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Post by hibernicus on Dec 7, 2011 20:56:00 GMT
Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith offers some thoughts on Belloc after reading the AN Wilson biography www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2011/12/05/is-belloc-best-forgotten/ I tend to be in two minds about Belloc - like Chesterton I always mean to reread him systematically and never get beyond nibbling round the edges. Some of his virtues: He comes across as adult in ways Chesterton was not (in bad ways as well as good - there is a really brutal edge to his anti-semitism that is not there with Chesterton; he really did have some sense of how a peasant farmer lives, which Chesterton did not - again with problematic results, cf the essay in ESSAYS OF A CATHOLIC where he dismisses English concern about cruelty to animals as ridiculous). Quite recently a priest preaching a sermon on Hell where I was present quoted Belloc about Hell as being brought face to face with reality and insisting on denying it - that is very good. Fr Michael O'Carroll's memoir has a description of Belloc coming to Blackrock College and giving a talk to the pupils about the need to remain true to the Faith even if you have to suffer for it, and how they saw him as a rugged old crusader who had lived what he preached. That Gibbonian Latinate style can be really intoxicating when you encounter it first. On the downside, the Wilson biography makes it clear just how much he was a hack (a lot of his big biographies, which I used to collect with loving care, were simply dictated off the top of his head to a secretary in a week or two) and he carried Teutophobia to really hideous lengths (he practically denies it is possible for Germans to be really Christian, whereas the French are assumed to be inherently Catholic even when they are revolting against the Church and persecuting it). He was a tough debater and a bully, and his political views are a striking illustration of the point that Jacobinism and absolute monarchy actually had a good deal in common. Chesterton is much simpler and more intuitive in both good and bad ways. I would also say that Fr Lucie-Smith gets one thing right - he did know how hard it is to be a disciple and that we are saved by grace.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 14, 2011 21:23:32 GMT
A fascinating article on the Japanese Catholic novelist Shusako Endo. We may hear more of him as MArtin Scorsese has been talking for years about filming his novel SILENCE - this may be a mixed blessing if it ever comes off, for the novel is about a character who apostasises under persecution and convinces himself this is the most Christlike thing to do: EXTRACT n Silence, possibly Endo’s most critically acclaimed work, the landscape shifts to a different kind of embattled territory: the conflicted soul of a Portuguese missionary cast adrift during the seventeenth-century Christian persecutions in Nagasaki. Like many Endo novels, Silence reads a bit like a detective novel, no doubt because Endo believed Christianity to be inseparable from mystery.
In Silence, the mystery involves a controversial historical figure, Christovao Ferreira, a Jesuit provincial who worked for three decades in Japan before reportedly apostatizing under torture. Refusing to believe the scandalous reports, a group of young Jesuits sets sail from Lisbon to discover the truth, and to provide support to the persecuted Christians who must struggle on despite a dwindling number of priests. Among this group of fervent Jesuits is Sebastion Rodrigues — a character also based on a historical figure — who arrives in Japan ready to defend and support the nascent Christian communities.
Rodrigues finds Catholic Japan, once the hope of the Christian world, in ruins. Previously, the local rulers had tolerated and even embraced Christianity. Then they determined that the missions were a beachhead for a European invasion, or, at the very least, that the foreign fathers sought the subversion of the status quo. The persecutions began with the crucifixion of twenty-six martyrs in 1597. It was not the most gruesome sort of torture inflicted on the Christians. Still, the persecutions did not inhibit further conversions which numbered at least three hundred thousand by 1614, when the first Tokugawa, Ieyasu, ordered the expulsion of Catholic priests from Japan.
Most Catholics sought to conceal their beliefs, but the authorities then devised a religious test that forced believers to choose between committing a sacrilege, by treading on the image of the Virgin Mary with the Infant Jesus, or die a martyr’s death. Many refused to step on the image, but others, after enduring days of extreme torture, apostatized.
The austere terrain of Silence is like a Japanese Golgotha, stubborn and brutal, yet empty and soundless, producing not even an echo of Christian love or hope to break the desolation. At the novel’s close, the bleak silence envelops the soul of Rodrigues. His apostacy becomes inevitable.
Why did Endo concern himself with apostates, spurning the martyrs of that era? Among Nagasaki Christians who revere the martyrs, Silence remains extremely controversial. One Nagasaki Protestant minister has noted that the “silence” Endo describes was not reflected in the experience of the Japanese martyrs who died praising God. Further, this minister has argued, Endo’s personal history gives lie to his thesis that the Japanese cannot conceive of the dynamic God of Abraham and Isaac.
Undoubtedly, Endo would have responded that his arguments arose from his own conflicted faith. But he is surely not alone. After all, the number of Japanese Christians in the modern era has remained less than 1 percent of the overall population. Further, the author also singled out the apostates with the purpose of asking some pointed questions: Christians are repelled by their spinelessness, but don’t these outlaws demonstrate the depths of man’s weakness and his attendant need for Christ and his Church? Judas was condemned not for betraying Christ, but for despairing of his forgiveness... END OF EXTRACT A discussion worth having about a very challenging writer
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 27, 2011 18:10:14 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 16, 2012 12:45:08 GMT
The review is scary, but fascinating. I agree with you about the types that Toole may well be describing, the theological and devotional magpies. I think the label 'traditionalist' is one which one must be careful about, both in application and adoption. There are plenty of Catholics willingly adopting and turning out just as a la carte as some of the most dedicated Tabletistas. I knew I commented on this and I think I would like to elaborate on the point. If being a traditionalist means attachment to the EF Latin Mass and traditional devotions of the Church (eg Friday Abstinence, Rosary), then I am a traditionalist. If on the other hand, it means to an 19th century gallocentric, selectively Ultramontanist view which embraces monarchism and a number of related political and economic views, including anti-semitism, then I am not a traditionalist. There are other narrow views out there too, and many self-declared trads are pick and mix. Many would suppress Eastern Catholicism yesterday if they got a chance. Others would treat those comfortable with the OF exactly the way we complain about having been treated. Traditionalism covers a multitude and we ought to be careful as to how we either apply it or in some cases, what we mean when we embrace the term.
