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Post by hibernicus on Oct 25, 2013 19:48:48 GMT
There are so many dodgy myths about the Templars as occult secret society (e.g. Freemasons often claim they are in some way a continuation of the Templars, as do some occultists; WB Yeats famously incorporates into one of his poems the legend that when Louis XVI was executed a mysterious man beside the scaffold called out "Vengeance for the murder of Jsacques de Molay", the Templar Grand Master burned by the French king almost 500 years previously) that portraying them as the villains is not necessarily anti-Catholic, though of course it could be - it depends on the details of the portrayal. What it DOES imply is a dangerous preoccupation with "secret history" and the idea of a group of initiates manipulating history, which can lead in some very dangerous directions.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 5, 2013 0:24:59 GMT
I recently read A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor. It seemed nasty and silly to me.
The Misfit in this story, and Pinkie in Brighton Rock, seem to me rather ridiculous examples of thugs who stand around discussing Catholic theology in between crimes. Surely this is a hokey and clumsy literary device?
Admittedly, I am a confirmed anti-modernist in all things literary, but I just don't understand the adulation heaped upon writers like Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, Walker Percy, and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's nerveless prose seems nigh-on unreadable to me; as elegant and refined and tasteless as cucumber sandwiches. Graham Greene seems to turn to Catholic themes through a morbid fascination with sin, and a kind of dissatisfaction with the level of lurdity attainable in the purely natural order. I read The Movie-Goer by Walker Percy, and found it to be merely another dreary study of modern man's alienation-- surely there are enough of those already?
C.S. Lewis's words seem applicable to all of them: "What I am attacking is a set of people who seem to me to be trying to make of Christianity itself one more highbrow, Chelsea, bourgeois-baiting fad." All of these authors seem to share a kind of contempt of workaday virtues and a stark opposition between grace and nature, rather than the orthodox view that grace perfects nature. It's better, in this mental world, to be a great-souled criminal, who sees his own evil and need for redemption, than a vulgarian in thrall to commonplace notions of sin and virtue.
Or am I wrong?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 5, 2013 10:37:35 GMT
I recently read A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor. It seemed nasty and silly to me. The Misfit in this story, and Pinkie in Brighton Rock, seem to me rather ridiculous examples of thugs who stand around discussing Catholic theology in between crimes. Surely this is a hokey and clumsy literary device? Admittedly, I am a confirmed anti-modernist in all things literary, but I just don't understand the adulation heaped upon writers like Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, Walker Percy, and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's nerveless prose seems nigh-on unreadable to me; as elegant and refined and tasteless as cucumber sandwiches. Graham Greene seems to turn to Catholic themes through a morbid fascination with sin, and a kind of dissatisfaction with the level of lurdity attainable in the purely natural order. I read The Movie-Goer by Walker Percy, and found it to be merely another dreary study of modern man's alienation-- surely there are enough of those already? C.S. Lewis's words seem applicable to all of them: "What I am attacking is a set of people who seem to me to be trying to make of Christianity itself one more highbrow, Chelsea, bourgeois-baiting fad." All of these authors seem to share a kind of contempt of workaday virtues and a stark opposition between grace and nature, rather than the orthodox view that grace perfects nature. It's better, in this mental world, to be a great-souled criminal, who sees his own evil and need for redemption, than a vulgarian in thrall to commonplace notions of sin and virtue. Or am I wrong? Brilliant, Maolsheachlann, a lot of lauded Catholic literature in English in the twentieth century is in fact gnostic or Pelagian. Waugh does try to make a case for the operation of grace in Brideshead Revisited. I think literature reflects what is seen in architecture, in visual art, in music and in the performing arts - the apotheosis of the ugly, or despair and depression. The triumph of Satan? Is there a case, which I believe that Benedict XVI set his face on, that as Dostoyevsky said through Dmitri Karamazov "Beauty will save the world". Seems like we need to return to a classical education, to re-introduce the old virtues and to banish the despair. This sounds a bit like Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill or even his parody of W.B. Yeats' Fairy Child. Do we want to revert to the older artistic forms across the board? In the town of Kleinwallstadt which is outside Ashaffenburg in northern Bavaria, the SSPX built a church which opened in 1999. This is done entirely according to the Rococco style which Bavaria is famous for. The church is gorgeous. Is it possible to do something like this in other areas? In literature from dystopia back to Utopia?
