Essays in Idleness

Having supper last night with dear friends of the Anglican persuasion (not their fault, they were raised that way!), I felt, among them, a particular Christian warmth, in which Newfoundland was crossed with the far east, of Ontario. The parents are, by citizenship, both Canadian, but there are deeper cultural traits — which I share with them. They, we, are of British ancestry, with a Protestant history, preceded by a misty Catholic one, “beginning” with Normans, who spoke French. But prior even to this there were the indigenous English, who ruled over themselves, except while they were being overrun by Vikings.

Their English is, alas, a language we must now learn, for it looks as strange as Althochdeutsche, but has a poetry and a prose immediacy that makes the effort worthwhile.

When the French wish to insult us, they call us “Anglo-Saxons,” and this serves also as an abusive racial term to hurl at any “white man,” ignorantly. Our enemies were (sometimes still are) under the naïve impression that we habitually colonize and enslave the gentle, virtuous peoples. In truth, we were colonized and enslaved ourselves, nearly a thousand years ago. I do not complain about this, for it would be pointless: “history happens.” We were “got” by the Normans, to use a fine old Norse part-of-speech.

But the genuinely Catholic “old England” was of a kind with the old Ireland. Christianity was sprung on western Europe through missionary efforts from these islands — in days when England and Ireland were instinctively in league, rather than at each other’s throat, as imperial politics later put them.

My Anglican friend is a perfesser in the university here, who lives in the past, most impressively. He is a student of the Old English liturgical forms, chiefly accessible through Latin manuscripts. Under them we find Anglo-Saxon (or, “West Saxon”) speakers, in a national culture that would be utterly transformed by the Norman invasion.

The dynasties followed. One thinks of Angevins, Plantagenets, Lancastrians, Tudors, Stuarts, succeeding to the conquered estate.

And one contrasts them not only in language but with the monarchs of the authentic Old England. For these “furriners” changed the essence of the islands, from a religious into a political reality.

The earlier kings — Alfred, Aethelstan, Edmund, Edgar, Edward the Martyr — had been infused with a different spirit, and with an unambiguously Christian conception of kingship. Sanctity was not impossible for them. They made an England in every sense superior to the Englands that superseded.

A crumbling book, published by the Macmillan Company of New York in 1925, written by Harriet and Vetta Goldstein, and intitulated Art in Everyday Life, can now command a splendidly pretty penny on the Internet, as will several of its subsequent printings. This is one of the achievements of the Internet: to make second-hand books impossibly expensive, so that only specialized collectors may afford them; or else worthless, until all but a few of their owners have had them pulped.

Harriet was the elder of these two spinster sisters, and the book was in its time the “Emily Post” of art and design. The authoresses were twinned fixtures of the home economics department, in the University of Minnesota, before exactly gauging what the mass market would bear. My father obtained his copy as a boy of fourteen or so, and was inspired by it to become an industrial designer (though a Spitfire pilot first). He said this to me, sans ironie, while feeding the book to me as a child.

While in subsequent editions the book’s advice, especially on women’s fashions, was watered down towards inoffensiveness, the first had just enough edge to awaken the curious reader. It was the age of Picasso, and the Bauhaus. Yet the advice is not now entirely out of date, nor has it receded into flea-market camp.

Most important, the book contained moral-aesthetic reasoning against ludicrously costly clothes and furnishings, assuring the young lady that a tasteful cloth coat could outshine a cumbersome fur, and the young gentleman that his devices should be useful. It explained how to be artful, in line and volume, without the conspicuous consumption that had been condemned in Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class.

John Ruskin (also from papa), and then Bernard Leach, confirmed my own attachment to simplicity, an “ideal” that is not always simple to comprehend. This is because it is pre-modern.

But the Goldstein ladies retain their place of honour.  For, they were the occasion of a delightful argument I was able to pick with my father. For the first time, perhaps, I was myself inspired — to the observation that modernity is prim.

