Fought Out On a Spring Morning

This post Resurrection and Hope at Quiddity reminded me of the chapter of Creed in Slow Motion that I just read to Kieron last week. A couple of excerpts:

The species goes on, but what about the individual? Does Death triumph here, too? Does immortality belong only to the race, or can the individual human being look forward, somehow, to immortality?

That issue, too, was fought out on a spring morning. There's a fascinating verse of St. Matthew, just after his description of how St. Joseph of Arimathea took our Lord's body and buried it. "But there were two who sat on opposite the tomb, Mary Magdalen and the other Mary with her." They cannot drag themselves away, spectators of the great world conflict between life and death, which has now reached its final round. If nothing happens on Easter Morning, then it is all over; there is no hope left for human hearts. Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando, says the Easter sequence; "Life and Death met in wondrous combat". And the darkness fell, and the sabbath dawned; and you were not allowed to go out and look at the tomb on the sabbath. But as soon as the grey twilight of Sunday morning came, Mary Magdalen and the other Mary were there, with their spices. And they looked, to find the stone rolled away, and the soldiers asleep, and the tomb empty.

and this following part reminded Brendan and Clare and me of some of the things Chesterton said; not surprising, since Ronald Knox was led to the Catholic Church by Chesterton and gave his requiem mass:

But at the root of it all. you see, baptism has made a permanent difference: we are no longer what we were. The devil had a natural claim over us, so to speak, until the day when we were christened; now he hasn't, now it is Christ who has the natural claim over us. Life has triumphed over death in our souls. Grace has been implanted in us, a principle of supernatural life, a seed that sprang from our Lord's tomb. That garden of the Resurrection was the nursery garden of the whole Church. And that's why we must never allow ourselves to grow despondent over our sins, even when we find ourselves falling into them again and again; there's something in us stronger than sin, Divine grace, which is always thrusting up like a plant rooted in our souls, always claiming us for itself. There is no autumn in your soul; as long as you believe in Jesus Christ and in what his Resurrection has done for you, it is always spring.

And just as Christ, by rising again, has planted this irresistible principle of victory in your soul and mine, so by his rising again he has planted an irresistible principle of victory in his Church. Again and again, when you read the history of the Church, you will come across periods when it looks as if the whole thing was no use, and there was nothing for her but to chuck up the sponge; the world keeps on persecuting her, and it seems bound to get her down. You see it in the Dark Ages, when the barbarians invaded Europe; you see it at the time of the Reformation, when half of Europe was torn away from her influence; you see it at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, when it looked for a moment as if religion had ceased to count. You will live your life, maybe, in equally troubled times, when it will look as if everything we Catholics care for were going under. But the Church is the Church of the Risen Christ, and till the end of time every death she undergoes will be the prelude to a resurrection.

History as Story -- "Man at the Cross-roads"

I once read a mention by CS Lewis of one of the history books used in Ambleside's early curriculum, Henrietta Marshall's Our Island Story:

I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study. The stories are best when they are handed on and accepted as stories. I do not mean by this that they should be handed on as mere fictions (some of them are after all true).

But the emphasis should be on the tale as such, on the picture which fires the imagination, the example that strengthens the will. The schoolboy who hears them should dimly feel - though of course he cannot put into words - that he is hearing saga. Let him be thrilled - preferably "out of school" - by the "Deeds that won the Empire"; but the less we mix this up with his "history lessons" or mistake it for a serious analysis - worse still, a justification - of imperial policy, the better.

When I was a child I had a book full of coloured pictures called Our Island Story. That title has always seemed to me to strike exactly the right note. The book did not look at all like a text-book either. What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or baised history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact.

I thought that was interesting.

The point, I think, is that when history is taught through narrative, through Story, it becomes personal and elevates one's thinking. One doesn't think of it as straight objective fact, though one draws a general sense of how things are from it. Whereas when propaganda is taught in standard textbook form, taught as plain fact, it can lead to a narrow parochialism that pretends to be patriotism, or to cynicism when the child grows up and realizes things aren't really that way.

Though CS Lewis assumed that books like this wouldn't be used for actual history lessons, I wonder what he would have thought of Charlotte Mason's PNEU if he had been acquainted with it. I know he rather disliked school the way it was done to him, though he got a lot out of his relationship with his tutor, a Scottish skeptic who Lewis called the Great Knock, who questioned almost everything.

