Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, while the Barbary corsairs ranged freely around the Mediterranean, these pirates also sailed by the dozen up the [English] Channel and even into the Thames estuary, plundering local fishing and coastal towns. . . . The Algerians were said to have taken no fewer than 353 British ships between 1672 and 1682, which would mean that they were still picking up between 290 and 430 new British slaves every year.

—Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters

Historical truths become casualties of preferred narratives in the present. Modern scholarship, preoccupied with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, gives little more than a passing glance to the scope of corsair piracy. Yet, as historian Robert Davis reminds, the systematic enslavement of white, Christian Europeans by Muslim’s on North Africa’s Barbary Coast, is a crucial, if politically disfavored, aspect of modern slave studies. 

Moroccan Slave Market. Anonymous woodcut (17th C.).

Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 leaves no doubt that Islamic slaving was far from a minor phenomenon, not mere corsair hysteria as some would term it. In Davis’ densely documented account, white slavery in the Mahgreb was enormously consequential. In the three centuries of its flourishing, Muslim predation entrapped as many as a million victims from France and Italy to Spain, Holland, Great Britain, the Americas. Even Iceland suffered slave-hunting raids.

The diary of Thomas Baker, English consul in Tripoli from 1679 to 1685, took careful note of ship traffic in and out of the Libyan port. In addition to the usual run of European-bound merchant ships were many local vessels openly setting out “in corso.” Baker was blunt: they were “going out a-thieving,” stalking seas and coastlines for poorly defended Christian prizes. Davis notes that Libyans were particularly fond of what Baker’s contemporaries called “man-taking” or “Christian-stealing.” Their dedication prompted the consul to remark: “To steale Christians . . . is their Lawfull Vocation.”

Ransom of Catholic Slaves by a Monk in the Barbary State. (17th C.).

The Cambridge World History of Slavery estimates the attrition rate for white slaves at 20 percent a year in seventeenth century Maghreb:

Given the age of captives seized from European sailing ships, the hostile epidemiological environment of North Africa, and the harsh working and living conditions [Read Davis for these.] the crude mortality rate among whites was probably higher than among black in the Americas, even on sugar plantations.

Consequently, a steady resupply was needed to sustain existing slave populations. The seasoning of new captives could take several years, leaving half or fewer captives to survive the first five years. Read Davis for detailed descriptions of slave taking and breaking, slave life and labor, including the death-in-life of galley slaves. After examining various slave lists, he concludes that those captured by Muslim corsairs and taken off to Barbary stood a less than 50/50 chance of being ransomed: “They left their bones in unmarked plots, often in shallow graves where dogs or waves could unearth them. .  .   .  Or simply thrown into the sea.” 

Davis quotes Piero Ottoni’s 1997 essay in La Repubblica lamenting Italy’s turn inland, and inward, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “We retired to the countryside. We lost [our] freedom and love of the sea.” In the face of corsair piracy, the people who had produced Columbus, John Cabot, and Amerigo Vespucci were no longer “a nation of navigators, although we did become a nation of bathers.”

Davis’ study offers a rein on the Church’s timorous, conciliating urge—in the wake of Nostra Aetate—to list toward accommodation with an ideology that has sought dominion over Christianity since it first burst out of the Arabian desert. Today’s Boko Haram is not an aberration. Rather, it is a portent of our likely future if we lull ourselves with a flawed understanding of Islam, one dangerously installed in the 1992 edition of the Catechism.

The Catechism refers readers back to Nostra Aetate. As the encyclical’s name suggests, the document is very much of its time. Unhappily, that time happened to be 1965, epicenter of a decade of jingle-jangle mornings and heady student rebellion against reality. “Be reasonable—think the impossible” was one of those utopian slogans that, migrating from the Sorbonne, seeped like gas into popular culture and under the door of the papal apartments as well.

The vapor of 1965 drained into the Catechism three decades later: “The Church regards with esteem also the Muslim.” Those words were not intended to apply simply to the human dignity of individuals. Forgetful of how much was owed Britain’s containment of the Ottomans, the Vatican miscast itself as Ophelia, strewing herbs a-Sunday over the dogma and mandates of Islam. Official dissolution of the Ottoman caliphate by Ataturk in 1923 gave the West forty-some years to forget centuries of brutal predation. Rosemary—for remembrance—shriveled in the sun of victory and wafted away. Only rue remains.

The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, founded in 1964, still bears the marks of the decade of its birth. In its recent condemnation of Islamic barbarity toward the Yezidis (without whom Christians might have gone unnoticed), the Council sweetened its censure with this:

We cannot forget, however, that Christians and Muslims have lived together —it is true with ups and downs—over the centuries, building a culture of peaceful coexistence and civilization of which they are proud.

It was the Beatles all over again: “Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play.” Only that it was not. Those downs were severe and consequential. The Council, hobbled by bureaucratic courtesy, fell back on multicultural fantasy. That oblique reference to coexistence offered as history the prevailing myth of medieval convivencia, an illusion of harmony that has drawn fire from contemporary historians. David Nirenberg, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago, put paid to that romance with his magisterial Communities of Violence (1996).

It is time to send members of the Pontifical Council a copy of Davis’ text—Nirenberg’s, too—before we strangle on our own good manners. Anbar province is not as far from Rome as we like to think.

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Just arrived in this morning’s email is this broadcast from Sandro Magister’s Chiesa: “Francis’ Patient Revolution.” Reading it, patience is the last quality that comes to mind: 

There was no agreement at the synod on homosexuality and divorce, but in the end it will be the pope who decides. And he already has in mind the changes he wants to introduce, or rather is already putting them into practice.

Paul Anthony McGavin writes:

It is not true that Francis was silent during the two weeks of the synod. In the morning homilies at Saint Martha’s, he hammered away every day at the zealots of tradition, those who load unbearable burdens onto men, those who have only certainties and no doubts, the same against whom he lashed out in the farewell address with the synod fathers.

He is anything but impartial, this pope. He wanted the synod to orient the Catholic hierarchy toward a new vision of divorce and homosexuality, and he has succeeded, in spite of the scanty number of votes in favor of the change of course, after two weeks of fiery discussion. 

One paragraph startled me some. In the early days of his pontificate, the romance of Francis was stoked with charming stories of his humility. He scrambled his own eggs, tied his own shoes, took the bus. An ordinary Joe, just like you and me but more so. We saw nothing in the press like this:

On communion for the divorced and remarried, it is already known how the pope thinks. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he authorized the “curas villeros,” the priests sent to the peripheries, to give communion to all, although four fifths of the couples were not even married. And as pope, by telephone or letter he is not afraid of encouraging some of the faithful who have remarried to receive communion without worrying about it, right away, even without those “penitential paths under the guidance of the diocesan bishop” projected by some at the synod, and without issuing any denials when the news of his actions comes out.

Set aside, if you can, the specific moral teachings that are in the dock. Suppress for a moment whatever conscientious sympathy you might have with Francis’ aims. What bewilders me here is the precipitous end-run being made around collegiality and subsidiarity, with scant regard for the trust of the faithful in the validity of the Church’s essential moral suasion on essential matters. If McGavin’s report is correct—what reason to think it is not?—Francis is more a covert operative than the shepherd we welcomed at the outset. 

The law of unintended consequences is inexorable. And fearsome. We already have one seditious authoritarian in the White House. To think there could be another on the Chair of Peter breaks the heart.

