The Theology of the Body in Shakespearean Comedy

Jonathan Pryce as Petruchio and Paola Dionisotti as Kate in The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1978 production of The Taming of the Shrew

Whether we realize it or not, the love of “mutual submission” John Paul II writes about is the defining characteristic of the happy ending we expect from Shakespeare’s comedies.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays explore the tension between duty and inclination, and the various conflicts that arise from this tension. In Shakespeare’s comedies – take The Taming of the Shrew, for example – man’s struggle to reconcile duty and inclination is often typified in a conflict related to sex and marriage, which is resolved only when the characters learn to compromise their inclinations for duty’s sake. In Taming, for instance, Petruchio and Kate learn to channel their passions and to relate to one another respectfully as they are obligated to do as husband and wife. In Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (TOB), Pope John Paul II discusses the necessity of this sort of compromise and couches it in terms of his theology about the meaning of creation, sex and marriage.

Shakespeare makes the basic thematic point that while duty and inclination seem to contradict one another, they do not have to remain at odds. John Paul II develops this idea further and argues that if we allow our inclinations to be ordered properly, that is, toward our duty to obey the moral law, we will find the happiness and fulfillment that we seek in God’s plan for sex and marriage.

In the TOB, the Holy Father presents what he terms an “adequate anthropology,” a comprehensive philosophy intended to help man better understand himself in light of his created body, his sexuality, and the mysteries of the Catholic faith. The significance of the sexual act transcends the physical because we are not merely bodies; rather, we are beings with great worth because God created us, body and soul, and His plan for sex and marriage redeems our entire person, bodies included (144). Marriage is sacramental, and therefore more than merely a social convention; it is the visible sign of a spiritual reality, and it is intended both to safeguard the sacredness of sex and to help husband and wife grow in virtue, specifically in love for one another and for God (363).

We noted earlier that conflicts involving sex and marriage often form the basis for the theme of “duty vs. inclination” in Shakespeare’s comedies. More often than not, marriage becomes purely a matter of duty, and sex – or sexual desire – purely a matter of inclination. John Paul II argues that this dichotomy is due, in part, to the ways in which God’s plan for sex and marriage is tarnished and obscured by human sinfulness (256). He uses Sacred Scripture and natural law to support the TOB as he explains that in God’s plan for sex and marriage, man’s desire for sex directs him toward marriage, and the sacrifices married life requires ensure that man’s sexual desire remains properly ordered toward its unitive and procreative ends, and thus toward his eternal happiness.

We can see John Paul II’s ideas at work in the ways audiences typically respond to Shakespeare’s characters. At the beginning of Taming, Petruchio treats marriage as merely a binding social contract, and we cannot help but disagree with him for doing so; nor are we wiling to believe that marriage is merely as Lucentio imagines it to be: a lifetime of infatuation, sunshine and roses. We recognize very early on in the play that both men’s views are erroneous. If, at the play’s end, it seems that Petruchio still regards marriage as “a contract of domination,” we will most likely be unsatisfied with the play’s resolution (473). Shakespeare seems to point out that marriage is not purely a matter of obligation or purely a matter of romance; ideally, it is a combination of both.

The TOB echoes this idea, while of course developing it further: if we wish to be happy, we must submit our inclination to our duty; we must place sex within its intended context, that is, within the sacrament of marriage. At the center of the Holy Father’s reflections on married life are the words of St. Paul in Ephesians (Ephesians 5:21-33), in which Paul calls husbands and wives to “be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.” The Pope calls this practice “reciprocal submission” expressed in love (473). While Paul is often quoted as simply instructing wives to submit to their husbands, the Pope examines this directive in context and concludes that spouses “are, in fact, ‘subject to one another,’ mutually subordinated to one another” (473).

This ideal of mutual submission plays a central role in the resolution of the sex-and-marriage conflicts in Shakespearean comedy. Depending on how Taming is played, it may seem by the end of the play that Petruchio and Katharina have learned to practice the sort of reciprocal submission necessary for a happy, lasting marriage; or it may seem that only Katharina practices submission, which we find distasteful and unfair, since we know intuitively that Petruchio ought to submit, in some way, to her as well. Whether we realize it or not, the love of “mutual submission” John Paul II writes about is the defining characteristic of the happy ending we expect from Shakespeare’s comedies.

