NEVER MIND JOHN STOTT,
WHO, DEAR GOD, IS DAVID BROOKS?
Jerry Harkins
The short answer is David Brooks is the anointed successor of the late William Safire as the house conservative of The New York Times. He is the voice of what passes for right wing reason, not as witty as William F. Buckley, nor as experienced as George F. Will, but presentable enough to be invited to dine with the Sulzbergers. Most public conservatives are loud-mouthed hypocrites: the adulterer Newt Gingrich, the drug addict Rush Limbaugh, the gambling addict William Bennett, the idiot Sarah Palin and, of course, the entire cast of sociopaths who contended for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Some, like Mr. Safire, are loud-mouthed libertarians who occasionally cross back over to the normal side of the MMPI. Mr. Brooks, however, is none of these things. He abjures almost all right wing craziness in favor of a thoughtful Hamiltonian understanding of politics and governance. He is, in short, one of those peculiar intellectuals regularly produced by the University of Chicago—intelligent, articulate but sometimes a bit careless or perhaps lazy. He is attracted to the slightly offbeat perspective. For example, he shares the conservative objective of doing away with social security. However, he recommends a gradualist approach. Step One would be for the government to open tax deferred savings accounts for all American children, depositing $1,000 at birth and $500 a year for the next five years. This he says would give everyone a nest egg of over $100,000 at retirement, that is 65 or 70 years later. But here’s the part where a bit more analysis might have been helpful. Even if there were only an annual average of 3% inflation, $100,000 isn’t going to be a hell of a lot in 2075 and the purchasing power in current dollars is likely to be about $3,500. Some nest egg! Some conservatism! The government gets to spend billions in current dollars and the retirees get to collect an almost worthless pourboire at retirement.
Even Congress would be unlikely to fall for such flimflam so to really understand Brooks, you have to follow his line of thought on a more obscure subject. After the 2004 elections, he set out to instruct Democrats on which religious conservatives they should court. Begging the question of why the Democrats should be interested in any such thing, he counseled that there is no need to deal with the “Elmer Gantry-style blowhards” like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, [1] but rather they should make their pitch to the John Stotts of this world. [2] Stott was identified as “…the framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a crucial organizing document for modern evangelicalism.” Brooks says, “[His] is a voice that is friendly, courteous and natural. It is humble and self-critical, but also joyful and optimistic.” In short, Stott’s conservative Christian voice is not unlike Brooks’ own conservative political voice. Indeed there are similarities, but they are not flattering to either party. Stott who died last year was, as the highly liberal Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong once said, “Jerry Falwell with perfume.” By that standard, David Brooks is Rush Limbaugh with a brain.
The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 is one of the most ridiculous documents in the history of Christianity—right up there with its more famous first cousins, Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam (1302), and Adrian IV’s Laudabiliter (1155). Here is its key pronouncement:
We affirm the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety as the only written word of God, without error in all that it affirms, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice. We also affirm the power of God's word to accomplish his purpose of salvation. The message of the Bible is addressed to all men and women. For God's revelation in Christ and in Scripture is unchangeable. Through it the Holy Spirit still speaks today. He illumines the minds of God's people in every culture to perceive its truth freshly through their own eyes and thus discloses to the whole Church ever more of the many-colored wisdom of God. (II Tim. 3:16; II Pet. 1:21; John 10:35; Isa. 55:11; 1 Cor. 1:21; Rom. 1:16, Matt. 5:17,18; Jude 3; Eph. 1:17,18; 3:10,18)
As I read this statement, it makes seven explicit claims about the Bible, all of them demonstrably foolish. It is said to be (1) divinely inspired, (2) truthful, (3) authoritative, (4) infallible and inerrant, (5) addressed to all people, (6) directed to their salvation, and (7) unchangeable but also capable of being “freshly” perceived by different cultures. In support of these claims, it provides ten biblical references, which is to say it quotes the Bible to establish the Bible’s validity. [3] This is rock solid, because-I-say-so Christian fundamentalism and the fact that its principal author is soft-spoken and polite does nothing to mitigate the fact that anyone whose rhetoric is so impaired is also a zealot, a wild-eyed fanatic and a religious bigot. Anyone who purports to believe that the Bible is, “the only infallible rule of faith and practice” must stand foursquare for the death penalty for homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13). Stott must also think it licit to whip his male and female slaves as long as he does not kill them in the process (Exodus 21:20-21). These and a long list of other psychopathologies and moral abominations.
One of the most amusing things inerrancy demands of its servants is belief in a literal reading of the Book of Revelations. Now here is how John describes the God who appears to him:
His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.
Or consider this lovely passage from Chapter 17:
Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a desert. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. This title was written on her forehead: Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Prostitutes, and of the Abominations of the Earth. I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.
Do you think Stott believes the Mother of All Prostitutes was or will be drinking his blood? Nah! No more than he believes Scotland Yard would let him own a single slave, never mind whip one (more the pity). He is, you see, a hypocrite, preaching the inerrancy of the Bible while ignoring anything that is intellectually inconvenient. It is a joy to watch him weaseling his way around whatever it is he means by the “many-colored wisdom of God.” In a masterful display of such equivocation, he once wrote, “However strongly we may disapprove of homosexual practices, we have no liberty to dehumanize those who engage in them.” This may sound pretty high minded until you realize it doesn’t mean anything. Dehumanize? How do you do that? Branding them with a scarlet letter I for inhuman? Of course, he may mean it literally, but even Pat Robertson would stand up and admit that turning gays into frogs is, sadly, beyond his ability. What Stott is doing is throwing a meaningless bone to moderate Protestants—people who don’t have the stomach to stone gays and adulteresses.
In another place, Stott writes, “Thus, homosexually-oriented individuals must choose whether they will submit to the lordship of Christ, with the loving support of the church community, or to the messages of contemporary culture. Furthermore, faith accepts grace; therefore, celibacy is possible!” That’s his exclamation point, not mine, but I endorse it wholeheartedly. Now it is not useful to burden the Christian right with the discipline of logic for the same reason that you can’t fault an elephant because it can’t fly. [4] So we can ignore his earlier admission that the Church is nowhere near being a loving community for gays. (If they do go looking for such a community, what they will find is the cult of what is called “reparative therapy.”) But you can’t let the man get away with an inanity like the idea that celibacy is possible because faith accepts grace. As recent events have once again made clear, celibacy—abstention from sexual expression—is exceedingly rare even among those who have vowed to be celibate. Either faith or grace needs to do a better job.
The Bible is a very complex book. Anyone who purports to believe that it is the inerrant word of God has a very dim view of God’s IQ not to mention his Rorschach profile. Of course, such people are not talking about God God so much as about themselves. It’s their understanding of the Bible that is inerrant, their favorite translation. “I know the mind and meaning of God” is not all that far from “I am God.”
Okay, do you remember David Brooks? I assure you he thinks all this Christian fundamentalism is gaga preached by people who were educated somewhere other than the University of Chicago. It’s a good bet he’s never read the Book of Revelation with all its nonsense about multi-headed, fire-breathing monsters and The Rapture so beloved of evangelicals. [5] He knows that people like Fred Phelps, Jimmy Swaggart and John Stott do not have God’s unlisted phone number. What he seems not to know is that Fred, Jimmy and Johnny are birds of a feather—there’s not a hair of difference between them except that one has a better vocabulary and speaks with an upper class British accent. Not for Stott the word of the Lord as preached recently by the pornography addicted, prostitute using Reverend Bubba:
I get amazed. I can't look at it but about ten seconds, at these politicians dancing around this, dancing around this -- I'm trying to find a correct name for it -- this utter, absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died. Case anybody doesn't know, God calls it an abomination . It's an abomination . It's an abomination! These ridiculous, utterly absurd district attorneys and judges and state congress. 'Well, we don't know.' They oughta -- they oughta -- they oughta have to marry a pig and live with them forever.
John Stott has enough sense not to say this kind of thing out loud in public. But there isn’t a single idea (I use the word loosely) in that diatribe that Mr. Stott would say is not supported in the “written word of God.” Well, maybe the good book would not recommend bestiality as a substitute for sodomy, but you see my point. My father always warned me not to discuss cosmology with anyone who believes the moon is made of green cheese. So why do I want to deal with a mad priest who is utterly convinced that David Brooks is going to hell because he is not born again of water and the spirit? Can I hope to change his mind? David, David! Were you paying attention to W’s rants about John Kerry’s “flip-flopping?” Bush knows everything in his gut and has never felt the need to change his mind about anything. At least, not since he stopped drinking and found Jesus. He doesn’t read newspapers. I have as much hope of changing John Stott’s mind about the absurdities he purports to believe.
More to the point though, why does David Brooks think Democrats ought to reason together with John Stott? Perhaps he thinks he’s doing them a favor, increasing their chances of ousting the dangerous radicals now controlling the federal government. Maybe he’s embarrassed that it’s his side that’s sucking up to the Yahoos. Or maybe he sincerely feels that Democrats will be morally if not electorally superior people if they somehow come to terms with the moral majority by adopting their crazy social agenda. For my money, though, his motive is a lot simpler. He had a deadline approaching and nothing to write about. So he retrieved an essay he had written as a sophomore at old UC and made a few changes without giving it much thought. Which may be unfair of me but has the virtue of being consistent with longstanding tradition at The New York Times.
Notes
1. This is what I mean by “careless.” I suspect Mr. Brooks saw the movie and was too busy falling in love with Jean Simmons (surely not Shirley Jones) to pay much attention to what, if anything, Sinclair Lewis was getting at. Elmer Gantry was many unattractive things but he was never a blowhard. Like the Revs. Robertson and Falwell, he was a charlatan but unlike them he was not a simple-minded hypocrite. He would never have taken notice of the homosexual conspiracies of Squarebob Spongepants and Tinky Winky Teletubby. Elmer, a fictional character, is pretty much the most reasonable of Evangelicals.
2. “Who is John Stott?” The New York Times, 11/30/04. Brooks doesn’t tell you this but Father Stott is an Anglican priest who identifies himself with the reactionaries of the African church. He is a best selling but mediocre popularizer of orthodoxy who, through his voluminous writings, is almost single-handedly responsible for the low estate of Evangelical homiletics. For more than forty years, he was the Queen’s confessor which was probably not as interesting as it sounds. In fairness, it should be said that he has many admirers and even acolytes among the clergy. And, of course, he is very popular at The Times. Ninety days after Brooks’ encomium, the Metro section did an adulatory puff piece occasioned by Stott’s visit to New York. When he died in 2011, The Times ran an adulatory obit complete with sidebars. Sadly, the praise of Brooks and his colleagues is offset by Brooks’ correct observation that practically nobody else ever heard of him.
3. The biblical references are only marginally related to any of Stott’s claims and appear to be there mainly as window dressing. However, I will let you judge for yourself. In several cases, I have included surrounding verses to give you a sense of the context. In two cases, I have put a period at the end where the sentence went on in the following verse. The citation from Jude is taken from the New Oxford Bible. All others are from the New International Version.
2 Tim 3:16: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Peter 1:21 For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
John 10:34-36: Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are gods.’ If he called them 'gods,' to whom the word of God came--and the Scripture cannot be broken, what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son?”
Isaiah 55:10-11: As the rain and the snow / come down from heaven, / and do not return to it / without watering the earth / and making it bud and flourish, / so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, / so is my word that goes out from my mouth: / It will not return to me empty, / but will accomplish what I desire / and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
1 Corinthians 1:21-25: Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.
Romans 1:16-17: I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."
Matt 5:17-18: Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.
Jude 3: I have no idea where Stott came across this reference. There is no Jude 3. Jude has only a single chapter of 25 verses, the third (i.e., 1:3) of which is, “My friends, I was fully engaged in writing to you about our salvation—which is yours no less than ours—when it became urgently necessary to write at once and appeal to you to join the struggle in defense of the faith, the faith which God entrusted to his people once and for all.” Sounds more like a right wing fund raising letter to me.
Ephesians 1: 17-18: I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.
Ephesians 3:10-18: His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence. I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.
4. Logic has never been a strong point of the right wing, especially when the subject turns to sex. When, for example, Mr. Brooks writes, “Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide,” you have to accept that he has no rational basis for thinking so. Not even the Bible condemns polygamy. Do you think he believes that masturbation will make your palms turn hairy?
5. Here is how John describes Jesus in Revelation 5:6: “Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. He had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. He came and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song: ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God …’” I love it. Not that I know what a dead lamb with seven eyes would smell like, but you’ve got to be impressed by living creatures and elders holding bowls of incense while playing the harp. Unless, of course, they had three hands. Of even greater interest is what the writer of such fantasy was smoking.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES
Jerry Harkins
The Catholic Church in America is dying of self-inflicted wounds. A process that took nearly two hundred years in Europe, is playing out here at breathtaking speed. It would be less embarrassing if we could screen the agony from public scrutiny but it has become too obvious. Decay and corruption are the order of the day. The bishops’ behavior is becoming more deranged every day. They and their Roman masters compete to see who can generate the most lurid headlines, the most pungent scandals, the most fertile fodder for the late night comedians. They blame their troubles on the modern world, on too much sex, materialism, and secularism. But the root of the problem is their own unrelieved stupidity. For example, at the behest of the American bishops, the Roman Curia has recently renewed the church’s historical and hapless crusade against women in the form of a multi-front assault on, of all people, the nuns. The nuns! The selfless women whose works and prayers give substance to the gospel of love and meaning to the word Catholic.
Holy mother the church has never been comfortable with women in general and nuns in particular. The recent pogrom began with canonical sanctions against several hospitals, widely considered a crowning achievement of the nuns. In late 2010, Bishop Robert F. Vasa withdrew the right of Saint Charles Medical Center of Bend, Oregon to call itself Catholic because it had “gradually drifted away” from church teachings. About a year later, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted issued a similar fatwa against Saint Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center of Phoenix, Arizona and excommunicated Sister Margaret McBride, a member of its medical ethics committee. Sister had approved the termination of the pregnancy of a woman in danger of imminent death. There was no hope at all for the fetus. Their Excellencies seemed not to notice that neither hospital was calling itself Catholic and, needless to say, neither anathema had any effect in the real world. Undeterred, the bishops next went after two important theologians, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, and Sister Margaret Farley, RSM, Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale and President of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Sister Johnson stands accused by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of feminism because she apparently takes seriously the claim of Genesis 1:27 that God created both men and women in his likeness. Sister Farley wrote a scholarly book setting out a rational foundation for sexual ethics which Bill Levada of the Curia’s doctrinal office found heretical. Of course the hierarchy has a long history of attacking the church’s best male theologians viciously. Until recently, however, there have been no female theologians. Now they can kill two enemies with one stone.
For men who profess to be infallible and who insist on what they believe to be God’s promise to be with them all days and preserve them from error, the top men in the Roman Catholic Church really are egregiously stupid. As the entire world now knows, the aforementioned Bill Levada has just finished a “doctrinal assessment” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents about 80% of American nuns. The purpose of this exercise was to encourage “a patient and collaborative renewal of this conference of major superiors in order to provide a stronger doctrinal foundation for its many laudable initiatives and activities.” In other words, as Bill himself wrote, “The overarching aim of the doctrinal Assessment is, therefore, to assist the LCWR in the United States in implementing an ecclesiology of communion, confident that ‘the joyous rediscovery of faith can also contribute to consolidate the unity and communion among the different bodies that make up the wider family of the Church.’” It sounds almost poetic: overarching aim, ecclesiology of communion, joyous rediscovery. What was lost is found, alleluia. You need hip waders to parse the prose. Ecclesiology of communion, for example, is devoid of meaning. But not to worry, the bullshit is only Vaticanspeak for the liturgical formalities that precede every auto-da-fe. Film at eleven.
The man in charge of shaping up the nuns is J. Peter Sartain, Archbishop of Seattle. Pete is Number Two to Timmy Dolan of New York in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. His current priority is to mobilize his parishes to get signatures for a referendum to repeal Washington’s gay marriage law. His success to date has been limited. Six parishes have outright refused to participate including his own cathedral parish. At Our Lady of the Lake church, parishioners responded to the vote not to participate with a sustained standing ovation. The pastor observed, “I only wished the archbishop could have experienced the sustained applause — the sensus fidelium — of the people. He needs to listen to this ‘voice.’ That is my prayer.” That’s one prayer that is certain to go unanswered.
