoined. And as we are reminded by the helpful rumblings of the stomach. Care of the individual body may well be called the first task of the individual soul to whom, so to speak, it has been allotted: the body in which that soul is incarnated. Each body is as much a creation of the Lord as a tree, or a mountain, and deserving of at least as much respect. It is not to be reproached for being what it is, or acting as it does.
And so also the sinful, or shameful, member. Switching the emphasis, Prof. Steinberg asks - verbalizing the visual statement of the works he has examined - why the member should be considered shameful? We do not know, as a historical fact, that the Blessed Mother made a point of emphasizing the penis. He cites Father O'Malley as remarking that there is nothing theological against the emphasis: nihil obstat. The which said, Prof. Steinberg's ruminations add to our understanding. He carries his observations of the display of the penis further to an examination of the paintings and sculptures of Christ as an adult. And then further into the difficult territory of those paintings and sculptures which display the penis in its full potentiality. Here lies the crux of the discussion: the question posed by the Synagogue to the Church. If Jesus of Nazareth be God, in the flesh, is He fully a man? With this question are the associated matters of marriage, the injunction to increase and multiply, and the matter of chastity. These are the questions which our modern, physically comfortable world finds so vexing.
We are not here discussing the barnyard theology of evolution back into which the protestant rebellion has degenerated, with its Mother Nature selecting or devouring her children. We are talking history. That the Lord created the world; that the first pair of humans did not listen to (obey) a simple prohibition; that the events recounted in the Bible did happen; and that a promise was made to one group of people if they kept to the laws; and that they have kept to the laws and continue to do so and to survive as a people. Where are the Sumerians and Assyrians and Greeks and Romans and the Hittites and the Kings of Upper & Lower Egypt? All gone with their godlets and nymphlets and their children's play-houses called pantheons, swept away by the words "One God". There are no several "monotheistic" religions. There is Judaism and that which claims to be its fulfillment, Christianity, with a side-show of the non-Jewish Judaism, Islam.
VI
Prof. Steinberg's studies of paintings and sculpture over the years have been devoted to the subject of the works: that which is being depicted. In the back of his mind, there lies an awareness of the condemnation of the graven image. And of the dangers of the vocabulary used in the making of such images. Think but of the danger of the word "create"; how easily we may mislead ourselves into confusing a re-arrangement of molecules with a creation ex nihilo. And that a picture of a thing is as valid as - nay, more valid than - the thing itself.
Prof. Steinberg attempts to look at the various pictures much as, say, a traveler from some South Sea island. He sees depictions of a naked baby boy, in his mother's arms, with many of the gestures typical of a baby. He notes the great variety of depictions of what he has been told is a particular child. He notices that in a certain period - of about two centuries - some of the pictures also place a mild emphasis on the membrum virile. A courteous and observant traveler, he makes notes of these to recount them back home, much as a tourist will take several hundred photographs of places he has been and things he has seen.
He hears also the story of the later life of this child, grown into a man, and of its terrible end. He sees depictions of this end - the barbarity of crucifixion. He notes the many ways in which it has been depicted. He notes also that there is something going on about the depiction of the membrum virile, the decent covering, but a strange kind of covering. To a man nailed to a cross with thorns shoved into his scalp, or to those who did this, the decency seems a bit beside the point. "Strange people, these Europeans".
He continues along and is shown pictures of the corpse and of the lamenting mother. In one of these, a statue in the cathedral of St. Peter's in Rome, the mother has the face of a 17 year old, across whose lap is displayed the body of man older than she. And it is a body, not a corpse. He hears that this man did indeed die and was buried for a period of about two days. But then he rose from the grave, a man as he was before. In several of the depictions of this resurrecton, there is again an mild emphasis on the membrum virile: that member engorged. When remarking on this, he finds himself mocked for not understanding, for exaggerrating, and as being somewhat disrespectful to notice it. "Strange people, these Europeans. Back home, when a man dies, his body disintegrates and his spirit goes to the great Otherworld. These strange people say that a man died completely and then rose again in his same body. What difference does it make whether the penis is engorged or not? They swallow the camel of resurrection and strain at a gnat. Do none of them on awakening from sleep find themselves with an engorged penis?".
In examining and discussing his observations, Prof. Steinberg does so with the language of theology. The topic of the Incarnation is a theological topic. It is indeed the topic which has given rise to the science of theology. Had I a hesitation about this splendid book which gives our minds much to ponder and chew on, it would be about the emphasis on the writings of Augustine, as though that science had not further developed, much as our other sciences have developed. The writings of Thomas Aquinas are a corrective to the writings of Augustine. Aquinas defends the powers of the mind, and of the raw materials of the mind's work: the data from the senses. In this defense, he carried on the work of Francis, refusing to find that any part of the Lord's creation is evil. In so doing he broke the spell which Augustine's words had on the minds of Christians. Augustine is great thinker, and an even greater teacher. But his writings are not the Gospels. For all the great powers of his mind, Augustine had the mark which is that of the truly intelligent man: the recognition and admission of ignorance. When he arrived at a point at which he could no further, he - the bishop of Hippo - deferred to the bishop of Rome.
It was a mark of the break-up of Europe that the unhappy clerics reverted to the writings of Augustine. They dismissed the writings of Aquinas as too intellectual, too concerned with logical subtleties. And they, and their modern descendants, found themselves prisoners of the logic of things, without being aware of it. The "modern oblivion" of Prof. Steinberg's title refers precisely to this state of affairs: to this refusal to accept the plain meaning of words such as the Incarnation, and the consequences.
My single specific criticism of Prof. Steinberg is his use of differing versions of the text of the Bible in English. He cites, for example, a passage from the conversation of Jesus with Nicodemus as: "The wind bloweth where it listeth". I have read this cited as: "The Spirit bloweth where it wills". My version has: "The wind blows where it will, and thou hearest its sound but does not know where it comes from or where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit". The footnote in my copy explains this parable as indicating to Nicodemus that as there are happenings in merely physical nature which are mysterious to us (beyond our intelligence), how much more so in supernatural things.
The version which translates the first word as "The Spirit" changes "will" into "wills", as in making it a choice by the Spirit. Prof. Steinberg keeps the "wind" but uses "listeth". To "list" has in it a core senses of "lust", not far from the notion of "choosing", endowing the wind with a will. The more current sense of "list" is to bend, which is not a characteristic of a wind, but a result of its action. Boats list in the wind. I have heard (from Prof. Steinberg) that the word for "wind" and "spirit" is the same in the "original" (whichever language that is). So it is a matter of choosing words that will carry over the meaning of the parable. As the words are a direct quote from the mouth of Jesus, it is of great importance to get the meaning right. I do not know the "original" from which the phrase (we speak in phrases, not in words) is translated. There is an incoherence in the translation used by Prof. Steinberg; a wind does not list, though it may be the proximate cause of listing. The text I have seems simple enough, as does its footnote. Read after the questions put by the Lord to Job - have you walked at the bottom of the sea? can you make the sun to rise every morning? - it is simple business. You can hear the wind but do not even know where it is coming from or where its going. (We might add, despite the best efforts of our meteorologists).
It is the third "translation" which is deadly. It is a favorite of those who would use Augustine's words to dress their Manichee. Had Augustine given this meaning to the words (which he did not), the Church would have corrected him. The implications which have been drawn from this direct quote by those who would call themselves "augustinian" would tumble us back into the arms of Manichee, or those of Job's comforters. Whatever happens, they say, is the will of the Lord. In the context of the events of the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s in Europe, this is a terrifying doctrine. It has all the difference of meaning between a sacrifice and a disaster.
Who will touch upon matters theological and matters religious is as one who would handle radium, or perform an operation on the heart. You must study and practice carefully. The academies, the schools and the colleges, are not formed to develope a great body of truth independent of those who know. A heart operation is not meant to be an exercise in skill: a performance art. Its purpose is removal of the obstacles to the good enough functioning of a particular heart. We cannot handle too many successful operations from which the patient dies.
The failure of the academies to allow space for study of the central concern of our lives - for its theology - simply allows the growth of theological fantasies; weeds rush into a neglected part of a garden. Our modern fantasy is the all-inclusiveness of the merely physical sciences. Its passiveness admits into the garden yet again the bizarre theology of Evolution and Natural Selection and Mother Nature, with its uncontrollable Improvement of Mankind, with its emphasis on the (non-existent) Species as against the existing specimens.
The reformation was not a great new movement; it was a relapse. Its motto of cuius regio eius religio now shows its barrenness with the ongoing collapse of the regimes as the riches which supported them are depleted. And the ongoing collapse of the schools and universities whose purpose has degenerated into providing the rhetoric for the defense of the regimes. In treating of one small aspect of the core matter of the theology which made possible the development of the European civilization, Prof. Steinberg reveals the extent to which the neglect of that study has, as Newman warned, allowed each other study to make imperious claims - the imperial intellect - of being the core study. And of allowing our civilization to lapse back into a swamp of decaying culture, inhabited by the fragmentary creations of our imaginations.
The great and wonderful mark of this book is Prof. Steinberg's respect for work of our ancestors. Among all the Art Historians who use paintings and sculptures as grist for their mental activity, is there one who is capable of drawing a portrait, or carving stone? (Is there one who can explain precisely the process of lost wax bronze casting?). How many of our Economists can make a good business deal? How many of the students of Sociology or Government can run a government office? How many of our judges can write a clear paragraph? How many of our politicians can earn the money which they are so quick to tax? Prof. Steinberg's native intelligence is suspicious of those who would substitute verbal descriptions of human works and doings for the works and doings themselves. And the responsibilities thereto attached.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Bishop Shannon
SHANNON, JAMES PATRICK Reluctant Dissenter Crossroads 1998
The bishop's account of his life (b.1921 in Minnesota), his resignation from his office,and subsequent marriage. The crux came when he, having participated (though young) in Vatican II, expected a change in the teachings of the Church about contraception. He was flattened by the Holy Father's reiteration of the teachings in Humana Vita. And brought to face the problem when a young wife came to him looking to be told that she could use the pill, or whatever. He could not find it in himself to tell her that it was wrong. As an honest man, he resigned. As a honest man, he does not criticize the Church, nor give weapons to those who would attack it. The core of the book is the great loneliness which is at the heart of us all (Gen. 2:18). And the perplexities to which that gives rise. (The church might advise the flock that a priest is a man and not reluctant to accept invitations apart his priestly activities; and in need of someone to check his socks and be sure he eats regularly. Men bishops & popes incline not to think of these things).