While The Taming of the Shrew is perhaps one of the clearest examples of the TOB at work in Shakespearean comedy, John Paul II’s ideas are certainly applicable to the other comedies as well, perhaps especially to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Love’s Labour’s Lost.

"You suffered with them, and now you are theirs."

I Heard the Owl Call My Name by American author Margaret Craven is a very short novel (just over 150 pages), but don’t let its thin spine fool you – its themes run deep: a community’s experience of suffering and death, the struggle to preserve tradition in the face of progress, the growing generation gap, the fruits of spiritual simplicity, and the essence of the priestly vocation.

Craven’s novella, set in the 1960’s, follows Mark Brian, a young Anglican cleric sent by his bishop to be pastor in Kingcome parish, a remote First Nations (Native American) village in British Columbia. The Bishop has learned that Mark only has a few years left to live, but he chooses not to tell Mark this; instead, the Bishop assigns Mark to the most difficult parish in his bishopric in hopes that the assignment will teach the young priest the true nature of his vocation.

At first, Mark does not feel at home in Kingcome, but gradually, the priest and his people learn to accept one another’s differences, to work together to provide for one another’s needs, and most of all, to live together as the Body of Christ. Throughout the book, Craven makes it abundantly clear that the village lives as one body, and its people suffer and survive as a community. In one particularly beautiful passage, she writes that, as the village prayed together at sunrise after a hard winter, “it seemed to Mark that he felt the burden of winter lift as from a common shoulder, and heard the sigh of gratitude rise from a common heart” (140). It isn’t long before Mark realizes that he and the tribe must work together – not to prosper, but merely to survive.

As Mark observes the life of the community he shepherds, the tribe’s appreciation for simplicity teaches him the importance of voluntary poverty in the priestly vocation. When Mark first arrives in Kingcome village, the old vicarage where he must live is falling down, but he refuses to let a new one be built when he sees the condition of the other dwellings in the village. After Mark has served in Kingcome for some time, the men of the tribe offer to help him build a new house. Mark writes to his bishop to tell him the good news, and the bishop replies: “You suffered with them, and now you are theirs, and nothing will ever be the same again” (87). That, Mark learns, is the heart of missionary life, and of his priesthood: entering into the lives of the people one has been sent to serve, giving oneself over to them, and learning to suffer together, to “bear one another’s burdens” for Christ’s sake (Galatians 6:2).

The greatest burden Mark and his people are asked to bear is death, but even that burden is lightened when death is seen for what it really is: the door to eternal life. The death myth of the people of Kingcome – the myth of “the talking bird, the owl, who calls the name of the man who is going to die” (19) – helps Mark to see death in a new way, and more importantly, to realize that to live his vocation, he must constantly die to himself; he must lose his life in order to find it (Matthew 16:25).

Near the end of the novel, the Bishop comes to visit Kingcome village, and his words to Mark resonated with me in a special way. As a missionary, I've learned that it is always hard to say what one has learned from an encounter with Christ’s poor, but the Bishop seems to get it right:

“Always when I leave the village,” the Bishop said slowly, “I try to define what it means to me, why it sends me back to the world refreshed and confident. Always I fail. It is so simple it is difficult. When I try to put it into words, it come out one of those unctuous, over-pious platitudes at which Bishops are expected to excel…

“[F]or me it has always been easier here, where only the fundamentals count, to learn what every man must learn in this world.”

“And that, my lord?” [Mark asked.]

“Enough of the meaning of life to be ready to die.” (144)

I Heard the Owl Call My Name is a must-read for missionaries, seminarians, and avid Catholic readers alike. Its story may be simple and brief, but its presence will linger long after you've finished the last page.

The Humility of a Saint: Brother Lawrence

I have recently been introduced to the writing of Brother Lawrence, the seventeenth-century lay Carmelite brother who penned The Practice of the Presence of God. This little book is chock full of poignant and profound descriptions of Brother Lawrence’s intimate connection and superhuman devotion to the Lord. In fact, it is a very difficult book to pare down, as it already reads like a devotion-a-day calendar (though it might be because I mistakenly bought an abridged version, but passages on the internet from other editions are very similar).

