On Literature and the Aesthetic

Of the traditional transcendentals—the true, the good, and the beautiful—the lattermost is the one most frequently and most easily tossed from its noble rank.  The popular sentiment that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is among the many dominant cultural and psychological influences acknowledged to exist and yet seldom subjected to examination.  It seems reasonable, on observation of the sundry opinions as to what is beautiful and what is not.  Yet such reasoning is superficial and characteristic of a lazy inquiry.  It is easy to be swept along by commonality and never realize it, to consciously recognize only the variances amongst the dominance of taste—which is not to say that all dominant taste is good; on the contrary, the more prevalent an aesthetic criterion, the more unlikely it is to adhere to an objective standard, being driven instead by the masses of untrained aestheticians who demand sensory pleasure rather than genuine objective quality.  Consider popular music: the innovators of a particular style are not always the best musicians, and the best musicians are certainly not always innovators.  Neither sort is guaranteed any true popularity; instead, those who perform the style with little regard to either talent or innovation and focus instead on making their music accessible are guaranteed a large following.  Yet amongst the performers who garner a significantly populated fan base, the styles vary drastically, from saccharine cooing to dark, heavy metal.  Though some would see this as even more evidence of the relativization of aesthetic preference, it is the truth that—even if the majority of followers of death metal would not readily accede to such—all music, and indeed all art, even if in the smallest degree, is recognized as communicating some transcendental and objective aspect of the beautiful.

Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, wrote that “Fine art shows its superiority precisely in this, that it describes things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly.”¹ While good art imitates nature, poor art imitates good art; and so in poor art, as opposed to the fine, which portrays the naturally distasteful there is found a diluted representation of this transformed beauty; and like all dilution, makes it easier to swallow, hence the popularity of the under-talented and accessible.  Of course, this raises the question, which regularly revisits civilization every few decades, “What is good art?”  When the societal norms dictate relativization of aesthetic judgment, the criteria are usually centered around the evocation of powerful emotion.  When objectively grounded in a transcendental conception, the criteria center around the portrayal and signification of truth or goodness, be it by a via negativa or by a positive relation.  This contrary standard of analysis indeed provides insight to the distinction between good and bad art; the latter being that which merely evokes emotion—sometimes quite powerfully—but passes away, while the former produces a lasting impression by connecting the perceiver with some eternal truth through means of the perceived.  This impression of truth is most powerfully achieved by the well-wrought literary work.

It is for this reason that William Shakespeare is a name known by almost everyone, whereas the Great Bard’s contemporaries Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson do not share such fame.  The latter two were excellent playwrights, make no mistake, but the brilliance of Shakespeare is universally recognizable, even by those who have great difficulty in articulating why he was so brilliant.  It could be said that Shakespeare’s brilliance resides in the fluidity of his language or the richness of his characters; but the same could be said for a thousand other deservedly lesser-known poets, playwrights, and novelists.  What Shakespeare constructed so well in almost all of his plays, on a level unparalleled, were symbols of essential and immutable human nature.  Were these constructs not immanently beautiful, they would retain their atemporal universality but lose the profundity of their atemporal accessibility.  The contemporary perception of Shakespeare as, to the common reader, impossibly recondite, shows not a lack of beauty in the writing, but a lack of comprehension in the undereducated reader; yet it shows the indomitable nature of Shakespeare’s symbolic constructs that the educated few persist in advocating for the bard, maintaining his status as the playwright par excellence.

