The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580

The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580.  By Eamon Duffy.  Yale University Press; 2^nd edition, 2005.

 

Eamon Duffy is a well-respected historian whose primary field of focus is British history from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.  His major contribution to historiography is his revision of the prevailing view that English Catholicism was a decaying force that maintained precious little support in the broader English community when King Henry VIII broke with Rome and started the Protestant Church of England.  Duffy argues that this popular perception is quite far from the truth, and in fact Catholicism and its attendant traditions and practices were quite popular in England and formed an integral part of everyday life.

 

Revisionist history is inherently controversial, and Duffy’s work has received a wide range of responses, ranging from staunch supporters of the prevailing historiography who viewed Duffy’s perspectives as little more than wishful thinking.  In contrast, others, particularly Catholics, have responded warmly to Duffy’s scholarship, viewing it as a means of reclaiming a past that has long been distorted by false perceptions and slanted views.

 

In his introduction, Duffy criticizes the oft-stated assumption that English Catholicism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was primarily the obsession of the Church and the upper classes, and that the common people had little interest in this religion.  In this view, when Henry VIII imposed a new religious regime, the populace switched faiths without any compunction, and possibly even without much interest.  Duffy asserts that the complete opposite was the case.

 

“It is my conviction, and a central plank of the argument of the first part of this book, that no substantial gulf existed between the religion of the clergy and the educated elite on the one hand and that of the people at large on the other.  I do not believe that it is helpful or accurate to talk of the religion of the average fifteenth-century parishioner as magical, superstitious, or semi-pagan.  Nor does it seem to me that the most interesting aspect of late medieval religion lay in the views and activities of those who, like the relatively small number of Lollards, rejected its central tenets and preoccupations…It is true that the wealthy and literate had increasing access to and interest in types of spirituality previously confined to the monastery.  Yet within the diversity of medieval religious options there was a remarkable degree of religious and imaginative homogeneity across the social spectrum, a shared repertoire of symbols, prayers, and beliefs which crossed and bridge even the gulf between the literate and the illiterate.”    (2-3).

 

Duffy’s book is divided into two parts.  In the first, he describes religious life in England during his time, and argues that every aspect of the average Englishman’s life was permeated with religious teaching and practice.  Duffy studies the Mass, educational primers, belief in Purgatory, the lives of the Saints, religious business influences, and how the average person dealt with superstition and other folk beliefs that were opposed by the Catholic Church.  Duffy stresses that Catholicism was not some easily detachable and discarded trait, but instead was an essential part of the nation’s worldview.  Duffy illustrates just how deeply Catholic practices influenced people’s lives, such as in his study of the liturgy, where he describes how attending religious services helped people cope with all aspects of existence.    

 

“Any study of late medieval religion must begin with the liturgy, for within that great seasonal cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture, lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it.  Within the liturgy birth, copulation, and death, journeying and homecoming, guilt and forgiveness, the blessing of homely things and the call to pass beyond them were all located, tested, and sanctioned.  In the liturgy and in the sacramental celebrations which were its central moments, medieval people found the key to the meaning and purpose of their lives.”  (11).

 

The second half of the book is devoted to explaining how Henry VIII, his descendants, and his government changed England’s religion from Catholicism to Anglicanism.  Though Henry VIII initially saw his Church of England as exactly the same as the Roman Catholic Church, only without the Pope, others adopted new theological viewpoints.  The title of this book refers to the fact that the artwork and valuable treasures of the churches and chapels were all taken from their original homes and taken to enrich the nobility.  Indeed, the common people of England were largely impoverished as the Church’s property was taken away and its charitable activities were destroyed, and the rich nobles who promoted Protestantism seized hold of the wealth and kept it for themselves.     

 

Duffy illustrates that the average Englishman suffered in the midst of these upheavals.   The people of England obeyed their monarch because to go against their ruler, and therefore their country, was thought to be unthinkable.  Yet the actions of a determined elite minority transformed the nation from the top down, and the people had no choice but to follow them, even if it meant the death of their culture and in many ways, the destruction of a part of themselves.

 

“But the price for such accommodation, of course, was the death of the past it sought to conserve.  If Protestantism was transformed, so was traditional religion.  The imaginative world of the Golden Legion and the Festial was gradually obliterated from wall and window and bracket, from primer and block-print and sermon, and was replaced by that of the Old Testament.  Cranmer’s somberly magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemnand their most vulnerable moments.  And more astringent and strident words entered their hearts and minds too, the polemic of the Homilies, of Jewel’s Apology, of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and of a thousand “no-popery” sermons, a relentless torrent carrying away the landmarks of a thousand years.  By the end of the 1570’s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had the known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.”  (593).

 

The story of England at this time is a tale of how a nation’s people lost their faith by force and had another foisted upon them.  A government managed to completely change the entire country’s culture by replacing the most essential aspect of that culture: its religion.  Other historians have approached this subject with a great deal more anger and resentment, but there is no rage in Duffy’s book, only a very deep and profound sadness.  In well over six hundred pages of text, Duffy creates a picture of a beautiful and complex world, one that was unceremoniously destroyed.  It is therefore understandable why many Anglicans might find this book offensive: Duffy’s book presents the story of the imposition of Protestantism in England as a heartbreaking tragedy.

 

 

­–Chris Chan

The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision

 The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision.  By Henry Kamen, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997.