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Post by shane on Jan 16, 2012 16:04:38 GMT
I would also like to qualify my own traditionalism. (I am a Francophile but not monarchist, ultramontanist or anti-semitic.) Indeed much of what passes for 'traditionalism' today is not traditional at all; for instance it would have seemed alien to your average Catholic 60 years ago. In fact, and as strange as it may seem, but increasingly I find the much-maligned Irish Catholicism of the 1950s very appealing. Whatever its defects, it was certainly far better than anything on offer these days. I used to be extremely critical of what I thought was pre-conciliar Irish Catholicism (seeing it as aliturgical, anti-intellectual, oppressive etc.) but I've now changed my mind. For all its flaws, it had an awful lot going for it.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 17, 2012 21:36:25 GMT
To be fair, Alasdair, "pick and mix" is not how I would describe the sort of trad who wants to suppress the Eastern Rites and the OF. They are perfectly consistent in their tyranny and bigotry. It is a pity that in the English-speaking world we are not familiar with the history of this sort of extreme ultramontanism (deriving from Joseph de Maistre and popularised by Louis Veuillot). It was only one strand in nineteenth and twentieth-century European Catholicism, rather than being the pure stream of orthodoxy as some of its admirers have it. Shane has a point about 1950s Irish Catholicism - it is so easily dismissed out of hand, not only by liberals, but by trads as well. We need to understand it better (to understand is not necessarily to endorse) - and to some extent it didn't understand where its good points came from, which is how we got into our current mess.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 28, 2012 22:19:00 GMT
To return to topic - I have just been reading a 2006 science fiction novel called EIFELHEIM by Michael Flynn (republished in paperback by Tor Books - it cost me E7.99 in Hodges Figgis) , which counterposes an account of modern researchers who slowly realise that some fragmentary oddities in the historical record concerning an abandoned Black Forest village known as Eifelheim indicate that it was visited by aliens (stranded by an accident) in 1348/9 just as the Black Death was spreading across the country, and the same events as witnessed by the village's parish priest, Dietrich and his attempts to make sense of this new development by using his scholastic training. (He is a graduate of the University of Paris - various revelations about his past are a little too obviously devised to explain why a Paris-trained doctor au fait with the latest natural philosophy and on speaking terms with William of Ockham would be acting as parish priest in a village so small and remote that the arrival there of a large group of man-sized talking grasshoppers would pass almost unnoticed by the outside world - mediaeval parish clergy tended to have only the most basic education). Dietrich establishes contact with the aliens, and with the aid of a convenient translation machine tries to explain the two groups to each other. Some of the aliens are baptised (involving both a scholarly debate about whether rational beings not descended from Adam can be baptised, and an accusation sent to the Inquisition that Dietrich has been baptising demons - one of the surviving fragments discovered by the researchers is a scholastic rejoinder by Dietrich arguing in a careful syllogism that if the "wayfarers" in the village were demons they could not endure baptism), and as the plague spreads and the aliens develop their own problems it turns into a meditation on faith and death. Mediaeval society is described in some detail, and certainly not idealised (though one feature of the book is an incidental refutation of the view of mediaevals as simply delusional, while at the same time emphasising how much we know that they did not). One theme which is brought out more clearly in the modern part of the story is that to the modern reader the mediaevals and their lives and beliefs will seem almost as alien as the aliens. (The modern characters do not display any religious belief themselves, and though I read the story through my own belief that the Christian hope offered by Dietrich to the villagers, the aliens and his own troubled conscience is real, the book should in theory be quite accessible to any agnostic or atheist prepared to acknowledge honesty and virtue even among people believed to be fundamentally mistaken.) Another theme of the modern section is the fragmentary nature of the historical record and the limits of historical as distinct from scientific knowledge; while the researchers come to know a good deal about the people of the village, the mediaeval narrative of "what really happened" indicates that they have an oversimplified image of certain characters and are unaware of significant details - which of course have not, in the world of the novel, been recorded or preserved and are only accessible to the omniscient narrator. The Black Death which engulfs the village becomes the death which awaits us all, and the forgetfulness that awaits us within a few generations. . Michael Flynn, whose blog can be visited here: m-francis.livejournal.com/ is a well-known "hard science fiction" writer who combines a knowledge of physics and statistics with considerable study of mediaeval culture. He puts a "soft" explorer of the last two centuries like myself to shame.
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Post by assisi on Feb 25, 2012 22:35:33 GMT
In this weeks Irish Catholic (Feb. 23rd 2012) Mary Kenny writes about the contribution of Irish missionaries in China during the 19th and 20th centuries.
If you want a good dramatic and entertaining representation of one such story (although it concerns a Scotsman rather than an Irishman) then it is well worth reading AJ Cronin's novel The Keys of the Kingdom.
This is the story of a Scottish Catholic priest Fr. Francis Chisholm from his tragic childhood days in Scotland where an anti-Catholic incident renders him an orphan, to his missionary work in China where he sets up a mission to educate children and aid the sick.
Fr Chisholm is a man of simple faith whose self sacrifice, austerity and humanity are often at odds with some of his more career minded colleagues some of whom count success by the number of converts rather than the sincerity of the converts.
Fr Chisholm is a bit like a 20th century St Francis of Assisi but he is never sure if he is really fulfilling God’s work. But during plague and local wars in China his stoicism and faith shine through. His relationships with his childhood atheist doctor friend, his neighbouring Methodist missionaries and the Confucianism of the locals show him to be non-judgemental priest.
One of the the most powerful aspects of the novel is his relationship with Sister Maria Veronica who is sent to help him. She immediately takes an instant hatred towards him due to his unorthodox ways yet they have to work together in some of the most brutal and harrowing conditions.
Despite the gritty Scottish chapters and the gargantuan struggle against poverty and senseless war in China the novel is uplifting and ends in a simple but positive way. Well worth a read.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 26, 2012 15:57:35 GMT
One point that might be worth mentioning is that the portrayal of the Catholic church in the novel is not uncritical. Fr Chisholm is contrasted with an ambitious, worldly seminary contemporary of his who "plays the system" for his own advancement and winds up becoming a bishop, while Fr Chisholm, having done much more for souls, is left in obscurity though finally content. There was a film version of THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM starring Gregory Peck but I have never seen it and I don't know if/where it is available.