Read the entire essay here.

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To clear the palate from all things synodal, let us go look at a painting. One in particular deserves a place of honor. Among the loveliest images of Mary that we hold as our own, none delights me more than Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Annunciation.

Henry Ossawa Tanner. The Annunciation (1898). Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Tanner (1859-1937) was this country’s first major African-American artist. Within nine years of moving to Paris—a crucial destination for artists of his generation—he had become an international success. By 1900, he ranked among the leading Americans in Paris and, released there from the burdens of race, was counted the premier biblical painter of his day. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon, attracting even greater critical acclaim than Thomas Eakins, his friend and former mentor at the Pennsylvania Academy.

The first of Tanner’s works purchased for an American museum, The Annunciation is a marvelous blend of academic realism and abstract invention. No winged angel appears, no benedictory gesture.

Francisco de Zubarán. The Annunciation (1650). Madrid.

Feathered messengers are an ancient technology. Angels, as we are used to imagining them, are a pictorial device somehow off-kilter a mere five years before the airborne marvel of Kitty Hawk. This is Paris, 1898. Pigeon post—winged angels a variant of it—will not do today for depicting divine address to the daughter of Zion. The God-bearing word travels, as ever, at the speed of light. Tanner’s Gabriel arrives as an electromagnetic pulse, a shimmering Doppler effect that proclaims a wonder in heaven and another within the soul of a girl.

And the girl! Gone is the Lady of medieval imagining, interrupted at her psalter. Here is a dark-haired, adolescent peasant from the hills of Galilee, who never held a book. Teenaged Miriam, hands in her lap, looks into the light, weighing the message. She does not shrink back in awe, as in the Sienese version below. She makes no gesture of excessive humility. Her body language is attentive, poised. Composure in the face of the miraculous hints at something in the very nature of revelation. Gabriel’s extraordinary message bursts into the ordinary. Domesticity is no stranger to epiphany. 

Simone Martini. The Annunciation (detail), 14th C., The Uffizi, Florence.

Notice that single, sturdy bare foot peeking out from a cascade of drapery. It is a small touch but one that marks Tanner’s intentional distance from centuries of Marian typology. The Virgin might have bared one breast to suckle her baby but she was rarely, if ever, depicted barefoot. As if she never really touched the floor. But those traditional images of Mary nursing had a doctrinal purpose: to affirm the humanity of Jesus. Here, Tanner emphasizes the humanity of Mary. No need, then, for the exaggerated modesty of a shod foot.

The scene’s exaggerated drapery, however, serves purely compositional purposes. Too lavish for the historical accuracy which was crucial to Tanner, its undulating spread provides pictorial counter to the spare geometry of an otherwise austere interior. Moreover, the technical demands of that pendant droop declare Tanner’s brotherhood with Bouguereau, Meissioner, Géròme, Cabanel, Bastien-Lepage, and other prize-winning stars of the Salon. Pride in craft makes a proclamation of its own.

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Balmoral Castle, 1874. It was a Halloween to remember. Queen Victoria planned an elaborate party, taking charge of designing every element of the night herself. Something in the incongruity of that touches me. Victoria, living with the ghost of Prince Albert, sought to stave off the monstrous with a Halloween bash.

W.S. Stacey. Queen Victoria’s Halloween. From The Life and Times of Queen Victoria, 1897.

Diana Millay’s The Power of Halloween, is a witch-friendly potboiler that you need not bother reading. But even a bad book can have something worth plucking:

The Queen’s lavish preparations and attention to detail may have run a close second to her coronation. Masked balls were nothing new to her. Nor were holidays which she believed she was born to celebrate.

The Queen invited not only friends and royal relatives, but also her tenant farmers and castle servants to join in a torch light procession around the palace grounds. They walked while she rode in a four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage. With a fiery torch in every hand (including the Queen’s), this strange but exotic procession was only the beginning. How cleverly she had set the stage for her indoor celebration: Balmoral by candlelight. It must have been hard to tell the ghosts from the guests.

That last sentence is a bit breathy but it suits the day. More precisely, it is of a piece with what the day has become. I prefer real ghosts to the cheesy inflatable ghouls that sway on every front lawn between here and the Henry Hudson Bridge. Even the city—the Upper West Side, for heaven’s sake!—has its growing share of orange lights and fake cobwebs. The campiness of it all irks me. I prefer a good fright. Something to curdle the blood. 

Eugene Grasset. Three Women & Three Wolves (c.1900). Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.

Either that, or bring me some sign of genial accommodation with the dead. Each of us lives with ghosts. We call them saints to console ourselves for the mystery of their whereabouts. There is solace in the word saint. It deflects dread but does not erase it. Some humor brought to the unseen, to all that is concealed and goes unnamed, complements the hope we have for ourselves and for our dead.

Contemporary Halloween aims at nothing more than mocking the death-conjuring unease inherent in mortality. There is no humor in our Halloween stuffs, only inanity.

George Cruikshank. The Ghost of Mrs. Leckie (1830).

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Conservatives whaled me for “degrading” America, purists for representing things, and the radicals were mad because I didn’t put in Nikolai Lenin as an American prophet.
                                                Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America, 1983

If it’s not art, it’s at least history.
                                        Thomas Hart Benton, New York Times, 1968

But it is art. Incontestably and splendidly so. With the politics and dogmatic arguments of American modernism behind us, Benton’s first mural commission can be seen for the glory that it is. His ten-panel cross-section of American life, America Today—donated to the Metropolitan Museum and on display until next April—is an epic kaleidoscope that embodies the intimacy between visual art and United States social history in the first third of the twentieth century. Here is the restless pulse of the Jazz Age, painted just before an intoxicated nation sobered in realization of the full effects of the 1929 stock market crash. This is the mural series credited with prompting the federal mural project of the WPA in the 1930s. And it put Benton on the cover of Time, 1934.

Thomas Hart Benton, City Activities with Dance Hall (1930-31). Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

A bastion of progressive adult education, the New School for Social Research commissioned the mural series for its board room in 1930. José Clemente Orozco had just received a commission to paint murals for the school’s public dining room and student lounge. Uninterested in the pure fresco Orozco practiced, Benton was eager to experiment with mural techniques on large panels to be installed upon completion. So eager was he that he took no fee for the commission, asking only to be compensated for materials. (“I’ll paint you a picture in tempera if you finance the eggs.”) He was ambitious for stature; America Today achieved it.

It seemed an inspired paring, Benton and Orozco. Both artists were committed to grand themes imbued with social significance. Both counted themselves on the left. Both were the nation’s most prominent spokesmen for mural painting as the premier medium for public architecture. Their work was complementary in intention and technique. Yet Orozco’s New School murals have not aged well while Benton’s retain their persuasive power.

José Clemente Orozco. Struggle in the Orient: Slavery, Imperialism & Gandhi (1930). New School, NYC.

The Mexican painter’s sententious fresco cycle lingers as a visual correlative to the rhetoric of social revolution promoted in the 1920s by editorials in New Masses. Popular in their time, today his murals carry the weight of a blunt instrument. I cannot look at his fervid assertions of the brotherhood of man without thinking of heavy machinery and the Red Army. The sensibility inherent in them hints—despite self-conscious commiseration, devoid of warmth, with the wretched of the earth—at the inhumanity at the heart of the millenarian ideology that inflected Orozco’s art.

