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Post by hibernicus on Mar 28, 2015 16:21:41 GMT
I agree it was meant to be surreal. I think the big problem with it is summed up in Pugio's remark that the villagers sounded like smart undergraduates. That's just right - it wanted to combine undergraduate humour (which is based on the assumption that you know everything, and which is reinforced by the in-jokes sprinkled throughout the movie) with taking the priest seriously. Can't be done - if you take the priest seriously then the parishioners come across as superficial, and if you take the parishioners at their own valuation then the priest is a fool. It is quite plausible for the audience not to realise the killer's identity (remember that the voice is heard before we meet any of the possible suspects - I'm really not competent to judge because I read a review beforehand saying who it was). What is much more irritating is that that it is made absolutely clear that the priest knows who it is, but the audience are kept in the dark. Since the priest is the audience's stand-in it would make dramatic sense for them both to be in the same position; having him know means that the audience are not fully able to understand the nature of his exchanges with the suspects. The younger priest was not I think meant to be a 40s figure - he was a hostile stereotype based on the idea that the only people who would want to be priests nowadays are conservative, stupid, and probably homosexual. (There is a line in the dialogue where someone looks at him and remarks "there's the future of the church" - which is reinforced when by the end of the film he has left the priesthood and taken to studying Richard Dawkins, this development being played for laughs and presented as equally clueless.) A 40s seminarian would be sufficiently drilled on the seal of the confessional not to break it out of sheer cluelessness as the curate does at one point. A wooden church might not be totally implausible - what is much more implausible is that it is located on the seashore away from the village.
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Post by Ranger on Mar 28, 2015 20:01:18 GMT
I notice that Lord of the World has been mentioned on this thread previously. The American magazine Inside the Vatican has an article today detailing how Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict seem to have often referred to this book as prophetic for the situation of the Church in the world today. I read half of this book several years ago and stopped because I was moving abroad and decided I didn't have the room to pack it. I may take it up again. Does anybody who has read this book have any comments on how it might be relevant to our current situation? I suppose, like other dystopian books like 1984 and Brave New World, it may be portraying an extreme example in order to warn against a lesser form of dystopia. The article itself is online here: insidethevatican.com/magazine/culture/ideological-colonization-in-lord-of-the-world
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Post by Ranger on Apr 29, 2015 13:38:26 GMT
Apropos of my previous post here, I notice that the conservative Catholic Canadian magazine Michael has reprinted an article from the Spirit Daily website, quoting at length from the more apocalyptic portions of The Lord of the World and speculating as to whether or not Pope Francis' reforms are in preparation for the coming of the Antichrist and the apocalypse. I was afraid that the Holy Father's recommendation would be taken this way, although his quotation in the link above seems to suggest that he's more interested in how social trends are dictated by certain socialist forces working quietly to influence society. I wonder what the Pope really thinks about apocalypticism. He's obviously highly recommended the reading of the novel. Any thoughts?
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Post by maolsheachlann on Apr 29, 2015 17:24:03 GMT
I've never read it, I'm afraid to say. In fact I've never read anything by him.
I agree this seems barely worth posting, but I can never bear to leave a question hanging.
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Post by Ranger on Apr 29, 2015 18:38:47 GMT
I appreciate the sentiment
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 30, 2015 7:39:32 GMT
First thing I would say is that it is best to read The Lord of the World in conjunction with The Dawn of All, also by Benson and which gives a positive position of the end times. In its own way, it is quite scary.
With regard to The Lord of the World, it is incredible how it anticipates much of the ideas in Brave New World (especially) and 1984. In a funny way it develops an older tradition to, going back at least to More's Utopia, which was science fiction of its day (undiscovered island on new continent), also satire (it was a send up of humanistic ideas), also ironic (he didn't mean it to be an ideal society; he meant it to be "nowhere", which is what Utopia translates as). In fact Utopia is the original dystopia. Benson presents a dystopia in The Lord of the World and manages to match the apocalyptic tradition to contemporary literary trends. Soloviev was doing something similar in Russia at the time, very much following what he took from Dostoyevsky with what he saw in Catholicism. Perhaps he anticipated the onetime Bolshevik Zamyatin who wrote the chilling "We" (though this, unlike Brave New World and 1984, ends on an ambiguous note - the dictatorship may be toppled). I wonder if Benson was familiar with Soloviev.
Aside from the apocalyptic and the dystopian, Benson falls back on Elizabethan times in regard to the general apostasy in The Lord of the World. His "Come Rack, Come Rope" about this period is similar. In The Lord of the World, one sees Catholic families apostasising on a frequent basis and even priests abandoning the priesthood. This is the type of point which Benedict and Francis might mean, with the humanistic direction of culture (shades of More; prefiguration of Huxley, whom Benedict cites in books he wrote as Joseph Ratzinger). In a phrase, the book is certainly worth reading. Just remember, its a very High Tory take on the world. So is The Dawn of All.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Apr 30, 2015 9:38:12 GMT
I read Zamyatin's We. I thought it was a very poor book from a literary point of view, though it's hard to tell with translations.
One interesting thing is that Zamyatin explicitly describes the revolutionaries who have created this dystopian society as being the heirs of the Catholic Church. I have read this comparison several times. Catholicism is often seen as a kind of ur-type of totalitarianism. Hitler actually claimed to have modelled a lot of the theatrical elements of Nazism on Catholicism.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Apr 30, 2015 9:41:00 GMT
The English blogger Bruce Charlton, who is deliciously idiosyncratic but sometimes insightful, actually blames Catholicism for all the bureaucracy, technocracy, and managerialism of modern society. He believes this all grew out of the rationalism of Catholicism. He appeals instead to the supposed mysticism of Eastern Orthodoxy.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 30, 2015 14:17:10 GMT
Zamyatin is probably following Dostoyevsky's idea that Catholicism and socialism are flip sides of the same coin. Dostoyevsky puts this forward forcefully in The Idiot through Prince Myshkhin's address to the princes. This idea is also put forward in The Devils, but not in The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky had become friendly with Soloviev at that stage.