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Post by assisi on Feb 26, 2012 21:32:56 GMT
Yes, the narrative portrays his colleague Anselm Mealey as the career priest networking, cultivating the Arts and cultivating influential patrons and is undoubtedly used as a stark contrast to Fr Chisholm's humanity. But Fr Chisholm tries not to be jealous and says of Mealey that he has 'developed his talents to the full'. The novel was made into a film in 1944 with a strange piece of casting, Vincent Price, he of later Hammer Horror fame, in the role of the Anselm (Angus in the film) Mealey. Trailer below: www.imdb.com/title/tt0036983/
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 3, 2012 20:10:35 GMT
Some comments on the fact that Christopher Hitchens' last article was a denunciation of Chesterton, which combines some reasonable points with a rant against Catholicism as allegedly allied with Nazism. Robert Royal offers a summary/critique of why Hitchens appears to have hated Chesterton and what is wrong with the Hitchens critique; John C Wright ponders the mystery of iniquity. One little irony; Hitchens cites approvingly Kingsley Amis's novel THE ALTERATION, which posits an Europe where the Reformation never happened and symbolically equates Catholic belief in virginity with the castration of choirboys to preserve their voices. This would be the same Kingsley Amis who later wrote a novel (known to have strong autobiographical elements) in which the central character ends up welcoming alcohol-induced impotence because it frees him from the need to pay any further attention to women, who have the annoying habit of expecting men who have sex with them to treat them as something more than sex objects? www.scifiwright.com/2012/03/hitchens-spits-his-last-breath-at-chesterton/www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/hitchens-chesterton-and-the-fall-into-mysticism.htmlEXTRACT Fabio P.Barbieri says: March 1, 2012 at 1:30 pm Sorry and all. Chesterton was a hero, a multiform genius, and “the only poet who knew what was going on” (quoth Neil Gaiman, and quite right too – compare Chesterton’s views of the contemporary world with those of nearly every one of his most eminent contemporaries, including even TS Eliot, and you will feel that you are in with a sharp-sighted adult after listening to a roomful of self-centred adolescents fed on ill-informed mimeographed sheets). He touched no literary form that he did not ennoble, from the historical essay to the nonsense verse and from heroic fantasy to literary reviews. But he WAS a Jew-basher. Instinctively so. Sneers at Jews rise over and over again in his prose and verse. To give one instance out of literally hundreds, it defaces such a fine poem as “The Song of Quoodle” (“…The park a Jew encloses/ Where even the law of Moses/ will let you steal a smell”). Now, not only is this yet another sterile poke at the supposedly grabby and miserly Jews, but it contains a subtler bit of nastiness that you can only appreciate if you are familiar with GKC’s historical theories. For in GKC’s view of the History of England, “to enclose” is a dirty word. It represents all the subversive activity of the English upper classes, their destruction of ancient rights for their own selfish and corporate advantage; and while this is a reasonable interpretation of English enclosure history – indeed, one with which I happen to agree – to stick it to the Jews is despicable. The Jews were only allowed into England under Cromwell, when the enclosure movement was already triumphant and unstoppable, and never had any serious part in English landed society. GKC used to expand on the few Jews, such as the Rotschilds, who had made enough money to buy land and a title, as if that explained everything, in the classic way of Jew-bashers everywhere; not considering that those Jews were vastly outnumbered by families of Dutch, Scottish, even French and Italian, descent. The English aristocracy has always been moderately welcoming to those with money and political power, such as the wave of Anglicized Dutch who came in with William III. But of the Dutch, of which much more and worse can easily be said, GKC has next to nothing to say. You say that he was “almost a Zionist”, and I say that that is disingenuous: he was vaguely drawn to the idea of the Jews leaving Europe for Palestine until 1929, when he actually visited the country and promptly fell for every single Arabic lie against the Jews. His book on that journey is an embarrassment: in the year when the Arabs butchered the oldest Jewish community in the world – that of Hebron – down to the last woman and child, GKC, the wisest man of his generation and the most far-sighted, was incapable of doing anything except regurgitating propaganda that even the more enlightened pro-arabists – such as TE Lawrence – knew to be worthless. It is simply an incredible and depressing spectacle, the more so because the book then features a simply stupendous chapter on the First Crusade that is the best thing (I speak with some authority, since I made a study of the First Crusade for a dissertation in college) that any historian has written on the subject, and miles better than the standard and seductively misjudged history by Sir Steven Runciman. What is true is that GKC chose the right side from the beginning when Nazism began to be a power in Europe; used the right words, showed that he understood the real nature of the thing he saw – at a time when even Winston Churchill was still being careful – and, among its foulnesses, rightly listed the brutal assaults on defenceless Jews. But that does not in any way make him pro-Jewish; it just makes him a man who did not push his stupid and irritating prejudice as far as to blind himself (and he did blind himself in Palestine in 1929). That, at least, compares favourably with the likes of Nesta Webster, who started out as a passionate anti-German and swiftly allowed her idiotic notion of Hebraism to align her to the worst enemies of her own country. But it is not much to say on behalf of any man, let alone one from whom we have a right to expect so much more. The saddest if not the worst thing about Chesterton’s Jew-bashing is that it is not funny. The funniest man this side of Wodehouse, when he started on the Jews, fell curiously flat. A fourth-rate racist comedian would have been funnier. The allusion to the Law of Moses in “The Song of Quoodle” is typically infelicitous. I don’t know how to interpret it, except than as the sudden manifestation of a mindless itch that, from time to time, had to be scratched. In fact, I would say that this piece of unassimilated absurdity in the make-up of one of the century’s wisest and best human beings may have been left there by God, like his other few flaws – in particular, his utter inability to appreciate music – so that we should be remembered that wise and great as he was, he was still only a human being, a mortal and in need of forgiveness and of redemption. END
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 27, 2012 11:26:19 GMT
Some Catholic bloggers discuss why contemporary Catholic/Christian art tends to be sterile and mediocre. (They are talking about North America where there is still a certain amount of middlebrow material being produced/written for orthodox Catholic publishers.) catholicphoenix.com/2011/10/11/the-sentimental-option-how-piety-can-betray-art/EXTRACT In the non-fiction writings of Flannery O’Connor, who could probably be said to have “advanced American literature,” whatever that means, Cardinal Spellman’s Foundling seems to serve as a watchword for all that she found defective in mid-century American Catholic letters: dreary prose, implausible characters, a sentimental plot built upon moral pieties about what ought to happen, all derived from an underlying mistake: the confusion of subjective intentions, however noble, with artistic skill, which is the only thing that can justify a work of art. Spellman’s Foundling was by no means unique in its day as an example of Catholic kitsch. And in our own age of mass-produced culture, in which Catholics have half a dozen reliably orthodox publishers and distributors trying to sell us Catholic books, films, and music, O’Connor’s warnings about bad art hiding behind orthodoxy are as needful now as fifty years ago. There is more Catholic kitsch for sale than ever before, and one-click internet ordering renders us especially vulnerable to