The book is comprised of conversations and letters of Brother Lawrence that were recounted and compiled after his death by his friend Fr. Joseph le Beaufort. The theme unifying each short chapter is that of living every moment in the profound presence of the Lord—that is, constantly being aware of God’s existence within and surrounding oneself. From this awareness springs exclusive trust in the Lord and, therefore, peace of spirit.

This man’s wisdom, humility, and devotion to God are incredibly inspiring—and, quite frankly, incredibly daunting. Here is one who successfully rose above the distractions of the world and instead lived in communion with his Maker. Here is one who completely died to himself and lived solely for love of God. The humility described in this book is in stark and terrifying contrast to the lukewarm and half-hearted faith often deemed acceptable in today’s world. I would like to show a few examples of Brother Lawrence’s wisdom, but would first implore you to read him yourself. I’m afraid these snippets may seem less poignant when removed from the context of the book…nevertheless, here are a few passages:

“To be constantly aware of God’s presence, it is necessary to form the habit of continually talking with Him throughout each day. To think that we must abandon conversation with Him in order to deal with the world is erroneous. Instead, as we nourish our souls by seeing God in His exaltation, we will derive a great joy at being His” (12).

“Brother Lawrence said that he was always guided by love. He was never influenced by any other interest, including whether or not he was saved. He was content doing the smallest chore if he could do it purely for the love of God. He even found himself quite well off, which he attributed to the fact that he sought only God and not His gifts. He believed that God is much greater than any of the simple gifts He gives us. Rather than desiring them from Him, he chose to look beyond the gifts, hoping to learn more about God Himself” (14).

“The dear brother remarked that we must give ourselves totally to God in both temporal and spiritual affairs. Our only happiness should come from doing God’s will, whether it brings us some pain or great pleasure. After all, if we are truly devoted to doing God’s will, pain and pleasure won’t make any difference to us” (12).

“He remarked that thinking often spoils everything and that evil usually begins with our thoughts. In Brother Lawrence’s opinion, we should reject any thoughts that distract us from serving the Lord or that undermine our salvation” (17).

“Our brother remarked that some people go only as far as their regular devotions, stopping there and neglecting love, which is the purpose of those devotions. This could easily be seen in their actions and explained why they possessed so little solid virtue” (21-22).

Again, I highly recommend this book! It is one to be savored and meditated upon as a gauge of our own spiritual growth. It and similar writings can be found here .

The Ball and the Cross, or My First Meeting with Chesterton

"For the world of science and evolution is far more elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare" (1).

The Ball and the Cross by G. K. Chesterton begins with this dichotomy, one that seems to turn the chief argument of most modern skeptics on its head. As people of faith in a secular society, we have become accustomed to acknowledging before those who would oppose us that religion is indeed akin to poetry and other "abstractions," that it is mysterious and therefore confusing, and somehow out-of-reach, like a dream - but as Chesterton points out, such an admission is utterly untrue. The truth of our Catholic faith is more solid and more certain than any "new" science, and any ideology that denies the existence of absolute truth. (One might also note that good poetry, like true religion, cannot be called abstraction - truly good poetry is specific, concrete, intelligible and enduring, like dogma.)

In a witty and entertaining allegory, The Ball and the Cross chronicles the adventures of James Turnbull, the editor of an athiest newspaper, and Evan MacIan, a young Catholic who wishes to fight a duel with Turnbull because he has blasphemed the Blessed Mother. In a hilarious turn of events, the two men become fugitives from the law by mutual agreement, and on the fantastic adventure that ensues, they find time to discuss all manner of subjects: ethics and morality, tradition and progress, and of course, the place of the Church in the modern world.