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Post by hibernicus on May 2, 2015 22:03:05 GMT
So far as I recall from my recent reading of WE, Zamyatin doesn't specifically mention Catholicism but Christianity generally, and his point is that although the revolution was fought against and overthrew the Christians it has actually come to resemble Christianity (e.g. public executions conducted like sacrificial liturgies - I wonder had he read the famous French reactionary de Maistre who said the two foundations of social order were the Pope and the hangman?). Bear in mind also that Tsarism was explicitly a sacral monarchy, so the total identification of Christianity with the ancien regime is more understandable from that perspective (as it would be for a French monarchist) than it is in an Irish context. Oddly enough, his specifc remark relates to the Christian invocation of bread - bread having disappeared with the ancien regime, the inhabitants of Zamyatin's city are fed on artificial food made from petroleum. The Orthodox blogger is putting forward a pretty widespread Orthodox view - the flipside of which would be the argument of some dissident Russians, such as the early C19 writer Pyotr Chaadaev, that Orthodoxy is directly responsible for the Russian tradition of autocracy because of its failure to work out ways of making the ruler accountable and delineating the spheres of church and state as Latin Christendom did.
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Post by Ranger on May 26, 2015 14:16:28 GMT
I wasn't certain where to post this, but since there have been a fair few comments on Malachi Martin here I was wondering if I might ask if anybody has any sources which might offer evidence to show he was a fraud? I don't believe in his writings in any way, but after searching through seven pages of google results for his name all I could find were posts praising his writings and his secret knowledge, as well as a few critical posts from rad trads who distressingly refer to him as a 'double agent of the Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy.'
On a related note, does anybody think that there would be value in some sort of institution that could investigate all these various phenomena within the Church (weird apparitions, cult-like groups, conspiracy theories) and try and debunk the false ones them so as to help Catholics discern what is or isn't true? Too many of these phenomena turn up only web pages that are positive towards them when searched online.
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Post by hibernicus on May 28, 2015 21:02:45 GMT
The liberal-Catholic journalist Robert Blair Kaiser (who died recently) published a memoir some years back describing in some considerable detail how Malachi Martin seduced Kaiser's wife and manipulated Kaiser himself into checking into a mental hospital in the belief that his initial suspicions were the product of paranoia. I would disagree with most of Kaiser's worldview but he names names of people who were still alive when he wrote (after MM's death) none of whom disputed it so far as I know. The literary critic Edmund Wilson who had an interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls got to know MM after MM settled in New York; EW's journals, published after his death, certainly don't portray MM as devout at that stage. Sections of MM's books have clear indications of fantasy. Early in THE JESUITS he has a minute-by-minute description of JPII's thoughts during a meeting with senior bishops which only the Pope himself could have described (if he could). In HOSTAGE TO THE DEVIL Paul VI is a saintly figure whose mere presence in New York assists an exorcism in the city; in VATICAN Paul is a Freemason and heretic who probably vacated the Holy See through heresy and is certainly damned. The heretical reforms which Paul VI is depicted as planning in VATICAN are the same ones which are portrayed as the only way to save the Church in THE FINAL CONCLAVE (original edition; I haven't read the later revised version). Michael Cuneo's AMERICAN EXORCISM has an interview with MM with a commentary which notes how hard it is to pin down any of his specific claims, and the contrast between the vast number of exorcisms he portrays and the very few known to diocesan authorities (who must approve any exorcism).
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 10, 2015 20:34:43 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 30, 2015 21:09:52 GMT
One point the writer of these articles completely misses is that 1984 is at least as much anti-Catholic as anti-communist. Newspeak is partly a parody of the Chestertonian paradox (note that the intellectual who explains it to Winston Smith, quoted in the article, is called Syme which is the name of the hero of Chesterton's MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY), the inquisitor figure is called O'Brien, the Party promotes celibacy, and as part of his general attack on Winston Smith's reason towards the end of the novel O'Brien tries to persuade Smith that the Party can perform miracles and only refrains from doing so because it can't be bothered (he specifically tells Smith that he - O'Brien - is able to levitate). Orwell had it in for English Catholic apologists, partly because of their support for Franco (some more than others, he differentiated Chesterton by noting that Chesterton attacked people who could and did harm his career, while certain imitators only went in for safe targets) and he made a point of contributing to collections for the militantly anti-Catholic Protestant Truth Society.
The piece on BRAVE NEW WORLD strikes me as somewhat weak (though I have never read BNW myself) because the author takes it for granted that its soft dictatorship is less plausible than the iron dictatorship of Orwell. Admittedly, this is the view that Huxley himself took after WWII, but it has been quite widely argued that the hedonist shallowness of BNW is unnervingly like our world and seems more capable of longterm survival than the Orwellian dictatorship. (Huxley actually believed in eugenics himself - he was a grandson of "Darwin's Bulldog" - and the prospect of the state biologically moulding its citizens in its preferred image is present as it is not for Orwell.)
The summary of LORD OF THE WORLD is quite misleading; it is not the case that all the dissidents live in independent Papal Rome (though it does possess the remaining monarchical pretenders, all converted to Catholicism including the English and the CHinese) and the attack on Rome takes place some time before the final chapters of the book, which are set in the Middle East
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 17, 2015 19:28:31 GMT
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