Second Terrace

An Anglophile Correction

In the likely event that the last post might lead one to suspect an "America First" predilection, I rush to add that  I am beholding, morally, more to English writers than American. I am either not fond of nor am I sufficiently familiar with American Christian writing. A sample note of my feelings: "Christian romance paperbacks" are an unfortunate homegrown (and viral) production that should be, for the convenience of the trade, printed with the front cover already removed.

I think, although I'm not certain of this, that Emerson's transcendentalist legacy insinuated a great simpering fog bank into American religious thinking, at least in the literary tradition. Once in a while, great sparks like Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy and Ron Hansen leap out of the otherwise mouldering mass of the Christian American bookshelf, which is usually weighed down by the gospels of self-improvement, marriage techniques, and get-rich-quick schemes.

Even with the likes of O'Connor, I confess that the clarity of Christian literature is found more easily on the English shelves. Maybe this is due to the residual effects of Christendom on English literature, especially that writing that is self-consciously Christian. It may also be that American Christian literature suffers from being thoroughly, and inherently, protestant -- that is, devoid of a sacramental reference, and without the traditional lineaments of anthropology and, even, Christology.

Is it just me? or is there a lot better satire and burlesque on the other side of the pond, at least in the Christian library? are the Christian sentences more limpid in Oxbridge?

In any case, here is a very short list of English Christian books. They are more my favorites than they are a helpful bibliography:

• Hilaire Belloc, The Four Men.
• Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome.
• Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday.
• Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.
• Chesterton, The Flying Inn.
• Msgr. Ronald Knox, Let Dons Delight.
• T. S. Eliot, most everything, especially The Four Quartets. Is he American? Is Auden English?
• J. R. R. Tolkien, everything.
• C. S. Lewis, most everything, especially Till We Have Faces, Perelandra and The Discarded Image.
• Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice and All Hallows' Eve.

I know there is more. I know that I missed your favorites. Remember, too, that this is a short list of English writers. It is not meant to list the most important spiritual texts, especially for Orthodox Christians.

I should note that some of these volumes are out of print and hard to find. Out of insane neglect, one of the most beautiful reveries of all time, The Four Men, is available only in crumbling paperbacks from the miscreant sixties and seventies. Used copies of Let Dons Delight are available for around $40. In both cases, the authors are being suppressed.

Heretofore, I have prattled long on the Thunderer, who is a lot more bittersweet, smoked with sunset-wisdom than his nickname suggests, especially in The Four Men. It was providential this last year that I came upon this little book. I have encountered such depth of sweetness and awe only in Tolkien before, and that was an altogether different sort of writing. In this book, I have found traces of someone who really knows what it is like to wander meadow and field in the gloaming, with the haunted, sentimental wind.

With regard to GK, The Everlasting Man must be read again so that we, like innocent children, can see (and tell) that the pompous emperor has no clothes on: the naked doctrines of evolution and scientific materialism are being foisted upon us, and we trample the hypersensitivities of the age when we appear less than chipper about the foisting. Evolutionism is the pernicious suppression of Christian anthropology and, ultimately, of Christology. The Everlasting Man demands attention.

The Flying Inn manages to uncover the spiritual DNA double helix entwining wahhabism, boorish secular puritanism, and political arabesque. It fails to resonate, nowadays, because most people think of Inns as "Holiday Inn," and not as a place substantiated by a wheel of cheese and some ale (and a few raucous songs).

And GK's masterpiece? "... it remains the most thrilling book I have ever read," Kingsley Amis once wrote of Thursday. (I would so much like to hear D. B. Hart's take on Sunday.) Thursday needs read by everyone nowadays, if only to hear  this particular setting of the words, "Can ye drink the cup that I drink of?" (get The Annotated Thursday, provided through the kind offices of Martin Gardner, from Ignatius Press, for all the bells and whistles). Thursday is current events, like you can't believe.

If I could suggest two books to you, apart from Scripture and the Fathers (oh, and yes, Florovsky, Lossky and Hart), then get the pages of Thursday and The Four Men.

Shakespeare is better than Dostoevsky

As an Orthodox Christian, I have tried to be a good fan of Dostoevsky, especially The Brothers Karamozov. I continue to believe that this novel is one of the few greats of all time.

But I confess my nagging unease that Dostoevsky is too existential in my book, and that Shakespeare narrates much more clearly the moral order that surmounts us all.

Here is an especially nice essay from the good folk at the Claremont Institute:

Link: The Claremont Institute - Macbeth and the Moral Universe.

The message—I am tempted to call it the moral—of Macbeth, is the inexorability of the moral order. Macbeth's soliloquy in act 1 tells us with perfect clarity why the murder must fail. The action that follows bears out the truth of that soliloquy. Not only does the plot fail, but neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth is allowed one moment of enjoyment of the fruit of their crime. Their punishment begins almost immediately with the murder. The crime is therefore in every sense self-defeating. The moral order, accordingly, is more powerful than the evil spirits that Lady Macbeth called upon. The moral order, according to The Stranger or Crime and Punishment, lacks any such power. Both of these works record the declining power of morality in Western civilization, and in this sense they record the decline of the West. Yet Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address reaffirms the same power of morality as Macbeth. Perhaps that is why Lincoln said that "nothing equals Macbeth."

A Post on Post

If you would take some of Poe and Hawthorne, a tiny bit of Faulkner and spooky Bierce, a lot of Macbeth and Walter Scott, and the little-read book of Kings (all four parts), you’d come up with, as a result of your labors, the 1924 Democrat nominee for President, Melville Davisson Post.

He wrote detective stories around his stern protagonist, Uncle Abner. The stories are wedded to the mountains of antebellum western Virginia (which had not the “West” to it then), and they carry the graveyard and meadow mistiness of sundown – a lovely velvet of goodness and post-tragedy that constitute an epic tapestry backdrop for these little crime dramas of lesser men.

I mightily enjoy mysteries (especially those with a soupcon – well, more than that – of the supernatural) and the detective genre. I like Chesterton’s Fr. Brown stories, but I think of them, as I think he himself thought of them, not as real stories, but as geometries. I also like Sherlock Holmes with his frenetic dialectic and Bohemian aristocracy. I enjoy P. D. James’ Dagliesh and Agatha Christie’s retinue of querists, especially when the latter is televised and I can watch with my wife and daughters.

Of course, my favorite of all is my hero, Lord Peter Wimsey. Lately, I’ve been informed that he is a product of well-written tales penned by a certain Dante scholar. Certainly not: I choose to suspend my belief.

But out of the mystic hills of old America, on the cusp of the civil catharsis, the liberation of slaves, and the victory of commerce and the bourgeoisie Melville Post weaves stories that only enter the genre of detection on the surface. At times, an eerie echo can be heard from the pages, as if the Cvil War were back-haunting the Virginian glades from the future, resonating backward a decade or two.  The mood is thus heavier and the characters are more prophetic than what is usually permitted in mysteries. Uncle Abner, the “detective” (if such a disagreeable word could be used of him or Wimsey) of these stories, is a prophet, not just a policeman: “Abner belonged to the church militant, and his God was a war lord.”

To prime your appetite, I’m offering these samples of Post’s fine, whiskey writing that smells of hickory and is cold like the moon.

On God’s Law, and Man’s Law

In the law court … that procedure would be considered sound sense; but we are in God’s court and things are managed there in a somewhat stranger way. (The Doomdorf Mystery)

“I was thinking that if men like you … violate the law, lesser men will follow your example, and as you justify your act for security, they will justify theirs for revenge and plunder. And so the law will go to pieces and a lot of weak and innocent people who depend upon it for security will be left unprotected.” (A Twilight Adventure)

His god was the god of the Tishbite, who numbered his followers by the companies who drew the sword. The land had need of men like Abner. (The Riddle)

"I cannot think of God depending on a thing so crude as reason. If one reflects upon it, I think one will immediately see that reason is a quality exclusively peculiar to the human mind. It is a thing that God could never, by any chance, require. Reason is the method by which those who do not know the truth, step by step, finally discover it." (The Straw Man)

"The situation in this republic is grave, and I am full of fear. In God's hands the thing [i.e., the issues leading to the Civil War] would finally adjust itself. In God's slow, devious way it would finally come out all right. But neither you, Mansfield [i.e., a southern partisan], nor the abolitionist, will leave the thing to God. You will rush in and settle it with violence. You will find a short cut of your own through God's deliberate way, and I tremble before the horror of blood that you would plunge us into." (The Edge and the Shadow)

"To be fair everywhere in this republic, to enforce the law everywhere, to put down violence, to try every man who takes the law in his own hand, fairly in the courts, and, if he is guilty, punish him without fear or favor, according to the letter of the statute, to keep everywhere a public sentiment of fair dealing, by an administration of justice above all public clamor -- in this time of heat, this is our only hope of peace!" (The Edge and the Shadow)

And I saw that law and order and all the structure that civilization had builded up, rested on the sense of justice that certain men carried in their breasts, and that those who possessed it not, in the crisis of necessity, did not count. (Naboth's Vineyard)

On the Devil

“The law does not recognize the sovereignty and dominion of the devil.” (An Act of God)

“The devil … is not an authority that I depend on.” (The Age of Miracles)

"The devil has been much maligned ... He is no fool to mislead his people and to trap his servants. I find him always zealous in their interests, Campbell, fertile in devices, and holding hard with every trick to save them. I do not admire the devil, Mr. Campbell, but I do not find his vice to be a lack of interest in his own." (The Concealed Path)

On the Cowl and Other Country Magics

I see now why the Lord stamped out your practice. It was because you misled His people. (The Concealed Path)

On Reaping What We Sow

It is the weapon in our own hands that finally destroys us. (The Doomdorf Mystery)

On Story-Telling and Reason

It is a law of the story-teller’s art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli. (The Doomdorf Mystery)