The assessment is only the first shoe to fall on the nuns. There is another in the works called an “apostolic visitation” which was conducted simultaneously by Mother Clare Millea, Superior General of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, on behalf of the Congregation for the Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CICLSAL), a Vatican dicastery concerned with religious orders. In spite of the name of her own congregation, Mother Millea is not an apostle nor are the real apostles about to make a joyous reappearance in the land of the living. Rather, she is a canon lawyer assigned to “look into the quality of the life of apostolic women religious in the United States.” In other words, a special prosecutor in the mold of Kenneth Starr. The women religious are not apostles either although they’re a lot more apostolic than their imperial masters. Mother Clare is also supposed to “learn more about the varied and unique ways in which women religious contribute to the welfare of the Church and society,” which apparently the princes are ignorant of. Like poor dear Guenevere, Mother is trying to discover what the simple folk do. Her work is meant to “assist the Church to strengthen, enhance and support the growth of the more than 400 congregations to which the approximately 59,000 women religious in the United States belong.” Mother has already submitted her final report on these mysteries but they remain secret at least at present. However, you can rest assured that “strengthen, enhance and support” do not mean the same thing in Vaticanspeak that they do in other languages. Similarly, the assessment’s promise of a “patient and collaborative renewal” should not be taken to mean the Vatican has discovered the virtue of patience or the value of collaboration. As the Pope has often said, in rather a scornful tone, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” He does not want the nuns to collaborate with him. He doesn’t even let the bishops do that. What he’s looking for is groveling submission. And by a “joyous rediscovery of faith” he’s referring to his joy over their submission.
The doctrinal assessment, such as it is, has been released. According to the National Catholic Reporter, it “calls into question the lives, motives, spirituality, fidelity, theology and ways of approaching the church and the world” of the American sisters. Subtle, no? It demands reform, stressing the need for the sisters “to have total allegiance of mind and heart to the magisterium of the bishops.” That’s Vaticanspeak for obedience. Obeisance, actually. Docile, reverential abasement to the majesty of the alpha males.
The inquisitors labored mightily for four years and brought forth an 8-page report with a variety of generalized grievances under three headings. First, the sisters invited their then-President, Sister Laurie Brink, to address their annual meeting. Sister is accused of challenging “core Catholic beliefs” by claiming that congregations of women religious had to change to remain relevant. Second, the sisters objected to the Holy See’s position on women’s ordination and ministry to gay persons and failed to agree with the Church’s teaching on sexuality. Given the intellectual bankruptcy of these asinine positions and teachings, it is not surprising that they are questioned by people who are not brain dead, including huge majorities of lay persons. Finally there came the usual catchall complaint about “radical feminism,” a term which conjures up bomb-throwing, bra-burning harridans or, in Rush Limbaugh’s felicitous phrase, “feminazis.”
The Pope and his mandarins apparently expect the entire Catholic world to breathe a sigh of relief now that the nuns have been brought to heel. Well, of course! What would Jesus do? Demand unquestioning compliance with the dictates of the boys who brought you the worldwide pedophile scandal and its attendant cover-up? Denounce the waste of time involved in ministering to the poor, the hungry, the sick and the persecuted? Elevate stupidity to infallible church dogma?
They never learn. I’ve always wanted to be a fly on the wall of the conference room where the bishops thrash out their decisions. At the meeting on the nun problem, no one seems to have noticed the obvious parallels to the trial of Joan of Arc. Like the case of the American nuns, the charges against Joan were a potpourri of the night terrors of medieval hierarchs, including heresy, witchcraft, disobedience, scandal and, by implication, immorality and blasphemy. The charges against Joan were vague except for the one specific act for which they had her burned. Cross-dressing. They had ordered her to give up wearing the garments of a soldier in favor of a woman’s dress. Then they removed the dress from her cell while she slept and left her with—you guessed it—her forbidden uniform. This was, of course, taken as relapse into heresy, it apparently being a doctrine of the holy Roman faith that girls should either wear dresses or go naked.
Joan had exactly no chance of escaping the stake. You can still read the transcript of the kangaroo court that convicted her. She made logical mincemeat out of their inane questions. She exposed the poverty of their theology and the depravity of their politics. She defended the supremacy of the individual conscience. But she was a pawn in the power struggles of church and state. Once captured by the Burgundian traitors, she was abandoned by her Valois allies and sold to her English enemies. Her life was forfeit and the pious proceedings were a sham designed to bring about her death in the most painful, most humiliating manner possible. She tried to appeal to the Pope as was her right but Eugene IV was busy playing his own power games with the Council of Basel which was about to gather to challenge papal primacy.
It is worth rehearsing Joan’s saga in every generation because from beginning to end it was pure politics. It involved no credible theology, no moral philosophy and not even a hint of the rule of law. From 1428 when she first offered her services to the hapless then-Dauphin Charles VII to 1920 when she was made a Saint by Pope Benedict XV, every twist and turn of her story was motivated exclusively by the unprincipled, sometimes sordid political considerations of the French, the English and the Holy See. The nullification trial twenty-five years after her death was a political sham. It declared she had been improperly martyred but forbade any remembrance of her. It was enough for Charles who cared only that his legitimacy not be questionable because of his association with a convicted heretic. It was enough for the still powerful Burgundians who escaped sanctions for their obscene persecution of Joan. And it was enough for Pope Callixtus III who hoped to placate Charles and convince him to rescind the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges which had limited papal power in France. Her ultimate canonization was a cynical compromise between the French and the Vatican done only after Pope Leo XIII had gained the permission of Queen Victoria.
It is true that many Popes of the era really did believe in witches, demons and the host of Satan abroad in the world and some claimed to have had first hand experience with them. They were victims of superstition, magic, the occult and the esoteric. But they, their predecessors and successors have been principally preoccupied with establishing, extending and preserving their own power. Until recent centuries, the means they employed included the military and police forces of the Papal States. They warped theology and made it a handmaiden to force. Their institution has been the source of a great deal of human misery but, fortunately, it has never been successful in the long run because, throughout the centuries, it has been afflicted with stupidity.
The church can no longer turn heretics over to the secular arm for burning which is a grace the American nuns should be thankful for. But it can still do remarkably stupid things, many but not all of which are aimed at women. As this is being written, the American bishops have declared another war, this one on Barack Obama, and are threatening to excommunicate anyone who supports him in the coming elections. Their strategy is to make all 35 million Catholic voters feel that the President has dissed their religion by failing to agree with their absurdist position on contraception. Leading the troops into battle is their new superstar Cardinal Timmy Dolan of New York whom they have also anointed President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Upon his election, Timmy told the press, “It’s not like we’re in crisis; it’s not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives. Thank God for the leadership of Cardinal Francis George, things are going well.” How could anyone say such a stupid thing? The sex abuse crisis has not been solved. The church is not enjoying a new influx of vocations or money. Those remaining in the church are still rejecting its nonsensical doctrines regarding marriage and sexuality. Dioceses are still declaring bankruptcy. And still the bishops rage against women. Nuns. Altar girls. Girl Scouts. Lesbians. Pants suits. Dresses with hems shorter than eight inches below the knee. Eight and a half inches if you want to attend mass in Padre Pio’s church in Pietrelcina.
Dolan is by no means the worst of them. Among the contenders for that honor is Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of Peoria, Illinois. In April 2012, His Excellency denounced the Obama administration for its “radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda,” most importantly its health insurance plan. The President’s “calculated disdain” for Catholic truth is nothing less than an endorsement of the policies of Hitler and Stalin. This rhetoric is, as the Irish would say, beyond the beyond. It is indecent to equate anyone with two of history’s most despicable icons of evil and, if its intent is to persuade Mr. Obama to reconsider his positions, it is flagrantly stupid.
In its long history, the church has done many stupid things, taught many stupid doctrines and offered many stupid interpretations of the gospel. From the virgin birth to the way the Pope dresses, from original sin to transubstantiation, from the Trinity to the selling of indulgences, stupidity reigns. Stupid, stupid, all is stupid. Why? Because stupidity is an essential strategy for any person or institution that denies change.
A crusade against the American nuns is stupid for many reasons. First, of course, the charges against them are false, the tactics being used against them are immoral, and the whole undertaking is counterproductive. The poverty of the bishops’ case is obvious. They know it which is why they try to conceal their wrath behind a veil of vacuous verbiage. But they fool no one and every time they open their mouths, they lose more adherents. They know that too but the nuns seem to be promoting change by engaging the world as it is today. To the bishops the combination of women and change is nightmarish not only because it threatens their diminishing power but also because it lets loose their formless fears, those night terrors lurking in their souls. But ultimately the new crusade is stupid because there is a fundamental difference between the parties. The nuns want to confront and embrace change. The bishops want to deny it.
In the fifth century before the common era, Heraclitus of Ephesus taught that, “You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” Everything is in a state of permanent flux. Reality is merely a succession of transitory states. Many major philosophers beginning with Plato rejected this notion in favor of more comforting beliefs in ultimate permanence, immutability, constancy. They sought absolutes, eternal verities, natural law. The problem they encountered, however, was the stubborn character of knowledge itself. Knowledge evolves. Whether Plato’s perfect ideas are eternal or not, our understanding of the world and our ability to control it constantly change. Worse, the change is directional. Knowledge becomes deeper, more accurate, more useful and more satisfying. Even as we have come to expect that uncertainty lies at the heart of our reality and that our understanding of it can never be complete, our experience of it is progressive.
Thus, as we learned more about the dynamics of the solar system, it became clear that regardless of what it says in the Book of Joshua, the sun did not stop in the middle of the sky and delay going down. The church, of course, could not accept the new knowledge because it might be taken to mean that God erred when he inspired the author of Joshua. Thus, it was compelled to behave stupidly by condemning Galileo as a heretic. It was stupid, among other reasons, because it was unnecessary. The movement of bodies within the solar system had never been a matter of faith and morals in the first place. The church defended the inerrancy of the Book of Joshua only because it feared it would lose power and influence if it did not. But Galileo was no more a heretic than, say, Pythagoras for demonstrating that, in a right triangle, a squared + b squared = c squared. The hierarchs knew this at the time and they still know it. “Truth cannot contradict truth.” So said John Paul II, quoting his predecessor Leo XIII. In 1979, John Paul initiated a reconsideration of the Galileo case. It took thirteen years. When he received the report, the Pope conceded the obvious. “Paradoxically, Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard than the theologians who opposed him.” But he did not lift the verdict of heresy. Nor did he apologize to history. He went to his grave intending to canonize his intellectual hero, Pius IX, the apostle of stasis.
The hierarchs want you to believe that sacred truth does not evolve, that the Rock of Ages is not metamorphic. They pray constantly, “Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.” As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. They sing plaintively, “Oh, Thou who changest not, abide with me.” But if the Bible has any theme, from Genesis to Revelation, it is of change. Even God changes from the Baal-like sociopath who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, including its women and children, for the sins of some of its men. He softens a bit when he restores Job’s fortunes after squandering them in a whimsical bet with Satan and even more significantly when he only kills David’s firstborn son to punish the king for murder and adultery. By the time of the New Testament, he is preaching the gospel of love and coming to understand that he himself needs the love of his creatures. Ultimately, he gives his own life for our sins. This is a very different God from that of Genesis or, better perhaps, a very different human understanding of the idea of God. Of course, it is not actually God who is changing; it is our perception of God. And our perception is all we have. Our perception of God is the reality of God, and it changes continually.
Change is almost always for the better even though, at the time, it is always distressful. It gives rise to uncertainty, insecurity and anxiety. Resisting change is natural but rejecting it is childish. It puts the church in the awkward position of Winnie the Pooh. “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.” Given the constraints of Winnie’s metaphysical space, there is no option of “stop bumping and think.” Just as it is now too late for Winnie, it is too late for a church whose mythology is defined as immutable.
Jerry Harkins
The Catholic Church in America is dying of self-inflicted wounds. A process that took nearly two hundred years in Europe, is playing out here at breathtaking speed. It would be less embarrassing if we could screen the agony from public scrutiny but it has become too obvious. Decay and corruption are the order of the day. The bishops’ behavior is becoming more deranged every day. They and their Roman masters compete to see who can generate the most lurid headlines, the most pungent scandals, the most fertile fodder for the late night comedians. They blame their troubles on the modern world, on too much sex, materialism, and secularism. But the root of the problem is their own unrelieved stupidity. For example, at the behest of the American bishops, the Roman Curia has recently renewed the church’s historical and hapless crusade against women in the form of a multi-front assault on, of all people, the nuns. The nuns! The selfless women whose works and prayers give substance to the gospel of love and meaning to the word Catholic.
Holy mother the church has never been comfortable with women in general and nuns in particular. The recent pogrom began with canonical sanctions against several hospitals, widely considered a crowning achievement of the nuns. In late 2010, Bishop Robert F. Vasa withdrew the right of Saint Charles Medical Center of Bend, Oregon to call itself Catholic because it had “gradually drifted away” from church teachings. About a year later, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted issued a similar fatwa against Saint Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center of Phoenix, Arizona and excommunicated Sister Margaret McBride, a member of its medical ethics committee. Sister had approved the termination of the pregnancy of a woman in danger of imminent death. There was no hope at all for the fetus. Their Excellencies seemed not to notice that neither hospital was calling itself Catholic and, needless to say, neither anathema had any effect in the real world. Undeterred, the bishops next went after two important theologians, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, and Sister Margaret Farley, RSM, Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale and President of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Sister Johnson stands accused by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of feminism because she apparently takes seriously the claim of Genesis 1:27 that God created both men and women in his likeness. Sister Farley wrote a scholarly book setting out a rational foundation for sexual ethics which Bill Levada of the Curia’s doctrinal office found heretical. Of course the hierarchy has a long history of attacking the church’s best male theologians viciously. Until recently, however, there have been no female theologians. Now they can kill two enemies with one stone.
For men who profess to be infallible and who insist on what they believe to be God’s promise to be with them all days and preserve them from error, the top men in the Roman Catholic Church really are egregiously stupid. As the entire world now knows, the aforementioned Bill Levada has just finished a “doctrinal assessment” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents about 80% of American nuns. The purpose of this exercise was to encourage “a patient and collaborative renewal of this conference of major superiors in order to provide a stronger doctrinal foundation for its many laudable initiatives and activities.” In other words, as Bill himself wrote, “The overarching aim of the doctrinal Assessment is, therefore, to assist the LCWR in the United States in implementing an ecclesiology of communion, confident that ‘the joyous rediscovery of faith can also contribute to consolidate the unity and communion among the different bodies that make up the wider family of the Church.’” It sounds almost poetic: overarching aim, ecclesiology of communion, joyous rediscovery. What was lost is found, alleluia. You need hip waders to parse the prose. Ecclesiology of communion, for example, is devoid of meaning. But not to worry, the bullshit is only Vaticanspeak for the liturgical formalities that precede every auto-da-fe. Film at eleven.
The man in charge of shaping up the nuns is J. Peter Sartain, Archbishop of Seattle. Pete is Number Two to Timmy Dolan of New York in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. His current priority is to mobilize his parishes to get signatures for a referendum to repeal Washington’s gay marriage law. His success to date has been limited. Six parishes have outright refused to participate including his own cathedral parish. At Our Lady of the Lake church, parishioners responded to the vote not to participate with a sustained standing ovation. The pastor observed, “I only wished the archbishop could have experienced the sustained applause — the sensus fidelium — of the people. He needs to listen to this ‘voice.’ That is my prayer.” That’s one prayer that is certain to go unanswered.