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Nov 5, 2013 13:10:50 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 5, 2013 22:00:42 GMT
To understand Walker Percy, you have to understand that the despair wasn't something he adopted as a badge - it was where he started from and what he was trying to escape from. Both his parents - and his grandfather - committed suicide; he and his brothers were brought up by an uncle who had lost his Christian faith and adopted a stoic-aristocratic form of cultural despair, seeing himself as the last gentleman about to be swamped by the tide of barbarism represented by the KKK types. There are various problems with that, one of which is that the tradition of southern noblesse oblige it glamourises was founded on racism and vigilantism as much as the backwoods redneck populists who displaced the gentry in early C20 Deep South politics. The Percys were one of the biggest slaveholding families in Mississippi; that's a terrible thing to have to live with once you realise what it means. And of course the redneck populists presented themselves as heirs to an idealised Confederate tradition; I often thought of Percy's depiction of KKK rednecks comparing themselves to Robert E Lee when I saw how Belfast loyalists invoke Carson. The best place to start with Percy is the two Thomas More novels - LOVE IN THE RUINS and THE THANATOS SYNDROME. Admittedly with the former it can be hard to get the seventies references, but if you do it's darkly hilarious. One of the targets of the satire BTW is the sex therapists Masters and Johnson, who are now being repackaged by US cable TV (cashing in on the Mad Men vogue)as Heroes of the Sexual Revolution. When I read BRIGHTON ROCK I actually found Pinkie (who is much more complicated and pathetic than the straightforward psychopath in the Richard Attenborough film) quite credible. (The passage where as he prepares for his final crime he feels menaced by some unseen force with "great beating wings" - the implication being that this is in fact the Holy Ghost working on his residual conscience, and that what he sees as a threat is really his last chance of salvation - is both chilling and heartrending.) The real problem with that novel is the character of Ivy - because she is a slut and complacent about it, but is outraged by murder, Greene presents her as contemptible by comparison with a murderer driven by spiritual pride - and thereby exhibits spiritual pride himself.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2013 22:15:04 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 25, 2013 20:53:54 GMT
Evelyn Waugh's meditation on the Wise Men, from his novel HELENA about the mother of the Emperor Constantine and discoverer of the True Cross. Like much of that strange man's work, Helena is at once eccentric and profound, and this passage speaks very well to those who know they are sinners and have wasted much of their lives, but still seek the Light Whose shining forth we commemorate tonight on Christmas: jp2forum.blogspot.ie/2011/01/from-evelyn-waugh-meditation-for.html"Like me, you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before. Even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way. For you, the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed, and a new defiant light blazed amid the disconcerted stars. How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road attended by what outlandish liveries laden with such preposterous gifts. You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you, and what did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod with a deadly exchange of compliments which there began that unending war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent. Yet, you came and were not turned away. You, too, found room before the manger. Your gifts were not exactly needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too. You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family than the ox or the ass. You are my special patrons and the patrons of all latecomers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who, through politeness, make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talent. For his sake, who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not quite be forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom." (Loyola Classics edition, pp. 208-210) END
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 15, 2014 20:03:18 GMT
An interesting piece on the Elizabethan English recusant composer William Byrd (h/t Fr Zuhlsdorf) reginamag.com/just-christmas-carols/and here is a link to the Christmas carol mentioned in the piece: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eshvXkr7E-AOne little caveat which might be borne in mind - the fact that Byrd adhered to the Catholic faith at some loss and risk to himself doesn't mean he was always exemplary. SOme of his business dealings were dubious, and some of his musical pieces (such as "The Battle") celebrate Elizabethan military victories in Ireland (dissonance between English and Irish Catholics has been an abiding issue)
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 27, 2014 21:09:04 GMT
This review of a selection of the letters of JF Powers, who has featured on this thread before, may be of interest. They also raise an interesting question about the relationship between certain types of vocation and others. Powers and his wife loved each other very much, but I wonder on the basis of this review whether he might not have been better as a celibate, even as a priest. Because in the Irish context one thinks of Joyce as the great rebel against the faith, I had not particularly thought of Powers in relation to him, but I can see some obvious affinities now that I think of it (most notably the way in which the temptations of his worldly clergymen reflect the way in which Joyce presents Stephen Dedalus' potential vocation as a temptation to simony - to power and a sense of superiority, to spiritual pride - and the emphasis on the tension between quotidian mundanity and higher yearnings). It's also noteworthy that he was a born Catholic (and from an Irish background, too) whereas most of the major Anglophone Catholic writers of his period were converts (and Flannery O'Connor - a born Catholic - was much more an exotic and much less