Our present contest with the pagans, Donatists, Arians, Manichaeans, and their modern equivalents by whatever name (“Woke” is the current catch-all) has not been going well, mostly because we are not fighting. When contradicted by violent bullying and threats, the contemporary Christian gentleman, or narcissist, will lay down his arms and arguments, and avoid direct confrontation by hiding. This, at least, is my own strategy. The only places where we are winning, is where we have not laid down. Unfortunately, the Christian movement (Catholic at centre) is advanced mostly by vulgar politicians; the bishops seem to be swinging the other way. So I have come to adore some of these “stooges of the people”: Mister Donald Trump, Signora Georgia Meloni, Señor Javier Milei. And note, “adore” them as persons, not necessarily for their political judgement, which may stray sometimes.

They do not expressly campaign as Christians, but most unusually, they do not try to avoid the charge, or hide from their accusers. This is what makes them remarkable, today. They know that family, faith, and freedom are the lodestars, against the obfuscating bureaucracies; satanic machinery that has been installed everywhere in public life. For unlike common politicians, they have a noble purpose; and are aware that nobility invites martyrdom. That impetus, is to break the machine.

Stupid people are a danger, chiefly to themselves. But smart people are a danger to the whole community.

I was reminded of this recently, when idly studying the dolphins. They are generally credited, by human naïfs, as perhaps the smartest of the marine animals: highly intelligent, sophisticated social life, known linguistic ability. I, personally, would try to converse with an elephant, before mixing socially with a bottlenose, or a chimpanzee (at the low end of this intellectual pyramid). But that is because I am also perilously naïve. (Have you ever seen an elephant having a temper tantrum?) All three creatures can be dangerously clever, certainly compared to snakes, and poisonous frogs, who tend to mind their own business. But dolphins socialize back, as we learn on the sight-seeing expeditions. They not only mix, but are extroverted.

Dr Chantel Elston, my favourite marine biologist on the U-Boob, studies stingrays in her native Cape Province, South Africa. She is also informative on other marine topics, and it is from her that I have learnt of the bottlenose dolphin’s propensity to purposely-organized gang rapes, and their many other incidents of aggression and violence.

Infanticide, for instance, is among their disagreeable habits. So advanced is their understanding of genetics, that the males know how to pick out the children of questionable paternity. Nature requires mothers to defend all of the babes, but allows fathers to be selective. The dolphin calves, like young humans presently, are responsively suicidal. They often beach themselves after such an assault has broken their backs and cracked all their ribs. It’s not easy, coming of age as a dolphin. They must wish their fathers were slower-witted.

Don’t kid yourself: emotional intelligence is actual intelligence, and like the other forms, is minacious, as any persecuted husband or boyfriend will tell you. (Human males are, of course, much less intelligent than the females.) Dolphins, indeed, are among the most emotional animals. They have mastered cute and cuddly, when swimming with people, as an act to get food and snacks, but may with little warning switch to another mood, in which they bite viciously, ram, and attempt to drown their companions — unlike the dim-witted sharks, who only want more food (and may go about choosing it unwisely). For the emotional are subject to strange hungers, that can never be satisfied; whereas a stupid creature can just eat something, then be at peace.

Dolphins kill porpoises gratuitously, as individuals when they dislike a face, or collectively when the dislike is for another pod or tribe. They have complex inter-personal relationships, and as gentle reader may know, politics and war follow from that.

They also call each other by name. As our knowledge of marine biology increases, we are bound to discover satirical intentions.

We (myself, plus imaginary companions) are fully bissextile, up here in the High Doganate. For like others of British race, we accept the gaily leaping Gregorian calendar. It took us palefaces less than two centuries to count ourselves Inter gravissimas — or “Among the serious” whom Pope Gregory XIII addressed in his papal bull of late February, 1582. Some of the presumably less serious have not yet caught up, for it requires them to take, initially, a long jump: currently thirteen days that they will never have again.

The pope was not legislating a “reform,” however, let alone anything progressive; for popes, who must follow divine law, are instructed to do neither. He was rather “restoring” the (northern) vernal equinox to what it had been during the Council of Nicaea, when not only the most contentious Christological issue was settled (the relation of God the Son to God the Father), but the date for Easter, and a first handful of canon laws. The calendar had been drifting through the centuries that had intervened since then, and needed steadying. This was an appropriate “centralizing” job for the pope.