The assessment is only the first shoe to fall on the nuns. There is another in the works called an “apostolic visitation” which was conducted simultaneously by Mother Clare Millea, Superior General of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, on behalf of the Congregation for the Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CICLSAL), a Vatican dicastery concerned with religious orders. In spite of the name of her own congregation, Mother Millea is not an apostle nor are the real apostles about to make a joyous reappearance in the land of the living. Rather, she is a canon lawyer assigned to “look into the quality of the life of apostolic women religious in the United States.” In other words, a special prosecutor in the mold of Kenneth Starr. The women religious are not apostles either although they’re a lot more apostolic than their imperial masters. Mother Clare is also supposed to “learn more about the varied and unique ways in which women religious contribute to the welfare of the Church and society,” which apparently the princes are ignorant of. Like poor dear Guenevere, Mother is trying to discover what the simple folk do. Her work is meant to “assist the Church to strengthen, enhance and support the growth of the more than 400 congregations to which the approximately 59,000 women religious in the United States belong.” Mother has already submitted her final report on these mysteries but they remain secret at least at present. However, you can rest assured that “strengthen, enhance and support” do not mean the same thing in Vaticanspeak that they do in other languages. Similarly, the assessment’s promise of a “patient and collaborative renewal” should not be taken to mean the Vatican has discovered the virtue of patience or the value of collaboration. As the Pope has often said, in rather a scornful tone, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” He does not want the nuns to collaborate with him. He doesn’t even let the bishops do that. What he’s looking for is groveling submission. And by a “joyous rediscovery of faith” he’s referring to his joy over their submission.
The doctrinal assessment, such as it is, has been released. According to the National Catholic Reporter, it “calls into question the lives, motives, spirituality, fidelity, theology and ways of approaching the church and the world” of the American sisters. Subtle, no? It demands reform, stressing the need for the sisters “to have total allegiance of mind and heart to the magisterium of the bishops.” That’s Vaticanspeak for obedience. Obeisance, actually. Docile, reverential abasement to the majesty of the alpha males.
The inquisitors labored mightily for four years and brought forth an 8-page report with a variety of generalized grievances under three headings. First, the sisters invited their then-President, Sister Laurie Brink, to address their annual meeting. Sister is accused of challenging “core Catholic beliefs” by claiming that congregations of women religious had to change to remain relevant. Second, the sisters objected to the Holy See’s position on women’s ordination and ministry to gay persons and failed to agree with the Church’s teaching on sexuality. Given the intellectual bankruptcy of these asinine positions and teachings, it is not surprising that they are questioned by people who are not brain dead, including huge majorities of lay persons. Finally there came the usual catchall complaint about “radical feminism,” a term which conjures up bomb-throwing, bra-burning harridans or, in Rush Limbaugh’s felicitous phrase, “feminazis.”
The Pope and his mandarins apparently expect the entire Catholic world to breathe a sigh of relief now that the nuns have been brought to heel. Well, of course! What would Jesus do? Demand unquestioning compliance with the dictates of the boys who brought you the worldwide pedophile scandal and its attendant cover-up? Denounce the waste of time involved in ministering to the poor, the hungry, the sick and the persecuted? Elevate stupidity to infallible church dogma?
They never learn. I’ve always wanted to be a fly on the wall of the conference room where the bishops thrash out their decisions. At the meeting on the nun problem, no one seems to have noticed the obvious parallels to the trial of Joan of Arc. Like the case of the American nuns, the charges against Joan were a potpourri of the night terrors of medieval hierarchs, including heresy, witchcraft, disobedience, scandal and, by implication, immorality and blasphemy. The charges against Joan were vague except for the one specific act for which they had her burned. Cross-dressing. They had ordered her to give up wearing the garments of a soldier in favor of a woman’s dress. Then they removed the dress from her cell while she slept and left her with—you guessed it—her forbidden uniform. This was, of course, taken as relapse into heresy, it apparently being a doctrine of the holy Roman faith that girls should either wear dresses or go naked.
Joan had exactly no chance of escaping the stake. You can still read the transcript of the kangaroo court that convicted her. She made logical mincemeat out of their inane questions. She exposed the poverty of their theology and the depravity of their politics. She defended the supremacy of the individual conscience. But she was a pawn in the power struggles of church and state. Once captured by the Burgundian traitors, she was abandoned by her Valois allies and sold to her English enemies. Her life was forfeit and the pious proceedings were a sham designed to bring about her death in the most painful, most humiliating manner possible. She tried to appeal to the Pope as was her right but Eugene IV was busy playing his own power games with the Council of Basel which was about to gather to challenge papal primacy.
It is worth rehearsing Joan’s saga in every generation because from beginning to end it was pure politics. It involved no credible theology, no moral philosophy and not even a hint of the rule of law. From 1428 when she first offered her services to the hapless then-Dauphin Charles VII to 1920 when she was made a Saint by Pope Benedict XV, every twist and turn of her story was motivated exclusively by the unprincipled, sometimes sordid political considerations of the French, the English and the Holy See. The nullification trial twenty-five years after her death was a political sham. It declared she had been improperly martyred but forbade any remembrance of her. It was enough for Charles who cared only that his legitimacy not be questionable because of his association with a convicted heretic. It was enough for the still powerful Burgundians who escaped sanctions for their obscene persecution of Joan. And it was enough for Pope Callixtus III who hoped to placate Charles and convince him to rescind the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges which had limited papal power in France. Her ultimate canonization was a cynical compromise between the French and the Vatican done only after Pope Leo XIII had gained the permission of Queen Victoria.
It is true that many Popes of the era really did believe in witches, demons and the host of Satan abroad in the world and some claimed to have had first hand experience with them. They were victims of superstition, magic, the occult and the esoteric. But they, their predecessors and successors have been principally preoccupied with establishing, extending and preserving their own power. Until recent centuries, the means they employed included the military and police forces of the Papal States. They warped theology and made it a handmaiden to force. Their institution has been the source of a great deal of human misery but, fortunately, it has never been successful in the long run because, throughout the centuries, it has been afflicted with stupidity.
The church can no longer turn heretics over to the secular arm for burning which is a grace the American nuns should be thankful for. But it can still do remarkably stupid things, many but not all of which are aimed at women. As this is being written, the American bishops have declared another war, this one on Barack Obama, and are threatening to excommunicate anyone who supports him in the coming elections. Their strategy is to make all 35 million Catholic voters feel that the President has dissed their religion by failing to agree with their absurdist position on contraception. Leading the troops into battle is their new superstar Cardinal Timmy Dolan of New York whom they have also anointed President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Upon his election, Timmy told the press, “It’s not like we’re in crisis; it’s not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives. Thank God for the leadership of Cardinal Francis George, things are going well.” How could anyone say such a stupid thing? The sex abuse crisis has not been solved. The church is not enjoying a new influx of vocations or money. Those remaining in the church are still rejecting its nonsensical doctrines regarding marriage and sexuality. Dioceses are still declaring bankruptcy. And still the bishops rage against women. Nuns. Altar girls. Girl Scouts. Lesbians. Pants suits. Dresses with hems shorter than eight inches below the knee. Eight and a half inches if you want to attend mass in Padre Pio’s church in Pietrelcina.
Dolan is by no means the worst of them. Among the contenders for that honor is Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of Peoria, Illinois. In April 2012, His Excellency denounced the Obama administration for its “radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda,” most importantly its health insurance plan. The President’s “calculated disdain” for Catholic truth is nothing less than an endorsement of the policies of Hitler and Stalin. This rhetoric is, as the Irish would say, beyond the beyond. It is indecent to equate anyone with two of history’s most despicable icons of evil and, if its intent is to persuade Mr. Obama to reconsider his positions, it is flagrantly stupid.
In its long history, the church has done many stupid things, taught many stupid doctrines and offered many stupid interpretations of the gospel. From the virgin birth to the way the Pope dresses, from original sin to transubstantiation, from the Trinity to the selling of indulgences, stupidity reigns. Stupid, stupid, all is stupid. Why? Because stupidity is an essential strategy for any person or institution that denies change.
A crusade against the American nuns is stupid for many reasons. First, of course, the charges against them are false, the tactics being used against them are immoral, and the whole undertaking is counterproductive. The poverty of the bishops’ case is obvious. They know it which is why they try to conceal their wrath behind a veil of vacuous verbiage. But they fool no one and every time they open their mouths, they lose more adherents. They know that too but the nuns seem to be promoting change by engaging the world as it is today. To the bishops the combination of women and change is nightmarish not only because it threatens their diminishing power but also because it lets loose their formless fears, those night terrors lurking in their souls. But ultimately the new crusade is stupid because there is a fundamental difference between the parties. The nuns want to confront and embrace change. The bishops want to deny it.
In the fifth century before the common era, Heraclitus of Ephesus taught that, “You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” Everything is in a state of permanent flux. Reality is merely a succession of transitory states. Many major philosophers beginning with Plato rejected this notion in favor of more comforting beliefs in ultimate permanence, immutability, constancy. They sought absolutes, eternal verities, natural law. The problem they encountered, however, was the stubborn character of knowledge itself. Knowledge evolves. Whether Plato’s perfect ideas are eternal or not, our understanding of the world and our ability to control it constantly change. Worse, the change is directional. Knowledge becomes deeper, more accurate, more useful and more satisfying. Even as we have come to expect that uncertainty lies at the heart of our reality and that our understanding of it can never be complete, our experience of it is progressive.
Thus, as we learned more about the dynamics of the solar system, it became clear that regardless of what it says in the Book of Joshua, the sun did not stop in the middle of the sky and delay going down. The church, of course, could not accept the new knowledge because it might be taken to mean that God erred when he inspired the author of Joshua. Thus, it was compelled to behave stupidly by condemning Galileo as a heretic. It was stupid, among other reasons, because it was unnecessary. The movement of bodies within the solar system had never been a matter of faith and morals in the first place. The church defended the inerrancy of the Book of Joshua only because it feared it would lose power and influence if it did not. But Galileo was no more a heretic than, say, Pythagoras for demonstrating that, in a right triangle, a squared + b squared = c squared. The hierarchs knew this at the time and they still know it. “Truth cannot contradict truth.” So said John Paul II, quoting his predecessor Leo XIII. In 1979, John Paul initiated a reconsideration of the Galileo case. It took thirteen years. When he received the report, the Pope conceded the obvious. “Paradoxically, Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard than the theologians who opposed him.” But he did not lift the verdict of heresy. Nor did he apologize to history. He went to his grave intending to canonize his intellectual hero, Pius IX, the apostle of stasis.
The hierarchs want you to believe that sacred truth does not evolve, that the Rock of Ages is not metamorphic. They pray constantly, “Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.” As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. They sing plaintively, “Oh, Thou who changest not, abide with me.” But if the Bible has any theme, from Genesis to Revelation, it is of change. Even God changes from the Baal-like sociopath who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, including its women and children, for the sins of some of its men. He softens a bit when he restores Job’s fortunes after squandering them in a whimsical bet with Satan and even more significantly when he only kills David’s firstborn son to punish the king for murder and adultery. By the time of the New Testament, he is preaching the gospel of love and coming to understand that he himself needs the love of his creatures. Ultimately, he gives his own life for our sins. This is a very different God from that of Genesis or, better perhaps, a very different human understanding of the idea of God. Of course, it is not actually God who is changing; it is our perception of God. And our perception is all we have. Our perception of God is the reality of God, and it changes continually.
Change is almost always for the better even though, at the time, it is always distressful. It gives rise to uncertainty, insecurity and anxiety. Resisting change is natural but rejecting it is childish. It puts the church in the awkward position of Winnie the Pooh. “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.” Given the constraints of Winnie’s metaphysical space, there is no option of “stop bumping and think.” Just as it is now too late for Winnie, it is too late for a church whose mythology is defined as immutable.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
SON OF XAVIER
Jerry Harkins
Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta (1506–1552) was born to an aristocratic Basque family in the Kingdom of Navarre and became one of the founders of the Society of Jesus (aka The Company) in Paris in 1534. Changing his name to Xavier in honor of the family homestead, he had some success as a missionary to India and the Far East. He was the quintessential Jesuit, smart, tough and persistent, in some ways even more so than his friend and colleague, Ignatius of Loyola. As one result of this, there are dozens of schools around the world that bear his name one of which is a high school in New York City. (Oh, yes, Francis is also a Saint, having been beatified by Paul V in 1619 and canonized by his successor Gregory XV in 1622. Paul was the Borghese Pope and Gregory was the first Jesuit-educated Pope but sanctification does not require the moral perfection of the sanctifier.)
I attended the Xavier in New York between 1952 and 1956, the years corresponding to the first Eisenhower administration and the rise of Joseph R. “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy who was also Jesuit-educated (Marquette University, 1935). My father had hoped I would wind up at Brooklyn Tech and when I got screwed out of a couple of Catholic school scholarships because the nuns thought we were rich, he almost pulled it off. The nuns, however, were clever. They told him they would negotiate the matter with my mother. He caved. [1]
Now the truth is I was bright enough but was and still am an indifferent student. I did well enough to be admitted to and retained in the Greek honors class but I was the bottom man. That distinction earned me the position of Beadle, a functionary charged by the Jesuits with significant responsibilities and no authority. Still, it is an honorable office with roots going back to the earliest days of the Roman Empire. It has always had a comedic aspect verging on the clownish or, in our more debased times, the slapstick. If ever a man and an office were meant for each other (think of FDR and the Presidency or, if you prefer, Sancho Panza as Squire to the Man of La Mancha), I was born to be a beadle.
I’m pretty sure there is no God but I agree wholeheartedly with Benedict XVI that Deus Est Caritas which I translate as love is god. Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson of Fordham University (another of my alma maters), building on the theology of the late Karl Rahner, SJ, says that grace is not so much the created gift of God as the primordial, dynamic presence of love in the universe. Both Sister Johnson and Father Rahner are regarded by official Catholicism as heretics, the former because she seems obsessed with the idea that God did not make a mistake when he created woman in his image, the latter because he had been involved somehow in a bizarre love triangle with a widow and a Benedictine Abbot. But I digress. [2]
Xavier in the 50’s was staffed by a hard core of eccentric Jesuits and laymen all of whom seemed to want nothing more of life than success in getting me to do something I did not want to do. Charlie Lehmkuhl, SJ was the Prefect of Discipline, a tall, ugly bastard with a bit of a beer belly and a sense of humor that managed to avoid smiling. In spite of his best efforts to hide it, Charlie was a scholar, a theologian I think, and a lover of classical music. The rumor was that he was a descendent of the Habsburg emperors. He was ugly enough but he did not have the lip and he was certainly not retarded. Still, I found myself believing it after encountering his mother, a lovely and regal woman I met after running an errand for her as partial expiation for one of my many sins.
At one point, Charlie gave up and decided he would have to expel me but I declined to write a letter of resignation from Mary’s Blue Regiment which I had somehow disgraced. [3] He demanded to see my father first thing the following Monday morning. After calming me down, my father told me to go in alone on Monday and tell Charlie that he, my dad, was too busy to deal with the trivia of high school discipline and that he had complete confidence that Charlie and I could work out an equitable solution. “It will only work if you let him know I called him Charlie. But whatever you do, don’t use the word asshole.” Charlie listened to me and then burst out laughing. Without smiling, of course. "No doubt your father thinks I'm an asshole. Well, it takes one to know one."
I was, it seemed, always in trouble with the poor, dear Prefect. In fact, he wanted to recruit me for the Society and couldn’t believe that anyone could lack the necessary vocation. Father Taylor had no such illusions. Vincent A. Taylor, SJ., a man who spent fifty years teaching English at Xavier. I had something of a reputation as a poet because I was, by a long shot, the best translator in the class. As my beloved patron, Saint Jerome, said, translation is the art of blarney. Anyway, Father Taylor thought I should be a littérateur. The only problem was that I found the great Catholic authors boring. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh and J.F. Powers. Well, maybe not the only problem. As a freshman, I had been assigned to do a book report on Anna Karenina but I took the wrong book out of the library and wrote my report on Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. The Xavier English Department never let me forget it. When asked for the name of my favorite book, I didn’t hesitate. The Catcher in the Rye. The nuns had caught me with a copy in eighth grade and had confiscated it on the ground it was on the Index. Father Taylor added it to our reading list.
He treated every student as a serious adult which was a double fiction. For me, he was willing to concede that since I had not read Scott, Thackery and Dickens before the age of 16, these worthies probably had little to offer me. I knew he didn’t really believe that. He thought I was working my way through Mortimer Adler’s Great Books because he caught me with a paperback copy of Rousseau’s Confessions and that was my excuse. The truth was as usual somewhat different. I was really trying to find out why the Vatican had put such a boring book on the Index. (Father was not surprised that I had heard of Mortimer Adler and Jean-Jacques Rousseau but he certainly did not believe I would read a book by either one.)