5: F.J.Turner's thesis has a defensible kernel of truth, even if he spent a lifetime overstating it.
: his widowed mother with three (or four) kids, beginning as a waitress and ending as the owner. [Typical strong minded Irishwoman]
9: "With a little encouragement, I would be hard to handle" [said one of his nun teachers]
10: He got a 100, just to show his 8th grade teacher. {Maybe that was her point]. His mother was sceptical.
11: "got my clock cleaned"
: "the low keyed, polysyllabic, non stop, two paragraphed gentlemanly dressing down" [gift of the gab. Can be dangerous. v.JFK]
12: his father waiting up to see that "I was home, and safe, and sober" [in descending order of importance. The exchange between them is typical of men]
15: learning the gimmicks from his brother: the left jab, making a replacement pin for a motor, and such. [I suppose it's been going on since Creation]
18: tuition (not board) at St. Thomas' Military Academy in 1936 $150
23/4: debating skills. Years later, in a seminary class in metaphysics, a professor icily informed me not to confuse the study of philosophy with the glib of sophistry
29: listening to the radio in "a crowded smoke filled rec room" [Ah, the days when our minor bad habits were not taken to be vices]
36: to serve needs larger than your own [to serve the needs of others by including them among your own?]
37: young Oscar at his ordination was sent out by his mother to get some things needed for the party ["Priest you may be, but you're still the youngest"]
38: the priest hunting in Ireland in the 17th & 18th [&19th] Centuries
41: the gestation period of an elephant is 22 months, but when it comes out it's still an elephant
43: kindergarten is the most difficult age to teach [It's why it is best left to women. Men have neither the brains nor the stamina]
44: the bigotry of the camp director who complained of the presence of negro children [Was he a bigot? His complaint was of its effect on his business. How did he treat the kids? If he was a bigot, should the kids have been left at the camp?]
47: "welfare chiselers" I hold no brief for them [Why not? Are they hopelessly beyond the pale?]
48: that peculiarly Catholic fascination with sex [No Jews in St. Paul? It's where the "fascination" began]
49: authority of service and authority of position. Ideally they exist together [Actually, probably not. Consider the Cure d'Ars, and Andre Trocme. It's rougher being a parish priest]
52: the humor of it. Never make deals with God.
53: the density of specification [H.James] [but, as distinct from accumulated details]
56: the fire chief forbidding his men to enter a building about to collapse but: "Come on, padres. You're wanted inside"
: thereafter, freezing & cold, he eats a hot dog. "Should you have?" asks his Abp. "It's Lent". [Women will never understand how men give each other pats on the back to loosen the tension]
69: Father Flynn, the liberal arts purist, rejecting business courses [It's the great failing of the liberal arts colleges. "What am I going to do with my Degree in Philosophy? Open a shop and sell concepts?". The liberal arts without application become sophistry: survey courses. I read today (5/3/99) in the Jewish Sentinel one fellow praising the superiority of "religiosity" over religion. But how can you have "religiosity without religion? Perfume without a flower?]
69/70: on lay teachers [the advantage is to leave priests free to be priests]
81: Abp. Bing's letter allowing him to accept the Ford Fdtn. challenge grant, without committing the Adiocese [and keeping it free from foreign entanglements]
84: on Vietnam [But no discussion of how we were tricked into it by the college boys in DC. Nor of the constitutional illegality. Nor of the spinelessness of the representatives. Poor LBJ's great work in domestic affairs was ruined by the sweet talkers with their word games. So much for the liberal arts without content]
93: Catholic traditionalists [makes them a species]
94/5: on the naming of bishops. [Does the Holy Father name bishops? Or Himself? Do candidates present themselves? What does nolo episcopari mean?
98: Msgr. Higgins was at Henry Luce's party at the Flora in Rome! Hobnobbing!
101: 'Any use of matrimony whatsoever in the exercise of which the act is deprived, by human interference, of its natural power to procreate life ...' [That's a clear enough statement. It accords with the deeper doctrine that God makes each human creature; and with the Jewish teaching that there are certain arbitrary (consider the etymology) rules which we are required to follow, having free will and self consciousness. God says don't stick your finger into the electrical outlet. The serpent says "you will learn about good & evil". And so we do: stick the finger in and learn the difference between good & evil. And so later do those who used the pill learn that they could have copulated and let God worry about supporting the results]
: the Council Fathers had reached a consensus about contraception [earlier he is against consensus]
102: [that the purpose of marriage is procreation. Is this so? Or is the purpose companionship, in the course of which we may copulate; but if we do, we should not attempt to block the other Actor in "pro" creation. It's not easy]
104: Paul VI's Humana Vita. [Paul VI's? Or the Church's?]
108: a mutual friend told me that [my resignation] broke his pastor's heart [some friend!]
116: an exchange with Cardinal Spellman and a fine tribute. [THE cardinal would battle, privately; he knew who was at work, whispering in the ear. He might holler but he would never denigrate. He also had an Irish mother]
119: Cardinal O'Boyle of DC. [Was it he who confirmed me? 1944 it would be]
121: Father Marvin O'Connell calling bishops "amateurs". [Amateur whats? Who he?]
126: the bishop who referred to priests who drifted away as "derelicts" [Guess he never heard of the Lost Sheep. It's easy to be a bishop of sheepish sheep]
130/1: [a bit rough on Cardinal McIntyre, whose behavior illustrates the wisdom of the Holy Father's call for automatic resignation at 75. We must be careful not to criticize our elders. If what JP says is the case, the cardinal violated several rules of Church procedure, including discretion]
134: "Some prince!" [of Card. McI. Could be deleted. It's a crack, not an analysis. Judging from JP's autobio, he did not have much experience with difficult cases among the sheep]
137/8: on the bishops' meeting and the carryings on [shows the danger of these National Councils. Is error less erroneous because it has a majority vote?]
141: His mother: "I've read about the old man in Calfornia". [I suppose even John Paul's mother had her moments of scepticism about his behavior. V. Oscar, supra]
143: "to control conception rather than leave it wholely to chance" [chance? this is where the fuzziness begins. Substitute "God" for chance and the matter becomes clear]
146: on the burden of a bishop [It was summed up by Dennis Malvasi: "The cardinal says stop bombing the abortuaries. I stop. I don't know whether he's right or wrong; that's his problem. I got problems enough without God getting mad at me".
182: the process of making it to that age "when we find no longer all things possible" (TSE)
192: Brown vs. Board of Ed. [Curious that lawyers do not see the flaw in the second part. The first is correct: the law is color blind. How then can the law know whether the "colored" have been adequately helped. That flaw that iota of difference has created as many problems as it attempted to solve. It is condescending to the blacks. And led to the nonsense of no difference between male and female. Tell it to your mother]
193: the fire that melts the butter hardens the iron
195: on treating students in law school as mean judges might treat them so that they will get the experience [It rather makes them cowards. Cf. Thaddeus Stevens when threatened by a judge for showing contempt of court: "I apologize, your honor. I was doing my best to conceal it"]
198: the process of learning the law consists of watching skillful practitioners "move the pieces on the board" [But not allowing them to determine what the pieces are, nor the size and formation of the board. They practice, they do not make, the law]
203: Greenleaf noted that all churches tend to become narcissistic, defending the bureaucracy ... [relying on the tried & true. Is that wrong if you don't have a replacement in place? Who wants the traffic laws changed every two months? All bureaucracies become hide bound, not "narcissistic". It's a psychoanalyst's word. And "Catholics" are fascinated by sex? Who isn’t?]
204: [too many "very's" used as adverbs; "Pro active": a sophist's word, trying to mean something more than it does. "Active" does all the necessary work.
212: Elmer Andersen [RIP]. Owned a Grolier binding, he did.
The bishop's account of his life (b.1921 in Minnesota), his resignation from his office,and subsequent marriage. The crux came when he, having participated (though young) in Vatican II, expected a change in the teachings of the Church about contraception. He was flattened by the Holy Father's reiteration of the teachings in Humana Vita. And brought to face the problem when a young wife came to him looking to be told that she could use the pill, or whatever. He could not find it in himself to tell her that it was wrong. As an honest man, he resigned. As a honest man, he does not criticize the Church, nor give weapons to those who would attack it. The core of the book is the great loneliness which is at the heart of us all (Gen. 2:18). And the perplexities to which that gives rise. (The church might advise the flock that a priest is a man and not reluctant to accept invitations apart his priestly activities; and in need of someone to check his socks and be sure he eats regularly. Men bishops & popes incline not to think of these things).
5: F.J.Turner's thesis has a defensible kernel of truth, even if he spent a lifetime overstating it.
: his widowed mother with three (or four) kids, beginning as a waitress and ending as the owner. [Typical strong minded Irishwoman]
9: "With a little encouragement, I would be hard to handle" [said one of his nun teachers]
10: He got a 100, just to show his 8th grade teacher. {Maybe that was her point]. His mother was sceptical.
11: "got my clock cleaned"
: "the low keyed, polysyllabic, non stop, two paragraphed gentlemanly dressing down" [gift of the gab. Can be dangerous. v.JFK]
12: his father waiting up to see that "I was home, and safe, and sober" [in descending order of importance. The exchange between them is typical of men]
15: learning the gimmicks from his brother: the left jab, making a replacement pin for a motor, and such. [I suppose it's been going on since Creation]
18: tuition (not board) at St. Thomas' Military Academy in 1936 $150
23/4: debating skills. Years later, in a seminary class in metaphysics, a professor icily informed me not to confuse the study of philosophy with the glib of sophistry
29: listening to the radio in "a crowded smoke filled rec room" [Ah, the days when our minor bad habits were not taken to be vices]
36: to serve needs larger than your own [to serve the needs of others by including them among your own?]
37: young Oscar at his ordination was sent out by his mother to get some things needed for the party ["Priest you may be, but you're still the youngest"]
38: the priest hunting in Ireland in the 17th & 18th [&19th] Centuries
41: the gestation period of an elephant is 22 months, but when it comes out it's still an elephant
43: kindergarten is the most difficult age to teach [It's why it is best left to women. Men have neither the brains nor the stamina]
44: the bigotry of the camp director who complained of the presence of negro children [Was he a bigot? His complaint was of its effect on his business. How did he treat the kids? If he was a bigot, should the kids have been left at the camp?]