Lewis was an admirer of GK Chesterton though, and his thoughts on patriotism and its attribuest had some overlaps with Chesterton's (scroll down) .

Chesterton's wife, Frances Blogg, worked as the Secretary at PNEU (editing notes, for one thing, writing articles, giving talks and so on) before her marriage to GKC (scroll down). It looks like Chesterton spoke at least once at a PNEU meeting, according to this biography written by Maisie Ward:

Gilbert.... speaks for the Richmond and Kew branch of the P.N.E.U. on "The Romantic Element in Morality"

I couldn't find that talk or any version of it online, to my regret but this is nice.

To a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't....

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that?--that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis.

Watching Bleak House

We didn't get around to playing Robo-Rally. I made pizza and ginger cookies and it all took a long time. But we did watch 3 episodes of Bleak House while we ate dinner, and that was fun -- the older four kids and I -- the youngers were in their bedrooms, and Kevin was working. Usually it is me off somewhere while Kevin is watching movies with the kids, but Clare knows I am more likely to sit down for a classic book adaptation than for most anything else.

A couple of years ago we got this Charles Dickens collection. So far we've watched Martin Chuzzlewit, which the kids absolutely loved and have watched twice, and Our Mutual Friend, which was quite good too.

Our Mutual Friend was fun because we watched it during Lent, the year before last, I think; we had given up videos and most sweets for Lent so we watched an episode each Sunday and Clare planned a round of teas and dainties -- like, lemon bread and lemon ginger tea for one week, chocolate caramel chai and oreo-frosted tea cake another time, and so on. She printed it out on a pretty itinerary, and we would bring our little tea pot and goodies upstairs every Sunday afternoon. The second to last episode, we were visiting Liam at college and bringing Sean to a football combine in the same area, so we stayed at Ventura beach overnight and watched the penultimate episode along with almond poppyseed muffins and chicken salad rolls and some kind of tea which we brought with us and made at the hotel. It is a nice memory.

Bleak House is a bit odd.... quite dark in the filming. The London scenes are so slimy and grey and grotesque that it feels to me a bit like the second Pirates of the Caribbean. You expect to see people growing barnacles or merging into walls. The pacing is odd in places, and you can really feel the persona of the director in the way he plans the camera shots. We're on the 5th episode now and all the multiple Dickens characters that make these movies quite brisk to keep up with visually are moving towards their Dickensian plot revelations and unravellings of mystery. It's very worthwhile to watch, but not quite so much a tea and muffin type movie, nor quite as hilarity-inducing as the kids found Martin Chuzzlewit. Of Bleak House, Chesterton writes:

Bleak House has every characteristic of his new realistic culture. Dickens never now, as in his early books, revels in the parts he likes and scamps the parts he does not, after the manner of Scott. He does not, as in previous tales, leave his heroes and heroines mere walking gentlemen and ladies with nothing at all to do but walk: he expends upon them at least ingenuity. By the expedients (successful or not) of the self-revelation of Esther or the humorous inconsistencies of Rick, he makes his younger figures if not lovable at least readable. Everywhere we see this tighter and more careful grip. He does not, for instance, when he wishes to denounce a dark institution, sandwich it in as a mere episode in a rambling story of adventure, as the debtor's prison is embedded in the body of "Pickwick" or the low Yorkshire school in the body of "Nicholas Nickleby." He puts the Court of Chancery in the centre of the stage, a sombre and sinister temple, and groups round it in artistic relation decaying and frantic figures, its offspring and its satirists, An old dipsomaniac keeps a rag and bone shop, type of futility and antiquity, and calls himself the Lord Chancellor. A little mad old maid hangs about the courts on a forgotten or imaginary lawsuit, and says with perfect and pungent irony, "I am expecting a judgment shortly. On the Day of Judgment." Rick and Ada and Esther are not mere strollers who have strayed into the court of law, they are its children, its symbols, and its victims. The righteous indignation of the book is not at the red heat of anarchy, but at the white heat of art. Its anger is patient and plodding, like some historic revenge. Moreover, it slowly and carefully creates the real psychology of oppression. The endless formality, the endless unemotional urbanity, the endless hope deferred, these things make one feel the fact of injustice more than the madness of Nero.

