Second Terrace

New tome on GK and Beren

The First Things site has an enticing review of Alison Milbank's Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: the Theology of the Real.

Ralph Wood sets into motion an almost hagiographic essay, and concludes with this superlative:

With clarity and wit and verve, she shows that the gift-quality of Tolkien’s and Chesterton’s art is premised on the gift-character of the universe itself. Their work, as she splendidly verifies, has profound moral implications. For in a gift-giving and gift-receiving world, we are not meant to seek our own advantage at the expense of others. Rather we are meant to create gifts—like those presents into which Galadriel has woven her own character before she gives them to the Company—that serve to free their recipients rather than putting them into our debt. Milbank has gifted us with what may well become our finest study of these Catholic artists in their unique relation not only to each other but also to our imagination-starved churches and culture.

I would like to purchase anything that almost hagiographizes these two heroes of mine. Trouble is, Alison Milbank's nice book, only 184 pages printed by T & T Clark, lists at the intriguing price of $120. My calculations reveal that this comes out to $0.65 per page. That's pretty steep, given the fact that for about 2 cents a page, you could get a lot of Proust, in a deluxe edition no less.

Of course, what you would do with Proust might differ from what you would do with GK or Tolkien, or their expositors like Milbank.

Tolle lege (while you can)

On a single day, the December Touchstone appeared in my mailbox, and the 26 November issue of Newsweek fell in my shopping cart at Giant Eagle.

The cover story of the latter trumpets Jeff Bezos of Amazon, holding up and eclipsing half his face, his new Kindle gizmo ($399), which is set to replace the old fashioned sort of paper-and-leather book.

The article gushes about this new e-book and e-books in general. Here are the ecstatic text-boxes:

1. “’The vision is that you should be able to get any book – not just any book in print, but any book that’s ever been in print – on the Kindle, in less than a minute,’ says Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.”

2. “Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem – in fact, you could subscribe to a book with the expectation that an author will continually add to it. A novelist might rewrite an ending.”

3. “Devices like the Kindle, with its reader-friendly ink and type face, can subsume consciousness in the same way a physical book does. It can take you down the rabbit hole.”

[I bet your imagination is piqued by that phrase, "it can subsume consciousness." Do books "subsume" your consciousness? No. But do virtual/techno books? Hmmmmm ... ]

Not to be outdone by Amazon, Google is doing its own digitization thing. Adam Smith (what a name) of Google’s Book Search project line, says that digitizing the world’s libraries is all about “getting rid of the idea that a book is a [closed] container.

Honestly, despite my misgivings about the constant press of technology into daily life and my romantic luddite proclivities, I find much in this project attractive. I won’t pay $399 for a Kindle, but in a year, I’ll probably pay $50 for an even better e-book. I kind of like the conservationist appeal: “We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world. ‘Do you really believe that we’ll be doing that in 50 years?’ asks Microsoft’s Bill Hill” (what a name).

No, we won’t be doing that for sure. I know that I will have to accustom myself to wincing at more screens.

But I am not so offended by clean white paper in codex, the feel and smell of leather, and the texture of imprint, and the beauty of typeface, the aroma of a newly-printed page in a book with wide margins, rich apparatus, and pages meant to be fanned and opened up into a play of apparent random and predestined, appointed revelation. I also like a sharp No. 2 Faber pencil for the scrawling of marginalia. I like the sound and feel of graphite scribing on paper.

And let us remember, fondly and morosely, that it took a book to call forth this rather cruel clue of Fermat's on a real live page: Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet. [Supposedly, Andrew Wiles back in 1993 fulfilled Fermat's challenge with a proof of Pythagoras' cultic riddle. Here I find myself very much like the atheists: I am not convinced by Wiles' proof because I will not understand him.]

Then there’s Touchstone. Fr. Michael Ward of Peterhouse in Cambridge reveals the secret unifying blueprint underlying the Narnian heptology. I will have to chew more on his idea that Lewis associated each of the seven books to a different planet in the Ptolemaic astrology.

But before this feature article, there’s this homily by that inestimable Dante (and Tasso) translator, Dr. Anthony Esolen. The penultimate section of his reflection on Josiah’s discovery of the Book of the Law in the shabby Temple is a threnody on the passing of books in this age.