related to a particular regional style of Catholicism than Powers was). Powers also seems to have been caught between the pre-conciliar version of liberalism/self-conscious Catholic intellectualism, and traditional practice (if I'm correctly informed, he was depressed by the New Rite of Mass replacing the EF) and that might also have lessons for our own day. Perhaps one day soon, if I get all my other commitments sorted out, I may re-read MORTE D'URBAN, dust off my 6-year-old post on it (I remember back then I spoke of posting on a different Catholic book/writer every week - what a joke) and write something for the BRANDSMA. www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/catholic-novelist-commercial-folly/EXTRACT In Ireland, he became friends with the Irish short story writers Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor, who seemed to misjudge him somewhat as a kindred anti-clerical spirit. Although the celibate childlessness of priests and the carousing (relative) childlessness of a poet like Lowell indicate that Powers’s main objective in socializing was little more than to escape Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with his wife and five children, it testifies also to the easy humor of the man that he should seem so at home among abstemious clergy and the somewhat libertine writers of his day. His exchanges with fellow writers stand out as the most substantial and illuminating in this volume, and one wonders whether a more conventional edition of selected letters, consisting chiefly of the author’s writing on literary matters, would not have been a more timely and valuable offering. What Suitable Accommodations does provide leads us again and again to cringe and lament that Powers did not find the prospect of a well-fed and well-ordered house, or the company of his family, more a boon to his art—not to mention his life—than he did. He opines with bitterness that his father, a talented piano player, had surrendered his art to support his widowed mother. After Betty suffers a miscarriage, Powers not only absents himself at Christmastime but writes to console her, “I do not feel so bad. I would feel shakier than I do, about money, if we had a baby. In that respect I am relieved.” His first letters to Betty betray an unconventional candor, but the resultant portrait is unflattering. As their children are born, the occasional refrain in the letters is “I haven’t had much to do with it.” Nor did Powers entirely fit in with another subculture to which, like his family, he would nonetheless long remain attached—that of the Movement, the Catholic intellectual, liturgical, and cultural reformers who swelled the rural diocese of what Powers called the “Big Missal Country” in Minnesota. These were his friends, the Catholic statesman Eugene McCarthy most prominent among them, and his letters from Ireland show a Powers anxious to maintain such connections, though always with a comic, distancing smile. He was repelled by the prospect of the “dialogue mass,” such as that through which Catholics have awkwardly slurred for the last half-century. After an initial enthusiasm for the Catholic Rural Life Movement, he and Betty hurried back to her parents’ house in town, conscious that the labor and deprivation of spiritual agrarians, though beguiling, were not for them. On these Catholic intellectual connections, the letters are fascinating and suggestive, but largely uninformative of detail. For again the editor has brought her focus to bear primarily on Powers’s character as a father. He was a brilliant but idle and dreaming man, whose resistance to the realities of life caused his wife and children to suffer. Passages like this one to Father Egan shape that story: “I personally dislike this stretch of life ahead of me: the father of numerous children; the husband of a woman with no talent for motherhood (once she’s conceived); and the prospect of making no more money than in the past.” Behind the unhappiness that makes this mostly personal story of “family life” ironic, if not cruel, a whole line of historical inquiry begs exploration. In our day, orthodox Catholics stand out from the rest of Western society most obviously through their “familism.” Committed to a natural understanding of marriage as a conjugal union, they have more children than most; understanding the family at once as a natural, pre-political institution and as a “domestic church,” they tend to give their children freer rein to play and learn, even as their households are significantly more ritualized and ordered to piety, often at the expense of prosperity. Theirs is a way of life so countercultural as to receive little but incomprehension and ridicule from a mainstream America committed to contraception, abortion, divorce, and the treating of children as rare, precious commodities to be prepped for scaling the meritocracy. Many Catholics were conscious that this emphasis on the family was deeply countercultural in Powers’s day. Church teaching had adopted the family as a chief site of resistance against liberal individualism and left-wing collectivism. Further, its expressions were more visible and more potent than in our time because still integrated with the emergent “liberal” and suburban slices of Catholic society. For Powers, that may have been the problem. Catholic familism looked suspiciously like a conspiracy to absorb the radical otherness of the Gospel into a Cold War American culture that already celebrated itself as an engine of prosperity anchored in the nuclear family. He would lament, “I am not by nature cut out for this life, as it’s defined in these parts by the chamber of commerce and our bishop, who is devoted to Christian family living, as everyone knows.” He jokes about “the family-liturgico-rural-life” movement which engages so many of us in this diocese, thanks, need I say, to an alert clergy (alert to the real dangers of the times), not least of whom is our bishop, himself the product of family life and parents.” Powers takes on the appearance of a lower class but “cleaner” Holden Caulfield, who sees “the Movement” and “Standard Oil” as interchangeable aspects of the inauthentic conformity of postwar American culture. Everything threatens to be reduced to a slogan, a jingle, or a decency pledge—and to get in the way of his art. A few doubtful