American Thinker...

See here for a very interesting take on the Je suis Charlie nonsense. My chief complaint to-day is that I am eating a Christmass cake my mother bought from Sainsbury's that is one inch thick and smothered with icing, in deceptive packaging that made it look bigger, and they didn't even bother to call it Christmass cake - "winter woodland" seemed to suffice. I'm sure the Marxist authors of Charlie Hebdo would call me for everything for raising that benign complaint. What would be the charge? Probably incitement to religious hatred.

General Knowledge...

What is general knowledge? As somebody with a diagnosis of autism I find this extremely difficult to answer. But perhaps I can answer it by some examples. It is years since I did an inventory of my books but I guess I have something in the vicinity of six to seven hundred books, many of them duplicates (different editions, impressions, translations), most on similar subjects (liturgy, Tolkien, church history). I do not claim to possess or exhibit even a fraction of the eminent wisdom that they contain but that wisdom itself is vastly circumscribed by its own subject matter. You won't find anything in my meagre library on the French Revolution, women's suffrage or any of the sciences. I have never read anything by Harold Robbins or even Agatha Christie. I'm not interested in pop culture or which boorish celebrity is sharing a bed with another boorish celebrity. In other words, I'd probably flounder if I went onto a modern quiz shew.

My musical knowledge is very limited. I have a rudimentary knowledge of the great "classical" composers, who they were, when they lived and their particular styles. With some, however, they are just names in my head to which there are neither dates nor particular styles attached. For all I know, Strauss could be a contemporary of Gershwin but I think Gershwin was early 20th century, and American. I have a few favourite composers but I think I own less than twenty CD's in toto. I enjoy Gilbert & Sullivan but I have heard only six of the Savoy Operas (and seen only three, one of which was a concert performance which doesn't count). I like Ivor Novello and Noël Coward but can name only bits of their respective oeuvre. I know something of the life and works of Tennessee Williams, but I have never actually seen one of his plays in much the same way that I know that Terence Rattigan was an Irishman and queer; that's it.

With art history, my knowledge is again pretty routine. I can distinguish a Duccio and Giotto from icons; I can recognise Botticelli by his particular style (as unique as William Blake's), even if I have never seen a particular painting, and I can tell the difference between Raphael and his predecessor Perugino. I prefer Michelangelo's sculpture to his painting and I love Titian. I tend to confuse Correggio and Caravaggio; which was the one who dragged corpses from the Tiber? I enjoy the portraiture of Gainsborough and the landscapes of Constable. Turner could paint watery water like no other. With architecture, I have a less-than-routine knowledge of particular styles and architects. I know what Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque mean in a general sense but I could by no means give a definition that would satisfy historians or connoisseurs. I cannot tell the difference between particular gothic or baroque styles, for example, and I would look at you with polite incomprehension if you asked me about 20th century architects. I vaguely recall reading about a proposed "monument to the third international," but whether this was Soviet or Nazi, who knows. I think it was Soviet.

I have read Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, but I cannot really say that I understood them (possibly because I read them in translation). I remember Pythagoras' Rule from school foundational mathematics but can't tell you what that might be. I have no idea who Euclid was and tend sometimes to confuse Aristophanes with Demosthenes. I know that Heracles undertook seven labours but I couldn't tell you what they were, or at whose behest they were undertaken. I never took Classical Greek and learned the vulgar stuff in my Novum Testamentum Graecae, without much success. I even used to think that Maimonides was Greek!

With antient Rome, my ignorance improves a bit. I have read Caesar and Cicero. I have read Virgil (arma virumque cano, and all that), the Eclogues and Georgics; I like Catullus and know something about Tacitus. I struggled to read Horace and still do. Similarly with Roman Britain. I have seen the Vindolanda Tablets and I've been to Fishbourne; I've read about Spanish Hadrian and his wall; about Claudius, the most unlikely Emperor to cow the British chieftains. I know about Cogidubnus and how the Romans dispatched with Boudica (but I think she dispatched herself). I know something vague about the coming of the Saxons to Britain and the withdrawal of the legions and subsequent incremental "collapse" of the Empire in the West. Did St Leo the Great really impress Attila by rhetoric and persuasion alone, and not ransom the City with money?