I really did have a talent for translating. I understood what the author was trying to say, even if he was saying it to bore me. I could also do a credible explication de texte from having read the Classic Comic version of almost anything. Father knew I hadn’t read the book but didn’t know I had read the comic book. The perfect Jesuitical formula. Someone, possibly I, started the rumor that Father Taylor’s middle initial stood for Ascanius, son of Aeneas, of whom Apollo said, “Dis genite et geniture deos.” The son of gods will have gods for sons. We were his sons. Indeed, V. A. Taylor was the most civilized man I ever met.
Tom Guerin was a scholastic who taught Latin and Greek. Unlike Father Taylor, he looked the part he played. In preparing their famous series on The Company, the editors of Life had selected a photograph of Tom for the cover of the magazine to represent the entire Society. The picture was cropped to hide the rosary he was holding and the terrible statue of St. Ignatius hovering over him at the right of the image. He was not the best teacher I ever had but he was the one I most wanted to be like. In Junior year, he saved for me that marvelous passage in Book 17 of The Odyssey where Odysseus returns to Ithaca after twenty years and is recognized by his faithful old dog Argos. Odysseus is afraid that if he greets Argos, the shepherd Eumaeus will realize who he is and so he ignores the dog who wags his tail and dies on a dungheap. When I finished, Tom had tears in his eyes and asked me why Homer had used this story. I argued that Homer was making the point that even a great hero can be a first class son of a bitch. Tom, being a perfect straight man, challenged this. “But Odysseus must first fulfill his duty to the gods, must he not?” I replied to gasps of horror that Homer was saying that even the gods can be first class sons of bitches. Exhibit A was what God did to Job. I hadn’t actually read the Book of Job but I knew that it was a story with many parallels in pagan mythology. What good does it do to be Jesuit-educated if you don’t know stuff like that. Tom Guerin didn’t which was why I knew he wouldn’t last. He didn’t.
Tom’s buddy was another scholastic, Richard E. Doyle, who taught Latin and Greek with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader. He is best remembered as a distinguished classicist who became the Dean of Fordham Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and an editor of Traditio, one of the most important journals in classical and medieval studies. But I remember him conducting class with the help of a gavel which he would use to threaten anyone who offered a colorless translation even of something as gray as Cicero’s "Pro Archia Poeta." This is the single piece of literature that separates the academics from the human race. The former universally consider it brilliant, scintillating and even humorous. The rest of us consider it unbearably boring and the archetype of hypocrisy. Poor Archias certainly never got his money’s worth in that old M. T. Cicero skipped town without delivering it. As to Mr. Doyle, he was an enthusiast until I suggested we set up a Cicero fan club to attract cute girls from Marymount. We had all recently been to a tea dance at that esteemed institution and the class found my suggestion uproarious. Mr. D, however, was a good sport. Our next outing was to hear Edith Hamilton speak on the meaning of Greek mythology today. She was 89 that year. At the reception afterward, I found myself in a conversation with her and her sister Alice who was a Professor of Toxicology at Harvard and had been one of the key figures in Hull House. Heady stuff. It even distracted me from the justly fabled girls of Hunter College.
Leo “Twinkletoes” Paquin taught freshman Latin and coached varsity football. Then, as now, I despised the sport but I thought Mr. Paquin was a genius with the driest wit imaginable. He had been one of the Seven Blocks of Granite on the 1936 Fordham football team and the roommate of his fellow blockhead Vince Lombardi. It was many years before I encountered the 1926 silent film “Twinkletoes” but I was mildly offended by the nickname. He may have been a graceful left end for Fordham but he was a big, stolid looking man with a placid demeanor. I remember him asking our star student to conjugate the verb scire. Dougie pronounced the third person singular, scit, as skit. “Douglas, does your book say ‘skit?’ Mine says ‘shit.’”
My parents had both recommended that I become an engineer but in high school that was not even on the radar screen. Still, I enjoyed math even then and was blessed with good teachers, Mr. Nash, Mr. Finnegan and Tough Tony Karpowich in particular. Tony had been co-captain of the 1947 Fordham NIT basketball team. He gave me my first summer job selling refreshments at the Sunset Park Pool in Brooklyn and did his best to keep me safe from girls on the prowl for free ice cream. Given the way my academic career turned out, it is curious that I never thought of math as a career. When I finally did discover its joys and established the credentials to become a statistician, I pursued it as a career only briefly. I blame it on Father Taylor.
Another subject that made little impression on me was religion. Remember, this was a period of enormous theological turmoil. Among the philosophers, Jacques Maritan and Étienne Gilson were revisiting Thomism, and a whole generation of immortal theologians were at or near the prime of their work. Karl Rahner, SJ, of course, Hans Küng, Jean Danielou, S.J., Yves Congar (OP but God is all-forgiving), Henri-Marie de Lubac, SJ, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the immortal Canadian Bernard J.F. Lonergan, SJ and so many other Catholic leaders. Harvey Cox and Martin Buber among the infidels. [4] But at Xavier (and later at Fordham) theology was left to the B team. Even in France, the Jesuits were not innovators. Brilliant analysts, outstanding interpreters, even masters of biblical criticism, yes. But, except for Rahner and Lubac, dull theologians. Well, add Lonergan to the short list of Jesuit immortals but with an asterisk next to his name. The great Trinitarian was really a card-carrying empiricist and a closet mystic. I blame it on Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola. The latter’s Spiritual Exercises are promoted vigorously by the Society but, to me, they are no more compelling than the Baltimore Catechism. At one point in my career, I had the opportunity to work with Mircea Eliade on a proposed Book of Uncommon Prayer and came away with the impression that my Jesuit education had been deficient in the life and care of the spirit. It took me many years to rectify this problem by studying the work of Father Andrew M. Greeley, the quintessential non-Jesuit. It wasn’t easy but I blame only myself.
Joe Caruso taught French at which I was hopeless and conducted the glee club at which I was a star. Okay, a faded star. As a child, I had an angelic soprano voice and made a fair amount of money singing at weddings and funerals. No wedding was valid without my rendition of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” no funeral complete without Mozart’s “Ave Verum.” The pastor thought the former was a Protestant hymn but he wisely decided not to resist the demands of the market. Even at Christmas concerts, the old ladies wouldn’t leave without hearing my rendition of “Danny Boy.” By sophomore year at Xavier, however, I was an insecure baritone, thoroughly depressed by my inability to hit and hold a pitch or sing a single scale without breaking at La. Mr. Caruso insisted I still had a wonderful voice and I would “grow into it” if only I practiced every day. As you may know, there is no Classic Comic on solfège and he quickly discovered my allergy to practicing anything and decided instead to teach me how to improvise around a jazz melody. I’m still not very good at it but it has given me enormous pleasure every day of my life since. I have no idea why he took the time to do what he did but it is what I am most thankful to Xavier for.
Of course, I owe a lot to Xavier. Among other things, I finally learned how to succeed in school without really trying. College turned out to be a lot easier than high school. The teachers, for the most part, were not nearly as interesting. Graduate school was tough because I had to make up so much math but, again, I knew how to get A’s.
Gertrude Stein said, “I am who I am because my little doggie knows me.” [5]
Can you imagine Ms. Stein having a doggie? She was simply embroidering Popeye’s famous line, I Yam What I Yam. Me too. Just another poor dumb sinner making his way in this vale of humiliation and looking up occasionally in wonder at the sky and the stars. I was luckier than some in both my choice of parents and the fact that I encountered at a crucial stage of life a whole choir of interesting teachers who were interested in me.
One last note: There are no original thoughts in this essay. You will find similar—virtually identical—reminiscences written by or about hundreds if not thousands of men who attended Jesuit high schools around the world. In this morning’s Times for example there is an appreciation of the life of the late Jesuit-educated football coach, Joe Paterno. Joe was class of ‘44 at Brooklyn Prep where the Prefect of Discipline was Father Frederick W. Engle, SJ, a clone of my Father Lehmkuhl except for the royal blood. Engle was a tall German “with the fists of a trained boxer.” Probably the cauliflower ears too. Anyway, here are a couple of items about that beloved but, alas, now defunct institution:
• Robert S. Bennett, class of 1957 and President Bill Clinton’s personal lawyer during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said the school had changed his life more than Georgetown and Harvard.
• Richard J. Carter, class of ’64, a tax and estate lawyer in Manhattan, described Brooklyn Prep as “the hardest school I ever went to.” [6]
Right on!
Notes
1. The nuns thought we were rich because both my parents worked. Also, my mother had been raised by a lace curtain Irish immigrant mother so she knew how to appear rich by the standards of the community. For example, my father, a lace-curtain-Irishman-in-training, liked to serve Haig and Haig Scotch. He never noticed that mother kept his distinctive Haig and Haig “pinch” bottle filled with Teacher’s. Or maybe he did but wisely decided to say nothing.
2. “Bizarre” is not too strong a word for the possibly chaste affair Father Rahner had with Luise Rinser. They exchanged thousands of letters over a period of 22 years and she eventually published her side of the correspondence. (Sadly, The Company claimed ownership of his letters and wouldn’t let her publish them. A great loss to the now extinct world of Belles Lettres. I do not know whether there is a legally binding agreement between Jesuits and the Society as to the ownership of intellectual property and I know nothing of German copyright law but its application to personal letters is exquisitely complex. I do not believe the Society’s position would be upheld if challenged today in an American court.) The Rahner-Rinser affair took place between 1962 and his death in 1984. In her autobiography, she wrote, “We were both clearly aware of the implications of a relationship which became gradually closer, a spiritual pilgrimage along a rocky mountain edge…We did not see it as a lurid tasting of forbidden fruit but as a divine experiment, being wholly man and wholly woman, flesh and blood, and yet intent to live in a spiritual way.” The Benedictine Abbot, known only as MA, was Ms. Rinser’s Spiritual Director of whom Rahner was jealous. It should be noted that Luise was a beautiful woman and slightly weird. But she was no one’s bimbo. In her obituary, The Times of London wrote, “She remained a practicing Roman Catholic to the end of her days, but campaigned for abortion and against celibacy, as well as against the power of the priesthood. In spite of that, she counted among her personal friends Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ... She stood for the German Presidency in 1984 at the age of 73, as the Green Party’s candidate ... and campaigned in the West for the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung.”
3. My offense had something to do with being caught by the Cadet Colonel horsing around after a First Friday formation. My partner in crime, Bill Grant, cowered before authority but I allowed as to how I would shove his sword up where the sun didn’t shine if he didn’t stop poking me with it. I had not yet encountered John F. Kennedy’s dictum that life is unfair.
4. Twenty-eight hundred words into this essay, I should not have to admit that, in high school, I was blissfully unfamiliar with these worthies. You already know that the publishers of Classic Comics ignored them and all their works. However, you may have noted that absent from my list of distinguished theologians is the name of Joe Ratzinger who is often said to have been one of them. His Holiness is an interesting theologian (see Deus Est Caritas) but not in the same league. He was a liberal collaborator at Vatican II but definitely on the B team. He might have been better had there been a Luise Rinser in his life. Another missing name is John Courtney Murray, SJ. My only excuse for this is pure prejudice. Father Murray was a brilliant theologian, the principal author of Dignitatus Humanae, the Council’s acceptance of religious liberty. Murray’s claim that moral truth might emerge outside the church led to conflict with Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and the eventual Vatican demand that Murray cease writing on religious freedom and stop publication of his two latest articles on the issue. He was rehabilitated by Pope John XXIII. However, he was entirely too friendly with Cardinal Spellman for which sin I have not forgiven him. A similar problem appertains to another great Jesuit, Bob Gannon, who was President of Fordham from 1936 to 1949. Father Gannon was not a theologian but was the greatest preacher the Catholic Church ever produced in America—better even than Fulton Sheen. He too was close to Spellman having written the bastard’s official and, some would say, fawning biography. Sadly, he left us little in the way of other writings. He had a marvelous self-deprecating sense of humor and a scholar’s ability to change his mind with grace. He would be the first to say he had been wrong about religious liberty in his youth and wrong about his pacifism in the run-up to World War II.
5. According to Stein scholar Ulla E. Dydo, what Stein actually wrote was, “When I am I I know I am because my little dog knows me.” Dydo may be right but my informant’s version has the advantage of meaning something. Anyway, she did have a dog or a doggie to keep her and Alice company during World War II, which is embarrassing enough even if you didn’t know its name was “Basket.”
6. Joseph Berger, “For Paterno, a Playbook Begun at Brooklyn Prep,” The New York Times, January 25, 2012, p. A26.
Jerry Harkins
Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta (1506–1552) was born to an aristocratic Basque family in the Kingdom of Navarre and became one of the founders of the Society of Jesus (aka The Company) in Paris in 1534. Changing his name to Xavier in honor of the family homestead, he had some success as a missionary to India and the Far East. He was the quintessential Jesuit, smart, tough and persistent, in some ways even more so than his friend and colleague, Ignatius of Loyola. As one result of this, there are dozens of schools around the world that bear his name one of which is a high school in New York City. (Oh, yes, Francis is also a Saint, having been beatified by Paul V in 1619 and canonized by his successor Gregory XV in 1622. Paul was the Borghese Pope and Gregory was the first Jesuit-educated Pope but sanctification does not require the moral perfection of the sanctifier.)
I attended the Xavier in New York between 1952 and 1956, the years corresponding to the first Eisenhower administration and the rise of Joseph R. “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy who was also Jesuit-educated (Marquette University, 1935). My father had hoped I would wind up at Brooklyn Tech and when I got screwed out of a couple of Catholic school scholarships because the nuns thought we were rich, he almost pulled it off. The nuns, however, were clever. They told him they would negotiate the matter with my mother. He caved. [1]
Now the truth is I was bright enough but was and still am an indifferent student. I did well enough to be admitted to and retained in the Greek honors class but I was the bottom man. That distinction earned me the position of Beadle, a functionary charged by the Jesuits with significant responsibilities and no authority. Still, it is an honorable office with roots going back to the earliest days of the Roman Empire. It has always had a comedic aspect verging on the clownish or, in our more debased times, the slapstick. If ever a man and an office were meant for each other (think of FDR and the Presidency or, if you prefer, Sancho Panza as Squire to the Man of La Mancha), I was born to be a beadle.
I’m pretty sure there is no God but I agree wholeheartedly with Benedict XVI that Deus Est Caritas which I translate as love is god. Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson of Fordham University (another of my alma maters), building on the theology of the late Karl Rahner, SJ, says that grace is not so much the created gift of God as the primordial, dynamic presence of love in the universe. Both Sister Johnson and Father Rahner are regarded by official Catholicism as heretics, the former because she seems obsessed with the idea that God did not make a mistake when he created woman in his image, the latter because he had been involved somehow in a bizarre love triangle with a widow and a Benedictine Abbot. But I digress. [2]
Xavier in the 50’s was staffed by a hard core of eccentric Jesuits and laymen all of whom seemed to want nothing more of life than success in getting me to do something I did not want to do. Charlie Lehmkuhl, SJ was the Prefect of Discipline, a tall, ugly bastard with a bit of a beer belly and a sense of humor that managed to avoid smiling. In spite of his best efforts to hide it, Charlie was a scholar, a theologian I think, and a lover of classical music. The rumor was that he was a descendent of the Habsburg emperors. He was ugly enough but he did not have the lip and he was certainly not retarded. Still, I found myself believing it after encountering his mother, a lovely and regal woman I met after running an errand for her as partial expiation for one of my many sins.
At one point, Charlie gave up and decided he would have to expel me but I declined to write a letter of resignation from Mary’s Blue Regiment which I had somehow disgraced. [3] He demanded to see my father first thing the following Monday morning. After calming me down, my father told me to go in alone on Monday and tell Charlie that he, my dad, was too busy to deal with the trivia of high school discipline and that he had complete confidence that Charlie and I could work out an equitable solution. “It will only work if you let him know I called him Charlie. But whatever you do, don’t use the word asshole.” Charlie listened to me and then burst out laughing. Without smiling, of course. "No doubt your father thinks I'm an asshole. Well, it takes one to know one."