comments about the career of Allen Tate as a man of letters in the modern world of commerce drive home how blighted everything appeared to him as soon as it was touched by the American business sense. What these letters leave to implication is that the greatest obstacle to Powers’s art was himself. The vulgarities of American culture, including those of a fast-assimilating American laity and priesthood, were his natural materials. The combination of affectionately rendered detail given bite by a sense of awkward and impossible compromises between the “officially” unworldly life of the Church and the worldly materialism with which its priests and people strain clumsily to find accommodation make Powers’s stories about parish life a quizzical joy to read. His early stories on American racism show his genius for Joycean impressionism but are also one of several indications that his range, as Flannery O’Connor noted, did not extend far beyond the rectory. Limited in his material, as Joyce was, his sprinter’s prose could never have undergone the freakish maturation the Irish modernist’s did, in which words became the chief subject of his art. Powers’s style developed, even taking on some of the associative overtones of Joyce’s early books, but mostly it just got sharper, more wry and complex. The plots of his priest stories provide a sound but repetitive basis for his humor, so that Morte D’Urban, simply because of its ambitious scale, would prove to be the zenith of his career. The stories and novel that followed—many years later—offer simply more delightful misfits of the spirit for those who already liked Father Urban and his decrepit Order of St. Clement. Though the letters contain incidental details that subtly suggest the sources of Powers’s books—e.g., squirrels he chased from the eaves of one of the better houses the family rented ultimately come to nest in those of St. Clement’s Hill—the most agonizing tale they tell is not about the genesis of art or the impositions of family life but the limit of Powers’s eye for reality. He persisted in believing that the external demands of fatherhood and making a living prevented him from spending more time at the writer’s desk. But this does not ring true. His idleness and limited range of subject and style were the more compelling cause. He could live the material for Flesh, but I doubt he could ever have finished writing it... END OF EXTRACT
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 9, 2014 18:08:44 GMT
Given the acknowledged influence of the French Catholic novelist George Bernanos on the much-ballyhooed film CALVARY (whether that film is a homage to BErnanos or a travesty of him is the big question about it) these pieces on him may be relevant. His belief in facing both the utmost evil and the highest good (and note one of these pieces describes some of the horrors he lived through, just in case you think he's overegging it) is very reminiscent to the horrors we have seen in our own time and of which we are being constantly reminded - especially when those horrors were perpetrated by professed Catholics. His remark that when seen from outside the Church looks like a spiritual policeman, and it is the perspective of the saint - the awareness of the illimitable love of God - that we must find and embrace, goes to the core of the matter. The more ignorant of and alienated from the Church someone becomes, the more it seems to them to be a pure expression of power - it is that illimitable Love of which the Church sub specie aeternitatis is an expression that we must find and live out and display to others. I read DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST years ago but was too young and green and immature to understand it. I must try again. www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2014/06/09/the-diary-of-a-country-priest-shows-christian-are-caught-in-a-battle-between-good-and-evil/www.patheos.com/blogs/acatholicthinker/2014/06/what-georges-bernanos-taught-me-about-saints/
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 10, 2014 17:34:40 GMT
Recently read a late-1940s biography of Sigrid Undset which I found in the Central Catholic Library. I read the old translation of KRISTIN LAVRANSDOTTIR (which I understand is dumbed-down) many years ago, but from general ignorance most of it went over my head. I also saw Liv Ullman's film of the first volume - a bit too scenic. I keep on meaning to explore Undset more deeply and have read a couple of her books of historical essays, but have not gone very deep. Some interesting points from the biography: Her father was an archaeologist - hence the deep knowledge of/interest in mediaeval Norway. She was part of a reaction against the largely irreligious liberalism a la Ibsen to which her parents subscribed; not that she approved of every aspect of this reaction - at one point she writes about old-style liberals having produced descendants who are willing to swear allegiance to the devil because he is a strong leader (remember the Norwegian for leader is forer - analogous to Fuhrer - and you will get what she means). She was also part of a dispute within Scandinavia over the nineteenth-century romantic view that the great age of Scandinavia was the age of the Vikings and the conversion to Christianity marked a falling-off (this view was derived, unintentionally, from the Lutheran view that the mediaeval church was pretty much worthless). This had the implication that a shared Nordic-Germanic identity was what really mattered and Scandinavians should regain their true selves by aligning with Germany. Undset subscribed to the rival view that Scandinavia must be understood as part of a wider European civilisation in touch with the South (it will be seen how this could feed into a more positive view of mediaeval Christian Norway and of Catholicism, but she held it before conversion - residence in Italy in the period before WWI was of great personal importance for her). She found Wilhelmine Germany, when she visited it in connection with her early writings, arrogant and bullying, and she was a very outspoken supporter of the Allied cause during WWI. I knew that she was a major spokeswoman for the Norwegian Resistance in WW2, but I had not realised just how early and how prominent she was in her 1930s denunciations of the Third Reich.