it... How to explain the desire for “trash,” as she called it? What is it that makes the Catholic reader prefer the kitschy and sentimental? The answer, according to O’Connor in another speech called “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South”, lies in a deep if unacknowledged heresy looming large in the modern Catholic mind: …the average Catholic reader…(is) more of a Manichaean than the Church permits. By separating nature and grace as much as possible, he has reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché and has become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene. He would seem to prefer the former, while being more of an authority on the latter, but the similarity between the two generally escapes him. He forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence…We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality… Pornography…is essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purposes and so far disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it simply an experience for its own sake. The decidedly unsentimental Flannery O'Connor O’Connor’s close juxtaposition of smut and sentimentality is an interesting one: both phenomena seem to spring from the same defective theology of the human person: the ancient heresy of Mani, known well to Saint Augustine in the 4th century, to Saint Dominic in the 13th, to John Paul the Great in the 20th. The view is that man is either all angel OR all beast: if he thinks he is the former, he will try to hide from real life and the slow and often painful workings of redemption in puritanism, in the ardent fanaticism of the one who think he has found the shortcut to redemption through his own efforts. But if the modern Manichee believes man to be in truth nothing more than a beast, he will attempt to hide from grace and from his own spiritual nature by rutting like a chimpanzee. [WALKER PERCY HAS SOME VERY PROFOUND COMMENTS ON THIS ANGELISM-BESTIALISM] Viewed from one aspect, the ascetic puritan is much closer to God than the animalistic fornicator; but when viewed from the exacting standards of philosophical and theological truth, both views distort reality by abstracting one part of truth (that holiness is otherworldly; that man has a body) from the whole and inflating it up to gross proportions. And as puritanism is a falsehood and a distortion of life, so too is the literature of sentimentality a falsehood and a distortion of art. The sentimentalized story betrays the rules of art by portraying a false world, one in which the good and honest always persevere, temptation and other obstacles are always dispelled, suffering is rewarded, and the supernatural is on vivid display, in the expected packaging—all with a stirring soundtrack. There are always those who demand such art or literature, because they want to be encouraged by tales of the world as they wish it was—but the serious Christian artist cannot gratify such appetites... END OF EXTRACT I wonder if this overstates things slightly, in that the "sentimentalist" view was often defended by reference to a perfectly respectable theory of art - a Platonic view that the purpose of art is not to mirror reality but to present the ideal towards which we ought to strive. The "sentimentalist" view can be seen as a debasement of this, however, in that for the Platonist type of art to be credible it should give some idea of the difficulty of attaining and living the ideal; if this is neglected it becomes fatally vulnerable to accusers who claim the ideal presented is impossible and actually corrupts readers by making them despise everyday life for not living up to it. It should also be borne in mind that one of the classic criticisms of nineteenth-century Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, was that it was often a bourgeois fantasy favoured by those who liked to keep religion in a "separate sphere" divorced from the "real world" where hardheaded business decisions were made and life was lived, and who were comfortable enough to have a certain amount of insulation. This was a tremendous distortion but there was a considerable amount of truth in it, which is why the corporal works of mercy are so important and why trads should beware of walling ourselves into enclaves. redcardigan.blogspot.com/2011/10/catholic-writing-rant.htmlEXTRACT I really could not agree more with the ideas expressed above--and this, even though my fiction aspirations are to write children's fiction, not adult fiction. The writer of children's fiction has, in my view, a special task: to tell the truth, to tell a good story, to create a realistic world in which good and evil both struggle--but to do so in a way that respects the veil of childhood and that does not unduly breach the trust of parents who allow their children to read the work, to show some restraint in scenes of violence, and to practice reticence most especially of all in terms of sexual content. Some writers for children, especially in this day and age, disagree with those principles and most of all with the last one. But the world of a child is not the world of an adult. The dawning awareness a child ought to have about certain types of evil and some kinds of sin on the one hand, and of certain greatly good gifts which properly belong to marriage on the other, must, I most firmly believe, be treated with a great deal of respect by the writer who aims his or her work to audiences as young as age eight or so (as I do in my writing). But I can't, and don't, write the kind of children's fiction that most Catholic fiction publishers today would be at all willing to publish or sell. I don't proselytize, I don't preach, and my characters are not wells of unadulterated goodness. My main character is, in the beginning of the book, a thief (though not a very good one). [SHE MAY BE THINKING OF THE FACT THAT SOME CRITICS OF THE HARRY POTTER SERIES DENOUNCED IT BECAUSE ITS SYMPATHETIC CHARACTERS SOMETIMES TELL LIES] Some of the other characters struggle with selfishness, laziness, guilt and fear, and the character who is in many ways the most morally admirable has a serious fault, which leads to considerable trouble in the not-yet-finished second book. And, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the book is not overtly Catholic. The only way to bring religion into the fictional galaxy where the story takes place would be to drag it in, kicking and screaming, and then to club it into submission--and that's just to make some quiet little mention of Christianity; to have the characters attending Masses or praying the rosary together etc. would be to reduce the story to the lowest sort of pandering. I feel sorry for those Catholic writers I know who write fiction for adults. Their Catholic worldview shapes everything about the way they approach their art, and yet they are far less likely to be published by a Catholic publishing company, no matter how talented they are, than a secular one (and we all know how hard it can be to get a secular publisher even to look at a manuscript) unless they are willing to write a Kinkade-esque [THOMAS KINKADE, WHO DIED RECENTLY, WAS A POPULAR ARTIST FAVOURED BY EVANGELICALS WHO PORTRAYED LIGHT-DRENCHED IDYLLIC SCENES AND PASSED HIMSELF OFF AS A GREAT IDEALISTIC MASTER] fantasy about a sweet Catholic family in a little roseate cottage whose main conflicts involve being nice to the neighbors who let their daughters wear jeans. Okay, okay, I'm exaggerating--but not by all that much. Which major Catholic publisher today would publish [FLANNERY] O'Connor? Or Walker Percy? Or Graham Green? Would any of them?
I've heard Catholic publishers say, in essence, "Look, we have to publish safe fiction that our readers like, because nobody buys Catholic fiction anymore except for the 'old lady in California' or the reader looking for a positive, affirming tale." But maybe nobody buys Catholic fiction anymore because there's so darned little of it being published. END
thwordinc.blogspot.com/2010/01/bad-catholic-art.html thwordinc.blogspot.com/search?q=liturgical+dance thwordinc.blogspot.com/2011/10/something-for-human-beings.html EXTRACT David said to me something that will always stick in my mind. We were talking about how most Catholic drama and Catholic comedy and Catholic programming is utterly bad (I've touched on this elsewhere). And David said simply, "We need to be putting stuff out there that human beings would want to see."