By contrast, Benton’s dynamic Instruments of Power, the central panel of America Today, is animated by the ebullience of a decade that witnessed the flight of Charles Lindbergh and the passenger-carrying Graf Zeppelin. Benton understood the motive sources of industrial power—water, steam, electricity, the internal combustion engine—to be, also, the prime movers of an industrial democracy. The Machine Age had no lovelier apotheosis than this. 

Thomas Hart Benton. Instruments of Power (1930-31). Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

While not a member of the Communist party, Benton was a Marxist himself in the early Twenties. His disenchantment with orthodox Marxism came later, as it did to his friends Max Eastman and Sidney Hook. Still, he remained a populist, his cultural leftism refined by a pragmatism that led him to tell the socially-conscious Survey in 1930: 

I realized that the supposed and much-harped-upon standardization of America was a neat descriptive formula which bore only a surface relation to fact. My experience had brought out infinite varieties of ways of living and doing which the formula did not fit.

The hero of America Today is the working man: the farmer, steel worker, construction worker, coal miner. But Benton’s enthusiasm for technology and American vitality was not naive. Coal, below, is an exquisitely rendered depiction of a bleak, back-breaking industry. The panel, aflame with social protest, is the single work that comes close to unrelieved pessimism. The stooped miners, the slag heaps, the shanties on a hill—all in service to a giant electrical plant belching smoke. The artist’s personal ambivalence toward a troubled industry in the Twenties is conveyed through formal means that maintain their aesthetic appeal even while withholding assent from their subject. It is a commanding performance that has few equals in modern painting.

Thomas Hart Benton. Coal (1930-31). Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Benton’s preparatory drawings for the murals are exhibited in a room adjoining the reconstructed board room setting. These are a feast in themselves. He had a firm hand, drawing with force and expressive intensity. Master of the classical essential—line—he brought to it a bold confidence that endowed with life every form he modeled, from machine parts to the human figure. His drawings obey William Morris Hunt’s dictum: “Draw firm! And be jolly!” Spend time with them. They tell us why Ingres referred to drawing as “the probity of art.”

Thomas Hart Benton. Dancer (1930). Whitney Museum, NYC.

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Every so often some wit writes to advise me of the exquisite consonance between my postings and my last name. So indulge me for a bit while I take a quick run through a complex etymology. Leave out the Gaels; pass over the Normans who anglicized Gaelic names within the Pale. I do not need too much. Just enough to illustrate how beautiful this ancient clan name appears in Gaelic: Ó Maelearchaidh. Phonetically, the Old Irish spelling is identical to the modern variant, Mullarkey. But you must pronounce it with a lilt. Do your best. Listen as you say it. The music of it fills me with regret that my husband had no interest in reclaiming the historic form of his patronymic surname.

To paraphrase Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: “I could have been a Maelearchaidh.”

Banquet of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Hotel Astor. Museum of the City of New York, NYC.

The anglicized version, Mullarkey, appears on British records in Ulster in the 1600’s. Family tradition has it that the Mullarkeys were among the Irish Catholics cleansed from Ulster by Cromwell’s 1652 Act of Settlement. The Act confiscated Catholic-owned properties and sent native Irish east of the Shannon into exile. Dispossessed, the clan was driven onto the poorer soil of Connacht and Clare. Some dispersed to the hard landscape of Mayo, where my husband’s people farmed as best they could amid rock and peat.

Charles Muller. Exile of Irish Catholic Youth (1655). Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon.

Early on in my professional life, I was encouraged to shed my married name. My maiden name was pretty; it had a sturdy British ring to it. No popular banality attached to it. Besides, women were increasingly accustomed to keeping the name they were born with. But I had not chosen my birth name nor the male line that gave it to me. I did choose my husband. I took his name as I took him, a gift. I understood it not an erasure of identity—as feminist thinking had it—but as a sign of the perfection of it. 

We were very young—too young to know that the answer to the question What’s in a name? is: More than you think.

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Since social propriety demands that wives wear mourning for their husbands, it is fair that they be reimbursed for their mourning clothes . . . . Since she is legally required to wear mourning but not pay for its cost, it the responsibility of the husband’s heir to provide her with mourning. —From a lawsuit, 1757. Quoted by Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death.

My mourning has been quite an inconvenience to me this summer. I had just spent all the money I could afford for my summer clothes, and was forced to spend $30 more for black dresses. —Julia Ward Howe to Louisa Terry, 1846.

Only recently has society undone it historic role and dismantled the protocols of mourning which it had designed and imposed until the twentieth century. Mourning rituals are not addressed to the dead, but to each other. They are a conversation among ourselves—an exchange between the mourner and the community from which the dead have been evacuated.

Young widow with friend at the end of the First World War (c.1918). Postcard

But community in the traditional sense has largely faded. In its place are fluid alliances of atomized individuals clustered, often in the abstract, as interest groups. Members are kin by dint of condition, practice or purpose e.g. the handicapped, transgender, and hedge fund communities. (Or, as I heard on the news some days ago in what has to be the ultimate corruption of the word: “the terrorist community.”) The gathering of witnesses toward whom the conventions of mourning are directed have dispersed. Or gone to the gym to put mortality at bay.

How, then, does a contemporary museum approach the sensibilities of a century in which death was a constant companion? One chastened by an acutely higher mortality rate and lower life expectancy than our own? Should the Metropolitan Museum of Art present mourning costumes as revelatory items of social history, tribal marks that acknowledge the scandal of death? Or can it take the Anna-Wintour-devil-wears-Prada route, and beat the drum for widow’s weeds as chic?

Fashion Plate (1824). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Reference Library.

Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire at the Met’s Costume Institute takes the gauzier route. The tenor of things is all there in the wording. “Death becomes her” is another, somewhat waspish, way of saying, “She looks good in black.” It is a calculated segue into the mentalité of vintage Vogue. On show is the vanity of melancholy, and its use as a screen between death and the living.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition features mourning dress from 1815 to 1915. Since most men of the time wore black anyway, the evolution of mourning garb concentrates on women’s clothing and accessories. Color and fabric follow the prescribed progression from the total black of early grief to the gradual introduction of grays and mauves that signaled a period of half-mourning. It is a compelling subject that angles into history through dress. Going by the posted blurbs, however, fashion trumps the history it embodies.

Gallery view ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Unquestionably, garments on display offer compelling testimony to the beauty and craftsmanship of the needle arts. With the single exception of what is deemed a homemade dress, every outfit is an exquisite work from talented, high-end dressmakers or from newly emergent vendors specializing in funeral wear. (Intimate with ever-present death, the 1800s and early 1900s created a busy market for bereavement apparel analogous to today’s bridal trade.)

It is impossible to look at the cut, construction and detailing of these dresses and refuse honor to the artistry of their making. Hold for another day the debate over whether fashion is art. Here, it simply enough to recognize needlework as inherently worthy of the aesthetic attention given to what we flatter with the term fine art. In the medium of fabric, this is abstract art applied to the human figure instead of a canvas.

Detail of mourning dress (1902-04). ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Where the show stumbles is in its staging. There is a campiness to the presentation that undercuts the larger cultural value of its own subject and sets entertainment over history. The exhibit opened the last week in October. Halloween hangs over it like Casper the ghost. A-haunting we will go with projected wall texts that fade in and out, wraithlike. A shadow glides across the words for a few disconsolate seconds before one spectral quotation dissolves into another.