" ... if one could be certain that one had always every piece, there would no longer remain such a thing as human mystery. Every event dovetails into every other event that precedes and follows. With the pieces complete, the truth could never elude us. But alas, sir, human intelligence is feebly and easily deludes itself, and the relations and ramifications of events are vast and intricate." (The Straw Man)

"It is impossible for the human mind to manufacture a false consistency of events except to a very limited extent." (The Straw Man)

"Is not all science mental? Do not men take their facts in a bag to the philosopher that he may put them together?" (The Straw Man)

On the Expiration of Evil Men

It was an awful commentary on the dead man – that this strange half-child believed that all the evil in the world had gone out with him; that now that he was dead, the sunlight of heaven would fill every nook and corner. (The Doomdorf Mystery)

On Accident and Justice

“It is a world,” [Randolph said], “filled with the mysterious joinder of accident!” “It is a world,” replied Abner, “filled with the mysterious justice of God!” (The Doomdorf Mystery)

It was an accident that made one shudder. It came swift and deadly and unforeseen, like a vengeance of God in the Book of Kings. One passing among his fellows, in no apprehension, had been smitten out of life. There was terror in the mystery of selection that had thus claimed Blackford in this crowd for death. (An Act of God)

“We call it chance, monsieur … when we do not understand it.” (An Act of God)

“It is a fabric woven from many threads – this justice of God.” (An Act of God)

"It is the Ruler of Events who knows, sir; we can only conjecture. We cannot see the truth naked before us as He does; we must grope for it from one indication to another until we find it." (The Straw Man)

On Possessions

“We do not have our possessions in fee in this world … but upon lease and for a certain term of service. And when we make default in that service the lease abates and a new man can take the title.” (The Wrong Hand)

On the Legacies of the Dead

“Why, man, our lives follow grooves that the dead have run out with their thumbnails!” (The Wrong Hand)

On the Courage of Evil

Something that had been servile in him, that had skulked behind disguises, that had worn the habiliments of subterfuge, had now come forth; and it had molded the features of the man to its abominable courage … “And so,” said Abner, “we have got courage with this new face.” (The Angel of the Lord)

“While one is the servant of neither [i.e., God nor the Devil], one has the courage of neither; but when he finally makes his choice he gets what his Master has to give him.” (The Angel of the Lord)

"Hell's work is heavy work ... and the weakling who goes about it is apt to fall." (The Tenth Commandment)

He was a man one would have traveled far to see -- yesterday or the day ahead of that. He had a figure out of Athens, a fast cast in some forgotten foundry by the Arno, thick-curled mahogany-colored hair, and eyes like the velvet hull of an Italian chestnut. These excellencies the heavenly workman had turned out, and now by some sorcery of the pit they were changed into abominations.

Hell-charms, one thought of, when one looked the creature in the face. Drops of some potent liquor, and devil-words had done it, on yesterday on the day ahead of yesterday. Sure not the things that really had done it -- time and the iniquities of Gomorrah. (The Adopted Daughter)

On Perdition, Meanwhile Creation

He would go swiftly and by violence into hell, the preachers said; and swiftly and by violence he had gone on this autumn morning when the world was like an Eden. (An Act of God)

The laugh meant disbelief, but the curse meant fear. (The Hidden Law)

On Manhood, Respect and Honor

He was like all those who undertake to command obedience without having first determined precisely what they will do if their orders are disregarded. (A Twilight Adventure)

“If I do not respect a man when he is living, I shall not pretend to when he is dead. One does not make a claim upon my honor by going out of life.” (The Age of Miracles)

She, and not her husband, was the head of their affairs, and with an iron determination she held to every Highland custom, every form, every feudal detail that she could, against the detritus of democratic times and ridicule, and the gain upon her house of poverty, and lean years. She was alone at that heavy labor. [Her husband] was a person without force. (The Concealed Path)

On Night and Twilight

There is a long twilight in these hills. The sun departs, but the day remains. A sort of weird, elfin day, that dawns at sunset, and envelops and possesses the world. The land is full of light, but it is the light of no heavenly sun. It is a light equal everywhere, as though the earth strove to illumine itself, and succeeded with that labor. (A Twilight Adventure)

It is a world that we do not understand, for we are creatures of the sun, and we are fearful lest we come upon things at work here, of which we have no experience, and that may be able to justify themselves against our reason. And so a man falls into silence when he travels in this twilight, and he looks and listens with his senses out on guard. (A Twilight Adventure)

It had been a devil's night -- streaming clouds drive across an iron sky, a thin crook of a moon sailed, and a high bitter wind scythed the earth. (The Hidden Law)

"The creatures behind the world are baleful creatures." (The Hidden Law)

On Circumstantial Evidence and Lawyerly Logic

“Well … what circumstantial evidence proves, depends a good deal on how you get started. It is a somewhat dangerous road to the truth, because all the signboards have a curious trick of pointing in the direction that you are going. Now, a man will never realize this unless he turns around and starts back, then he will see, to his amazement that the signboards have also turned. But as long as his face is set one certain way, it is of no use to talk to him, he won’t listen to you; and if he sees you going the other way, he will call you a fool.”

He advanced with specious and sententious innuendoes and arguments, a priori and conclusion post hoc ergo propter hoc to inclose her as the guilty agent. But from the commanding position of a blameless life, she did not see it, and he could not make her see it. (The Devil's Tools)

She was beyond the acquittal, as she had been beyond the accusation. (The Devil's Tools)

For all his hearty interest in affairs, the law was merely a sort of game. It was nothing real. He played to win, and he had chosen his profession with care and after long reflection, as a breeder chooses a colt for the Derby ... He cared not one penny what the laws were or the great policies of Virginia. (The Straw Man)

In all trials of great public interest, where the evidences of guilt overwhelmingly assemble against a prisoner, there comes a moment when all the people in the court-room, as one man, and without a sign of the common purpose, agree upon a verdict; there is no outward or visible evidence of this decision, but one feels it, and it is a moment of the tensest stress. (Naboth's Vineyard)

On Chance

"'Chance,' Mr. Mill demonstrates, 'is not only at the end of all our knowledge, but it is also at the beginning of all our postulates.' We begin with it, Abner, and we end with it. The structure of all our philosophy is laid down on the sills of chance and roofed over with the rafters of it." "The Providence of God, then," said my uncle, "does not come into Mr. Mill's admirable essay" ... "Why, sir, the intelligence of man that your Scriptures so despise can easily put [God's] little plan of rewards and punishments out of joint. Not the good, Abner, but the intelligent, possess the earth. The man who sees on all sides of his plan, and hedges it about with wise precaution, brings it to success. Every day the foresight of men outwits your God."

"[But Chance] has this objection, if no other," replied my uncle, "it encourages a hope of reward without labor, and it is this hope, Byrd, that fills the jail house with weak men, and sets strong ones to dangerous ventures." (The Mystery of Chance)

On Parsimony and Agrarian Piety

He cultivated his fields to the very door, and set his fences out into the road, and he extracted from those about him every tithe of service ... And like every man under a single dominating passion, he grew in suspicion and in fear. (The Hidden Law)

We must not press the earth too hard, old, forgotten peoples believed, lest evil things are squeezed out that strip us and avenge it. And ancient crones, feeble, wrapped up by the fire, warned him: The earth suffered us to reap, but not to glean her. We must not gather up every head of wheat. The earth or dim creatures behind the earth would be offended. It was the oldest belief. The first men poured a little wine out when they drank and brought an offering of their herds and the first fruits of the fields. (The Hidden Law)

"This is a mysterious world. It is hedged about and steeped in mystery ... no man can use the earth and keep every tithe of the increase for himself" (The Hidden Law)

On a Small Glass of Apple Liquor

He held up the glass, watching the firelight play in the white-blue liquor. "You fill the mind with phantoms," he said, turning the glass about as though it held some curious drug. "We swallow you and see things that are not, and dead men from their graves." (The Riddle)

On Women

She seemed embarrassed and uncertain what to do, a thing of April emerging into Summer. (The Age of Miracles)

I cannot say that a woman is an armful of apple blossoms ... or as white as milk, and as playful as a kitten. These are happy collocations of words and quite descriptive of her, but they are not mine. Nor can I draw her in the language of a civilization to which she does not belong -- one of wheels and spindles with its own type; superior, no doubt, but less desirable, I fancy. The age that grew its women in romance and dowered them with poetic fancies was not so impracticable as you think. It is a queer world; those who put their faith in the plow are rewarded by the plow, and those who put their faith in miracles are rewarded by miracles. (The Devil's Tools)

She was clean-limbed and straight like those first daughters of the world who wove and spun. (The Hidden Law)

She was a beauty of her type; dark haired and dark eyed like a gypsy, and with an April nature of storm and sun. (Naboth's Vineyard)

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

If anyone ever sends me one of those craven evil eye emails that curse you if you don't send it on to 83 other people, please understand that I will not do so. I will even stand out on my porch and make it easier for the curse to find me. If it does, I will quote Scripture at it, clutch the Cross, and watch it wither into vapour for the stews of the Vestibule. I spit at the evil eye and intentionally stomp on sidewalk cracks.

But if such an email questionnaire, or tag, ever finds me that asks me who I would like to invite from history or fantasy to dinner, here is how I would answer.

First, it won't be dinner, because it is hard to talk at dinner. Talking is better done at a place like the Eagle and Child, with a roaring hearth, a complete absence of fluorescence (pseudo-light from hades that probably causes ADHD and other forms of industrialist brainwashing). There is also real darts, even though I'm a rotten player. The floor is not so clean, and we don't have to do that wretched "meta-thinking" about having a conversation that one finds oneself doing at dinners with mixed company and awkward.

