Posted on by Mark Patton · 1 Comment

The Emperor – and the sea-squirt

Emperor Hirohito in Japan’s Imperial Laboratory in 1936
MARK PATTON remembers the day Hirohito came to Massachusetts

 It was 1974 and a cloudless bright blue autumn day, and I was out sailing with a friend in her Herreshoff 12 – a beautiful gaff-rigged wooden sailboat designed in 1914 by Nathaniel Greene Herreshoff. Herreshoff designed and built other boats, including five winning America Cup yachts. Of course, the H12 we were sailing in was just 12.5 feet long, compared to the America Cup behemoths, which were ten times its size. However, the scenery surrounding us in the little sloop was just as grand and imposing as anything the Vigilant, Defender, Columbia, Reliant or Resolute encountered during their successful defenses of the trans-Atlantic trophy.

The boat owner’s house sat up on a nearby hill, which overlooked the craft’s mooring in Little Harbor, Woods Hole. It had been used over decades to house family members during the summer scientific season at the Marine Biological Laboratory. We were soon sailing past the buoy tenders of the adjacent United States Coast Guard base into Vineyard Sound, then onto a long reach, placing the Nobska Point Light on our stern and Great Harbor on our bow. To port was Martha’s Vineyard of Teddy Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick fame and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws fame, contrasting with the pristine, and more exclusive, chain of the Elizabeth Islands.
West of the Great Harbor ferry line terminal, the peninsula of Woods Hole came into view, which is often called Water Street. Water Street is a half mile long coastal road, bisected in the middle by a drawbridge, which gives pleasure craft access to the sheltered harbor of Eel Pond. On its ocean side, Water Street is lined with fishing vessels and deep-sea research vessels. Apart from a few scattered bars and eateries, science is what this town is about. From the tarmac, Water Street’s seaside view is nearly obscured by the many buildings of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Marine Biological Laboratory.

This small strip of land has big accomplishments to its name – such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic’s deep-sea submersible Alvin, which among other things, in 1966 located a nuclear bomb off the coast of Spain, mislaid by a United States B-52 bomber after a midair collision. It later discovered deep sea hydrothermal vents and the strange chemosynthesis ecosystems that surround them and, in 1985, carried out a systematic exploration of the Titanic. Then there is the National Marine Fisheries Service, enhancing, regulating and inventorying the northeast fisheries stocks since 1871. The Marine Biological Lab is less attention grabbing, and little known to the public, though it boasts no fewer than 60 Nobel Laureates.

Our trip in the Herreshoff came to an end, and soon we were at my friend’s house, for a promised dinner with her family. I cannot tell you anything about what I was served as an entrée, or what most of the conversation was about. However, I can tell you that I learned that the house had been recently passed down by my hostess’s grandfather, who had died the year before. Like so many around here, he had received a Nobel Prize, in his case for the discovery of the antibiotic properties of streptomycin. Nobel Prize aside, among his many other honours was the Star of the Rising Sun, bestowed upon him by Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Hirohito’s son, Crown Prince Akihito had even sat at the table at which I was dining.

Emperor Hirohito was a marine biologist, and had started his pursuit as a young boy. He had his own lab constructed so he could study the subject throughout his life, including the war years. Akihito was no stranger to the subject either. He had officially visited Woods Hole on three separate occasions, starting as far back as 1953 when he was presented with a rare deep-sea fish in a bottle of formaldehyde by the Woods Hole Oceanographic. I was flabbergasted. I think few Americans had any idea that Japan’s imperial family had any interest in marine biology and had such prolonged contact with this distant promontory on Cape Cod.

I had to ask my hosts what this prince was like.
“A nice fellow”, they said. “Naturally, there was a language barrier but he seemed to be a happy sort.”
“How did he look?” I asked.
“Slender, like you, and wore a blue jean jacket just like you’re wearing now.”

How could this be? I had seen many productions of the Mikado and knew that when the son of the Emperor of Japan traveled in disguise it was as a second trombone, not dressed like me – a former helmsman of the research vessel Chain, who was now working as a part-time police officer while attending Northeastern University in Boston.

***

It was October 4th, 1975, and another cloudless bright blue autumn day. I was walking up Harbor Hill, the upper section of Water Street, Woods Hole. Next to me was the Falmouth Police Department’s junior sergeant, who normally commanded the community’s midnight shift. We were heading to Woods Hole’s only coffee shop.

Most of the preliminary preparation had been done. All the cars that had been parked on either Water Street or MBL Street had been towed. Sawhorses had been erected to prohibit traffic entry, and part-time police officers ensured no one went beyond them. Rope lines had been placed at strategic spots where the motorcade would be accessible to view to authorized viewers.

A month prior, I had been called by the Falmouth Police Department’s captain of operations. He needed manpower. He was mobilizing every man he could get from his regular officers, provisional officers and auxiliary police officers for the 124th heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne, the longest reigning monarch of Japan. Michinomiya Hirohito was coming to town, with his wife, the Empress Nagako.

The plan was that the Emperor’s motorcade would drive down Water Street, stop at the Wood Hole Oceanographic’s Redfield Laboratory. There, he would exit his limousine, go in and discuss marine biology with some leading scientists in his field. The Oceanographic had a lab all set up for him, including a bathroom specially designed for this very occasion, nicknamed The Royal Flush. Once the science had been taken care of, the Emperor would be back in his limousine headed further down Water Street to the Marine Biological Laboratory’s (MBL) library in the Lillie Building. He would enter the library and be given a precious pickled tunicate (sea squirt) from the top brass of both research institutions.
Concomitantly, the Empress would be up in Falmouth proper, at the historic home of Katherine Lee Bates, composer of ‘America the Beautiful,’ to  be presented with some silver candle sticks carved with the MBL logo.  The silversmiths were a local couple, the Panis’s, who lived on several acres of wooded and elaborately gardened land next to the town’s colonial cemetery. On occasion, I had helped Mrs. Panis with her weeding – a very short, round, and elderly woman. The couple lived in a small white house not much bigger than a doll’s, where they kept their jewelry patterns for rings and brooches in an old tobacco tin. If the empress was to receive a gift from anyone in town, I couldn’t imagine anyone more delightful to bestow it.

Regrettably, the sergeant and I never made it to the coffee shop. As we were about to open the door, six Massachusetts State Police cruisers were let through the upper Water Street barricade. They came with their blue strobe lights flashing. This struck us as showboating, due to it being early morning and the street had been cleared of people. There was no one about to be impressed by the display but other cops. These units then parked at an oblique angle, totally ignoring the painted parking lines, in front of a local tourist bar, The Captain Kidd. In unison, the troopers exited their cruisers, formed up into two columns and began to march. When they were finished with their parade, most of them went up to their positions on various rooftops with sniper rifles.

At this point, their ranking officer noticed the sergeant and me, still by the coffee shop. He hailed us, and then came over and discussed the upcoming event. As he put it, “I don’t like guarding this son of a bitch, but my job requires that I do so. If someone offs the emperor I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”
He then mentioned that three former Canadian prisoners of war, who had been held at a Japanese internment camp during World War II, had been stopped at the US border. Their plan was to be at this event and do something the trooper wasn’t going to lose any sleep over. However, he then quickly added that the men he had selected for the rooftop assignments had no fathers who fought in the Pacific theatre during World War II. I thought, “That was a bit harsh,” as the head trooper departed to attend to his other duties.   

At that time, most of Woods Hole, and the rest of the nation, were still buying the official line of the Supreme Allied Commander in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur. His spin was that the emperors were always just puppets under the thumb of strong military generals. So, Hirohito didn’t cause the war or actively participate in any major decision making. He was just required to rubber-stamp things. MacArthur even went to the length of persuading Hirohito not to acknowledge his responsibility for the war. Having the Emperor of Japan brought before The Tokyo War Crimes Trials would have caused considerable heartburn for the American occupation forces in Japan.

Not long after the trooper’s departure, the sawhorses on the upper barricade were pulled open again. Now it was time for the school buses. A long line of yellow buses was admitted onto Water Street. The first was filled with reporters, their cameras sticking out the various windows and clicking away. The next series of buses contained ‘Save the Whale’ people. That year, Greenpeace had started its campaign to end whale hunting, but like Norway and the Soviet Union, Japan wanted nothing to do with it.

These Save the Whale folks were to be my particular problem. They had been granted space within a roped barricade in an area off Water Street that became known as Peace Park. It was one of the few strips of land on Water Street with a clear view of the ocean and the outlying Elizabeth Islands.
As the sergeant and I headed down the sidewalk to our assigned positions we passed the Woods Hole Pharmacy. There, a strange looking young man opened the door to the drug store and entered. His chin had a couple days growth, he wore a black motorcycle jacket, and most curiously, he wore a pink knitted cap replete with brim and a pompom on top. When he entered the store, I could partially see into one of his coat pockets. It was a fleeting glance, and I wasn’t really sure of what I had seen. Was it a gun? Or was that just the sheen from a package of cigarettes? I resolved to keep an eye out for him.

At this point, the sergeant went off to his station, the Redfield Building, where the emperor would first arrive, as I headed down to Peace Park. Once there, a couple of provisional officers and myself began the process of herding cats – the cats being the protestors. They really wanted to be on the street. One of them kept engaging me in a conversation about Japan’s whale killing. I kept telling him that there was nothing I could do about Japan’s maritime policies. He then began sticking his foot beyond the rope line.

“What would you do if I go out into the street?” he asked. “Would you arrest me?”

“I would arrest you,” I answered.
My assigned position was very close to the steps of the Lillie Building, where Hirohito would make his public appearance. Closer to those steps was the roped-off press area. Two fulltime officers were stationed there.