In the main, texts posture for audience effect. A sardonic note slips into the printed materials as if to taunt the objects they escort:

Black is becoming; and young widows, fair, plump, and smiling, with their roguish eyes sparkling under their black veils are very seducing. —Robert De Valcourt, The Illustrated Manners Book (1855).

When we see young ladies persist in wearing sable, we are reminded of the reply a young widow made to her mother: “Don’t you see,” said she, “it saves me the expense of advertising for a husband.” —D.C. Colesworth, Hints of Common Politeness (1867).

The Scots shut themselves up in total darkness, wear veils, I know not how many folds, but so black that sitting beside them you could not tell whether it is a broomstick dressed up or what it is. —Elizabeth Stuart to Mary Baker, 1856.

Charles Henry Dana. Illustration (1900). Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

On Halloween night, the Costume Institute celebrated with an invitation to museum-users “to chart their own path through the galleries and join drop-in, interactive experiences with art.” (Not sure what those drop-in experiences entailed; very likely, playing dead was not one of them.) 

The doleful sound of Hildur Guonadadóttir’s cello accompanies the display. The sound track irritated me. Plaintive Icelandic hymns about death suppress recollection of the reasons mourning costumes were in such demand in the hundred years featured here. The nineteenth century was a river of blood. Europe convulsed in revolutions, wars of independence or unification. Americans suffered a Civil War that slaughtered a generation of men. Bereavement came blood-stained; widowhood, rampant. 

Ms. Guonadadóttir’s contemporary cello loops aestheticize death. They insure a detached, secular response to the crisis of mortality which required these ritual clothes in the first place. Any number of appropriate musical alternatives come to the historically minded. For starters: A Mighty Fortress is Our God or The Strife is Over. Brahms’ How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place would do nicely, as would any arrangement of the Twenty Third Psalm. So would Julia Ward Howe’s Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. The Battle Hymn of the Republic is more fitting to the time frame of this exhibition than her tart quotation on the wall.

Queen Victoria, a musician herself, loved John Henry Newman’s Lead Kindly Light. Her dress is here; her favorite hymn is not.

Currier & Ives. Departed Worth (19th C.). Museum of the City of New York.

One text makes reference to the agony of the age. But even that skips quickly to cost:

No, I do not dress in mourning. It is seldom worn now; there are so many deaths. But few put it on even when the nearest and dearest relatives die. There is probably another reason for not donning mourning; it is very expensive now. Dress goods, especially imported, are very dear. —Annie Fahs, in a letter written in 1863, during the Civil War. 

Trembling at the core of respect for the dead is deference toward death itself. In the end, it is ourselves we mourn for. But Ash Wednesday dampens box office.

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Now is it official. There is no need for more speculation about the whereabouts of Michael Hull, the disappearing pastor of Manhattan’s Guardian Angel parish and director of the Sheen Center.

Charles II (Charles the Bad) Preaching to Clerics (14th C.). Biblioteque Nationale, Paris.

The Scottish Episcopal Church has announced the appointment of Dr. Hull as its Director of Studies. He is currently living out his baptismal call by Skype at the Mercer School of Theology on Long Island. The former monsignor conducts classes through the ether from his conjugal home in northern Italy. Now an Episcopalian, he will assume his post in Scotland this January, after semester end at Mercer. This appears on the Church’s website:

The Rev Anne Tomlinson, Principal of SEI said “Dr Hull’s scholarship, experience, pedagogic skills and humanity will bring much to the SEI staff team as together we seek to form people as competent and confident authorized public ministers for the Church of God. I look forward enormously to welcoming him into the SEI community, to working with him and learning from him.”

The Rt Rev Kevin Pearson, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles and Convener of the Institute Council said “This is an exciting time in the development of the Scottish Episcopal Institute. Dr Hull brings a remarkable range of skills to the staff team and to the Scottish Episcopal Church.”

Dr Hull says “I am delighted for the opportunity to serve as the Director of Studies! The optimism of the Scottish Episcopal Church in its missional orientation is palpable. The chance to participate in the formation of women and men for authorised ministry in the Scottish Episcopal Institute and to share in the Church’s mission is thrilling. It is with great joy that I look forward to praying, working and growing with everyone in the SEC and SEI as we strive together to share the Good News of Jesus Christ.”

We know what Rev. Tomlinson means by the word humanity. 

The Scottish Episcopal Church, a proud celebrant of diversity, seems tailor-made for this new member of the Anglican communion. It describes itself as a denomination that “delights in its non-established status.” And its liturgies were made in heaven for an ex-priest who not long ago described himself as a card-carrying member of MoMA:

Its patterns of worship are full of drama and colour which link together the experimental and the intellectual.

In the end, Michael Hull has his Sheen Center. (The irony of it! The Center, rumored to have cost at least $20 million, no longer has him.) The only thing left to wonder about is whether Hull came to his new position with a recommendation from the New York Archdiocese. Could any of our episcopate have been that cynical or cavalier? Let us hope not.

No one begrudges Hull his ability to make a living or to continue teaching. But Director of Studies in yet another seminary? An authority intimately involved in the “formation of women and men for authorised ministry”?

Priestly formation takes place within a context of great moral seriousness. It is not the place for a man who brings to the job a middle-aged susceptibility to much younger women. And a taste for lavish digs. (It is still not known where funds came from for the high-end renovation of the Guardian Angel rectory which Hull abandoned shortly after completion.) Both inclinations are askance of the pastoral requirements incumbent on candidates for the ministerial priesthood. So is the chutzpah of a man who apparently feels no need to keep his head down after embarrassing the Church he was committed to serving.

What ever happened to the Scots’ reputation for canniness?

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It has been ten years since The Onion published its spoof of controversies over NEA-funded antics. By the time it appeared in 2004, audiences were pretty well accustomed to what Hilton Kramer once termed “a jolly rape of public sensibilities.” Writing in 1996, Kramer declared it almost went without saying that the “America-as-merde” tenor of so much recognized art arrives supported by NEA grants. 

That was also the year a professor at Bates College, William Pope, received a $20.000 grant for two performance pieces: In one, he would chain himself to an ATM machine in his underwear. In the second, according to news accounts, he planned to walk around New York City wearing a six-foot long white tube as a mammoth codpiece. This, you recall, followed on the heals Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ of blessed memory and preceded the foofaraw over Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum.

Whatever your position on the benefits of a federal hand in the arts—particularly to individual artists—The Onion piece is an evergreen. It is still fun to read after so many years, so many assaults brought to us with taxpayer dollars.

KANSAS CITY, MO—Republican lawmakers and conservative religious groups blasted the National Endowment For The Arts & Crafts Tuesday, claiming that the organization has allocated federal funds for “obscene crafts.

The $15,000 grant in question was awarded last October to Detroit arts & craftsman Albert Kahle, 39, for a nine-foot macramé penis titled “Father (By Mother),” which is currently part of the Macramazement! exhibit at the prestigious National Gallery Of Arts & Crafts in Kansas City, MO.

“‘Father (By Mother)’ is neither art nor craft,” House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) said. “It’s trash. The fact that American taxpayers are paying for this kind of lewd handiwork is outrageous.”