In his characteristically matter-of-fact tone, Chesterton challenges his readers to hold fast to the unpopular truth that the Catholic faith has always been more stable and more certain than any other ideology, even if its enemies argue that it is too incredible to be believed. As MacIan explains to Turnbull in "The Last Parley":

"The world left to itself grows wilder than any creed. ... That is the only real question - whether the Church is really madder than the world. Let the rationalists run their own race, and let us see where they end. If the world has some healthy balance other than God, let the world find it. Does the world find it? Cut the world loose ... Does the world stand on its own end? Does it stand, or does it stagger? ... We cannot trust the ball to be always a ball; we cannot trust reason to be reasonable. In the end the great terrestrial globe will go quite lop-sided, and only the cross will stand upright." (168)

Though I started quoting him years ago, The Ball and the Cross was the first book of Chesterton's that I read in its entirety, and it's convinced me that old G.K. and I are going to be good friends. I found that the 1995 Dover edition (pictured above) handled nicely - just the right thickness, just the right size font - but the introduction by Martin Gardner was awful. Don't bother with it - if you haven't yet read the novel, it will spoil it for you by dissecting the allegory. And if you have read the novel before you tackle the introduction, you will probably be forced to conclude, as I was, that Gardner doesn't sound as if he knew what Chesterton was getting at, at all. The only bit of his commentary that I appreciated was his inclusion of a short poem which Chesterton wrote in the copy of The Ball and the Cross owned by Father John O'Connor, the model for the author's famous Father Brown. Chesterton was ultimately unsatisfied with The Ball and the Cross, and expressed his sentiments to his friend as follows:

This is a book I do not like,
Take it away to Heckmondwike,
A lurid exile, lost and sad
To punish it for being bad.
You need not take it from the shelf
(I tried to read it once myself:
The speeches jerk, the chapters sprawl,
The story makes no sense at all)
Hide it your Yorkshire moors among
Where no man speaks the English tongue.

While I understand that most great writers aren't satisfied with their work, I don't think the author's criticisms are entirely true. Perhaps the speeches do jerk a bit, but the story is clearly meant to be an allegory, so we can forgive him that. The chapters do sprawl, but it seems that most of Chesterton's chapters do, so that's not really a very valid criticism for this work specifically. And the story doesn't make much sense, but that was perhaps the thing about it that delighted me the most: its whimsical quality. It's refreshing every once in a while to read fiction that's truly imaginative and well-written. While I realize that in the author's opinion this wasn't one of his finer works, I enjoyed it immensely, and if I could be half the writer he was, I would be quite satisfied with my work, indeed.

T.S. Eliot and Community: Part III of III

Miss Maria, feel free to read this post by the way. You may want to begin at the first post which is linked in the next paragraph.      rph2odbp@gmail.com

In the first post I focused on identifying the linguistic illness of scientific reduction in the modern community. The second post examined the deterioration of communication when language ceases to signify. Now I shall see if T.S. Eliot offers any hope on these matters.

Often with T.S. Eliot, readers have a hard time discerning how pessimistic he really is about society and the possibility for community. For everything T.S. Eliot writes about the fragmentation of language and the isolation of individuals that are representative of modern society, he still chooses poetry as a legitimate means to communicate this with his readers. Such a communication presupposes a common language and meaning by which we could understand T.S. Eliot’s insights. No matter how far Eliot indicates that the destruction of language and community has gone, the fact remains that he is able to indicate this to the reader. Thus even Eliot’s approach presupposes the possibility for a communal understanding and the ability of words to signify. While T.S. Eliot portrays extremes to validate the importance of his critique of culture and seeks to identify the real threats to community, at the deeper core of his writings comes a certain sacramental and optimistic view of reality. Eliot’s own poetical communication of his insights show a certain hope of intelligibility that is most explicitly expressed at the end of The Waste Land and The Four Quartets.

Nearing the end of the last section in The Waste Land and The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot has composed a theory of renewal. By previously emphasizing a bleak view on the future of community, the destruction of genuine communication, and the despondency of language, Eliot seems to disallow for any possibility of renewal from within this fragmented community, but he does still allow for renewal. If renewal cannot come from within it must come from without, or it cannot come at all. Whereas man creates the wasteland, something else renews it. “In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust/ Bringing rain” [394-395]. The rain comes down as a gift to revitalize the land and offer the possibility of peace. This undeserved grace comes again in The Four Quartets. Eliot stresses the importance of history and past. “A people without history/ Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern/ Of timeless moments” (p.144). Only people with a history can be redeemed because they become aware of their folly and true nature. To ignore history is to ignore man’s beginning, his sin, and consequently his end. Renewal is on the horizon.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time (p.145)

Eliot identifies a certain cosmic narrative in which the beginning signifies the end, and the end signifies the beginning. This may be akin to Aristotle’s understanding of formal cause - what a thing is, and final cause - the end toward which a thing is acting. Community and its history stand at the center of this revelation, and the gift of renewal stands as its redemption.