Second, it won't be about sports, TV shows, video games, or unmanful subjects like the stupid things Dick or Bob is doing and what a nutter he is and did you hear about what he/she did at the conference last week? You can't blame the feminists for taking manhood away, because the men are doing that all by themselves by watching too much TV and learning to talk like the View. There can be some mention about football teams or rugby to establish kinship (baseball or cricket is okay, but only in the mystical sense). Politics, yes, but only as a necessary evil. Philosophy, certainly, but not at all in the "meta-thinking" wraith-language of academia. The American university system would be better off giving up workshops and advanced degrees, and taking up instead the noble business of  dwyle flonking, where one could, if he is lucky, in the course of four snurds, become a flonker, a girter, or even a jobonowl (better, much better, than a Ph.D.).

Poetry of course, but only the kind with a humane prosody like a ballad -- iambic tetrameter that even rhymes (and is thus rendered unfit for acceptance into the modern canon). As Belloc would say, ... bad verse, oughly verse into which a man may get his teeth. Not sloppy verse, not wasty, pappy verse; not verse blanchified, but strong, heavy, brown, bad verse; made up and knotty; twisted verse of the fools. Laughter, occasional silences. Perhaps a numinous reading framed by swirling clouds of pipe smoke punctuated by the crackling fire.

Second, it won't be any of the saints I'd invite, because I am not worthy to tie their shoelaces. I would be happy, more than happy, to simply bus their table and not be seen or heard. What in the world would we talk about as peers, simply as we are not peers? Who am I to ask them anything, or -- God forbid -- to say anything to them? Forsoothe, the nerve: "Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest enter under my roof."

Third, it won't be Gandalf or anyone like him, because he might tell me something meaningful and disturbing like "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us" (which was said, by the way, in the Shire and not in Moria). Neither will it be any hobbits or dwarves, because eating with them could lead to dancing on the table, and no one who appreciates truth or beauty would want me to do that (all the witnesses would be traumatized and end up liking top-40s music because the experience would have destroyed their good taste). I don't know about elves: I think it would be hard to sit back and rub elbows with anyone who can walk on the surface of snow and belongs to the other shore of an uncurved Sea (although I do like the idea of pointy ears and waking up trees). And neither will it be anyone who can do magic, because I would find it too spooky and unsettling for my digestion: card tricks yes, magic no.

Fourth, no politicians, not even a great one like Lincoln. Not Washington, maybe Franklin (only if he takes a bath). Not Quixote or anyone who can't rise above their gaseous quixotic vocabulary. Absolutely no Napoleons, or anyone of such secularist ilk (like Voltaire) who takes his own character seriously and reads his own biography. Accordingly, no Democrats, no Republicans. Distributists yes, agrarians yes. No Tsarists. No one who believes in the first, second or third Rome. I would prefer anyone who knows Homer more and less of focus groups, polls and surveys. Curse surveys and censuses: they are all vapors of the Vestibule.

Fifth, no one who wears a bluetooth-earwig (which burrows through gray matter, laying eggs along the way) or who carries a blackberry-amulet: such people speak constantly to the ether and communicate with strange spirits, staring blankly and schizophrenically into some vanishing point outside the room. It goes without saying that they violate all conventions of the convivium. They divinize with chill runes and necromantic glyphs on little fertility pocket gods, on which can be heard, occasionally, chants of dark Dionysian rituals. No one, either, who cannot tell the difference between reality and virtuality, or who would ever prefer the latter to the former. Orthodoxy and the wearing of the One Ring (which is the demonic sacrament of technolust) must come into sharper contradistinction.

Sixth, not Satan, neither devil, nor admirer of the darkness nor destroyer of the sacred order, nor vandals of the same. Neither Joyce nor Warhol nor Mapplethorpe nor network executives. Anathema.

Seventh, it will be my family and friends if we can all promise not to talk about people or the Today Show. It will be you dear reader. It will be some of the Inklings (maybe not Charles Williams -- I read him but can't eat with him), especially if they promise to read new stuff. It will be Bertie and some of his pals but not too many: then there would be that hobbit and dwarf problem. It will be Tom Bombadil and Farmer Maggot. Chesterbelloc. Wendell Berry. Allen Tate. Ochlophobists and Axegrinders, philosopher moms, handmaids, scriveners and minor clergy. It will be my English profs and my favorite History prof at Malone (yes, you, Mr. Oliver). Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Chaucer. If they come, I would have more qualified people sit with them and tell me what they're saying: put me at the back corner of the room, close enough to see the light.

We will talk about the past and the end of the world, yes. But more, we will sing the songs and tell the stories that will take us safely through to the harbor, poetry that opens the shutters of the lantern of the Last Day upon this shadowed present.

And we will discover, in our recovered language, the words to prayer that calls down miracles, and magically lightens the mundane up to the harmonious spheres. Still there, after centuries of alchemy and science.

I will not bow before the iron crown, and I will help you not to either.

What about Dumbledore?

Dear JK,

I’ve been peckish about your last book, since I read the last few words of your epilogue, “Nineteen Years After.”

And that was before I found out, from you, that Dumbledore is/was gay. Others suspected it: they more astute than I could ever be. My gaydar is not good at all. It turns out that Grindelwald was more than just a pal.

That was a neat trick, JK. You turned Dumbledore into a hero for zillions of kids. You waited until the book sales smashed one superlative after another, and the Brinks trucks lined the drive of your post-welfare mansion.

Then, after the kids (and priests like me) were lined up in your palm, eating out of your hand, you squeezed the bird, Slytherin-like. You seemed to really mean the "Christian parallels" and "obvious religious meaning," and we (myself included) were very happy.

But then Dumbledore the hero, the wise man, the quasi-Christ-figure, you outed. Gay, despite no real narrative logic that demanded him to be so.

The gayness of Dumbledore is only a useless appendix (though, doubtless, quite a profitable one: now that the family market has been exhausted, this latest revelation opens up the new über-rich childless childish gold-vein of the self-involved, who practice their simultaneous (not mutual) communion before the Mirror of Erised).

Ex post facto, and clearly tangential to the story line, you announced this hero as a homosexual. The syllogism is neat, I have to admit. To bring out of the closet what had been squirreled away inside, the argument goes something like this in the daylight:

• Major Premise: I admire Dumbledore the powerful and wise and mostly good …
• Minor Premise: Dumbledore is gay …
• Conclusion: therefore all gays are powerful and wise and mostly good and I must admire them.

Especially if I’m a kid, and especially if Dumbledore’s been fashioned, over the last decade, like a golem into the only father-image left in the West: theoretically good-intentioned, calm and detached except for exceptional moments, absent at other exceptional moments, frustrating, goofy, manipulative, proficient at visiting infirmaries and at making incomplete revelations.

Now that’s a Dad – the product of bourgeois post-childhood psychotherapy.

Well, JK, enough of Dumbledore. I suppose you and your associates at Scholastic saw an opportunity to ram home a score for the home team under the rubric of tolerance. Is that what you think evil is? Is that the sum and range of Voldemort’s deviltry – just a cheap, sniveling, nitwit bigotry? That Voldemort is evil because he murders people on one hand, and on the other and sinister hand, because he is intolerant?

I realize now that there was something I clearly missed in my earlier missive to you. Then, I was concerned mainly about the quality of the hero. I asked you then to make of Harry a real hero that could no longer remain mundane, that could not rest in the familiar world. In the revolution wrought by a hero in his land, his translation to the higher worlds impels the narrative toward tragedy.

I mean romantic tragedy, not the effluvial ironic tragedy of modernistic scapegoats like Willy Loman. The real death of Harry would have wrought redemption for your storied world.

As it turned out, there was no death. No, I’m serious, neither he nor Mr. Voldemort really died while Harry was clutching that stupid resurrection stone (did you mean a Christian resonance here? … the very fact of its Gospel echo makes its hollowness all the more awkward). That particular “deathly hallow” was one of the dumbest and cheapest deus ex machina maneuvers of all time: “I’m technically dead, Voldy, so I did that self-sacrifice thing so your Deathly Stick is bootless … but, mind you, I’m not really dead as I'm up here in the White Light chatting with Dumbledore who’s telling me everything while we’re watching you gross us out with your naked self … and since I’ve got this neato magic rock with me, I’m going to use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card and play dead until I can really fight you at the end by making you curse me and then bounce the curse back on you.”

That’s quite a complicated programme, JK, and you have millions of pre-pubescents and adolescents and adults (refugees from the modern important literature of free association and inverted commas) arguing over the ins and outs of your metaphysics like a mystical soap opera.

That is the best thing that can be said of your piece. You tied up all the important loose strings (leaving enough untied to make space for further “non-plot-advancing” additions to the canon). You had them all marked out in your spiral-ringed college-ruled notebooks: character vectors, slope lines for plots and formulae for their intersections, chronology marching along the x-axis.

It was a neat geometry, Ms. Rowling, and that’s what soap operas do.

I am afraid that this method of storytelling – this iron maiden of your geometrical notebooks – is the culprit behind Harry stripped of heroism, Voldemort disrobed as a pulp novel nutcase, Dumbledore denatured and disoriented by the white light, and the whole story denuded as merely a graphic novel with no pictures.

You dropped the ball, JK. You tried to have it both ways, the cutting and eating of the cake. You wanted to marry Harry off to someone (it might as well have been Ron’s sister) and land him into domesticity with three kids, nodding cursorily to Draco at the Hogwarts Express. You desperately – and, might I add, naively – scrabbled to punch down the hero back into his mundane loaf pan. And in tethering Harry back to the pre-lapsarian world, you demoted him from hero to Mr. K. in The Castle.

You made his heroism ironic because his death was ironic. Jesus' was real.

I know why Harry couldn’t rise to the occasion. It is because his sub-creator (that would be you, JK) could not rise to the challenge of evil. I don’t expect much, if any, of today’s literature to treat goodness with much respect: but I continue to think that evil ought to be dealt with in concrete and vivid detail. God knows we’ve seen enough of evil to write expertly about it.

