The past is a foreign country

The Rolls Royce Cloud pulled up (of all the ironic incongruities!) in front of my modest condominium. Out stepped a gentleman in a tux WITH TAILS! I watched him out the window as he placed on a silver tray, with white-gloved hands, a cognac glass, popped open a bottle of Camus, and deftly poured some into the glass, then added a rose in a vase, and placed beside it a folded parchment with a red wax seal upon it. Then he rang my doorbell.

First time I ever had Camus Cognac ... along with something else I missed while looking out the window: a neatly-wrapped pack of four Louixs cigs. Amazing.

You guessed it. This guy's got taste. No, not the gentleman courier. I mean the gentleman who sent the courier: the clandestine underground correspondent we keep on retainer in an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep it's secrets, Guy Noir - Private Eye, who more than makes up for the modest stipend I send him in all these elegant accessories he sends along with his telegrams and sundry other missives. It's like being a seminary professor and hiring a guy with James Bond's tastes (or James Bond himself!) to do a little sleuthing for you. You pay him pennies on the dollar in terms of the good time he shows you. It makes Lent a nearly impossible challenge some days.

Here's what he wrote me: Noir, not Bond (though they could be the same person for all we know):

Interesting meditation here. This part hit me because it is a boilerplate line of recent papacies: "And there is no going back."

Peter Kreeft has a counterpoint line to the effect that, "People say you can't turn back the clock, but why not? Isn't that exactly what you do if it is telling the wrong time?"

Like in discussion of many other items, a lot of informed people would say the old product was simply plain better. They don't make them like they used to. Etc. An odd attitude to have to take to a Church's most prized communal possession.

Oh, and enjoy the cigs. I picked them up in Havana, of all places, last week. [emphasis mine - PP]

The "meditation" Noir was referring to was this piece, by James Casper, "The Past is a Foreign Country" (Ignatius Press, March 19, 2015). Wistful and profoundly true, I was glad to have the Camus Cognac in hand as I read the piece, which awakened some deep sentiments in my own soul:

Much we know about the world would be lost were it not for artistic renderings of the past. Memories otherwise would seldom outlive those who remember.

Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars forced professional historians and casual readers alike to revise assessments of the Catholic religion in England in the years immediately preceding the Reformation:

If medieval religion was decadent, unpopular, or exhausted, the success of the Reformation hardly requires explanation. If, on the contrary, it was vigorous, adaptable, widely understood, and popular, then we have much yet to discover about the processes and the pace of reform.

In the almost six hundred pages following this observation, Duffy develops support for this thesis: that the Reformation in England was more of a revolution against a popular, widely-revered institution than an effort to reform something rife with problems and corruption. He can only build his case by reference to contemporary written accounts and a study of Church artistic works that somehow managed to survive state-sponsored efforts to obliterate the past.

Fascinating: Evelyn Waugh Face To Face BBC Interview

Quite stiff, awkward, a bit difficult; but if you love Waugh, fascinating. Some things about his conversion beginning around 15:30ff. And what he says about Protestants and "heathens" around 27:30ff. is positively endearing.

Thomas Howard interviewed by Patrick Henry Reardon and David Mills

The Catholic Angler
An Interview with Thomas Howard

A longtime friend of Touchstone and himself a model of the “ecumenical orthodoxy” and “mere Christianity” we strive to represent, Professor Thomas Howard has brought many—Catholics as well as Evangelicals—to a deeper understanding of the treasures of the historic church through his writings and personal influence.

A graduate of Wheaton College and New York University, Professor Howard taught for many years at an Evangelical college until he became a Roman Catholic in 1985. From then on until his retirement he taught English at St. John’s Seminary College, the seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. 

He has written several books, on both religious and literary subjects, beginning with Christ the Tiger, a sort of spiritual autobiography, in 1967. Since then he has written seven more books, including Evangelical Is Not Enough; Lead, Kindly Light, the story of his conversion to Catholicism; and most recently On Being Catholic. He has also written studies of the novels of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, notably The Achievement of C. S. Lewis and C. S. Lewis, Man of Letters. Ignatius Press, the publisher of On Being Catholic, also distributes a videotape series of 13 lectures by Professor Howard on “The Treasures of Catholicism.”

Professor Howard was interviewed by senior editors Patrick Henry Reardon and David Mills while at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry to teach a weeklong course on the novels of C. S. Lewis. The interview has been edited for clarity and completeness, but the oral style has been retained.
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Touchstone: One of the things C. S. Lewis is now notable for is his intellectual dissent from, in a way his assault on, feminism. I mean not the ordination of women as in his essay “Priestesses in the Church?” but the feminist ideology in general.

Thomas Howard: That’s one of those questions that has to be chased all the way through the corpus of Lewis’s works, because, obviously, feminism as such was not then a major or articulate force. He wrote the essay “Priestesses in the Church?” because the question had surfaced in a mild Anglican sort of way, but there was nothing very imminent about it.

