Archives for October 2010

It is to this sort of statement that a soul might look to thank his holy stars he was born under a constellation that was at once one, holy, catholic and apostolic. But even if he were not, even if he were given the pabulum of Parmenides, the quotidian of Quintilian, the scotches and scabbards of a hoplite or the sere stoicism of a centurion, would not such a one cling more dearly to the grateful fact that he was born under a Hellene or Roman star? That such a star would catch fire from the summit of Olympus? That such a fire would heat the pitch that would preserve the pilings for the Pontus Maximus’s speculative ponti? That such dentistry would cage the tongue that spoke to uphold such bloody augurs, dour omens and fastidious fasti that best maintained pax deorum?

A man, truly a man, body and soul, would rather all this, I say, than be left on the cold perch of the fabled giant’s shoulder, gazing with self-delusion at the shambling and crumbling horizons of the modern world – full of satellites and telescopes, images unreal, cities unreal, love and eroticism, unreal. We see through the telescope and fool ourselves into thinking that the distance we reach is progress; in fact, we are no really further than Plato’s troglodyte, blinded to a more sacred precision by a dumb fascination with accuracy. Indeed, can we really blame Plato’s Pluto for not rather desiring a natural marriage of mind and body in Ithaca or Tarentum than an unholy divorce courted by the Reformation, consummated by the Enlightenment and laboring to give birth even now in these infant days of the Self-haunted 21st Century?

Of course, it is for the catholic mind to see that even the suicide warrants a burial mound – if only – to remind us with what care nature’s stern but loving mother tenders us; a monument – if only – to maintain a prudent guard of that memory which was lately our mother’s children and our own siblings; and a sentinel – most certainly – to counsel us and send us forth in cautious opposition to any who might once again raise the specter of self-obliterating fictions passing as true philosophies.

Even second best to the unity proposed first by the figure of Christ (the truth of such unity is, arguably, evident in Christendom’s tangible fruits: the arts and sciences of its finest minds) and even carried through all its permutations of classical culture, history and philosophy, the pagans’ belief is nothing by comparison to the faith which begins in a crib and ends on a cross (the truth of which, equally arguable, is evident in Christendom’s tangible harvest of martyrs, if you can and do believe such things).

But our current dilemma has been heaped upon us not by the holy innocence being set upon by the logical sword point of pagan belief – for which even the Romans can be commended in preserving whole against the deviltry of Carthage – but by a queer veering from Christianity itself. In fact, it would take a more sophisticated perversity than even Carthage (to which, nonetheless, we have now come) – the so-called Renaissance – to serve as a momentous acknowledgment of the moment the wood warped and the olive press of body and soul no longer adhered or applied. Thus, again, Mr. Dawson:

Voltaire writes: “For 900 years the French genius has been almost always cramped under a Gothic government, in the midst of divisions and civil wars, without fixed laws or customs…The nobles without discipline, knowing only war and idleness, churchmen living in disorder and ignorance, and the populace without industry stagnating in their idleness.”

This absolutism of judgment, of course, has its roots in the literary culture of the Renaissance, which revived in an abstract form the old dualism of Hellenism and barbarism and thus for the first time introduced a cleavage between the facts of social development and the ideals of the educated classes (-Dawson, ibid.).

It was this cleavage which became the (in)fertile furrow which the Enlightenment would sow with blood and which we now reap in…well, we are past tears. In fact, all traces of tragedy are abolished from the postmodern mindset. Like Euripides of old, who destroyed tragedy the moment Bacchus’ defining features were revealed beneath the torn mask (and torn curtain) of tragedy, the postmodern man has no tears. He has only facts and his perilous quest is to find meaning in those facts. As a famous Catholic memoirist, whose ancestors inhabited civilization’s nemo region of Alsace-Lorraine, once remarked over whisky and bitters, “What makes the postmodern at least conducive to sanity is his obsession with definitions” or something to that effect, the whisky having obtained too succinct an advantage over the bitters on that particular occasion for this author to recall the memoirist’s words with greater precision. And so let us have definitions – and have them, indeed, to hilt and brim.