They turned to me, and admonished, “Remember, never take your eye off the crowd. When the emperor comes out refrain from looking at him. Keep your eye on the crowd.”
As I resolved to heed the experienced advice of these veteran cops, the Japanese security team made its presence known – a well-tailored group of men in dark suits, led by one man in a light-coloured suit.

The people who had been allowed to assemble up the road at the Redfield Building began clapping and cheering as the black limousines pulled in front of the building.

Down on my end, the one protestor was still pestering me with his version of the Hokey Pokey — put your right foot in, take your right foot out. Put your left foot in and shake it all about.
The Save the Whale crowd was getting agitated, but it was too early for them to raise their signs and begin chanting. I then felt the presence of someone directly behind me. As I turned, I discovered that it was the man in the light-colored suit, and he was some angry. He gestured wildly. I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying. Somehow, we had a serious problem. There were so many people he could have vented to, like those two veteran officers near me, or perhaps my sergeant, or that top ranking trooper, but he for some reason latched onto me, the person with the least authority in the entire bunch.

Following his lead, I left my post and hurried with him to the backend of MBL Street. There was a sawhorse there with some sort of Falmouth Police officer stationed next to it. I’d never seen this guy before. He was far too old to still be in uniform, and his uniform looked even older. I asked him who he was, and he told me that he was the father of one of the regular officers. Not sure how he got the barricade job – perhaps sworn in just for the occasion? You only needed a week’s training and passing a state exam to be a provisional. Even the town hall janitor had once flashed a badge at me. So, I guessed it was all legit. I dare say that the chief of Japan’s security had better qualifications, and his beef was that this fellow was allowing anyone who wanted to see the emperor to go beyond the official police sawhorse. They were lining up near the steps of the Lillie Building – the best seats in the house if you wanted to see the emperor. I told the well-meaning officer to knock it off, then went back to sort out the unwanted gawkers.
When I made it back to my post, I saw him…the man in the black leather coat with the pink pompom knit hat. He was right amongst my Save the Whale people. I asked two other provisionals who were working with me to follow me into the crowd. As I sidled behind the fellow with the outlandish pink hat, I got a good look into that suspicious pocket of his. There was a gun. Immediately I commanded him to put his hands into the air as I lifted my revolver from its holster.
“I’m a trooper!” he said in sort of a loud, but hushed style voice, as though no one would notice he was now surrounded by cops.
“Oh, yeah? Well if you are a trooper why wasn’t I told you were in my crowd?”
“It was to be kept a secret.”

I sent one of the other provisionals to go get the head trooper while the rest of us kept this guy’s hands up.

Yep. He was a trooper. His boss came down, nodded his head, and then walked back up Water Street.

“Why are you dressed in such an outlandish getup?” I asked him in amazement.

“I was told that Woods Hole is filled with Hippies. I thought I’d blend in with the Save the Whale people.”

His cover blown, I left him as an oddity amongst the Save the Whale people, and returned to my spot in front of the protestors.

Shortly after came the roar of more cheering up the street. I glanced towards the Redfield building and saw that the scientific discussion had apparently ended. The limousines were coming down to the Lillie Building.
Everything was now happening behind me. I could hear car doors opening and closing. People were applauding and some were booing. The planned speech under the portico of the Lillie Building was now taking place.

There I was, my back turned to one of the most significant people in the history of the 20th century, and I wasn’t allowed to look at him. I was just to keep my eyes on the protestors and the fake hippie trooper. Even after the conclusion of World War II many Japanese still considered Hirohito to be of divine origin. For much of his life his subjects averted their eyes in his presence. Here I was probably the only person left on the planet still doing so. I had to take a glance. Just for a second. Capture the moment. You know, “Yes, I saw the emperor of Japan.”
As I turned my head to see what was happening behind me, I saw that the two veteran officers, who warned me about doing what I was doing now, had left their posts in front of the news media people, and had sauntered up to the foot of the stairs leading up to the portico. They were totally engrossed with the ceremony, arms folded over their chests, listening to every word being spoken.

Hirohito at Woods Hole. Source: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

Well, the emperor was handed the precious pickled tunicate. The show was over. In a few weeks Hirohito would be down in Orlando, Florida being escorted through Disney World by Mickey Mouse. The emperor would live on for fourteen more years. In 1989, Akihito would ascend to the Chrysanthemum Throne.

As is tradition with Japanese emperors, Michinomiya Hirohito was given a posthumous name after his death. It would be Showa. His reign would be titled the Showa Era, which translates into “Bright Peace” – which is a bit odd if you consider that the wars Hirohito engaged in cost an estimated loss of life somewhere between three million and ten million people.

Irony seems to be the nature of human history. In 1964, the Japanese government awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun to Air Force General “Bombs Away Le May” Curtis Lemay. They did so even though he was responsible for the strategic bombing of Japan, specifically the firebombing of the paper houses in Tokyo. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people died there, with another estimate of half a million deaths for the entire bombing operation.

Then there is also the case of General Minoru Genda, who was the military architect for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Twenty years after the attack, he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the United States Air Force. By the way, the Legion of Merit is one step above the Distinguished Flying Cross, and is meant to be awarded for exceptional meritorious conduct.
So, all in all, I think things worked out. I mean, Hirohito’s actions had the highest body count, so he only got a sea squirt pickled in a jar of formaldehyde.    

Posted on by Guy Walker

Vowels / Voyelles by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Guy Walker

Vowels



A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue – Vowel Sounds,

Some day I shall disclose your secret parturitions;

A – bodice bristled black by shimmering flies’ ignitions

Around the noisesome evil; fizzing Legion drowned



In shadows. E – bleached tents and ashen steam’s emissions,

White kings, shivered lilies, ice-fields ironbound;

I – Tyrian blood like spat contumely that redounds

From gorgeous, mocking lips with wine-infused contritions;



U – rehearsing seas’ veridian shudders, clear, divine.

The peace in greensward specked with livestock; peace in lines

Alchemic training draws on brows that books made wise.



O – highest Clarion thronged with alien stridencies,

A silence crossed by [Thrones and Principalities]

– O that Òmega, amethyst ray of [His] Eyes!







Voyelles



A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles,

Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes :

A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes

Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,



Golfes d’ombre ; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,

Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’ombelles ;

I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles

Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes ;



U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,

Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides

Que l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux ;



O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,

Silences traversés des [Mondes et des Anges] :

O – l’Oméga, rayon violet de [Ses] Yeux !



Posted on by Jon Bishop

How The Napoleon of Notting Hill can educate us

JON BISHOP finds Catholic meaning in the urbis

In an 1874 letter to members of the Augustinians of the Assumption, Venerable Emmanuel d’Alzon, who founded the congregation in 19th century France, spoke about the “radical denial of the rights of God” in the post-revolutionary period. Society then – as now – did not understand the order of things and did “not want the truth to serve as its bedrock.” And he observed that “ever since society ceased to rest on this doctrinal foundation, we can see…the resulting turmoil.”

Like other thinkers and figures of the time, d’Alzon recognized that the disenchantment of the world caused profound disorder. His solution to this was to “proclaim everywhere in the world the rights of God, of Jesus Christ and of his Church.” To do this, the Assumptionists had to focus on education in all its forms. Elsewhere, d’Alzon had written that “humanity needs to be taught, but first we need to give humanity a heart of flesh, as Scripture says, to replace the one becoming like stone in its chest.”

I open with d’Alzon for two reasons. First, I am indebted to the Assumptionists and d’Alzonian thinking; I was educated by the Assumptionists at Assumption College in Massachusetts, now Assumption University, and briefly considered a vocation to the congregation. Secondly, I believe his observations on the turmoil of the modern period have much to teach both intellectuals and artists.

D’Alzon can help us approach art because art, good and bad, has an educative dimension to it, particularly a moral one. To demonstrate this, I’d like to take a moment to compare him to T.S. Eliot. In Religion and Literature, Eliot observes that modern literature seems to express “no higher ideal to set before us than [absolute liberty].” It has been “corrupted by…Secularism, that it is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life.” If we are exposed to this and do not think seriously about what we are reading, then, Eliot says, we will receive an improper formation, one that puts us at odds with the Truth. Emmanuel d’Alzon would likely agree with Eliot and has, in fact, used artistic language to talk about the seriousness of human formation. He has noted that the soul is “like a block of marble” that like the sculptor’s block can be chipped away meticulously until it becomes a work of art.

A good example of a novel that can shape the reader and demonstrate where we moderns have become unmoored is G.K. Chesterton’s 1904 novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. In the aforementioned essay, Eliot identifies Chesterton as a propagandist, used in its original sense to mean propagation of the faith. But despite its rather overt sensibility, the novel works quite well for my purposes.

It’s apt to describe The Napoleon of Notting Hill as a story about education and ideas – in particular, the Christian idea.

Before the novel – which is set 80 years after its publication date – begins in earnest, Chesterton’s introductory note runs through a litany of modern “prophets,” each of whom has offered a particular vision of what the future might look like – from H.G. Wells saying “science would take charge of the future” to Edward Carpenter’s assertion that “we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do.” These are all attempts at what Eric Voegelin called “immanentizing the Eschaton.”  [Editor’s Note: From A New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin, 1952: “The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.” The term “immanentizing the Eschaton” would become a satirical way of describing utopian thinking.]  

That so many people would strive for utopian solutions makes sense, because, like d’Alzon, Chesterton would have encountered similar disordered thinking. Ideas take root and spread. All these “prophets,” having jettisoned God, still needed to find ultimate meaning, in the form of capital-s Science or something else. But the order of things cannot be separated from God, and human life cannot be reduced to a series of predictions and numbers. Reality is deeper than ideological fads, and life is not a series of “cold mechanic happenings,” to quote from Chesterton’s poem he includes as an epigraph. Instead, it’s all bound by joy.