Although not explicit in either work, humility seems to stand as the fundamental core to this renewal. This openness to possibility and language is what Alfred Prufrock lacks. The problem with the positivistic scientific movement is that it prevents a holistic view on reality because it has no internal means to recognize the mystery inherent in reality and our experience. Prufrock stands as a prime example of being intellectually prideful, at least in the sense that he presupposes the disaster of his possible interaction without actually interacting. In this sense pride leads to fear and cowardice, which leads to loneliness and hell.

Rational scientific knowledge cannot totally inform our worldview because only a willingness to accept mystery and approach others in humility will maintain a community that can both give and receive in an exchange of language. When language attains full representation, the literal and spiritual become one. This redeemed language signifies exactly what the individual means thus eliminating any dichotomy between the signifier, language, and the signified, meaning. Renewal cannot come only or primarily from within because the individual would have to impose the model of self onto the community. Rather than being based on the individual, the paradigm for renewal is that of gift and love within a community. The gift must be given, received, and continually reciprocated in much the same fashion that language between persons operates in the context of a conversation. Grace stands as the transforming power. In other words, maybe we must receive grace from without before we can truly renew the world from within.

A Month of Sundays--A Continuing Discussion of The Man Who Was Thursday

Last week I wrote about the character of Sunday, the President of the Central Anarchist Council and a Police Chief, in The Man Who Was Thursday. Sunday is a man whom Chesterton meant to exemplify the idea of a god who is willfully elusive, both good and evil, and a general enemy of mankind. Towards the end of the novel, Sunday leads his band of six detectives on a bizarre chase through the English countryside, during which he throws them meaningless notes such as “The word, I fancy, should be pink” (161), and “Fly as once. The truth about your trouser-stretchers is known” (157). I believe Chesterton meant these nonsense “clues” to illustrate how many believe God works: by throwing us confusing and nonsensical tidbits designed, not to bring us closer to Him, but to further alienate us from Him. This is, of course, contradictory to the Catholic understanding of God as one who wishes to lead us to Him and help us use our reason to understand something of His mysteries.

Contradictions abound in this man/god-hunt, especially when the detectives begin to describe their views of Sunday. (A reminder: physically, Sunday is grotesquely large and inspires fear and wonder in those who look upon him.) For example, Monday perceives him as cruel because, when he met Sunday, Monday asked him serious questions that only elicited laughs from the President, who shook like “a base body,” or "protoplasm." Monday speaks about how awful it was to be “laughed at by something at once lower and stronger than oneself.”

Wednesday says that the awful thing about Sunday is that he is absent minded. He maintains that, “absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man. We think of a wicked man as vigilant. We can’t think of a wicked man who is honestly and sincerely dreamy, because we daren’t think of a wicked man alone with himself. An absent-minded man means a good-natured man. It means a man who, if he happens to see you, will apologize. But how will you bear an absent-minded man who, if he happens to see you, will kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with cruelty” (167).

After each man has described his opinions of Sunday, Thursday says, “Each man of you finds Sunday quite different, yet each man of you can only find one thing to compare him to—the universe itself” (168). He goes on to describe his impression of Sunday from the back as a beast and from the front as an archangel, and that he is always certain that, whether he looks at his back or front, he is viewing Sunday’s true self. He explains himself by saying, “bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained” (169). He then goes on to say what could sum up the idea of the entire book (so read and think carefully!):

Listen to me. Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—

The above passages warrant careful consideration: how are these views different from the Catholic view of the Lord and His creation? It is the crux of the whole novel (which I highly recommend you read!) and important questions for our faith as well.

T.S. Eliot and Community: Part II of III

Part I from last week.