Also, I did finish Kant and the Nineteenth Century today as I had hoped to, though I had to stay up late to do so (and once dozed off with my reading glasses on my nose, and now it's even later and I'm wide awake).

Quotes on Gratitude from GK Chesterton

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Here ends another day, during which I have had eyes, ears, hands and the great world around me. Tomorrow begins another day. Why am I allowed two?

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.


When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Peacock's Trail

It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had happened in that fold or crack in the great gray hills except that the whole universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now. turned inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest all that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the colored Catholic imagery like a peacock's tail. (GK Chesterton, the Everlasting Man)

The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. Flannery O'Connor.

You probably already know of our family fondness for peacocks. Liam photographs them at his college, and has written one into a story he is working on. When I am talking to him on the phone on Sunday afternoons, while he strolls in the meadows below his campus, often the conversation is punctuated by comments like:

There's one up on the roof!
The others are looking up at it. They look concerned.
It looks concerned, too.
Now it's flying down.

Then you hear the background pea-chicken chorus that Flannery O'Connor transcribed like this:

Lee-yon, lee-yon,
Mee-yon, mee-yon!
Ee-e-oy ee-e-oy!
Ee-e-oy ee-e-oy!

She calls it a "chorus of jubilation" but filtered through a cell phone they always sound like cats yowling plaintively, to me.

For Flannery O'Connor they evoked mystery and manners. When I talked to the Dominican priest who lives near the peacocks on the campus, he told me that they like to perch on his roof and sometimes early in the morning, just as he is waking up, he hears them run heavily down the roof to land on the ground. The combination of respect for mystery and pained admiration for manners in his voice was quite indescribable.

I read in Stanley Jaki's book Savior of Science that Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend, Asa Grey:

"...and now trifling particulars of structure often make me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!"

This struck me quite forcibly, that his reaction was so different from the wonder and amusement that these pheasant-folk inspire in my children, one of my favorite writers, and the priest acquaintance.

I went on a "peacock trail" online and found this much more appreciative passage in Darwin's Descent of Man:

The Argus pheasant does not possess brilliant colours, so that his success in love appears to depend on the great size of his plumes, and on the elaboration of the most elegant patterns. Many will declare that it is utterly incredible that a female bird should be able to appreciate fine shading and exquisite patterns, It is undoubtedly a marvellous fact that she should possess this almost human degree of taste. He who thinks that he can safely gauge the discrimination and taste of the lower animals may deny that the female Argus pheasant can appreciate such refined beauty; but he will then be compelled to admit that the extraordinary attitudes assumed by the male during the act of courtship, by which the wonderful beauty of his plumage is fully displayed, are purposeless; and this is a conclusion which I for one will never admit.

While I was looking for more thoughts upon peacocks and evolution, I found this site called The Third Evolutionary Synthesis. It's interesting because it contains all sorts of evolution-related material, including some critiques. I haven't looked enough to see whether it is weird marginal stuff or not. More central to my topic are the peacock feathers on the page's banner and these postscripts of the review of Johnson's Darwin on Trial.

In the postscripts, the webmaster mentions that Johnson critiqued Darwin's views on peacocks and sexual selection.

(Quoting Johnson)"what I find intriguing is that Darwinists are not troubled by the unfitness of the peahen's sexual taste. Why would natural selection, which supposedly formed all birds from lowly predessors, produce a species whose females lust for males with life-threatening decorations?" (p.30).

Biologists now have good explanations for the peacock's tail. It is called the handicap principle. It is beautifully and accessibly described in a book by A. and A Zahavi(1997,1999) 'The Handicap Principle - A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle'. In short: the long tails of male birds reliably demonstrate to females that those males are healthy and can afford such handicap. It can only be a reliable signal when it is a handicap. Females prefer strong males because they produce healthy children.

The Handicap Principle -- hey, there is another peacock tail on the cover!

Some people apparently don't think the handicap principle explains things sufficiently. I followed the trail a bit further and found this book, displaying another peacock-tail decor on its cover: Darwin Misread Miss Peacock's Mind.