Now, the twelve demonstrably lunar months have only 354 days, or sometimes 355, whereas the solar year has 365, or sometimes 366, when fractionated into days; so that either may require at least one intercalary day, and there will be many such loose and awkward days if we try to use both. Thanks to Pope Gregory, we are now set up with just the one predictable bissextile “leap” until the day before eternity, using solar calendar alone, as we did less cautiously in the old, solar, Julian calendar — and with a unique February 29th, when necessary, instead of two consecutive February 24ths. For this 24th was the sextus in February, i.e., the sixth day before the end of the February; which was formerly, the last month of the year.

Alas, we are no longer counting backwards, in the Roman manner. The sextus, or sixth day back, was what we would call the fifth day. This is because the Romans always began counting from one, whether going forward or backward. As the numerate may be aware, they did not have the zero we adopted from the ancient mathematicians of India. Thus the Romans counted the Ides, the Nones, and their other days, backwards from the end of the month, instead of forward from the beginning as we do now. For we’ll do anything, no matter how perverse, for the sake of “progress” — even counting zero as a number.

But, as Saint John Henry Newman observed, we walk to Heaven backwards, constantly falling and failing and flipping and tripping over ourselves. It is our human way: incessantly “course correcting.” Perhaps it was from the old Romans that Newman gathered this profound insight: that backwards is the natural way forward.

By their fruits ye shall know them. I might call this Christ’s recommended principle for taking sides. Note, it is seldom if ever in our capacity to judge “as God judges,” for we have neither the fulness of evidence, nor the sophistication of analysis that is available to Him.  God, in this sense, actually has the right to form a liberal conclusion, should He do so. In looking through the murky annals of our human history, we may think we glimpse meanings in the works of providence. But without certainty.

By this recommended principle — know the fruits — we may steer away from the obvious poisons, at least. Even the wild animals do this, though none has, to my knowledge, any appreciation of history (whether ours, or theirs). It is to know the fruits, and not to hunger, except after truth and righteousness.

Father Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, my late confessor, wrote a marvellous book on Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, in which he treats of this most judiciously. It is a book on ascetical theology — “the science of the saints, based on the study of their lives” — that does not reduce sanctity to abstinence, nor avoid the topic. Kindness, patience, truth-telling, and chastity, are instead creative forms, in which the element of self-denial does not constitute the beginning. But in Scupoli’s Spiritual Combat, which has spread as much through Orthodox Greek and Russian translation as by the original Italian, we begin not only by trusting God, but by distrusting ourself. For by our own fruits, we know ourselves.

Ignorance and curiosity are our twin outward-looking debilitations.

Knowledge “from the fruits” is, in fact, the only reliable moral knowledge for us, about the external world. It is why the origins of heresies need not, possibly should not, be investigated.

Diplomatists and statesmen should note, than when I recommend a war in these columns, it is likely to end badly. In my own much-needed defence, I would insist that — starting with Vietnam, in the last century — these wars were not fought in the manner I put forward. For instance, the frequent American resort to saturation bombing self-defeats many objects in a good war, and may complicate arrangements for peace, later. War is a craft, not just a technology.

Still, one could apologize too much for heavy bombing. “Shock and awe” has its place in any offensive strategy. And it is important to convince a ruthless enemy that we can be more ruthless, by a factor of many times.

Most important, the war should be over relatively quickly. This is especially important if one is saddled with the rule of a “democracy,” in which your own people will whine and go peacenik, when they get bored. For unlike chess, a poorly projected war can be interminable. A civilized, defeated nation, such as Germany, Italy, or Japan, will benefit from temporary occupation, but among the desert savages of the frontier (Iraq, Afghanistan) it is best to leave promptly, after smooshing them.

The Romans knew this.

But there are wars that can’t be won, given the vastly superior arms, and implacable will of an enemy. This does not mean they are not worth fighting, of course. When Stalin’s troops invaded Finland, on 30th November 1939, the valiant Finns resisted. They taught the Russians many painful lessons, but by mid-February the Russians had begun to learn. In March, the Finns “bit the bullet,” and ceded their eastern districts to the lumbering bear. They did not have to cede their middle, however.