 

Mention the Spanish Inquisition, and images of terror, tyranny, torture, and religious fanaticism are bound to pop into people’s heads.  Three of the most prominent images of the Spanish Inquisition in popular culture are Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of suspense “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Mel Brooks’ musical send-up in History of the World, Part One, and the Monty Python sketch with the famous line, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

 

The Spanish Inquisition is commonly used as a cudgel against the Catholic Church.  A reference to the Inquisition is usually used by the Church’s detractors to strip the Church of its moral authority, painting it as bigoted, violent, and cruel.  Even staunch Catholics feel that the Inquisition is a blot on the Church’s history.  Certainly the Inquisition was no credit to those who led it, and there were many cases of innocent people suffering for actions of conscience, but for all of its disturbing sins and injustices, the Spanish Inquisition is one of the most misunderstood and wrongly represented periods in history.  This is not meant to say that the prevailing views of the Inquisition are wholly wrong, far from it, but the Inquisition has been blended with mythology and historical distortions, so that the popular conception of the Inquisition is a far cry from the actual historical event.

 

Kamen first wrote The Spanish Inquisition as a young scholar in 1965, arguing that for all of the Inquisition’s iniquities, the overreaching devastation and viciousness that supposedly characterized the era was grossly exaggerated, a product of Protestant propaganda, Enlightenment exaggerations, and authors of historical novels that were more fancy than fact.  The true state of Spain during the time of the Inquisition is too complex to summarize, but the Inquisition was run by the Spanish government, at a time when the country was fighting over its national identity.  Anti-Semitism was common, but a surprising amount of fear and hostility was directed towards many Jewish converts to Christianity, even against families that had been Catholic for generations.  Yet the complexity, intricacy, and contradictions of the era make summarizing the time period challenging, and prove that the popular conceptions of the age have been highly distorted.  The scope of this review cannot do justice to all of the points that Kamen addresses, and the absence of time spent discussing certain aspects of his analysis is not meant to belittle or whitewash any facts not covered here. 

 

Kamen observes that, “We can be certain of one thing.  Spain was not, as often imagined, a society dominated exclusively by zealots.” (5)  In his introduction, Kamen writes about his goals in writing this book:

 

“Written principally for the general reader, this book pays due attention to the major scholarly themes that have dominated Inquisition studies.  Its conclusions, though based firmly on documentary sources, will not satisfy everybody.  My aim, however, has been t go beyond polemic and present a balanced and updated synthesis of what we know about the most notorious tribunal of the western world.  Like its predecessor, my book is fundamentally a ‘state of the question’ paper and therefore still open to discussion.  It is dedicated to all those who have helped us to look more dispassionately at the Holy Office of the Inquisition.” (xi-xii)

 

Kamen is a very good writer, but he deals with a massive and complex subject, and for people with a limited background in European history, particularly Spanish history, the sheer breadth of information is enough to overwhelm casual readers.  History is way more complex.  In order to understand the political culture during the reign of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, it is important to know the details behind the Reconquista.  In order to understand the Reconquista, one needs a solid grasp of the details of life under the years of Muslim conquest.  In order to comprehend the state of society under Muslim rule, one needs to know what life was like before that...  And so on and so forth.  Kamen’s greatest stumbling block as a writer is a common one for many historians.  He knows so much about Spanish history that he often forgets that many of his readers have a much more limited knowledge of the subject. One does not need to be an expert on Spanish history to appreciate this Kamen’s fine work, but it may require a little additional effort in to understand the nuances of historical currents at work here.

 

Another problem facing those who seek to easily summarize the Inquisition is the fact that the Inquisition seemed to have broad popular support.  Kamen writes:

 

“Throughout the history of the Inquisition, commentators agreed on the impressive support given to it by the people.  Foreign visitors to the peninsula were appalled by the mass participation of the public in autos de fe.  Subsequent defenders of the tribunal felt that they could in part justify the Inquisition by the evidence of its roots in the authentic faith of Spainards.  Opponents of the tribunal were equally impressed.  Eceb the great Llorente, the first modern historian of the tribunal, was staggered by the lack of evidence for any opposition to it in Spain…

The apparent support given by the people to the Inquisition has inevitably created problems of interpretation.  Partisans of the Holy Office have maintained that its popularity was based on its unswerving sense of justice, and that it responded to a profound religious need.  Critics, by contrast, have presented it as a tyranny imposed by the state upon the free conscience of Spainards.  Both extremes of opinion can probably be supported by contemporary evidence, but neither is wholly plausible.  The primitive state bureaucracies of fifteenth-century Castile and Aragon were ill equipped to impose a tyranny on the mass of the people abd in reality never attempted to do so.  If the Inquisition acquired a broad base of support, on the other hand, we need to examine why this came about.” (66)

 

Other writers have attempted to revise conceptions of the Inquisition.  Thomas F. Madden’s brief essay “The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition” (http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0075.html), is an interesting overview of how contemporary scholarship has led to major revisions of scholarly interpretations of the Inquisition.  Madden’s essay, though its theses vary slightly from Kamen’s work, may be a useful piece of pre-reading before studying Kamen’s book.