But what is the significance of these symbolic constructs?  What is a symbol?  Man encounters symbols every day: in corporate logos, in ritual practices, and in all media of art and entertainment.  These symbols act as intermediaries between the perceiver and the signified.  As such they are signifiers, but not merely signs, for a sign, such as a word or a red octagon on which “STOP” is written have no substantial content in their functionality themselves; a word may be spoken or written or transmitted through sign-language, and a stop sign can be made of metal or wood or any number of materials.  A sign represents its signified by completely accidental means; that which they signify could be signified in a number of other ways, as both “rage” and “anger” connote a particular emotion (with nuanced differences) and both a stop sign and a red light signify that the driver must stop his car (with different rules for proceeding after stopping).  A sign does not share in the participation in being of the signified, of the signified’s substance.  The entire substance of a sign, as a sign, is to point to something else.  Contrariwise, a symbol shares in the participation of that which it ultimately signifies; which is why it is said that a good portrait “captures” an image of its subject.  Likewise a crucifix, though it ultimately signifies the Crucifixion of Christ, also makes present in its own being an aspect of the crucifixion, and is hence venerated.

Literary Critic Allen Tate

While the symbolic nature of the plastic arts, or even the well-designed corporate logo, is plain to see, perception of pervasive symbolism in good literature is more difficult.  After all, was it not said just above that words are merely signs, and is not literature composed of words?  Most certainly literature is; but despite its material building blocks being themselves signifiers, the words from which literature is made are accidental to literature itself, the whole instead being something greater.  This accidental nature of the parts is well demonstrated by translation, through which the same work, though homogenous in its original language, may be presented in great variety by multiple translations into another language.  The quality of a translation, it ought to be noted, is not determined strictly by the most precise terminology, but rather by the best connotation.  For example, it is debatable which description of Odysseus in Homer’s Iliad is better:

This one is Laertes’ son, resourceful Odysseus,
who grew up in the country, rough though it be, of Ithaka,
to know every manner of shiftiness and crafty counsels.²

or

That’s Laretes’ son, the great tactician Odysseus.
He was bred in the land of Ithaca.  Rocky ground
and he’s quick at every treachery under the sun—
the man of twists and turns.³

Each translation has its merits, but the latter carries the description awkwardly and with some vagueness and imprecision—“tactician” being of narrower meaning than “resourceful,” “twists and turns” being less indicative than “shiftiness and crafty counsels”—whereas the former has both linguistic fluidity and richer connotation of Odysseus’ character; the reader is given a better image of the man and of Helen’s perception of him.  But even this image, like all individual literary images, is not itself the symbolism of the work or even a symbolic particular, properly speaking, for it is a mere fragment of the work as a whole and may serve simply to frame some more significant action or individual.

Wherein, then, does the symbolism of a literary work as a whole reside?  First, let a particular symbol of a work be examined; in this case, a simile in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet, “God’s Grandeur.”  Though the poem is explicit in reference to its subject matter, it nonetheless corroborates its explication through the use of imagery.  The first two lines,

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

say directly what is meant, and yet use a symbolic image in order better to convey meaning through to the corporeally enmeshed intellect; the world is full, energized, by the greatness and the glory of God, which will become visible through bursts of brilliance, which resemble the light which comes off a piece of foil when shaken.  The foil, as that which reflects light—which catches light so to speak—acts as an analogate for the world, and the light as an analogate for the divine grandeur.  The foil as a symbol participates in the same sort of being of the world, the receptivity of a greater and nobler beauty, and the world in turn serves as a symbol that participates in the grandeur of God.  This imagery of transitive significance is what Allen Tate once so succinctly and insightfully described: “The symbolic imagination conducts an action through analogy, of the human to the divine, of the nature to the supernatural, of the low to the high, of time to eternity.”⁴

Although actions are usually considered as individual elements, when the whole of a literary work is realized by the reader, there is a totality constructed by the various individual actions; as such the action of a Shakespearean tragedy (or any good tragedy) is complete when, through freely-willed human action and the unpredictable vacillations of fate, the life of an extraordinary man ends in calamity, death, or complete disintegration of harmonious existence.  In such a tragedy—Macbeth, for instance—the totality of action becomes symbolic by analogizing the particular to the universal, of showing in the actual fall of one man the potential fall of all; by showing how anyone may capitulate to lust for power and the consequences that may thereby be suffered, regardless of societal norms or provincial circumstances.  This whole signification is achieved by mediate significations, such as the Weird Sisters—the word “Weird” in Elizabethan English connoting that which has to do with fate—who symbolize the impersonal machinations of a world that acts in ways contrary to and independent of human will.  Such intermediaries, which stand between the perceiver and the signified, act as lenses by which, individually, aspects of the total significance are perceived, and together, as that which shows the whole while yet retaining the particulars.  Indeed, the well-wrought literary work is at once a telescope and a microscope to sempiternal truth and reality.