The Ukraine war has now gone on too long for anyone’s advantage or comfort, and if the NATO allies want the best possible result, they will insist that Ukraine cede her eastern districts. The rest of the country has now fought nobly for its independence, and the intention should be to win the peace.

Moreover, the allies should learn from the nasty experience that stockpiles are necessary. For if anything like this should happen again, we mustn’t again be running embarrassingly short of ordnance and munitions.

My mother, from whom I inherit my Tory endowment, did not flinch at the usual Tory scandals, nor fall for any of the Whiggish lies about “equality” and so forth. She did, however — on only one occasion, so far as I am aware — vote for a Liberal candidate. That was during the year of “Trudeaumania,” AD 1968. She confessed to having been briefly seized by the disease, from which by year-end she had completely recovered. By the grace of God, I was then too young to also vote for that affliction, though in the event of War Crimes Trials, I would have to admit some transient, debilitating forays.

Well, I was young, then. Imbecilic stupidity is common in the young, who are subject to fashionable excitations. My mother, on the other hand, was older. As a Tory, she of course doubted whether women should vote at all; but as my father was of old Ontario Methodist farmboy stock, his congenital propensity to vote Liberal had to be acknowledged.

“I have to vote Conservative, for his sake,” she reasonably explained.

She had compounded his characteristic error in 1968, however, and felt she owed an explanation to her son. This began by reminding me of her fragile, female sex.

“One thinks of the party leader on the analogy of going for a date.”

And true enough, the Tory leader, Mr Robert Stanfield, was the sort of man you could present to your father. He could be relied on, to get you home safely, and on time.

“But there are times when a woman does not want to get home on time,” mama added.

She, a registered nurse acquainted with the eccentricities of mental patients, called my attention to a phenomenon I had not previously noticed. Whenever a truly monstrous (male) psychopath is strapped away in gaol, the prison receives adoring letters for him, from women. These correspondents have never met him, and know him only from accounts in the yellow press. He may have been found guilty of heinously murdering a succession of wives and lovers. But they promise to be waiting for him on the steps of the penitentiary; and as the police will confirm, they are still there.

My mother had never comprehended how a woman could be so crazy. But when she realized that she had herself just voted for “Pierre,” she suddenly understood.

George Washington’s birthday is still observed (on a first Monday instead of on the actual day by the Julian or Gregorian calendar), in the United States — at least, in the Republican (“fascist”) tradition. Those who lean Democratic have gone mostly Woke/Satanist, and may wish to protest the fact that Washington, along with the other wealthy Founding Fathers, owned slaves. He inherited them, O lucky man, along with considerable land holdings, including the Plantation at Little Hunting Creek, which was renamed Mount Vernon — within an easy cart-ride of Alexandria, Virginia. His white, cisgendered, Anglican family had owned some of that property since 1674, and the founding president extended it. Slaves thus proved useful — as they had through humanity’s universal past. Washington was good to his slaves, said the old narrative.

Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, while also white, cisgendered, and Anglican (though truth be told he converted from Presbyterian), has also been spurned and repudiated by the progressively smug, though he could not own slaves. For the (spurned, repudiated) first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, Lord Simcoe, had abolished the importation of slaves in 1793, so that any surviving slave would have croaked from old age by Macdonald’s time. Instead, charges against Macdonald have been stitched together from the way he treated Indians (letting some go to residential schools), the Metis (allowing an insurrectionist murderer to be hanged), and immigrants from China (imposing a “head tax,” of fifty dollars). … Boo! boo! bad man! as my little sister would say, who was rather Woke from the age of four.

We do not celebrate prime ministers’ birthdays in Canada, except that I understand December 25th is the Nativity of Justin Trudeau. But instead of Washington’s Birthday, when leading capitalist enterprises may wish to close north of the border, the way they do to the south, we devised Family Day — or whatever it is called by the whim of politicians outside Ontario.

But family is a form of slavery, and may be heteronormative, and thus opposed to transgenderism. Moreover, a family that breeds children is an affront to the woman’s right to an abortion; as well as to the pregnancy rights of a deadnamed male. I do not see how anything like a “family day” can be allowed to stand.