Now think about that.
And think about the stuff we try to pass off as our attempts at Transforming the Culture. And think about how much of that any actual human being would want to sit through.
Chesterton got it. Chesterton knew that in fiction, drama, journalism, poetry, or what have you, first you have to engage the human person - first you have to reach out to human beings.
By contrast, the True Believers, the hard core and long suffering residents of the Catholic Ghetto aren't that picky. They grasp for straws, producing and consuming stuff that hardly rates as culture much less culture transformed. But if we're going to appeal to the pagans and agnostics and lapsed Catholics in our midst, we must do so with art that's honest, that's authentic, that engages, that is not contrived, not didactic, not dreary, not self-indulgent, not boring, not bad.
The True, the Beautiful and the Good echo the glory of the Holy Trinity, and we dare not as artist or audience settle for the Trite, the Banal and the Mediocre. END thwordinc.blogspot.com/2011/10/most-dangerous-thing-in-world.html EXTRACT It's painful because writers die a little bit for their work, poets speak from hearts that are circumcised, and actors are the most vulnerable of the lot. I can not tell you how difficult it's been throughout my career to pour my soul into something that is disregarded or kicked around or cheapened by the people who are paying me to do it, and who do not really value it. And it's worse in the Church than in the world.
And I've begun to suspect this is because many folks in the Church are unwittingly abetting the Cult of Sterility.
When God tells us in Isaiah 55:11
So shall my word be that goes forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, achieving the end for which I sent it.
He is telling us that his Word, Jesus Christ, is not just a nice guy, but the most creative and active element in the world today. His Word is seminal, a seed that exists to make us fruitful. We see this in the mystery of the Annunciation. The love that the Lord and Mary had for one another does not return void, the incarnate Son of God comes to be on earth through this love and this assent, born of prayer - born of an intimate communion.
Love is supposed to lead to something - something interesting, for crying out loud (like the little girl on the left, something interesting that the love my wife and I shared led to).
But the world around us is all about the Void, sterility, emptiness. We love "safe sex", but the only way to make sex safe is to cut the gonads off of love.
I have just finished a creative project that will never be seen or heard by human beings. It was a Catholic project, for which I was paid a ridiculously low figure, and which now, being finished, will return void - for the producer will neglect to market it. It's like doing great work for EWTN and having it air at 5:30 in the morning on Thursdays. And while I'm at it, all that Marty Haugen crap and the eager young squeaky Catholics with guitars at the Youth Mass - all of that is simply contrived and unreal, and like all such things will return nothing but the whirlwind.
The stalk has no head; it will produce no flour. Were it to yield grain, foreigners would swallow it up. (Hos. 8:7)
Our bishops are friendly but squeamish, our youth hooking up but disconnected, our hearts bleeding but barren. Our food is not filling; our sex is safe, our passion is listless.
They shall eat, but not be satisfied; they shall play the whore, but not multiply, because they have forsaken the LORD to cherish. (Hos. 4:10)
What I'm saying in this tirade is that the problem is not merely the Catholic Ghetto. The problem is assuming that the Word is somehow unreal, that He can not appeal to real men, to sinners, to actual people, to human beings - the problem is our vastly naive assumption that we ought to control the situation, and that the Word will stay aloof from all this mess and return void.
On the contrary, the Holy Spirit, who comes to us from the Father and the Son, is disturbing, unsettling, fecund.
We are the ones keeping Him from touching hearts and minds. We are the ones who think that art can be safe, as safe as contraceptive sex, as safe as loving another person - and yet loving another person is the most dangerous thing in the world. END
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 30, 2012 20:58:53 GMT
In relation to the above discussion - I have recently been reading Michael O'Brien's 1999 novel PLAGUE JOURNAL. This is one of his six-title CHILDREN OF THE LAST DAYS series in which a nascent one-world government infiltrates the Church and uses secret state agencies to persecute faithful Catholics. The first novel in the series, FATHER ELIJAH, whose central character is a Jewish Carmelite priest who may also be the eschatological Elijah confronting Antichrist, has been discussed earlier in the thread. PLAGUE JOURNAL is a first-person narrative by the editor of a small local newspaper who is bringing up his two elder children alone after the breakup of his marriage. As he is a vocal opponent of abortion, euthanasia, and the general one-world government ideology of the forces of darkness, he is targeted by their instruments and forced to go on the run with his children after being falsely accused of abusing them. He is eventually captured and disappears, while his children escape to a hidden refuge in the far north. (Another novel in the sequel, STRANGERS AND SOJOURNERS, describes the lives of his Irish paternal grandfather and English paternal grandmother as small farmers in rural British Columbia, where they both came to escape their pasts. A third, ECLIPSE OF THE SUN, describes the attempts of an elderly priest to keep the editor's third child out of the clutches of the authorities after the boy's mother is killed in a government-sponsored massacre which is blamed on right-wing extremists to encourage further crackdowns.) The book does have some good points - for example the editor comes to realise that his campaigns have partly been driven by pride in his own intellect and contributed to the breakdown of his marriage, and in the last resort he must trust in the grace of God. This is quite subtly linked to O'Brien's own aesthetic of preferring fable-like archetypes to realist naturalism. It is also interesting to see that the book has some decidedly Canadian elements (O'Brien is a Canadian living in rural Ontario). The rural setting, the sense that the narrator's pioneering ancestors have been betrayed by the capitalist economy which has led to their valley being bought up and their farms submerged to create a hydro-electric dam, the location of the final refuge (never seen in this book but we are assured it remains inviolate) - all draw on a well-known Canadian cultural trend of seeing the North as the true source of Canadian identity, rather than the cities along the US border where most Canadians live. It is also notable that the narrators' grandparents come from four Canadian founding nations - English (though Scots might have been preferable given their prominence in Canadian history), Irish, French and Indian (his maternal grandparents are Catholic metis, descendants of French-Canadian furtrappers' intermarriage with Indians; it is the metis maternal grandfather who eventually takes the children to safety). They are assisted by descendants of more recent immigrants - Russian and Vietnamese - whose experience of communist persecution is paralleled with the rising shadow of the one-world dictatorship.
