Essays in Idleness

“O, when Degree is shak’d! …”

Thus spake the noble Ulysses, as he expounded the great chain of being in Troilus and Cressida. Slipping into that play now (and thus into the Grecian camp, by Agamemnon’s tent) — for perhaps the first time since writing my then-girlfriend’s master’s thesis in 1975 — I am reminded how slight and hopeless my commenting has been on the important topics.

Ulysses, via Shakespeare: “Take but Degree away, un-tune that string, and hearke what Discord followes: each thing meetes in meere oppugnancie.” Things that once pulled together, now vie with each other to pull apart. And, “strength should be Lord of imbecility.”

It has been some centuries now since the links in the great chain of being, the corresponding planes, and the cosmic dance, were universally acknowledged, as they still were among the Elizabethans.  The aristocracy is gone, or rather, it persists only as a superficial “elite” of power and wealth. It began to break up from the moment the mediaeval order, or the mediaeval conception of order, was trashed and replaced by the modern conception of “equality.”

For Christian man (or, “peoplekind,” as wee Clown Justin likes to say) had invested centuries in pursuit of political, social, and religious harmony, often failing. But these Catholic ancestors realized that they had failed by their sin. The very possibility of success is what we have since surrendered.