After the twilight of the gods has given way to the mellow evening of metaphysical croquet (with ontological cocktails immediately following) we are left to determine our course – by a left path cluttered with the utter disjoint of despair (though, as Mr. Walker Percy quoting Mr. Soren Kierkegaard notes, more desperate for not knowing it is despair) and by a right path cleared with the trim, balance and heft of sound definitions (at the very least). So to reverse the Cartesian formula: sum ergo cognito. And in my being’s capacity to think, the intellect’s use of reason is not “merely an organ that has been developed by man’s effort to adapt himself to his environment,” as Mr. Dawson says (IBID), excoriating the faddish (d)evolutionary theories that make mice of men and vice versa; rather, the catholic mind is able to imagine – with the aid of both fine and liberal arts, those ultimate borders of intellect’s empire and thereby the colder frontiers that produces the empire’s fresh heralds of humility. It should be remarked at this point, too, that humility ought to be considered the exact opposite of suicide.

So we enlist the poets and artists to erect their houses of words, their woodsheds of fiction, their domestic iconostases of staring and penetrating images, employing that ever ancient-ever renewable trinity of resources: goodness, truth and beauty. Today, these terms (which come with their own limits withal) obtain to naught within the modern ear, except a bit of wind and a quick reactionary gust which obtains to a startling verisimilitude of dear old Pythagoras’ sacred beans. So perhaps we might do well to harbor them as Pisistratus and Caesar had the Eleusinian sort. Otherwise, they are inflated in an age of cheap durable goods, an age when out-Carthaging Carthage, we delete our children a priori and dispense with our demons a posteriori.

That said, we would do well, too, to acknowledge the suicide in the family and give him a fitting burial – though in a precinct distinct from hallowed ground, as the churchmen of old would have insisted. While the baptism of the individual is not revoked by suicide, its effects are to a certain extent willfully resisted. Indeed, when speaking of a body politic and a body human, the pathology is clearer in the large than in the small. At least it is so in this case. We may have sympathy for the singular Hamlet pondering the rising stock of his bodkin; but for an entire culture of Danish diddlers, we can be assured of a simpler paper chase and less dubious pedigree.

Just as grey can be predicated of the nocturnal feline en masse, so too the artist can apply such masks to make saints and sinners cavort alike on the eve of All Saints. So it is that as Christians of old turned houses to churches and palaces to cathedrals, let the artist and poet build without fear over the suicide’s grave. Let him even find inspiration in his poor pitiable relation’s fruitless works, his endless Katherine wheel of days and his autocratic auto-da-fe.

For whether the modern age ends well or badly (though the universe’s water clock sounds more like a sinking than a raising at this point in time, it must be admitted), more than even the classical world can understand, “the ideal of the supernatural” came to show the world saecula saeculorum with offense enough to surprise everyone. From that cross that divides history (Mr. Dawson, again), all endless blessings flow – most importantly for our purposes here, as Mr. Dawson notes, as a defense against decay, despair, and specious and spurious notions of progress.

Indeed, the ideal became the real, the possible became the actual, and man’s solution to suicide became a fleshy rational biped submitting himself to parental and regal authorities, government taxes and even the banality of evil and ordinary death. Scandal! Folly! Ah, but Mr. Dawson’s “all-powerful ally outside time” also anointed time by stepping into it. Such must the suicide consider; such, alas, will the suicide deny; and such did Cato and Sylvia Plath examine as they saw their faces reflected in the black waters of Styx asking, Where was this so-called ally for me?

We cannot answer that question, of course – not definitively (though a Jesuit we’ll call “Father Methuselah” once speculated over a dry gin martini garnished with an unpitted green olive, “It is possible for grace to insert itself between the practice of the finger’s muscle on the pistol’s trigger and the forceful supersonic ingress of the heat-expanded lead into the cranium,” or something to that effect, the gin having made, at the time, high liturgical sport of this writer’s memory.

We can only respond by pointing out that this omniscient being became our ally once for all, in infant simplicity, despite – to paraphrase Mr. Dawson in another context – the scandal of Jerusalem and the folly of Athens and Rome, even as Moses came to rest among the Pharaoh’s children; came once for all to rest in discursive clarity among the temple elders, even as Noah survived break and blow of wind and flood to navigate his way to the slopes of Ararat; and came once for all, passing from this world for a time and times on a cross that now serves as sun dial for history, but returning three days thence to renew even the wintriest of man’s discontent, even as evinced by the slow self-slaughter of our own late great Western Civilization.