So what are the flaws which I think vitiate the book? I'll leave the worst till last: (1) The author talks in terms of archetypes, but uses the book to air too many of his own petty crotchets. The narrative expounds at length O'Brien's well-known view that children's books which present dragons favourably are always and everywhere lures of Satan, on the grounds that Satan is portrayed as a dragon in the Bible and dragons are often invoked by occultists. The Bible also associates Satan with the North (in adult baptisms catechumens face the north as they renounce Satan, because they are defying him), and occultists often present the north as a place of hidden wisdom - so the same style of argument could be used to "prove" that Mr O'Brien is himself pursuing some sort of occult agenda when he locates the Camp of the Saints in the north. Similarly, it is never explained why the narrator did not sell up and move to some place where he could be with like-minded Catholics/orthodox Christians, rather than trying to raise his children on his own in a school district where he is isolated (most of his readers live elsewhere in Canada rather than in his immediate vicinity), where the local authority figures are actively hostile and seek to corrupt his children, while most people defer to them. The real reason seems to be that Mr O'Brien believes that independent small farmers are somehow uniquely virtuous and cities are inherently corrupt. What does this say to those of us who have to live in cities? Are we automatically damned, or not worth taking into account?
Worse still, the problem with apocalyptic fiction is that it makes everything the author dislikes unambiguously the work of the Devil - we live in a greyer world where discernment is needed - and its insistence that one-world liberals in our present world (the novels deliberately emphasise that their world is only a few years removed from ours - John Paul II is still Pope in FATHER ELIJAH, and a well-known Canadian lawcase involving a holocaust denying schoolteacher who propagandised his pupils is presented as possibly having been staged by the liberals to justify their own agenda) are paving the way for Antichrist can easily be used to proclaim that all evils come from the left and there are no real enemies on the right (this is not Mr O'Brien's intention but it is his tendency). Similarly, the false accusations of child abuse experienced by the narrator are presented in a way which implies that most/all such accusations are fakes got up by Antichrist to smear innocent Catholics. That leads straight to denial and hostility to genuine victims.
(2) The narrator is a lapsed Catholic only reconciled towards the very end of the novel. This seems odd - given that he is increasingly harrassed and beleaguered because of his outspoken views on certain ethical issues - abortion, euthanasia - where the Church, or at least "conservative Catholics" would be his major allies, you would think he would long since have looked there for spiritual support and help with his children's upbringing. Mr O'Brien does it this way because he thinks it's more edifying.
(3) This is the absolute no-brainer and glaring fault in the whole edifice. The author invokes the persecutions perpetrated by the totalitarian regimes of the C20, but he doesn't have the foggiest idea of how determined and ruthless those persecutions actually were, and to present them in such a lackadaisical manner is an insult to those who suffered from them, and to the readers as well. For example, when the narrator is finally arrested he is left in a cell for hours while various sinister agencies argue over whose concentration camp he should be sent to - he uses this time to finish writing up his journal - the narrative we are reading - and to hide it in his cell in the hope that some sympathetic person will discover and preserve it (as actually happens). Given that the authorities are anxious to locate his children and any ideological sympathisers he may have, he would be interrogated thoroughly and ruthlessly as fast as possible (while still disoriented from his capture) to get as much information as could be got from him. ANY police force would do this, let alone one as merciless and lawless as shown in the novel. Similarly, one of those who assists the narrator is killed and the body falls into the hands of the authorities, who know the person helped the fugitives - yet it never occurs either to the narrator or to O'Brien that the authorities would round up all the dead person's relatives and friends on suspicion of helping the fugitive. The source of both these anomalies is that O'Brien wishes the novel to end with a ray of hope, with the children's escape - whereas given the powers available to the authorities the plot as developed "ought" to end with their martyrdom or disappearance into captivity. But there is one utterly glaring idiocy which pervades the whole novel - and that is the fact that it is written as a journal, in which the narrator dutifully records everything he did and names everyone who helped him. Nobody in their right mind who is a hunted activist under a totalitarian regime should keep such a journal, and only an utter egoist would fail to destroy it - would preserve it even in captivity when he has a chance to destroy it, and abandon it in a place where there is an extremely strong risk of its falling into the hands of those who would use it to destroy everyone named in it (and if they did the journal-writer would be directly responsible for their fate). This could have been avoided or at least minimised in various ways (e.g. handing the journal to a confidant, having an epilogue told by a third character after the journal has been abandoned when the protagonist leaves it with his family before leaving on the journey which leads to his capture, having the journal destroyed with the implication that the reader is able to read it from an eye-of-God perspective), but Mr O'Brien never even tries to do this. This is the central reason why the book is a travesty - not because of its descriptions of the Last Days of which we know not the day nor the hour, but because it invokes terrors which many of the faithful have known all too well from experience in such a laughably cack-handed manner.