With British history, again I can claim no expertise in any era. I greatly reverence St Bede the Venerable and much enjoyed his histories and scriptural commentaries. I have a vague knowledge of the wars between the Saxons and the Danes, the Vikings, the coronation ceremony devised by St Dunstan, St Patrick, St Cuthbert, St Caedmon, St Hilda and the great Synod at Whitby...by no means in that order. Like Tolkien I bemoan the Norman Conquest and the subsequent, inevitable adulteration of our language, the subjugation of the English Church to Papal legates brought over by bastard William and the contemptible treatment of the Saxon nobility and peasantry by the Norman conquerors for the next two hundred years. Even so I am fascinated by the 12th century and by its adventurous, pious characters; Orderic Vitalis, John of Salisbury, Eleanor of Aquitaine. The 13th century history remains somewhat mysterious to me and, while I can name a few events like Magna Carta, the provisions of Oxford, the parliament of Simon de Montfort, Good King Edward and the Edict of Expulsion, I remain generally ignorant of the time. The 14th century, again, I can name a few events and persons; famine, plague, peasants' revolt, Watt Tyler, John of Gaunt, the Lollards, Wycliffe, Edward II and III, the Dispensers and their grim deaths, Richard II. And so on and so forth into the 20th century. History, for me, is less a narrative as a map of obscure names fixed to obscure places; altogether very random, even if I enjoy history.

I know nothing about nature. I did read David Attenborough's Trials of Life with some interest as a boy because my father owned it, and I also enjoyed my brother's books about dinosaurs, but I know nothing about geological ages or even how old the earth is. I am not, like my father, green-fingered either. When, as a boy, my father allotted to my brother and me small patches of garden with which we could each do as we pleased I planted snowdrops but nothing could have induced me to scratch, let alone dig, the soil at any other time. I can recognise silver birch but I cannot really distinguish most trees one from another, even though to alleviate this problem I own a number of books about trees. I can distinguish roses from tulips and poppies from pansies but that's hardly distinguishable for the average gardener. Only the other day my father pointed out something about plants that hitherto hadn't occurred to me...and I've forgotten what that was. Beyond pigeons, robins, game birds and the obvious ones like ostrich, penguins and parrots I cannot tell birds apart.

With literature and poetry, I am again a tabula rasa. I know some songs, ballads and rhymes and I can take a guess at quotations and by whom they were first said but my memory is so bad that I am often stumped in conversation. I have read some Shakespeare (hasn't everyone?), Donne, Spenser, Byron, Burns, Hardy, Owen, Yeats and others. I have read Dante, Chaucer, Milton, bits of the Kalevala and Icelandic Eddas; and, of course, Pearl. With most of these grand works I cannot claim to have had any real understanding beyond a general impression of the sense thereof. I found Paradise Lost an impenetrable work and didn't really know who Milton was or what he thought. When I read Dante I was 13 or 14 years old. What did I know then of Italy, of its mediaeval past, let alone of Dante's guide through Hell? I remember getting to the end of the Inferno and wondering who Brutus and Cassius were. These days I'd have said "pearls before swine," and lamented my education. Tolkien was, with C.S Lewis, a member of the Oxford Dante Society; a measure of both their genius. By comparison I stand no chance!

I suppose, for "general knowledge" this is enough to be going on with but there are other kinds of knowledge. Even so I have come no nearer to defining what it means. Does it mean simply the ability to recall obscure dates from history, obscure quote from literature or obscure facts about nature? If that is so then you might say I have a working "general knowledge." But if it means something more profound than that then I can say that I am thoroughly ashamed that I am so ignorant, so rustic and so untutored.

I suppose the photograph at the top of this post (of me in April 2012) illustrates my point. What a boring person I must really be!

Zuhlsdorf the Great...