 

 

“The Inquisition helped to institutionalize the prejudices and attitudes that had previously been commonplace in society.  Like all police forces that operate in secrecy and are not publicly accountable, it began to enjoy the arrogance of power.  As the society of conflict developed, the Inquisition found itself at the centre of communal tensions.  The people accepted it because its punishments were directed not against them but against the scapegoats and the marginalized: heretics, foreigners, deviants.  Outside the crisis years of the mid-sixteenth century, few intellectuals felt threatened.  From the early eighteenth century onwards many felt that the Inquisition could be rendered harmless if subjected entirely to government control.  Not until the end of that century did the tribunal show itself to be clearly out of step with opinion in both Church and state.”   (320)

 

What lessons should we draw from our revised view of the Spanish Inquisition?  The Inquisition is often denounced as an example of intolerance gone mad.  Yet one particularly harmful form of intolerance is the belief that the people of the past were less intelligent, decent, and civilized that the people of the modern era.  If we bemoan the very real flaws of past societies, we have to be seriously prepared to address the similar problems in our own culture.  Observers of American culture can see how people who diverge from the standards of political correctness are demonized in the public arena.  Right now in Great Britain, victims of violent crimes are sued and prosecuted simply for defending themselves against assaults, and children are charged with crimes (known as Anti-Social Behaviour Ordinances) for as little as playing ball in the streets.  (For a look at the insanity that has crept into the British legal system, please read John Mortimer’s perceptive novel Rumpole Misbehaves).  The Spanish Inquisition was not a time for anyone involved to be proud of it, but those who condemn the mores of the past would to well to turn a critical eye towards the follies of the present.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Saint Francis of Assisi

Saint Francis of Assisi.  By G.K. Chesterton, numerous editions, first published 1923.

 

Saint Francis of Assisi is simultaneously one of the most famous and most misrepresented saints.  Painted as a kind of proto-hippie, a crusader against an overly worldly and materialistic Church hierarchy, and as an over-idealistic aesthetic by various sources, G.K. Chesterton asserts that all of these misconceptions are very far from the true life and legacy of Saint Francis of Assisi.

 

Chesterton is fully aware that the major problem facing him is that the average reader is improperly educated about history and culture.  The great curse of common knowledge is the belief that “everybody knows” something.  “Everybody knows” that the Dark Ages was a time of stagnation in Europe, and “everybody knows” that certain people were horrid human beings, and “everybody knows” so many other things, so there is no need to question them or give them a second thought.

 

The problem is, all too often, everybody is wrong.  All too often a narrative or a character summation has been passed around from generation to generation in a kind of gigantic game of “telephone,” where the story is repeated with ever-so-slight adjustments each time, until the current version of the tale is almost completely unrecognizable from its initial form.  Common knowledge is dangerous because it is so prone to turning everybody into ignoramuses.  When everybody assumes that the world was a certain way and that famous portraits of people’s character must be accurate, it never occurs to them to question if someone’s name has not been whitewashed or if an era’s reputation has not been unjustly dragged through the mud.  

 

Chesterton’s book is not based on long-lost documentary evidence on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, or even extensive research on the existing literature on the man.  Instead, Chesterton challenges the reader to review everything he thinks he knows about the man and his era.  Guiding the reader through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and providing the reader with psychological insight into the people who figured prominently in St. Francis of Assisi’s life, Chesterton asks the reader to move beyond facile snap judgments of who the heroes and villains (if any) of the story are and to really think about who people are, what their actions meant to their own lives, to the lives of those around them, and to the world in general.

 

Chesterton takes pains to stress that St. Francis was a man of God, not the New Age flower child that he is occasionally depicted as being in popular culture.  As the following passage shows, St. Francis loved nature and animals because they were the creations of God, not because they had a supernatural power of their own.

 

“St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not. The phrase implies accepting the material universe as a vague environment, a sort of sentimental pantheism. In the romantic period of literature, in the age of Byron and Scott, it was easy enough to imagine that a hermit in the ruins of a chapel (preferably by moonlight) might find peace and a mild pleasure in the harmony of

solemn forests and silent stars, while he pondered over some scroll or illuminated volume, about the liturgical nature of which the author was a little vague. In short, the hermit might love nature as a background. Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine darkness out of which the divine love had called up every coloured creature one by one.

He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. A bush could stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as ready to welcome the brigand as the bush.

In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing, being a child of God and therefore a brother or sister of man.”

 

All too often, St. Francis’s life and teachings are used to castigate the Church for being too worldly.  These critics fail to realize that the Church could not perform the charitable work is does without funds.  St. Francis’s order was founded as a group of monks in need of lifelong charity themselves.  Chesterton argues that the Pope realized that there was plenty of room in the Church for Franciscans, but that it was not necessary, indeed potentially detrimental, for all members of the clergy to be Franciscans.  Chesterton writes:

 

“The truth is that this incident shows two things which are common enough in Catholic history, but very little understood by the journalistic history of industrial civilization. It shows that the Saints were sometimes great men when the Popes were small men. But it also shows that great men are sometimes wrong when small men are right. And it will be found, after all, very difficult for any candid and clear-headed outsider to deny that the Pope was right, when he insisted that the world was not made only for Franciscans.”

 

Chesterton’s book is relatively short, but each page is full of insight and wisdom.  It is an easy read, consisting of concise summaries of the major events of Saint Francis’s life, as well as profiles of the other major figures of his life and descriptions of the state of the world.  At the end of his book, Chesterton writes:

 

“For that is the full and final spirit in which we should turn to St. Francis; in the spirit of thanks for what he has done. He was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its

depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the mere fact of existence if we realize that but for some strange mercy we should not even exist. And something of that larger truth is repeated in a lesser form in our own relations with so mighty a maker of history. He also is a giver of things we could not have even thought of for ourselves; he also is too great for anything but gratitude. From him came a whole awakening of the world and a dawn in which all shapes and colours could be seen anew.”