It apparently makes the case that the handicap principle or Darwin's aesthetic appreciation explanation is too much like anthropomorphism:

But beyond this, many present-day students still maintain that at least part of the explanation for the origin of fancy males involves female choice. In support of this, some authors resort to many highly convoluted anthropomorphic interpretations that outdo even those of Darwin. Birds are seen as possessing a knowledge of population genetics in near mystical proportions. The female can evaluate the "fitness genes" of a male on the basis of intricate plumage designs, following a principle of "handicaps."

Mr. Darwin Misread Miss Peacock's Mind develops the idea that attraction of a female to a male warrants a straightforward stimulus-response interpretation. The female is driven by response to a food stimulus. The food may be found in the territory of the male or may be pictorially represented on the plumage of the male. The female obeys the laws of plain, old-fashioned home economics! Courtship-feeding is seen as a method of bringing together creatures of similar tastes and physiologies. The ensuing mate selection results in genetic specialization to differing food niches, finally resulting in species formation.

Hmm, that seems stretched to me. Home economics? Isn't that anthropomorphizing a bit too?

A National Geographic article puts forth another explanation in: How Did the Peacock Get His Tail?

A study published earlier this year in the journal Behavioural Ecology shows that a male's plumage is a direct indicator of the strength of his immune system; a signal to females of his internal workings.

It goes on to say that showy feathering may show lack of parasitical infestation, a survival trait that will be passed on to Mrs. Peacock's sons and daughters. However, the article goes on to say that the evidence on this is inconclusive. Infested peacocks often continue to have showy plumage to the very end stages.

This post on Peacock's Feathers: Darwin's Nightmare has some spectacular pictures of albino peacocks, and makes the point that things like feathers and eyes seem to be "irreducible" -- it is difficult to even imagine them evolving in stages.

The peacock's tail remains a mystery even after it is analyzed, and a related but even more mysterious thing is the paradoxical power of the brown peahen. Even more mysterious and paradoxical is the power of that"galaxy of gazing, haloed suns" has for a human mind, not leastly Darwin's.

Non sum dignus

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.
Is that time dead?lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?

Helas, Oscar Wilde

An article on The Long Conversion of Oscar Wilde begins with this:

"I am not a Catholic; I am simply a violent Papist."

This article, The Vatican Goes Wilde, tells more about the context for this aphorism.

A few months before his death Wilde had travelled to Rome. On Holy Saturday he went to tea at the Hotel de l'Europe and there a man he did not know suddenly came up to him and asked if he would like to see Pope Leo XIII the next day. Wilde, ever the joker, bowed his head and, borrowing a phrase from the Mass, said "Non sum dignus [I am not worthy]". But the man produced a ticket. On Easter Day, Wilde appeared in the front row among the pilgrims at the Vatican and received a blessing from the Pope.

For five months the Irishman had been suffering from a terrible rash - perhaps, biographers have speculated, the late effects of syphilis, eating bad mussels, an allergic reaction to his hair dye or vitamin deficiency dermatitis from overuse of alcohol (he was on a litre of brandy a day, plus copious amounts of absinthe). Whatever, the rash vanished.

Wilde later wrote: "When I saw the old white Pontiff, successor of the Apostles and Father of Christendom pass, carried high above the throng, and in passing turn and bless me where I knelt, I felt my sickness of body and soul fall from me like a worn garment, and I was made whole." But still he hesitated. "My position is curious," he epigrammatised, "I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent Papist."

Like everyone, I had known that Oscar Wilde was convicted in a public trial and went to gaol, but I had not known that it was the Marquess of Queensberry who actually had brought him to court after Wilde sued him unsuccessfully for libel. Queensberry was the one who codified the rules for boxing.

Whatever his prowess in the boxing ring, the athletic Marquess was clearly no match for Wilde in a war of words, so Wilde (against good advice) decided to bring an action for libel against him. Wilde had at the time two hit plays running in London. He had everything to lose — and he lost it. Why, then, did he take the Marquess to court?

Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol after seeing a man hung for murdering his wife:

The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Chesterton once wrote:

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Of course, he was referring to the "Oscar Wilde" with the +TM mark, the flamboyantly amoral aesthete, not the interior individual. And he was making a point about gratitude and what true appreciation for beauty requires of the person, not proposing a pay-for-goods transaction. On another occasion, GKC made a distinction between the public figure of Wilde and the real thinker and man and artist behind the persona.

About Oscar Wilde, as about other wits, Disraeli or Bernard Shaw, men wage a war of words, some calling him a great artist and others a mere charlatan. But this controversy misses the really extraordinary thing about Wilde: the thing that appears rather in the plays than the poems. He was a great artist. He also was really a charlatan. I mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks that he employs.

and later:

One might go through his swift and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil marking two kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization. This is what I mean by saying that he was strictly a charlatan - among other things. He descended below himself to be on top of others. He became purposely stupider than Oscar Wilde that he might seem cleverer than the nearest curate.

Last summer, Clare and Liam and I did an impromptu reading of a scene in Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. We had so much fun reading the parts together. I was Jack, if you want to know. But I did notice the red-pencil versus blue-pencil sorts of clevernesses. As a family, we seem to find ourselves amused even by his merely facile turns of phrase, which seem to me to be a restless impatience with conventionality, like a boy who has to ask the teacher difficult questions just to annoy her and cause a stir. You can sympathize a bit even while you get irritated by the wasted time and effort. You can sense the desire to turn things over and pull them apart in order to get at the real things behind them.

I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.

I think one of the best things about Wilde as a person and probably as an artist is that he probably knew as well as anyone the difference between his charlatan side and his truthful side. That's probably one of the best things that could be said of anyone, actually.

From his De Profundis:

It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

He also wrote:

Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their Gnomic aphorisms, 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past.' Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing he could do.

This isn't a real post, just a quote....

The Doctor Who Is Thursday posted this Chesterton quote on Nancy C Brown's blog and I wanted to preserve it since I thoroughly agree --

The man who would not praise Pindar unless he had read him would be a low, distrustful fellow, the worst kind of sceptic, who doubts not only God, but man. He would be like a man who could not call Mount Everest high unless he had climbed it. He would be like a man who would not admit that the North Pole was cold until he had been there.

But I think there is a limit, and a highly legitimate limit, to this process. I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a Greek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going to abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well perhaps--I think, at any rate, it would do no harm--if he did know a little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar. And I think the same situation would be involved if the critic were concerned to point out that Pindar was scandalously immoral, pestilently cynical, or low and beastly in his views of life. When people brought such attacks against the morality of Pindar, I should regret that they could not read Greek;....

I found the whole GKC article here.

CS Lewis says something very similar in an article about science fiction and who should undertake to review it (NOT, he says, the people who generally despise or have no sympathy for sci-fi or have no understanding of what it purports to be about).

Sense and Simplicity

This is an interesting Catholic, literary blog I just found --- And Sometimes Tea. It's going directly into my rather un-minimalistic -- possibly even cluttered? Google Reader subscription.

These two posts:

You Can't Take it With You
and
A Review of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons
are both good reading, and only two of many.

They inspired me to hunt up this quote from GK Chesterton's Heretics, on Sandals and Simplicity -- one my teenagers and I have discussed in the past. It expresses some of my own reservations about Crunchy Cons when I read it a year or so ago:

A man approaches, wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held firmly in his right hand, and says, "The affections of family and country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love;" but the plain thinker will only answer him, with a wonder not untinged with admiration, "What a great deal of trouble you must have taken in order to feel like that." High living will reject the tomato. Plain thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable sinfulness of war. High living will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material. And plain thinking will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to reserve our horror chiefly for material wounds.

The only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart. If that be gone, it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular clothing; but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not quenched. If that remain, it matters very little if a few Early Victorian armchairs remain along with it. Let us put a complex entree into a simple old gentleman; let us not put a simple entree into a complex old gentleman. So long as human society will leave my spiritual inside alone, I will allow it, with a comparative submission, to work its wild will with my physical interior. I will submit to cigars. I will meekly embrace a bottle of Burgundy. I will humble myself to a hansom cab. If only by this means I may preserve to myself the virginity of the spirit, which enjoys with astonishment and fear. I do not say that these are the only methods of preserving it. I incline to the belief that there are others. But I will have nothing to do with simplicity which lacks the fear, the astonishment, and the joy alike. I will have nothing to do with the devilish vision of a child who is too simple to like toys.