But this is not all that good literature and other successfully crafted works of art do; for it is not merely the communication of truth and goodness, but the communication of truth and goodness in a particular manner; namely, a beautiful manner.  Certainly, as any Catholic metaphysician worth his salt could attest, the true, the good, and the beautiful are fundamentally the same in their per se existence, much like the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  And yet the manifestations of the good, the true, and the beautiful are as diversely realized as those of the Trinity.  The Father may stand for the Good, the Son for the True, and the Holy Ghost for the Beautiful; but there is goodness in beauty and beauty in truth and truth in goodness, each in the other and the other in each.  Nonetheless it is through the manner of being of the individual human person, tied to the immanent and particular world as he is, that man naturally perceives the Three in One as Three, as through particular symbols and analogates by which the universals of his experiences are known.  This is the task of the aesthetic, to perceive that which is portrayed by a symbol and thereby enable the recognition of the universals which indicate the supreme Universal; through grasping the signs of words, a symbol can be grasped; through grasping a symbol, that which it signifies can be grasped; through grasping the whole of a series of symbols, the greater symbol is realized, and with that realization comes the possibility of tasting eternal truth.

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1 Google Books, p.180
2 Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Lattimore, Richard. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) 105.
3 Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Fagles, Robert (New York: Penguin Books, 1998) 135.
4 Tate, Allen. Essays of Four Decades. “The Symbolic Imagination.” (Wilmington DE: ISI Books, 1999) 427.  For explication of the symbolic in literature, this essay is highly recommended, particularly when read in juxtaposition to “The Angelic Imagination.”

On Comforts and Crosses

In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton, having moved on from the creature called man to the man called Christ, explains that in the first half of his book he “often treated man as merely an animal, to show that the effect was more impossible than if he were treated as an angel.”  The rationalist, the man who unreasonably believes in nothing but a domineering aprioristic reason, tries to account for the nature of man by construction from his lowest and most ignoble parts.  Such a man always has a disparaging conception of the human person, for abstracting any sort of universal from the majority of individuals based upon their worst actions is bound to produce a deformed and vulgar conception.  On the surface, that would be the conception possessed by Flannery O’Connor, whose writing is permeated with stupid and sinful characters who act viciously and selfishly.  Almost all of her stories end with some grotesque deprivation of happiness, a calamity in life or by death.  Yet what O’Connor most definitely saw in the sinful human person was the same thing Chesterton saw; namely, Christ, or at the very least, the effect of Christ.

“The Comforts of Home,” though not one of the more frequently-commented upon stories of O’Connor, does a magnificent job of showing this contrast.  In a strange sort of double-inversion, the story takes what is ostensibly an anecdote told of St. Thomas Aquinas, turns it inside-out, and then stands the world on its head; quite a feat in a mere 21 pages.  The story opens with the protagonist, Thomas, a thirty-five year old scholar of history, chasing a naked girl out of his room in the middle of the night with a chair, a story which parallels the popular legend that the great Saint of the 13^th century did likewise, with a burning long, when his brothers attempted to induce him to forsake his vows of chastity.  But while the men, the real theologian and the fictional historian, share a distaste for strumpets, the similarities do not penetrate any deeper.  St. Thomas slammed his door, burned a cross into it, and fell to prayer; Historian Thomas chased the girl into the guest room and turned to berating his mother for bringing the young nymphomaniac into the house.  The fictional Thomas is not unlike what the real Thomas would have been if not for the gift of faith, if not for the transformative power of Christ; and thus they are radically different.