You never adequately explained why Voldemort was so wicked. You explained his madness, perhaps, with all that stuff about being lonely and weird, cursed by a mean father, burdened with a wretched mother, damned to a boarding school like Dotheboys. You built up a case for a psychopath: you cobbled together an explanation that would have suited a school shooter like the ones at Columbine or VT.

I wouldn't be so strident here if you had left the villain as a crazed Gadarene -- evil yes but also stupid. It is possible for the protagonist, after beating such a knave, to return back like Odysseus after planting his oar to some sort of normalcy (with even that normalcy renewed and restored).

But villains who are not crazy, who want power and state, language and meaning, time and space -- these villains are much more than demons. When you so darkly moved your Harry from the precincts of fairy tale to necromancy ... when you settled the cloud of 1984 and Goebbels on the Ministry of Magic and Hogwarts itself, you incarnated Voldemort and shifted him from the dastardly to the satanic.

And when you do this, the hero who conquers can never go home (unless you capitalize the "h"). Returning him home is like Frodo pretending he can stay in the Shire. Or, it is like suggesting that the Theotokos and Joseph had kids after the Crisis, like any other family.

Voldemort was more than sorcerer or demon: he orchestrated revolution to usurp the order and he commanded destruction of the good: this is not the work of a bulleyed boy who was misunderstood, but of someone who was more likely to have been pampered and permitted the full exercise of his prurient demands. School shooters may be produced by bullies at school, but mass-murdering despots are produced by rather cushy church-less upbringings. They are too intelligent, too focused and aware of what they want, too well brought up.

Voldemort, as your character, is a slander to all the orphans and nerds and marginalized bullied kids. Isolation and nerdification do not a devil make. God-denying does.

Lessee, how to really make a Voldemort, instead of your way JK? Deny the Trinity. Lie about the good. Sever the sign from its meaning. Objectify the people around you. Construct your own world and populate it with yourself. Sanctify your auto-eroticisms. Revile the Cross. Time-travel to alternative universes to run away from the Cross.

That, by the way, is exactly what real monsters like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible, and Robespierre did: revolution toward an alternative, non-Created, universe. It was their way of reading Hegel, after all.

That is what I missed in my last letter. For a Hero, you’ve got to deal with Evil. And to deal with Evil, you've got to know that there are worse things than death, slavery or even intolerance ... and you’ve got to believe in God.

And that is what you missed, JK. You tried to take the Cross out of the Christian myth, and update it for the neo-mythic post-ironic age. It doesn’t work, mainly because the age is still ironic and always will be (sorry Northrop). You made of the devil a silly tawdry villain, who busies himself with tying up maidens on the railroad track, caring nothing about perdition.

For a while, while I was captivated by your tale (until that disastrous ending and farcical Carnegie  announcement), I fancied that in you we might have another Tolkien or Lewis, to help our souls stave off the Camazotz tide of IT. Certainly not them, but a shadow at least, more at the level of L’Engle. Surely, I thought, you can pull off something like that (maybe you did, time will tell).

But you never really pulled off a good story. A decent tale, yes, but neither tragedy nor comedy wherein reality is explored, God is perceived, evil is fought. There was in your tale neither Christ nor Antichrist. A lot of goodness to be sure, but even more badness that remains unrecognizable, free-floating, and unsecured to a reference of meaning.

A good Christian story like The Lord of the Rings will have saints and orcs, the genesis and future of light, along with the ringlore of evil. It will not be permitted in Sunday School, as good stories often cannot be. But it will be enshrined in Christian imagination.

You took fragments of the Christian story, but you fashioned them into another shape. Because of this (and not because of Dumbledore's irrational gayness) it will not fit into a Christian imagination. Not for long.

Accordingly, you might be a protestant author, but you’re not a Christian one.

Chapter 2 (the final one).

A new work of modern art

Last Friday afternoon (10/5) in the Harry-Potter-looking Swedish hamlet called Lund, at least five provocateurs destroyed $200,000 worth of art by Andres Serrano.

You remember Serrano. He's the one who said that Lund looks like something out of Harry Potter (whatever that means). He is also the one who dunked a crucifix in a jar of urine and called it art. He was paid $15,000 to do this under the aegis of the publicly-funded National Endowment for Art. That means that you and I have put a few pennies of our own in that particular jar.

Serrano’s artistic work that was hacked by crowbars and axes was a bunch of photographs, for one thing, which I think is a degraded sort of art. In photography, the image is removed from the mind of the artist by an entire order. One cannot see, in photographs, brush strokes defining light and shadow in Caravaggio, diaphanous wisps in Botticelli, spiritual tumult in El Greco and Tintoretto. Photographs cannot ever be icons (maybe photographs of icons can be, but that is emblematic of Orthodoxy’s chief conundrum in the West), and that is why photography must always be second-class art, even when there are so few artists of the first class getting decently paid. (It is entirely possible that the only reason why Kinkade has made so much money is because the native artistic sensibilities of Westerners have been dulled by photography and its illegitimate brood.)

Speaking of second-class, the Serrano photographs are only dirty pictures. They are transgressive in the Mapplethorpe tradition, meant to shock. And if you are shocked (and titillated), therefore (goes the syllogism) you must have seen art. So Serrano’s hand-held dirty picture of a woman with a horse must be art and liable to modern veneration, simply because it is shocking to all and arousing to some: as was all the stuff in the pornographer’s exhibit, “The History of Sex.”

It is said that the pictures were worth $200,000. No, that is not correct. It is true that the value of the pictures was appraised at $200,000 on the art-commodities market. Appraisals such as this have nothing at all to do with real value. (From another perspective, it may have been worth $200,000 to have these dirty pictures destroyed.) The big money in the art market is all tulip mania.

Besides its obvious rank as a commodity, the $200,000 figure is a symbol of the sacramental worth of Serrano’s project. I ascribe to the theory that whatever a society puts into a special building and pays loads of money for, and marshals legions of academic and elitist talking heads to herd our fascination and celebrity-worship towards – that object, or class of objects, and their veneration, compose a religion.

QED. Pornography is a religion, and Serrano is (one of) its prophet(s) -- or profits. In industrialism, that last ambiguous gag makes not a whit of difference.

The sacraments in the Lund museum have been defiled. Seven Serrano icons have been defaced. Therefore, the masked wielders of crowbars are no longer mere vandals, but also heretics. They Have Been Identified as Nazi Skin-Heads So That We May All Revile Them. After all, those Bad Men wrote Mean Things in their leaflets, which they scattered in their wake: "Against decadence and for a healthier culture."

Andres Serrano wants the world to know that he is "shocked and horrified." I was hoping he felt this way before the crowbar incident, but alas, his feelings are hurt by the Mean People Who Messed Up His Stuff.

I have just two more things to say about this artistic/religious event.

The first is that I didn’t think such a thing was possible in Sweden. I thought, like Andres did, that Sweden would have provided only a hero's welcome. Who knew that there were people still there who can tell the difference between a skanky peep show and splintered light?

The second is that in such a transgressive age, doesn’t this very act of tidying up count as art itself?

My hope for novels

Having lodged my complaint about novels, even the good ones, I now file a commendation. Novels cannot help but being humanistic. One cannot tell a story, even a history, outside human nature. One can describe a sequence of observations in a scientific manner, but this completely external sort of deadpan chronology does not at all fulfill the demands of story.

Time and consciousness are the two things that must go into story. Style and particularity are necessary additions to make a story good. The further articulations of generation and culture produce, in turn, the novel. But consciousness -- the radically unevolvable "element" that makes the spark of humanism -- is the ineffable "sign of the book," and time is God's signature emblazoned above that of the novelist.

So I read novels -- rarely yes, but I read them -- for many reasons. One of them being that they are every one (even the modernistic ones, even distempered transgressive ones like the stuff of Joyce) a sure and certain proof that idiot, fundamentalistic scientism is quite stuck on the intellectual floor. No one has explained the whence of consciousness, or has established a conceptual framework for the scientistic link between the experienced phenomenon of consciousness and its material conditions and theoretical predictability.

Consciousness is all contingency, where divinity reigns, and grace is the only wisdom. Novels, even the bad and disgusting post-pagan ones, prove this, and fluster the alchemists who have ever sought to silence bard and writer, for these cannot help to sing of God.

My problem with novels

Here is a good essay on the moralistic offices of the novelist. In his critique of the book and new movie, Atonement, David Womersley explores whether the novelist can succeed at presenting the moral reality of his story.

The great novelists felt strongly about their ability to do so. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dickens, James, Eliot and Conrad all believed that the moral reality of their story was the central and enabling extension that defined their novel as form.

This purpose of the novelist is set forth by the grand lady of the novel, Jane Austen, in her masterpiece Northanger Abbey:

[the novel is where] the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

When we read novels, especially those really big ones that paint an entire world, we rather hope that Austen’s words turn out to be true. And yet, at the end of every story, at least a little distemper echoes. David Womersley explains:

A different kind of disquiet focuses, not on the work of literary art itself, but on the artist. The shaping imperative which rules the artist can easily be presented in a less flattering light: as meddling, improper curiosity, prurience, the denial of autonomy to others in pursuit of its own aesthetic satisfactions. Viewed like this, the artistic temperament is not a chalice of moral wisdom; rather, it is a source of moral blindness dressed up as insight, and the artist is a peddler of poisons labelled as medicines.

It turns out that the author, for the purposes of storytelling, is often forced to violate the freedom of his own characters. He also distorts the reality of motives and prevenient forces by the mere isolation of a narrative thread. He is usually guilty of judgmentalism in his description of psychic worlds.

And, worst of all, in even the most famous of novels, he lies about human nature. He has often established his own implicit anthropology in stark contrast to the old-fashioned anthropology of the sacred order. This is my chief complain against D. H. Lawrence and most of the novelists (like Jonathan Franzen) who call themselves modern. Moods and streams of consciousness become franchised above all other authority and constraints of community. Impulse, fulfillment and aggrandizement supplant the simple truths of grace and maturity in the soul.