The macramé-work phallus comprises three discrete elements: testicles, shaft, and head. The testicles are knotted in Double Alternating Lark’s Head style and decorated with black maple beads. The shaft of the penis, knotted of Tammy’s Hemp Cord in flesh tone, is embellished with subtle strands of Half-Knot sinnet cord in light blue and Amy’s Cord in pale lavender. The head, the most detailed portion of the work, is embellished with a spray of silver glitter.

The Onion’s burlesque description of the art work is a pitch-perfect rendition of what art criticism has been reduced to. When grounds for judgment have disappeared or are dismissed, detailed description is all that is left. Reportage continues:

When expressing the human condition through craft, the craftsman is responsible only to himself,” Sirota [fictional NEAC spokesman] said. “It takes great courage to pick up those popsicle sticks and empty dishwashing-soap bottles and bring something forth out of the ether. The creative space is outside Congress’ jurisdiction.”

The macramé penis is Kahle’s first phallic work of art & craft to receive media attention. His other major works include a shoebox diorama titled “Abe Lincoln In The Bathtub,” a 13-foot-tall newspaper and poster-paint papier-mâché penis titled “What’s Black And White And Red All Over?,” and “Pin(whee)ls,” a collection of 200 pinwheels made of construction paper, pencils, and clippings from pornographic magazines.

“If people took the time to explore ‘Father (By Mother),’ there would be no controversy,” Kahle said. “The piece is not prurient. The true meaning of the piece is located on its head, where glitter was applied with Elmer’s Glue. Every speck of glitter is a tiny mirror reflecting the observer. At end, this piece is about love, sex, birth: what we came from.”

Lurking beneath the satire, is a serious comment on the pretensions of art and the cultural exhaustion they represent. Read the entire piece here. First have fun. Then weep.

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Here in my email this morning is an unhappy note from a Carmelite priest serving in a suburb of Dublin. He is terse. “Hatred of the Church in Ireland” is his only comment. No more words are needed given the accompanying article by Tim O’Brien that appeared yesterday in The Irish Times. It reports on the recent cutting down of a high steel cross erected some four decades ago on Carrountoolhil, County Kerry’s highest mountain. It had taken some one hundred people to put it in place in 1976 and had been televised as a major event at the time. Razed with an angle grinder, it was discovered recently by mountain climbers. 

The destruction is not being minimized as an random act of vandalism. It is understood as a sign of growing hostility toward the Church in Ireland.

Kerry county councillor John Joe Culloty who earlier this year proposed a crucifix be hung in the council chamber in Killarney, said the cutting of the cross was a further step in the move towards “a Godless society”.

Mr. Culloty sees Ireland moving away from its constitutionally affirmed Christian ethos in its effort to become secular:

He said he saw the removal of the cross as part of a drive to “allow what is not normal and to become normal”. He said he meant abortion, gay marriage and “assisted dying” as issues which were not normal.

Mr Culloty said it was his job to promote his faith “in a respectful way” and the special place of Christianity and Catholicism would not be removed from Irish life until the people of Ireland ever choose to change the constitution and honour “the Koran” or any other religious symbol in place of the cross.

Read the entire article here.

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Transparency is more appealing in concept than in practice—at least as it applies to backstage doings at the Sheen Center.

Judging from email responses, the Sheen is a great yawn to readers of First Things. No grand Truth is at risk in the matter. No heady policy positions. The only truths in play are those gnarled and spotted ones of human designs. Besides, mention of co-founder and erstwhile director Michael Hull points to disagreeable details better left in the dark. Do we need another scandal? Let’s not feed anti-Catholicism. Please, can’t we all just stick to the smiling aspect of things?

Scene from The Way of the World (1901). Museum of the City of New York.

Yes, of course we can. And we do. The genteel tradition persists bi-weekly in Catholic New York. House organ of the New York Archdiocese, the sheet is an amiable blend of public relations and parlor talk. Reading it reminds me of Sinclair Lewis’ description of William Dean Howells: “He had the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight was to have tea at the vicarage.” If Catholic New York were really a newspaper, it would lift the fog of picturesque edifications long enough to inquire into the Sheen’s costs and—most interesting—its original intentions.

Apparently, Cardinal Dolan inherited the Sheen project from his predecessor. Cardinal Egan and his protégé Msgr. Hull purportedly collaborated on the original concept, with the chancery in the loop. If what I am told is accurate, plans initially included a permanent space for the Gianna Center for Women’s Health and Fertility.

A pro-life clinic founded in 2009 by family physician Anne Nolte, the Gianna opened under the sponsorship of St. Vincent’s Hospital. Its prenatal care programs provide medical support to the region’s crisis pregnancy centers. As its name suggests, it also aids women seeking to conceive or to practice Church-approved family planning methods..

When St. Vincent’s declared bankruptcy in 2010 the Gianna lost its angel and needed lower cost space than it already occupied in mid-town. The Sheen, still taking shape, was a likely place to house the sponsorless Gianna. No such accommodation happened.

Illustration for Theatre World (September 1927) by Bovey.

Hosting the Gianna would have been an inspired use of archdiocesan property. Why? Because the Sheen, at 18 Bleecker Street, is next door to the Margaret Sanger Center, a prominent Planned Parenthood division at 26 Bleecker.

What happened to that reputed first intention? Are reports of it accurate? Or does the truth lie in claims that the Sheen meant only to provide temporary housing for the Gianna Center? Or maybe not at all? The story gets murky. All that is clear is that the Sheen arrived strictly devoted to the performing arts. And Gianna, committed to live performances of another kind, has found a new sponsor in St. Peter’s University Hospital, New Brunswick, and is again operating at its initial location on 40^th Street just off Fifth Avenue.

 This past January, Cardinal Dolan appointed Dr. Nolte to his Pro-Life Committee. Was the appointment a consolation prize of sorts? Last week, the cardinal presided over a fundraising gala at the New York Athletic Club to kick-start the Gianna’s regeneration uptown.

Illustration for Theatre World (January 1926) by Bovey.

Lord Acton was as hostile to secrecy-on-high as to the corrupting influence of power. Addressing his cautions to the Church, he descried bureaucratic secretiveness on grounds that it degenerates keepers of the secret: “Nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.” Good will—what Santayana called “the great American virtue”—is not enough.

At stake in the evolution of the Sheen Center is the way the chancery oversees and uses the monies it solicits from you and me. The archdiocese is obliged to account for its management of parishioner donations. Disclosure to donors is a moral obligation that is especially keen while parishes are being closed or merged. At the same time, transparency would help distinguish between the demands of evangelization and the ambitions of men seeking a stage.

I am caught here in futile wondering about the road not taken. Gianna’s presence within the Sheen could have placed a damper on the Sheen’s rental income. It might also have saved lives. Saved some, touched or unsettled others. It would have witnessed—in stone—to alternatives to the abortion “services” offered by the friendly, caring staff next door. (The Margaret Sanger Center has recently expanded its hours. The Sheen, meanwhile, set about re-renovating its theater space as soon as it opened.)

Transparency is its own justification. The men who instruct us in Truth cannot be slippery about lesser truths on which so much depends. Credibility is the linchpin of evangelization, now as ever. There is nothing new about it.