I was, it seemed, always in trouble with the poor, dear Prefect. In fact, he wanted to recruit me for the Society and couldn’t believe that anyone could lack the necessary vocation. Father Taylor had no such illusions. Vincent A. Taylor, SJ., a man who spent fifty years teaching English at Xavier. I had something of a reputation as a poet because I was, by a long shot, the best translator in the class. As my beloved patron, Saint Jerome, said, translation is the art of blarney. Anyway, Father Taylor thought I should be a littérateur. The only problem was that I found the great Catholic authors boring. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh and J.F. Powers. Well, maybe not the only problem. As a freshman, I had been assigned to do a book report on Anna Karenina but I took the wrong book out of the library and wrote my report on Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. The Xavier English Department never let me forget it. When asked for the name of my favorite book, I didn’t hesitate. The Catcher in the Rye. The nuns had caught me with a copy in eighth grade and had confiscated it on the ground it was on the Index. Father Taylor added it to our reading list.
He treated every student as a serious adult which was a double fiction. For me, he was willing to concede that since I had not read Scott, Thackery and Dickens before the age of 16, these worthies probably had little to offer me. I knew he didn’t really believe that. He thought I was working my way through Mortimer Adler’s Great Books because he caught me with a paperback copy of Rousseau’s Confessions and that was my excuse. The truth was as usual somewhat different. I was really trying to find out why the Vatican had put such a boring book on the Index. (Father was not surprised that I had heard of Mortimer Adler and Jean-Jacques Rousseau but he certainly did not believe I would read a book by either one.)
I really did have a talent for translating. I understood what the author was trying to say, even if he was saying it to bore me. I could also do a credible explication de texte from having read the Classic Comic version of almost anything. Father knew I hadn’t read the book but didn’t know I had read the comic book. The perfect Jesuitical formula. Someone, possibly I, started the rumor that Father Taylor’s middle initial stood for Ascanius, son of Aeneas, of whom Apollo said, “Dis genite et geniture deos.” The son of gods will have gods for sons. We were his sons. Indeed, V. A. Taylor was the most civilized man I ever met.
Tom Guerin was a scholastic who taught Latin and Greek. Unlike Father Taylor, he looked the part he played. In preparing their famous series on The Company, the editors of Life had selected a photograph of Tom for the cover of the magazine to represent the entire Society. The picture was cropped to hide the rosary he was holding and the terrible statue of St. Ignatius hovering over him at the right of the image. He was not the best teacher I ever had but he was the one I most wanted to be like. In Junior year, he saved for me that marvelous passage in Book 17 of The Odyssey where Odysseus returns to Ithaca after twenty years and is recognized by his faithful old dog Argos. Odysseus is afraid that if he greets Argos, the shepherd Eumaeus will realize who he is and so he ignores the dog who wags his tail and dies on a dungheap. When I finished, Tom had tears in his eyes and asked me why Homer had used this story. I argued that Homer was making the point that even a great hero can be a first class son of a bitch. Tom, being a perfect straight man, challenged this. “But Odysseus must first fulfill his duty to the gods, must he not?” I replied to gasps of horror that Homer was saying that even the gods can be first class sons of bitches. Exhibit A was what God did to Job. I hadn’t actually read the Book of Job but I knew that it was a story with many parallels in pagan mythology. What good does it do to be Jesuit-educated if you don’t know stuff like that. Tom Guerin didn’t which was why I knew he wouldn’t last. He didn’t.
Tom’s buddy was another scholastic, Richard E. Doyle, who taught Latin and Greek with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader. He is best remembered as a distinguished classicist who became the Dean of Fordham Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and an editor of Traditio, one of the most important journals in classical and medieval studies. But I remember him conducting class with the help of a gavel which he would use to threaten anyone who offered a colorless translation even of something as gray as Cicero’s "Pro Archia Poeta." This is the single piece of literature that separates the academics from the human race. The former universally consider it brilliant, scintillating and even humorous. The rest of us consider it unbearably boring and the archetype of hypocrisy. Poor Archias certainly never got his money’s worth in that old M. T. Cicero skipped town without delivering it. As to Mr. Doyle, he was an enthusiast until I suggested we set up a Cicero fan club to attract cute girls from Marymount. We had all recently been to a tea dance at that esteemed institution and the class found my suggestion uproarious. Mr. D, however, was a good sport. Our next outing was to hear Edith Hamilton speak on the meaning of Greek mythology today. She was 89 that year. At the reception afterward, I found myself in a conversation with her and her sister Alice who was a Professor of Toxicology at Harvard and had been one of the key figures in Hull House. Heady stuff. It even distracted me from the justly fabled girls of Hunter College.
Leo “Twinkletoes” Paquin taught freshman Latin and coached varsity football. Then, as now, I despised the sport but I thought Mr. Paquin was a genius with the driest wit imaginable. He had been one of the Seven Blocks of Granite on the 1936 Fordham football team and the roommate of his fellow blockhead Vince Lombardi. It was many years before I encountered the 1926 silent film “Twinkletoes” but I was mildly offended by the nickname. He may have been a graceful left end for Fordham but he was a big, stolid looking man with a placid demeanor. I remember him asking our star student to conjugate the verb scire. Dougie pronounced the third person singular, scit, as skit. “Douglas, does your book say ‘skit?’ Mine says ‘shit.’”
My parents had both recommended that I become an engineer but in high school that was not even on the radar screen. Still, I enjoyed math even then and was blessed with good teachers, Mr. Nash, Mr. Finnegan and Tough Tony Karpowich in particular. Tony had been co-captain of the 1947 Fordham NIT basketball team. He gave me my first summer job selling refreshments at the Sunset Park Pool in Brooklyn and did his best to keep me safe from girls on the prowl for free ice cream. Given the way my academic career turned out, it is curious that I never thought of math as a career. When I finally did discover its joys and established the credentials to become a statistician, I pursued it as a career only briefly. I blame it on Father Taylor.
Another subject that made little impression on me was religion. Remember, this was a period of enormous theological turmoil. Among the philosophers, Jacques Maritan and Étienne Gilson were revisiting Thomism, and a whole generation of immortal theologians were at or near the prime of their work. Karl Rahner, SJ, of course, Hans Küng, Jean Danielou, S.J., Yves Congar (OP but God is all-forgiving), Henri-Marie de Lubac, SJ, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the immortal Canadian Bernard J.F. Lonergan, SJ and so many other Catholic leaders. Harvey Cox and Martin Buber among the infidels. [4] But at Xavier (and later at Fordham) theology was left to the B team. Even in France, the Jesuits were not innovators. Brilliant analysts, outstanding interpreters, even masters of biblical criticism, yes. But, except for Rahner and Lubac, dull theologians. Well, add Lonergan to the short list of Jesuit immortals but with an asterisk next to his name. The great Trinitarian was really a card-carrying empiricist and a closet mystic. I blame it on Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola. The latter’s Spiritual Exercises are promoted vigorously by the Society but, to me, they are no more compelling than the Baltimore Catechism. At one point in my career, I had the opportunity to work with Mircea Eliade on a proposed Book of Uncommon Prayer and came away with the impression that my Jesuit education had been deficient in the life and care of the spirit. It took me many years to rectify this problem by studying the work of Father Andrew M. Greeley, the quintessential non-Jesuit. It wasn’t easy but I blame only myself.
Joe Caruso taught French at which I was hopeless and conducted the glee club at which I was a star. Okay, a faded star. As a child, I had an angelic soprano voice and made a fair amount of money singing at weddings and funerals. No wedding was valid without my rendition of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” no funeral complete without Mozart’s “Ave Verum.” The pastor thought the former was a Protestant hymn but he wisely decided not to resist the demands of the market. Even at Christmas concerts, the old ladies wouldn’t leave without hearing my rendition of “Danny Boy.” By sophomore year at Xavier, however, I was an insecure baritone, thoroughly depressed by my inability to hit and hold a pitch or sing a single scale without breaking at La. Mr. Caruso insisted I still had a wonderful voice and I would “grow into it” if only I practiced every day. As you may know, there is no Classic Comic on solfège and he quickly discovered my allergy to practicing anything and decided instead to teach me how to improvise around a jazz melody. I’m still not very good at it but it has given me enormous pleasure every day of my life since. I have no idea why he took the time to do what he did but it is what I am most thankful to Xavier for.
Of course, I owe a lot to Xavier. Among other things, I finally learned how to succeed in school without really trying. College turned out to be a lot easier than high school. The teachers, for the most part, were not nearly as interesting. Graduate school was tough because I had to make up so much math but, again, I knew how to get A’s.
Gertrude Stein said, “I am who I am because my little doggie knows me.” [5]
Can you imagine Ms. Stein having a doggie? She was simply embroidering Popeye’s famous line, I Yam What I Yam. Me too. Just another poor dumb sinner making his way in this vale of humiliation and looking up occasionally in wonder at the sky and the stars. I was luckier than some in both my choice of parents and the fact that I encountered at a crucial stage of life a whole choir of interesting teachers who were interested in me.
One last note: There are no original thoughts in this essay. You will find similar—virtually identical—reminiscences written by or about hundreds if not thousands of men who attended Jesuit high schools around the world. In this morning’s Times for example there is an appreciation of the life of the late Jesuit-educated football coach, Joe Paterno. Joe was class of ‘44 at Brooklyn Prep where the Prefect of Discipline was Father Frederick W. Engle, SJ, a clone of my Father Lehmkuhl except for the royal blood. Engle was a tall German “with the fists of a trained boxer.” Probably the cauliflower ears too. Anyway, here are a couple of items about that beloved but, alas, now defunct institution:
• Robert S. Bennett, class of 1957 and President Bill Clinton’s personal lawyer during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said the school had changed his life more than Georgetown and Harvard.
• Richard J. Carter, class of ’64, a tax and estate lawyer in Manhattan, described Brooklyn Prep as “the hardest school I ever went to.” [6]
Right on!
Notes
1. The nuns thought we were rich because both my parents worked. Also, my mother had been raised by a lace curtain Irish immigrant mother so she knew how to appear rich by the standards of the community. For example, my father, a lace-curtain-Irishman-in-training, liked to serve Haig and Haig Scotch. He never noticed that mother kept his distinctive Haig and Haig “pinch” bottle filled with Teacher’s. Or maybe he did but wisely decided to say nothing.
2. “Bizarre” is not too strong a word for the possibly chaste affair Father Rahner had with Luise Rinser. They exchanged thousands of letters over a period of 22 years and she eventually published her side of the correspondence. (Sadly, The Company claimed ownership of his letters and wouldn’t let her publish them. A great loss to the now extinct world of Belles Lettres. I do not know whether there is a legally binding agreement between Jesuits and the Society as to the ownership of intellectual property and I know nothing of German copyright law but its application to personal letters is exquisitely complex. I do not believe the Society’s position would be upheld if challenged today in an American court.) The Rahner-Rinser affair took place between 1962 and his death in 1984. In her autobiography, she wrote, “We were both clearly aware of the implications of a relationship which became gradually closer, a spiritual pilgrimage along a rocky mountain edge…We did not see it as a lurid tasting of forbidden fruit but as a divine experiment, being wholly man and wholly woman, flesh and blood, and yet intent to live in a spiritual way.” The Benedictine Abbot, known only as MA, was Ms. Rinser’s Spiritual Director of whom Rahner was jealous. It should be noted that Luise was a beautiful woman and slightly weird. But she was no one’s bimbo. In her obituary, The Times of London wrote, “She remained a practicing Roman Catholic to the end of her days, but campaigned for abortion and against celibacy, as well as against the power of the priesthood. In spite of that, she counted among her personal friends Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ... She stood for the German Presidency in 1984 at the age of 73, as the Green Party’s candidate ... and campaigned in the West for the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung.”
3. My offense had something to do with being caught by the Cadet Colonel horsing around after a First Friday formation. My partner in crime, Bill Grant, cowered before authority but I allowed as to how I would shove his sword up where the sun didn’t shine if he didn’t stop poking me with it. I had not yet encountered John F. Kennedy’s dictum that life is unfair.
4. Twenty-eight hundred words into this essay, I should not have to admit that, in high school, I was blissfully unfamiliar with these worthies. You already know that the publishers of Classic Comics ignored them and all their works. However, you may have noted that absent from my list of distinguished theologians is the name of Joe Ratzinger who is often said to have been one of them. His Holiness is an interesting theologian (see Deus Est Caritas) but not in the same league. He was a liberal collaborator at Vatican II but definitely on the B team. He might have been better had there been a Luise Rinser in his life. Another missing name is John Courtney Murray, SJ. My only excuse for this is pure prejudice. Father Murray was a brilliant theologian, the principal author of Dignitatus Humanae, the Council’s acceptance of religious liberty. Murray’s claim that moral truth might emerge outside the church led to conflict with Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and the eventual Vatican demand that Murray cease writing on religious freedom and stop publication of his two latest articles on the issue. He was rehabilitated by Pope John XXIII. However, he was entirely too friendly with Cardinal Spellman for which sin I have not forgiven him. A similar problem appertains to another great Jesuit, Bob Gannon, who was President of Fordham from 1936 to 1949. Father Gannon was not a theologian but was the greatest preacher the Catholic Church ever produced in America—better even than Fulton Sheen. He too was close to Spellman having written the bastard’s official and, some would say, fawning biography. Sadly, he left us little in the way of other writings. He had a marvelous self-deprecating sense of humor and a scholar’s ability to change his mind with grace. He would be the first to say he had been wrong about religious liberty in his youth and wrong about his pacifism in the run-up to World War II.
5. According to Stein scholar Ulla E. Dydo, what Stein actually wrote was, “When I am I I know I am because my little dog knows me.” Dydo may be right but my informant’s version has the advantage of meaning something. Anyway, she did have a dog or a doggie to keep her and Alice company during World War II, which is embarrassing enough even if you didn’t know its name was “Basket.”
6. Joseph Berger, “For Paterno, a Playbook Begun at Brooklyn Prep,” The New York Times, January 25, 2012, p. A26.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
WHAT'S IN A NAMESAKE?
Jerry Harkins
Lego de spinas rosas, de terra aurum, de concha margaritum.
—St. Jerome, Letter to Eustochium, 384
SAINT JEROME was born Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus in Dalmatia, then a Greek colony in what is now Croatia, in about 340 and died in Bethlehem in 420. He is one of the early Doctors of the Church — indeed he was Maximus Doctor, the greatest teacher, and Gloriosus Doctor, the glorious teacher — a scholar and prolific writer best know for translating the Bible into Latin and recording a great deal of what we know about the sack of Rome in 410. Much of his work is brilliant. When St. Aidan and his Irish monks set out to teach the English to read and write [1], their McGuffey’s were Jerome’s Psalms and Gospels and, most especially, his commentaries on the latter. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he was widely admired and often cited by the best and brightest thinkers. The phrase sicut beatus Hieronymus dicit [2] appears almost as an imprimatur in the works of Thomas Aquinas and others. Even Martin Luther (“I know no writer whom I hate as much as I do Jerome.”) relied heavily on the Vulgate for his own German Bible. [3] Still, Jerome was not immune to superficiality and even plagiarism [4] and he sometimes crossed the fine line between orthodoxy and heresy as, for example, in his attraction to certain of the more Stoic ideas of Pelagius. [5]
Jerome’s most important cultural contributions concern the art of translation. He codified and promoted the Roman rhetorical tradition that it is more important to convey the sense of the original than its literal meaning. This is all the more remarkable in that he was dealing primarily with what he believed to be the inspired word of God. He learned Hebrew as an adult and he mocked the pretense of the Septuagint that there had been 72 translators working separately to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, and that, in the end, all their versions were identical. For his trouble, he was denounced by the fundamentalists of his day including his fellow Doctor — Doctor Doctoris — St. Augustine. [6]
Sad to say, Jerome was not an altogether appealing personality, making enemies with his sharp tongue wherever he went. Denouncing the gentle Pelagian theologian Jovinian, he wrote: "Whenever I see a dandy, or a man who is no stranger to a hairdresser, with his hair nicely done and his cheeks all aglow, he belongs to your herd, or rather, grunts in concert with your swine."