In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot furthers his description of the fragmented community. In the opening lines of The Waste Land, April is considered the “cruelest month” [1]. Rather than its traditional symbol of renewal and rebirth, April becomes an aching reminder of a better past in the midst of a wintery present. In other words April becomes an unfriendly reminder of the unhappiness that permeates the present. The past holds an account of our sins and acts as a conscience that brings man into contact with the true nature of the wasteland. The memory functions to make us painfully aware of the current ruins that surround us. But this experience has been deemed as cruelty because of the desire to be disconnected with the past. Accountability becomes unbearable. In turn this disconnection with the past has blinded man to his own nature and cut him off from the means of knowing and fulfilling his own natural end. Quite literally, the poem brings this image to life by showing people as ghost of their former selves.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winder dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. [60-64]

People surround each other, but there is no communication and no community. People are more dead than they are alive, but unable to recognize that lack of life because they are unable to recognize each other. As with Prufrock, they are stuck in the world of the self.

This isolation takes concrete forms in the two unloved women of The Waste Land. In section II the aristocratic lady waits hopelessly for love and human affection. However, even the bird of love becomes meaningless.

Yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears. [100-103]

The voice of the nightingale is nothing more than a meaningless cry that ceases to signify. The symbol of love no longer signifies love; in other words, the sign is not signifying. This action with no meaning personifies the hopelessness of the women waiting for love. On the other extreme, the description of the second lady shows another type of isolation even more discontenting. The lady dreads the return of her husband from war who only wants “a good time” regardless where he has to go for it. Her husband will not sexually leave her alone. Despite this physical intimacy she feels alienated and used by her husband. Both women are not really loved and these two antidotes juxtaposed together identify two perspectives on the disconnection between people.

In the poem The Hollow Men it seems the best we can achieve is communal meaninglessness.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Learning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar [part I]

Here Eliot indicates that language no longer signifies and communicates meanings. We are without substance and stuffed with learning that only gives off the semblance of communication. Language is depraved of its creative power to transcend the physical and inspire the soul. This fragmented culture is left with “Shape without form, shade without colour,? Paralysed force, gesture without motion” [part I]. These contradictory pairs show how the meanings signified by certain actions are being divorced from their sign. Common language is destroyed and communion becomes impossible. One by one all things begin to lose their meaning: education, relationships, the singing nightingale, love, physical intimacy, and eventually language.

So if Eliot's poetry is correct about the current state of language, where does this leave the possibility for meaningful communication? I will look at this question in the next post.

The Ghoul Who Was Sunday

I am feeling heroic today, so I will attempt to summarize the plot of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Here it goes:

Gabriel Syme is a police detective in a city plagued by political turmoil and threatened by anarchist plots of destruction. By happenstance, he becomes an undercover agent in the Central Anarchist Council, which consists of seven members, each named for a day of the week. The Council is led by Sunday—a mammoth of a man terrifying in his intensity and deadly purpose. While desperately hiding his identity, Syme discovers that each of the other members of the council is also a disguised undercover policeman working AGAINST anarchy. They eventually join forces against Sunday, whom they all fear and despise. They then discover that Sunday is the very same man who, in a room so dark they could not see his face, had recruited them to be policemen in the first place. The plot culminates in a long and exciting chase that leads them to Sunday’s vast country estate, where they discover that Sunday is not a man at all, but, in his own words, is “the peace of God.”

Unfortunately, even a quite good summary of this novel (and I must say, this one is not that bad) excludes the philosophical asides, witty observations, and poignant comments about society and humanity. Many of these lovely tidbits regard the character of Sunday, an elusive and confusing man whom Chesterton meant to exemplify the “mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order” who is a “sort of elemental elf who had appeared to be rather too like a pantomime ogre” who would have inhabited the “world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing” at the time the book was written (these quotes were taken from an article Chesterton wrote for the Illustrated London News in 1936). This can be seen in the entire title of the work, which is, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare.

Sunday is described as a huge man—very tall and very fat, to the extent that he looks unnatural and frighteningly inhuman. His dual roles as police chief and President of the Central Anarchist Council are in opposition to each other. Strangely, he openly acts as an anarchist in broad daylight but acts as a police chief only in darkness. He even holds the anarchist council meetings on a balcony during the day to discuss their plans, for he believes in concealment by not being secretive; in other words, because they are open with their dissention, they will not be taken as serious threats.