Flannery O'Connor

What changed in the world with the advent of Christ and His Church?  In a word: everything.  That which constituted perfect virtue in the eyes of the world became imperfect virtue, seen through the corrective lenses of Christianity.  When Christ died on the Cross, the veil in the temple was torn, and indeed, so too was a veil torn off of man, that which obfuscated his transcendent nature.  This vision of man, as created in the image and likeness of God, Who, by the Incarnation and Eucharist gave man an eternal and immanent channel to the transcendent, was made possible by incomparable suffering, and therein lies perhaps the most significant transfiguration affected by Christ; that what was most ignoble in man—physical torment, public humiliation, and ignominious death—becomes his greatest means to perfection.

This infused value of suffering is recognized everywhere by the fictional Thomas’ mother, who, as Thomas describes it, has a “daredevil charity.”¹ Indeed, Thomas’ mother’s act of kindness, bringing home Sarah Ham, an obsessive compulsive liar and nymphomaniac who has seen no end of trouble, can be seen as daring the devil.  The girl abuses the elder woman’s charity and constantly taunts and tempts the uninterested Thomas.  Yet the mother finds herself either unable or unwilling—possibly both—to send away the girl, believing that she has been the victim of an unfortunate past and that she deserves an infinite number of chances to right her life.  Despite Thomas doing everything he can to oust the young girl, who turns to weakly-attempted suicides to further her appearance of being imperiled, the mother pictures the girl as being her own, and pities her lack of a good home.  Ultimately, in the story’s last moment of final suspense, Thomas’ mother sacrifices herself for the sake of the young harlot—and it is left open to interpretation whether or not such an action might also be salvific for her son.  Like most of O’Connor’s stories, it ends abruptly, leaving the reader a bit confused and a bit perturbed.  None of the characters are blatantly good, with the mother’s “daredevil charity” resulting in her own death, and no good having evidently come out of the story, one character ending up a murderer and another yet ensconced in a sinful life.  But despite this seemingly fruitless, seemingly vain story of grotesque hate and violence, the story’s sanguinity is not one-dimensional.

St. Thomas deprived of his faith becomes an ordinary Thomas, not only doubting but denying; Mary Magdalene without redemption a harlot remains, a debauched life unabated; and in the end, Christ dies for them both, sinners each beloved and unloving.  Though the end is abrupt, as with all of O’Connor’s fiction, the distinctly Christian element, the meaningful sacrifice, the purposeful suffering, instills the otherwise morbid story with a silver lining of hope.  The fates of Thomas and Sarah are not decided by the author, nor by the mother; but that thread is dangled not tauntingly but beckoningly before them, out of the blood-stained shroud of the unnamed mother; Magdalene may yet escape the stones, and Thomas may yet write his Summa.

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¹ O’Connor, Flannery. “The Comforts of Home,” The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971) 383.

An Appeal for Authority

Any just court of law operates on the premise that a man is innocent until proven guilty.  The reasoning behind this premise is that, in most cases, mere suspicion is not enough to warrant the sort of action that is to be taken upon the guilty.  If the powers-that-be in the legal system were to act upon mere unproven suspicions, many more people would be unjustly incarcerated.  It has also been proven that paranoid minds are subject to a very slippery slope, whether they belong to Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, or Senator McCarthy.  Provided leeway, a paranoid legal system would look much like, to be frank, the Obama administration if given its druthers.  A sane society is one in which men can trust one another and particularly trust the authorities on whom their civil rights and material well-being dependent.  Indeed, submission to an authority operates on a premise similar to that of the courts of law: that the authority is valid until proven illegitimate.  Yet in the contemporary perspective of the United States, growing numbers of people are operating conversely; that is, on the premise that until an authority validates itself, until the natural tendency to hold some actions of authority suspect is proven unfounded, that it should be treated as an instrument of one’s oppression.  This perspective, fostered by mediums of entertainment, is not only destructive of the individuals who capitulate to its prideful rhetoric, but of the institutions of Western civilization as a whole, for it is only by an authority that unity can be maintained, and it is only by unity that civilization persists and achieves any sort of genuine progress.