I am thankful for the better witnesses of Austen, Dickens and Dostoevsky. But I am still far better entertained by big books that tell big stories, instead of novels that seek to reinvent the wheel.

Diabological reading from Kirk

Few things are better, on a cold dank October grey day towards November, than to pull out a spooky book by the gloomy window, expecting the scrape of holly on the pane and Heathcliff’s vindictive pallor.

I don’t enjoy Wuthering Heights or any of the Brontes' stuff: too much atmosphere and soap opera, too little story. I know I should do the literary thing and prefer those volumes, but I’m drawn more to simpler and more Christian tales like those of Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Harry Potter (yes, Christian).

And then there’s Russell Kirk. His Ancestral Shadows is something one should immediately procure for this month’s non-professional reading. There are stories in this volume, handily bound and introduced by Vigan Guroian, that will spritz you with frissons of frabjous joy (for that spookiness of the jabberwocky is the rollercoaster scare-happiness that reacquaints us all with the exhilaration of being real men and women, for once).

Moreover, there is that weird book of Kirk’s called, glumly, Old House of Fear. Lady Fortune has smiled on you: I had to read this little tome in the form of another library discard (culled from some horrible bureaucracy called “The Amphitheater Library,” which believed in vandalizing texts with arcane rubber stampings and that peculiar septuagenarian librarian pencil-scratching which periodically commented on the volume’s absence of circulation). It was sheathed in a bubonic mix of bread mold and Milk of Magnesia, and mottled with stylized maple leaves for some unknown mystical purpose. Thank God the cover lay unseen when the book was open, though its neighbors on my shelf have filed a number of aesthetic complaints.

You are fortunate in that you can order, online, a new paperback edition by Eerdmans. Don’t bother going to Borders and Barnes and Nobles. They ban such books, censoring them from popular regard.

Despite the sickening cover of my copy, the text remains Kirk’s, and on page 189 he proceeds to lecture us on diabology, or how men can grow down to be like demons.

On what G. K. meant when Father Brown said that good men can remain the same, but bad men must get worse

Both [the bad guys] must have been reared and educated well enough … They might have commenced, like others, full of humanitarian sentimentality. And then, perhaps, demon ideology, with its imperatives and its inexorable dogmas, its sobersided caricature of religion, had swept them on to horrors. Ideological fanaticism had made of Jackman [the main bad guy] the goat-man, mastered by lust: but not the lust for women’s bodies. Jackman’s was the libido dominandi, the tormented seeking after power that ceases not until death. And in the flame of that lust for power, Jackman and Royall would be burnt up, today or next week or next month: they were at the end of their devil’s bargain, and the fiend would claim his own.

Now, in this oppressive silent moment, the conviction came to Logan [the good guy] that these two artists of disintegration were more frightened than he … Because frightened, Jackman and Royall were the more dangerous; but also their brains were stagnant with dread.

Fear … is the normal condition of man, after all. Quiet ages and safe lands are the rare exceptions in history. Nowadays the tides of disorder were gnawing at whatever security and justice still stood in the world, quite as the swell round Carnglass [the island where the story takes place] sought to bring down that heap of gray stones to the mindless anonymity of the ocean. With growing speed, the brooding spectre of terror, almost palpable in Carnglass, was enveloping the world. This island was the microcosm of modern existence …

For all their effort to behave as if they were still masters of the island, a tautness almost hysterical had crept into Jackman and Royall, and their voices were strained. What for years they had dealt out to others, now waited for them; and they had forgotten the meaning of mercy. There was no justice to which they could appeal. By fear they had lived: and now the fear which they and their sort had carried throughout the world was claiming them also. Having murdered order, these two at last were cast into the outer darkness.

Underline two phrases here: “artists of disintegration,” and “having murdered order, these were cast into outer darkness.”

The pimply idiocy of modern scare literature is predicated on the simple fact that most of it isn’t about evil at all – at least, not diabolical evil. The “fear” in modern horror has only to do with grotesquerie, not what demonism really is. That’s the chief difference between Christian literature, and the ilk that surrounds it: the former calls the villain for what it is, the latter runs away from it, while, at the same time, eroticizing its effects for the entertainment of children.

"Erotic horror" is a rubric that covers offscourings like "Resident Evil" and "Saw" (a favorite of too many 12-year-olds), as you would expect. But the category also includes the awkward prancings of spandexed single-mother divas, and the leerings of airbrushed mannequins: these, too, fall under the pall of dehumanized erotics and horrors. After all, just what is the "Living Dead"?

Only Christian theology prized out in art and literature still remembers what evil is. I understand that there is much that is called Christian that is neither art nor literature, and certainly cannot be called theological. And it is just as likely that there is much that is good stuff that is Christian without looking that way, or even knowing that it is.

There must be evil talked about for art to be art, simply because evil is all around and must be dealt with on the journey home. That is the simple morale of the Odyssey. It is the heroism of Jesus Christ.

Finally, this last "diabological" thought: I am not at all afraid of haunted houses or spooky spaces ... but I am afraid of the real and grievous hauntings: minds possessed and homes defiled. Then, in those places, when my own bravery fails, I hold on to the Christological courage which the Cross becomes, which makes us more than conquerors.

Where the exorcists are

I hold a lantern and I howl,
And today, I look no longer for an honest man,
For every ruler under the sun
I have told to stand aside:
I looked for the bones of their fathers
And cannot tell them from the remains of a slave.

Today I look for the One who restrains him --
The lawless man, the liar and phantasmagorist,
The herald and currier
Of gangrene carrion.

You think I’m shocking
With my Ginsbergian, anarchical ways
(who’s your Dada?)?
But I am nothing to his nothing,
The anti-logos who deserves no capitalization,
The killer of pigs
Who authentically, like the good existentialists they were,
Chose suicide
Over one more moment of demonic swinehood.

I look for the One who restrains them,
The nameless, bodiless gnashers of teeth
And who throws them like lightning into outer darkness
From the precincts of human nature,
Now sociologically dedicated to the proposition
That all men are not created,
But “equivalent” all the same
(inverted suspended double commas were invented just for me).

Democracy, egalitarian, Jacobean, has swept the house clean, brothers,
And eight visitors have noticed the vacancy sign.
The lawless, a-logial and chthonic suckers of passion,
Incubi and succubae, who really do exist, mind you,
And simply adore every reverie,
Every maxim daydream, every housewife desperation and ennui.

And whilst I’m at it, rubbed in my tub,
Debasing Sinopian coinage and dieting on onionage,
I should point out (and I am, after all, a good pointer in the middle way)
That the night snackers are not all that gender picky:
A guy is just as likely to draw the incubi.

I look for the One who restrains him,
The One who exorcises the Age of Men,
Who raises the shield to let man be man
And possibly grow into something better and forever,
Like god.

But times are a-changin’ and the answer that’s blowin’
Is not the Third Person and blows ill indeed
Like a rolling stone.

It is my dogged opinion
That the icy lake down below might now be vacant,
Except for record numbers in Ptolomaea:
That’s the hyper-modern anthem --
Treachery to guests:
"Come in for the orgy, leave your ancestors behind,
Your metaphysics, memory of place and gardens of time,
Oh, and forget your soul,
So we can eat you whole."

The Restrainer is the Exorcist,
In His House,
Eschatology and diabology hereby embrace.
Where the Word is, the Son in His pleroma,
In His legacy undiminished,
Where symbol and substance marry
In union and knowledge,
Where truth and experience are one in vision
Of a company beyond death:
There the antichrist cannot abide
And withers down the lusty, aggrieved  and hungry chain of privation.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked …”
he had no idea, the badness of naked
the whence of hysteria, the starvation of revolution.

My object, Hitler said to Josef Hell in Aufzeichnung,
is to guide first-rate revolutionary upheavals,
regardless of what methods or means
I have to use in the process.
Earlier revolutions were against the peasants,
or nobility, or clergy,
or against dynasties and their network of vassals,
but in no case has revolution succeeded without the presence
of a lightning rod that could conduct
and channel the odium of the general masses.

[Adolf answering Mr. Hell, when the latter asked,
"Why, Mr. Hitler, did you choose the Jews?"]

Are you frightened, Frodo?
Then you are not frightened enough:
I know what hunts you.

Go to Rivendell, the place of mystery,
Where breathes the light of the Tree.

I look for the one who restrains him
(the lawless man),
I looked where the exorcists are,
And found Him there:
Rampant upon the serpent supine.

There were exorcists by the score in the Great Church upon a time,
And they didn’t look at all like a casting call
For a maudlin movie with red flannel, ketchup,
And regrettable Roman glissandos and cymbal crash,
Rotating crania and green bile.

They were, rather, quotidian Sunday School teachers
Who taught what Sunday School teachers used to teach
(instead of that spot-color Rogerian ilk that misses all the punch lines):

Hard-core orthodox doctrine to the children,
Trinitarian, Christological (scandalously exclusive),
And the rehearsal of Apostolic ascesis,
And the reception of mystical, material sacrament:

Which is the only antidote for pig-possessors.

In the Great Church,
Exorcists were the catechists:
Sunday School teachers drove out demons,
Everyday.

That is the criterion for the real Church, brothers:
Does it exorcise when it theologizes?

That is the basis for ethics, brothers:
Does it address the demons when it theorizes
in committee and extemporizes in the news?

That is the only reason for ecumenicity, brothers,
My fellow sons of Sceva,
Does it help us drive them out?
Does it help us do our job?
Does it help us be where the exorcists are?

Which is the real meaning,
I say in my onion dome breath,
Of the Church on the rock today.