 

Readers will be lucky to take away from this book a renewed sense of appreciation of the world and a strengthened feeling of gratitude for the grace of God.  The point of reading lives of the saints is to inspire and to encourage people to live better, more virtuous lives that prove beneficial to others and the world.  In his book on the life of Saint Francis, Chesterton does not necessarily encourage his readers to mirror the great saint’s behavior exactly, but he does suggest that his readers would greatly benefit to strive to approximate Saint Francis’s great reverence for God and pure appreciation for all of God’s creation.  Saint Francis of Assisi was Chesterton’s first major theological work written after he entered the Catholic Church, so it is infused with the energy of a convert who has recently found his way home and is now seeing the world with fresh eyes.

 

 

–Chris Chan

The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh

The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh.  By Ian Ker, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.

 

In this book, Ian Ker presents profiles of six of the most prominent Catholic British authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  All but Belloc were converts to Catholicism.  Throughout their careers, these authors continually incorporate themes of faith, the clergy, and theology in their writings, ranging from fiction to nonfiction to poetry. 

 

Nearly all of the authors discussed in this book (I am as of this time unfamiliar with the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins) are favorites of mine.  I am not a fan of these authors simply because they are Catholics. Rather, I am captivated by the way that these authors invigorate and enrich their work through the worldview expressed in their books, and it just so happens that their worldviews are driven by their faith.  One of my favorite quotes on literature comes from the novelist, essayist, and social critic Alice Thomas Ellis, who quipped, “Once you take away the religious element, you can’t write fiction. Well, you can, but it’s boring.”

 

Other than a brief introduction and an even briefer conclusion, Ker’s book is composed of six chapters, each devoted to a short biographical overview of one of the authors, as well as a critique of some of each author’s work and the Catholic themes that permeate it.  The chapters grow longer as the book proceeds.  The first chapter on Newman is only about thirty pages, which is far too short to do justice to the man’s life and work.  Comparatively, the final chapter on Waugh is around fifty pages, composing nearly a quarter of the book.  The added length makes for a much better analysis, since far more of Waugh’s books are referenced here.  Casual readers should be cautious– some major plot points and spoilers are included in the chapters on Greene and Waugh.

 

Given the lengths of these profiles, and the details provided about each of these authors’ writings, these chapters might work best for readers with introductory-level knowledge about these authors.  Those who are well-versed on these writers will find a great deal of factual information that they already know, but the main attraction of this book will be for people who seek to find out how great writers were able to blend faith into their work.

 

The first two chapters on Newman and Hopkins are good overviews of the authors and their work, but their primary shortcoming is their brevity.  Ker touches upon some intriguing autobiographical information on the pair, but only a handful of sentences are provided on the topics before the direction shifts.  Herein lies the central difficulty of a work such as this.  When dealing with extremely talented authors who deal with massive themes and important topics, it takes considerable skills to condense the men and their writings into a few dozen pages.  The Newman and Hopkins chapters are the weakest– the two men are not sufficiently developed as individuals.  Thankfully, the next four chapters provide vivid images of the men in question.

 

The chapters on Belloc and Chesterton give extremely enjoyable glimpses of the authors and their work.  Some problems lie in the critical analysis of the pair.  Belloc is summed up as a minor writer, whose greatest works were his comic verse and his book The Path to Rome.  Belloc was a brilliant humorist and poet, and The Path to Rome is a classic, but I strongly disagree with Ker’s categorization of the man.  Indeed, Belloc’s histories, which sought to debunk the Whig version of history, which denigrated Catholic England in favor of the rise of Protestantism, are critical to understanding his Catholic literary mindset.  Belloc’s economic treatises, which blended Catholic moral teachings with monetary concerns, are another field where a social science was infused with faith.  By not including Belloc’s historical and economic studies, let alone his fiction, this chapter seems oddly hollow.

 

At one point, Belloc’s famous Christmas song, blending the joys of faith with tongue-in-cheek curses is cited.  When I hear this song, it brings on the warm fuzzy feelings in a way that “Frosty the Snowman” never could:

 

Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!

A Catholic tale have I to tell!

And a Christian song have I to sing

While all the bells in Arundel ring.

 

I pray good beef and I pray good beer

This holy night of all the year,

But I pay detestable drink for them

That give no honor to Bethlehem.

 

May all good fellows that here agree

Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me

And may all my enemies go to hell!

Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!

May all my enemies go to hell!

Noël! Noël!

 

In order to give proper due to the man and his work, the poem and its themes, hidden meanings, and humor would have to be analyzed and discussed. Unfortunately, the poem and others like it are not sufficiently critiqued, perhaps due to Ker’s insistence that Belloc is a “minor” writer.  Given the limited information provided, it is understandable that the reader who is uninitiated in the books of Belloc might concur that the man was a “minor” writer, but this would be a gross shortchanging of a remarkable wordsmith.

 

Ker refers to Chesterton as “Dickensian,” and with good reason.  Chesterton has many similarities to Dickens characters, such as Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield.  The major disappointment of this chapter is Ker’s seemingly selling Chesterton short.  Chesterton’s massive religious-themed output is barely addressed here, and his theology-saturated Father Brown mysteries are referenced but not discussed, and his novels are similarly ignored, despite the heavy spiritual themes of The Man Who was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross, Manalive, and The Flying Inn.