According to Dr Joseph Shaw, he will be at Corpus Christi church in Covent Garden on Monday next. Had I known this contemptible charlatan was within twenty miles of my house I'd have left the country. Still, I've no doubt that his celebrating Mass in that dingy hovel of a church, littered with dirty chipped statuary and with a noticeable stench of stale urine, will attract scores of eager sycophants ready to buy him beer in the Coal Hole afterwards and hang onto his every word. Still, his state visit would be occasion to picket outside and throw eggs and rocks at him as he comes out.

Awful, awful man. Why anybody listens to him and his half-baked drivel, I have no idea.

Secundum carnem...

Nativitas carnis manifestatio est humanae naturae; partus Virginis divinae est virtutis indicium. Infantia parvuli ostenditur humilitate cunarum: magnitudo Altissimi declaratur vocibus Angelorum. Similis est rudimentis hominum, quem Herodes impie molitur occidere; sed Dominus est omnium quem Magi gaudent suppliciter adorare.

None the worse for having been used here aforetime.  For those of you who keep to the old customs, may I wish you all the temporal and spiritual blessings in the Infant Christ on this most sacred solemnity of His Birth.

Another comment...

And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures,

And ascended into heaven,

AND SITTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF THE FATHER.

I reproduce here a comment I left on Fr Chadwick's blog apropos of the real presence, elevations and all that rubbish:

In answer to some points above about my post, I deliberately left blank any reasons, whether theological or liturgical, for the nine points I submitted for sound enough reasons. I am not a sacramental theologian and leave the “machinations” of Grace to God. I hope you would agree that were the nine points put into any kind of practise they would successfully lift any vestiges of belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation clean out of the liturgy. That is the sole ultimate objective.

I do not come from a Roman Catholic family. Half my family are Anglicans. My upbringing was quite strange in the sense that my mother, whose mother is Anglican and father a lapsed Catholic, took my siblings and me to a Roman Catholic church on Sundays (never on holydays) and while she insisted that we all (with the strange exception of my sister) “made our sacraments,” that is penance, first communion and confirmation, she became increasingly annoyed as the years went by that I took it “too seriously” and not as this sort of cultural rite of passage that she undoubtedly thought it all was. We never prayed at home. My mother made no effort to instruct any of us in the faith herself. In fact, she stopped attending church more than fifteen years ago at around about the time that my brother was confirmed. My father is an agnostic/atheist of lapsed Anglican parentage. My brother “believes in something,” but is largely apathetic about religion. My sister is an outspoken atheist. So, in terms of my immediate family, I really am the exception. I still remember the horror with which my mother greeted the news that I was going to university to study Divinity!

Perhaps the misconception that Dale makes about my “Lutheran-influenced” doctrine of the Eucharist comes from what I said about the Hypostatic Union. I reject the Lutheran confessions as lukewarm. Luther was a great man but a tortured one I think and in later years found the maelstrom of the Reformation too much out of his direct control. My own view of the Eucharist is that it is a divine mystery, largely cheapened by historic and contemporary Roman Catholic praxis. For clarity’s sake, I will say the following: I am not a Jansenist. That was an heresy within Roman Catholicism. I publicly left the Roman church four years ago after a series of abortive attempts to reconcile my waning faith in that system with a bunch of damned hypocrites in Blackfen. If I have expressed Jansenist tendencies then I can say in all honesty it is not intentionally Jansenististic; at least no less than saying that a Jansenist is a Chrsitian because he professes belief in Jesus Christ. I am not a Lutheran either; I have no experience of Lutheranism besides a one off visit to a Lutheran church when I was in Cologne in 2005. Fr Chadwick is correct to say that I am influenced by the classical Anglican Divines, particularly Parker, Hooker, Andrewes and, of course, Laud. I greatly admire the writings of Dr John Wickham-Legg and, while I do not share his political views, I am also a great admirer of Percy Dearmer. I don’t have the text handy so this is not verbatim but I rather agree with Andrewes when he said that the Scriptures and the first four General Councils determine the boundary of our faith.

Tolerance again...