The general spirit of reactionary resentment of authority in the United States grew out of the blooming rock-and-roll culture of the 1950s and protest movements of the 1960s.  For several decades, the spirit had little political or economic effect—since the two are nigh indivisible in this country—beyond the nominally counter-cultural movements centralized largely around the various music scenes and progressive college campuses, and achieved little grounding in people over 30 who were not enlightened liberal college professors.  Yet the seeds sown by the counter-cultural movements and the deficiently educational and exceedingly propagandistic colleges, though abated in the lives of individuals who found that working for the man is not so bad since he pays so well, nonetheless took root in the larger social consciousness.

The germ of this spirit, which for brevity will be called the Puerile Spirit, which finds yielding soil in the drama that is adolescence, readily blooms when watered by the inundation of politically-driven entertainment media.  Anti-establishment movies such as Fight Club or V for Vendetta corroborate not only the rhetorically polished but insubstantial conjectures of authors such as Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Phil Lombardo, nor just government conspiracy television shows and “investigative” programs on channels such as Discovery or The Learning Channel, but also the average news broadcast.  The subtle use of background music, computer graphics, interviews and expert analysis, emotional testimonies, and a thousand other nuances of manipulation invigorate the dramatically-grounded Puerile Spirit.  This has become blatantly obvious over the past 6 years, as media disillusionment with the Bush administration, some of which was justified and some not, was played up to a frenzy of conspiracy and lies.

Are you going to trust this guy telling you to question authority?

Ironically and amusingly, the backlash of sensationalistic reporting by the mainstream media is being felt in the pullulating distrust of the socialist policies of Barack Obama.  Granted that FoxNews employs spectacle more than any other major news outlet, the trend was viciously employed and to great effect by the liberal news media over the past several years.  Though Hussein started with a high approval rating, his acceptance as an authority was based entirely on the thin ice of his substantially deficient hortatory mantras.  The Puerile Spirit, though hypocritical in its fostering of an inquisitional attitude without simultaneously encouraging an intellect sufficiently developed enough to pursue truth, despite its pursuit of naught but self-affirmation, can nonetheless instigate the downfall of an authority proven illegitimate on the grounds of incompetence and injustice.  It is to be hoped that the distrust of an illegitimate authority can mature into an objective evaluation of authority itself; that the goodness of authority can be seen for what it is.  A distortion of the perception of authority, as something that mandates incessant inquisition, breeds a society of distrust; a society of insanity.  Government, rightly exercised, is a good thing, which provides for man’s material well-being, by enabling him to pursue it and by preventing his wrongful deprivation.  To preserve the United States, the emerging weeds of the Puerile Spirit’s tendency to reject civil authority need to be plucked before long.