 

Ker argues that Chesterton’s best work is his collection of critical essays on the work of Charles Dickens.  There is something to be said for this selection– his book in Dickens is certainly a masterpiece, and shows Chesterton at the height of his powers, yet to focus on this work at the expense of all of his others, and to categorize Chesterton as yet another figure in the tradition of Victorian nonfiction prose stylists is accurate, yet oddly incomplete.  I should reiterate that this an original, intelligent, and well-crafted depiction of Chesterton’s work, and yet Chesterton’s chapter, like those of Newman, Hopkins, and Belloc, seems to only say a little bit about a very big subject.

 

The best essays are the last two on Greene and Waugh.  Both authors are given fairly substantial biographies, although I have grown tired of the typical characterizations of Greene as a man who was very much a “burnt-out case” in the later decades of his life, and Waugh as a Catholic left adrift in the wake of Vatican II.  There is a lot of truth in these depictions, yet after reading their work from that period I can’t help but feel that there was far more to their stories than that.  Wisely, Ker ends his chapter on Greene by mentioning my favorite anecdote about Greene, which coincidentally happens to be my favorite anecdote about Waugh, as well.

 

In the mid-1950’s, Graham Greene informed Evelyn Waugh that he was seriously considering ceasing writing about God in his novels, and Waugh firmly replied “Oh, I wouldn’t drop God if I were you.  Not at this stage anyway.  It would be like P.G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series.”

 

I liked this book a lot.  Perhaps my major problem with it lies with me, and not Ker.  The plain fact is, if I were to write a book like this– and I hope to some day– it would be radically different from The Catholic Revival in English Literature.  The focus, arguments, and critique would be utterly unlike Ker’s.  I can’t blame Ker for not being me.  Yet I can’t help feeling that this book reinforces the popular mindset that these Catholic writers are a subset genre, talented certainly, yet not part of the “canon.”  Perhaps my feelings are better expressed by Chesterton in his opening pages of his book on Charles Dickens:

 

In everyday talk, or in any of our journals, we may find the loose but important phrase, "Why have we no great men to-day? Why have we no great men like Thackeray, or Carlyle, or Dickens?" Do not let us dismiss this expression, because it appears loose or arbitrary. "Great" does mean something, and the test of its actuality is to be found by noting how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to some men and not to others; above all, how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to four or five men in the Victorian era, four or five men of whom Dickens was not the least. The term is found to fit a definite thing. Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer. He is treated as a classic; that is, as a king who may now be deserted, but who cannot now be dethroned. The atmosphere of this word clings to him; and the curious thing is that we cannot get it to cling to any of the men of our own generation. "Great" is the first adjective which the most supercilious modern critic would apply to Dickens. And "great" is the last adjective that the most supercilious modern critic would apply to himself We dare not claim to be great men, even when we claim to be superior to them.

 

–Chris Chan

 

In Soft Garments: A Collection of Oxford Conferences

In Soft Garments: A Collection of Oxford Conferences.  By the Right Reverend Monsignor Ronald Knox, Burns Oates, 1942.

 

Ronald Knox (1888-1957) is one of the leading Catholic English writers of the early twentieth century. Though he was raised an Anglican and entered the Anglican priesthood, five years after his ordination he converted to Catholicism and became a Catholic priest soon afterwards. 

 

Throughout his career he worked to evangelize the masses through essays and radio lectures, although he also wrote mysteries and pioneered the use of pseudoscholarship in exploring literature.  Knox became famous for a series of essays on Sherlock Holmes, where he combed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries for facts and trivia, and drew ingenious conclusions and speculations regarding discrepancies and unanswered questions in Doyle’s work. In Soft Garments is a collection of talks he gave to Oxford students, mostly on the role of religion in contemporary life.  The title comes from the Book of Matthew, which states, “They that are clothed in soft garments are in the Palaces of Kings.”

 

There are twenty-four essays in this volume, with titles such as “The Church and Human Progress,” “Morality and Convention,” “Unselfishness in Marriage,” “Faith Lost and Found,” and “Immortality.”  Knox’s first essay, “The Cross-word of Creation,” discusses the validity of various justifications for the existence of God, and concludes that some oft-cited “proofs” of God’s existence are too facile to hold under critical scrutiny, and then moves on to cite better evidence and reasoning to prove that God is real.  “The Cross-word of Creation” ends thusly:

 

“It’s not necessary for us to prove that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, it doesn’t matter (for the purposes of our present argument) whether the laws we find in nature are beneficent or harmful in their operation; the point is that order exists in the Universe, and that it is logically impossible to conceive of order existing without a Mind.  And if we denied the existence of that Mind, and went on thinking about it hard, it wouldn’t be very long, I fancy, before most of us would go out of our own.” (7).