The hand is the window on to the mind.
—Immanuel Kant

Early man is our brother, body and soul. We beckon to him down the void of time, craving a glimpse of that epochal moment the human creature confessed, in his being, the image and likeness of God. A Paleolithic premise of ourselves, he gestures back; he signs to us with the work of his hands. Whatever meanings—part discovery, part projection—we pull from his works, one thing is indisputable: Our brother was gifted with an aesthetic sense. And grace of hand was well within his capacities.

Panel of horses facing each other. Chauvet Cave.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I watched Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams for the second time. I immersed myself in it to erase from mind, if only for an hour or two, the squalor of Ferguson and a power-and-race crazed president.

Filmed in 2010, the documentary is an enraptured tour of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave in southern France. Discovered twenty years ago, the cave is twice as old as the famed caves at Lascaux and Altamira. Chauvet’s wall drawings are about thirty five thousand years old in radiocarbon years. A smaller, second wave of activity followed some five thousand years later.

Cave is a glorious movie. I am glad not to have seen it in its original 3-D version. The impact of these Stone Age images is stunning enough without inflating the element of spectacle that, invariably, becomes an end in itself. My laptop condenses the poetry of Herzog’s camera. It mutes the opera  of big-screen entertainment to penetrate the obscurity of our beginnings with a suitable hush.

Lions chasing bison. Chauvet Cave.

Hibernating bears used this cave for thousands of years before man put his mark on it. A primeval landslide sealed those marks in a long, solitary slumber. The beauty of these drawings, their elegant lines and careful shadings, chastens that strain of our own contemporary art trumpeted for its presumed revival of the vitality of primitive forms. Those Paleolithic cave drawings available to us testify to an inherent love of workmanship independent of whatever function they might have served when they were made. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Untitled (1981). ADAGP Image Bank.

The word function is key. The Wagnerian sweep of Herzog’s own artistry is in service to what he calls “ecstatic truth.” But what truths these drawings reveal is open to debate. Herzog acknowledges their ambiguity with a typically modern question: “Will we ever be able to understand the vision of the artist over the abyss of time?”

Substituting vision for function, the filmmaker bestows on the makers of these works a self-consciously expressive, individualistic component. Ahistorical, that ingredient is the modified fruit of modernity and leisure. It is an unlikely factor in the precarious lives of ambush hunters and food gatherers during harsh centuries of glacialization. But what function did they serve? E. H. Gombrich asserted the prevailing opinion seven decades ago in The Story of Art:

Among these primitives, there is no difference between building and image-making as far as usefulness is concerned.  .  .  . Images are made to protect them against other powers which are, to them, as real as the forces of nature. Pictures and statues, in other words, are used to work magic.

It is easy to patronize rude ancestors who cannot testify with up-to-date eloquence. It is harder to remember that man’s primordial sense of enchantment—that same intuition of the numinous we bring to the sacraments—coexisted with his rationality. It did not displace it; if it had, we would not be here. It is hard to know that, though, from popular enthusiasm for retrospective condescension.  One introduction to Chauvet describes the natural bridge over the Ardèche River, running close to the cave, as something that was likely considered a “symbolic animal” by Paleolithic passersby. Maybe. But it could as easily have been considered a handy way across the gorge.  Another modern voice-over chirps that the bridge “would have been an impressive sight to Paleolithic residents.” It still is.

Herzog’s seductive presentation of the cave as a “lost cathedral” gilds the accepted interpretation. But before surrendering altogether, it is beguiling—in its own way—to keep in mind Josh Billings’s old caution: “Why is it that so much of what everybody knows just ain’t so?” 

Without denying received wisdom, we can still ask whether more than a single motive was in play in Paleolithic art. The dynamism of the Chauvet images upends any exclusively magical or runic one. These are not static symbols but life-like animals in motion. Horses gallop. Two rhinos butt heads. Lions stalk prey. A bear bends his head to the ground, as if foraging. Why such rambunctious emphasis on movement? Chauvet’s compositions delight in clamor and tumult.  They evidence no interest in stylization. Only an inexplicable panel of red ochre palm prints suggests ritual purpose or the sensibilities of priestcraft.  Its cavalcade of species conveys the zest of the pursuer together with the admiration of wary cohabitants. 

I love this bear. It was drawn with regard, even tenderness. Snuffling for berries or tubers, it does not display the posture of an object of veneration. Whatever else it might have represented in the day of its making, it comes to us as mortal, eking livelihood from a hardscrabble world:

Head of a bear. Chauvet Cave.

Our early brothers had the same need we have to instruct the young. How did they do it? Even if we grant them language, did they have syntax? We can guess but all we know for sure is they had pictures. And pictures are instructive. 

It is not just whimsy that makes me wonder if prehistoric drawing had a possible tutorial function, among others. Chauvet, with its chambers, fireplaces, and—so crucial—solid roof, would have served beautifully as a classroom. We moderns project PowerPoint presentations onto walls or proxies for them. Aboriginal instructors had no screens, no blackboard. They worked straight on the wall. Imagine a huddle of little boys being initiated into the hunt before joining adults on the risky business of a kill. (A young boy’s footprint survives on the floor of Chauvet.)

Rhinoceroses in combat. Chauvet Cave.

A fantasy, perhaps. But I am fond of it. One reason it appeals to me is that it offsets, without evicting, unquestioned insistence on religious function alone. Dominant association of the primitive with the religious yokes the two together in facile accommodation to secular self-congratulation. Religion is for cavemen. We are past all that now, thank God.

Herzog made an appearance in last year’s The Unbelievers, a talking-head paean to biologist Richard Dawkins, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, and the New Atheism in toto. His interview lent celebrity support to celebrity detractors of religious belief. Watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams again, this time in the wake of that interview, Herzog’s euphoric embrace of the cave-as-cathedral leaves behind the scent of atheism-for-aesthetes. Atheists, too, bow to beauty where they find it.

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Before bishops take possession of their dioceses they are to take an oath of fealty either to the Reich Representative of the State concerned, or to the President of the Reich, according to the following formula: “Before God and on the Holy Gospels I swear and promise as becomes a bishop, loyalty to the German Reich . . . . In the performance of my spiritual office and in my solicitude for the welfare and the interests of the German Reich, I will endeavor to avoid all detrimental acts which might endanger it.”
                                                                                           Article 16, Reich Concordat, 1933

Two books hold pride of place on my shelves. They stand next to each other, never separated in my possession or my thoughts. One is Gordon Zahn’s In Solitary Witness: the Life and Death of Franz Jäggersttäter. Its twin is The Prison Meditations of Father Delp, with an introduction by Thomas Merton.




                                                                               Fr. Delp, on trial at Gestapo headquarters.

Jägerstätter, a farmer and married father of four, resisted the advice of his own bishop in defying the Third Reich. Delp, a Jesuit and editor of Stimmen der Zeit, was associated with the Kreisau Circle dedicated to re-Christianizing society upon the collapse of Hitler’s regime. For challenging the collective delusion of their era, Jägerstätter was beheaded in Brandenburg prison in 1943; Delp was hanged two years later at Plötzensee.

Both were cremated by official order, their ashes broadcast on the wind. The Reich took care to leave no martyr’s relic to venerate, no burial place to mark. Jägerstätter was beatified in Linz in 2007; Delp, not so. (John Paul II passed over him for the more prominent Rupert Mayer, S.J., when he beatified Edith Stein in 1997.)