The comment thread on Fr Chadwick's post referencing my own curt post on elevations and reservation, and what I would do, has become increasingly annoying. It all seems to come down to questions of tolerance, an issue about which Fr Chadwick and I are oft at variance, and I have to say I find that kind of cosy, inbred and condescending disposition largely informed of politics that have nothing to do with the Gospel. It's almost as if I were to present my case forcefully and convincingly before a panel of snooty clergymen, who then discuss it in my absence, and then summon me back only to say loftily, "oh, all very interesting, Patrick, but we rather think we'll keep our heathen totemism; but by all means go off and put your ideas into practise on your own!" Which is but to say "bugger off, we aren't interested." And you can imagine the one in the middle waving his hand dismissively. It's like the argument I had with the Traddies about Signum Magnus/Gaudeamus in a pub on the Strand in the summer of 2011. I won the argument by appeals to Tradition, theology, reason and moral uprightness; and I had everybody at the table (with one exception) convinced against Pius XII. What difference did it make? None whatsoever! I concede that they were all convinced and would singly look thenceforth with renewed judgement on the new propers; but would any of them put up a spirited defence of tradition if their parish priest dictated that they would use Signum Magnum until the End of Time? Of course not! The euphoria and clarity are fleeting and seem only to last while I am around myself. Why? God only knows that, but I expect the spinelessness around their parish priests has something to do with clericalism and the fact that any sound arguments for tradition tend to come from people like me; notorious Patricius, whom everybody knows but whose existence is kept a stark secret.

The reason I find this whole issue annoying, well to the point of rage actually, is because my views are nowhere manifest in this world and so whenever I raise a point on liturgical and eucharistic heteropraxis for consideration, and thereunto that it might, heaven forbid, be put into practise, it might be discussed airily by a few people but is still treated with the kind of condescension I have described above. Some might say, "well, why don't you march with soldiers into a pub like Hitler in 1923 and impose your ecclesiastical views by rebellion!" What can I say to that? It's ridiculous. All I can say is that I have been part of a parish but it was a failed experiment; I was turned out actually. During the three and a half years of my time in that parish (whose menace is, thank God, no more), do you think that any one of my views was taken seriously, still less put into practise? Of course not. For example, my suggestion that we might have Terce before Mass on Sundays was met with the harshest criticism. Think of that! A very short, probably ten minute, service to make the LORD's Day more fitting and even the suggestion was unthinkable. Another suggestion that we might reduce the number of torch bearers similarly fell upon deaf ears. Throngs of miscreant kiddies on the sanctuary naturally add to the dignity of a celebration.

Over my time there I put forward similar suggestions, none of them too radical, and they were all summarily dismissed. I would ask therefore, were any of them unreasonable? If not, and they are not, then why on earth should I be tolerant of the dissenting view? Maybe I would be more tolerant if I could go to a church and find there something even faintly agreeable. As it happens, I cannot and have often come away from such churches feeling nauseous.

UPDATE: There are now more comments on Fr Chadwick's post, one of which says that I offer here no theological justification for the nine points. I have deliberately left questions of theology blank for two reasons; 1, I am not a sacramental theologian and; 2, my rejection of such things as Corpus Christi (ruinously popular) is logically a rejection of the supreme liturgical maxim turned in on itself. I shall deal more on this in a subsequent post.

Voting...

People often say (my own mother especially) that if you don't vote, you have no right to criticise the democratic process or any government policy. They also add the cynically manipulative remark that failure to vote makes you somehow lack a sense of civic responsibility which, by default, makes you apathetic about public life. That I don't believe in "rights" notwithstanding I would say that whether you vote or not makes no difference whatsoever and that furthermore I can criticise whomever and whatever I want. There are exceptions, of course, but it is long since Members of Parliament represented their constituents. Who represents my beliefs and sentiments? No one but myself. So why should I assent to the least of the evils presented to me in a voting booth? The major political parties in the United Kingdom are barely distinguishable so, in effect, what I am being called upon to do is choose between three competing secular liberal collectivists bent on the obliteration of Christian values. The fringe parties, like UKIP (with which I have some sympathy), will never form a government and so making the trip to the local school to tick that option would be a waste of time. They can all go hang as far as I am concerned.