 

Some of the essays deal with real-world situations, such as how Catholics who want to live up to their Church’s teachings ought to respond to divorces.  Knox observes that it is easy for Catholics to get caught up in uncomfortable situations, such as when a divorced friend asks a Catholic to be involved in the wedding party for a second marriage.  In “Cutting the Knot,” a penetrating look at the reasons why divorce is not acceptable, Knox writes,

 

““The Catholic Church forbids divorce”– so we are always reading in the newspapers.  Of course, that isn’t true.  It isn’t the Catholic Church which forbids divorce; Almighty God forbids divorce, and all the Catholic Church does is to say she’s very sorry, but there it is; the Divine Law will not allow a marriage to be dissolved, so she is afraid she can’t very well do anything about it.  If it was the Church that had made this law, she would be able to dispense people from this law; the whole point of the situation is that the Church is powerless; she can do nothing.  She can no more prevent a person who has two wives being in mortal sin that she can prevent a person who falls off a precipice breaking his neck.  It is not part of her legislation that a married man should not remarry.  It is part of her doctrine that a married man cannot remarry, so long as his first wife is alive.  If he goes through the form of marriage, it is an empty farce.” (166).

 

In this essay, and all of his other essays, Knox explains the Catholic Church’s position by first debunking the widespread popular opinion that the Church has adopted a certain perspective out of sheer arbitrariness.  Catholic doctrine is not meant simply to be mean or contrary or rigid, but instead is formed the way it is because it is compelled to follow a specific code of conduct because to deviate from the prescribed path will in all likelihood lead to something sinful, destructive, or unbearable.  Actions have consequences, and the many “don’ts” of Catholicism is to warn people of potential pitfalls that may not be immediately apparent.  Knox observes that Christian morality is far more than just an attempt to prevent people from doing whatever they want, it is a guide that has the wellbeing of everyone involved at heart.  Knox writes:

 

“Those are the people who are asking nowadays, “Why shouldn’t I?”  And the obvious answer is, “If you think morality a mere matter of social convention, if you are only concerned to consider what other people will say about you, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.”  Nobody will think very much the worse of such a man nowadays if his irregularities are not too blatant.  And if he cannot see that morality means something more than a code of human conventions, there is no more to be done with him.  What we have to try and persuade him of is: First, that there are such things as right and wrong.  Second, that the art of living and, if I may so describe it, the fun of living, can be found only in regulating your life according to fixed principles of conduct.  Third, that there is one single standard of morality, ideally for all people, and practically for all Christian people.  And fourth, that if you are really a Christian, the irksomeness of merely obeying negative rules is exchanged for the positive joy of trying to live so as to please our Lord Jesus Christ.” (163).

 

Too often, people look at Catholic codes on conduct and denounced them as repressive or irrelevant to the modern world.  Knox uses numerous plausible real-life examples throughout his work in order to illustrate how behavior restrictions apply to contemporary everyday life.  Knox’s primary theme in these essays is to point out just why acting as the Church teaches is vital to long-term safety and happiness.  Though certain codes of morality may clash with short-term interests and base desires, no modern argument has been able to prove Christian behavioral doctrines wrong.  As G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult and left untried.”

 

In Soft Garments, though written for a young audience nearly seventy years ago, is still accessible to readers of all ages today.  These were meant to be comparatively casual yet salutary talks, and in book form they make for chapters that are both easily read and challenging intellectually.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Mary, Mother of the Son: Volume III– Miracles, Devotion, and Motherhood

Mary, Mother of the Son: Volume III– Miracles, Devotion, and Motherhood.  By Mark P. Shea, Catholic Answers, 2009.

 

Mark P. Shea concludes his impressive trilogy on Mary’s true role in the Catholic Church and Christian civilization with Mary, Mother of the Son: Volume III– Miracles, Devotion, and Motherhood.  This volume centers on the enduring legacy of Mary, how her intercession helps Christians in countless ways, and the role of the miraculous in the world.  As in the first two volumes of this series, Shea utilizes historical analysis, logic applied to real-world situations, humor, popular culture references, and spiritual insight in order to explain why Christians have no need to fear venerating Mary.

 

Shea uses an intriguing array of sources for quotes in order to buttress his information.  On a couple of occasions he cites from anti-Catholic (or at least Catholic-critical) websites in order to reference their positions or erroneous views, and then provides counterpoints in order to contradict them.  Shea is unafraid to state that many of those people who harbor viewpoints contrary to his own (at least on Marian historical/theological matters) are wrong, but he largely avoids the common trap of painting his opponents as fools or deliberate liars.  There is a major difference between pronouncing someone’s statements as being incorrect, and impugning someone else’s integrity and intelligence, and for the most part Shea simply references opposing perspectives so he can criticize the ideas and not the people promoting them.

 

G.K. Chesterton, who Shea describes as one of his heroes, is referenced multiple times in order to explain Catholic doctrine on Mary further.  One of the most common allegations against Catholic beliefs and traditions is that they steal from pagan practices, thereby diluting or masking Jesus’s true message.  A primary goal of Mary, Mother of the Son, is to refuse such allegations.  Sometimes this takes a strictly factual approach, other times a theological, logical, or emotional tactic is utilized.  In one instance, Shea quotes from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy in order to explain how Catholicism is more than just paganism with additional trimmings:

 

“Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light.  Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration.  But it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light.  Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination.  Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution.  He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types.  He is an unselfish egoist.  An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion.  Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light.  Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.”

 

This quote is used to illustrate Shea’s point that humans require extra help in order to save themselves and keep themselves spiritually sane– there is no shame in needing a little intercession.