The novel opens in a London “almost exactly like what it is now.” Chesterton’s third-person narrator tells us that the people of this time have “absolutely lost faith in revolutions” and instead have accepted “Evolution,” in the sense that any changes must be done “slowly and safely,” as in nature. This flattening of the human spirit had resulted in the death of democracy, because “no one minded the governing class governing.” England, seemingly a world-bestriding colossus, because it seems to have conquered Athens, Jerusalem, and Nicaragua, was “now practically a despotism, but not a hereditary one.” The narrator tells us that “someone in the official class was made king.” The passive voice there suggests the passivity of the population, and indeed, in the next sentence, the narrator says that “no one cared how; no one cared who.” We then learn that, unsurprisingly, “everything…had become mechanical.”

Into this comes Auberon Quin, a comic figure whom the narrator describes as godson of “the King of the Fairies.” Apparatchiks of the regime arrive at Quin’s house and, to the shock of the people present, announce that he has been named king. Later that day, King Auberon makes a humorous speech in which he announces his desire to save “from extinction a few old English customs.” He suggests a form of local patriotism, in which each borough of London “shall immediately build a city wall with gates to be closed at sunset.” These places will be “armed to the teeth” and will “have a banner, a coat of arms, and, if convenient, a gathering cry.” Intellectuals turn “purple with laughter,” while others are “purple with indignation.” Most have their “minds a blank.” But not one Adam Wayne, who is there watching with “burning blue eyes.” He takes Quin very seriously.

It makes sense that Wayne would take Quin seriously. A mechanized, flat world is an inhuman world. People float through it like seaweed in the deep, because they have been given nothing to believe in. This is a world that isn’t foreign to us, but nor was it foreign to Chesterton or d’Alzon. The latter, in discussing his vocation to the priesthood – he founded the Assumptionists and became a religious later – observed that France had become a “decrepit machine.” Because it was “dangerous to try to repair,” he reasoned that the best approach would be to become a priest and press on the culture “with all the weight of the rights it had no authority to give.”

For d’Alzon, humanity is “deeply wounded” by “indifference and ignorance,” both of which “imply a total lack of faith.” His solution to this, as was mentioned, was to provide a serious education, one that would “penetrate” the world with “the Christian idea.” It would otherwise be in danger of collapsing. D’Alzon’s description of France and of his vocation should remind us of what Chesterton says about England in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. There are striking similarities of language: machine, indifference, a loss of faith.

Another point of comparison: the reactions to d’Alzon’s decision to become a priest mirrored the reactions to Quin’s speech. He was from an aristocratic family. People were shocked that, as they saw it, he would renounce his inheritance to become a priest. In an 1830 letter, D’Alzon had chided a friend for not wanting “at all to be reasonable,” going as far to say, “I scare you in a priest’s robe.” In the same letter, he offers his thoughts on the state of France. In addition to describing France as a “decrepit machine,” he observed that “sovereignty did not exist any more in the Palais Bourbon than at the Tuileries.” This was a “society that was so sick, one could have influence only in separating oneself completely.”

The England of the novel is also a sick society and one that truly lacks sovereignty. In effect,  Quin is providing a kind of education. The fact that he views things as a joke fits his character as a “Fairy.” But fairy tales themselves – and Chesterton wants to link The Napoleon of Notting Hill to the fairy tale tradition – discuss very serious things. In his essay “Fairy Tales,” [Editor’s Note: Included in his 1908 book, All Things Considered], Chesterton points out that “if you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.” He closes the essay by observing that fairy tales find “the great mystical basis for all Commandments.”

Quin’s speech, then, awoke something in Adam Wayne. To use d’Alzonian and scriptural language, you could say that Quin replaced Wayne’s heart of stone with one of flesh. And because his kingship sets off the events of The Napoleon of Notting Hill –Wayne decides to lead a rebellion, and this inspires others – we might say that Quin has effectively brought about a re-enchantment of the world. Indeed, Wayne says as much, both at the beginning of the novel and at its end. He says Quin has given him a desire to “fight for something greater,” noting that “this leadership and liberty of Notting Hill is a gift from your Majesty.” Wayne has been reminded that the purpose of human life is, as Pope Emeritus Benedict has noted,” is one of “greatness.” And he thus sees that there is a “mystical basis for all Commandments.” Now fully awakened, he believes these things are worth fighting for.

For Emmanuel d’Alzon, this was the exact purpose of an education, which he called a “great and magnificent work.” Through this, “we refashion the being of our students.” D’Alzon hoped the world would “receive [the Christian idea] by individuals who will be taken up with it.”

Adam Wayne was taken up by this idea of Quin’s, and it reshaped the world as it is. He brings it from a mechanized, empty flatness to “fairyland” and “elfland.” It leads to a re-enchantment and, à la d’Alzon, reorders the being of the world.

By the end of the story, it’s clear that both Wayne and Quin function as a dual symbol of “fairyland,” which, as Chesterton observes in “Fairy Tales,” is “a world at once of wonder and of war.” Wayne remarks that he and Quin “are not two men but one man.” He continues, and his remarks are worth quoting at length:

It is not merely that you, the humorist, have been in these dark days stripped of the joy of gravity. It is not merely that I, the fanatic, have had to grope without humour. It is that though we seem to be opposite in everything, we have been opposite like man and woman aiming at the same moment at the same practical thing. We are the father and mother of the Charter of the Cities.

In effect, he is saying that the complete picture of the created order is a place “of wonder and war.” This is the full picture of human life. Quin and Wayne broke the mechanized imposter that, demiurge-like, was posing as the created order and made things real again.

How, then, does The Napoleon of Notting Hill educate the reader, both then and in the present? Chesterton deliberately sets the novel in a London not far removed from the one of 1904 and peppers it with real places, in addition to references to real people. The reader from 1904 would then be able to recognize his world in the text. Then, if he is attentive, he would start to ask questions: are things detached and mechanized? Where do we find meaning today? What is the cause and purpose of my life? Am I ordering my life toward good and appropriate things? And so on. We do have a real-life example of this. According to Dale Ahlquist, president of the Society of G.K. Chesterton, Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary, was inspired by the novel to seek Irish independence.

But despite its references to early 20th century things, this is not a novel that is time-locked. We can read it and still be edified; the problems discussed by d’Alzon, Eliot, and Chesterton have persisted.

Consider Quin’s reflection during Adam Wayne’s initial audience with him at the beginning of the novel. He says that “the whole world is mad, but Adam Wayne and me.” This madness consists of being obsessive about politics, caring for money, and thinking yourself right. These of course are perennial human concerns, but then Quin gets specific. He accuses people of trying to “spoil my joke, and bully me out of it, by becoming more and more modern, more and more practical, more and more bustling and rational.” This joke-spoiling and bullying has of course accelerated greatly since Chesterton’s time – leading to confusion and unhappiness, and eventually maybe even destruction.

As the American Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor once observed in Mystery and Manners:  Occasional Prose, “in the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness.” She continues: “It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

We can objectively call this true. The 20th century was one of theories, each of which, like Chesterton’s prophets, attempted to bring about utopia, but instead led to millions and millions of deaths. But this confusion has persisted. As Walker Percy observed inhis posthumously-published Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, ours is a “deranged age…because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

In 2017, in an essay for Crux on both d’Alzon and education, I pointed out that the Department of Education lists its purpose as “foster[ing] student achievement” and “preparation for global competitiveness.” I observed that we tend to see education as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. Seven years on, the US Department of Education still lists its purpose as “preparation for global competitiveness.” Then, as now, these are buzzwords, but they also tell us something about how we view education:  a mere means to an end, a way to place people into a culture with only the basest of aspirations. When we are taught that there are no higher things, we will be led to believe that life is a mechanized existence, as described by both Chesterton and d’Alzon.

In a way, it’s all more of the same. Various techno-utopians have proposed that the solution to the human condition is to place us in a “metaverse,” where we’d live our lives in virtual reality. In City Journal, Jacob Howland has detailed the “destruction” of the University of Tulsa, where he holds emeritus status. Entire programs were eliminated or consolidated into minors: Greek, Latin, philosophy, religion. This, he pointed out, will result in students who are “credentialed, but…not…educated.” Sadly, his university is not unique.

But what are the results of this? A profound sense of malaise, particularly among the young.

Perhaps reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill – and having a good teacher discuss the novel with students – might provide a way forward for students who are feeling stifled by our deranged age. It would show them that the ideas that undergird our modern culture are ones that flatten the human spirit. They would not have to become revolutionaries or leaders of statelet neighborhoods, like Michael Collins or Adam Wayne, but perhaps they could be awakened to the idea that there is something profound about human existence. This is the purpose of good art and literature–to show people that there is a higher ideal than Eliot’s “absolute liberty” – because absolute liberty is  little more than nihilism.

I can speak to this. I felt a sense of aimlessness when I’d finished high school, with vague ideas about becoming a doctor or a politician, but then, while at Assumption, I received two gifts, which cannot be separated:  the Catholic faith, which I reverted to as a student, and liberal education. My professors – although not trickers or jokesters! – were my Quins. They awakened something in me and gave my life a telos. I don’t think it’s an accident that liberal education is often deemed a kind of lunacy. Quin and Wayne were seen as lunatics, but Auberon Quin notes that “the whole world is mad, but Adam Wayne and me.” I am thankful that I pursued this “madness,” and was given access to the truth.

An education that featured books like The Napoleon of Notting Hill would send readers and students on a search, resulting in a deeper engagement with tradition, and helping settle the turmoil of our age. It might help sweep away the sadness and hopelessness that plague so many people today, by reminding us that the world is enchanted, and guiding us along “the starry streets that point to God.”

Posted on by Derek Turner

The ghost coast

Adam ran his hand over his balding scalp. The dunes shimmered all around – expectant, empty of any movement except his, although he knew rare beetles trundled through rough grass, and he could hear toads, chirring contentedly somewhere amongst orchids and buckthorn. He couldn’t see the sea from here, but it would be far out at this time, perhaps exposing the ribs of the Sprite, which had foundered here fatally in 1888.