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Post by hibernicus on May 18, 2012 12:07:04 GMT
A fascinating article on the artists and intellectuals of the early twentieth-century Catholic Renaissance, with some interesting resonances for some topics we have discussed here. BTW there is at least one factual error which I noticed; the Catholic editor Ernest Oldmeadow who accused Evelyn Waugh of apostasy because he mentioned contraception in his novel BLACK MISCHIEF (in order to satirise it) was a layman, not a priest, although his journal was clerically owned (hence Waugh's writing an Open Letter of complaint to the Archbishop of Westminster about it) catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0060.htmlEXTRACTS Whenever I have had the chance to visit second-hand book shops in recent years — whether they be converted barns in Pennsylvania, decaying mansions in the Corktown section of Detroit, or dank corridors in Oxford or London — I have found myself shouting out my discoveries to my friends. More often than not, my finds have been books by Catholic thinkers that have been out of print for twenty or thirty years. On their frayed dust jackets and faded paper covers, the praise of critics whose names are all but forgotten today testifies to the excitement these books once generated. The prices have been hard to beat: Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World for a dollar, Christopher Dawson’s The Historic Reality of Christian Culture for 30 pence, Chesterton’s Manalive for a quarter. Many of these books come from libraries — predominantly Catholic libraries. In fact, I have personally profited from the closing of dozens of seminaries and convents in the Anglo-American world. With a feeling that is at once elated and guilty, I run off with spoils that once lined the shelves of imposing Gothic buildings. In reflecting upon the topic of this conference, it occurred to me that my book-hunting adventures might serve as a metaphor for the sweeping changes in Catholic intellectual and cultural life over the last twenty-five years. The writers whose works I was collecting were those who constituted what was once called the Catholic Intellectual Renaissance, an outpouring of philosophy, theology, history, and literature which combined fidelity to the ancient teachings of the Church with considerable sophistication of mind and spirit. Here were the works of the minds who dominated Catholic letters for the first half of the twentieth century, gathering dust, rejected by the current establishment, only to be discovered and then hoarded as treasures by a small segment of the younger generation. The outstanding Catholic historian James Hitchcock has termed the eclipse of these writers in the 1960s and 1970s “the slaying of the fathers”. [2] But in cocktail parties at most Catholic universities today, the mention of names such as Maritain, Gilson, Mauriac, or Waugh would very likely evoke not so much hostility as an amused condescension for individuals who are considered thoroughly passé. Relegated to that zone of weeping and gnashing of teeth known as the “pre-Vatican II” world, the Maritains and Mauriacs are thought of as apologists for an order that has been largely left behind in our progress toward a more enlightened dispensation. “To be sure,” the cocktail chat might go, “they were men of cultivation and learning, even of wit, but, you know, they were positively medieval.”.. As will be evident by now, I am pursuing a paradox about the spiritual and intellectual life of the Church. Chesterton, that modern master of paradox, has come very close to the matter in his discussion of the term reform. For Chesterton, the word reform is both meaningless and dangerous unless we recover its literal definition. The liberal conceptions of reform as either a gradual evolution away from an older doctrine or practice or as a revolution against tradition are woefully misguided. True reform, he says, involves a return to form. Only in subjecting oneself to the rigors of the original form — a term that itself reminds us of something ordered, coherent, and specific — can the detritus of time and human folly be washed away and vitality return. But just as one might step in at this point and argue that Chesterton’s definition is really nothing more than a slavish imitation of the past, notice how the paradox executes its boomerang turn. By returning to the original form from the standpoint of the crisis of the present, the resulting reform might well take on a radically different path when compared with the immediate past. In other words, the return to form may yield results that are startling but that remain true both to the distant past and to the conditions of the present. (Chesterton loved his self-proclaimed role as a “conservative radical”.) As the brilliant theologian Cardinal Henri de Lubac puts it in his Paradoxes of Faith: “To get away from old things passing themselves off as tradition it is necessary to go back to the farthest past — which will reveal itself to be the nearest present.” [3] Beyond the paradoxes of intellectual history and institutional reform, of course, lies the fundamental paradox of the divine nature itself, which Saint Augustine described as the beauty that is “ever ancient, ever new”. [4] It is also the paradox of the Gospels, which remain united with the Old Testament even while ushering in the New. The thinkers we group under the heading of the Catholic Intellectual Renaissance embodied that paradox in their writing. It is what makes them at the same time profoundly traditional and strikingly modern. Few of these figures could be called tame or timid; ever the servants of the Church, they nonetheless were bold, occasionally shocking, figures, who were suspected by some of their less imaginative contemporaries of being imprudent or even heretical. .. First, the Renaissance was not an expression of anything that might be called an “establishment”. The single most striking fact about the majority of its writers is that they were converts. In the earlier generation, one could point out Leon Bloy, Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Paul Claudel, Gabriel Marcel, Charles Peguy, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Edith Stein, and Adrienne von Speyr. The younger generation included such converts as Louis Bouyer and Walker Percy. Add to this such near-converts as Henri Bergson and Simone Weil, as well as the Anglo-Catholic converts T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and you have a picture of a worldview that had the capacity to draw many of the leading minds of the age. Conversion is an experience that is in some sense unique to every convert, but it inevitably involves a process of discovery — the feeling, to quote T. S. Eliot, of arriving home and knowing the place for the first time. Ironically, many of these intellectual converts did not find ready acceptance in official ecclesiastical circles. All this goes to show that the converts were hardly submitting themselves blindly to authority figures in order to assuage their anxieties about sex, guilt, and death (a common charge of their secular critics). Rather, they were engaged in a protracted mental and spiritual struggle that ended in a willing embrace of the central mysteries of the Faith. To all of them, their faith was an asset, a key to understanding both the highest truths and the most pressing problems of the moment. They would undoubtedly share Flannery O’Connor’s belief that “there is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery.” [6] If the Renaissance intellectuals were not creatures of any establishment, neither did they form a “movement”. There were, of course, “schools” of thought, including the Thomists, the Catholic existentialists, and the neo-patristic theologians, but even within these schools there were widely divergent views. This point may seem a truism, but it is, to my mind, an important corroboration of the intellectual honesty of these thinkers that, while they shared a common faith, their explorations of the world took them down disparate paths. Finally, it is worth noting that these writers were predominantly laypeople, not clerics. We take the leadership of lay intellectuals in the Church today somewhat for granted, but it has largely been a modern development. It is a development that recent popes and the Second Vatican Council itself have strongly endorsed, seeing it as a necessary consequence of an increasingly secularized society, and also because the specific character of the laity is to know the natural goods of various forms of worldly endeavor. The leading figures of the Catholic Renaissance moved easily and naturally in secular professional circles — a fact we may tend to forget. This is a testament not only to the greater openness of secular intellectuals in the earlier decades of the century but also to their positive rejection of the fortress mentality on the part of the Renaissance thinkers. Their place, as they saw it, was on the front lines of culture, and if they encountered some hostility, they also found a great deal of respect. As James Hitchcock has pointed out, the Catholic Thomists helped to spur a neo-scholastic movement that was taken up by such teachers as Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon at the University of Chicago, where the joke was that “atheist professors taught Catholic philosophy to Jewish students.” [7] It has been said that orthodoxy develops only in response to the challenges posed by heresy. But if the great orthodox thinkers have received their impetus from the need to oppose a narrowing and distortion of the faith, it is equally true that they always manage to rise above merely defensive postures to achieve a vision which reawakens in us a sense of the beauty and wonder of the world. One need only think of a work like Saint Augustine’s The City of God, which