 

A substantial portion of this book consists of explaining the rosary and what it means for proper veneration of Mary.  Prayer beads have been used in non-Christian religious practices, but that does not make their use idolatrous or in any way improper.  As Shea notes, rosary beads are meant solely as a tool to help the faithful keep track of their prayers.  One could pray the rosary on one’s fingers if one likes.  The point of the rosary is not to mumble prayers mindlessly, but to use the time and repetition as a guide to direct one’s mind and spirit as one reflects on Marian Mysteries and making oneself stronger, more focused, and purer spiritually.  The rosary is not a superstitious bauble, it is a guide to self-betterment and a means to bring oneself closer to God. 

 

My favorite part of this book is Shea’s take on how a political figure like Pontius Pilate would fit into the modern media.  Pilate, after all, was a skilled and powerful politician who was one of the most prominent and influential people of his day.  Shea imagines a theoretical television interview between Pilate and Barbara Walters, where Pilate is pitched a series of softball questions about his political career, personal life, and where Pilate responds with subtle false modesty about his imperfections and shortcomings, but glosses over it all with a slick narrative about having done the best he possibly can and that all things considered he has done a pretty good job.  At the end of the interview, Walters would pronounce, “Pontius Pilate: A Man to Remember.”

 

Shea’s wry commentary underscores just how ersatz much of contemporary television can be.  We see politicians and celebrities speak on-camera with apparent sincerity or weep softly with apparent regret, but the camera can lie.  Prominent figures go to great lengths in order to look good on television, win people over, and shape their personal legacy in a way that flatters them best.  Pilate almost certainly believed that his name would be remembered throughout the ages, possibly for his strong government or useful infrastructure projects or for general competency.  In any case, in today’s society even the most blundering and venal politicians strive to craft lasting pictures of themselves that depict them in the most positive light possible, and it is not to much of a stretch to postulate that the public figures of two millennia ago similarly tried to assure that their historical legacy would be a glowing one.

 

What Pontius Pilate probably never would have guessed is that two thousand years after his death, he would still be known worldwide, and mentioned publicly thousands of times daily, but not in a positive way.  At masses, it is regularly recited that Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate.”  Pilate would almost certainly have never dreamed that by far, the most pivotal action of his life would be to condemn a seemingly obscure religious figure to death, and that the ensuing events would overwhelmingly overshadow all of the other political achievements of his career combined.

 

An appendix of famous Marian apparitions is included at the end of the book.  The idea of seeing a miraculous vision of Mary (or any other religious figure) is laughable to many people, even otherwise believing Christians, who contend that such a violation of natural law and is therefore either impossible or demonic.  Shea argues that to deny that miracles can happen only serves to make people believe in a God that is smaller, not larger.  Shea cites a number of real-life cases of Marian apparitions, ranging from Lourdes and Fatima, to a notorious case where a woman claimed to have seen the face of Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich.  The latter case may be a figure of fun to some skeptics and an embarrassment to some believers, but Shea observes that miracles serve to bring people close to God, and that those who see them are free to reject them.  

 

Shea references the case of a former Catholic of his acquaintance, who impossibly heard a mass that her mother was attending from a long distance away.  The woman who heard this miraculous event remains an ex-Catholic, dismissing the miracle as useless to her because it didn’t cure her diabetes or anything like that.  As Shea reminds us, God’s grace is a gift that we are free to reject, but he strives to make us wonder why anybody would want to deny themselves something so wonderful. 

 

Shea cites two more cases connected to miraculous cures at Lourdes.  In the twin cases of Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who had left Catholicism for atheism, and Emile Zola, the famous writer and public figure and outspoken atheist; both men observed a seemingly impossible act of healing at Lourdes.  Zola denied that he had seen any solid evidence of divine intervention, but Carrel, faced with the evidence of his own observations, wrestled with this disruption to his materialistic worldview for the rest of his life, finally reconciling himself to the Church shortly before his death.  Grace, Shea declares, acts in ways that we often cannot expect.  For it to better us, we must allow ourselves to accept it.

 

After reading the entire trilogy, it is clear that it was a good decision to divide Mary, Mother of the Son into three parts.  If it were published as a lengthy tome, as was originally planned, the thickness of the spine might have put off some readers.  Divided into three easy-to-read, topical volumes, the information presented in this work is easily read and digested, without anything being lost in the sheer breath of the study’s scope.  Mary, Mother of the Son is a clear, concise, and easy-to-use resource for anyone who wants to understand the Catholic Church’s teachings on Mary better.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Mary, Mother of the Son: Volume II– First Guardian of the Faith

Mary, Mother of the Son: Volume II– First Guardian of the Faith.  By Mark P. Shea, Catholic Answers, 2009.

 

Mark P. Shea continues his trilogy on the life, theological role, historical impact, and contemporary relevance of the Virgin Mary in the second volume: First Guardian of the Faith.  As my earlier review mentioned, the purpose of this series is to explain the role that Mary plays in the Catholic Church, especially for an audience that has been influenced by misconceptions and pseudoknowledge.  Although Shea directs a lot of his focus towards educating an Evangelical audience, this is an invaluable reference for helping Catholics learn more about their faith, as well as helping non-Christians learn about what the Catholic Church believes.

 

While the first volume looked at how popular culture and bad theology may have influenced people’s beliefs and conceptions, this book focuses primarily on the Catholic Church’s teachings about Mary, how they were developed, and why it is important that these teachings not be distorted or misrepresented.  The reduced number of popular culture references, and the increased focus on history, religious doctrine, and intellectual development makes the book seem rather more formal than its predecessor, but Shea’s prose style is always eminently readable, and never, ever stuffy.  Shea’s great strength as a writer is his ability to present information in a clear and conversational manner, thereby crafting a rapport with the reader that a more formal style might never have achieved.