A track wended up a slope surmounted by wind-tortured hawthorns and a World War Two pillbox – an outsized armoured helm in lichened concrete. This had always been a watchful coast, wary of invaders or worried by water, fearing one day it might break through to complete the drowning of Doggerland. There were times – more and more often – when Adam remembered the world’s hugeness, and hardness. Its terrible hardness…

He sighed, and sweated up the slope. Bone-weary though he was, his eyes were darting everywhere. He had tofind it. Had to. It would be his first. It would be his last. It would crown the day, this year – in fact, his nature-watching life. And it would be the perfect sign-off for this place, which he’d soon be leaving for good.

Angela had loved it here. So many days here with her, sharing the exultance of seeing some creature that according to the textbooks shouldn’t be there at all, some visitant magically manifesting thousands of miles outside its accustomed range. Once, when lying beside her under bushes, watching a vagrant warbler almost never recorded outside Central America, she had breathed just audibly, “It’s like a miracle!”

So it was – although there was also sadness surrounding such wanderers, so far from home, never to return, fated to end among unfamiliar dangers, trembling in unaccustomed cold, calling out plaintively into unanswering air for flock or mate.

Birds had been Angela’s passion – house-sparrows as much as any exotic warblers. She had never taken any species for granted since reading as a girl about the passenger pigeon. They had even given their daughter the name of Martha, in honour of the elderly endling which had fallen to the floor in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, the last representative of flocks which had once broken branches by sheer weight of superabundance. On that proud day at the font in sunlit St Michael’s, with smiling family all round, they had never considered their choice might be so portentous…

Adam was more interested in insects. They had fascinated him since he was four, after a hoverfly had alighted on his outstretched hand like a benediction, a gold-and-black bejewelled being gracing his hand in a God-ray of sunshine slanting through trees.

He had lived insects and arachnids since, keeping ants and stick-insects, rearing moths, watching Attenborough, reading books like The Life of the Spider and The Soul of the White Ant, habitually turning over stones and rotten logs – in incessant search of insect lives, their meanings, their secrets, their symbolism.

Medieval illuminators had made minibeasts into miniature marginalia, and philosophers had seen them as metaphors of society and statecraft. The bee-kings that became queens as science advanced – the toiling workers so infinitesimal in themselves, but whose united efforts brought strength and sweetness to the world. Adam owned a small 1660s still-life, an anniversary present from Angela – a Delft bowl of apples, grapes, pears, and pomegranates, festooned with delicate butterflies – a Golden Age representation of Earth’s bountiful interconnectedness. Insects intersected with everyone everywhere always; their fall would also be ours.

He had become an academic, a writer of papers and addresser of conferences, a campaigner and charity trustee – so often dull and dry work, filled with frustrations, but energised always by that childhood encounter, and then the prospect of the whole planet losing its pollinators – losing its life. Losing its soul.

Whenever things got bad, there was balm in the multi-legged multiverse that began outside his back door. He would switch off machines and go into the garden – there to lose himself in the polished elegance of earwigs, watch whirligigs writing in an unknown language across the pond, or look into the compound eyes of bee-flies and wish he could see the world their way. Invertebrates had more sense than some vertebrates. Their unflagging energy was humbling as well as inspiring, an example of courage to him and to everyone – how they would resurge after every reverse, like bees building each spring, or Robert the Bruce’s spider in the cave. Insects had seen dinosaurs pass; woodlice would probably see us out.

He interested himself intimately in insects’ activities, intervening like a god when provoked by some miniscule plight. Even today, with his mind filled with his quest, he stooped to move a burnet moth caterpillar from a bare sandy tract that from its perspective must have seemed miles wide, and placed it on the sappy stem of a ragwort. Caterpillars found out in the open were often dying, he knew, driven insane by parasites eating them inside. But maybe this one might just make it. And anyway, it was indecent to leave a helpless creature – just as sick people deserved treatment, at whatever cost, and however distant the chances of success. However futile, even – however blackly written in the book of mitochondrial heredity.

An emperor dragonfly angled electrically into view, and he watched it zigzag away like an escaped ampere – a spectacular insect, whose even larger ancestors once darted over drowned Doggerland. Land and sea so often seemed interchangeable along this littoral, confusing even the animals. He sometimes found insect-falls along the advancing edge of the sea – ants, devil’s coach-horses, ladybirds – tiny fragments of feeling kicking their legs helplessly or crawling desperately away from the water at the salt end of all things, pitifully paralleling the great human-falls of history. He always lofted as many as he could away to safety, although aware he was making little difference, and that all safety was at best a postponement. Under every summer beachscape lay freezing physical forces, under sun-warmed wavetops a constant churning of cold deeps, and under the fine sand sliding earth plates, all part of the constant longshore drift of life into detritus.

As Adam aged and ailed, some of his students joked that he looked like a late-summer lepidopteran. Mr Mothman, they called him – an upright and ugly imago. His skin grew dry, thin and chitinous, and his bones increasingly prominent, as if he was turning inside out, developing an exoskeleton. But why shouldn’t his softness hide inside? Life had so often shown him need of a carapace.

How he wished Angela could have been here today, of all days.

Late yesterday evening, when Adam had been reading a local nature blog, he briefly stopped breathing. Just a few casual words, written by a local nature-guide, mentioning that a Camberwell Beauty had been seen the previous day. It was the most wonderful of shocks. A Camberwell Beauty!

For much of his life, Nymphalis antiopa had been flitting through Adam’s imagination – an apparition flapping always in front, just out of reach. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known of the butterfly’s existence. But then his first home had been on Coldharbour Lane, where the butterfly was first recorded in 1748, by a man named Moses Harris, who called it ‘Grand Surprise’ to register his astonishment at its size and striking appearance – richly maroon wings, with blue dots and creamy yellow fringe, and powerful un-butterflyish flight.

It had stuck out even in Moses Harris’s still semi-rural, semi-magical London, with Camberwell still famous for fruit growing, and Peckham Rye nearby, where Blake would soon see angels in the elms. Science itself was still in a state of wide-eyed and wondering innocence, where each day brought discoveries which could still be attributed to God’s benevolent grace, and clustering new species were named after characters from Greek myth. There had been many Antiopes in Attica, but Adam was sure the Beauty must have been named after the daughter of Aeolus, or the consort of Helios, or maybe in honour of both, seeing that the creature was the most perfect union of air and light.

The boldness of the Beauty had clearly compelled Harris, who as well as being an entomologist, had also been an engraver and theorist of colour. Adam had sensed the other man’s aesthetic and aurelian excitement across the gulf of years – although for Adam excitement had always been mixed with melancholy, because the Beauty hadn’t been seen in Camberwell since the early twentieth century.

Others people had noticed, and mourned the butterfly’s absence. It had been referenced in literature and music, and there was a huge mosaic of one on a building in Burgess Park, moved there in 1982 from a demolished 1920s printworks, which had used the already rare butterfly as emblematic of their expertise. Adam remembered the mosaic in its prominent original location, and being told that the Luftwaffe had ironically used it as a navigation aid for raids.

But Adam felt the insect’s absence almost physically – felt it like a folk-memory of destroyed wildness, felt it like the pains amputees imagine in absent limbs. He almost envied the long-dead who had glimpsed the Beauty in habitats like those he had known – battening in Brixton back-gardens or fluttering up Forest Hill, or beating between the Hammer Horror monuments of Nunhead Cemetery, a Gothic shade among the white angels and the ivied urns – the Germans’ name Trauermantel (‘mourning cloak’) so suitable in that context, so redolent of the insect’s elusiveness, and adjacency to extinction.

Nymphalis was quite common elsewhere; Adam had even seen a subspecies in Sweden. But it was surrounded with special significance for him and all English lepidopterists, including the Edwardians who were the last to see it in London. Those Edwardians, with which Camberwell always seemed synonymous – those bicycle-clipped, moustached City clerks, with their copies of Illustrated London News, and Elgar on wax cylinders – so often seemed frozen in photos, fixed in period the way old collections of coleoptera were pinned to museum boards. But they had been wonderfully alive in at least one respect – to have had even an outside chance of seeing Beauties in their rose-gardens, flying in from some other realm to enrich their Arts and Crafts universe.

The Camberwell Adam had known as a child, then heard about as an adult – an anthill without purpose, a place of bad air, cars, crime, and riots – had seemed daily less likely to throw up Beauties. So now, one had kindly come to him, was waiting for him, possibly just over this hill – his personal ‘Grand Surprise’ sipping the sap of a willow, or winging royally across rabbit-nibbled clearings, the ultimate prize for hours of exertion on the hottest day of the year, the culmination of a life’s longing. This was circularity. It felt a little like – destiny.

How could it have come? Some came over the sea in some years, but very few, and never this far north. There were theories about pupae carried in cargoes of Scandinavian timber. There were also rare private rewilders, eccentrics or idealists who raised and released animals they felt ‘belonged’, animals which had a moral right to be in particular places. Aged eight, Adam had met one, the famous Leonard Newman, who had signed Adam’s copy of Complete British Butterflies in Colour – a book outdated even then, but still on Adam’s shelves. Newman had reared thousands of Beauties and let them fly in Kent one hopeful spring, then waited…and waited…and given up.

Adam knew why Newman had done this; skies that had known the Beauty must one day know it again. But he wanted to think this specimen had somehow made its own way here, acting on some unknown impulse, linking his early life with his late – bringing old London to modern Lincolnshire. It would be kismet – completion – closure.

He had sometimes worried that if he ever caught up with the Beauty it might feel like an anti-climax. Species ticked off lists were like sports trophies – wholly inadequate, tinny mementos of a very different day, a different outlook, whole other worlds of happiness and health. And this just wasn’t any species. The Beauty dwelled by itself. It had flown in front of him for so long that finding one might feel more like losing something. But if this was a risk, it was one he had to take. What else would he do? What else could he do? It was his nature. Angela would have understood – and Martha.