was written as a response to the pagans who claimed that Christianity was responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire. This magisterial book not only refuted those charges but became the blueprint for the political and social order of medieval Europe for nearly a millennium. I would like to suggest that the greatest of the Catholic Renaissance writers in the modern era accomplished this twofold mission of critique and imaginative vision. Of the many themes that run throughout their writings, I have chosen to single out three: the recovery of the sacred, the critique of the world, and the assimilation of modernity... For Waugh, the notion that the life of faith ought to lead inevitably to worldly prosperity and what the pop psychologists call “wellness” is both unrealistic and dangerous. In a fallen world, afflicted by evil and stupidity, happiness can never be a gauge of fidelity to God. To think otherwise is to confuse happiness, with its bourgeois connotations of comfort and freedom from any burdens, with blessedness, or what Catholics call the “state of grace”... The second theme, which I call “the critique of the world”, is admittedly, broad and amorphous. What I wish to focus on is the fact that Catholicism reminds us that we can never allow ourselves to become too closely identified with the order of worldly goods. I have chosen to focus on a less frequently discussed theme, namely, the association of Christianity with bourgeois materialism in the modern age, but I could just have easily explored the Christian critique of totalitarianism, as in Solzhenitsyn, or the reemergence of gnosticism. We are told in the Gospels to be in the world but not of it. From the time of the apostles down to the present, the tension between “Christ and Culture”, as the Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr has put it, has remained constant. The writers of the Catholic Renaissance faced strong challenges from modern novelists and political philosophers who accused Christianity of being nothing more than a prop for a decadent bourgeoisie. Philosophers as different as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had railed against a complacent, bourgeois Christianity in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth, novelists like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence portrayed organized religion as hypocritical, repressive, and out of touch with human needs. Despite attempts to declare such writers anti-Christian, their depictions carried the conviction of experience and cannot be dismissed. Catholic social thought, both in the tradition of papal encyclicals and in the works of Renaissance scholars such as Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, and, in a later generation, John Courtney Murray, steered a middle course between the extremes of radical capitalism and revolutionary socialism. Stressing the importance of a recovery of the notion of the common good, these thinkers avoided baptizing any current political system. In this sense, they followed the wisdom of returning to form — that is, to the Augustinian understanding of the tension between the City of God and the City of Man — in order to achieve true reform. If the problem of a too ready identification between Christian values and the bourgois life seems less applicable to contemporary Europe, it certainly retains its bite for America in the 1990s. Despite our secularized public institutions, America is a nation awash in religion and religious expression. But American Christianity has always suffered from a chameleon like tendency to become identified with civil religion and popular culture. From the gospel of success preached by certain strains of fundamentalists, to the New Age pantheism that characterizes much of progressive Catholic thought these days, the Faith is often of the world but not quite in it, if I may be permitted to reverse the metaphor. Once again, I would like to draw my illustration from the thing I know best, literature. The French Catholic novelist — Léon Bloy, François Mauriac, and Georges Bernanos — succeeded in continuing the tradition of the fictional critique of bourgeois society which had been pioneered by Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. But whereas Flaubert could only see Christianity as a beautiful dream that had been corrupted by complacency and provincialism, the Catholic novelists managed to depict the same symptoms while preserving a vision of the radical transcendence of true faith... The final theme I want to touch upon may appear to be another truism. It is simply this: that these twentieth-century Catholic writers were, in fact, modern men, and that they participated fully in the unique opportunities and difficulties of the modern world. It is worth saying because, among those who consider themselves orthodox, there is a persistent tendency toward nostalgia and a provincialism that brands everything “modern” as decadent, or even demonic. Flannery O’Connor once said that “smugness is the Great Catholic Sin”, [16] one to which we are all prone. Cardinal de Lubac puts it this way: “`Know the moderns in order to answer their difficulties and their expectations.’ A touching intention. But this way of projecting the `moderns’ into an objective concept, of separating oneself from them to consider them from the outside, makes this good will useless.” [17] The Church, because it embraces the truth about human nature and human destiny, has always been able to assimilate new ideas and new cultural patterns, finding in them redemptive possibilities. To quote Cardinal de Lubac again: No longer to believe, in fact, in the assimilating and transforming power of Christianity; to divert the exercise of Christian prudence so as to make of it an entirely negative and defensive prudential system: such is one of the most fatal forms of lack of faith. It is to believe no longer, in fact, in Christian vitality. It is to refuse confidence in the Holy Spirit. It is to justify as if on principle those who think that Christianity has grown old for good. [18] The leading figures of the Catholic Renaissance did not think this way. Philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel and Dietrich von Hildebrand established a healthy dialogue with existentialism and phenomenology, respectively. The painter Georges Rouault drew inspiration from the fauvist and expressionist movements in art. Even Chesterton, seemingly the most defiantly anachronistic of writers, employed Joycean literary techniques in The Man Who Was Thursday to convey the chaos of modern subjectivism. An apt illustration of this assimilative capacity is the aesthetic theory of this century’s two leading Thomists, Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson. Cultivated and urbane scholars, these men devoted a large portion of their philosophical study to aesthetics. Throughout their careers, they asserted that an appreciation of works of the imagination is essential to the fulfillment of our humanity. Both were unabashed champions of modern art. Maritain maintained a close personal friendship with Rouault; his wife, Raissa, was a poet. Gilson’s daughter Jacqueline was a painter in the semiabstract style. In their description of the history of art, Maritain and Gilson claimed, contrary to most people’s intuition, that painting began to go downhill after Giotto “discovered” perspective and ushered in the era of representational painting, and only began to recover with Cezanne and the revolution of modern art. The reason for this hinges on the definition of the purpose of art. The common belief is that art should be an imitation of reality, rendered with a faithfulness that approaches that of the camera. But Maritain and Gilson countered that the end of art is not the mere repetition of reality through imitation but the creation of beautiful objects that enable us to see through nature to deeper meaning. No artist creates pure representations of reality: we tend to admire artists precisely insofar as they possess a unique style that moves away from imitation and communicates a penetrating vision of reality... END OF EXTRACTS Certainly a stimulating introduction, but only an introduction, and one tending perhaps to gloss over the existence of real flaws and evils in some "Renaissance" writers, but it's a good starting point.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 29, 2012 19:49:11 GMT
JRR Tolkien on the Eucharist in a letter to his son. Bear in mind that his father died when he was an infant; his mother died some years later, partly due to privations after her family disowned her because of her conversion to Catholicism, he was a soldier on the Western Front where several of his friends were killed, and his marriage was deeply troubled. He used to suggest in conversation that his country had been going downhill since the Battle of Hastings, and while the LORD OF THE RINGS does have a black/white moral structure, one of the few areas where he admits shades of grey is in his treatment of despair in the characters of Theoden and Denethor. Where did he find light and hope in this darkness? The last passage BTW is a reproach to all those who love to gripe at annoying liturgical and non-liturgical circumstances surrounding the celebration of Mass (as distinct from actual abuses): EXTRACT “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament… There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.”... “The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals. “Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children – from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn – open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand – after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.” END Via John C Wright's blog www.scifiwright.com/2012/06/quote-for-the-day/
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