47: "welfare chiselers" I hold no brief for them [Why not? Are they hopelessly beyond the pale?]
48: that peculiarly Catholic fascination with sex [No Jews in St. Paul? It's where the "fascination" began]
49: authority of service and authority of position. Ideally they exist together [Actually, probably not. Consider the Cure d'Ars, and Andre Trocme. It's rougher being a parish priest]
52: the humor of it. Never make deals with God.
53: the density of specification [H.James] [but, as distinct from accumulated details]
56: the fire chief forbidding his men to enter a building about to collapse but: "Come on, padres. You're wanted inside"
: thereafter, freezing & cold, he eats a hot dog. "Should you have?" asks his Abp. "It's Lent". [Women will never understand how men give each other pats on the back to loosen the tension]
69: Father Flynn, the liberal arts purist, rejecting business courses [It's the great failing of the liberal arts colleges. "What am I going to do with my Degree in Philosophy? Open a shop and sell concepts?". The liberal arts without application become sophistry: survey courses. I read today (5/3/99) in the Jewish Sentinel one fellow praising the superiority of "religiosity" over religion. But how can you have "religiosity without religion? Perfume without a flower?]
69/70: on lay teachers [the advantage is to leave priests free to be priests]
81: Abp. Bing's letter allowing him to accept the Ford Fdtn. challenge grant, without committing the Adiocese [and keeping it free from foreign entanglements]
84: on Vietnam [But no discussion of how we were tricked into it by the college boys in DC. Nor of the constitutional illegality. Nor of the spinelessness of the representatives. Poor LBJ's great work in domestic affairs was ruined by the sweet talkers with their word games. So much for the liberal arts without content]
93: Catholic traditionalists [makes them a species]
94/5: on the naming of bishops. [Does the Holy Father name bishops? Or Himself? Do candidates present themselves? What does nolo episcopari mean?
98: Msgr. Higgins was at Henry Luce's party at the Flora in Rome! Hobnobbing!
101: 'Any use of matrimony whatsoever in the exercise of which the act is deprived, by human interference, of its natural power to procreate life ...' [That's a clear enough statement. It accords with the deeper doctrine that God makes each human creature; and with the Jewish teaching that there are certain arbitrary (consider the etymology) rules which we are required to follow, having free will and self consciousness. God says don't stick your finger into the electrical outlet. The serpent says "you will learn about good & evil". And so we do: stick the finger in and learn the difference between good & evil. And so later do those who used the pill learn that they could have copulated and let God worry about supporting the results]
: the Council Fathers had reached a consensus about contraception [earlier he is against consensus]
102: [that the purpose of marriage is procreation. Is this so? Or is the purpose companionship, in the course of which we may copulate; but if we do, we should not attempt to block the other Actor in "pro" creation. It's not easy]
104: Paul VI's Humana Vita. [Paul VI's? Or the Church's?]
108: a mutual friend told me that [my resignation] broke his pastor's heart [some friend!]
116: an exchange with Cardinal Spellman and a fine tribute. [THE cardinal would battle, privately; he knew who was at work, whispering in the ear. He might holler but he would never denigrate. He also had an Irish mother]
119: Cardinal O'Boyle of DC. [Was it he who confirmed me? 1944 it would be]
121: Father Marvin O'Connell calling bishops "amateurs". [Amateur whats? Who he?]
126: the bishop who referred to priests who drifted away as "derelicts" [Guess he never heard of the Lost Sheep. It's easy to be a bishop of sheepish sheep]
130/1: [a bit rough on Cardinal McIntyre, whose behavior illustrates the wisdom of the Holy Father's call for automatic resignation at 75. We must be careful not to criticize our elders. If what JP says is the case, the cardinal violated several rules of Church procedure, including discretion]
134: "Some prince!" [of Card. McI. Could be deleted. It's a crack, not an analysis. Judging from JP's autobio, he did not have much experience with difficult cases among the sheep]
137/8: on the bishops' meeting and the carryings on [shows the danger of these National Councils. Is error less erroneous because it has a majority vote?]
141: His mother: "I've read about the old man in Calfornia". [I suppose even John Paul's mother had her moments of scepticism about his behavior. V. Oscar, supra]
143: "to control conception rather than leave it wholely to chance" [chance? this is where the fuzziness begins. Substitute "God" for chance and the matter becomes clear]
146: on the burden of a bishop [It was summed up by Dennis Malvasi: "The cardinal says stop bombing the abortuaries. I stop. I don't know whether he's right or wrong; that's his problem. I got problems enough without God getting mad at me".
182: the process of making it to that age "when we find no longer all things possible" (TSE)
192: Brown vs. Board of Ed. [Curious that lawyers do not see the flaw in the second part. The first is correct: the law is color blind. How then can the law know whether the "colored" have been adequately helped. That flaw that iota of difference has created as many problems as it attempted to solve. It is condescending to the blacks. And led to the nonsense of no difference between male and female. Tell it to your mother]
193: the fire that melts the butter hardens the iron
195: on treating students in law school as mean judges might treat them so that they will get the experience [It rather makes them cowards. Cf. Thaddeus Stevens when threatened by a judge for showing contempt of court: "I apologize, your honor. I was doing my best to conceal it"]
198: the process of learning the law consists of watching skillful practitioners "move the pieces on the board" [But not allowing them to determine what the pieces are, nor the size and formation of the board. They practice, they do not make, the law]
203: Greenleaf noted that all churches tend to become narcissistic, defending the bureaucracy ... [relying on the tried & true. Is that wrong if you don't have a replacement in place? Who wants the traffic laws changed every two months? All bureaucracies become hide bound, not "narcissistic". It's a psychoanalyst's word. And "Catholics" are fascinated by sex? Who isn’t?]
204: [too many "very's" used as adverbs; "Pro active": a sophist's word, trying to mean something more than it does. "Active" does all the necessary work.
212: Elmer Andersen [RIP]. Owned a Grolier binding, he did.
Ratzinger, Joseph. SALT OF THE EARTH
Ratzinger, Joseph, cardinal. SALT OF THE EARTH: The Church at the End of the Millennium: an Interview with Peter Seewald. Translated by Adrian Walker. Ignatius Press 1997. 8vo. 283pp. Paper. ISBN 0-89870-640-2. $12.95
Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger has had a bad press. (Looking at his beaming face, one is tempted to refer to him as Joe). Those for whom the definition of the Hypostatic Union, or the Procession of the Holy Ghost, or the more abstruse of the theological distinctions are questions of great matter will not find a discussion in this book. Instead, the Prefect of the Holy Office (the dreaded Black Inquisition of overactive imaginations) responds to a wide variety of questions that are the stuff of the popular press. And as the popular press does in its curious way reflect the vox populi they are the questions - respectfully put - which agitate the minds, and thus the souls, of men today.
There is a delight that arises because the cardinal is a German, or properly, a Bavarian. He has the earnestness, the seriousness, of that race. (Of Italy, he comments with that same seriousness: "political systems collapse, and then nothing really changes". Like the aqueducts and the roads, it's been that way for over two millennia). The seriousness might best be thought of as the earnestness with which, in the popular imagination, a German having had a joke explained to him, laughs and laughs and laughs. He laughs seriously, as a tribute to the joke. And continues to explain it: "It is like when you are full of joy. You must communicate it in some way". He has a good phrase for this: the Bible is full of what seem to be contradictions, but are really paradoxes. Look at the size of an acorn; look at the size of an oak.
From his account, the cardinal didn't want to take on his job; nor did he want to become a bishop; he wanted to be a parish priest, writing dissertations and learned papers on the Franciscan theology of St. Bonaventure, and explaining the teachings of the Church to the local children, those brutes quick to spot contradictions. (His sermons for children packed the house with adult listeners).
The questions put by the reporter - there are a few theological bits - are chiefly what are called pastoral concerns. Joseph (I can't resist it) took as his model the doings of St. Augustine. Augustine was also a man who loved theological disputes but had to deal with daily problems; such as the propriety of having a brothel in the city. (St. Augustine was not against it, which is not the same thing as being for it. He would know where his straying sheep might be found). So also the cardinal does not avoid the simple hard questions: contraception, remarriage after divorce, celibacy, women priests. To these he gives, gently, the answer which is the answer of common sense. He does not think he can make people chaste; he can only point out what happens when you are not. Like the doctor who points out the effects of bad eating habits. He refers to the lady who was all for the ordination of women. She came to realize that ordination entails subordination. She wants even less of that and has decided against ordination in general. (One step more and she'll come full circle to ordaining men to keep them subordinate).
Of greater interest to U.S. Americans is the account of the doings of the Church in other countries. And his view of events; of protestant sects, of divisions within the Church, of the Orthodox church, of Judaism, of Islam, of Buddhism. It will perhaps come as a surprise that, large as our country is, it is a minority in the world. Those who yearn for a more democratic Church would be upset to be outnumbered by the larger part of the one billion Catholics throughout the world. Most of them do not speak American College English; they speak their own funny languages; as Mark Twain observed, even their kids do. Fortunately for us these matters are not decided by majority vote.
The translation is well done. Which is to say, it is clear; while retaining just those touches that remind us that it is a translation. (One minor flaw: the subtitle should read "The Church at the Turn of the Millenium (Jahrtausendwende)"). Perhaps the cardinal will one day be allowed to get back to his theological dissertations; to write his great book; to explain things to children in the local parish. We are fortunate that the Holy Father decided he would meanwhile be useful where he is. He is a good brake (but not a wet blanket) on the enthusiasts of both "right" and "left", the "traditionalists" and the "rebellious". He does not wish "a plague on both your houses", but visits both. He is a vigorous moderate, the best kind of radical; one who listens to questions and is delighted by them. ("That's a good question"). For there are no answers to questions that haven't been asked.
This is a good book, easy to read and easy to understand. The cardinal takes up the questions as they are asked; he pretty well covers the territory, sometimes with answers, sometimes with pointers, and occasionally (following Maimonides' suggestion) "I don't know". (Who does understand how they do politics in Italy?). For those who have (and which of us has not?) read many slanders on him, it's a book which lets the man speak for himself. It's one to be read by those who would criticize him because of what they have read about him, rather than by him.