He fantasised hotly, the sun boiling the reddened skin of his scalp. There might be more than one. A venturesome individual might be the vanguard of a viable colony. Could this bold outrider be a scout – the crest of a climate-adapting wave, coping with change by expanding range? He knew, in truth, this was a fancy too far; the Beauty liked cooler climates. But somehow, somewhere among all this global destruction and private desolation, some species must find a way forward, lead a rebirth and recolouring of the cosmos. How wonderful it would be if at least a few beautiful things could defy the world’s contagion…Was that too much to ask? There was so much loss, so much waste and death…

He stopped to get breath, and looked up, to see the sun well on its way to the west. There weren’t many hours left. There were never enough. There was never enough time for anything. Angela and Jane were also now flying in front… He pushed on through trees and across a wide wasteland, while a large butterfly on the highest branch imperiously flared indigo wings, and indifferently watched him pass.

Posted on by Bill Markley

Keystone State – Pennsylvania’s place in old and new America

Image: Derek Turner
BILL MARKLEY traces the legacy of William Penn

The widely-travelled American author Bayard Taylor wrote in 1866 about his native region:

The country life of our part of Pennsylvania retains more elements of its English origin than that of New England or Virginia. Until within a few years, the conservative influence of the Quakers was so powerful that it continued to shape the habits even of communities whose religious sentiment it failed to reach. [i]

In my boyhood years of the 1960’s and 70’s, I spent a lot of time in a rural section of Taylor’s Chester County, where my Quaker ancestors settled over 300 years ago, and where some close family members were still living. The farms there seemed well-ordered and prosperous, life moved at a slower pace, and there was a quiet, gentle, modest quality in many of the people whom I encountered. The rolling fields, haunted woods, and centuries-old homes always drew my attention. These landscapes were sometimes lush, and at other times they showed a stark beauty. Andrew Wyeth piercingly portrayed that latter quality in the adjoining Chadd’s Ford region, in “Pennsylvania Landscape, 1941,” and depictions of the Kuerner Farm.

During my teen years, I noticed that the east-coast Megalopolis was encroaching on this area. New housing developments, shopping strips, and busier roads presented glaring, distracting contrasts, but didn’t completely break the spell yet. I learned that utopia means “no place,” and is not a reasonable expectation where any humans go to and fro, but still there had been something special here, independent of but intertwined with my own nostalgia.

One day, around the year 2000, I was driving along an old, sunken Chester County road, a canopy of overarching trees above. I slowed to a stop when I saw a few horses walking across the way ahead. The riders, proceeding to or from a fox hunt, were dressed immaculately in scarlet coats, and they all politely doffed their caps at me as I waited for them to cross. Not a sight that one expects in most of today’s America.

Living a few hours away, in a congested, grimy, industrial city, I still had to remind myself that this rural spot wasn’t a utopia. Sorrow, conflict, poverty – these things, of course, are to be expected everywhere. But there was that pleasing blend of qualities that kept drawing me back to Chester County as an adult, long after my close relatives there had died. Along with the beautiful landscapes and the pleasant old architecture, there was an embattled, intangible something which had lingered on here and there. Compared with other places I had lived, there had been a balance and proportion – order along with freedom, well-preserved nature amid agriculture, and some communities that stayed within a smaller, more humane scale. Was it the same quality that Bayard Taylor had described?

William Penn in 1666

Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn probably wouldn’t have approved of fox-hunting, but he revered the fundamental liberties and rule of law—sometimes violated, sometimes renewed—which Englishmen had inherited since the days of Magna Carta and before. Penn had been a studious, reflective boy, and he acquired an appreciation for history and the classics. He was convinced that substantial elements of liberty, and law based upon consent, stretched back to the Anglo-Saxons, and then further back to some of the Britons who met Julius Caesar. He praised the English who had been “as resolute to keep, as their Ancestors had been careful to make those excellent Laws.”[ii] While urging the protection of that English constitution, along with his concept of “liberty of conscience,” Penn insisted that limits must also be established to preserve peace, civil order, and virtue. According to Penn biographer Andrew Murphy,

Penn’s radical argument for liberty of conscience always sat alongside a conventional, even austere, notion of personal morality. Denunciations of sin and vice went hand in hand with calls for the toleration of conscientious dissent, and the two campaigns mutually reinforced each other.[iii]

Penn’s liberty of conscience meant that English citizens should be allowed to freely seek, worship and meet their own obligations to God, as long as they were not acting treasonably. He worked tenaciously for many years on behalf of his ideals, getting arrested several times in the process. In an England with an established church, following decades of severe religious conflict, liberty of conscience seemed radical and threatening to some, but Penn was no revolutionary. He believed that while all were equal before God, society was naturally hierarchical due to human variation. Along with other Quakers of his day, he valued private property, family, and of course those English liberties. Although Whiggish, and hoping for a more meritocratic society rather than ranks based upon birth, he was loyal to Charles II, and developed a close, friendly, working relationship with Charles’ brother and successor James.

The young Penn had been groomed by his father to rise in the lofty circles of Charles’ court, but he disappointed his parents when he converted to Quakerism as a young man. Quakers were looked upon with suspicion by many Anglicans, and were among the religious dissenters in England who continued to be severely persecuted by Parliament, Anglican authorities, and some magistrates after the Restoration, although Charles and James favored toleration.

Along with that persecution, Penn was troubled by the licentiousness which came out in the open, after moral standards had loosened following Charles’s Restoration. During the social and political unrest which erupted against Catholics and other dissenters in 1678, he wrote to fellow Quakers in England that he feared God would punish the nation for rampant immorality. He also hoped that the virtues of his comrades and other “conscientious and well-inclined people” would “shine unto others, in these uneven and rough times that are come, and coming,” and that God would therefore show mercy. Like the Puritan John Winthrop, who had earlier led the settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Penn believed that he and his fellow Friends “must show ourselves to be that Little City and Hill of God.” He urged them to resist worldly temptations, and act as good examples:

Let us be careful not to mingle with the crowd, lest their spirit enter us instead of our spirit entering them…. Yet can we not be unsensible of their infirmities, as well as we shall not be free from some of their sufferings; we must make their case as our own, and travel alike in spirit for them as for ourselves.[iv]

Within a few years, Penn had an opportunity to try to make those dreams a reality on a large scale, by forming the new colony of Pennsylvania.

In 1681, as Penn was devising Pennsylvania’s initial constitution and laws, he wrote to settlers already in the colony that, “whatever sober and free men can reasonably desire for the security and improvement of their own happiness I shall heartily comply with.”[v] “Reasonably” was key, and his government would have a significant role to play in buttressing morality. In his Preface to the Frame of Government for Pennsylvania, Penn stated, “Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.” His first set of laws for Pennsylvania stated that “offenses against God…, which excite the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness, and unreligion, shall be respectively discouraged and severely punished.” Such offenses included foul language, drunkenness, fornication, gambling and other activities, as well as crimes such as assault, murder and treason. Clearly, government was to have a punitive role, as well as positively encouraging virtue, yet everything hinged on the nature of the people. Penn also wrote in his Preface, “Let men be good and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill they will change it. But, if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavor to warp and spoil it.” This was echoed years later by the American founder John Adams, who wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[vi]

Penn elaborated on why government should circumscribe human behavior: “There can be no pretense of conscience to be drunk, to whore, to be voluptuous, to game, to swear, curse, blaspheme, and profane,” since such behaviors “lay the ax to the root of humane society, and are the common enemies of mankind.”[vii] Not all of us with a traditional bent will agree that all forms of gaming contribute to the undermining of a society, but many of us would agree that Penn’s general principle is sound.

According to historian David Hackett Fischer, there were “comparatively few crimes against morality or order” in Pennsylvania and Quaker New Jersey before 1755:

At the same time that the laws of the Quaker colonies were comparatively mild as regards capital punishment, they punished very harshly acts of disorder in which one citizen intruded upon the peace of another In Pennsylvania, penalties for crimes of sexual violence against women were exceptionally severe. The lash was used abundantly… Something of this Quaker testimony of peace and order entered permanently into the cultural fabric of the Delaware Valley…. Rates of violent crime remained comparatively low. [viii]

English Quakers were not the only inhabitants of early Pennsylvania. Before Penn’s proprietorship, along with Indians, there were Dutch, Finns, Swedes and English Anglicans present. Germans, Welsh and Irish soon arrived. Penn was beleaguered by political discord that arose in his new colony, even within the Quaker communities. His own sometimes combative and disorganized nature didn’t always help matters, nor did his need to spend much time away in England, defending his proprietorship and handling other concerns. Factions formed, ethnic and religious strife occurred, and conflict with neighboring colonies flared and continued for several years.

Is it a stretch to say that Penn’s principles, along with those of his fellow Quakers, helped encourage and maintain that “arcadian” quality that I witnessed? The ethnic and religious troubles in early Pennsylvania subsided eventually, as the English and Protestant culture took root and maintained its predominance for a long while, with that special Quaker influence that Taylor emphasized. In the American colonies, cultural variations among discrete groups of English colonists such as Puritans, Quakers, Cavaliers, and Borderers clearly resulted in regional differences, which continued long after the American Revolution.[ix] The distinctive cultural aspects of the Society of Friends shaped, and were shaped by, Penn’s thought and actions. An important element of the liberty which Quakers offered, and with which they differed from others such as the Puritans, was what Fischer called “reciprocal liberty,” meaning that “every liberty demanded for oneself should also be extended to others.”[x] Penn’s liberty of conscience was one example of this general principle. And along with Quaker political and religious tenets, so many of their social characteristics continued, from their early years in England on into the 20th century. Penn’s appreciation for independent farmers, and a Quaker concern for the responsible use of one’s property, had an impact on the landscape of rural southeastern Pennsylvania. As I studied the Quakers of the 16th and 17th centuries, I was struck by how profoundly they had influenced my parents’ and grandparents’ ways and manners, as well as my own beliefs and preferences ranging from taste in dress to thoughts on social rank to yearnings for quiet, for social peace, and for order.