Chiasmus and Paradox

This seems like a chiasmus, too, but I'm not sure... if you have a thought one way or another, please comment. Anyway, I liked it, so I'm putting it here:

I have found the paradox,
that if you love until it hurts,
there can be no more hurt,
only more love.
-- Mother Teresa

From this site on Biblical exegesis (thought it looked interesting but I haven't scanned it thoroughly enough to know whether I would agree with everything on it or not):

A fundamental principle when dealing with chiasmus is not to think linear, but concentric. We have been trained to think and outline in our western culture in a fashion incongruent with the literary patterns of both the ancient Near Eastern civilizations and the Graco-Roman. When we outline, we designate with an ever increasing alphanumeric point of harmonize with the progressive thoughts of a speech or book..

I have reached the firm conclusion that many of these (chiastic) symmetries were altogether subconscious, and that it was felt rather than seen. This is merely another way of saying that the writers had learned their forms so thoroughly that they had forgotten them as forms.

The talk of concentricism reminds me a bit of Chesterton's "henceforth the spiral works inward..." In an earlier part of Everlasting Man, Chesterton writes:

It is true, and even tautological, to say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.....In other words the cross, in fact as well as figure, does really stand for the idea of breaking out of the circle that is everything and nothing. It does escape from the circular argument by which everything begins and ends in the mind. Since we are still dealing in symbols, it might be put in a parable in the form of that story about St. Francis, which says that the birds departing with his benediction could wing their way into the infinities of the four winds of heaven, their tracks making a vast cross upon the sky.

Sigh... I am trying to pull all that together but there it will have to stand for now.

Gilbert --- & Sullivan, and Chesterton!

This Gilbert and Sullivan ditty has been running through my head all day thanks to my kids:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotepotenuse

It goes on, and on!


The students at my oldest son's college just put on an in-college production of Pirates of Penzance last week. We didn't get to see it, but my ds said someone was filming... so we are hoping that we will get to see the DVD version at least. My daughter got to see a couple of the rehearsals when she was visiting there last month.

I thought maybe Chesterton would have had something to say about Gilbert and Sullivan, and indeed, I found this Introduction to a critical appreciation of the Savoy Opera pair. A quote:

And then the odd thing happened that was like a lucky coincidence in a farce or a magic gift in a fairy tale. As it stood, his satire was really much too intelligent to be intelligible. It is doubtful whether by itself it would ever have been completely popular. Something came to his aid which is much more popular than the love of satire: the profound and popular love of song. A genius in another school of art crossed his path and co-operated in his work; giving wings to his words, and sending them soaring into the sky. Perhaps no other musician except Sullivan would have done it in exactly the right way; would have been in exactly the right degree frivolous and exactly the right degree fastidious. A certain fine unreality had to hang over all the fantasies; there was nothing rowdy, there was nothing in the special sense even rousing about such song, as there is in a serious, patriotic, or revolutionary song, or even drinking song. Everything must be seen in a magic mirror, a little more delicately distorted than the mirror of Shalott; there must be no looking out directly upon passing events. The satiric figures were typical but not topical. All that precise degree of levity and distance from reality seemed to be expressed, as nothing else could express it, in the very notes of the music; almost, one might say, in the note of the laughter that followed it. And it may be that in the remote future that laughter will still be heard, when all the voices of that age are silent.

The Spiral Henceforward Works Inward

I am reading Chesterton's Everlasting Man along with a discussion group and here are some quotes from The God in the Cave and a few of my comments:

"A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded. "

"It is at least like a jest in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see. He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true. "

"But it is true in a sense that God who had been only a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small. It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal"

"... the practical difficulty (of celebrating the infant Jesus without including his mother) is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You can not suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother."

I think I could write much more on this chapter, which seems to be the "centre as well as circumference" of the book.

I notice that Chesterton seems to us two kinds of paradoxes, much as our Master did. One kind is hyperbolic -- trying to cast light on truth indirectly by means of a sparkling contradiction. Jesus said it is better to pluck out your eye than to keep it in Gehenna. In an earlier chapter, Chesterton says something about the joking and word plays of the Egyptian hieroglyphics that does not seem (to me) literally true, but it makes a point about the creativity of language in refining, as well as representing, thought processes.