Principled abstention has nothing to do with "apathy." A "right" to vote which does not allow the right to abstain is completely meaningless. Ask any North Korean. The only civic responsibilities of which I am truly conscious are my obligations to obey the law, pay my taxes and pray for Caesar - whoever he (or she) is; and Caesar has almost always been a monster. Remember that God called even Nebuchadnezzar "my servant."

"The strongest poison ever known, came from Caesar's laurel crown" William Blake.

God save The Queen!

Octaves and Vigils...

"Now, my dear, as to my name. It is John: a name much used and loved by Christians, and since I was born on the Octave of St John the Evangelist, I take him as my patron - though neither my father, nor my mother at that time, would have thought of anything so Romish as giving me a name because it was a saint's." J.R.R Tolkien, 1969.

Of course, in 1892, the year Tolkien was born, the Roman liturgy was still recognisably intact; in letter (for the most part) if not in spirit. All the more interesting then that even so many years after all those antient octaves had been legislated out of existence at papal command Tolkien still reckoned his birthday according to the traditional Roman kalendar of saints days. Another point for Mistress Custom, methinks. Down with heretics and twopenny bookmen! Pass another mince pie!

St John the Evangelist, pray for us!

Just a thought...

I don't think I'll ever understand what a "godly conversation" means.

A quick reply...

...to some of the objections raised to my post on elevations. Let it be known that I say nothing on this blog that I do not believe sincerely; that is insofar as my beliefs are worked out (and some of them aren't very popular!). I suppose we all of us reach a kind of idiosyncratic set of beliefs and morals, based on experience and "gut instinct." I have always been "instinctively" conservative, intolerant and pessimistic and so my worldview naturally proceeds from that. Seen also from the context of a sense of innate intellectual triumphalism, is it any wonder that I look aghast at popular forms of piety? My liturgical interests tell me that where these pieties take over, it is where the liturgy itself has ceased to fulfill its proper function. I think that liturgy can be constructed and done well and so I am inclined to think that I can do it. This presents the problem that we living in a world far removed from the England of 1549. I cannot compel (much as I'd like to) people to attend the services that I provide on pain of stiff fines and imprisonment. But I think it is only fair that people take me seriously.

With regard to the nine points I raised, you can draw your own conclusions but the sole ultimate object would be to remove any vestiges of belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation - that's it. As the 28th Article of Religion says in its wisdom:

The Sacrament of the LORD's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.

A Latin class...

My Latin teacher at school was Mrs Granden, a patient elderly woman with some dignity who wore those ornate old dear glasses with a gold chain (she even let me try them on once) and long skirts. I liked and respected her enormously because she was authoritative, in a kindly manner, and knew her subject with the kind of effortless tenacity that only comes with forty years of teaching experience. In short, I wanted to work hard for her.

The only occasion where she fell foul of me was when the word "paravisti" came up in a text we were translating. We each took turns on a sentence and I had done very well by translating "appropinquaverunt" without recourse to a dictionary or grammar and it was somebody else's turn. James' in fact. James was both the class simpleton and stinker. We were all held up for about ten minutes on this one simple word. This is obviously not verbatim but this is the general gist of it so far as I can remember:

Mrs Granden: "Think back to the perfect tense. Do you remember -i, -isti, -it?"
James: "Yeah..."
Mrs Granden: "Right, so do you remember the second person singular?"
James: "Yeah!"
Mrs Granden: "Right, so in this sentence what person does the verb take?"
James: "I don't understand."
Mrs Granden: "What don't you understand?"
James: "I don't understand what the person is."
Mrs Granden goes to the blackboard and picks up some white chalk. "Okay, let's go over it again." She conjugates paro in the perfect tense. Pointing with the chalk to two columns, singular and plural, she underlines paravisti in yellow. "What is the second person singular?"
James: "Paravit?" (He pronounced it pa-rawit).
Mrs Granden corrects his pronunciation. "And that's the third person singular. See! one, two and three? I, you, he, she and it. Do you understand?"
James: "But that's five..."
Mrs Granden: "It doesn't matter. He, she and it are all one person." She writes numbers next to the words. "James, what is the second person singular? I promise you, it is not a trick question."
James: "I don't know."
Mrs Granden: "Let's start again, then." She picks up some chalk and writes down the grammatical persons in English adjacent to the Latin column. "Repeat after me, everyone: I, you he, we, you, they. I, you, he, we, you, they." She starts a rhythm going by tapping the table for each person. "Right, James only now; I, you, he, we, you, they."
James repeats this four times.
Mrs Granden: "Look at the board." James looks up."If paravi is the first person, and paravit is the third person, what is paravisti? Remember, I, you, he!"