Highly recommended for subscribers to America and Commonweal looking for a balanced diet. And subscribers to Sursum Corda, so's not to get carried away in an attempt to be more Catholic than the Pope. John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger, like all our bishops, have been given us by the Holy Spirit. They are what we have to work with; we, the ever bleating never satisfied unruly sheep, are what they have to work with. Where they get the patience to explain the same thing over and over again, the Holy Spirit (with the Father and the Son) alone knows.
Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger has had a bad press. (Looking at his beaming face, one is tempted to refer to him as Joe). Those for whom the definition of the Hypostatic Union, or the Procession of the Holy Ghost, or the more abstruse of the theological distinctions are questions of great matter will not find a discussion in this book. Instead, the Prefect of the Holy Office (the dreaded Black Inquisition of overactive imaginations) responds to a wide variety of questions that are the stuff of the popular press. And as the popular press does in its curious way reflect the vox populi they are the questions - respectfully put - which agitate the minds, and thus the souls, of men today.
There is a delight that arises because the cardinal is a German, or properly, a Bavarian. He has the earnestness, the seriousness, of that race. (Of Italy, he comments with that same seriousness: "political systems collapse, and then nothing really changes". Like the aqueducts and the roads, it's been that way for over two millennia). The seriousness might best be thought of as the earnestness with which, in the popular imagination, a German having had a joke explained to him, laughs and laughs and laughs. He laughs seriously, as a tribute to the joke. And continues to explain it: "It is like when you are full of joy. You must communicate it in some way". He has a good phrase for this: the Bible is full of what seem to be contradictions, but are really paradoxes. Look at the size of an acorn; look at the size of an oak.
From his account, the cardinal didn't want to take on his job; nor did he want to become a bishop; he wanted to be a parish priest, writing dissertations and learned papers on the Franciscan theology of St. Bonaventure, and explaining the teachings of the Church to the local children, those brutes quick to spot contradictions. (His sermons for children packed the house with adult listeners).
The questions put by the reporter - there are a few theological bits - are chiefly what are called pastoral concerns. Joseph (I can't resist it) took as his model the doings of St. Augustine. Augustine was also a man who loved theological disputes but had to deal with daily problems; such as the propriety of having a brothel in the city. (St. Augustine was not against it, which is not the same thing as being for it. He would know where his straying sheep might be found). So also the cardinal does not avoid the simple hard questions: contraception, remarriage after divorce, celibacy, women priests. To these he gives, gently, the answer which is the answer of common sense. He does not think he can make people chaste; he can only point out what happens when you are not. Like the doctor who points out the effects of bad eating habits. He refers to the lady who was all for the ordination of women. She came to realize that ordination entails subordination. She wants even less of that and has decided against ordination in general. (One step more and she'll come full circle to ordaining men to keep them subordinate).
Of greater interest to U.S. Americans is the account of the doings of the Church in other countries. And his view of events; of protestant sects, of divisions within the Church, of the Orthodox church, of Judaism, of Islam, of Buddhism. It will perhaps come as a surprise that, large as our country is, it is a minority in the world. Those who yearn for a more democratic Church would be upset to be outnumbered by the larger part of the one billion Catholics throughout the world. Most of them do not speak American College English; they speak their own funny languages; as Mark Twain observed, even their kids do. Fortunately for us these matters are not decided by majority vote.
The translation is well done. Which is to say, it is clear; while retaining just those touches that remind us that it is a translation. (One minor flaw: the subtitle should read "The Church at the Turn of the Millenium (Jahrtausendwende)"). Perhaps the cardinal will one day be allowed to get back to his theological dissertations; to write his great book; to explain things to children in the local parish. We are fortunate that the Holy Father decided he would meanwhile be useful where he is. He is a good brake (but not a wet blanket) on the enthusiasts of both "right" and "left", the "traditionalists" and the "rebellious". He does not wish "a plague on both your houses", but visits both. He is a vigorous moderate, the best kind of radical; one who listens to questions and is delighted by them. ("That's a good question"). For there are no answers to questions that haven't been asked.
This is a good book, easy to read and easy to understand. The cardinal takes up the questions as they are asked; he pretty well covers the territory, sometimes with answers, sometimes with pointers, and occasionally (following Maimonides' suggestion) "I don't know". (Who does understand how they do politics in Italy?). For those who have (and which of us has not?) read many slanders on him, it's a book which lets the man speak for himself. It's one to be read by those who would criticize him because of what they have read about him, rather than by him.
Highly recommended for subscribers to America and Commonweal looking for a balanced diet. And subscribers to Sursum Corda, so's not to get carried away in an attempt to be more Catholic than the Pope. John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger, like all our bishops, have been given us by the Holy Spirit. They are what we have to work with; we, the ever bleating never satisfied unruly sheep, are what they have to work with. Where they get the patience to explain the same thing over and over again, the Holy Spirit (with the Father and the Son) alone knows.
HIDDEN ENCYCLICAL
Passelecq, Georges, & Bernard Suchecky. THE HIDDEN ENCYCLICAL OF PIUS XI. Introd. by Garry Wills. Harcourt Brace 1997. 319pp. $25
This book, translated from the French, is an incomplete history of a document prepared at the invitation of Pius XI. On June 22, 1938, Pius XI directly requested the American Jesuit, Father John Lafarge, to write "as if you were the pope" a statement on the matter of racism and anti-semiticism. After consulting with the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Fr. LaFarge set to work with two other Jesuit fathers, the French Gustave Desbuquois and the German Gustav Grundlach. The result was three versions (from the American, the Frenchman, and the German) which were "not always coherent or identical" and "cannot be considered a true pontifical document, but at most a draft". Pius XII recast some parts for use in his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus issued in October 1939.
The dust jacket blurb, looking for a selling point, would turn this into a "smoking gun" to be used "against" Pius XI, and his successor, Pius XII, as yet another instance of their "failure" to address the persecution of Jews. With its careful documentation (apart the irrevelant animadversions), the book instead raises questions about the role of the Society of Jesus in the period. For six decades prior to Pius XI's request, the Italian Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica had not been behind-hand in its suspicion of Jews. So much was this case that the official journal Il Regime Fascista in August 1938 mockingly reported that it would be reluctant to accept the suggestions of the Jesuit fathers for segregating and marking Jews. The Jesuit journal had maintained its suspicion and comments about Jews until it was silenced, probably by the pope in July 1938, when against the threats of the Fascist government, he openly condemned the racial laws adopted by Mussolini in June of that year.
It is not unlikely that the pope's direct request to the American Jesuit was an indirect reproach to the Superior General. In 1966, his successor, Father Pedro Arrupe, warned his Jesuit fathers against a "too rigid concept of truth where personal opinions are sometimes confused with Divine Revelation". The book itself is suffused with a spirit bordering on contempt for Pius XI, and hostility towards Pius XII. A useful antidote to this spirit is Pinchas Lapide's Three Popes & the Jews. Mr. Pinchas (who has not much love for the Church) gives a better balanced account, with much detail, of the unceasing activities of the popes in a period, marked by great economic depression and an explosively unstable condition of society, worldwide. The wonder is that the popes were able to do as much as they did in face of the direct hostility of the persecutors, and the all-too-human inertia of political and ecclesiastical institutions.
The American edition of this flawed book contains a preface by Professor Garry Wills. A 1957 graduate of the midwestern Jesuit school, St. Louis College, Professor Wills has been littering the American publishing scene with half-cooked opinions for several decades. He tells us that "the Gospels are not a historical record". (Cf. 1 Corinthians 15 on this theory). He refers to the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin as "fictive". What he probably means (the fuzziness of his prose makes it difficult to determine) is that the trial was a kangaroo court, with no standing in Jewish law: a "trial" that would be condemned by Jews. The preface is a fine example of Alexander Pope's dictum, with its careful choice of words: "A little learning is a dangerous thing".
The title of the first encyclical ever written in German, Mit brennender Sorge - a joint work of Pius XI and his successor Pius XII - expresses admirably their worry about the situation in Germany. An inadequate translation into English would be something along the lines of "With searing concern ...". (But a better understanding can only come with some study of the language). Mr. Pinchas wrote truly when he acknowledged that his three popes knew that "Synagogue and Church are hewn from the same rock". It is a great promise that the rock will not give way, much as the enemy will try. Those who would easily criticize the work of lighthouse-keepers during a great storm should try their hand at it. Monday morning quarterbacking is a harmless past-time for boyish amateurs; it treats but of football games. The situation in the late 1930s was a different kind of game, played for human souls.
The Gallicans - German and French - were annoyed at the interference of the popes in "internal politics". Mit brennender Sorge had to be smuggled into Germany; its publication led to many arrests. Just so now our Gallicans - Americans like Prof. Wills included - are annoyed at the interference of the pope in the "internal politics" of birth prevention and abortion and euthanasia and economic embargoes and the fictive, but not fictitious, debt of impoverished countries. The cheap chatter about the "failure" of the popes Pius XI and Pius XII to wave a magical encyclical which would bring to a sudden halt the persecutions of the 1930s comes across as an attempt to distract from the efforts of their successors - who also are not possessed of "magical" formulas - to admonish and to warn. They cannot do it for us.
This book, translated from the French, is an incomplete history of a document prepared at the invitation of Pius XI. On June 22, 1938, Pius XI directly requested the American Jesuit, Father John Lafarge, to write "as if you were the pope" a statement on the matter of racism and anti-semiticism. After consulting with the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Fr. LaFarge set to work with two other Jesuit fathers, the French Gustave Desbuquois and the German Gustav Grundlach. The result was three versions (from the American, the Frenchman, and the German) which were "not always coherent or identical" and "cannot be considered a true pontifical document, but at most a draft". Pius XII recast some parts for use in his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus issued in October 1939.
The dust jacket blurb, looking for a selling point, would turn this into a "smoking gun" to be used "against" Pius XI, and his successor, Pius XII, as yet another instance of their "failure" to address the persecution of Jews. With its careful documentation (apart the irrevelant animadversions), the book instead raises questions about the role of the Society of Jesus in the period. For six decades prior to Pius XI's request, the Italian Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica had not been behind-hand in its suspicion of Jews. So much was this case that the official journal Il Regime Fascista in August 1938 mockingly reported that it would be reluctant to accept the suggestions of the Jesuit fathers for segregating and marking Jews. The Jesuit journal had maintained its suspicion and comments about Jews until it was silenced, probably by the pope in July 1938, when against the threats of the Fascist government, he openly condemned the racial laws adopted by Mussolini in June of that year.