Lewis presents a view of reality at a polar extreme from the frame of mind that ends up demanding ordination of women as presbyters. Obviously, he believes in hierarchy, but it’s not a hierarchy of power, which seems to be the feminist understanding. The whole discussion of priestesses in the last thirty years has run along sociological and political lines, with theology dragged in, when necessary, from the sidelines and various attempts made to rewrite the Bible to show that St. Paul said you should ordain women as presbyters.

In Lewis, you get a vision of things—of everything—in which the whole question of masculine and feminine is a subdivision of tremendous, prior considerations that he understands to characterize the universe. Lewis felt that those categories are of the very stuff of the universe, prior to male and female. Male is the way masculinity exhibits itself under biological species or terms, and female is the way femininity manifests itself under biological species.

For him, hierarchy is obviously the way the dance is choreographed, or the way the map of the universe is drawn. He points out in one place that in a hierarchy one has the duty of obedience to those above one in the hierarchy and the duty of magnanimity and stewardship and noblesse oblige to those below one. I seriously doubt that Lewis would use the words “above” and “below” with respect to masculine and feminine, because they don’t apply. They’re the terms of people who can only think of a dance in terms of power—which makes for a pretty poor dance.
The locus classicus for his view of gender is, I think, the scene toward the end of Perelandra when Ransom sees the two eldila: Perelandra, who is feminine, and Malacandra, who is masculine. The feminine eldil, Perelandra, participates in equal majesty, dignity, authority, and so on, with the masculine figure, Malacandra, but she has a receptiveness, a nurturing side. All these words have become buzzwords now, but they weren’t when Lewis wrote them in the 1940s.

I think he would feel that it’s turning things upside down to try to come at the mystery of femininity and masculinity with a power glint in one’s eye, or with an egalitarian, calculating set of categories to try to even up the slices of the pie.

You see this mind in That Hideous Strength.

TH: There’s a sense in which the entire book That Hideous Strength is a document in the case. Jane Studdock is clearly deeply confused at the beginning of the book in her effort to avoid being thought of as “little wifey”—and who wants to be thought of as little wifey? Fairy Hardcastle calls her that.

But she doesn’t want to be identified with what she would think of as stereotypes, but which are actually archetypes, having to do with womanhood and being wife or mother, etc. She is an intellectual, she is writing her dissertation on John Donne’s “triumphant vindication of the body,” and yet poor Jane is a Gnostic without knowing it. She hasn’t got a clue about the vindication of the body. She doesn’t know that her body will turn out to be virtually Mark’s salvation, not just because he remembers her with lust or concupiscence in the toils of Belbury, but because it is her womanhood that stands with clarity and truth and good sense and resilience and toughness over against the bottomless deception and disintegration that is Belbury.

It is Jane embodied, not just the idea of Jane, not just Jane’s intellect—far from it—but Jane as his spouse that saves Mark. And, of course, the very last paragraph of the book is, in one sense, the beginning. We have now come up to the real beginning of the marriage. Mark is about to be saved. He has escaped hell, and Jane is to be his salvation.

Undone by the “Permanent Workshop” (a review)

by Philip Blosser

A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes.Edited, with a new Introduction, by Alcuin Reid. Ignatius Press. 124 pages. $11.95.

Most readers acquainted with English novelist Evelyn Waugh know him for his magisterial Brideshead Revisited(1945). Many know that he became a Catholic in 1930. Few, however, are familiar with his great love for the Traditional Latin Mass and how painfully he was afflicted by the liturgical changes throughout the last decade of his life.

A Bitter Trial is a collection of the personal correspondence between Waugh and John Carmel Heenan, the archbishop of Westminster, along with some of their other writings, during the tumultuous 1960s. It is significant, not chiefly because of what it adds to our understanding of the Second Vatican Council or its aftermath, but for the light it sheds on the raw and conflicting emotions felt by so many of the Catholic faithful and their spiritual shepherds during those years. First published in 1996, an expanded edition was released in 2011 with a foreword by Joseph Pearce and a new introduction by its editor, Dom Alcuin Reid.

Both Pearce and Reid contribute substantial insights to the volume. Traditionalists, however, would reject as premature Pearce’s judgment that, “with the wisdom of hindsight, we can now see the election of John Paul II as the date at which the high tide of the modernist encroachment within the Church began to turn.” Some would even question whether the tide has yet begun to turn. Others might also think that Reid lets Heenan off the hook rather too easily for going back on his earlier assurances that the liturgical changes would be negligible, assurances Waugh later described as “double-faced.” Reid states that Heenan, like so many clergy of his generation, found himself in an “almost-impossible situation.”

Waugh was only in his late twenties when he was received into the Church. “I was drawn, not by splendid ceremonies but by the spectacle of the priest as a craftsman,” he writes, using a simile suggested by G.K. Chesterton. “He had an important job to do which none but he was qualified for. He and his apprentice stumped up to the altar with their tools and set to work without a glance to those behind them, still less with any intention to make a personal impression on them.”

