Enlightenment as its Opposite in Pope’s Dunciad

One could almost forgive Alexander Pope’s Epitaph on Newton in view of the magnificent ending of his Dunciad. Pope wrote the Dunciad at the same time as his friend Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, and it takes a similarly dim view of the achievements of the Enlightenment. Dr. Johnson had this passage by heart:

In vain, in vain,—the all-composing hour
Resistless falls: the Muse obeys the power.
She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold
Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
The sick’ning stars fade off the ethereal plain;
As Argus’ eyes, by Hermes’ wand oppress’d,
Closed one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after art goes out, and all is night.
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
Philosophy, that lean’d on heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all.

David Foster Wallace, Dante, and the Stars

At one point in his Kenyon College Commencement Speech (embedded above; transcript here) David Foster Wallace describes in brilliantly vivid detail the frustrations of standing in line in a supermarket. Our default setting, he says is to burn with impotent rage against the dreariness, misery, and stupidity of the situation. But this is not the only option:

Style, R.L. Stevenson, and the Pauline Epistles

John Bergsma has an excellent post (the comment box of which I can’t seem to get to work) comparing the variations in style in Plato’s works to those in the Pentateuch and the Pauline Epistles. On the later:

Several of Paul’s epistles are dismissed as “deutero-Pauline” because of differences in style. Are these differences more dramatic than the differences between Plato’s compositions? Could Paul’s style have changed with age and circumstance?

I have often thought the same thing with reference to Robert Louis Stevenson; surely there is more variation of style between A Child’s Garden of Verses and the The Master of Ballantrae than between Romans and 2 Timothy.

The Only Thing Worth Writing About

This year’s Big American Novel is the long-awaited, unfinished book that David Foster Wallace had been working on up to his death in 2008. The Pale King is about the dull lives of IRS bureaucrats, and, as DFW wrote in one of the notes appended to the manuscript (p.545), it has two “broad arcs”: the first arc has to do with boredom and paying attention and the differences between people and machines; the second has to do with with being an individual vs. being part of something larger, civics. Both of these arcs are closely related to the central theme of pretty much all of Wallace’s writing.

Bonum Prolis I: De Koninck and Guy Crouchback

During a recent discussion involving James Chastek and Arturo Vasquez, I uploaded  some texts of De Koninck’s on birth control. The most interesting paper is “The Question of Infertility”, which argues that infertility is sometimes intended by nature as part of the “bonum prolis”, the good of offspring. I don’t want address the main argument here (I share James Chastek’s assessment), but the exposition of the meaning of “bonum prolis” at the beginning reminded of what I’ve always thought was wrong with Mr. Goodall’s argument in a famous passage of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms.

“Bonum prolis” includes three things, De Koninck points out: 1) the simple existence of the child, 2) the feeding and clothing of the child, and 3) the education and upbringing of the child. The first two are ordered to the third:

Marriage was instituted chiefly for the good of the offspring, not only as to its begetting—since this can be effected even without marriage—but also as to its advancement to a perfect state, because everything intends naturally to bring its effect to perfection. (S. Th., Suppl., q.59, a. 2, c)

S. Thomas uses this understanding of “bonum prolis” to prove that fornication is contrary to the natural law:

Since fornication is an indeterminate union of the sexes, as something incompatible with matrimony, it is opposed to the good of the child’s upbringing [bonum prolis educandae], and consequently it is a mortal sin. (IIa IIae, q. 154, a. 2, c)

And this is precisely what Mr. Goodall fails to see. Waugh readers will recall that Guy Crouchback, protagonist of the Sword of Honour trilogy, is a Catholic whose Protestant wife has left him and obtained a divorce. Mr. Goodall, an eccentric old Catholic, and he have the following conversation:

[Goodall] spoke of the extinction (in the male line) some fifty years back, of a historic Catholic family.
“..They were a connection of yours through the Wrottmans of Garesby. [...] They had two daughters and then the wretched girl eloped with a neighbour. It made a terrible ado at the time. It was before before divorce was common. Anyway they were divorced. [...] Then ten years later your kinsman met this woman alone, abroad. A kind of rapprochement occurred but she went back to her so-called husband and in due time bore a son. It was in fact your kinsman’s. It was by law the so-called husband’s who recognized it as his. That boy is alive to-day and in the eyes of God the rightful heir to all his father’s quarterings.”
Guy was less interested in the quarterings than in the morality.
“You to say that theologically the original husband committed no sin in resuming sexual relations with his former wife?”
“Certainly nor. The wretched girl of course was guilty in every other way and is no doubt paying for it now. But the husband was entirely blameless.” (pp. 159-160)

Guy proceeds to act on this dubious morality, and later in the novel makes a pass at his former wife, Virginia. That is certainly contrary to the bonum prolis, and thus (in way) Virginia is right in her extraordinary outburst of indignation when she realizes what is going on, though she doesn’t give the proper ratio:

Tears of rage and humiliation were flowing unresisted. “I though you’d taken a fancy for me again [...] I thought you’d chosen me specially, and by God you had. Because I was the only woman in the whole world your priests would let you go to bed with. That was my attraction. You wet, smug, obscene, pompous, sexless lunatic pig.” (p. 178)

Lying to Children; or Edward Feser at the Battle of Solferino

In an excellent series of blog posts Edward Feser has been defending (against a surprising amount of protest) Saint Thomas’s teaching that lying is always contrary to the natural law. Since words are natural signs of what is in the mind it is perverse to use them to signify what is contrary to one’s mind. Now while speech itself is natural, the particular meaning of speech is established be convention, and, Feser points out, this can mean that, depending on the context, certain speech, which might seem to be a lie if one took it literary, is not in fact a lie:

Fictional stories and jokes do not count as lies […] because circumstances make it clear that they are not intended to be taken to communicate what the speaker really thinks is true. Similarly, given circumstances and the conventions of English usage, utterances like “Fine, thanks” are widely understood to be mere pleasantries, the sort of thing one will say out of politeness however one is actually feeling. In typical circumstances, they are simply not conventionally used to express a meaning like “I am completely free of anxiety, physical pain, or difficulty of any sort.” Hence it is […] silly to classify them as “lies”.

The question of how speech is conventionally meant to be taken becomes particularly complicated in the case of speaking to children, because children often have an imperfect understanding of the conventions of speech. The most hotly contested post in Feser’s lying series is one on Santa Clause. Telling your children that Santa is real, Feser argues, is a lie. He quotes Fr. Thomas Higgins:

A child can distinguish between fable and fact. When we purport to tell him things “for real” he does not expect a fairy tale. An example in point is the Santa Claus legend. We obtrude the story upon his belief, insisting that we are not weaving tales and commanding his acceptance – it is nothing but lying.

But Higgins is making the case simpler than it really is. A child is still in the process of learning how to distinguish between fable and fact. Depending on the child and how old it is etc. this process can be at very different stages. In fact children often take fables as fact, this is true even of fables that they themselves have invented. They slowly learn to distinguish between “pretend” and “real”; as they grow older they realize that their dolls are pretend persons whereas their brothers and sisters are real. Now I think that there are probably ways of telling the Santa Clause Myth that really make a lie out of it and harm the process of sorting out real and pretend in the child, but I think there are probably ways of telling it as what it is, namely figurative speech, which is not a lie. The child will initially take it literally but gradually learn to take it figuratively. My parents did not do the Santa thing, but they did have Saint Nicholas fill our shoes with chocolates on his Feast Day, and my experience was that we gradually came to see that it had been meant figuratively—there was no rude awakening, because our parents never said “this is not pretend;” they simply told the story and left us to develop the correct interpretation.