The other kind of paradox seems more simply literal. "Blessed are the poor.." No one would think this is conventional wisdom, but it is simply, practically true in many ways. It is a hidden truth. Chesterton's points about the hands that had made the sun and stars being too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle, and about the modern expert casting mild doubts upon the reality of something that has been "madly exalted as incredible", seem to fit in this category.

I'll have to keep looking as we keep going through the book and seeing if these categories are helpful in looking at Chesterton's paradoxes.

Edited to Add: I went to Studeo to see what Love2LearnMom had put down for her list of thinking blogs. Through the list , I found her family's CINBlog and found this post Theology of Littleness, where Love2LearnMom had earlier pasted practically the identical quotes that I just put in this post. My duplication was inadvertent, though I suppose it's not surprising that the same sparkling contrasts jumped out at both of us. She has put some quotes of Ratzinger's alongside Chesterton's so it is interesting reading.

Integers and Infinitely Thin Lines

This is a good post on the Infinitely Thin Line by Maclin Horton of Caelum et Terra-- I came across his writing after I read Crunchy Cons.

He is pondering the same verse that struck me this year when I heard it at Mass:

And the same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together; for before they were at enmity between themselves. —Luke 23:12

which sounds to me like a dreadful judgment, as he says.

He writes, after discussing the sympathy the modern sensibility has for Pontius Pilate:

Truth and falsehood are ultimately divided by a geometric line—not the proverbial thin line, but one which has no second dimension at all. It is infinitely thin. You can’t really stand on it. There is no surface, so even if you think you’re straddling it every atom in your body is on one side or the other. You’re divided, and you can stay that way indefinitely about many questions, but not on a matter or in a circumstance that requires a decision, because in the end there is no indeterminate state between action and non-action: you may hesitate for a while, but eventually you either do, or do not.

This made me think that Pilate, the man divided, was a very contrast to Christ, the Man of integrity... integrity being defined as it relates to the Latin adjective integer -- meaning "whole, complete". Jesus is described this way, deviously but in the end truly, by the Pharisees:

Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. "Teacher," they said, "we know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren't swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?"

But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, "You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?""Caesar's," they replied. Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

This is exactly what Caiaphas, and Pilate, did not do. They did not give to Caesar what was his, and to God what was due to Him.

I am reading Chesterton's Everlasting Man, and he writes:

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilization. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece.

But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask, 'What is truth?' So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility . Yet he stands forever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgment-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.

There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away.

Horton points out that we admire the civilized, divided man -- Pilate-- much more nowadays than the narrow, calculating religious leader -- Caiaphas--- but that in fact the two kinds of personalities and outlooks united for one bitter result.

I am thinking that there are two kinds of unity -- the wholeness depicted by the word "integrity", personified by Jesus -- mind, body, heart all working together under the command of the will subordinated to what is right. This is what you see in his answer to the Pharisees, which makes clear and correct distinctions in the service of a whole Truth.

Then there is a kind of union of assimilation, that you see in the verse about Pilate and Herod, that you see in the account of Pilate and Caiaphas, and that you see in CS Lewis's Screwtape Letters -- a kind of breaking down of what is best and noblest and a collaboration in what is worst and meanest.

Angels Fly,,,,

My husband read aloud this bit to us from the American Chesterton Society. He read it in Gilbert which is one of our favorite magazines.

Pope Benedict is quoted as saying:

I'm not a man who constantly thinks up jokes. But I think it's very important to be able to see the funny side of life and its joyful dimension and not to take everything too tragically. I'd also say it's necessary for my ministry. A writer once said that angels can fly because they don't take themselves too seriously. Maybe we could also fly a bit if we didn't think we were so important.

My husband has liked this particular Chesterton quote for a long time. He even put it on his website which also contains some scans of some Chesterton first editions and other memorabilia that he owns. I thought it was funny that the Pope remembered the same line that has become part of our family anthology of proverbs. The original is:

Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.

Dr Thursday points out that in context, Chesterton was comparing angels to the devil:

For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.