In spite of all this, Jerome, was a favorite subject of Renaissance painters, possibly because he had vivid erotic dreams that gave them an excuse to paint naked ladies. For example, while fasting and praying for four years in the Syrian desert, he was haunted by visions of Roman dancing girls. The young ladies are featured prominently in several otherwise pious portraits of him. In another dream he was accused by Christ of being a pagan at heart and was flogged senseless by angels. When he awoke, there were (of course) welts on his back and shoulders, a scene that today graces the walls of the Louvre in the form of a fifteenth century painting by Sano di Pietro. Another tradition has him as quite mad. Jusepe Ribera’s 1626 portrait is typical in depicting him as an ascetic with wild eyes. The best known portrait of him, St. Jerome by El Greco (c. 1590), is relatively straightforward. He appears anachronistically in the robes of a Cardinal, imagined as a Spanish don in deep and melancholy thought. [7]
He was very big on virginity. He preached on it so often that one must wonder if he was protesting too much. There were those who thought so. The Pope appointed a special prosecutor to look into the matter and, although Jerome was eventually exonerated, the wonder persists. He was surely an extremist on the subject. The wonderful line quoted at the outset (I gather roses from the thorns, gold from the earth, the pearl from the oyster) was written in the context of saying that he approved of marriage only because, without it, there would be no virgins. The recipient of this famous letter, De Custodia Virginitate, was a 16-year old girl, Eustochium Julia [8] who, with her mother, the widow Paula Julia, followed Jerome to Bethlehem. There Paula established four convents for the good doctor to supervise. Eustochium died on September 28, 420. Jerome passed to his own eternal reward two days later. At the hour of his death, his soul appeared in the company of Christ and the heavenly chorus to Augustine and a number of others who had been critical of his theology.
Custodia was by no means Jerome’s only venture in defense of virginity. Adversus Helvidium argues that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus and that, as a calling, virginity is inherently superior to the married state. In fairness, he was merely echoing here the views of St. Paul, and there are those kind souls who think both were trying to protect young women against premature marriages forced upon them by parents who thought that the single state was scandalous. The Bible is, after all, ambiguous on the question of marriage. Paul says it is better to marry than to burn which, in one sense, is obvious. Few things, after all, are worse than burning. And, in Judges 11, Jephthah delays the sacrifice of his daughter for two months so that she can bemoan the fact that she will die a virgin. “Go tell it on the mountain,” he instructs her, clearly signaling that he agrees that virginity is something to be greatly regretted.
But we can only envy anyone who has reached the age of reason believing that the Bible has a subtle feminist agenda. Bear in mind, we are not even told the name of Jephthah’s daughter. The Holy Bible is a book that names three female prophets: Miriam, the sister of Moses, Deborah, the wife of Lappidoth, and Huldah, the wife of Shallum. In each case, that’s pretty much all we know about them — the names of their closest male relatives. At least they have names. And at least two of them were not virgins.
Jerome himself was not a virgin. “I praise virginity to the skies,” he wrote to his friend Pammachius, “not because I myself possess it, but because, not possessing it, I admire it all the more.” It is not credible that anyone could conjure up such erotica as he did out of whole cloth, uninformed by experience and unfettered by embarrassment.
Jerome. The rose and the thorn. Red rose, proud rose, sad Rose of all my days! And God would bid His warfare cease,/ Saying all things were well; / And softly make a rosy peace, / A Peace of Heaven with Hell. [9]
Notes
1. Well, how did you think the English became literate? We’re not talking about the Britons who, as Celts, had been reading and writing for millennia and who are known today as the Welsh. We’re talking about the Anglo-Saxon pagans that invaded the island after the Romans left. One of these was Aethelfrith who established the Kingdom of Northumbria (North of the Humber River) in the early part of the Seventh Century. Upon his assassination, his sons, Oswald and Oswy were given sanctuary by the Irish monks of Iona. When Oswald regained the throne, he invited the monks to establish a colony on the holy island of Lindisfarne from which they sallied forth teaching and sanctifying the barbarians. Oswy who succeeded his brother, eventually betrayed the Irish in favor of the more rigid Roman version of the faith but that is a different story. It is told in a marvelous mystery novel by Peter Tremayne, Absolution by Murder, (St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
For a variety of reasons, a great deal of Jerome’s work has survived and a fair amount of it is still in print. More than a hundred of his letters, dozens of his commentaries on the major and minor prophets and his Latin translation of the Bible can all be found on the Web. My favorite compilation is that of the Loeb Classical Library, Volume 262 which includes superb translations by F.A. Wright (Harvard University Press, 1933). The first collection of the Letters appeared in Rome in 1470, a thousand and fifty years after his death and just 20 years after the Gutenberg Bible. Major editions have followed roughly once a century since. The second edition (Basle, 1520) was edited by Jerome’s great admirer, Desiderius Erasmus. There is also a very large body of literature devoted to St. Jerome but much of it is controversial. A notable exception is Saint Jerome In The Renaissance by Eugene F. Rice, Jr. of Columbia University (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). This is the sort of book every scholar wants to write, a labor of love based on long years of delightful research. I have leaned heavily on Rice whose work has given me great pleasure. Finally, Elaine Pagels treats Jerome extensively in her remarkable book, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (Random House, 1988). If you’re ever curious as to why the church turned sour on sex, this is the book to read.
2. Literally, “As Blessed Jerome says.” A modern version, preferred by the present writer would have it, “Right again, J.P.”
3. It is often said that Luther’s Bible shaped the modern German language in much the same way that the King James Version shaped English. Technically, like all other modern versions, it is a rendition of the Septuagint although Luther’s Greek was sketchy at best. You will also find claims that it “follows” the original Hebrew, but Luther’s Hebrew was worse than his Greek. In fact, the New Testament follows the second edition of Erasmus’ Latin translation of 1519 which, in turn, is more faithful to the Vulgate than contemporary critics realized. The Old Testament appears to have been based on the Brescia Hebrew Bible of 1494. Luther and his collaborators took pains to render the scriptures into ordinary language, in a sense following the practice of Jerome. Perhaps they went too far. Their work, at least to someone who struggled with German locution, seems full of awkward rhetoric and inexplicable logic. Worse, it reflects a narrow, parochial mind. For example, Luther uses Ostern, Easter, for Passover. So on the first Palm Sunday, he has Jesus saying, “In two days time, it will be Easter…” which is, of course, absurd. Luther was an anti-Semite but his avoidance of the perfectly good German word Passah is extreme by any standard. Both Jerome and Erasmus had it right as, “…post biduum pascha fiet.”
4. Jerome was a quick study and the fastest pen in the East. He is, therefore, occasionally wordy and the reader may be excused for sometimes feeling that he is being deliberately obscure or imprecise. And several of his ideas were clearly borrowed from earlier writers without attribution. Plagiarism, of course, is not nearly so serious an offense in a society that must transmit its culture through the hand copying of manuscripts. It is hardly culpable at all when translation is involved. Indeed, by creating work for subsequent generations of scholars, it may even be said to be beneficial.
5. Pelagius was a contemporary heretic of Irish origin who taught, among other things, the doctrine that we are justified or saved by faith alone (sola fides). He seems to have been congenial, brilliant and persuasive, several times charming hostile synods to his views. Both Jerome and the redoubtable Augustine weighed in with lengthy polemics against him but Jerome could not resist the closely related notion that, since God created man, man merits grace. This, of course, limits God’s power in the sense that it renders God incapable of withholding grace. The present writer has offered a different, almost opposite path to a similar conclusion: man cannot merit justification under any circumstances because man is, by nature, a poor dumb sinner. Sin, however, is defined as anything that detracts from the harmony or wholeness of God. Therefore, while man cannot merit forgiveness, God cannot withhold it. God must forgive us whether or not we ask for it. Thus, Pelagius, Jerome and I agree that God is not really omnipotent which is logical but heretical. Einstein said, “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the universe” [Emphasis added]. He believed but could not prove that God had no choices, that physical laws are universal and that there can not be a differently ordered universe.
David Douglas quotes an unnamed Anglican priest as saying that Pelagianism is the national heresy of England (see “Amazing Grace: A Journey in Time and Faith,” The Hymn, 49:3, July 1998, pp. 9-12). Hogwash! Pelagianism is too Irish to be English anything. The traditional argument is not between faith and grace but faith and works. Luther had rendered Romans 3:28 as, “So halten wir nun dafür, daß der Mensch gerecht wird ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben.
"We maintain that man …is justified by faith alone. The Vulgate reads, “…arbitramur enim justificari hominem per fidem sine operibus legis” which is to say man is justified by faith without respect to the law. There is no solam, no allein, no only. Indeed in 23-24, Paul says, “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace.” In Paul’s mind, justification seems to be merely one link in a chain that includes grace and even good works which he thinks of as the “fruits of faith.”
6. Jerome was not as steadfast in this as my encomium might imply. In the Letter to Pammachius defending his translation of a letter of Epiphanius to Bishop John of Jerusalem, he says, “For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek (except in the case of holy scriptures where even the order of the words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word.” This is simply not true; he makes no exception for scripture. However, he seems to have concluded that discretion was the better part of valor and the scriptural fight is one he chooses not to fight here.
7. This portrait proved to be a best seller for El Greco who made at least four versions of it. What is probably the first enjoys a place of honor in the Frick Museum in New York. A smaller version hangs in the Met. In both, the Saint’s hands rest on an open copy of the Bible and he appears to be contemplating a passage he has just read. The book is open near its mid-point, somewhere around the beginning of Ecclesiastes where King Solomon laments (2:15), “I too shall suffer the fate of the fool. To what purpose have I been wise?”
8. Jerome had also been spiritual advisor to Eustochium’s sister, Blaesilla, a young widow who could not overcome the grief she felt for her husband. Jerome prescribed a month of fasting and penitential prayer even though she had a high fever. She died of it.
9. William Butler Years (of course). The Rose, 1893. The first line quoted here is from “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time.” The quatrain is from “The Rose of Peace.”
Jerry Harkins
Lego de spinas rosas, de terra aurum, de concha margaritum.
—St. Jerome, Letter to Eustochium, 384
SAINT JEROME was born Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus in Dalmatia, then a Greek colony in what is now Croatia, in about 340 and died in Bethlehem in 420. He is one of the early Doctors of the Church — indeed he was Maximus Doctor, the greatest teacher, and Gloriosus Doctor, the glorious teacher — a scholar and prolific writer best know for translating the Bible into Latin and recording a great deal of what we know about the sack of Rome in 410. Much of his work is brilliant. When St. Aidan and his Irish monks set out to teach the English to read and write [1], their McGuffey’s were Jerome’s Psalms and Gospels and, most especially, his commentaries on the latter. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he was widely admired and often cited by the best and brightest thinkers. The phrase sicut beatus Hieronymus dicit [2] appears almost as an imprimatur in the works of Thomas Aquinas and others. Even Martin Luther (“I know no writer whom I hate as much as I do Jerome.”) relied heavily on the Vulgate for his own German Bible. [3] Still, Jerome was not immune to superficiality and even plagiarism [4] and he sometimes crossed the fine line between orthodoxy and heresy as, for example, in his attraction to certain of the more Stoic ideas of Pelagius. [5]
Jerome’s most important cultural contributions concern the art of translation. He codified and promoted the Roman rhetorical tradition that it is more important to convey the sense of the original than its literal meaning. This is all the more remarkable in that he was dealing primarily with what he believed to be the inspired word of God. He learned Hebrew as an adult and he mocked the pretense of the Septuagint that there had been 72 translators working separately to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, and that, in the end, all their versions were identical. For his trouble, he was denounced by the fundamentalists of his day including his fellow Doctor — Doctor Doctoris — St. Augustine. [6]
Sad to say, Jerome was not an altogether appealing personality, making enemies with his sharp tongue wherever he went. Denouncing the gentle Pelagian theologian Jovinian, he wrote: "Whenever I see a dandy, or a man who is no stranger to a hairdresser, with his hair nicely done and his cheeks all aglow, he belongs to your herd, or rather, grunts in concert with your swine."
In spite of all this, Jerome, was a favorite subject of Renaissance painters, possibly because he had vivid erotic dreams that gave them an excuse to paint naked ladies. For example, while fasting and praying for four years in the Syrian desert, he was haunted by visions of Roman dancing girls. The young ladies are featured prominently in several otherwise pious portraits of him. In another dream he was accused by Christ of being a pagan at heart and was flogged senseless by angels. When he awoke, there were (of course) welts on his back and shoulders, a scene that today graces the walls of the Louvre in the form of a fifteenth century painting by Sano di Pietro. Another tradition has him as quite mad. Jusepe Ribera’s 1626 portrait is typical in depicting him as an ascetic with wild eyes. The best known portrait of him, St. Jerome by El Greco (c. 1590), is relatively straightforward. He appears anachronistically in the robes of a Cardinal, imagined as a Spanish don in deep and melancholy thought. [7]
He was very big on virginity. He preached on it so often that one must wonder if he was protesting too much. There were those who thought so. The Pope appointed a special prosecutor to look into the matter and, although Jerome was eventually exonerated, the wonder persists. He was surely an extremist on the subject. The wonderful line quoted at the outset (I gather roses from the thorns, gold from the earth, the pearl from the oyster) was written in the context of saying that he approved of marriage only because, without it, there would be no virgins. The recipient of this famous letter, De Custodia Virginitate, was a 16-year old girl, Eustochium Julia [8] who, with her mother, the widow Paula Julia, followed Jerome to Bethlehem. There Paula established four convents for the good doctor to supervise. Eustochium died on September 28, 420. Jerome passed to his own eternal reward two days later. At the hour of his death, his soul appeared in the company of Christ and the heavenly chorus to Augustine and a number of others who had been critical of his theology.
Custodia was by no means Jerome’s only venture in defense of virginity. Adversus Helvidium argues that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus and that, as a calling, virginity is inherently superior to the married state. In fairness, he was merely echoing here the views of St. Paul, and there are those kind souls who think both were trying to protect young women against premature marriages forced upon them by parents who thought that the single state was scandalous. The Bible is, after all, ambiguous on the question of marriage. Paul says it is better to marry than to burn which, in one sense, is obvious. Few things, after all, are worse than burning. And, in Judges 11, Jephthah delays the sacrifice of his daughter for two months so that she can bemoan the fact that she will die a virgin. “Go tell it on the mountain,” he instructs her, clearly signaling that he agrees that virginity is something to be greatly regretted.
But we can only envy anyone who has reached the age of reason believing that the Bible has a subtle feminist agenda. Bear in mind, we are not even told the name of Jephthah’s daughter. The Holy Bible is a book that names three female prophets: Miriam, the sister of Moses, Deborah, the wife of Lappidoth, and Huldah, the wife of Shallum. In each case, that’s pretty much all we know about them — the names of their closest male relatives. At least they have names. And at least two of them were not virgins.
Jerome himself was not a virgin. “I praise virginity to the skies,” he wrote to his friend Pammachius, “not because I myself possess it, but because, not possessing it, I admire it all the more.” It is not credible that anyone could conjure up such erotica as he did out of whole cloth, uninformed by experience and unfettered by embarrassment.
Jerome. The rose and the thorn. Red rose, proud rose, sad Rose of all my days! And God would bid His warfare cease,/ Saying all things were well; / And softly make a rosy peace, / A Peace of Heaven with Hell. [9]
Notes
1. Well, how did you think the English became literate? We’re not talking about the Britons who, as Celts, had been reading and writing for millennia and who are known today as the Welsh. We’re talking about the Anglo-Saxon pagans that invaded the island after the Romans left. One of these was Aethelfrith who established the Kingdom of Northumbria (North of the Humber River) in the early part of the Seventh Century. Upon his assassination, his sons, Oswald and Oswy were given sanctuary by the Irish monks of Iona. When Oswald regained the throne, he invited the monks to establish a colony on the holy island of Lindisfarne from which they sallied forth teaching and sanctifying the barbarians. Oswy who succeeded his brother, eventually betrayed the Irish in favor of the more rigid Roman version of the faith but that is a different story. It is told in a marvelous mystery novel by Peter Tremayne, Absolution by Murder, (St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
For a variety of reasons, a great deal of Jerome’s work has survived and a fair amount of it is still in print. More than a hundred of his letters, dozens of his commentaries on the major and minor prophets and his Latin translation of the Bible can all be found on the Web. My favorite compilation is that of the Loeb Classical Library, Volume 262 which includes superb translations by F.A. Wright (Harvard University Press, 1933). The first collection of the Letters appeared in Rome in 1470, a thousand and fifty years after his death and just 20 years after the Gutenberg Bible. Major editions have followed roughly once a century since. The second edition (Basle, 1520) was edited by Jerome’s great admirer, Desiderius Erasmus. There is also a very large body of literature devoted to St. Jerome but much of it is controversial. A notable exception is Saint Jerome In The Renaissance by Eugene F. Rice, Jr. of Columbia University (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). This is the sort of book every scholar wants to write, a labor of love based on long years of delightful research. I have leaned heavily on Rice whose work has given me great pleasure. Finally, Elaine Pagels treats Jerome extensively in her remarkable book, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (Random House, 1988). If you’re ever curious as to why the church turned sour on sex, this is the book to read.