When the policemen (formerly members of the anarchist council) confront Sunday, he says,

You want to know what I am, do you? […] Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. […] Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have not been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.

True to his word, Sunday then leads the policemen in a bizarre chase around the English countryside that ultimately leads them to his estate and then to a final unveiling of Sunday’s dualist nature, the nightmarish view of God that Chesterton was trying to expose as fallacy. I would like to continue about this particular aspect of the novel next week, so I will end on a discussion of the above quote.

The idea that God does not wish to be discovered or understood at all is horrific; it is the crux of Agnosticism and completely contrasts the Catholic ideas of faith and reason leading men to salvation. Belief in a god who amuses himself by playing cat-and-mouse with his creation would drive anyone away from faith—many people alienate themselves from the Church because they believe that God wills everything about it to be incomprehensible. We must not fall into the mire of despair about ever reaching communion with Him due to this folly. Growing in wisdom and understanding about our faith is one of our greatest tools to reaching salvation, and the history of great intellects in the Catholic Church makes this possible. We must actively participate in the search for Truth, a participation that has been sadly neglected among Americans and the youth of the world.
(Shameless Parousians plug!)

T.S. Eliot and Community: Part I of III

In the midst of the English literary tradition comes a prophetic figure, T.S. Eliot, warning against the destruction of language and community. T.S. Eliot pushes language to new horizons in his attempt to critique and expand the cultural consciousness and conscience of his generation. This awareness comes through his exploration of man’s folly and failure in bringing about a better world through feeble attempts at education and so called “objective” accounts of the world through reductive science. Rather than informing and deepening man’s understanding of himself and the cosmos, these attempts wedded to intellectual pride create a wasteland that engulfs society and undermines the mystical bonds of community. Through his poetic and mystical writings, Eliot can be understood as attempting a literary and cultural renewal by warning against the dangers of his society and its direction towards destruction and human isolation.

At the heart of any community lies a framework in which people share common experiences such as historical events, desires, insights, and goals. All these things are mediated among individuals within the community through language. As experience and thoughts are translated into symbols and communicated through verbal, oral, and physical gestures, language develops into the heart of a community. Because of the intimate connection between language and community, the destruction of one may lead to the destruction of the other. Likewise the renewal of one may lead to the renewal of the other.

T.S. Eliot realized that the present situation of a society in ruins must be understood and assessed for what it is in order to understand the fullness of the calamity that the community faces. However, because this process involves coming to terms with the problem and naming man’s folly, the difficulty of the prophet’s task increases when the means to express this calamity, namely language, has been intimately affected by the very destructiveness that T.S. Eliot hopes to identify. This may account for Eliot’s reliance on poetic verse and powerful images as primary tools of relating his insights in the context of symbolic narratives. When the very language system to be used to express meaning is fragmented, then expression within this system must be done with fragmented language. Thus, even Eliot’s style of poetry resonates with the fragmentation and alienation he identifies within his society.

Eliot’s dramatic monologue, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, gives an illuminating account of an isolated mind separated from the community. Alfred Prufrock tries to apply his rational knowledge of scientific relationships to the area of human relationships. At some sort of evening party he spends his time calculating possible interactions with women. He begins with his own inadequacies, such as thinning hair and undesirable physical traits, and concludes the inevitable failure of any possible interaction with the opposite sex. The logical end of his reasoning is to resist entering into a dialogue at all.

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume? [5]

Prufrock’s consciousness of being judged prevents him from action. He falls into the problem that he cannot calculate how to begin. There can be no calculation of a beginning, therefore he stagnates into non-action. His ‘scientific’ need for certainty undermines his human need for community. Thus he pins himself to a wall and fulfills his own fears. Prufrock becomes trapped in the hell of the isolated mind with no hope of escape.

Education embodied in reason alone has rebelled against its master. Prufrock embodies the impotence of the educated by living in his head rather than in everyday human interaction. His intellectual musings become a hindrance to community rather than an aide. His mind has predetermined his end to be lonely. Limiting the scientific inquiry to the positivistic sciences has in turn divorced the academic mind from the community and human relations. Prufrock becomes unable to interact in community and has exiled himself.