One little irony, BTW, is that the portrayal of the polar bears in Philip Pullman's DARK MATERIALS trilogy is clearly influenced by the Nordo-Romantic view of the conversion of Norway as imposing an oppressive and autocratic monarchy on a society of free farmers, so that it would have been better had this never taken place. Pullman picks this up more or less wholesale, ignoring some of its more unsavoury implications, ancient (pre-Christian Vikings regularly practised human sacrifice; in SAGA OF SAINTS Undset quotes the story that St Olaf put a stop to it by telling his noblemen, when they urged him to offer sacrifices to the gods, that if such sacrifices had any value they should not be of peasants or slaves but of noblemen) and modern.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 10, 2014 20:00:35 GMT
The romantic nineteenth century view of the Vikings, and the notion of their conversion to Christianity as a falling-off, sounds very like the attitude of W.B. Yeats as expressed in The Wanderings of Oisin and elsewhere, transposed from Ireland to Scandinavia.
Chesterton also argued with his English contemporaries, many of whom were in love with the idea of Nordicism, that England was a part of Europe and that its Roman and Mediterranean heritage was an essential part of European civilization. I was rather taken aback and irritated when I started reading Chesterton and encountered this argument, as I thought a conservative (as I assumed Chesterton to be) should be hostile to cosmopolitanism and all forms of supranationalism, even cultural supranationalism, and rather proud than ashamed of being parochial. I eventually came to see Chesterton was right. Amongst the many riddles of life that Catholicism solves, I believe, is the tension between nation and humanity, local and universal.
I've never read Sigrid Undset but I intend to do so, encouraged by this post.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 10, 2014 22:11:54 GMT
I would say there is a good deal in common between Yeats' attitude and the Nordic romanticisation of the Vikings I described - and that it has Protestant or post-Protestant roots. It is often pointed out that many of the Irish Revival writers were sons or grandsons of Church of IReland clerics - Yeats's grandfather was Rector of Tullylish, Douglas Hyde and Standish James O'Grady were the sons of clergymen, JM Synge's maternal grandfather was Rector of Skibbereen and died of fever which he caught ministering to the starving during the Great Famine - and that one of their driving forces is rejection of their ancestral Evangelicalism while wishing to avoid merging themselves in what they saw as authoritarian peasant Catholicism, hence looking to the Gaelic tradition (pre-Christian especially) as an alternative focus of Irish identity. (There are affinities with Germany as well - the German philosophical tradition is influenced by Protestant Pietism with its emphasis on inner sincerity over external observances, and many German Romantics tended to see Catholicism as an alien Latin imposition on the freedom-loving Germans and Luther as the champion of a native German spirituality. I should add that German Catholics, especially liberals a la Dollinger - who thought at one stage that the Papacy ought to move to Bavaria where it would get away from those corrupt Italians and acquire a distinctly Germanic love of freedom - were not immune to this sort of thing; quite a few of the Nazis' early Catholic supporters wanted a Germanised Catholicism with pagan trimmings - that is where Himmler started out, for example, though he ended up rejecting Christianity tout court for neo-paganism, with results that embarrassed even Hitler. This is why Pope Benedict was so wary of the more enthusiastic proponents of "inculturating" the Church to fit in with different societies - he is aware from personal experience of how such ideas can be misused.) The Irish Revival writers had another motive for such ideas which didn't apply in uniformly-Lutheran Scandinavia - a desire to overcome religious differences in a shared national identity. (Here again the German case is similar, except that the two were divided half and half, whereas late-Victorian Irish Protestants as a minority - albeit a large one pre-partition - were in a much more precarious position. At one point in MEIN KAMPF Hitler argues that identifying Catholicism as the defining national identity is a bad idea because there are just too many German Catholics, before going on to point out that the Jews are much more suitable as a defining national enemy because they are a small minority, so it's convenient that - according to Hitler - they really ARE the national enemy. The passage is much debated in discussions about whether Hitler really believed what he said about the Jews or simply chose them as a convenient scapegoat; I suspect the real reason is that Hitler did not recognise any distinction between reality and what he wanted it to be.) Chesterton, and