2. Literally, “As Blessed Jerome says.” A modern version, preferred by the present writer would have it, “Right again, J.P.”
3. It is often said that Luther’s Bible shaped the modern German language in much the same way that the King James Version shaped English. Technically, like all other modern versions, it is a rendition of the Septuagint although Luther’s Greek was sketchy at best. You will also find claims that it “follows” the original Hebrew, but Luther’s Hebrew was worse than his Greek. In fact, the New Testament follows the second edition of Erasmus’ Latin translation of 1519 which, in turn, is more faithful to the Vulgate than contemporary critics realized. The Old Testament appears to have been based on the Brescia Hebrew Bible of 1494. Luther and his collaborators took pains to render the scriptures into ordinary language, in a sense following the practice of Jerome. Perhaps they went too far. Their work, at least to someone who struggled with German locution, seems full of awkward rhetoric and inexplicable logic. Worse, it reflects a narrow, parochial mind. For example, Luther uses Ostern, Easter, for Passover. So on the first Palm Sunday, he has Jesus saying, “In two days time, it will be Easter…” which is, of course, absurd. Luther was an anti-Semite but his avoidance of the perfectly good German word Passah is extreme by any standard. Both Jerome and Erasmus had it right as, “…post biduum pascha fiet.”
4. Jerome was a quick study and the fastest pen in the East. He is, therefore, occasionally wordy and the reader may be excused for sometimes feeling that he is being deliberately obscure or imprecise. And several of his ideas were clearly borrowed from earlier writers without attribution. Plagiarism, of course, is not nearly so serious an offense in a society that must transmit its culture through the hand copying of manuscripts. It is hardly culpable at all when translation is involved. Indeed, by creating work for subsequent generations of scholars, it may even be said to be beneficial.
5. Pelagius was a contemporary heretic of Irish origin who taught, among other things, the doctrine that we are justified or saved by faith alone (sola fides). He seems to have been congenial, brilliant and persuasive, several times charming hostile synods to his views. Both Jerome and the redoubtable Augustine weighed in with lengthy polemics against him but Jerome could not resist the closely related notion that, since God created man, man merits grace. This, of course, limits God’s power in the sense that it renders God incapable of withholding grace. The present writer has offered a different, almost opposite path to a similar conclusion: man cannot merit justification under any circumstances because man is, by nature, a poor dumb sinner. Sin, however, is defined as anything that detracts from the harmony or wholeness of God. Therefore, while man cannot merit forgiveness, God cannot withhold it. God must forgive us whether or not we ask for it. Thus, Pelagius, Jerome and I agree that God is not really omnipotent which is logical but heretical. Einstein said, “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the universe” [Emphasis added]. He believed but could not prove that God had no choices, that physical laws are universal and that there can not be a differently ordered universe.
David Douglas quotes an unnamed Anglican priest as saying that Pelagianism is the national heresy of England (see “Amazing Grace: A Journey in Time and Faith,” The Hymn, 49:3, July 1998, pp. 9-12). Hogwash! Pelagianism is too Irish to be English anything. The traditional argument is not between faith and grace but faith and works. Luther had rendered Romans 3:28 as, “So halten wir nun dafür, daß der Mensch gerecht wird ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben.
"We maintain that man …is justified by faith alone. The Vulgate reads, “…arbitramur enim justificari hominem per fidem sine operibus legis” which is to say man is justified by faith without respect to the law. There is no solam, no allein, no only. Indeed in 23-24, Paul says, “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace.” In Paul’s mind, justification seems to be merely one link in a chain that includes grace and even good works which he thinks of as the “fruits of faith.”
6. Jerome was not as steadfast in this as my encomium might imply. In the Letter to Pammachius defending his translation of a letter of Epiphanius to Bishop John of Jerusalem, he says, “For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek (except in the case of holy scriptures where even the order of the words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word.” This is simply not true; he makes no exception for scripture. However, he seems to have concluded that discretion was the better part of valor and the scriptural fight is one he chooses not to fight here.
7. This portrait proved to be a best seller for El Greco who made at least four versions of it. What is probably the first enjoys a place of honor in the Frick Museum in New York. A smaller version hangs in the Met. In both, the Saint’s hands rest on an open copy of the Bible and he appears to be contemplating a passage he has just read. The book is open near its mid-point, somewhere around the beginning of Ecclesiastes where King Solomon laments (2:15), “I too shall suffer the fate of the fool. To what purpose have I been wise?”
8. Jerome had also been spiritual advisor to Eustochium’s sister, Blaesilla, a young widow who could not overcome the grief she felt for her husband. Jerome prescribed a month of fasting and penitential prayer even though she had a high fever. She died of it.
9. William Butler Years (of course). The Rose, 1893. The first line quoted here is from “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time.” The quatrain is from “The Rose of Peace.”
Sunday, October 23, 2011
JJEROME HAS UNFRIENDED FACEBOOK
Jerry Harkins
There, Jerry! Don’t you feel a lot better now? Well, Doctor, ask me again in fourteen days when my unfriending becomes final and irreversible. That’s when Facebook says it will permanently erase me. Until then I will remain under constant surveillance and my every keystroke will be reported to The Party. But two weeks from now I will be not a has-been but a non-person, possibly a never-was like all those expunged from the Soviet history books. I expect they will denounce me to every man, woman and child I ever met, just as they sang my praises when I enrolled. How proud I was that day. “JJerome has become a member!” I never knew why the two J’s but it did not diminish my pride. Now I will no doubt be disfellowshipped by many, mourned by some and ridiculed by the rest. But the clozapine was not really helping (I think it’s better for schizophrenia than paranoia anyway) and it has several really nasty side effects.
What hath God wrought? (Either Numbers 23:23 is the culmination of a really weird story about Balaam beating his donkey or I dreamt it under the influence of the clozapine.) Facebook has become the universal consciousness [1] through the simple expedient of making all seven billion of us feel guilty if we don’t constantly tune into the trivia of our friends’ lives. Some of these “friends” are actually people you know, love and admire. (That’s how FB gets a hook into you.) Some are casual acquaintances you see once a year and exchange Xmas emails with. Then there are the folks whose names you have to dredge up from the deep recesses of memory. You know, people you met at a Free Paris Hilton cocktail party five years ago. Finally there are the thousands of people Facebook insists are just dying to friend you if only you would press the right button. After all, you have a friend in common and, if you remember the six degrees of separation thing, before long you will have seven billion friends. Every one of them will send you birthday greetings and you will know what they had for breakfast this morning and whether or not they faked an orgasm last night. Oh, joy!
But I digress. Actually God is not responsible for Facebook, Mark Zukerberg is. (I do not deny the possibility that Mr. Zukerberg is God.) He and a bunch of buds were sitting around in a circle in Lowell House one afternoon studying a Girls of the Ivy League feature in Playboy and having a grand old time. In the background, a DVD was playing on the TV. It was the 1984 release of 1984. (The one with the original Dominic Muldowney score rather than the Eurhythmics trash which replaced it a week after it was released in London [in 1984].) (I wrote that last sentence specifically to try out my new emoticon—a grin and a wink. Hope you liked it.) Anyway, Mark got this billion dollar idea and, by the end of the session, they had decided to call it CircleJerk.com. The name did not survive the first meeting with the venture capitalists who proposed inyourface.com and everybody thought that was pretty good but when the sweet-smelling haze dissipated, it got dumbed down to its present form.
Like most things that emerge from Ivy League bull sessions, Facebook is not an unmixed blessing. Think about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which emerged full grown from the mind of another Harvard man (Henry Strangeglove Kissinger) during an earlier Lowell House tea party. Dr. Kissinger was the coach of the mixed doubles tiddlywinks team at the time. Since Harvard lacked one of the genders in 1957, they recruited transvestites of whom there was no shortage.
As I say, Facebook has a number of drawbacks. To begin with, Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban it as a public health menace because of the number of people it bores to death. When Mike Bloomberg says you’re boring… Worse still, neo-conservatives see it as a threat to national security because it has exposed America as a nation of vacuous Yahoos. (A Yahoo is a character in a boring novel by Jonathan Swift. A Yahoo! on the other hand is a Yahoo trying to be non-boring by adding an exclamation point. Yahoo! emerged from what passes for a circle jerk at non-Ivy universities, in this case Stanford. The jerks were engineering students studying a beguiling circuit diagram. Enough said!) Don Rumsfeld came out of retirement to propose a surgical strike on Palo Alto which, with a little luck, might take out Sunnyvale and Cupertino at the same time. Of course with Don’s luck the missiles would miss the valley altogether and hit downtown Brattleboro, Vermont.
In addition to being boring, Facebook is ruining the market for talk therapy and the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation by encouraging people to vent their frustrations, complaints, indiscretions, alienations and other banalities to a global audience sure to respond only with a lol or meh. Given my skepticism about talk therapy, I contributed another new emoticon (I’m really good at this). :o stands for “How did that make you feel?” It hasn’t gone viral yet.
Bad enough I needed to reply to that post about your dog’s diarrhea but first I had to spend a half hour figuring out if you were serious. Maybe this was a test of your friends’ loyalty, sympathy or intelligence. Since I only vaguely remembered you from the cocktail party (while we were being introduced, I was probably ogling Paris’ sister, Nicky). I couldn’t be sure. I tell you, bubbula, Facebook was anxiety provoking. So I’m well rid of it even if, like the Ancient Mariner, I am doomed to wonder the world telling my tale:
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns;
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
Scholarly Endnote
1. Otherwise known as the “collective unconscious,” an idea invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in 1919. C.G. wrote a rich description of the fantastical material stored in his new mental construct but Facebook has now exposed this as utter nonsense if not culpable malpractice. The actual material of the collective unconscious is now seen to be nothing but the dregs of the most dreary, humdrum dross of daily life.
Jerry Harkins
There, Jerry! Don’t you feel a lot better now? Well, Doctor, ask me again in fourteen days when my unfriending becomes final and irreversible. That’s when Facebook says it will permanently erase me. Until then I will remain under constant surveillance and my every keystroke will be reported to The Party. But two weeks from now I will be not a has-been but a non-person, possibly a never-was like all those expunged from the Soviet history books. I expect they will denounce me to every man, woman and child I ever met, just as they sang my praises when I enrolled. How proud I was that day. “JJerome has become a member!” I never knew why the two J’s but it did not diminish my pride. Now I will no doubt be disfellowshipped by many, mourned by some and ridiculed by the rest. But the clozapine was not really helping (I think it’s better for schizophrenia than paranoia anyway) and it has several really nasty side effects.
What hath God wrought? (Either Numbers 23:23 is the culmination of a really weird story about Balaam beating his donkey or I dreamt it under the influence of the clozapine.) Facebook has become the universal consciousness [1] through the simple expedient of making all seven billion of us feel guilty if we don’t constantly tune into the trivia of our friends’ lives. Some of these “friends” are actually people you know, love and admire. (That’s how FB gets a hook into you.) Some are casual acquaintances you see once a year and exchange Xmas emails with. Then there are the folks whose names you have to dredge up from the deep recesses of memory. You know, people you met at a Free Paris Hilton cocktail party five years ago. Finally there are the thousands of people Facebook insists are just dying to friend you if only you would press the right button. After all, you have a friend in common and, if you remember the six degrees of separation thing, before long you will have seven billion friends. Every one of them will send you birthday greetings and you will know what they had for breakfast this morning and whether or not they faked an orgasm last night. Oh, joy!
But I digress. Actually God is not responsible for Facebook, Mark Zukerberg is. (I do not deny the possibility that Mr. Zukerberg is God.) He and a bunch of buds were sitting around in a circle in Lowell House one afternoon studying a Girls of the Ivy League feature in Playboy and having a grand old time. In the background, a DVD was playing on the TV. It was the 1984 release of 1984. (The one with the original Dominic Muldowney score rather than the Eurhythmics trash which replaced it a week after it was released in London [in 1984].) (I wrote that last sentence specifically to try out my new emoticon—a grin and a wink. Hope you liked it.) Anyway, Mark got this billion dollar idea and, by the end of the session, they had decided to call it CircleJerk.com. The name did not survive the first meeting with the venture capitalists who proposed inyourface.com and everybody thought that was pretty good but when the sweet-smelling haze dissipated, it got dumbed down to its present form.
Like most things that emerge from Ivy League bull sessions, Facebook is not an unmixed blessing. Think about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which emerged full grown from the mind of another Harvard man (Henry Strangeglove Kissinger) during an earlier Lowell House tea party. Dr. Kissinger was the coach of the mixed doubles tiddlywinks team at the time. Since Harvard lacked one of the genders in 1957, they recruited transvestites of whom there was no shortage.
As I say, Facebook has a number of drawbacks. To begin with, Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban it as a public health menace because of the number of people it bores to death. When Mike Bloomberg says you’re boring… Worse still, neo-conservatives see it as a threat to national security because it has exposed America as a nation of vacuous Yahoos. (A Yahoo is a character in a boring novel by Jonathan Swift. A Yahoo! on the other hand is a Yahoo trying to be non-boring by adding an exclamation point. Yahoo! emerged from what passes for a circle jerk at non-Ivy universities, in this case Stanford. The jerks were engineering students studying a beguiling circuit diagram. Enough said!) Don Rumsfeld came out of retirement to propose a surgical strike on Palo Alto which, with a little luck, might take out Sunnyvale and Cupertino at the same time. Of course with Don’s luck the missiles would miss the valley altogether and hit downtown Brattleboro, Vermont.
In addition to being boring, Facebook is ruining the market for talk therapy and the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation by encouraging people to vent their frustrations, complaints, indiscretions, alienations and other banalities to a global audience sure to respond only with a lol or meh. Given my skepticism about talk therapy, I contributed another new emoticon (I’m really good at this). :o stands for “How did that make you feel?” It hasn’t gone viral yet.
Bad enough I needed to reply to that post about your dog’s diarrhea but first I had to spend a half hour figuring out if you were serious. Maybe this was a test of your friends’ loyalty, sympathy or intelligence. Since I only vaguely remembered you from the cocktail party (while we were being introduced, I was probably ogling Paris’ sister, Nicky). I couldn’t be sure. I tell you, bubbula, Facebook was anxiety provoking. So I’m well rid of it even if, like the Ancient Mariner, I am doomed to wonder the world telling my tale:
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns;
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
Scholarly Endnote
1. Otherwise known as the “collective unconscious,” an idea invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in 1919. C.G. wrote a rich description of the fantastical material stored in his new mental construct but Facebook has now exposed this as utter nonsense if not culpable malpractice. The actual material of the collective unconscious is now seen to be nothing but the dregs of the most dreary, humdrum dross of daily life.
Friday, September 30, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Jerry Harkins
BERLIN 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth, Frederick Kempe, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011. 579 pages. $29.95
This is actually two books for the price of one. The first is a carefully researched, beautifully written account of the crisis that culminated in the erection of the infamous wall around the perimeter of East Berlin. The second is a diatribe of revisionist history concerning the intelligence, morality and, in some ways, even the patriotism of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The two books are only barely related. The first one is an outstanding contribution to Cold War Studies if only because it brings together a great deal of new information and contemporary perspective for the first time. The second, blessedly much shorter, is a hatchet job.