Franz Jägerstäter

For the moment, stay with Fr. Delp. We are in Advent now. And no one has written about the liturgical season as powerfully as he, a man who came to see life itself as a continuous Advent. Manacled in his cell, he could write only when his fetters were secretly unlocked or loosely fastened. Awaiting death, he had time only for the essentials: the question of man and the renunciations that awaken him to his true purpose. In God alone does man become fully man and find his End:

Advent is the time for rousing. Man is shaken to the very depths, so that he may wake to the truth of himself. . . . The kind of awakening that literally shocks man’s whole being is part and parcel of the Advent idea. . . . Life only begins when the whole framework is shaken.

The gallows at Plötzensee. Photographed in 2011, this is where Fr. Delp was hanged.

Delp reflects on three symbols bearing the Advent message: the voice crying in the wilderness, the herald angel, and Mary. Here, the herald angel:

Never have I entered on Advent so vitally and intensely alert as I am now. When I pace my cell, up an down, three paces one way and three the other, my hands manacled, an unknown fate in front of me, then the tidings of our Lord’s coming to redeem the world and deliver it have quite a different and much more vivid meaning. And my mind keeps going back to the angel someone gave me during Advent two or three years ago. It bore the inscription: “Be of good cheer. The Lord is near.” A bomb destroyed it. The same bomb killed the donor . . . It would be impossible to endure the horror of these times—like the horror of life itself, could we only see it clearly enough—if there were not this other knowledge which constantly buoys us up and gives us strength: the knowledge of the promises that have been given and fulfilled. . . .

The angels of Advent are not the bright jubilant beings who trumpet the tidings of fulfillment to a waiting world. Quiet and unseen they enter our shabby rooms and our hearts as they did of old. In the silence of the night they pose God’s questions and proclaim the wonders of him with whom all things are possible.

In the mounting loneliness of his cell, Delp addresses himself to you and me (“if ever these pages find you”):

Let us kneel and pray for clear vision, that we may recognize God’s messenger when he comes, and willing hearts to understand the words of warning. The world is greater than the burden it bears, and life is more than the sum-total of its grey days. . . . We must be our own comforters. The man who promises hope is himself a man of promise, of whom much may be expected.

Offered a reprieve if he resigned from the Jesuits, Delp refused. Instead, he held hope—even into his last hours—than the Russians would advance on Berlin in time to release him. “Can’t history come a little faster?” he asked the prison chaplain. On his way to the scaffold, Delp told him: “In half an hour, I’ll know more than you.”

In the shadow of execution, Delp kept a steady eye on the way spiritual questions masquerade as cultural or political ones. And he spoke down the decades to what lies concealed in our own Advent, caught in history’s labyrinth of cause and effect:

Among all the protagonists in the tragic drama of the modern world there is not one who fundamentally cares in the least what the Church says or does. We over-rated the Church’s political machine and let it run on long after its essential driving power had ceased to function. It makes absolutely no difference, so far the beneficial influence of the Church is concerned, whether a state maintains diplomatic relation with the Vatican or not. The only thing that really matters is the inherent power of the Church as a religious force in the countries concerned.

The guillotine was a fixture in Reich prisons. This, in Plötzensee, was identical to Brandenburg’s.

As Merton reminded, Delp died for his Church, obedient unto death. For that reason, we approach his words with heightened attention and deep respect. And the words are sober, unsentimental. These are among the hardest:

A Church that makes demands in the name of a peremptory God no longer carries weight in a world of changing values. The new generation is separated from the clear conclusions of traditional theology by a great mountain of boredom and disillusion thrown up by past experience. We have destroyed man’s confidence in us by the way we live. We cannot expect two thousand years of history to be an unmixed blessing and recommendation. History can be a handicap too.  .  .  . At some future date the honest historian will have some bitter things to say about the contribution of the Churches to the creation of the mass mind, of collectivism, dictatorships and so on.

Six months of beatings, hunger, and solitary confinement stripped him of patience with facile pieties and the shelter of easy gestures. He read a little Eckhart every day, advancing alone into what Johannes Metz termed a mysticism of open eyes.

Seven decades separate Delp’s Advent from ours. His era is over. Yet its desolations, presumptions, and perils survive in other guises. His legacy is a living thing that cries to be heeded. On Christmas Eve, 1944, he scratched into the wall with shackled hands: Trust life. We do not live it alone. God lives it with us.

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The life and witness of Alfred Delp are less familiar among First Things readers than I had thought. Several wrote to say they had not heard of him at all. Others asked why he should have been executed for refusing to resign from the Jesuits. Father Delp’s own letter, written from his cell to fellow Jesuits after sentence had been passed, answers that question. The letter contains the marrow of the man, the grandeur of his steadfastness and greatness of heart. The words themselves are grace-bestowing:

Dear Brethren,

Here I am at the parting of the ways and I must take the other road after all. The sentence has been passed and the atmosphere is so charged with enmity and hatred that no appeal has any hope of succeeding.

I thank the Order and my brethren for all their goodness and loyalty and help, especially during these last weeks. I ask pardon for much that was untrue and unjust; and I beg that a little help and care may be given to my aged, sick parents.

The actual reason for my condemnation was that I happened to be, and chose to remain, a Jesuit. There was nothing to show that I had any connection with the attempt on Hitler’s life so I was acquitted on that count. The rest of the accusations were far less serious and more factual. There was one underlying theme—a Jesuit is a priori an enemy and betrayer of the Reich. So the whole proceedings turned into a sort of comedy developing a theme. It was not justice—it was simply the carrying out of the determination to destroy.

May God shield you all. I ask for your prayers. And I will do my best to catch up, on the other side, with all that I have left undone here on earth.

Towards noon I will celebrate Mass once more and then in God’s name take the road under his providence and guidance.

In God’s blessing and protection,
Your grateful,
Alfred Delp, S.J.

It is left unspecified what Delp meant by his reference to “much that was untrue and unjust.” But the comment is of a piece with earlier, generalized confessions of unworthiness for his own lapses. Humility sharpens toward the end. And the harrowing end in which he found himself —to which he surrendered himself—left no room for pietistic evasion:

The devil. Yes there is not only evil in this world, there is also the evil one; not only a principle of negation but also a tough and formidable anti-Christ. Man must give thought to the fact that he must distinguish between the spirits. And to the fact that wherever self is stressed—as in strength that glories in its own might, power that idolizes itself, life that aims at “fulfilling itself—in its own way and by its own resources, in all these, not the truth, but the negation of truth may be suspected.

And there is only one thing a man can really do about it—fall down on his knees and pray. Only after ten long years—ten years too late—do I fully realize this.

You and I are awash these days in devotional writing. Mass market piety drips like sugared water down the page. The pamphlet press smiles and strokes. But Delp’s writing is of another order entirely. His words were formed at the edge of the precipice, death grinning in his face. There is a fragrance to these prison meditations. The odor of his own dying was in his nostrils as he wrote. Yet he did so with a sublime conviction—“Trust life. .  .  . God lives it with us.”—for which I have no gloss. I can only genuflect.

The conjugal act. I wince when I hear that phrase or see it in print. It is a wooden expression that trumpets discomfort with sexual expression, even distaste. A standard textbook phrase, it reduces marital sexuality to genital activity and an exchange of body fluids. The shrinkage is subtle but real.