especially Belloc, are susceptible to the opposite heresy - the view that only the Latin peoples are really civilised and Christian, and Germans and orientals are irrevocably alien. Belloc can sound quite like Maurras at times (Maurras thought Christianity was an oriental cult which ruined classical civilisation, and just when the Renaissance Popes had managed to subdue all that destructive nonsense about universal brotherhood and the like and re-create pagan classical civilisation, along came a pack of German barbarians who took the nonsense seriously and started it all up again - in other words the mirror image of the Germanophiles). When I read Edith Stein - as I do quite frequently - and think of some of the Bellocian rants about how Jews should be made go round dressed like Arabs, I shudder.
The Undset passage is interesting because it's an example of a neutral Norwegian forming the same impression of Wilhelmine Germany that you get in Chesterton and Belloc before as well as during the war - a big cynical bully throwing its weight around; in other words it wasn't simply a British invention, as we being the descendants of IRish nationalists are inclined to think. Whether it's the whole story about the Kaiserreich is another matter, but it's certainly part of it.
Interestingly enough, although Daniel COrkery self-identifies as Catholic and gets many of his ideas from the Catholic Gothicising tradition derived from Pugin, his hostility to the Renaissance as destroying national cultures, and his downgrading of Latin universalism, is very like the Revival writers I mentioned above
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 14, 2014 21:15:10 GMT
One other point about Undset - again going by the biography, even before she converted she was very strong on the point that union between a man and a woman sets up a permanent bond and is not to be undertaken lightly. (She was married to, and had children by, a divorced man - they broke up shortly before her conversion. Kristin Lavransdatter's permanent sense of guilt over her complicity in the death of her husband's former lover owes a lot to this._
Something else which is probably relevant to her anti-Nazism - one of her children was mentally handicapped.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 14, 2014 21:18:58 GMT
A nice piece from CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT on the famous film MONSIEUR VINCENT, about St Vincent De Paul. A challenging suggestion: EXTRACT When Christians make movies about saints, they sometimes succeed as hagiography, always make their intended audiences feel good, and almost always fail as art. Christians often can’t resist the temptation to tell the story with a bullhorn and end up, too frequently, with movies that appeal primarily to the choir, the members of which are (understandably) hungry for fare that glorifies the Faith. When agnostics and atheists make movies about saints or other heroes whose life choices were motivated by the claims of faith, however, things tend to turn out differently. If it’s true that saints irritate us into changing our ways, secular artists often build into their art their own anxious searching, their own “reaching out” to meet the irritating (read fascinating) protagonist, to understand him, and to unveil the mystery of what makes him tick. A few examples would include Therese (1986), the French film about St. Therese of Lisieux written and directed by Alain Cavalier; The Song of Bernadette (1943), written by Franz Werfel; Man For All Seasons (1966) and The Mission (1986), written by Robert Bolt; and The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), written and directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. I argue this would include Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel for Noah (2014). In this tradition stands Monsieur Vincent (1946), the classic biopic of St. Vincent de Paul. It was directed by Maurice Cloche based on a script adapted by the great French playwright Jean Anouilh, who built a writing career exploring ideas that resonate more with Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre than with Frank Capra and Walt Disney. Interestingly, Anouilh had successfully tackled another saintly subject in his celebrated play Becket, the movie version of which starred Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole... END OF EXTRACT www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/3217/nonbelievers_make_the_best_saint_movies_imonsieur_vincenti.aspx I would not be so sure that BECKET is a success - actually, it could be read as an expression of the blackest Machiavellianism - but the point stands. Another comparison might be with the way A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS makes St Thomas More's story primarily about personal authenticity, rather than about who was objectively right (the latter being how the real More saw things).
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