It is not unlikely that the pope's direct request to the American Jesuit was an indirect reproach to the Superior General. In 1966, his successor, Father Pedro Arrupe, warned his Jesuit fathers against a "too rigid concept of truth where personal opinions are sometimes confused with Divine Revelation". The book itself is suffused with a spirit bordering on contempt for Pius XI, and hostility towards Pius XII. A useful antidote to this spirit is Pinchas Lapide's Three Popes & the Jews. Mr. Pinchas (who has not much love for the Church) gives a better balanced account, with much detail, of the unceasing activities of the popes in a period, marked by great economic depression and an explosively unstable condition of society, worldwide. The wonder is that the popes were able to do as much as they did in face of the direct hostility of the persecutors, and the all-too-human inertia of political and ecclesiastical institutions.
The American edition of this flawed book contains a preface by Professor Garry Wills. A 1957 graduate of the midwestern Jesuit school, St. Louis College, Professor Wills has been littering the American publishing scene with half-cooked opinions for several decades. He tells us that "the Gospels are not a historical record". (Cf. 1 Corinthians 15 on this theory). He refers to the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin as "fictive". What he probably means (the fuzziness of his prose makes it difficult to determine) is that the trial was a kangaroo court, with no standing in Jewish law: a "trial" that would be condemned by Jews. The preface is a fine example of Alexander Pope's dictum, with its careful choice of words: "A little learning is a dangerous thing".
The title of the first encyclical ever written in German, Mit brennender Sorge - a joint work of Pius XI and his successor Pius XII - expresses admirably their worry about the situation in Germany. An inadequate translation into English would be something along the lines of "With searing concern ...". (But a better understanding can only come with some study of the language). Mr. Pinchas wrote truly when he acknowledged that his three popes knew that "Synagogue and Church are hewn from the same rock". It is a great promise that the rock will not give way, much as the enemy will try. Those who would easily criticize the work of lighthouse-keepers during a great storm should try their hand at it. Monday morning quarterbacking is a harmless past-time for boyish amateurs; it treats but of football games. The situation in the late 1930s was a different kind of game, played for human souls.
The Gallicans - German and French - were annoyed at the interference of the popes in "internal politics". Mit brennender Sorge had to be smuggled into Germany; its publication led to many arrests. Just so now our Gallicans - Americans like Prof. Wills included - are annoyed at the interference of the pope in the "internal politics" of birth prevention and abortion and euthanasia and economic embargoes and the fictive, but not fictitious, debt of impoverished countries. The cheap chatter about the "failure" of the popes Pius XI and Pius XII to wave a magical encyclical which would bring to a sudden halt the persecutions of the 1930s comes across as an attempt to distract from the efforts of their successors - who also are not possessed of "magical" formulas - to admonish and to warn. They cannot do it for us.
Morris. CHURCH IN AMERICA
Morris, Charles R. AMERICAN CATHOLIC. Times Books, 1997.
Irish has become chic; Catholic has become chic. But even more chic is attacking both. Charles Morris' book jumps on the band-wagon, with the intent to offset the appeal of the one and the other. He is a reporter, rather than a historian, and has all the defects of that trade with few of its redeeming qualities. He takes as his subtitle: "The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church". Like our newspaper and television reporters, he is bored with accounts of goodness; he looks instead for "the story" ("the dirt"), which will sell. There are precious few saints in his book. (And nothing about God to distract us). And no serious account of the role of nuns. Indeed, with the worn cliche about "severe grammar school teachers", he does not fail to take a swipe at them. As our poet put it, "he damns with faint praise". He finds little good in most bishops who served in the United States; and of one (a cardinal), he writes that "he was a terrible human being, and a bad priest". That's a lie.
Mr. Morris writes, like all our experts, as one virgin of experience. It would not be worth noticing this book had it not received superficial praise in some Catholic journals. Better to read a good, well-reasoned, well-documented, honest attack on the Church.
Irish has become chic; Catholic has become chic. But even more chic is attacking both. Charles Morris' book jumps on the band-wagon, with the intent to offset the appeal of the one and the other. He is a reporter, rather than a historian, and has all the defects of that trade with few of its redeeming qualities. He takes as his subtitle: "The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church". Like our newspaper and television reporters, he is bored with accounts of goodness; he looks instead for "the story" ("the dirt"), which will sell. There are precious few saints in his book. (And nothing about God to distract us). And no serious account of the role of nuns. Indeed, with the worn cliche about "severe grammar school teachers", he does not fail to take a swipe at them. As our poet put it, "he damns with faint praise". He finds little good in most bishops who served in the United States; and of one (a cardinal), he writes that "he was a terrible human being, and a bad priest". That's a lie.
Mr. Morris writes, like all our experts, as one virgin of experience. It would not be worth noticing this book had it not received superficial praise in some Catholic journals. Better to read a good, well-reasoned, well-documented, honest attack on the Church.
McClory. INFALLIBLITY etc
McClory, Robert F. POWER & THE PAPACY: the People & Politics Behind the the Doctrine of Infallibility. Triumph 1997. $25.
A journalist's reflections on the dogma of infallibility, set off by the ruling of the Congregation of the Faith concerning the Church's lack of authority to ordain women. The author relies on about half a dozen books on the matter. He takes from them what re-inforces his polite feeling that women should be ordainable; while setting a few straw positions to knock down without the effort of thinking. There is no real force in the book, no personal sense that for him the Church lacks something which makes it difficult for him to accept its teachings. The whole is a long, vague essay put between covers. It has the force of boiled cabbage.
To take an instance: the author makes much of the "reception" of a teaching by the pope. Thus, he cites Francis Sullivan on the teaching concerning contraception: that the continued debate since the 1960s, removes its claim to be considered a constant teaching. The world began in 1960, and Father Kueng is its prophet. By this argument, the Arians, who were numerous indeed for several centuries, were correct.
Although not their patron saint, George Orwell could serve as a role model for journalists. At the top of every page, or the frame of every screen of a word-blender, should be inscribed: "Do not write of fire unless you have been burned". On contraception, there is an aspect not considered at all: it is a sterilization of the female. It simplifies copulating, without danger of consequences.
On the ordination of women, the major practical, or pastoral, aspect is the existing general tendency of men to avoid going to church. Being preached at by a woman is not a sure remedy to overcome this sloth. Nor is at all certain that women will easily accept being ordered around by a woman. The realist novelist, Anthony Trollope, has given us the figure of Bishopess Mrs. Prouty. The woman theologian who began by insisting on ordination for women, came to realize that ordination entails sub-ordination. She is now against ordination of any kind. Mr. McClory would light a fire; he has not considered whether the fire might not burn down the house.
A minor, irritating, continuous reference in this book is to the figures of Cardinals Manning and Newman. Both began life as members of the English State Church, for the sensibilities of whose current members Mr. McClory expresses some concern. To one whose tradition is rather from the experience of that church in Ireland, this concern too quickly by-passes its failure to testify against the brutality of its government. Bishops of the English State Church sat in the House of Lords. Newman's Oxford-bred snarling at Rome was not likely to convince a people who got their religion from Rome, and their politics from the English parliament.
Just so does a question arise about the Lutheran church during the great persecution. It is not a question whether the Lutherans were right about this or that matter of theology, or interpretation of Holy Writ. It is rather a question of a failure to take into account the "whole picture" of human nature. And the openings left to allow the weakness of our nature to be played upon.
Cardinal Manning did great work among the immigrants driven from Ireland by starvation. Cardinal Newman did some work; but he acknowledged at the end of his life, that he had labored in the study, while his own bishop, Bishop Ullathorne, had been out in the vineyard. Were Mr. McClory's hero, Cardinal Newman, still with us, he would likely send many of the authors cited by Mr. McClory - college students all - out into the vineyard to learn that the sun is indeed hot, and the work sweaty and tedious. Give the sheep a chance to be promiscuous, and they will not fail. Give a college boy three books and he will invent a virtual world; with all the ease of not having to be virtuous.
It is curious that Mr. McCloskey - father of a daughter - is not alert to the risk posed by a sweet-talking college boy, who has taken some courses in theology and can come up with a 20 page bibliography of scholars' articles, demonstrating the lack of "constant acceptance" of the prohibition against rolls-in-the-hay. Is it to be wondered that the woman spokesman for the Providers of Sexual Services complained that the promiscuity of college girls amounted to unfair competition?
A journalist's reflections on the dogma of infallibility, set off by the ruling of the Congregation of the Faith concerning the Church's lack of authority to ordain women. The author relies on about half a dozen books on the matter. He takes from them what re-inforces his polite feeling that women should be ordainable; while setting a few straw positions to knock down without the effort of thinking. There is no real force in the book, no personal sense that for him the Church lacks something which makes it difficult for him to accept its teachings. The whole is a long, vague essay put between covers. It has the force of boiled cabbage.
To take an instance: the author makes much of the "reception" of a teaching by the pope. Thus, he cites Francis Sullivan on the teaching concerning contraception: that the continued debate since the 1960s, removes its claim to be considered a constant teaching. The world began in 1960, and Father Kueng is its prophet. By this argument, the Arians, who were numerous indeed for several centuries, were correct.
Although not their patron saint, George Orwell could serve as a role model for journalists. At the top of every page, or the frame of every screen of a word-blender, should be inscribed: "Do not write of fire unless you have been burned". On contraception, there is an aspect not considered at all: it is a sterilization of the female. It simplifies copulating, without danger of consequences.
On the ordination of women, the major practical, or pastoral, aspect is the existing general tendency of men to avoid going to church. Being preached at by a woman is not a sure remedy to overcome this sloth. Nor is at all certain that women will easily accept being ordered around by a woman. The realist novelist, Anthony Trollope, has given us the figure of Bishopess Mrs. Prouty. The woman theologian who began by insisting on ordination for women, came to realize that ordination entails sub-ordination. She is now against ordination of any kind. Mr. McClory would light a fire; he has not considered whether the fire might not burn down the house.
A minor, irritating, continuous reference in this book is to the figures of Cardinals Manning and Newman. Both began life as members of the English State Church, for the sensibilities of whose current members Mr. McClory expresses some concern. To one whose tradition is rather from the experience of that church in Ireland, this concern too quickly by-passes its failure to testify against the brutality of its government. Bishops of the English State Church sat in the House of Lords. Newman's Oxford-bred snarling at Rome was not likely to convince a people who got their religion from Rome, and their politics from the English parliament.