What is the point of such a procedure? Wouldn’t it have been better to tell the children from the start that it was not “really” Saint Nicholas who was filling the shoes? I don’t think so. It is important that children learn the different shades of speech, the conventions that determine when speech is taken literally and not. One has to guard against the naively priggish literalism of Belloc’s schoolmate:

There was a sturdy boy at my school who, when the master had carefully explained to us the nature of metaphor, said that so far as he could see a metaphor was nothing but a long Greek word for a lie.

There is a wonderful portrayal of the whole problem in the first chapter of Joseph Roth’s novel Radetzkymarsch (to take an example from Austrian literature for a change). Trotta, an infantry lieutenant, saves the Austrian Emperor’s life at the battle of Solferino by the rather un-romantic means of knocking His Apostolic Majesty down. Trotta is a Slovene, and (in stereotypically Slovenian fashion) a pusillanimous, miserly prig. He is covered in honors by the grateful monarch, and everything goes well till he reads an account of the Battle of Solferino in one of his son’s school books. Trotta’s heroic act has been turned into an exciting cavalry charge. Trotta is outraged. “It’s a lie!” he bellows, but everyone just answers him, “It’s for children.” “Children need examples that they can understand,” one of his friends says, “they will learn the real truth (die richtige Wahrheit) later.” Poor Trotta writes to the Imperial and Royal Ministry of education. The minister writes back in hilarious bureaucratic German, explaining “Euer Hochwohlgeboren” (Trotta is the son of a hedge-clipper) that in school books historical events have to be described in a way proportioned to the the imagination of children, “without changing the truthfulness of the events described.” So who is right the courageous but plodding Trotta or the imaginative minister? His Apostolic Majesty seems to side with Trotta when that noble officer takes his complaint all the way to the Imperial and Royal Throne:

“Your Majesty” said the captain, “it’s a lie!”

“There’s a great deal of lying goes on,” agreed the Emperor.

“Es wird viel gelogen:” that’s one thing we can be certain of!

Saint Benedict and Thackeray on False Peace

S. Benedict says (RB 4,25) that not to make a false peace (“Pacem falsam non dare”)  is one of the instruments of good works. There are a number of ways to take this. Dom Delatte, glossing it together with its context, writes: “It is the glory of the monastic life to be founded in loyalty and absolute sincerity, to be delivered from all the diplomacy and shiftiness of the world.” It occurred to me that that consummate mistress of diplomacy and shiftiness, Thackeray’s Becky (Sharp) Crawly, gives an astonishing example of one sort of “false peace”:

Becky, in the course of a very few hours, found means to make [George Osborne] forget that little unpleasant passage of words which had happened between them. "Do you remember the last time we met at Miss Crawley’s, when I was so rude to you, dear Captain Osborne? I thought you seemed careless about dear Amelia. It was that made me angry: and so pert: and so unkind: and so ungrateful. Do forgive me!" Rebecca said, and she held out her hand with so frank and winning a grace, that Osborne could not but take it. By humbly and frankly acknowledging yourself to be in the wrong, there is no knowing, my son, what good you may do. I knew once a gentleman and very worthy practitioner in Vanity Fair, who used to do little wrongs to his neighbours on purpose, and in order to apologise for them in an open and manly way afterwards—and what ensued? My friend Crocky Doyle was liked everywhere, and deemed to be rather impetuous—but the honestest fellow. Becky’s humility passed for sincerity with George Osborne.