Historian Bruce Catton remarked that America has long had a significant “rowdy strain” in its population.[xi] This seems true, but from America’s early years onwards there were also those many quieter colonists, who made their own long-lasting cultural impact.

Today, in the counties first established under Penn’s proprietorship, other, rowdier cultural influences sometimes shout down the quiet, modest ideals of the Society of Friends, and the ordered liberty inherited from England. Yet not all the land is covered by concrete. And not all the words of William Penn have been thrown down the memory hole, at least not yet. In 2023, government bureaucrats tried to get rid of a statue of William Penn in a Philadelphia park. A public outcry ensued, which pressured politicians to stop this cultural vandalism for the time being. And although Bayard Taylor’s hometown of Kennett Square has changed substantially, his beautiful home, Cedarcroft, still stands.

Until a few years ago, I sometimes visited a grand, old oak tree on the grounds of the London Grove Meeting House, where Quakers had gathered since 1714. The tree was standing when William Penn was in North America, and I was saddened when I learned that it toppled in 2023. It was partly the loss of a beautiful, stately, historic, and gracious old tree that tugged at me. But was this also an omen, to be considered along with the rampant cultural destruction of recent decades? Then I learned that over the years, many people had collected acorns which that old oak had sired. And after its fall, more people traveled to the meeting-house grounds to collect more acorns, from this tree which had already nourished so many spirits.

i Taylor, Bayard, The Story of Kennett, 1866, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8680/pg8680-images.html#link2HCH0024

[ii] Penn, William, England’s Present Interest Considered, with Honour to the Prince, and Safety to the People, 1675, The Political Writings of William Penn, introduction and annotations by Andrew R. Murphy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/murphy-the-political-writings-of-william-penn

ii Murphy, Andrew, William Penn: A Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018: p. 133

[iv] Penn, William, To the children of light in this generation, called of God to be partakers of eternal life in Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, and Light of the World, 1678, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N11856.0001.001/1:1?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

[v] Penn, William, “To the Inhabitants of Pennsylvania,” April 8, 1681, The Papers of William Penn, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, Vol. 2, p. 84

[vi] Adams, John, “To the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts,” Oct. 11, 1798, https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/john-adams-religion-constitution

[vii] Penn, William, An address to protestants upon the present conjuncture in II parts, London, 1679, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A54098.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext

[viii] Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 586, 589

[ix] See Fischer for a very interesting, thorough examination of this

[x] Fischer, p. 603

[xi] Catton, Bruce, This Hallowed Ground, New York: Vintage Books, 2012

Posted on by Ken Bell

Sex and the Enlightenment city

Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis

Julie Peakman, Reaktion Books, 2024, 352pps., £25

KEN BELL surveys sexual mores of yore

With Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, Julie Peakman has given us an intimate portrayal of women’s sexual activity during the long eighteenth century, which ran from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to Waterloo in 1815. Peakman ends her long century in 1830, but I doubt if many readers will quibble at her fifteen-year addition, since many of the chapters that make up Libertine London are a fine introduction to the social history of the period, which aims to look at that magnificent yet squalid era through the eyes of the sex hustlers of the time.

Each type gets a chapter devoted to her, starting with the drabs who worked the streets to the bawds who managed the brothels, then up to the courtesans. Finally, the volume culminates with the royal mistresses who were at the pinnacle of the oldest profession.

By dividing these women up into categories, Peakman shines a light on the niche each one inhabited, as well as open up the broader society to the modern reader. The raddled street prostitutes inhabited a world of extreme poverty, as did tens of thousands of Londoners in those days. It was a world where a child could have his head crushed under the wheel of a cart and where street crime was so ubiquitous that even the link boys who carried a blazing torch and were hired to light the way often worked with street thugs who relieved the victims of their wealth.

Many women were actually semi-whores. “Milliners…were particularly known for their sideline in prostitution,” Peakman tells us – as indeed they were until well into the twentieth century. The actresses who trod the boards often supplemented their income with acting of a different kind, as did the girls who sold fruit and nuts at the theatres, which reminds this reader of the legend of Nell Gwynn who took the fancy of Charles II when she offered him an orange from her basket.  Of course, there was also the army of seasonal workers who brought in the crops, along with the milkmaids who sold their product on the streets. Peakman doesn’t mention the milkmaids who were seen by many as innocent country girls, ripe for the plucking, but who this writer suspects knew exactly what they were doing and the role they were expected to play.

Peakman does touch on that theme when she reminds us that brothels could charge extra for a guaranteed virgin and that many a whorehouse bed had a secret compartment with a cloth soaked in red juice that the highly experienced trollop could use to show to her client that she had indeed just been deflowered.

One chapter that jars as it is so unconnected to the rest of the volume is the one dealing with homosexualism during the period. The chapter presents upper class homosexuality between consenting adults as being the norm, and ignores the, frankly, odious nature of the abuse that went on between wealthy pederasts and young boys. When it comes to the rape of servant girls by their employers, Peakman gives us chapter and verse on matters such as the trial of Colonel Francis Charteris in 1730 on a charge of raping a maid. She concludes: “Sadly, as with most aristocratic men who had committed rape or other crimes, Charteris managed to wheedle his way out of the death penalty.” That is true, as he got a royal pardon, but he still had to pay his victim £30,000 and when he died in 1732 his coffin was covered in dead cats before the gravediggers could shovel the earth over it. Libertine London also gives us horrifying accounts of the rapes of young girls, many not even in their teens and discusses the ways in which wealthy, well-connected abusers escaped from what passed for justice in those days.

However, what it does not do is even consider the equally vile crimes committed by wealthy homosexuals against lower-class boys. Two cases spring to mind, and both were covered by the pamphleteers and newspapers of the day, but neither is mentioned by this authoress.

The first is so famous that from the date of the trial in 1772 right up to the Oscar Wilde scandal over a century later, it was debated and chewed over long after all the participants were dead. Captain Robert Jones of the Royal Artillery (he may have been a lieutenant, but is usually given the rank of captain) was convicted of the buggery of a boy of 12. His victim was Francis Henry Hay who spoke clearly and bravely at the trial and almost certainly helped the jury return a guilty verdict, whereupon Jones was sentenced to death. Perhaps needless to say, he was pardoned on condition that he left the country and never returned, and left to live his life in Florence, although it is possible that he never got further than Lyon.

Then we have the matter of General Sir Eyre Coote in 1815 who was involved with some boys at Christ’s Hospital school. This involved the giving and receiving of the birch and did not lead to a trial, but Coote was dismissed from the army. Throughout the nineteenth century, the fictional character of Rosa Coote was used by Victorian writers of pornography as a stock figure that was presented as either the general’s daughter or his niece. It is unlikely that this character would have been created had the readers not understood the reference to the general, even many years after the scandal.

It is impossible to believe that Julie Peakman did not know of these cases as people were writing about them for decades afterwards. Why she chose to ignore them is a matter for her, but it does leave this reviewer wondering why this carefully curated account of upper-class homosexuality was even included in a volume that aims to show the lives of women in the sex trade.

Julie Peakman’s argument as she expresses it is to show us the lives of those women who had transactional virtues by presenting them as the victims of “misogyny,” a word that was not even invented until this century and a concept that was as alien to the long eighteenth-century as it is to many of us in the twenty-first. This was a world of utter poverty for the many and fabulous wealth for the few. Women, being great survivors, have always been aware that they have a commodity in their own bodies and when times are bad they will rent out that commodity to ensure their survival. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the going rate for sex in Vienna was three cigarettes. That is not three cartons of cigarettes, or even three packs, but three individual cigarettes. A girl with three cigarettes could exchange them for three eggs, or three loaves of bread: she could survive another day in other words. It was this need to survive, rather than “the prevalence of men’s unabated lusts and the sexual vulnerability of women” that was at work in Libertine London. That said, this reader did find the conjuration of the spirit of Mary Whitehouse that is implicit in that sentence very entertaining.

One does not need to over think what was going on during this era, and in most of her individual chapters, Julie Peakman presents clear, thoroughly researched and well-written accounts of the lives of many London women. It was a time when men murdered and robbed, with many ending their days dancing the hempen jig at Tyburn Tree, and women survived by renting themselves out. It was a hard time to be poor, is the conclusion that this reviewer took away from Libertine London.

Posted on by Alexander Adams

Clever and cheerful, like a lizard in the sun

Friedrich Nietzsche, by Edvard Munch (1906)

Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80-Spring 1881)

Friedrich Nietzsche, J.M. Baker Jr, Christiane Hertel (trans.), Stanford University Press, 2023, paperback, 530pp, $28

ALEXANDER ADAMS looks into Nietzsche’s notebooks

The thirteenth of nineteen volumes in the Stanford University Press edition of the German-language Friedrich Nietzsche Sämtliche Werke covers the notebooks from late 1879 to early 1881, at a time when Nietzsche was writing Dawn (Morgenröthe, 1881), the second book of his “free spirit” trilogy. Even a well-informed Nietzsche reader may draw a blank at that, as it is the least widely read of his books. These notes relate to a critique of the generation of morals, particularly the topics of dissimulation and self-deception, the subjects of Dawn. The title refers to the potential rebirth of modern man, freed from the shackles of Judeo-Christian religion and worldview, led by great self-actualised men – the Übermenschen.