Here it is, in Esolen’s very fine “Finders Weepers,” under the heading “A Land of Books”:

Books … Yes, I see books. I see a land littered with libraries. In them I see relics: wooden chairs and balustrades no one any longer has the skill to carve, and a few old books to go with them, dusty, forbidding, small-printed filled with observation, eloquence, and sometimes genius.

Nobody reads them. Few can. I can see those books packed in boxes to make room for the ephemeral. I see the boxes carted to the landfill.

I see crows pecking at the centuries …

I see Latin and Greek textbooks on the shelf behind me as I write. They are the works of years of devotion, by men who strove to understand the empires of our past, their glories and their fall. Their title pages take me aback. “Chairman of the Latin Department at Westfield High School,” reads one. “B.A., formerly fellow of King’s College,” reads another. Sometimes the editor boasts no title, because he is an amateur, a lover. I see these, I the holder of a doctorate, and am ashamed.

No Magic in Potter-land

[My apologies and prayers for everyone in southern California and north Georgia: this whole discussion must sound disagreeably irrelevant to you: May the Lord's graceful rain fall gently upon you, and bring solace to your forests and your land.]

Hey, everyone, (note the element of fatigue and cheerful aggravation) I did not get in this to argue about Dumbledore with the fandom. The blogosphere sounds like a bunch of angry villagers at a certain lightning-prone laboratory -- especially if one is attempting to steer a course via media.

I am neither endorsing Harry or condemning him. His books were entertaining, but I would not go to the Rowling texts to pan for nuggets of meaning. That would be like forcing poor Bertie Wooster into some loopy postmodern theory, or -- worse -- a special session at the MLA walpurgisnacht shindig.

I'll wager that at the Chicago MLA Convention at the end of this December, there will be more than one presentation on Rowling that focuses on some sort of faddish theory found hidden in her pages.

One goes to great books for meaning. One finds symbols in literature: metaphors are not all that hard. Heavens, even I can make a metaphor. But a real symbol is a hard thing to make, and takes greatness. Symbols make for great literature. Entertaining books are fun, and a lot better than video games and virtual reality, but it's a stretch to call them "meaningful."

It's true that I don't like it that JK said that the "father figure" is gay. That makes me neither anti-Potterian nor homophobic. And it doesn't matter one bit when and how and in what context applause after the Carnegie announcement was made. I don't want to talk about applause or Dumbledore's celibacy. It's getting a little ripe, n'est-ce pas?, when we surmise the unknown, unreported, unwritten inclinations of a fictional character. I don't know what "gay" means here, but I note that she didn't say "I've always thought that Dumbledore was a celibate gay." Did I miss the author's qualification that the gay-ness was a non-active gay-ness?

Here in my last post on Potter (I think), I will state my main and darkest suspicion about what happened to the Potter stories -- a set of tales I found thoroughly entertaining, though increasingly not so meaningful. While others find signs of Austen, narrative misdirection, Florentine alchemy and symbol, and Christian themes in Rowling, I find mostly, by the end, the influence of Judy Blume and Jung.

The Rowling partisans buoy themselves with the discovery of Christian symbols and themes, and induce the conclusion that this makes for a Christian book, or an okey-dokey book. It is true that there are Christian elements in Rowling's canon: but the same can be said for most, if not all, of Western literature, whether great or otherwise. For that matter, I can also find a good deal of Norse elements in Tolkien, Buddhist in Eliot, even Arab in Narnia, but that does not make these great writers anything but Christian. Furthermore, there is a lot of regrettable ilk written and marketed under the rubric of "Christian book" that can be described as "book" only because there are pages between two covers, but cannot be called "Christian" at all, even with a surfeit of Christian ingredients.

The purpose of fantasy in a Christian story is to pronounce, in human language, the usually unpronounceable things of the bodiless worlds. Christian fantasy takes magic seriously, because it finds magic and the larger world of the spirit quite real. The Good is painfully beautiful and bright. The Evil is demonic, decadent and decayed, always declining toward the satanic.

I strongly suspect that Rowling really doesn't believe in magic at all. I, on the other hand, believe it exists as a realization of the way things really are, as I hope to be more certain of spiritual realities than the physical ones. I am especially happier that miracles and "eu-catastrophes" exist.

I am afraid, though, that the magic of Rowling is the tiresome business of Jungian extrapolation from intra-psychic phenomena.

If that is so, there is no mythopoeia in Rowling. Mythopoeia depends on symbol -- each symbol linking, in one phenomenon, this world and the greater one. Rowling has all sorts of metaphor and metonymy, I'll give her that. But not transcendent symbol that speaks with a still small voice of the other side of appearances.