Dead silence.

Bearing in mind that the actual meaning of paro hadn't even been mentioned yet and that this stuff was so basic that we covered it in the first lesson, my patience had run out and I thundered: "Oh, come on! It's perfectly simple!"

At this, Mrs Granden gave me a stern look and asked me to leave the class. Afterwards, I was rebuked for disrupting the class and humiliating someone who was "clearly struggling" (that is verbatim). It was evident that I had made him cry because he left the class shortly after me and rushed towards the library with that dewy face that says complete incomprehension and frustration.

What I found incomprehensible and frustrating was that the answer was there, for all the world to see, and yet his mind couldn't assent to the answer. It still bothers me to-day.

Mistress Custom vs Mistress Newcome...

During the darkest days of Puritan ascendancy, Old Father Christmass was outlawed and a spray of holly was scorned as the detestable token of popery. The Royalist poet John Taylor (1578-1653) composed his many apologia for Christmass during this triumph of rebellion, most famously his Complaint of Christmass, in which Father Christmass went from town to town and saw no signs of holyday, the people thereof, mad and seduced to have arisen against God and King, and forbearing to keep any respective memory of Christ's birth. In London Father Christmass complained to a Mammonist merchant about the weakness of the beer, and is thereto told:

Alas, father Christmas, our high and mighty ale that would formerly knock down Hercules and trip up the heels of a Giant is lately struck in a deep consumption, the strength of it being quite gone with a blow from Westminster, and there is a Tetter and Ringworm called Excise doth make it look thinner than it would do.

Things were cheerier in the Devon farmsteads, where the poor went nimbly dancing, some to cards, some to carolling and good cheer. He left, exhorting them to call home exiles, help the fatherless, cherish the widow, and restore every man his due.

Taylor composed another in December 1648, a dialogue betwixt Mistress Custom, a victualler's wife in Cripplegate, and Mistress Newcome, an army captain's wife living in Reformation Alley just off Destruction Street. It was entitled Women Will Have Their Will or Give Christmas His Due. This, for me, is the most interesting as it questions the rightness of blind obedience to authority especially where cherished traditions are concerned. Mistress Newcome finds Mistress Custom decorating her house for Christmass and they discuss the feast. Quoth Mistress Custom:

I should rather and sooner forget my mother that bare me and the paps that gave me suck, than forget this merry time, nay if thou had'st ever seen the mirth and jollity that we have had at those times when I was young, thou wouldst bless thyself to see it.

When Newcome rejoins that Christmass custom ought to be put aside, being the writ of Parliament, Custom replies:

God deliver me from such authority; it is a Worser Authority than my husband's, for though my husband beats me now and then, yet he gives my belly full and allows me money in my purse... Cannot I keep Christmass, eat good cheer and be merry without I go and get a licence from the Parliament. Marry gap, come up here, for my part I'll be hanged by the neck first.

Newcome then responds, saying that putting the authority of Parliament aside puts her in the path of that "honest godly part of the army," to which Custom replies in delicious rhyme:

For as long as I do live

And have a jovial crew,

I'll sit and rhat, and be Fat,

And give Christmass his due.

It's reminiscent of my own arguments against papal authority to legislate dearly-held customs and traditions out of existence. If I am Mistress Custom and the Traddies are Mistress Newcome, which of us is right? Because it seems to me that Mistress Custom would be held in scorn by the Traddies which is ironic since they claim to be the godly elect and defenders, staunch in long years of trial, of that which has been set aside by the Bugninis of this world. God deliver us from papal authority indeed...

I hope that during this Christmasstide you raise your glasses to Mistress Custom and to Old Father Christmass whom she held so dear.