Notes:

I have been asked, courteously, to shed some light on allegedly obscure passages in the lines above. Here goes:

Line 1:
I thought that Diogenes of Sinope would make for a worthy, searching critic of non-exorcistic realms of ecclesiality. Legend has it that Diogenes went looking with a lantern for an honest man. He lived in a tub that was provided for him by the vastly entertained city of Athens. He ate a lot of onions. He also told Alexander the Great, who had come to visit him, to step aside, as he was blocking the sun. He also told the famous conqueror that crack about the bones. He was known to brandish his middle finger, but it is not known what that gesture meant back then. He (and/or his father) was exiled from Sinope for having debased the coinage.

Lines 7-8:
2 Thessalonians 2.1-10

Line 12:
That would be Allen

Line 13:
And that would be Dadaism and anti-art, with Tristan Tzara and friends.

Line 16:
Mark 5.13. Some Biblical scholars (I use the word in its broadest sense) have accused Jesus of the willful destruction of property not belonging to Him. I kid you not.

Line 23:
Human nature in itself is meaningful only in fellowship with the Holy Trinity – a redeemed fellowship that is nicely expressed in the icon of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, outside of which is darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth. The orcs do a lot of gnashing, if you need to see this done to be clear about the action. I guess orcs do this a lot mainly as a result of self-awareness.

Line 24:
America is a culture where freedom is predicated upon the acknowledgment that humanity is created and sustained by God. Since that doctrine’s been thrown out the window, what will happen to equality? Bestialization? Commodification? Eugenicization? ... What? This is happening already?

Line 27:
Quotation marks are justly called “scare quotes” by those of us creeped out by Derrida’s posse – who, against the advice of the Chicago Manual of Style, litters the text with these chicken scratches. Diogenes would have been delighted with scare quotes, though it pains me to think of what he’d have done with Jacques. He'd have probably stuck them around Jacques’ name, rendering him so-called, like "Derrida."

Line 29:
Matthew 12.43-45

Line 31:
The former means “lie on top,” the latter below.

Line 33:
Something for misogynists and misanthropes.

Line 49:
Fra Alberigo to Dante, in Ptolomaea, Inferno XXXIII, ll133-135

Ella ruina in sì fatta cisterna;
e forse pare ancor lo corpo suso   
de l'ombra che di qua dietro mi verna.

The soul falls headlong to this cesspool.
Perhaps the body of this shade, who spends
the winter with me here, still walks the earth ...

Line 52:
Real conservatism seeks to nurture the old knowledge of the complete man, with the hope that with manners and a sense of truth and beauty, he will have enough wits to recognize hell when he sees it. It worries me that people may be in Hades and never know the difference.

Line 67:
The first line of Howl.

Lines 71-82
This, unbelievably, is a real conversation with a man who really had this name. Cited in My Life Among the Deathworks, by Philip Rieff, p. 160.

Line 93:
St. Nikodemus the Hagiorite: “The name of exorcist is given to the catechists of those faithless or heretics who are coming into the faith, because in catechizing them, they exorcise the evil spirits dwelling in them, in the name of the Lord, that they should leave them …”

Line 105:
Of course, one must add to the list of antidotal ingredients these catalysts: humanistic and liberal enterprises like good grammar, good stories, and good poetry. Have you noticed that demonification corrodes language concomitantly with the decay of the ego? The intact language I'm speaking of here (pardon the pun) is the noetic art of communicating the experience of grace and glory, and of understanding the logoi of creation. This is the first world, primeval language described by Barfield in Poetic Diction and Saving the Appearances. The linguistic acrobatics and recursive closed-loop grammars of people like Proust and Joyce are not language that expels demons, but rather invites them.

With the exception of astronomy, it is an open question whether indoctrination in mathematics and science will do any good with regard to the devil and his horde. The history of "Science" and evil is ambivalent, to say the least -- as is true of all alchemies (of which this present techno-culture is only the latest): it is to be hoped, perhaps in blind faith, that science has saved as many lives as it has destroyed. I still suspect, with Tolkien, that goblins have a lot to do with technology.

Production Memo for The Hobbit

The news for hobbits (and people who like hearing about them) is ambivalent. It is morose for some: there is a tit for tat tiff going on between Director Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema. Either tat or tiff will certainly delay the film production of Tolkien’s first novel of the milieu, The Hobbit (which the filmsters now call a “prequel,” because film trumps print, you see).

Rather blithe it is for others, because the delay is not such a bad thing. It means that it is less likely now that either Peter Jackson or Bob Shaye will stick their name, like a PostIt note, on the story. Shaye is the lionized doyen of New Line, and NPR-feted pander for cinematographical lodestars like Pink Flamingos, and chief cartoonist for that Oscar-shoe-in triumph, The Last Mimsy (okay, maybe just a little hyperbole here).

New Line sees myth either as entertaining bedside stories for bored ADD-addled children and children-with-adult-bodies (a particularly hypermodern achievement), or as a set of alternative narratives that can be waged simultaneously against the core narratives of the old moral order.

That is why it is possible for a single studio to produce an eminently Christian, indeed Orthodox-Catholic Christian, trilogy such as The Lord of the Rings, and then turn right around and produce (to be released this December), a profoundly anti-Christian sure-to-be-serialized adaptation like The Golden Compass.

As an aside, it should be noted that Philip Pullman, the one who admits to writing Compass, is at least honest and consistent about Christianity: he recently, during the release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, came clean with his disgust over all things Narnian and Lewisian. The “Dark Materials” trilogist instructs the reader in not just the usual rejections of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the Return (what we Orthodox call “economy”), but the deeper rejections of the nature and Person-hood of God (what we call “theology” proper).

Many readers have noticed that the tone, or mood, of The Hobbit “darkens” in The Lord of the Rings. A number of elements contribute to this. The characters become more mythopoeic, even Wagnerian, in the latter. Even Tom Bombadil, whom Jackson eschewed, and the Scouring of the Shire episode, which Jackson despised, take on apocalyptic resonance in that these things must be made either to survive the revolutions of external events, or to be cleansed at all costs from the corrosions brought home from outside cataclysms. The character of Elrond, in particular, is wise and powerful in The Hobbit, but he is also jolly. There is nothing of jolly in the grim figure that presides over the fateful council in The Fellowship of the Ring, and the tragic figure that takes his leave of his immortal daughter in The Return of the King (the book, The Two Towers, has little for Elrond to do – Jackson saw fit to correct this “mistake” of Tolkien’s in the film, thus making the weird Hugo Weaving earn his keep).

Of course, one must quickly add that if the tone darkens from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, it turns to midnight in The Silmarillion, and even blacker – if that were possible – in the new tome just now coming out, The Children of Hurin.

The darker, more heroic and tragic dimensions in The Lord of the Rings, and that story’s essentially Wagnerian motifs, made it possible for the likes of Peter Jackson and the New Line people to do a half decent job. They produced something that a Tolkien fan like me paid money to see – in the theater, and in the purchase of all three collector DVD’s. I paid the money, and even enjoyed watching, despite my many grievances.

And there were many – grievances, that is. Permit me to list a few. The foppish assumption that the telling of the tale could leave off the scouring away of Sharky from the Shire (and the inane emendation of a quasi-Vladic impalement upon a wheel). The loss of the majestic Glorfindel, and his replacement by the Rock Princess Arwen (I pined, then, for Bakshi). The bypass of Bombadil in the Old Forest, and the beaming of cranky Old Willow into Fangorn. I guess the screenwriters couldn’t make much sense of Tom’s caprice with the Ring – flipping, spinning it, making it disappear, laughing and tossing the doomsday device of Aleister Crowley back into Frodo’s furry palm.

The Glittering Caves did not, well, glitter. Farmer Maggot was displaced by an accidental discovery of mushrooms, after the obligatory close brush with fecal piles and a priapic reference to a broken carrot. Lorien was imaged as a New Age midsummer’s encampment that went too far into autumn and outer space. The big battle, sans Imrahil but with Meriodoc, before the Black Gates gave new meaning to the word “encirclement,” and could have been choreographed only by people who really believed that WETA’s swords were better than those pesky museum pieces.

Steel armor. Arwen. Those schizophrenic rheumy-eyed “significant looks” of Frodo (toward the end, I kept begging the movie not to let Frodo see me). Arwen. The de rigueur “Night of the Living Dead” tribute at the Stone of Erech. Arwen. My feeling creepy about Gandalf’s slumber parties at Meduseld and Cormallen, especially after I find out that he’s been ripping out Leviticus 20.4-17 from the Gideon Bible in every one of his hotel rooms. Frodo/Elijah. Arwen. Orlando skateboarding down the banister, shooting orcs and never missing and doing that thing with the mumakil. Arwen.

Oh, I almost forgot. Viggo/Aragorn singing, and then treating us to his DNC Presidential Nomination Acceptance speech, probably the biggest cardboardy letdown piece of rhetoric in film history.

Please, please never again. That and Frodo looking. Significantly. With. Big. Wet. Eyes. While the Rock Princess wanders off, black-shrouded (Euripidean, Medean?, almost Fury-like), in the November woods of dying Lorien (doesn’t she have Eldarion to hang out with, btw?).

I guess I digress, but I really do not. It is these grievances which comprise the single reason why I, after having shelled out a number of bucks for the movies, cannot bear to watch them at all today. What draws me to revisit Middle Earth in the books are the very things missing in the movies. And the very things that made The Lord of the Rings the celluloid success it was are the things that will utterly blaspheme any production of The Hobbit.

The movies took the darker elements of the trilogy and inflated them. If you heard Wagner resonate in Howard Shore’s now-tiresome score, you were meant to. If you heard most of “This is My Father’s World” in the Shire theme, it was only because that melody could be floated atop the dark tide of Mordor music rather neatly indeed. Jackson concentrated the cinematographic focus on the Ring to catechize the non-Tolkien masses in Ring-lore, and did fairly well to his credit. However, he could not resist the temptation to add to the Ring-lore a soupcon (well, more than a soupcon) of nuthouse craziness. Theoden is enhanced from a disturbingly-familiar character that is marionetted by coddling minimalizations and rationalizations of a very PC Wormtongue, to a mucous-wheezing unwrapped mummy whose coroner hasn’t yet told him the bad news.