I wish (along with Fr. Stephen) that children could have their stories and the hearth would be safe from blood-sucking hyper-modernity, the firelight shutting out the dark and cold. They should be told of monsters, and not of gruesomely maudlin cutesiacs like Elmo, and certainly not of Freudian deconstructions like Bettelheim's Red Riding Hood, or of Jungian constructs like dementors and bogeys.

They should be told, in  good story, the honest truth that monsters are evil. They should be told, by a home fire that crackles merrily, about the heroes and angels that always win, because they always have and always will.

They should be told of fantasy that is true, instead of "fantasy" that is utilized only as instrumental narrative.

They should be told that God and the saints are always violating man's crummy prejudices about nature: the rules of science are always being broken, as time itself shatters science with every advance into the next moment. That single reason is why magic is really no big deal.

They should be told that sometimes, the hero does not come back except upon his shield. They should not be discouraged with that modernistic nonsense that the hero's victory over evil is merely a metaphor for puberty or growing up. No, no, and a thousand no's. The hero's victory is over a real external psyche, and the whole real world has changed accordingly. Things are really better because a good thing was done in history.

The hero doesn't get "well-adjusted," nor does he become a more complex person (which is the psychobabble heaven of Blume's Fudge and Forever): the hero in a good story journeys, fights and slays a real dragon. Other real people in the real village are saved, even if the hero dies.

When the "happily ever after" is only a showing up at home after a devil has been bound, and normal boredom has been restored, then things are neither happy, nor are they "ever after." It is likely that the return of the status quo ante to the stage deflates the mythic Journey and the Battle down to the gray, psychotherapeutic meanings of Judy Blume, or the dread angst of Leopold Bloom.

For my part, I think that a hero who fights death in the crisis really needs to go to the Home of which his hearth and heart were gleaming symbols. The community is healed, because he, as a saint, "filled up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in the flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church" (Colossians 1.24, KJV).

That's what should happen in the stories we tell our children. We should give talk show psychotherapy and guerrilla-egalitarianism a miss. Instead, we should revel in spooky magic and thrilling fantasy. We should read out loud to ourselves and our children stories that illumine our landscapes from within and haunt our consciousness with good ghosts.

My business with Rowling, which is now at an end, finishes with a "whatever" shrugging of the shoulders: she is neither magic nor fantasy, but at heart, only that other dismal stuff.

No magic, because there are, in the Potter-lands, no bigger worlds.

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).

Found: Silver Statue of Eudoxia

In our discussion of the life of St. John Chrysostom on Tuesday night, one of the participants asked if the silver statue of the Empress Eudoxia still stood.

I tried to remember if I saw a silver statue standing near Hagia Sophia. "No, I don't think so," I answered, scratching my head.

This statute lay at the heart of John's final controversy. Soon after his return from a short-lived exile, the Empress (who headed up an anti-Chrysostom coalition) erected a silver statue of herself up close to the Cathedral.

The setting was deliberate. St. John never flinched from letting the rich and powerful have it. He railed against the privileged not because they were rich and powerful, but because they did not use their riches to provide for the poor and their power to protect the weak.

And he did not flinch this time. He complained about the statue, and the star-studded "dedication" spectacle that went into its erection.

This was the last straw for Eudoxia. She hamstrung her milktoast husband Arcadius into exiling Chrysostom far away to the barbarous edge of the Empire -- to a place fittingly called "Pityus."

So, we know what happened to St. John Chrysostom, but what happened to the offensive statue?

I found it. It's in print form now (a single statue would be too limited in scope), and it's always in print. Here is the newest edition.

PS - be sure to play the video

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.

On feasting and fasting, and a few good books that cook

There are just a few cookbooks I like. They occupy space on my bookshelf, near my St. Gregory’s (Nyssa and Nazianzen), Dante, St. Maximus, Pelikan, Homer and Amis’ The King’s English.

If you’re interested, here they are:

The Joy of Cooking, nth ed., Rombauer, Rombauer Becker, and Becker.

The New Food Lover’s Tiptionary, by Herbst (unbelievably helpful).

Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts, which is full of rare tidbits like “Clam Cakes with Kidneys and Bacon,” how to play poker and win, and a short course in how to read a book by Mortimer Adler (I don’t care what Joe Epstein says about him, the cur).