Just so does a question arise about the Lutheran church during the great persecution. It is not a question whether the Lutherans were right about this or that matter of theology, or interpretation of Holy Writ. It is rather a question of a failure to take into account the "whole picture" of human nature. And the openings left to allow the weakness of our nature to be played upon.
Cardinal Manning did great work among the immigrants driven from Ireland by starvation. Cardinal Newman did some work; but he acknowledged at the end of his life, that he had labored in the study, while his own bishop, Bishop Ullathorne, had been out in the vineyard. Were Mr. McClory's hero, Cardinal Newman, still with us, he would likely send many of the authors cited by Mr. McClory - college students all - out into the vineyard to learn that the sun is indeed hot, and the work sweaty and tedious. Give the sheep a chance to be promiscuous, and they will not fail. Give a college boy three books and he will invent a virtual world; with all the ease of not having to be virtuous.
It is curious that Mr. McCloskey - father of a daughter - is not alert to the risk posed by a sweet-talking college boy, who has taken some courses in theology and can come up with a 20 page bibliography of scholars' articles, demonstrating the lack of "constant acceptance" of the prohibition against rolls-in-the-hay. Is it to be wondered that the woman spokesman for the Providers of Sexual Services complained that the promiscuity of college girls amounted to unfair competition?
Desmond. THOMAS HUXLEY
Desmond, Adrian. HUXLEY: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest. Addison Wesley 1997. 820pp. ISBN 0-201-95987-9. $37.50. (4.5 cents per page)
Egon Friedell tells us that from the 1890s to 1910, his dog had evolved from a canis impressionisticus to a canis expressionisticus. The life of Thomas Huxley reads like the continuation of a novel by Dickens with a good deal of Stevenson thrown in. Bright, good looking boy - a fair-haired lad - works himself out of the muck of the suburban shabby genteel world of Dissenting England in the 1830s, gets a job on a ship, travels for five years to the foreign world of Argentina and the newly opened continent of Australia, and to New Guinea, has all kinds of adventures in the jungle, reads a lot, teaches himself Italian (from The Divine Comedy), keeps careful notes of his passion for jelly-fish and molluscs, travels in the Australian outback, goes to dances in a Jane Austen world transplanted to Sydney, meets a girl and falls in love.
At the end of his five year service aboard, he returns home to earn his living with his jellyfish and molluscs ("an upright young man, in a society without safety nets. The mores of the parish magazine were his: no marriage without means"). After another five years, he succeeds just enough to be able to convince the girl into joining her fine dancing horseman. (She didn't need much convincing, having set her cap at him). They marry, and have children (from whom evolve the later Huxleys: Aldous and Elspeth and Julian, et hoc genus omne); all the while he is busy undermining the world of the amateur hobbyists who dominated (and corrupted) the biological sciences. He succeeds in replacing the amateurs by trained students. From these have come such great successes as the English have added to the evolving study of biology. (He succeeded too well as the trained scientists have evolved into the same kind of amateur theologians. But he was not to know that).
This is a fine book, almost despite itself. Which is the best kind of book. (The subtitle is meaningless). It is a love story. By prolific quotation from Huxley's letters and journals, and those of his wife, the author writes, almost accidentally, the biography of an active, honorable, generous man, who never lost his young man's fury at the injustice he had seen in the London slums and aboard ship; and who never lost his boyish delight in knocking hats off pompous heads.
Fortunately for Huxley, he had not been subjected to the brain-washing of the Public Schools which gives that querulous, frightened tone to so many of the intellectuals of his (and our) day. (The wealthy Darwin was forever checking his stock portfolio). Nor, despite the title, was Huxley sucked into the inanity of Evolution By Natural Selection; he recognized it as a substitute (a superstition) for "God [lege Mother Nature] put you where you are"; and despised it. He maintained simply "I do not know". ("Atheism is, logically speaking, as absurd as polytheism"). He went back to his studies of jellyfish and molluscs, of the diseases which kept ruining the fishermen, and his organizing of training institutes to give bright, enthusiastic young men a chance to develope their talents. Were he alive, he would undoubtedly be lashing out at the academic heirarchy which has replaced the ecclesiastical.
The author of this biography sprinkles the biography with a few flecks of the ignorance of the educated Englishman. Thus, St. Pius IX: "a good, inept, undiplomatic soul". (Von Bismarck's system has collapsed and the Parliament is in no great shape; the Vatican is still going strong. Inept?). Thus: "London's gigantic sewage system was set to flush out the medieval ages". (My fourth grade history book says that much of the city had been destroyed in the fire of 1666. Medieval or Malthusian?). For those interested in the study of institutions, this book does an excellent analysis of the evolution of the older clerical academy into the scientifical academy, both blindly selected by Mother Nature's Parliament, red in tooth and claw, ever prompt to indulge in bashing the heads of foxes, Boers, Indians, and Irishmen. And then wondering why nobody loves it.
Cervantes complained that Don Quixote had taken over his novel; Mr. Desmond, in the tradition of Boswell, allows his subject to take over this biography. Like the queen who gave her name to the epoch, our Victorian ancestors, pace the freudlich imaginations of our professoriat, were not ignorant, nor inactive in matters sexual (teste the size of their families). Where would we be without the ancestors? We could use another Huxley, inflamed by the amateur perversion of his work, and by its use to denigrate the poor in order to maintain the corporately comfortable and their saponaceous courtiers in the dating services called universities, research institutes, and government halls. Huxley well knew that babies are not brought by storks from gene pools. Darwin and Spencer and H.G. Wells and their neo-Darwinian successors are dour and despairing, ever counting their royalties. Huxley was never rich enough to be dour and despairing.
As a young man out in the jungle, or aboard ship, Huxley occasionally got drunk. There's nothing like the evolutionary experience of a hangover to clear the head of fantasies. We select the drink; Mother Nature blindly teaches us about the chemical process whereby the water in the body is fixed (dissolved) by the alcohol. Huxley is fun. Even with the excellent index, he is forever outrunning his biographer. But Mr. Desmond keeps up with him, enjoying himself and sharing that enjoyment with us. Highly recommended for all ages.
Egon Friedell tells us that from the 1890s to 1910, his dog had evolved from a canis impressionisticus to a canis expressionisticus. The life of Thomas Huxley reads like the continuation of a novel by Dickens with a good deal of Stevenson thrown in. Bright, good looking boy - a fair-haired lad - works himself out of the muck of the suburban shabby genteel world of Dissenting England in the 1830s, gets a job on a ship, travels for five years to the foreign world of Argentina and the newly opened continent of Australia, and to New Guinea, has all kinds of adventures in the jungle, reads a lot, teaches himself Italian (from The Divine Comedy), keeps careful notes of his passion for jelly-fish and molluscs, travels in the Australian outback, goes to dances in a Jane Austen world transplanted to Sydney, meets a girl and falls in love.
At the end of his five year service aboard, he returns home to earn his living with his jellyfish and molluscs ("an upright young man, in a society without safety nets. The mores of the parish magazine were his: no marriage without means"). After another five years, he succeeds just enough to be able to convince the girl into joining her fine dancing horseman. (She didn't need much convincing, having set her cap at him). They marry, and have children (from whom evolve the later Huxleys: Aldous and Elspeth and Julian, et hoc genus omne); all the while he is busy undermining the world of the amateur hobbyists who dominated (and corrupted) the biological sciences. He succeeds in replacing the amateurs by trained students. From these have come such great successes as the English have added to the evolving study of biology. (He succeeded too well as the trained scientists have evolved into the same kind of amateur theologians. But he was not to know that).
This is a fine book, almost despite itself. Which is the best kind of book. (The subtitle is meaningless). It is a love story. By prolific quotation from Huxley's letters and journals, and those of his wife, the author writes, almost accidentally, the biography of an active, honorable, generous man, who never lost his young man's fury at the injustice he had seen in the London slums and aboard ship; and who never lost his boyish delight in knocking hats off pompous heads.
Fortunately for Huxley, he had not been subjected to the brain-washing of the Public Schools which gives that querulous, frightened tone to so many of the intellectuals of his (and our) day. (The wealthy Darwin was forever checking his stock portfolio). Nor, despite the title, was Huxley sucked into the inanity of Evolution By Natural Selection; he recognized it as a substitute (a superstition) for "God [lege Mother Nature] put you where you are"; and despised it. He maintained simply "I do not know". ("Atheism is, logically speaking, as absurd as polytheism"). He went back to his studies of jellyfish and molluscs, of the diseases which kept ruining the fishermen, and his organizing of training institutes to give bright, enthusiastic young men a chance to develope their talents. Were he alive, he would undoubtedly be lashing out at the academic heirarchy which has replaced the ecclesiastical.
The author of this biography sprinkles the biography with a few flecks of the ignorance of the educated Englishman. Thus, St. Pius IX: "a good, inept, undiplomatic soul". (Von Bismarck's system has collapsed and the Parliament is in no great shape; the Vatican is still going strong. Inept?). Thus: "London's gigantic sewage system was set to flush out the medieval ages". (My fourth grade history book says that much of the city had been destroyed in the fire of 1666. Medieval or Malthusian?). For those interested in the study of institutions, this book does an excellent analysis of the evolution of the older clerical academy into the scientifical academy, both blindly selected by Mother Nature's Parliament, red in tooth and claw, ever prompt to indulge in bashing the heads of foxes, Boers, Indians, and Irishmen. And then wondering why nobody loves it.
Cervantes complained that Don Quixote had taken over his novel; Mr. Desmond, in the tradition of Boswell, allows his subject to take over this biography. Like the queen who gave her name to the epoch, our Victorian ancestors, pace the freudlich imaginations of our professoriat, were not ignorant, nor inactive in matters sexual (teste the size of their families). Where would we be without the ancestors? We could use another Huxley, inflamed by the amateur perversion of his work, and by its use to denigrate the poor in order to maintain the corporately comfortable and their saponaceous courtiers in the dating services called universities, research institutes, and government halls. Huxley well knew that babies are not brought by storks from gene pools. Darwin and Spencer and H.G. Wells and their neo-Darwinian successors are dour and despairing, ever counting their royalties. Huxley was never rich enough to be dour and despairing.