The philosopher succinctly summarises his primary concern in this period so: “The greatest problem of the coming age is the eradication of moral concepts and the cleansing from our representations of moral forms or colors that have crept into them and are often difficult to recognize.”[i] He meditates on the nature of morality and how it arises and if some different system of values can govern man’s conduct. Christian morality divides people (according to their characters) into obedient slaves or mindless enforcer. Both act from character, rather than making value judgements based on personal and social good. The claims that Christian morality has the right to be considered normative (as per Pascal) are spurious, Nietzsche contends – as outlined in many of his published books. “[…] Christianity takes no pleasure in the human being.”[ii]

Nietzsche rails against misguided egalitarianism, democracy, socialism and (of course) Christianity, which he sees at the root of modern European man’s slave morality and the ultimate cause of many of civilisation’s parlous state. He sees a levelling of people as a rebellion against natural inequality and exceptional men. It makes men manageably pliable. However, Nietzsche opens the door to individualism for its own sake – the myth of meritocracy, which allows the collectivised minority to seize its power and advantages and (ultimately) its supremacy, as Gaetano Mosca argued. There are few autobiographical comments, but these are indirect and brief, so only the reader averagely acquainted with the philosopher’s life will be able to glean anything from them.

He wonders at the alienness of Judaism, which has been incorporated into European thinking through Christianity, and notes that the words of the Old Testament are (perhaps paradoxically) more accessible to us than the ancient Greeks and Romans. He repeatedly describes morality as Asian – i.e. derived from the Semitic people of the Near East – and finds it unfitting for Europeans; he also adds that he considers Stoicism Semitic. Valuations determine both our personal responses, interpersonal relations and society as a whole; if moral valuations can be altered, or the whole system abolished, then human capacity is freed. Nietzsche is no Panglossian optimist, but he sees human capacity as much greater than what the constricting morals and customs of his day permitted. Incorrect valuations wage war against each other, distracting and confusing; these conflicts demonstrate the faulty foundations of morality and must be seen clearly.

Nietzsche is ever aware of the need for geniuses; these exceptional men will lead, instruct and inspire. “To use and recognize chance is called genius. To use the expedient and familiar – morality?”[iii] He assesses the possibility of describing “an extra-moral view of the world” that is “an aesthetic one (veneration of genius)”. Tantalisingly, the fragment breaks off there. He is aware of the bad character and suffering great men cause and admits that “veneration of genius has often been unconscious devil worship.”[iv]“[A]rtists are usually intolerable as persons, and this should be subtracted from what is gained from their works.”[v]

Of the hundreds of entries (mainly in the form of notes and aphorisms) few extend longer than one page. Every page has an insight into the human condition. “Compassion without intelligence is one of the most unpleasant and disturbing phenomena […]”[vi] There are oddities, such as the author’s contention that there is no instinctive fear of death, merely aversion to the pain of dying and the unknown and that the appetite for life’s pleasures acts as more of a stimulant. Hence there is no life-preservation instinct per se. Another bon pensée is “Clever and cheerful, like a lizard in the sun”, although Nietzsche never seems such a lizard – at least, not on this splenetic showing.

The style is brusque, the diction non-technical, with entries compressed to the extreme. Yet, he allows himself digressions and occasional exclamations. As the translator explains, this directness actually generates difficulties. Unlike his published works, which are models of clear prose and precise argumentation, the notes are littered with general words that can bear several specific meanings, introducing a degree of ambiguity that the translator must adjudicate. Many of these points were never subsequently taken up again by the author, so it is hard to know which meaning he had in mind.    

There are meditations upon the greats, such as Plato, Christ, St Paul, Martin Luther, Goethe, Napoleon, Schopenhauer and others, viewed in light of their limitations as well as their achievements. Napoleon was more intent on seeming superior to others than on being superior. Nietzsche was reading a biography of Napoleon at the time, so there are extensive comments relating to Napoleon’s conduct, character and significance. Wagner – his aspirations, his ambition, his vanity – is wrestled with at length:

Wagner courts being named the German artist, but, alas, neither the grand opera nor his character is specifically German: which is why he has not as yet become dear to the populace, but instead to a class of refined and over-cultivated people – the circle to which, say, in the last century Rousseau appealed.[vii]  

The appearance of these Stanford University Press translations keeps Nietzsche vitally alive, able to dazzle, surprise and shock. As usual, the annotation and index are accompanied by an extensive and illuminating afterword on the subjects of the texts. The critical apparatus is first class and the references well judged.

[i] P. 5

[ii] P. 262

[iii] P. 18

[iv] P. 47

[v] P. 95

[vi] P. 6

[vii] P. 163

Posted on by Derek Turner

Refracted future

Humani Victus Instrumenta – Ars Coquinaria. 1570s engraving

The Mirror

Tim Bragg, Sycamore Dystopia, 2023, pb., 292pps., £10

DEREK TURNER peers into a possible future

Ever since the ancients invented automata, writers have wondered about the implications for humanity, and ruminated about the nature of consciousness. The Industrial Revolution would spawn increasing concern about subservience to machines and “Satanic mills.” The Great War and then Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (from which we get the word ‘robot, based on a Czech word, robota, meaning ‘forced labour’) made many people anxious about out-of-control technology – a theme revisited every generation since, as seen for example in the 1984 action classic, Terminator. Today, the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence has turned a trope into a cliché, the subject of articles, books and documentaries which often really tell us more about contemporary concerns than they do about possible futures. Musician-novelist Tim Bragg’s newest book is therefore in a certain idealist-nostalgic-pessimistic vein; this does not mean it is not distinctive or worthwhile.

As in Orwell’s Oceania, or the pages of Fahrenheit 451, the world of The Mirror is a surveillance society, where the state strives to control thought. Like Bladerunner, there are huge and ugly megalopolises, and androids, and people who might be androids. Like Logan’s Run (film version), there is a mysterious and romanticised threshold that must be crossed. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, the authorities limit fertility. Like The Matrix, almost nothing is what it seems. As in many dystopias, there is an unjust government with a privileged ‘Inner Party,’ sinister secrets, ecological impoverishment, and bleak living conditions for the lowest echelons – and of course ‘red-pilled’ rebels seeking to upturn the system. This highly literate author imbues all these obvious influences with ideas of his own.

He brings the genre up to (future) date, setting his story in 2073, and reflecting upon today’s worries about self-image, the control of data, the time we spend online, the cashless society, the food we eat (insects bulk large in The Mirror’s meals), and the erasure of the past. Every citizen wears a ‘mirror’ device, which delivers a limited range of computer-generated entertainment and information, but most importantly allows the authorities to monitor the population. Emotions and sensations are all suspect – except those provided by pills or virtual reality, from ‘conversations’ with ancestors to sexual intercourse. There seem to be no local or national identities, or even any kind of economy.

The pivotal relationship is between two girls, Mia and Karella, who are arriving at physical and sexual maturity; there seems to be no ‘transgenderism’ in The Mirror world (which is plausible, as those who are so exercised by this today will have exited the scene by 2073). Both characters are well thought-through, and nuanced. Bragg’s emphasis on youthful female sexuality however feels slightly discomfiting, even though of course novelists must always be permitted to imagine themselves in guises or roles other than their own. It is however germane to this story, because both girls are being exploited by a highly intrusive state, with Karella the subject of life-long transhumanist experiments, and Mia being viewed as a brood-mare for a eugenics programme. Their every emotion is parsed for psychological significance, and there are constant interventions – for example a dogged therapeutic insistence on treating Mia’s phobia about swimming (a happy intervention, because her instilled ability to swim matters greatly later).

Like everyone else, Mia and Karella are under the purview of a panoptical ‘Hub,’ and an elite organisation called Earthly Living Kingdom (ELK). Mia’s own mother is an ELK Guardian, a senior operative of a group whose sinister plans become increasingly apparent, and the mother-daughter relationship is consequently complex. Mia’s father is absent – or is he?

There are menacing ELK operatives, partly countervailed by a sub-world of gathering rebellion, led by Ned, an IT expert who convenes a secret cell to keep alive fast-fading arts – in effect, the authentic human spirit, at risk from rationalist thinking, cultural coarsening, and technological reductionism. Mia finds especial inspiration and solace in the music of Bach, which although available through approved channels, has fallen into desuetude. In 2073, those who wish to hear such antediluvian sounds risk seeming at best eccentric – and at worst, refuseniks in ‘need’ of pharmaceutical intervention, or biotechnological ‘rebooting.’ Bragg has clearly thought a great deal about the psychological benefits of music for everyone in all ages, here showing synaesthesia as a means of inner escape from one-dimensional mundanity.

The ‘biohacker’ artist Neil Harbisson, by Hector Adalid. Wikimedia Commons

He handles generally well one of the perennial problems of dystopian literature – accustoming readers to invented concepts and specially coined terminology without interrupting the narrative with long screeds of explication. He has tried hard to come up with new idioms. French phrases are unexpectedly widely used. Anglo-Saxon expletives however appear to have gone out of vogue, to be replaced with what seem now insipid new terms of emphasis (“sparking uterus”), which seems an unlikely eventuality – but maybe this symbolises his surmised society’s distance from earthy realism. Some are more believable, such as “abundant” to express enthusiasm. There is admirable restraint and wit in the conversations between the human protagonists and the Rai robots who do much of the work (and are constantly being ‘improved’ by technologists and theorists obsessed with ‘migrating’ consciousness from human to machine, and even more worryingly back again).

The Mirror is a deeply well-intentioned book, and what is even more important, sensitively intelligent – a worthy reflection on issues which are swiftly becoming salient, and which seem certain to become even more so.

Posted on by Jon Bishop

On Dante’s politics

Reconstruction of Dante’s face, at the Anfiteatro de Villa in Costa Rica. Wikimedia Commons
JON BISHOP says the immortal poet was also an insightful statesman

Many Catholics have come to reject liberalism. They see the ruins of postmodern culture – its atomization, its rejection of the transcendent, its radical individualism – and identify liberalism as its cause. They argue our cultural decay is too great, and it requires radical solutions, and so they say we will be unable to reverse secularization unless we overthrow liberalism. Their solution to this is to put the Church in charge of the temporal order, a solution often referred to as “integralist.”