And

The Supper of the Lamb – a culinary reflection, by Fr. Robert Farrar Capon.

You might have noticed a paucity of ethnic cookbooks in this list. I am surprised, too, given my penchant for most dishes Rusin and Greek. I suppose I would rather go over to the church kitchen and help the ladies pinch pirohi, bake nutroll and stuff halupki. Why bother doing that sort of thing on your own, when a solo effort would only end in despair? Also, if I want baklava or lamb, my neighborly Greek friends are just a few blocks away at the Presentation of the Lord Church.

And I certainly don’t need a recipe for prosfora: that’s a thing you do with your hands and your soul, kneading flour, yeast, a soupcon of salt and the water of warmth until the elements combine into the substance of man’s strength. When I was a new priest, the making of the loaves was as hard and self-conscious as a dimwitted searching for a boy in the wilderness who had been long-sighted enough to bring a lunch – oddly enough, one loaf for each thousand.

Now, I add the fine white milling, the leaven and mined preservation, and the spring until a single stuff forms, annealed, grasped (like St. Thomas) and touched with caloric effort and supplication: with every knead, I call for mercy.

In holy bread, work and prayer make faith. But then again, faith and prayer make work. And come to think of it, work and faith make prayer. I know it doesn’t make much arithmetic sense, but there you have it: daily bread.

Here are a few tidbits from Capon’s delectable work:

On the evils of virtual (not “virtuous”) eating

Against all that propaganda for fancy eating and plain cooking, I hope to persuade you to cook fancy and just plain eat. First of all, it is better for your soul. Only a daily renewed astonishment at things as they are can save us from the idols; it is our love of real processes and actual beings that keeps us sane.

On feasting and fasting

I would rather have one magnificent meal followed by a day of no meals at all, than two days full of ambitious mediocrities at close intervals. In this vale of sorrows, we should be careful about allowing abundance to con us out of hunger. [Hunger] is not only the best sauce; it is also the choicest daily reminder that the agony of the world is by no means over … Fast, therefore, until His Passion brings the world home free. He works through any crosses He can find. (145-146)

On luncheon

If you take all your meals seriously, none of them gets a chance to matter. On the other hand, consider lunch … it need be nothing more than a crust, a leaf, and a glass of wine.
Light meals, therefore – or none at all – until we can use our appetites for their true and human end: not simply to satisfy ourselves, but to confer greatness on what we love.

On cheese, wine, friends and bread (practice for paradise)

May you be spared long enough to know at least one long evening of old friends, dark bread, good wine and strong cheese. If even exile be so full, what must not our fullness be? (147-148)

I carry a strong affection for Capon’s book. It is one of the few volumes that cheers me instantly with a winsome, fireside and musk-smelling inn-feeling that is rare, that is the atmosphere of friendly humanity. He insists, as do I, on the simple fact that one of the many reasons why the divinely-ordained evening dinner that glues a house together has failed so rottenly in America is because of this horrifying fact: men and children and the worker-bees that come home for dinner are not interested simply because they are not hungry. They have grazed all day on the pouched stuff of the Brave New World.

I call, like this good Episcopalian priest, for fasting, and we certainly do a lot of that in the Orthodox Church. But where we are deficient, my friends, is that we have forgotten how to feast. (Few things are so ironically symptomatic of this deficiency as the sad fact that we pride our Lenten cookery for its similarity, in taste, to secular cooking -- that is a defeat of the purpose of the former, and an indictment of the latter).

Conviviality is a lost art. There is no civilization without it.

And one cannot really fast until he first knows how to feast.

Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism by Roger Kimball

Link: Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism by Roger Kimball.

You can't beat Kolakowski for his history and analysis of Marxism. Kimball significantly notes, from Kolakowski's preface to the new edition of his Main Currents of Marxism, that the third volume has never been printed in France (probably because he says mean things about Sartre and Althusser's admiration of Stalin).

Best of all is the Polish thinker's admonition about the techno-cultural (modern industrialism) for which he will be remembered in the future, quoted at the end of Kimball's article:

With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization -- the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is "in principle" an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.

Of course, I am quite willing to deny man's total automony, as the Church has long been in the business of making this impolite denial for some time. But in denying autonomy, man himself is not denied. Instead, it is in the denial of autonomy and the embrace of the sacred that man is restored and fulfilled.