 

It is easy to see how people can develop mistaken impressions about what the Church teaches about Mary.  The 1999 television movie Mary, Mother of Jesus, starring Pernilla August as Mary of Nazareth and Christian Bale as Jesus of Nazareth, is an example of how certain Protestant doctrines or other Biblical interpretations not officially recognized by any denomination can disseminate into the popular culture.  There was nothing disrespectful about this production; on the contrary it was quite reverent towards the source material.  Nevertheless, some of the theology and character representation was distinctly different from what the Catholic Church teaches.  For example, in this film, when Joseph learns about Mary’s pregnancy, he is initially stunned, then angry, believing that the baby must be that of another man’s, only accepting the situation after an angel’s intervention.  This is a rather common view of how Joseph behaved, but Shea argues that this is not the Church’s interpretation of events.  Joseph knew Mary well enough to know that she would never betray him or commit a grave sin, and believed her immediately when she told him about the great and wondrous role that God had planned for her.  This is a reminder that we must sometime give great saints more credit than we often do.  What we call “human nature” is not necessarily how people behave when they are divinely guided.

 

Shea brings up many commonly-heard arguments and tropes attempting to discredit Marian theology, the early Church, the medieval Church, the contemporary Church, and Catholicism in general, and in each case, he proves how these perspectives are based upon spurious assumptions, misinformation, and faulty reasoning.  At times, it seems as if Shea is in the middle of a theological and historical version of Perry Mason, with Shea in the title role, all things Catholic as the defendant, and the Church’s detractors in the part of the consistently misguided prosecutor Hamilton Burger.  One of the Perry Mason series’ consistent charms and running gags was the fact that the defendant was always completely innocent (or in one case, acted purely in self-defense), but despite the fact that everyone who was ever defended by Mason was invariably exonerated, District Attorney Burger never allowed himself to suspect that maybe– just maybe– he’d accused the wrong man.  The way Shea keeps advancing alternative, more reasonable explanations of Biblical passages, contradicting historical errors, and refuting horribly flawed theses; it serves as a reminder that whenever one hears any sort of attack against the Church, one should wait to find a defensive counter-argument before automatically assuming guilt.

 

A wide variety of sources are referenced in order to show just how misconceptions about Marian doctrine enter the public consciousness.  Some examples are centuries-old heresies, such as Pelagius and his denial of original sin.  Others are far more contemporary.  Shea quotes extensively from several prominent anti-Catholic websites and how they rage against Catholic views of Mary, yet he never responds in kind.  Bitter anger is repaid with logical rebuttal and calm disapproval.   A deft touch and a sense of humor serve Shea well.  When he addresses oft-mocked and even more often misunderstood doctrines such as Mary’s perpetual virginity, Shea is always firm in his defense of the faith, seeking to explain why those who disagree are wrong while never getting upset.

 

Shea often likes to poke holes at the theory that every day, in every way, humanity is getting better and better.  The idea that 2011 is four centuries wiser and more enlightened than 1611 is utter bosh.  It often seems as if for every moral lesson that the culture at large learns, it in turn forgets two or more old truths.  One of the most interesting portions of this book is Shea’s critique of the legacy of several major figures.  Shea includes a concise but very interesting chronology of some of the most influential intellectual minds of the last couple of centuries, such as Freud, Marx, and many others, as well as how some of their ideologies, when put into practice, have led people away from Catholic teachings and caused destruction to the society as a whole.  To cite one example, when discussing the career of Margaret Sanger, Shea writes:

 

“Sanger even dreamed of establishing a vast American concentration camp for "morons, mental defectives, epileptics... illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, [and] dope-fiends". In all, she wanted to forcibly imprison about one-seventh of the entire American population. Needless to say, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the pioneering eugenics done by doctors of the Third Reich. For years, her slogan summed up a philosophy warmly received by her colleagues in Hitler's scientific elite: "Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds!"

 

The problem for Margaret Sanger was that all this became a tough sell in the post-war years, what with pictures of Dachau and Auschwitz circulating in classrooms and history books. So the organization she had founded changed its marketing strategy. Instead of encouraging Americans to worship racial purity, Planned Parenthood instead seized on the much more salable notion (pioneered by Freud) that we should throw off the shackles of guilt and responsibility and worship sex. This was sold as "Birth Control" but the practical outcome was, as Chesterton famously remarked, "No birth and no control."

 

The outcome of this story is a catalogue of human misery: Massive STD rates, a contraceptive culture in which love and fruitfulness are damned as hindrances to sexual pleasure, the ever-increasing sexualization of childhood, and 1.5 million abortions in the United States alone each year. And so, as Pope John Paul II said, "The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn."

 

Though a great deal of space is devoted to describing what’s wrong with the world, this book ends on a hopeful note.  The world is undoubtedly in a bad way, but the way to fight the problems is not through anger, nor through the use of power to crush dissent, but through following the virtuous example of Mary and praying for her intercession.  As Shea observes in his conclusion, Pope John Paul II knew that the way to set an unjust world right is not to do evil so that good may come of it; but instead to promote justice, truth, and freedom.  Understanding and following the example of Mary is a crucial step towards achieving such lofty goals.

 

 

–Chris Chan