As a young man out in the jungle, or aboard ship, Huxley occasionally got drunk. There's nothing like the evolutionary experience of a hangover to clear the head of fantasies. We select the drink; Mother Nature blindly teaches us about the chemical process whereby the water in the body is fixed (dissolved) by the alcohol. Huxley is fun. Even with the excellent index, he is forever outrunning his biographer. But Mr. Desmond keeps up with him, enjoying himself and sharing that enjoyment with us. Highly recommended for all ages.
John Devoy
Golway, Terry. IRISH REBEL: John Devoy & America's Fight For Ireland's Freedom. St. Martin's Press 1998. 371p. ills. notes, bibliog. index. $26.95 ISBN 0-312-18118-3
This is a well-written, well-researched, and calm account of the life, and of the activities, of John Devoy (1842-1928). For 70 of his 86 years, Devoy was the best of the organizers of support among the Irish in America for the independence of Ireland; and the clearest of thinkers about it. Mr. Golway writes his way cool-headedly through a period about which it is difficult not to arouse strong feelings. He avoids the temptations to express opinions, or to digress into dilations historical and sociological and psychological which are the stuff of college seminars, but not of good biographies. Biography being the only true history, and good biographies rare, this book is an excellent addition to the few good accounts of that unhappy period.
John Devoy was born near Dublin into the middle of the battle for independence, just as the potato blight and the ensuing famine loomed. His father, William, had already started a family, a responsibility which took his attention and his energies. But there was undoubtedly that in him which served as a model for his son. John did not hesitate to attack physically his teachers when he found them to have acted unjustly. He had that mark of all worthwhile young men: the blind rage for justice. It was fed by the unjustice he saw all about him; it continued to be stoked during his long life by the continuing unjustice. It got him early into jail. ("Henry, why are you in jail?" asked Emerson of Thoreau. "Waldo, why are you not?" he replied, question for question).
Released from imprisonment, Devoy came to the U.S. to continue his battle. Mr. Golway's account of his life during these long years is excellent. For Devoy, the matter was a purely political matter. Give the Irish in Ireland their independence to allow them determine their own politics. He insisted on this. The Irish in America had become American; Irish American, but American. Devoy quickly spotted this development of our human interests and concerns. In our day, the various groups of descendants, if they have any gumption and respect for their forebears, show their concern for the land of their parents and ancestors. But their lives are here.
The finest of English 20th Century historians remarked that man has an equal passion for social order and for social justice: for law and for equity. Their conflict is our human lot. Order we all need. We can't be changing the traffic laws every other day, nor long do without breakfast every morning. Nor will we long survive without the equity of sharing. It is against our nature. For Devoy equity was the burning passion. But he came to recognize the need for order and organization lest the passion consume the man. He was not inspired, nor much moved, by theories of "Ancient Irish Glory", or made-up accounts of the doings of bearded Druids two millennia earlier. In simply describing Devoy's life and doings, and allowing his writings to speak for themselves, Mr. Golway ignores these academic Gaelicisms and the aesthetic fogs of the "Celtic Revival". And Mr. Golway stays away from considering the yet unrecorded role of the Church which had sustained the Irish through several crushing centuries. And which is now easily dismissed. As the fine Irish saying has it: "You've worked for me, mother, all your life; now it's time to work for yourself". Whether you like the clergy or not (and even the clergy doesn't like the clergy), there's a great debt there.
(He has still not brushed off a few patches from the college habit of weaving term papers: the stitched-together prose which is offered as "thought". Thus, he refers to Cardinal Cullen's "cool contempt" when the body of Terence McManus was paraded through Dublin. The phrase has a pretty sound to it. But who was the recorder? The cardinal (it was he who found the formulation of the dogma of infallibility) had to work in an unsettled situation: "The Irish" as a great historian observed "make good monks and nuns and soldiers; but socially they are as quarrelsome as dogs").
Devoy insisted that Americans were American; that they must work within the laws and the habits of this country. And it was, indeed, by doing so that the greatest effect was achieved. The English oligarchy had not yet recognized - perhaps it does not still - that the center of power had shifted irreversibly to a land with a wealth of natural resources, and the possibilities of their development, hitherto unknown to mankind. How well the inhabitants of that country, and their succeeding generations would cope with the richness was another matter. John Devoy's great contribution to the country of his birth was at the same time a great contribution to the country of his adoption. The latter must find its own way. But as it does this, it must not forget its obligations to its past. Nor, in gratitude for the riches which with the land is endowed, its obligations to justice in the world. Devoy's principle was simple enough: leave be the country - of Ireland or of the U.S. - to decide for itself how it would go.
It is the problem in Ireland today. Devoy was not happy with the 1921 settlement, but recognized it, from long experience with the smile of a Saxon, as the best that could be had. He continued against De Valera and De Valera's IRA rebellion. He was against forcing the six counties into union. Let a vote be taken; let it be an honest vote. Then accept the results. The history of the Irish on the ground has yet to be written. There's no interesting history in accounts of the doings of the comfortable. One rich man is pretty much like another, the servant of his wealth. How the Irish managed to hold out through centuries of persecution, of contempt (still unbridled) for their poverty, of disdain for the bravery of their women, and of hatred of their religion, is one of the wonders of our history. The story will only be written in the manner chosen by Mr. Golway: allow the man to speak for himself. John Devoy has much to tell us. He was honorable, and courageous in his persistence. Mr. Golway does not speculate nor opinionize on these matters. He has dug into the archives. He has read the newspapers and the real memoirs, ignoring the over-chewed cud of academic seminars. His writing gives hope yet that our literature will survive the swamps of tertiary education. A good subject has been well treated.
This is a well-written, well-researched, and calm account of the life, and of the activities, of John Devoy (1842-1928). For 70 of his 86 years, Devoy was the best of the organizers of support among the Irish in America for the independence of Ireland; and the clearest of thinkers about it. Mr. Golway writes his way cool-headedly through a period about which it is difficult not to arouse strong feelings. He avoids the temptations to express opinions, or to digress into dilations historical and sociological and psychological which are the stuff of college seminars, but not of good biographies. Biography being the only true history, and good biographies rare, this book is an excellent addition to the few good accounts of that unhappy period.
John Devoy was born near Dublin into the middle of the battle for independence, just as the potato blight and the ensuing famine loomed. His father, William, had already started a family, a responsibility which took his attention and his energies. But there was undoubtedly that in him which served as a model for his son. John did not hesitate to attack physically his teachers when he found them to have acted unjustly. He had that mark of all worthwhile young men: the blind rage for justice. It was fed by the unjustice he saw all about him; it continued to be stoked during his long life by the continuing unjustice. It got him early into jail. ("Henry, why are you in jail?" asked Emerson of Thoreau. "Waldo, why are you not?" he replied, question for question).
Released from imprisonment, Devoy came to the U.S. to continue his battle. Mr. Golway's account of his life during these long years is excellent. For Devoy, the matter was a purely political matter. Give the Irish in Ireland their independence to allow them determine their own politics. He insisted on this. The Irish in America had become American; Irish American, but American. Devoy quickly spotted this development of our human interests and concerns. In our day, the various groups of descendants, if they have any gumption and respect for their forebears, show their concern for the land of their parents and ancestors. But their lives are here.
The finest of English 20th Century historians remarked that man has an equal passion for social order and for social justice: for law and for equity. Their conflict is our human lot. Order we all need. We can't be changing the traffic laws every other day, nor long do without breakfast every morning. Nor will we long survive without the equity of sharing. It is against our nature. For Devoy equity was the burning passion. But he came to recognize the need for order and organization lest the passion consume the man. He was not inspired, nor much moved, by theories of "Ancient Irish Glory", or made-up accounts of the doings of bearded Druids two millennia earlier. In simply describing Devoy's life and doings, and allowing his writings to speak for themselves, Mr. Golway ignores these academic Gaelicisms and the aesthetic fogs of the "Celtic Revival". And Mr. Golway stays away from considering the yet unrecorded role of the Church which had sustained the Irish through several crushing centuries. And which is now easily dismissed. As the fine Irish saying has it: "You've worked for me, mother, all your life; now it's time to work for yourself". Whether you like the clergy or not (and even the clergy doesn't like the clergy), there's a great debt there.
(He has still not brushed off a few patches from the college habit of weaving term papers: the stitched-together prose which is offered as "thought". Thus, he refers to Cardinal Cullen's "cool contempt" when the body of Terence McManus was paraded through Dublin. The phrase has a pretty sound to it. But who was the recorder? The cardinal (it was he who found the formulation of the dogma of infallibility) had to work in an unsettled situation: "The Irish" as a great historian observed "make good monks and nuns and soldiers; but socially they are as quarrelsome as dogs").
Devoy insisted that Americans were American; that they must work within the laws and the habits of this country. And it was, indeed, by doing so that the greatest effect was achieved. The English oligarchy had not yet recognized - perhaps it does not still - that the center of power had shifted irreversibly to a land with a wealth of natural resources, and the possibilities of their development, hitherto unknown to mankind. How well the inhabitants of that country, and their succeeding generations would cope with the richness was another matter. John Devoy's great contribution to the country of his birth was at the same time a great contribution to the country of his adoption. The latter must find its own way. But as it does this, it must not forget its obligations to its past. Nor, in gratitude for the riches which with the land is endowed, its obligations to justice in the world. Devoy's principle was simple enough: leave be the country - of Ireland or of the U.S. - to decide for itself how it would go.
It is the problem in Ireland today. Devoy was not happy with the 1921 settlement, but recognized it, from long experience with the smile of a Saxon, as the best that could be had. He continued against De Valera and De Valera's IRA rebellion. He was against forcing the six counties into union. Let a vote be taken; let it be an honest vote. Then accept the results. The history of the Irish on the ground has yet to be written. There's no interesting history in accounts of the doings of the comfortable. One rich man is pretty much like another, the servant of his wealth. How the Irish managed to hold out through centuries of persecution, of contempt (still unbridled) for their poverty, of disdain for the bravery of their women, and of hatred of their religion, is one of the wonders of our history. The story will only be written in the manner chosen by Mr. Golway: allow the man to speak for himself. John Devoy has much to tell us. He was honorable, and courageous in his persistence. Mr. Golway does not speculate nor opinionize on these matters. He has dug into the archives. He has read the newspapers and the real memoirs, ignoring the over-chewed cud of academic seminars. His writing gives hope yet that our literature will survive the swamps of tertiary education. A good subject has been well treated.
Erlos
Hoffman, Paul. THE MAN WHO LOVED ONLY NUMBERS: the Story of Paul Erlos. Hyperion 1998. 302p. (ISBN 0-7868-6362-5. $22.95.