It is easy to forget that the Church in the decades preceding Vatican II, whatever her problems, experienced what Pearce calls a “burgeoning Catholic revival” and a nearly unprecedented heyday of notable conversions. A few weeks after Waugh’s conversion, the British weekly magazine Bystander observed that “the brilliant young author [was but] the latest man of letters to be received into the Catholic Church. Other well-known literary people who have gone over to Rome include Sheila Kaye-Smith, Comp­ton MacKenzie, Alfred Noyes, Fr. Ronald Knox, and G.K. Chesterton.” The list might also have included J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Dawson, Hugh Ross Williamson, Sir Alec Guin­ness, as well as many others — not to mention giants like John Hen­ry Cardinal Newman, Fr. Fred­erick William Faber, and Gerard Man­ley Hopkins not much earlier. Mean­while, a wave of literary converts rivaling England’s was sweeping the Continent, and included François Mauriac, Léon Bloy, Jacques Maritain, Charles Péguy, Hen­ri Ghéon, Giovanni Papini, Ger­trud von le Fort, and Sigrid Undset. “It is a singularly intriguing fact,” Pearce writes, “that the preconciliar Church was so effective in evangelizing modern culture, whereas the number of converts to the faith seemed to diminish in the sixties and seventies in direct proportion to the presence of the much-vaunted aggiorna­mento, the muddle-headed belief that the Church needed to be brought ‘up-to-date.’”

Comment: Waugh to Buckley

At the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, so sure was Evelyn Waugh that the Council wouldn't dare to abrogate the Latin Mass, that he wrote, in part, to William Buckley:

The nature of the Mass is so profoundly mysterious that the most acute and holy men are continually discovering further nuances of significance. It is not a peculiarity of the Roman Church that much which happens at the altar is in varying degrees obscure to most of the worshipers. It is in fact the mark of all the historic, apostolic Churches. I think it highly doubtful whether the average churchgoer either needs or desires to have complete intellectual, verbal comprehension of all that is said. He has come to worship.

[Quoted by Chris Conlee in "The Fever of Vatican II," New Oxford Review (January 2007), p. 34.]

Comment: Buckley on Waugh

Writing about the great English writer and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote:

I somewhere opined that Evelyn Waugh's death on Easter Sunday in 1966, the Sunday before the reformers promulgated the Kiss of Peace, was evidence that the Holy Spirit was in fact behind it all, but merciful in His afflictions: no imagination is so vivid as to visualize Mr. Waugh yanked from prayerful thought to clasp the hand of the pilgrim to his right, to his left, ahead, and behind him.

[Quoted by Chris Conlee in "The Fever of Vatican II," New Oxford Review (January 2007), p. 34.]

Why I love Evelyn Waugh

First of all, I love Waugh because, somewhere either in his autobiography (A Little Learning) or in his diaries (The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh), he remarks on how good looking he is.

This audacity is already evident early on, as in passages in his autobiography about his early education (A Little Learning [Little Brown, 1964], p. 86), where he says things such as this:

I was quite a clever little boy.

And again:

I was quite a brave little boy.

I also love Waugh because of the way he can catch you off your guard and leave you stunned speechless with your heart caught in your throat by remarks such as the following, taken from his letter to Ann Fleming of January 3, 1963:

Dear Ann

I am deeply sorry to hear of your sister's distressing death. You must pray for her soul. This is best done by going to a chapel where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. The most convenient for you is Westminster Cathedral; go up the far left aisle under the screen. Kneel. Dispel from your mind all other considerations. Say, not out loud but in your mind: 'I have no right to ask you anything. Please don't consider my merits or my sister's. You made her and me what we are. But you sent Jesus to die for us. Accept his sacrifice. With luck I have a few years left to me to make amends. She hasn't. So please accept anything good I have ever done as a negligible contribution to the immeasurable sacrifice of the incarnation, and let my sister into heaven.' Easy? Yes, really, particularly for you who have no pride. Try it anyway. (The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory [Penguin, 1980], p. 596)

The depth and profundity Waugh's fathom of Catholic truth revealed in such passing remarks as these is truly breath-taking.

On the other hand, I love Waugh because his nearly insane sense of humor never leaves him, as evidenced when writing to Lady Diana Cooper on August 28, 1962, when he addresses her as

Darlng Stitch Pug Baby

Or, when he writes to Margaret FitzHerbert on October 28, 1963, dutifully noting that it is the feastday of "S.S. Simon and Jude" before proceeding to address her as

Darling Pig

Or, yet again, when he pens such remarks as the following, taken from his letter to Lady Acton of June 10, 1963:

Dearest Daphne

... Woodruff has developed a senile infaturation for a very dangerous clergyman called Kung -- not Chinese, central European; a heresiarch who in happier days would be roasted. (The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory [Penguin, 1980], p. 608)

The last remark, I would also note, reveals a remarkable theological sensitivity and prescience, given the fact that even mainstream Catholics were fawning over Hans Kung -- yes, he is referring to Hans Kung -- well into the 1980s before his true colors became apparent to most of them!