But there is more to Middle Earth than a few good guys trying to survive a Black Sabbath Jacksonian monster-bash. There is an easy-going, affable friendship forged in pipeweed, over a pint at the tavern, and lyricized on long walks in Shire woods and greens. There is the tempo of Yule and Midsummer, and the occasional eleventieth birthday party. There are the habits of regifting Mathom-worthy objets-d’art to the Sackville-Baggins. There is laughter – not that forced, arbitrary “someone must pay” stuff that tramps as laughter today, but real men-with-chests laughter that resonate from diaphragms that know how to sing songs with more than one verse, and certainly more than a Song of Myself, and lungs that breathe in mountain air freshened by snows and springs that pool in blue-silver meres.

There is also an appreciation for long songs warbled by good guys and bad. You don’t hear much of the latter sort warbling away in the trilogy, but you do hear goblins choiring rather grim foot-stompers in The Hobbit. The songs of the Elves are playful in the Hobbit, but poignant and mythical (almost terrible) in the trilogy. In both, the songs do what real poetry always does: it captures the light of the stars and leaves, and sets thought like a gem in foil and chain. The familiar traveling companion who snores, picks his nose, takes the best spots and tells the same gorblimey stories is recognized, by the clarion dulcet of poetry, as a Friend. Sartre is wiped away by song, and Aristotle and Plato are renewed. In one world, there are songs of playful creation wisdom, making and dancing, and recalling the original unity of poetry, which bound in a single word, once upon a time, the meanings of maker, singer and shepherd (Tom Bombadil). There are epics and elegies of lost ages, fallen cities, and dimming glories (Elrond). There are romances of love wrought over the centuries, and the sacrifice of death and self for love (which is ever the unavoidable price), even the possibility of the sexlessness of love (Aragorn). There are songs of the Journey, of there and back again (Bilbo and Frodo). There are celebrations of pipeweed, dinner (of course), copper bathtubs, fireworks, good beer, gardens and gaffers (Sam, Merry and Pippin – who, it should be said, was not forced by Tolkien to sing wretchedly about suicide missions and demonic filiocide).

Laughter and singing, and that Chestertonian ideal of the glorious-mundane-and-discernment-of-eternity sort of poetry are what Tolkien understood and well.

Jackson and New Line did not, and will not.

The monsters, especially Smaug, are corrupt, but not the mindless snot-gobbed bestowers of experience points that jump out of Doom or Halo, or  out of WETA's latex vats. Tolkien's monsters are grotesque, but they are also familiar. Goblins are depicted as industrialists. Dragons are corporate raiders who pillage every cent out of a community until the gold lines their caves like dust.

What's more is that dragons, and other monsters, are read in the book as projecting their evil very smartly indeed, through rhetoric, of all things. Their speech is not the boorish Satanistic sampled stuff that splotches the silver screens (recipe for movie evil: 1 inverted 5-point star; 1 skeletal goat's head; metal soundtrack backmasked from the defunct Hot Wheels cartoon show; a gazillion candles; ketchup; jock; not-so-innocent cheerleader; creepy guy ... oh, I almost forgot -- a half-Windsored kid with silver eyes).  It is not even the haranguing sweat-raining annual-meeting-worthy hijinks of Hitler.

No, it is elegant. Smaug would eat Bilbo, but not before a nice pre-prandial exchange of views, including an apology for finance capitalism. Gollum would eat Bilbo, too, but not before a riddle contest: here’s my riddle, by the way – how many riddles will show up in the movie? Three, or at least “What have I got in my pocket?” Or none?

Let’s remember that Tolkien was a linguist, and one of the first self-aware ones: moreover, as one of the symposiasts at the Eagle and the Child, he was a deft and jocund wit in the art of colloquy. I contend that conviviality (today, R.I.P) is even more important to The Hobbit than it is to the trilogy. I contend, too, that the affable, smoke-ring flow of soul was a frequent casualty in the film trilogy. It will be aborted in the next film, just as it is dead in the West (which is, I think, a sure sign of the dark years, deathworks and Melkor unchained).

With Jackson out of the picture for The Hobbit, we may not have to be anxious about the King Kong director’s garish love affair with monsters (he felt sorry for the cave troll in Moria: he probably wept over Shelob: and Sauron’s eye looked too Wellsian/Martian), but we wring our hands over New Line Cinema, still in the picture.

If they set to work on the book, which they must before the end of 2008 or they’ll lose their option, they will produce a Hobbit in keeping with the box office recipe used for the film trilogy. Now while the film version lay within a possible range of interpretations for the trilogy, the same sort of film treatment will lay completely beyond the range for the Hobbit. What you will get in a New Line movie is a lot of “Back to the Future” calendar-hopping, to underscore the “prequel” role of the 1936 volume in its relationship with the film trilogy -- a relationship which is not at all important in the real story. You will get a lot of monsters, but you won’t hear goblins singing rude drinking songs about hobbits and dwarves in trees. Neither will you be able to recognize the trolls (Bert, William and Tom) as people you know (a phenomenon Tolkien intended for this book). You will see dwarves like Gimli, but you won’t see the sophisticated mix of sardonic humor, dour outlook, Victorian 300 lb. fat uncle purveyor of the second breakfast and master fashioner of gem and silver that makes up a dwarf. New Line will make them dour and good for comic relief (watch for the obligatory flatulence), but they will miss, utterly miss, the ubiquitous tragedy of Moria and Nargothrond lying just behind every Khazad brow. You will see good fight scenes, without a doubt, but New Line will muff the absurdity of allies coming to near blows: New Line will fail to make the clear distinguishment of the real enemy as the warg-ridden orcs streaming onto the Lonely Mountain. There will be few songs, except those wanly composed and sung by Billy and Viggo: I know they don’t have a part, but somehow Aragorn at least will be wedged in. With the music score, you will get the unhappy mental image of Brunhilda batting eyes at Bilbo: there is Wagner in the trilogy, but not in The Hobbit, and the resulting music will be as jarring a pairing as Sibelius would be with Pooh.

You may say that the trouble here arises from the difference between the Hobbit and the trilogy -- a difference which lay chiefly in the fact that the Hobbit is a child’s tale. And if you say this, I'd say you’ve beat me to the punch.

I will also say that this is precisely the reason why New Line cannot do the Hobbit. Not because they cannot make anything fit for children, but because they haven’t a whit of understanding what goes into a child’s tale – especially a tale that only adults can truly understand.

They are, rather, morally unfit.

Please, please dear folks at New Line, give Tolkien a break. Let 2008 come and go, and drop the Hobbit in a mathom house in Michel Delving where it can stay safe until another production company might pick it up, and be true to the Christian vision that Middle Earth really is.

Sorry, Will, Thoughts Go Out to You

From the new book-length rant on the state of English, Beyond Words: How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now, author John Humphrys lists even more reasons on the ever-lengthening scroll for why we should send each other verbal condolences (while the definition still obtains).

Here is a smattering from the Telegraph's longish extract:

And yet when it comes to giving our children a taste of Shakespeare and English at its most beautiful, then suddenly we're all terrified. Might, like turn off the kids… know wha' I mean. Instead they are offered alternative texts, issued by educational publishing houses, that supposedly make our greatest writer more palatable.

Here's a taste. Take a few original lines from Macbeth:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
the handle toward my hand?

Compare them to the [children's] guide version:

Oooh! Would you look at that.

Yes, I know it sounds as if I'm making it up, but you can check it for yourself.

It almost sounds like the TEV, once known, in more innocent pre-inclusive days, by that classic exercise in ironic titles, Good News for Modern Man.

There was a lot of "oooh! would you look at that" business in the TEV. I wondered then, in the early seventies, what a Good Shakespeare for Modern Man might sound like.

I no longer wonder. Despair, yes, but not wonder.

Thanks, as usual, to ALD for the pointer.

Frey's pieces

Link: ARMAVIRUMQUE: THE NEW CRITERION'S WEBLOG.

Jeremy Axelrod writes a nice little piece here about Random House and Frey coming to terms with readers who assumed (why?) that a memoir should have something to do with the real past (as opposed, I imagine, to one that is made up).

Axelrod suggests that the idea of memoirs being held financial accountable for their truth is a "load of literary legerdemain." (I question whether this alliterative phrase was his first thought.)

With all the proper nods to Axelrod and his New Criterion crowd, the real legerdemain (which takes some skill, after all) has less to do with civil wrangling, editorial hand-wringing, and authorial astral-projection.

It has more to do with how in the world this book, A Million Little Pieces (2003, by James Frey) got so much press (in both senses of the word). I think it was genius work to arrange for a guy to announce that he is an addict and a criminal on every page, and then become criminalized (and therefore lionized) when it became known that he wasn't really all that much of an addict and a criminal ... at least, not as much as every page.

It was genius, because the Baal-prophet chest-banging from the Discovery that Frey was not so, dare I say it?, "fried," and thus should not have written under the 12-Step rubric, was a bit of self-righteous vaudeville in a place not famous for righteousness. And that very Discovery of the Truth produced -- you guessed it -- more sales.

More sales for great literature.

Errrlp.

Take a gander at this special little passage at the end of the first few paragraphs:

I turn and I leave their Room and I close their door and I go to the Kitchen. I look through the cabinets and I find an unopened half-gallon bottle of whiskey. The first sip brings my stomach back up, but after that it's all right. I go to my Room and I drink and I smoke some cigarettes and I think about her. I drink and I smoke and I think about her and at a certain point blackness comes and my memory fails me.

There are the de rigueur oddnesses of Modern Fiction, like the Capitalization of Important Words that will become Meaningful Later On.