The Beauty of Order from Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday

What is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I’m hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It’s mere vomiting.

This passage, from G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, rubs its proverbial elbows with other equally distinguished bits of wisdom within that text. In this novel, which is one of my favorites, Chesterton attacks what he described as the, “logic, or lunacy” of the popular opinion that “the mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order was the same sort of elemental elf” in an article he wrote for the Illustrated London News in 1936. I will not attempt to summarize the plot, but I do encourage you to read the book or at least find a summary online.

I am refraining from a rehashing of the story because of its complexity and because, when taken out of context, it can seem rather fantastical. It comprises many themes--anarchy is just one in this book, which is rife with metaphor, beautiful logic, and subtle theology—in fact, the themes in the novel could provide fodder for a frenzy of blogs (and it just might!). The novel begins with a meeting of “The Two Poets of Saffron Park” (which is the title of the first chapter). The two wordsmiths argue about the place of anarchy in poetry; the resident poet, Lucian Gregory, claims that chaos and rebellion are poetic in themselves and that “an artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only.” The second poet, Gabriel Syme (our hero!), counters that there is nothing poetic about anarchy; rather, “chaos is dull…it is things going right that is poetical.” (Note the symbolism of the names—Lucian/Lucifer, Gabriel/…Gabriel—the first poet expresses the twisted views of a fallen light-bearer, whereas the second proclaims truth.)

Another notable passage from Gabriel defends his position by describing his passion for, of all unlikely things, a train reaching its destination.

I tell you…that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloan Square on must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hair-breadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria', it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam.

This quote exemplifies one of the notable notions in this book: Gabriel’s idea of the romance of order. Attributing high adventure and mystery to the order that Lucian views as prosaic is one of our greatest tools as Catholics. We see the romance of a life devoted to fully utilizing our freedom to live well according to the qualities of dignified and fully realized human persons—the only true freedom we can have. We are free to be as wonderful as the Lord meant us to be and can see the beauty and romance of this. As Chesterton wrote in another great work, Orthodoxy, “The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say, "if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.”

Our victory as sons and daughters of Adam is to embrace the power our free will gives us to act in accord with truth and goodness. To say that we are imposed upon because there are guidelines to living well is erroneous; we have all been told the most valuable things are those we work for, and repetition has not made it false. We work to live up to certain standards, which only help direct our efforts. (Standards for beauty, for example, are even found in nature in the golden ratio, which has been found to describe the proportions of what is most pleasing to the human eye.)Most worthwhile things are done according to plans—buildings are built from blueprints, novels written (and rewritten) from outlines, paintings result from countless sketches…so embrace order and truth! To use a slightly corny metaphor, we are given the blueprints for living to our highest potential as human beings and will remain standing for eternity if we fashion ourselves according to them! [I apologize for the corniness!]

Thinking of Christmas, Compline, and a poem by T.S. Eliot

I stumbled across a lovely poem by T.S. Eliot this morning called “A Song for Simeon” that meditates on the Canticle of Simeon found in Luke 2:29-32. This canticle is prayed at Compline (Night Prayer) in the Liturgy of the Hours and is also called “Nunc dimittis” after its opening words in the Latin text. It reads as follows:

Lord, now you let your servant go in peace; your word has been fulfilled. My own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of every people: a light to reveal you to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.

Eliot’s poem expresses Simeon’s desperate hope and longing for salvation so poignantly that, as I read, I wished it were Advent already. Then I was struck with the realization that, as of today, Christmas is exactly two months away! The beautiful cool weather we’ve had lately has many of us looking forward to Christmas with anticipation. Ordinary time grows long, and much of our Easter-season fervor has faded.

As Catholics, we are asked to prepare ourselves to celebrate Christ’s birth with the same reverence, penitence and contemplation we practice during Lent. With great hope, let us look ahead to Advent (which begins on Sunday, December 2) and make Simeon’s prayer our own.

“A Song for Simeon” by T.S. Eliot

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have taken and given honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was an Anglican poet, playwright, and literary critic. He is most famous for his poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ” and “The Waste Land,” as well as his play Murder in the Cathedral about the death of St. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.