Dante Aligheri, author of The Divine Comedy, would likely take issue with this, because he was able to see first-hand how bad the Church was at governing. Dante was not just a great poet, but also a statesman and political philosopher, notably having written Monarchia, a text in which he discussed the nature of religious and political authority. Dante was also deeply involved in the affairs of the Republic of Florence, particularly with the clash between the White Guelphs, who favored less papal involvement and tended to welcome the influence of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Black Guelphs, who favored the opposite. Dante allied with the White Guelphs, which ultimately led to his exile.

In short, Dante was unlike a lot of twenty-first century writers and poets who tend to have beautiful prose and lines but quixotic politics. Instead, Dante was a nimble and interesting political thinker who, through his belief that the medieval Church was too involved in temporal affairs and that the political and spiritual should inform each other, seemed to anticipate such twentieth century Catholic political thinkers as the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray.

Dante, by Adolfo de Carolis, 1920s

We can get a sense of Dante’s view of politics by doing a close reading of The Divine Comedy, a poem he intended to be viewed as a work of political philosophy. We’ll examine three sections of the poem: Dante’s colloquy with Boniface – Dante the poet (I’m phrasing it this way to distinguish the author from the character) and his presentation of the lowest circle of hell – and Dante’s argument in the Purgatorio that men behave badly when they are governed badly.

But before I begin in earnest, I’d like to turn to Ernest Fortin, A.A.’s seminal study of Dante’s politics, Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Dante and His Precursors, in which he presents readers with not only Dante’s thought but also a history of medieval political and religious thinking. Fortin argues that Dante’s chief political project was to understand how both Church and state relate to one another. He says:

Dante has no more pressing concern than to show that the emperor receives his authority directly from God and that consequently he exercises it by his own sovereign right and not in the name of the Church. His argument begins from the principle that man has two ends: one natural and the other supernatural. The knowledge required for him to attain them comes to him through two bodies endowed for this purpose by divine wisdom: the imperial authority and the Church. The first leads to happiness in this world through philosophical instruction, the second to eternal happiness through spiritual teaching.

Fortin, p82

In the Middle Ages, though, there was no clear-cut definition of Church and state, the Church claimed a significant amount of power for itself. Consider, for instance, the Papal States. And Dante’s contemporary, Pope Boniface VII, in his papal bull Unam Sanctam, argued instead “for the total submission of princes to the sovereign pontiff.” Fortin says the question of the “two powers” of authority “absorbed Dante’s attention in great part.” (p81) And because Boniface VII, through his papal bull, essentially merged these authorities, Dante viewed him with scorn. He referred to him as “the prince of the new Pharisees” and a “usurper.” (p89)

Fortin suggests Dante believed that the Church, essentially, was too focused on the temporal. But there is also clear historical evidence of this. Fortin reminds us that Rome had “a habit of forging political alliances for its own aggrandizement” which had “the double effect of giving a bad example to its own followers and of neutralizing any effort which the temporal power could make to moderate its subjects’ worldly ambitions.” (p88) In fact, according to Fortin, Dante sought to depict the medieval Church, particularly the papacy, as “Geryon, the fabulous beast on whose shoulders Dante and Virgil pass from the seventh to the eighth circle of hell.” Fortin says:

The monster is invested with the most extraordinary features: he crosses mountains, pierces the thickest walls, destroys powerful armies, and afflicts the whole world. What does he represent? Fraud perhaps, as the text suggests in speaking of him as a “filthy effigy of fraud.” Sins of fraud are in fact punished in the infamous Malebolge the two travelers are about to enter. But the author seems to have something else in mind. If there is any institution in the Middle Ages whose power penetrates everywhere, shatters weapons and fortresses, and makes itself felt beyond mountains, it is the Church. Could it be that in the monster’s features Dante sought to depict the abomination that the medieval papacy had become for him?

Fortin, p89

The answer, of course, is yes. Fortin writes that, in Dante’s description of Geryon, “there is no mistaking the description of the animal’s body, which recalls very nicely the papal vestments of the time, the sleeves of which were covered with ermine and the sides decorated with knotted strips and medallions.” (p90)

Dante’s view of both Boniface and the medieval institutional Church—and, consequently, what happens when the Church becomes too interested in temporal affairs—becomes clear in Canto XIX of the Inferno, where we meet the aforementioned pope. Boniface is in one of the lowest circles of hell, in a space reserved for the simoniacal. The character of Dante denounces him, saying that his “avarice afflicts the world” and that it “tramples on the good, lifts up the wicked.” (p140) This is essentially an inversion of what we would normally read in the Magnificat: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.” What Dante is saying here is that a Church that has become too focused on the here and now, a Church that has made itself “a god of gold and silver” (p140), is a Church that has diluted and even perverted its mission and so has become too interested in power qua power. 

Perhaps this is why Dante places Brutus, Cassius, and Judas at the lowest circle of hell, chewed by Satan. Brutus and Cassius, of course, betrayed Julius Caesar, leading to his assassination. And Judas turned Jesus over to the authorities, leading to his arrest and crucifixion. We might posit that this is Dante’s ultimate warning to the medieval Church—it has become like what it once stood against. Becoming too focused on political intrigue and power for the sake of power leads you to betray friends and confidants. It can even lead you to betray God himself. Ultimately, it all leads to damnation.

But this is something Dante too had to learn, since his involvement in the clash between the White Guelphs and Black Guelphs eventually led to his exile. Dante likely spent a lot of time reflecting on the nature of things, and perhaps he authored The Divine Comedy as a means of sharing his reflections and to correct certain errors he had perceived. In Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Fortin says that Dante intended The Divine Comedy to be a work of political philosophy, his “aim” being

…none other than to teach men how they are to live or how they might leave the state of misery in which they languish for a better and happier state, or, as the Comedy states, how one goes from slavery to freedom, from the human to the divine, from time to eternity. Moreover, Dante was convinced that of all the senses to be found in his work, none was more useful than its moral sense.

Fortin, pps59-60

Dante, then, seems to have come to believe that the various disorders of the period were due to bad governance, which had handicapped human flourishing. And therein lies the paradox of the medieval Church, against which Dante had directed so much ire, in an attempt to get it to do better: the institution that should lead to human flourishing, since it was created by God Himself, in the form of Christ, was preventing it, because it had developed a horizontal gaze. In Canto XVI of the Purgatorio, Marco Lombardo says as much, telling Dante:

Misrule, you see, has caused the world to be malevolent; your nature is not corrupt, not prey to any fatal astral force. For Rome, which made the world good, used to have two suns; and they made visible two paths – the world’s path and the pathway that is God’s. One has eclipsed the other; now the sword has joined the shepherd’s crook; the two together must of necessity result in evil

Purgatorio, XV1, lines 103-111

So Dante the author is saying that the various pathologies we can see in public life are not due to fate or to ‘the gods,’ but instead due to the misrule of the Church. It had “confounded two powers in itself,” which “must of necessity [have resulted] in evil.” (Fortin, p291)

Dante’s solution to this is to ask the Church, clerics and lay, to do better and to forget about its entanglements in political and worldly affairs. (Again, we can imagine that this is also self-directed, since Dante’s political projects brought him to his exile.) In the Paradiso, we observe that Beatrice counsels Christians to “proceed with greater gravity: do not be like a feather at each wind, nor think that all immersions wash you clean. You have both Testaments, the Old and New, you have the shepherd of the Church to guide you; you need no more than this for your salvation.” (p400) She warns Christians to not heed the summons of “evil greed” and to not be “like sheep gone mad.” (p400) And later in the Paradiso, in Canto IX, Cunizza da Romano says that “the pope and cardinals are intent. Their thoughts are never bent on Nazareth.” (p422) But she suggests things will change, noting that “the hill of Vatican as well…will soon be freed from priests’ adultery.” (p422)

Ultimately, it seems Dante wants the Church to be the Church and leave the governing to the nations – they can work together, but the Church had absorbed too much authority, becoming, as Fortin observed in his reading of Dante, a monstrous distortion of what it was and is supposed to be. In this way, Dante is not unlike John Courtney Murray, who had argued that the religious liberty of the United States was not a threat to the Church but would rather help it, in that it would allow people to pursue the good life properly, without coercion from an authority such as the Papal States.

Placing states in the hands of the Church means bad governance, which Dante demonstrates both in The Divine Comedy and other texts. Rather than bring about a kind of quasi-perfect state, wherein citizens would be totally directed toward God, who is Goodness, the power of governing would corrupt the Church, making it too interested in worldly affairs and thereby corrupt the people, who would become afflicted by all sorts of pathologies. So advocates of integralism might consider revisiting Dante Aligheri and his Divine Comedy. There they can see the results of their political-theological project. And then, rather than attempt to turn the Church into an empire, they might encourage it – its clerics, its religious, and its lay – to do and be better, so that they could go out and bring the peace and joy of the Gospel to the world yet again.

Posted on by Jon Bishop

Elysium

JON BISHOP is an MFA candidate at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, where he studies poetry. He lives in New Hampshire

We walk along the ship and shore, are sure 

That this is how we each should spend our days—

Good food, good wine, no melancholy sneers

Of those who spend their lives in unreal things.

Yes, this—a paradise that’s tangible,

Like salt that cakes along your skin from swims

Or from the wind that blows along the beach.

We’re used to steel that blots the sun and stars.

But steel has brought us to this lovely place 

That seems to be beyond the normal earth.

O Love, I plead, I do not want to leave.

Why don’t we stay for one more day or two

Or three—or never leave, so we are free

To taste the things we know await us all.