The punishment should fit the crime, in the view of that literary master of cosmic jurisprudence, Dante Alighieri. So Mohammed, whose VIIth-century departure from Christian ways in Arabia, descended to that circle of Hell which encrusts the schismatics, where he was enchained and split lengthwise. His promise of carnal pleasure in the afterlife could be reviewed alongside his denial of the Trinity, and of the Passion of Our Lord, in the mediaeval view; and for various other reasons, “dialogue” with Islam was generally neglected.

The notion that a deceiving prophet had arisen among the Saracens was communicated to the Byzantine capital by Christians and Jews; but first the Armenians, and many others, were appalled by reports of civil wars, engulfing the Saracenic regions — on a scale even greater than when the Zoroastrians had invaded those regions. But “Allahu akbar!” — Muslim conquerors soon brought word to any of the neighbours who hadn’t heard. Spiritual conflict (“Jihad” to the Arabs) does not always result in material conflict, but given an unambiguously materialist faith (Communism is another example), it invariably does. The Utopia that has been conceived, must be imposed.

My own notion is compatible with what I believe was the eventual Franciscan response. In 1219, Saint Francis famously “went the distance” to Egypt to present the Gospel to the Muslim sultan, Malik al-Kamil, ahead of the Fifth Crusade — which had already reached Damietta, upon the Nile. Al-Kamil (known as “Meledin” to the Franks) was a brilliant man, himself juggling not only Christians but Mongol pagans and royal conspirators. But we must not forget that God has made all humans capable of what Christians are commanded to do. Saint Francis, we understand, was not treated ignobly.

Francis’ intention was not to negotiate a peace treaty, but rather to appeal to the heart of the Egyptian sultan. Francis did not hesitate to stake his life on this. His thinking was radical. If one’s religion does not exalt peace, over conquest, how will peace ever be achieved? If it exalts conquest, instead, so that peace can be obtained only when the world has been subdued, peace is an empty word.

Observe: peace must necessarily involve martyrdom — witness to the truth — as it did for Franciscans repeatedly in the Islamic realms. For in love we are still required to stake our lives, on the conversion of the warlike. Evangelism is not “an option.” Crusades must continue.

There is no conflict between “Valentine’s Day” and Ash Wednesday, as gentle reader might discern, while consulting my piece on Valentine, from nine years ago:

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Valentine was a IIIrd-century priest and martyr at Rome. A basilica was raised over his tomb beside the catacombs at the second mile of the Flaminian Way, along the feet of the Parioli hills, by Pope Julius I in the IVth century. (Today, the site is well within and under the Roman suburbs.) This, say archaeologists, was repeatedly enlarged through subsequent centuries, and by the XIth a convent and cloister was attached. It went into decline, but the ruins were still quite visible in early modernity, before they were washed out by floods (caused by modern human idiocy). That it were verily a memorial to Saint Valentine was attested by fragments of verses chiselled into the basilica itself.

No problem with this, so far, and there should never have been a problem. Valentine, who came from Terni in southern Umbria, was martyred at Rome under the emperor Claudius Gothicus — “the Cruel.” He was clubbed then beheaded for defying emperor’s orders, then justifying his action by Christ. Legend suggests there was a ban on marriages, which the psychopathic ruler had decreed because he thought his troops were being cissified by attachment to their wives and families. Valentine’s defiance took the form of marrying many Christian couples secretly. In his final incarceration he is said to have passed a last note to the gaoler’s daughter, whom he had converted (along with her father), hence: “From your Valentine.” This may be interpreted according to the holiness of the reader’s imagination. The mediaeval adumbrations were chaste; the post-modern mind, crippled by narcissism and pornography, seems incapable of imagining that any “love between two persons” might exist without at least some attempt at copulation.

The cult of Valentine spread both from Rome, and from his native Terni. The asinine notion that this indicated two Saint Valentines first surfaced in the XIXth century. It was championed by liberal scholars in the XXth, and other Valentines were solicited through the historical record as far afield as northern Africa. By the 1960s, we had liberals arguing that, on the contrary, there had been no Saint Valentine, only some otherwise nondescript guy who must have paid for the construction of the basilica, and been honoured as the modern rich are, when they endow some wing of a hospital or whatever.