Mario Incandenza, the Embarrassment of the Real, and the (Non-) Reality of Evil

I have just finished David Foster Wallace’s brilliant, disturbing, terrifying, sad, funny, and very, very, long novel Infinite Jest. It follows what seems like hundreds of characters in an elite tennis academy, a drug rehabilitation center, various Quebecois terrorist cells, etc. in the near future. The amazing thing is the way Wallace takes you into the various characters and gives you, so to speak, the flavor of their lives. He has an amazing ear for spoken language, for the way people actually talk, with all its hesitation and grammatical inconsistency, and through that he is able to show what it is like to live in our world. Above all he shows with terrifying clarity what it is to live “having no hope, and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12), what it is to be enslaved to the idols of the visible world, and what concrete form the simulacra gentium take in late capitalist America. And that is why a lot of it is really disturbing. In fact sometimes I found myself thinking it was to much; there are some things which it is simply better not to know. Felix Genn, the great bishop of Münster, once interpreted Rev 2:24 (“as many as have not this teaching, which know not the deep things of Satan, as they say; I cast upon you none other burden”) to mean that there are certain things which it is better not to look into. It is better to look at evil from a distance, to see it from a perspective from which its nothingness is most apparent–Tolkien is the master of the literary portrayal of evil in this mode. No one who reads Tolkien can doubt the clarity of his view of evil comes from remarkable personal innocence. Reading DFW on the other hand one has the sense that one is dealing with someone who has eaten way to much poisoned fruit… So, I abandoned Infinite Jest several times, but I kept on coming back to it.

Wallace was writing for an audience totally insulated against a Tolkienesque approach to literature: the post-modern avant-garde. In the above video he explains that he uses the techniques of post-modern literature to address ‘traditional human verities’ about spirituality and community and other ideas which the avant-garde would find very passé. I mentioned below that this presents him with certain problems. The basic paradox (and he was very much aware of this) is that the formal techniques that he employs were developed partly to mock the very idea of ‘traditional verities;’ post-modern literature is largely about seeing through the pretenses of supposed ‘truth,’ its ironic tone is aimed at exposing the hidden power-structures and manipulation that underlie supposed ‘verities.’ 

The most innocent character (in a Tolkienesque way) in Infinite Jest is Mario Incandenza, the severely handicapped second son of the Tennis Academy’s founder. Wallace is describes how Mario is puzzled by the way post-modern irony makes it embarrassing to talk about “real stuff:”

Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madam Psychosis [radio] programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she’d taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you love dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. [the tennis academy] over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that is really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. (p. 592).

In contrast at the drug rehab center, Ennet house, Mario finds that people have no problem talking about ‘real stuff:’

Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet house Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell that they were worried inside. (591)

The drug addicts have come to the end of their tether and they are desperate enough to shed their disguises. And that is why Wallace goes into the gruesome details of their predicament; he shows how their addictions are simply more evident versions of the same enslavement to idols that the cool tennis academy people are stuck in. I hope to discuss the central topic of idolatry more in future posts, but I want to end with Wallace’s amazing ability to enter into Mario’s innocent view of evil. Here is a wonderful passage which shows Mario’s experiential grasp of evil-as-privation-of-due-good. Mario is thinking about his brilliant but no-longer innocent brother Hal: 

He can’t tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal’s mind or whether he’s in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of pre-verbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you’ve lost something important in a dream and you can’t even remember what it was but it’s important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn’t have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes. (590)

Tolkien and the Common Good

Tom Shippey’s book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author Century is largely an apologetic work; it is a defense of Tolkien against literary critics who despise him as a romantic escapist whose mock archaic epics are unworthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the psychological explorations of “modernist” fiction. Shippey argues that is is in fact the “modern” which out of touch with reality and the “archaic” which is real. One argument that he brings for this has to do with the contrast between the private and the public:

Nevertheless, although [Tolkien’s concern] is not with the private and the personal (the themes of the ‘modernist’ novel), but with the public and the political, it should be obvious that to all but the sheltered classes of this century, the most important events in private lives (and even more, in deaths) have often been public and political. It is those who turn away from that thought, prefer to remain in what Graves called the ‘drawing room’ areas of literary tradition, who are in ‘flight from reality’. (p.xxxi)

Shippey should go farther though. That the “public” does touch what is most important in human lives is not just a consequence of its habit of ending them, but more importantly it follows from the primacy of the common good: the most important human goods are not private goods. Tolkien himself saw this quite clearly. In a lecture some years ago my father made this point:

We meet Frodo immersed in the ordinary life of a Hobbit. Step by step he discovers the significance of the ring he inherited from Bilbo. The ring is not a local matter. It touches the lives of all in Middle-earth. The quest on which this discovery sends him brings him into contact with concerns that are much larger than those that had moved him in the Shire. His quest is not a merely personal quest. It cannot be understood in terms of pop-psychology as a quest of finding himself. What he finds is much larger than himself and he understands himself more and more as a part of that larger whole. […] Frodo’s quest is therefore defined by a great and noble common good, a political good. This transition of Frodo from a private individual with a small radius of life to one who loves the common good of the kingdom established in Middle-earth is one of the most beautiful events in The Lord of the Rings. It corresponds to the rhythm of increase found at the beginning of the Silmarillion, at the very root of Middle-earth. A small story is suddenly enlarged into a story that has greatness, splendor and glory.

And there is another piece of evidence that the primacy of the common good is pretty much the hermeneutic key to the universe, as anyone who has read Charles De Koninck’s sapiential book on that principle will agree.

(Of course, not every author who is interested in the ‘public’ in Shippey’s sense uses an ‘archaic’ style. David Foster Wallace’s work, for example, turned a lot on the contrast between private and common good, but uses the most ‘advanced’ technique, and that presents him with certain difficulties…)

The Opalescent Parrot on Francis Bacon

Among the pilgrims here for the Exaltation of the Cross on Sunday I was surprised to see Aelianus of Laodicea. I have been discussing the most abstract kind of armchair politics with Aelianus recently, but I thought that he was in far away Britain. We spoke after Mass, and he asked whether my classifying Laodicea under the Opalescent Parrot is some sort of elaborate insult. On the contrary, it is a complement. Alfred Noyes’s brilliant literary-criticism giving parrot is, one might say, the Platonic form of Catholic blogger; at least, if there were a Platonic form of Catholic blogger the Opalescent Parrot would participate in it to the highest degree (except that he didn’t have a blog…). The Parrot is the master of the sort dismissive, aphorismic take down of the children of this world that Catholic bloggers specialize in. Consider the son of the Orinoco on Francis Bacon:

‘The Worst thing of all,’ said Francis Bacon, ‘is the apotheosis of error’ It is on of those ‘apothegms’ which have been acclaimed as among the most glorious jewels in the crown of Philosophy; and whether the acclaim be deserved or not, the ‘apothegm’ has a special applicability to the tercentenary of Francis Bacon himself. […] For Francis Bacon is the supreme instance in English history of a figure crowned with error. Errors of every kind (from the hard, bright, shallow judgments of Macaulay to the pathetic futilities of those who believe that Bacon wrote the Faërie Queene and Hamlet), follies of every kind, fly to him like iron filings to a magnet.

Incidentally, I have used the “pathetic futilities of those who believe that Bacon wrote the Faërie Queene and Hamlet” to illustrate a point that Newman makes in the Grammar of Assent. A man who has read Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon closely for many years, and has attained a real apprehension of their literary style and color of mind, is absolutely certain that the author of the Faërie Queene did not write Hamlet, and that the author of the New Atlantis wrote neither. But, if he is asked to produce arguments he can only bring a number of probabilities, none of which justifies his absolute certitude. Why? The problem is that when he produces arguments he must abstract and enter the realm of what Newman calls the “notional,” but the concrete fact does not admit of universal demonstration. His certitude is based on the myriad complexity of a concrete fact really apprehended, and he cannot translate it into notions that do full justice to the reality. Thus the “accumulated probabilities” that Newman speaks of as giving him the certitude arrived at in his religious inquiry, are not a collection of probable, notional arguments added up till all together they prove what none of them separately can, but rather the quasi-infinity of probabilities following from the real apprehension of the concrete.