Where the Puerile Spirit has not long lain dormant, however, is in the realm of religion, most notably the Catholic Church in America.  Intellectual dissent, such as that of Hans Kung and Karl Rahner, dissolved into the emotional coddling of the insecurities of feminists and homosexuals, and brought about what has been termed the hermeneutic of rupture; the interpretation of the documents of Vatican II according to this very same Puerile Spirit, which innately rejects authority on its merit as authority and collaborates with it only when its goals match those of the individual.  This intellectual and emotional juvenility also has its fostering in cheap entertainment spectacle: Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, both in written and cinematic forms, John Cornwell’s minimally researched Hitler’s Pope, countless inaccurate portrayals of the Church as it truly is (though depressingly accurate of how many see it), and the prominent liberal cafeteria Catholics and politicians throughout the media limelight, such as Sean Hannity, Maria Shriver, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, John Kerry, James Carville, Ted Kennedy, and Rudy Giuliani.  Dissent is everywhere glorified.  Whereas interaction with the authority of government constitutes only one part of a person’s life, however, faith is involved with the totality of a person’s existence, for it is or is supposed to be the pinnacle towards which all of a person’s actions aspire; thus a rupture in accepting the authority of any faith, but especially the Faith, by operating on the premise that the authority needs first to prove itself in order to be accepted, nourishes the noxious growth of the Puerile Spirit on a gigantic scale.  If inherent rejection of civil authority produces political weeds, then the inherent rejection of ecclesiastical authority sprouts moral, intellectual, and spiritual kudzu.  Where the former is a political pride, a fallacious principled intractability against the idea of men having authority over one another, the latter is a spiritual pride, the damnable obduracy of Satan.

In conclusion, it is not only acceptable to question authority, but right.  Yet questioning it from the premise that it is invalid to begin with, questioning it as the Pharisees and Herodians did Christ: “Tell us therefore what dost thou think?  Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?  But Jesus knowing their wickedness, said: Why do you tempt me, ye hypocrites? Show me the coin of the tribute. And they offered him a penny.  And Jesus saith to them: Whose image and inscription is this?  They say to him: Caesar’s.  Then he saith to them: Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s” (Mt. 22:17-22) ¹.

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¹ For any Protestants reading this, who would insist that the authority of Christ was not transferred to his Apostles, answer this: Why did Christ come in human form at all?  Why did He act as He did in human form?  Why teach with authority as a man?  As an addendum, watch Stephen Colbert intellectually trounce Dr. Zimbardo; as a caveat, Colbert does swear at the end.

On Culture and Reactions

In 1930, twelve men of letters published a book entitled I’ll Take My Stand, which defended man’s right to his land, his quiet, his leisure, and his right to say “no.”  It was and still is largely seen as a reactionary work stemming from Southern regressives against modern progress and the inevitability of cultural change.  Oftentimes, a reactionary production is indeed something to be scrutinized and rejected as the unthinking instinctual reflex of an closed mind.  Yet the mere fact that an action is reflexive does not necessitate that it is poorly chosen.  Thus the writings of the Southern Agrarians, who authored I’ll Take My Stand, may have been consonant with their initial reactions, but investigation of their writings shows that, while their cultural outlook may have been somewhat too rigid in some areas, their principles were both grounded in a virtuous disposition and thoroughly reasoned.

When the Southern Agrarians produced their manifesto, the damage which they foresaw being done to the culture of the South seemed little more than the paranoia of a few backwater hicks who had somehow managed to garner a fine literary education.  Yet what shines through in the eloquent writings of men such as Richard M. Weaver, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate is not a backwards rhetorical sophism, but a systematic defense of that which they found good.  Their taste in cultural preference was not chosen on a whim or by attraction to the superficial, but was deeply ingrained in both their personal lives and in their intellectual endeavors.  Most of the better-known Agrarians were poets or literary critics, many of whom were connected with Vanderbilt University, as either matriculants or professors.  In this life of relaxed academia and in the world of professional letters, what they discovered was not the competitive hustle and bustle that dominated the north-eastern universities which were ensconced by an industrial lifestyle, but the goodness of independent living.  Their intellectual peers who lived and worked in the centers of industry, such as H.L. Mencken, had no recourse to success but to trample down others; being good meant being better, and staying good meant being the best.  For the Southerners, good was good, and to stay good it did not need to become any better.