There is that appetizer of eros that will probaby burgeon into an entrée a few chapters later (but not too much later -- the guests are famished) ... and besides, all is made new and meaningful for the sake of romance ("I think about her," therefore "I drink and smoke" -- there's modern story for you).

There is the ubiquitous and post-modern insistence on the first-person and the present tense.  I may be a crank (probably), but I prefer my narrators in the third, and anything but past tense in a narrative makes me tense.

Dust-covered writers like Cooper and Melville (let alone Dostoevsky) utilized gracious style -- but today, the same texts are dismissed as grandiloquence, and are thus not taken seriously (perhaps because they require too long of an attention span).

I suppose Frey and buddies think of themselves as writing with Mark Twain's permission, especially after Hemingway's gag about Huckleberry Finn being the sacrament of the Modern Novel.

But Frey does not tax us with the substance of Moby Dick or Deerslayer, nor do the host of the other minimalists who make us wonder whether they are hiding the bad news that they might not be able to write, just as we wonder whether some abstractionists might not be able to draw.

I chose the particular passage above because in it, I finally found a writer who overuses polysyndeton more than I do. And I was getting worried. But now I'm peaceful. And I'm sorry for that. And blackness comes.

A little pastoral help from Auden (imagine that)

From In Memory of W. B. Yeats:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Oh, and how 'bout this from September 1, 1939:

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupour lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Ministry in General, Craziness and Art

First, a disavowal outlining what this essay is not about. Despite the title, the discussion is not about “the art of ministry.” There is a surfeit of material on this subject, except for a possible sparseness in the study of the Orthodox pastorate.

It is not about “craziness in art.” There is much of that, to be sure. But that vastly entertaining Gatling Gun of tut-tut’s I’ll reserve for the future, near and distant.

Also, despite the tendency of some previous posts, this is not a “youth ministry” theme. I fear I’ve contributed to the regrettable specialization that has produced a panoply of pastoral categories. Except for some practical considerations for age (i.e., children and adults) and for status (i.e., clergy and laity, employers and employees), there really isn’t much interest in Scripture or Tradition for technical focus on special ministries. There is certainly little support for the telephone directory list of “ministry opportunities” and “small group” listings one might find at the kiosk, in the fern-and-fountain atrium after the seeker-service fade-out and rolling credits.

So I dislike the term “youth ministry.” Everyone, not just youth, needs to think better, pray better, do better and live better. And for betterment to exist at all, as we all know, there needs to be a rightness to be aimed at (pay no attention to the whisper of “ortho” playing in the subscript right now) – a rightness that also makes meaningful the ugly inevitability of “missing the mark.”

Call me naïve – and I really wish you would (it would be pleasant, much like getting carded, gray-headed, at the wine shop by a compassionate clerk). Call me naïve, but I continue to believe that Christianity is all about sanity. It is about rationality, balance of psychic powers, and an apprehension of real beauty.

Call me a doomsayer, too, (even “stormcrow,” if you’d like) because I allege that we are surrounded by a tropical depression of craziness. Let us call the spade for what it is: most of the problems that scare us are due not to atheism, secularism, Islam, or paganism. Scary, frightening Jabberwockies for us professional religious types – you know, googly-eyed monsters like membership attrition, doctrinal diminution, moral putrefaction and executive un-inhibition – are not the fault of these “usual suspects,” not even the fault of that googliest of them all, immorality.

Immorality, too, is the product of craziness, along with attendance decline, the “white flight” to megachurches, and daftness in some ecclesial HQ’s.

Craziness, or insanity, is also the culprit behind what we call family “dysfunction.” I hate that word – “dysfunction” reduces the sacred family down to machine competence, down to the only transcendent known in the material world, the “system.”

Nevertheless, even systems analysts (like Jay Haley, Salvador Minuchin and Virginia Satir) can tell when a thing-a-ma-bob like a home goes kerflooey. It is not just sin, and it is certainly not just free choice that causes a parent to reject his child, or to dance the rage-n-stomp. It is not just the inevitabilities of development that causes an adolescent to pierce his outer shell in masochistic excruciation. It is not just repressed, unfinished childhood issues that drag a soul into the ghastly twilight of lost weekends.

It is mainly madness. We err when we exhaust our analysis of sin at the point of ethical distinction. It is more helpful to apprehend the base irrationality of sin and especially passion. We continue to believe, or rather hope blindly, that sin can be argued with dialectically, and that passion can be pacified by reason.

It cannot. Believe me, I've tried.

I know parents today whose main problem, despite what their therapists and groups tell them, is their failure to grow up and think straight, to mature into a Christian mind where the powers of irascibility, appetite and intellect are set on an even keel, and the soul may drink in the cool bright waters of the mystic Christ. They, and their households, are repeatedly overthrown into a chaos of barbaric posturing, childish ultimatums, and tirades that used to be expected only from the toddler quarter.

I have a dark confession to make. In my former life as a therapist, I had many people who suffered from an undeniably physiological malady. However, in the majority of my cases, most of the agonies were self-wrought, due to -- I hate to say it -- simple and selfish immaturity. Most of the family problems I dealt with were due, in large part, to parents complaining of behavior that was remarkably similar to their own. I can't tell you how many mothers complained of messy rooms, and tried to present this as evidence of their child's "pathology," when the disarray of the rest of the house eclipsed all comers.

Some of the depression that appeared in my office was produced, yes, by cognitive distortions and by languid neuro-transmitters. But most of it was produced by the craziness of self-regard -- a regard that culminates in the reflexive deification of the ego. Crazy, too, was the feckless reason that crumbled in the face of every strong emotion. This is why so many people are depressed -- not because there are so many mean family members and bosses.

The problem of man today is not just that he chooses wrong, but that he cannot think straight. The reason why most conversation is bankrupt today is not because not much is said, but it is because not much can be said. There are not enough completed thought processes, not enough logical arguments comprehended, that can be rhetorically presented in valuable talk. What remains is the stuff that reigns in those ubiquitous cell phone dialogues, overheard in the darndest of places with the darndest of messages.

I hear them, in the blank Mall, giving commentary on their travels from one advertisement to another, talking of menus, the byzantine stratagems of societal competitors, complaints of spouse and family, the endlessly recursive dialectic of whether to purchase now or wait for the sale later, and what’s on TV tonight.

And I know that they are not one whit prepared for challenges or temptations. They will be set on fire by the merest of slights. They will jump to defcon red at the tiniest sight of rolling teenage eyes. They will be crushed by the first tragedy. They will run into the arms of the first seducer. They will lurch, inexhorably, to the siren throb of the burning cyber sites. Even clergy will embrace Bre'r Rabbit's Tar Baby, and find themselves caressed, luxuriously, by the soporific pride of despondency.

It is because, among other things, they have little moral imagination. They have no good stories or fables from a decent canon of literature. They have been shielded, by a cabal, from any poetic strain that could have made them root themselves into history, breathe in prayer, and reach like saplings into the sky of glory.

Instead, they web themselves into the Soma crowd, murmuring the cloying mantra, “You have every right to be mad.”

They have not grown into adults who can command themselves, their thoughts and their feelings. They can do this only by orienting their “psychic vision” (i.e., the nous) to Someone Higher: this orientation is the sine qua non of the Church’s ministry in general.

It is hardly necessary to add that such has not been done. The sane vision of Christ is not, in practice, the ministry of the Church. Recruitment has been done in the name of ministry, yes. Vague forms of team development, yes. Encouragement, yes. Entertainment (and too much), yes. Grotesque consciousness-raising and liberationist experimentation, yes. Various and regrettable political garblings, yes.

Real Christian ministry, in contrast, usually does not excite, and will never titillate. Occasionally, it may not even succeed at bringing in the sheaves. But it will produce reason and peace ...  even in the land of the Gadarenes.

I suspect that the doctrinal content of catechesis, the apostolic mystagoguery if you will, was seen by the Fathers as a medicine of rationality. There was no stupefying division into “pastoral ministry” and “christian education” (whatever that is). It was all one. It was all a seamlessly unified ecclesial work to push the soul into reason, peace and beauty.

But we live in a science fiction world, where – psychically – all the techno-dystopias have actually come true. Experience, in this world, is immediate, formless and chaotic, where the style is completely, and exhaustively, barbaric. The style of man has been dredged from life, and from his existence the image has been effaced.

So we are raising people, and children, in not a secular world, but a mad one – one that has been assiduously prepared for the prevention of thought.

I began by claiming that this is not about youth ministry, but I will say this at the end. Among the many ideas that will be offered, in this theme, I suggest this. I really think that youth ministry and all ministry is about good catechesis. Not that Barney stuff of feeling good about yourself when you probably shouldn’t. But about the Holy Trinity. About the transforming love of God that informs the cosmos with the beauty of meaning, and the meaning of beauty. About the economy of Salvation, brought by the God-Man Jesus Christ, and radiated throughout the universe by the Church. About the duty of Mystery and the privilege of Prayer.

And I would teach them the Fathers, and the stories of Scripture. Just as Zosima once said,

[The priest] could open the Book and read to them out of it; there would be no need for him to spout wisdom to them, to give himself airs, and to feel himself superior to them. He need only read with feeling and humility and be gratified if they listen to him and understand him; he himself should enjoy the words he reads ... let him not worry: the heart of a Christian will, in the end, understand everything! ... a nation is lost without the Word of God, for every human soul thrists for His Word and for the good and the beautiful.

I would teach, also, without embarrassment, the old Western Canon of literature (at least, the little I know of it). I want them to know those long, multi-footed similes of Homer and those moralistic metaphors of Dante. I want them to know about Childe Roland’s war with the Paynim, and his approach to the Dark Tower. I want them to get the gags that are all of Bertie’s allusions to Shakespeare, Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Coleridge and Cervantes delivered in the space of a single schtick.

I want to teach them how to think and how to laugh, and why the