A brief biography of the Hungarian mathematician, Paul Erlos, with clear explanations of the various kinds of numbers (prime, perfect, friendly) and of various mathematical problems. There is an interesting parallel between the lives of Paul Erlos, Richard Feynman, Oscar Levant (and others) who were absorbed by their professions - their callings - and indifferent to creature comforts: with the same sense of humor, the same disregard for mere convention.
Mr. Hoffman refers to Erlos' disparagement of "technical" applications. He fails to realize (as Erlos did not) that technical applications are the bumping up of mathematics with the real world; or say rather the root attachment of mathematics to the real world: the surds from which math derives. Mathematics is the higher form of mere arithmetic: the overlap of geometry and arithmetic. Thus, the real but unending number Pi, which is our old friend, the squaring of the circle.
It can also be called the meeting of the two kinds of knowledge: that derived from calculation (cognoscere) and that derived from experience (sapere). This is what Erlos (and Feyman) meant when they said that "babies can ask questions that mathematicians cannot answer". These are the realm of logic and philosophy, of which mere scientific training is a branch.
Mr. Hoffman (like many others) gets suckered by the Monty Hall problem, failing to change both sides of the equation. It ends as 1/3 = 1/2. As this is done with a chart, I demonstrate it:
C G G Win Lose Lose
G C G Lose Win Lose
G G C Lose Lose Win
After a door has been opened the odds are said to be:
C G G Win Lose Lost
G C G Lose Win Lost
"C" "C" G "Win" "Win" Lost
The failure here is not to eliminate the column of the door which has been opened; this leaves
C G Win Lose
G C Lose Win
Choosing not to change is equal to choosing to change. This is Poppers' complaint about Heisenberg's "the viewer by looking changes the situation". Astrology.
Calculation bumps up against reality. Erlos comments on this as the "petering out" of the energies of the prodigy; as well they might be when faced by an absurd situation (the introduction of infinity). Feynman had the habit of devising a formula and then saying "let's see what the boys in the lab have to say".
The same situation arises with the statement that Pi to the 39th place gives the circumference of the universe (with a difference like a hole in a balloon) of the size of a hydrogen atom. The statement goes in both directions: "what we mean by the universe is that which is bounded by Pi to the 39th place plus the size of a hydrogen atom".
Apart this error, with some usual rhetorical nonsense about Dark Ages (as though people had forgotten how to reckon and could not build castles and ships and cathedrals), it is a fine read.
45: the square root of 2 is the diagonal of a square measuring 1 on each side
--: "A friend is the other I" (Pythagoras)
45: prime numbers are infinite. (This is the core of the Fermat theorem, as also of all other problems treating of infinity)
friendly numbers: the divisors of one add up to the other
22O: 1 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 10 + 11 + 20 + 22 +44 + 55 + 110 = 284
284: 1 + 2 + 4 + 71 + 142 = 220
perfect numbers: sum of those (not itself) which divide into it
6 = 1 + 2 + 3
28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7
53: Ramsey problem: to devise formulas which eliminate brute counting
166: a computer cannot stop in a calculation; adding more computers slows the process down. (i.e., analogical computers do not exist).
228: transcendental numbers, such as Pi. (He fails to see the connection between the Fibonacci series and the spiral (which give us fractals). The spiral is the circle squared.
A brief biography of the Hungarian mathematician, Paul Erlos, with clear explanations of the various kinds of numbers (prime, perfect, friendly) and of various mathematical problems. There is an interesting parallel between the lives of Paul Erlos, Richard Feynman, Oscar Levant (and others) who were absorbed by their professions - their callings - and indifferent to creature comforts: with the same sense of humor, the same disregard for mere convention.
Mr. Hoffman refers to Erlos' disparagement of "technical" applications. He fails to realize (as Erlos did not) that technical applications are the bumping up of mathematics with the real world; or say rather the root attachment of mathematics to the real world: the surds from which math derives. Mathematics is the higher form of mere arithmetic: the overlap of geometry and arithmetic. Thus, the real but unending number Pi, which is our old friend, the squaring of the circle.
It can also be called the meeting of the two kinds of knowledge: that derived from calculation (cognoscere) and that derived from experience (sapere). This is what Erlos (and Feyman) meant when they said that "babies can ask questions that mathematicians cannot answer". These are the realm of logic and philosophy, of which mere scientific training is a branch.
Mr. Hoffman (like many others) gets suckered by the Monty Hall problem, failing to change both sides of the equation. It ends as 1/3 = 1/2. As this is done with a chart, I demonstrate it:
C G G Win Lose Lose
G C G Lose Win Lose
G G C Lose Lose Win
After a door has been opened the odds are said to be:
C G G Win Lose Lost
G C G Lose Win Lost
"C" "C" G "Win" "Win" Lost
The failure here is not to eliminate the column of the door which has been opened; this leaves
C G Win Lose
G C Lose Win
Choosing not to change is equal to choosing to change. This is Poppers' complaint about Heisenberg's "the viewer by looking changes the situation". Astrology.
Calculation bumps up against reality. Erlos comments on this as the "petering out" of the energies of the prodigy; as well they might be when faced by an absurd situation (the introduction of infinity). Feynman had the habit of devising a formula and then saying "let's see what the boys in the lab have to say".
The same situation arises with the statement that Pi to the 39th place gives the circumference of the universe (with a difference like a hole in a balloon) of the size of a hydrogen atom. The statement goes in both directions: "what we mean by the universe is that which is bounded by Pi to the 39th place plus the size of a hydrogen atom".
Apart this error, with some usual rhetorical nonsense about Dark Ages (as though people had forgotten how to reckon and could not build castles and ships and cathedrals), it is a fine read.
45: the square root of 2 is the diagonal of a square measuring 1 on each side
--: "A friend is the other I" (Pythagoras)
45: prime numbers are infinite. (This is the core of the Fermat theorem, as also of all other problems treating of infinity)
friendly numbers: the divisors of one add up to the other
22O: 1 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 10 + 11 + 20 + 22 +44 + 55 + 110 = 284
284: 1 + 2 + 4 + 71 + 142 = 220
perfect numbers: sum of those (not itself) which divide into it
6 = 1 + 2 + 3
28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7
53: Ramsey problem: to devise formulas which eliminate brute counting
166: a computer cannot stop in a calculation; adding more computers slows the process down. (i.e., analogical computers do not exist).
228: transcendental numbers, such as Pi. (He fails to see the connection between the Fibonacci series and the spiral (which give us fractals). The spiral is the circle squared.
Cuneo. Smoke of Satan
Cuneo, Michael W. The Smoke of Satan: Conservative & Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism. Oxford UP. 1998
By an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University. Although a sociologist, the professor does not present his investigations as a sociological study. The movements which he sets out to describe have much in common with similar movements in the centuries old history of the Church. Matters religious, no matter how expressed, are the central core of our lives. Of this he seems to be unaware; as he is unaware of his own academically enclosed parti-pris.
The professor is of the snicker-snicker school of thought. He uses aesthetic adjectives to describe those whose efforts he is investigating: meretricious, claustrophobic, scraggly, huffing & puffing, sweetly pious and eminently forgettable. He refers to Henri Bourbon-Parme as claiming descent from Louis XIV and Philip VI. Whether true or not, the matter can be quickly checked in the Gotha Almanac, a standard reference book; and of particular value in the field of sociology. So also could the professor have done some reading in the history of the Church in America. The accusations of sexual misbehavior and satanic liturgies which were made against a group in Canada sound like excerpts from Maria Monk. The enemies of these groups seem to have even less imagination. Interesting is the professor's avoidance of such groups as Opus Dei.
The professor cites (p.28) someone else citing Thomas Sheehan that "it would be difficult to find a single scholar willing to stand behind traditional doctrine concerning, for example, the Resurrection, immortal life, or the Trinity". If the citation be accurate, Mr. Sheehan seems not to have looked. Perhaps the professor, as a start, would introduce Mr. Sheehan to his colleague at Fordham, Fr. Avery Dulles.
There is little thinking going on in this book; and no sympathy. It is a collection of the frightened current intellectual cliches about the movements, written in an abominable prose: "insightful". Ouch! The professor's students may find the book useful to finesse a term paper or an exam. (Decades ago, we called this ability the Finagle Co-efficient. It requires the same intellectual muscles used to fill-in the blanks of a cross-word puzzle). For some understanding of the movements of the soul which lead to such groups, and of their long history, far better is Ronald Knox's Enthusiasm. It is also written in clear prose.
By an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University. Although a sociologist, the professor does not present his investigations as a sociological study. The movements which he sets out to describe have much in common with similar movements in the centuries old history of the Church. Matters religious, no matter how expressed, are the central core of our lives. Of this he seems to be unaware; as he is unaware of his own academically enclosed parti-pris.
The professor is of the snicker-snicker school of thought. He uses aesthetic adjectives to describe those whose efforts he is investigating: meretricious, claustrophobic, scraggly, huffing & puffing, sweetly pious and eminently forgettable. He refers to Henri Bourbon-Parme as claiming descent from Louis XIV and Philip VI. Whether true or not, the matter can be quickly checked in the Gotha Almanac, a standard reference book; and of particular value in the field of sociology. So also could the professor have done some reading in the history of the Church in America. The accusations of sexual misbehavior and satanic liturgies which were made against a group in Canada sound like excerpts from Maria Monk. The enemies of these groups seem to have even less imagination. Interesting is the professor's avoidance of such groups as Opus Dei.
The professor cites (p.28) someone else citing Thomas Sheehan that "it would be difficult to find a single scholar willing to stand behind traditional doctrine concerning, for example, the Resurrection, immortal life, or the Trinity". If the citation be accurate, Mr. Sheehan seems not to have looked. Perhaps the professor, as a start, would introduce Mr. Sheehan to his colleague at Fordham, Fr. Avery Dulles.
There is little thinking going on in this book; and no sympathy. It is a collection of the frightened current intellectual cliches about the movements, written in an abominable prose: "insightful". Ouch! The professor's students may find the book useful to finesse a term paper or an exam. (Decades ago, we called this ability the Finagle Co-efficient. It requires the same intellectual muscles used to fill-in the blanks of a cross-word puzzle). For some understanding of the movements of the soul which lead to such groups, and of their long history, far better is Ronald Knox's Enthusiasm. It is also written in clear prose.
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