Southern Agrarian, Robert Penn Warren

In contrast to the modern progressives who saw it as their divinely-appointed duty to ridicule southern culture, the Agrarians had a fundamental humility which, though at times obscured by the strength with which they promoted their opinions and denounced the cultural wrecking-ball of ill-defined progress, acknowledged man’s sovereignty simultaneously with and in no way separable from his ecological dependence.  Though man may conquer the soil, though he may cut down the forests, he cannot survive without either.  Thus, in order for men to have a proper sense of himself, he must have a proper sense of that upon which he is dependent.  A society which provides man with his every immediate need by the exchange of currency is a society which dehumanizes man, by the very fact that it denies to him the necessity of his connection with land, and thus deprives him of its joy.  When a man owns no land, and is in no way responsible for either the expanse of terrain upon which he lives or the production of that which sustains him, he loses some of his masculinity.  He becomes daily dependent on others for not only those things which every man needs every day and cannot give himself, such as community and conversation, but for the material sustenance which maintains his corporeal existence.

With increased dependence upon others come increased arrogance and a decreased appreciation for the value of things.  A man who has struggled to build his own rocking chair will not, because of his own experience, smash one out of carelessness; whereas a man who can afford a thousand rocking chairs on a whim will have likely little regard for the value of the craftsmanship which was poured into their making.  Consequently, such a society which idolizes the wealthy man who has no respect for the non-monetary value of property will care only for the here and now, the immediate good; which is to say that their only pleasure is the thrill, and their only thrills are those which are cheap.  Flitting desultorily from one distraction to another, the society which is dominated by a mentality of modern progressivism is a society which denies itself a true culture.  Inexpensive pleasures take little time to produce and sustain the person for just as long; and when the media of cultural transmission – art, philosophy, literature, architecture, music, and other such forms of societal consciousness – plant no deep roots in the soil of the past, then from their indolence, masked as artistic originality, no fruit is borne.

A society without direct ownership of real property is a society without responsibility; a society without responsibility is a society without care; a society without care is a society without a culture.  Southern Agrarianism was not without its problems.  Most of its chief proponents were terrible farmers; and the movement eventually fell apart through internal discord and the irreconcilable conflicts which permeated the consciousnesses of the individuals who were its leaders.  Yet despite its ultimate failure and its reactionary inception, it was a justified defense of what was a genuine culture, a culture built from man’s intimacy with his land.  In the words of literary critic and professor Dr. Cicero Bruce, “Yes, Tate was a reactionary. But he believed that one could animate Western culture only by reacting violently to the enervating forces within it.”¹

Recommended Reading:

Allen Tate – Essays of Four Decades
Richard M. Weaver – Ideas Have Consequences
Various – I’ll Take My Stand
Cicero Bruce – The Stand of Allen Tate
Rev. Vincent McNabb – The Church and the Land

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¹ The Stand of Allen Tate – Dr. Cicero Bruce (links to page 8)

Man and the Mass

The return to the Traditional liturgy has revitalized true manliness.  For decades, not-so-subtle abuse has been made of the provisional allowances for female participation in the celebration of the Mass, as lectors, altar servers, and extraordinary ministers (which are all-too-frequently abused regardless of sex).  This sad state of affairs is beginning to disappear in more traditionally-leaning parishes, even where only the Novus Ordo is present, and is altogether vanquished in what can only be described, in the most positive connotations of the word, as truly extraordinary parishes.  While this being accepted by men and women alike throughout the world, there is a stronger tendency towards traditionalism amongst men than women.  It is not as though all women view the movement with hostility, but there are nonetheless two ways in which their enthusiasm for the structures of traditionalism which are built both up from and up towards the Traditional Mass are mitigated; one is a good thing, as a sort of docile and understanding acceptance that some things rightly belong to men alone (just as some belong rightly to women alone), and the other is harmful, as a sort of reluctance in resignation to exclusion based on sex.