Frederick Kempe despises JFK whom he portrays as stupid, indecisive, drug addicted and criminally promiscuous. The President gets 90% of the blame for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Walter Ulbricht is a brilliant strategist with a very understandable problem. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev is a master of psychological warfare whose only objectives are to improve Soviet economic performance and retain his own power. Konrad (Der Alte) Adenauer, Charles (Le Grand) de Gaulle, Lucius Clay and Dean Acheson are poor souls burdened with an inexperienced American President who refuses to allow them to decide how much American blood should be shed in defense of Berlin. All of this is, at best, simplistic.
Kempe is of the zero tolerance school. He has no sympathy whatever for either the overwhelming significance of the decisions that had to be made or for the uncertainty that invariably surrounds momentous events. In every case there is a single right answer and in every case Kennedy chooses a wrong one. Nor is this perfect hindsight. The right answer was always self-evident to all right thinkers. The major mistake was not standing up to Khrushchev’s bullying which was always mere bluffing. But ‘bullying’ is a polite way to describe the Premier’s antics and rhetoric. Like his mentor Stalin, Comrade K was or at least appeared to be certifiably crazy. This is the world leader who came to the United Nations in 1960 and started banging his shoe on his desk to protest a speech by the Philippine delegate. Kempe and many other think he was merely a shrewd peasant. With the fate of the world at stake, however, indecision does not seem beyond all understanding and caution reads as the only sane approach.
The history of the era must proceed from three unarguable facts:
• The erection of the Berlin Wall marked the obvious defeat of Communism as a rational economic system. As Kennedy said in his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech, “There are some who say Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.”
• Kennedy knew and publicly admitted that he had suffered a serious setback in Berlin. But the lessons were taken to heart and contributed to what was arguably the most important victory of the Cold War in the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year.
• Ultimately, the Wall came tumbling down in the aftermath of the fall of Communism itself. Much of the credit must go to conservative American presidents, especially Nixon and Reagan. But the global situation that prompted the end of the Cold War was set in motion by Kennedy and furthered by his successors. Kempe thinks the Communist downfall might have come faster had Kennedy not backed down in 1961 but that is pure speculation.
A reader can’t be sure that Kempe is even aware of his bias against Kennedy. Like all revisionists, he must take the view that the rest of us were hoodwinked into feeling good about America under Kennedy. Like all revisionism, it’s annoying whether it’s right or wrong. And it surely is bias. In his acknowledgments, Kempe, a son of pre-war German immigrants, says, “It is my parents who instilled in me an indignation both toward those who imposed and those who tolerated the oppressive system that encased seventeen million of their fellow Germans…” My own biases tell me that the Germans had no right to such feelings.
How bad is the bias? At the end of the disastrous Vienna summit, Khrushchev blusters about signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany in December. Kennedy says, “If that’s true, it’s going to be a cold winter.” Kempe snidely remarks, “…he got even that wrong. His troubles would come much earlier.” Even that!
Jerry Harkins
BERLIN 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth, Frederick Kempe, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011. 579 pages. $29.95
This is actually two books for the price of one. The first is a carefully researched, beautifully written account of the crisis that culminated in the erection of the infamous wall around the perimeter of East Berlin. The second is a diatribe of revisionist history concerning the intelligence, morality and, in some ways, even the patriotism of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The two books are only barely related. The first one is an outstanding contribution to Cold War Studies if only because it brings together a great deal of new information and contemporary perspective for the first time. The second, blessedly much shorter, is a hatchet job.
Frederick Kempe despises JFK whom he portrays as stupid, indecisive, drug addicted and criminally promiscuous. The President gets 90% of the blame for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Walter Ulbricht is a brilliant strategist with a very understandable problem. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev is a master of psychological warfare whose only objectives are to improve Soviet economic performance and retain his own power. Konrad (Der Alte) Adenauer, Charles (Le Grand) de Gaulle, Lucius Clay and Dean Acheson are poor souls burdened with an inexperienced American President who refuses to allow them to decide how much American blood should be shed in defense of Berlin. All of this is, at best, simplistic.
Kempe is of the zero tolerance school. He has no sympathy whatever for either the overwhelming significance of the decisions that had to be made or for the uncertainty that invariably surrounds momentous events. In every case there is a single right answer and in every case Kennedy chooses a wrong one. Nor is this perfect hindsight. The right answer was always self-evident to all right thinkers. The major mistake was not standing up to Khrushchev’s bullying which was always mere bluffing. But ‘bullying’ is a polite way to describe the Premier’s antics and rhetoric. Like his mentor Stalin, Comrade K was or at least appeared to be certifiably crazy. This is the world leader who came to the United Nations in 1960 and started banging his shoe on his desk to protest a speech by the Philippine delegate. Kempe and many other think he was merely a shrewd peasant. With the fate of the world at stake, however, indecision does not seem beyond all understanding and caution reads as the only sane approach.
The history of the era must proceed from three unarguable facts:
• The erection of the Berlin Wall marked the obvious defeat of Communism as a rational economic system. As Kennedy said in his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech, “There are some who say Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.”
• Kennedy knew and publicly admitted that he had suffered a serious setback in Berlin. But the lessons were taken to heart and contributed to what was arguably the most important victory of the Cold War in the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year.
• Ultimately, the Wall came tumbling down in the aftermath of the fall of Communism itself. Much of the credit must go to conservative American presidents, especially Nixon and Reagan. But the global situation that prompted the end of the Cold War was set in motion by Kennedy and furthered by his successors. Kempe thinks the Communist downfall might have come faster had Kennedy not backed down in 1961 but that is pure speculation.
A reader can’t be sure that Kempe is even aware of his bias against Kennedy. Like all revisionists, he must take the view that the rest of us were hoodwinked into feeling good about America under Kennedy. Like all revisionism, it’s annoying whether it’s right or wrong. And it surely is bias. In his acknowledgments, Kempe, a son of pre-war German immigrants, says, “It is my parents who instilled in me an indignation both toward those who imposed and those who tolerated the oppressive system that encased seventeen million of their fellow Germans…” My own biases tell me that the Germans had no right to such feelings.
How bad is the bias? At the end of the disastrous Vienna summit, Khrushchev blusters about signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany in December. Kennedy says, “If that’s true, it’s going to be a cold winter.” Kempe snidely remarks, “…he got even that wrong. His troubles would come much earlier.” Even that!
Thursday, July 28, 2011
SEX AND DEATH
Jerry Harkins
JOHN WARNE “BET-A-MILLION” GATES (1855-1911) was an American industrialist (U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Texaco) whose funeral was held in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Plaza Hotel. He was interred in an impressive mausoleum near the Jerome Avenue entrance of Woodlawn Cemetery. The bronze door is graced by a high relief partial nude sculpted by Robert I. Aitken. She is seen from the back in a posture of grief almost as though resisting the closing of the door that has brought home the finality of her lover’s death. In spite of a little strategic drapery, the sculpture has an obvious if muted erotic aspect. We see a strong well proportioned womanly body. She is graceful but not a sylph. She is young but not a teenager. She is vulnerable but not virginal. She is idealized but not unbelievable. Most interestingly, her eroticism is uncommon for an American cemetery. [1] In Nineteenth Century France and Italy, especially, nude or nearly nude women were regular features of urban cemeteries, most notably Père Lachaise in Paris and Monumentale in Milan, and the figures were often less draped than the Gates nude and more explicitly erotic. [2] Often they are, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “…in a pose of swooned, vulnerable abandon, as if grief were a form of erotic surrender.” [3] Although by no means pornographic, they tend to be considerably more erotic than most sculptural nudes.
Oates also implies that the sculptures and the graves they adorn “belong to the nineteenth century.” Well, of course. Prior to the Nineteenth Century, only major figures built elaborate permanent tombs. These abound in iconic women but few of them are overtly erotic. For example, the tomb of Michelangelo has three grieving women seated around his sarcophagus. All three are beautiful but there is little suggestion of eroticism. The figure on the viewer’s right wears what appears to be a diaphanous undergarment with a shawl on her right shoulder and drapery in her lap. The center figure is fully clothed in a classic pose of grief with her head resting on her right hand and arm. It is sometimes said these figures are allegorical representations—possibly Muses—of painting, sculpture and architecture. [4] If true, then these were the women who attended the artist during life and with whom he might have had a passionate if not erotic relationship. In any event, the story they tell is surely highly charged and it is not inconceivable that they symbolize a relationship that is erotic in Plato’s sense of the human yearning for ideal beauty and finality.
The faint eroticism of Michelangelo’s tomb and even that of the Gates mausoleum are subtle compared to the abandon discussed by Ms. Oates which appears to have been a short-lived vogue related perhaps to the cataclysmic social and political upheavals of nineteenth century Europe. Overt eroticism was much less common in the United States, in part because of our Puritan heritage and in part because we were preoccupied by more mundane distractions. [5] Early American grave markers were often quite ghoulish and those erected in the nineteenth century might be ornate but rarely played on the sex and death theme. Their descendants have generally sanitized all such emotions to the point that even such sex symbols as Mae West and Marilyn Monroe are interred in utterly simple wall crypts. Even when an attractive figure adorns a grave, there is no suggestion of eroticism. For example, Daniel Chester French’s Mourning Victory, the centerpiece of the Milmore Memorial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, is a beautiful but hardly erotic woman. [6]
The tension between Eros and Thanatos is one of the great themes of human culture, noted and discussed long before it became a central subject for Freud who associated the former with the life instinct and the latter with the desire for stasis. Freudian theory postulates that life is a constant struggle between these forces. It is fair to say that succeeding generations of philosophers and psychologists have found this notion intriguing but ultimately not compelling. It lacks a dynamic principle that allows the healthy person to resolve the conflict and lead a productive life as, in fact, most people do. Perhaps that missing element is a kind of spirituality as represented by Bacchus (Dionysus) who is often conflated with Eros even though they are distinctly different. [7] It is true that both invoke ecstasy as a means of encountering the divine. They share the epithet Eleutherios, Liberator, the one because of the liberating quality of wine, the other ecstatic sex. But Bacchus speaks for all the joys and passions of life. Sir James Frazer refers to him as the God of life-death-rebirth and alludes to the obvious parallels with the story of Jesus. Joseph Campbell, too, writes of Bacchus as the son of Persephone, Goddess of Death: “the ever-dying, ever-living slain and resurrected son, Dionysus-Baccus-Zagreus.” [8] Almost surely, this derives from the more ancient archetype of the Green Man known in more recent times in England and Ireland as John Barleycorn who represents the giving of life to others from the sacrifice of his own. Eros, then, would be a subsidiary theme in the service of this all-embracing motif. He is explicitly and sharply focused on sexuality, in some cases, homosexuality. Interestingly, he is usually depicted as a pre-pubescent child or an adolescent and his childishness is an important element of many of the stories about him. In the earliest of these, he is the son of Chaos and Gaea who embodies the force of their erotic love which is nature’s fundamental creative urge or life force. In other words, he is the product of eroticism, not its originator. Although his origins were attenuated in later versions, his primordial nature never completely disappeared. Plato proposed that he was the son of Poros and Penia, Wealth and Poverty respectively. Still later, he was said to be the son of Aphrodite and Ares, love and war. In all these incarnations, there are intimations of great force, even compulsion, and great pleasure.
It might seem that Bacchus would make a better foil for death than Eros, the totality of life vis a vis the finality of death. Actually, whenever Eros or Cupid is invoked in anything more literary than a greeting card, there is often the subtext of exactly the Bacchanalian revelry Pope Benedict XVI was complaining about in his first encyclical (see Note 7). This is evident in many funeral rituals where Eros is involved. In rural Ireland until recently it was a custom to adjourn from a wake for a death-defying interlude of heavy drinking, fighting and fornication al fresco. This custom was obviously a ritualistic way of defying death and also almost certainly a re-enactment of the symbolic sexual union of the new king with the land, a renewal ceremony in which, once again, ecstasy is a bridge between death and rebirth. Thus it would be wrong to focus on the Bacchanalian aspects of such doings which, I suspect, are a cover for the erotic undertakings. And Eros represents more than sexual release. Frazer notwithstanding, he is the symbol of rebirth, not necessarily the physical rebirth of the individual but the spiritual renewal of the community.
Rebirth and renewal are subtle ideas. In most versions of the John Barleycorn song, for example, no mention is made in the lyrics of his resurrection but in the associated dances he always springs up at the end bigger and stronger than ever, just as the barley plant did after being harvested and looking barren through the winter. Ancient and medieval farmers may not have understood the biology involved but they were awed by the annual reappearance of the crop. In some stories, Barleycorn was the king who mated with the earth, ruled for a year and was then killed so his blood might fertilize the earth. [9]
It is reasonable to suggest that the association of sex and death is not so much about either as it is about hope. We are used to hearing Hamlet’s lament, “But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / no traveler returns.” But in the First Folio it is not “dread.” The line is, “But for a hope something after death?” and the question mark seems important. For a very brief moment in the nineteenth century, cemetery art was enlisted in the service of this hope. Then, perhaps as the garden cemetery movement grew, people became embarrassed at the prospect of explaining swooning angels and ecstatic nudes to children. We will never know why it arose and why it vanished so soon. But it was not merely a passing fetish. It was an expression of one of our species’ most fundamental ideas.
Notes
1. She: erotic imagery is almost always in the form of a female figure and almost always adorns the tomb of a man. The most famous exception is the full length effigy of Victor Noir on his tomb in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise sculpted by Jules Dalou. Although M. Noir is depected as quite dead (i.e., complete with the entry wound of the fatal bullet) he nonetheless has an impressive erection which has been the object of the ministrations of successive generations of Parisian maidens hoping to find a husband. (The author is grateful to Dr. Caterina Y. Pierre for calling this story to his attention. See her article “The Pleasure and Piety of Touch in Aimé-Jules Dalou’s Tomb of Victor Noir.” Sculpture Journal, 19.2, 2010, pp. 173-85.)
2. See: Robinson, David, Saving Graces: Images of Women in European Cemeteries, W.W. Norton, 1995.
3. Ibid, p. 10.
4. There were no Muses of these arts in the classical world although later artists often contrived them. The Michelangelo sculptures were executed by three different sculptors following, perhaps, an overall plan developed by the architect Giorgio Vasari. The three figures each hold something that could be an emblem of the art they symbolize. The standardization of such emblems was a preoccupation of the period.
5. Compared to Europe, America in the nineteenth century was both a simpler and a more stable society. In addition to the Gates sculpture, there are fully clothed mourning women adorning some American grave sites, notably in the South. For example, two very female angels in the eroticized swoon described by Joyce Carol Oates stand atop the Aldigé memorial in Metirie Cemetery in New Orleans. Another example is the elaborate memorial to James “Diamond Jim” Fisk at the Prospect Hill Cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont. Four lovely young women in various states of undress circle the base, each holding a symbol of one of his earthly interests in the manner of Michelangelo’s tomb. Fisk’s muses seem to have been money, railroads, steamship lines and the theater. The last-named was not an artistic interest but the source of most of his mistresses.
6. The Milmore Memorial is not a grave marker. The actual family plot is at a different location in the same cemetery. The woman is the angel of death who is shown interrupting the sculptor Martin Milmore at work. It is one of French’s most emotional works. She reaches out gently to stay the sculptor’s hand as if to say, “Come, it is time to rest from your labor.” A marble copy of the bronze original is prominently displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
7. I believe Pope Benedict XVI conflates Eros and Bacchus when he complains of the “divinization of eros” by which he means “…a divine madness which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness.” (See his encyclical letter God Is Love: Deus Caritas Est, U.S. Conference of Bishops, 2006.)
8. There are several accounts of Bacchus’ origin. His mother is generally said to be the mortal woman Semele who was seduced by Zeus. In another version, Bacchus was conceived through an indirect, unusual and gruesome union of Zeus and Persphone. Zeus impregnated Semele in the usual way and she gave birth to Zagreus who was then killed by agents of the jealous Hera. Zeus then created mead out of the dead infant’s heart and gave it to Semele to drink which is how she became pregnant with Bacchus.
9. Frazer refers to this king as “Corn King” and it is not clear whether he is using an abbreviated form of Barleycorn or has made a typical nineteenth century mistake. Corn, of course, was not introduced into Europe until the beginning of the sixteenth century.
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