This was the sort of mental garbage in circulation about the time Annibale Bugnini (who incidentally came from Terni himself), decided to suppress the Commemoration of Saint Valentine. Veneration by millions of the faithful over seventeen centuries had now been clouded with uncertainties by a few godless pointy-heads. In an act of barbaric desecration, the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius was shunted from July 7th, to “occupy” February 14th, with carnage following down the line. And that is why thoughtful reader must turn from his Novus Ordo to his Vetus Ordo missal to begin recovering his Catholic heritage: on this, as on the other days of the year.

Had I world enough or time, I would ramble over at least six modern schools of hagiography that, since the later XIXth century, have vied to replace that attested through the many earlier centuries of Catholic practice. (A seventh seems to be under construction, on the fly, by our current Holy Father.) The time-honoured practice had been to consider the proposed saint’s earthly life in the light of Christ’s, and to test it by the evidence of miracles both in and after. This last was crucial, for the Universal Church does not create but only recognizes a Saint; invariably the devotees of the Saint have recognized him first, and the last word is from Heaven.

As usual in modernity, faith in Christ has been replaced by reliance on transient “scientific research.” This latter discounts or eliminates everything for which hard material evidence is lacking, and thus assuages the extreme self-regard of today’s credentialed intellectuals — who assume themselves, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to know better than the men of previous centuries, who saw evidence then freely available.

Shrove Tuesday Eve seems an appropriate occasion to remind my readers to eat bacon, for it will not be an option for observing Catholics, starting Wednesday. Let me remind them that bacon is deliciously savoury, and an abundant source of glutamate, and moreover let me add, that the one fact follows from the other. Our “umami” neurotransmitters not only broadcast taste throughout our central nervous system; glutamate is necessary to keep the brain functioning.

All vertebrates could benefit from this knowledge. It is why the herbivores never win Nobel Prizes; why deer are so often caught in headlights; and why vegetarians tend to recede, intellectually, to the level of budgerigars.

I argued against dieticians so recently as Saturday, but must now present two seemingly paradoxical assertions. I do not argue against those who tell us not to ingest demonstrated poisons. And, neither will I dispute with those who promote excellent and healthy foods. They serve an object, like art criticism.

The best food writing, by nuance, provides an irresistible argument for fasting and abstinence — the precise contrary of alimentary reasoning. You don’t fast because you don’t like bacon (unless you have perverse tendencies). You fast in despite of this, until Sundays, when plenitude will be permitted again.

In his “treatise on human happiness,” deep within the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas reveals the desire for happiness that is found in the heart of every human soul. It is part of our “hard wiring,” and so outrivals such limiting accidents, as a person’s race, gender, IQ, or creed. Moreover, Saint Thomas thinks that it should not be compromised. For as a lawyer might say, an ambition of complete, rapturous bliss — “is indicated.”

To this, modern medicine has responded with the heart monitor, and other devices to measure everything from caloric intake, to the state of your finances. Indeed, tedious instructions from dieticians make us all into neurotics. I calculate that worrying about cancer, alone, took five years off the average life. And that was before climate change was invented.

Saint Thomas never dieted, so far as I can see. He would, however, observe church fasts. For the best form of dieting is, not to eat. This may be supplemented by not listening to the news. For have you heard? God alone is the answer to our vexatious public questions.

One should not look for happiness only in the pages of the Angelic Doctor, however.

No, you should also consider the works of the Czech composer, Jan Dismas Zelenka, at the court of Dresden (whose horns and whistles were supplied mostly from Bohemia).

Zelenka was just pinged to me, on this infernally modern machine: his Missa Charitatis (in D Major, ZMV 10). It arrived with a reproduction of his autograph score, from 1727 (I think). It gives the text for his thrilling exposition of God’s love and mercy.

The theological point is clinched, in the Benedictus — within an extraordinary conversation, that we may overhear. It is between a soprano and an alto, and two transverse flutes.