Fulton Sheen once wrote that woman is “most reasonable when man is most irrational.”¹ Man finds the most complete privations of his rationality in the heights of his awe, his rapture, his love.  When a man is consumed with love, with a burning passion for some thing or some one, he cannot sit still; as the expression goes, he cannot contain himself, as though his whole person is ready to leap out of his body in a state of purest ecstasy, euphoria.  When a man becomes conscious of the potentiality of love realized, he wants to rush towards it and disregard everything else, even his own future; to give the entirety of his being in one intense thrust.  Propriety tends to go flying out the window for the man in love.  He throws it out in the depths of his irrationality.  As such does woman become most reasonable; she sees that he, in his burning love for her, cannot rightly disregard everything else, and reminds him of the value of propriety.  Out of love, he pays attention to those little and seemingly insignificant things that are pale lights beside her; the deeper his love, the more scrupulously he attends to them, and he loves propriety for the sake of loving her.

Curiously, this phenomenon manifests itself in the English language, as well.  When someone desires to communicate something of the most urgency, the most importance, he uses the fewest words possible; it is intense, but simply a burst of energy.  Oftentimes, indiscernible sounds screamed without any consonant formation, serve just as well as words; sometimes better.  An urgent cry of “marshmallows!” does not convey the sense of danger as well as “ahhh!”  But when man wants to convey something particular, definite, and intelligible, he relies on syntax; on rigidity, on rules, on structure.  Grammar and syntax allow for the nigh infinite possibilities of individual words to be placed into a meaningful utterance while retaining and even focusing the connotations each the individual word.  Thus when male pronouns are used in the singular to denote the entirety of the human race, that raging potentiality of the male is present, but restrained; the combination of the potentiality of the word with the definitive signification intended by a syntactical structure parallels the coupling of man and wife.  To use the feminine in the sexually undesignated singular would not necessarily be incorrect, but the connotation is one of particular actuality being further contained, rather than universal potentiality being made actual and meaningful (admittedly something of a paradox, if one is to consider the outlines of Chesterton’s perspective on man and woman – perhaps that is a topic to be reviewed later).  The word must be restrained by its sentence in order to be good, to be truly significant, to convey to the minds of men some definite meaning.

Rigidly enraptured

It is no different, and indeed much more profoundly related to the human experience, within the Holy Mass.  To eyes accustomed to seeing love as wild, burning, as passion unrestrained, the Traditional liturgy is cold, dispassionate, a seminar in death-like rigidity, devoid of meaning and fecundity.  Indeed, the rigidity of the Mass is very death-like, but in no way is it cold or dispassionate; the reverence of the priest, the deacon, the subdeacon, and the acolytes is the most meaningful strictly human part of the Mass.

In Elizabethan English, the words “death” and “die” carried the connotation of sexual climax.  Though this meaning may have come from any one of a dozen significations, there is nonetheless a certain fittingness to it.  A seed must die in order to create new life.  A lover dies to his beloved; in the realization of one potential love, every other dies.  The greatest act of love in all history was death: Christ on the Cross, a posture of notable rigidity.  Just as Christ was willingly, is willingly, nailed into place, so too does the priest willingly nail into a rigid posture his earnest and inflamed desire to celebrate the Mass: Christ conformed Himself to the Cross for the sake of His Church; the priest conforms himself to the Church for the sake of the Mass.  To again quote Sheen, “Man is the raging torrent of the cascading river; woman is the bank which keeps it within limits.”² So too is the priest, alter Christus, lovingly bound in the strict arms of his bride, the Church, for whom he willingly dies, to himself and to the world.

When a woman enters the sanctuary, she is trespassing into the “bedroom” of a priest and his Bride; with what intent does she enter?  The closer one draws to the sacrifice of the Mass, the deeper, the more burning, the more intense must one’s passion be; the more one must be fitting to the situation, to the role, not only in virtue but also in nature.  The sanctuary, the sacristy, and most especially the altar are places for men to be men, to be manly, to love so deeply that they hold themselves erect, that they walk only in straight lines, and that precision guides their every move; like a young man courting a young woman.

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¹ Sheen, Fulton J., The World’s First Love. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1952, 121
² Sheen, 158