Last month, Chiesa broadcast an encomium to Neocatechumenal families. It regretted their omission from vocal participation in the Synod because “they are the most engaged in putting the model of Catholic marriage into practice.” It printed an ostensibly confidential extract of a catechesis developed for internal use by Fr. Mario Pezzi, the Neocatechumenal Way’s high priest.

His attention to the centrality of the family is welcome. Less welcome is the language Fr. Pezzi uses in support of that centrality.

Aristide Maillol. Desire (1906-08). ©Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

Fr. Perri quotes José Noriega, of the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Study on Marriage and the Family, on the superiority of The Way. Noriega praises The Way for its “rediscovery of the holiness of the conjugal act.”

This is buttressed by co-founder Kiko Argüello’s assertion: “Responsible parenthood means accepting not to limit the number of children, it means accepting the plan of God.” In other words, Argüello rejects the contraceptive intention of what the Church refers to as natural family planning.

Set aside the unscriptural assumption that marriage is ordained to produce as many children as a woman can bear. The magisterium has never determined the number of children a couple should have. Neither has it invoked any commandment that couples have as many as physically possible.

Stay, for now, with rediscovery of the holiness of the conjugal act. The phrase repels in its priggishness and its implications. The rediscovery celebrated here skirts the premises of ancient fertility cults which sacralized sex and promoted fecundity. Seeking sanctity through sex takes us out of the gospels and drops us—at an acceptably Christianized angle—into The Golden Bough.

The mutuality of marriage occurs in countless ways: across a dinner table, in the kitchen, on the phone. It encircles everything from holding a job to holding one’s tongue. Conjugal self-giving embraces a universe of kindnesses, cautions, strains, and accommodations that make up a shared life. True conjugal acts are too many and various to list. Marital grace dwells in the totality of a life lived in tandem. For some, it abides in simply holding things together.

Cagnaccio di San Pietro. Onion Tears (1928). Camera di Lavoro, Trieste, Italy.

Holiness inhabits the individual, the person who acts. The schoolbook “conjugal act” is one of others that we, the embodied, perform. It is neither more nor less holy than the act of cognition, digestion, or any other bodily activity. Nor is it the only drive subject to the will. The vital processes of alimentation and elimination are each conducted within a framework of learned control.

Noriega’s wording, too easily mistaken as pious, is essentially pornographic. Like pornography, it falsifies sex. It strains to make sex ethereal, an attribute visible mainly from the planetary distance of the Vatican. Angelized sex is pornography’s mirror image.

Every animal species engages in coitus. Only human beings engage in lovemaking. We are the only ones who can bring to sex tenderness, intelligence, consideration, delicacy, playfulness, even humor. (“Happy combat” Michael Novak once called it.) Lovemaking is an activity of the whole person. But Fr. Pezzi will have none of that:

There is no love without the cross. So “making love,” as young people say, is pure falsehood. This is not a matter of love but of concupiscence, of attraction, etc.

These are the words of an executioner, accusatory and miserly. They are also askance of the mark. There is no life without the Cross.

Married or single, loved or unloved, we all live in the shadow of the Cross. The solitude of it is acute, inescapable. Aversion to the solace of sexual attraction denies the generosity of divine intent. Derision for the deep longing inherent in that phrase making love adds nothing to the Church’s credibility in sexual matters.

Jules Adler. Rough Weather on Open Seas: Sailors of Etaples (1913). ©RMN-Grand Palais, Paris.

With non-conjugal sex fast becoming the norm, the vocabulary of moral theologians and homilists could benefit from a taffy-pull. Evangelization originates in compassion for the world, not disdain for it. Language that suggests sexual desire is an obstacle to self-giving love convinces only stranglers who equate spousal sanctity with the reductionist duality of abstention or pregnancy.

The sexual revolution succeeded. Young people are unmoored and adrift in a permissive wilderness. If the Church is to lead them toward a humane understanding of the gift of sex, her spokesmen must first respect it for its intrinsic goodness, not solely for a procreative function shared with every species on the planet. Their counsel has to acknowledge sexual desire for the sweetness that it is—a fructifying promise—before it can plausibly direct it toward covenanted love.

I sorrow for any couple condemned to performing conjugal acts.

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Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books.
                                       Full title of H.G. Wells’ 1913 rule book for playing with tin soldiers

Old toy soldiers were a fixture in the local bookshop window when I was growing up. The store owner was Frank Womrath, a veteran of World War II. His affection for the military history represented by those hollow-cast lead figures had been well and truly earned.

I ached for a set. It did not matter which one. Highlanders in Black Watch kilts, Royal Marines, Buffalo Soldiers, or rag-tag Green Mountain Boys—all were beautiful. Hints were dropped; none were taken. What would a ten-year-old girl do with toy soldiers? My designs on them would have disappointed Wells: I’d have played house with them. I loved them for the same reasons I loved doll houses—for the Lilliputian charm of them. 

But there are better reasons to reclaim toy soldiers from adult collectors and return them to the children they were created for. T.S. Allen, a West Point graduate and second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, discussed those reasons in “Tis the Season for Toy Soldiers,” a recent guest editorial in The New York Sun.

The toy soldier is unique among toys in that he has an opponent and invites opposition. Once a child has grown old enough to begin aping the real world, she or he sets up an objective for the toys, and hopefully their friends bless them with competition. Rules (or, more often, norms of argumentation) are established to determine the feasability of achieving those objectives. A simple Kriegspiel develops.

In this way, the toy soldier models the real world better than any other toy. The world is and always will be a place of endless tension between competing forces. A child’s blocks and drawing-books may teach them reasoning, but cannot teach them the limits of reason. From toy battles the child learns two things. First, opposition is inevitable, and will come not just from the “enemy.” Little armies are afflicted by what military men call “friction of war” — they are hard to maneuver and fall over at the most inconvenient times. Second, the best way to overcome opposition is with aggressive initiative — forcing them to respond to you, rather than responding to them.

The school of the toy soldier educated many of the great leaders of the past. Winston Churchill, in tin wars against his brotherJack, learned from toy soldiers the craftiness about battle that he used to such effect against the host of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It is not just military men who have learned from their toys. Understanding of friction and instinctive intiative are military virtues, but they have equal value in the civilian world.

Anti-war dogma encourages magical thinking about a dangerous world and the abiding reality of enemies who do not smile on us. Toy soldiers are anathema in a cultural climate that entrusts its survival to certificates in conflict resolution and Orwellian word changes. Adult manners sweep the playroom clean of toy cannons and wind-up tanks. Today’s polite rumpus room is a hand-held video arcade with shooting games that test nothing more than manual reflexes:

Children will always find ways to play war. Video games, the new war toys, are an awful substitute. They teach children (falsely) that violence is enjoyable, easy to use, and sanitary. Toy soldiers do the opposite — indeed, in their heydey, they were seen as an antidote to rampant militarism. H.G. Wells, who revolutionized tin war with his 1913 book Little Wars, insisted that “I have never yet met in little battle any military gentleman, any captain, major, colonel, general, or eminent commander, who did not presently get into difficulties and confusions among even the elementary rules of the Battle. You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be.”

Photo by Mike Peters.

This Christmas, while we intone that lovely phrase “Peace on earth,” events remind us that the peace we are promised—the peace that passeth all understanding—is eschatological. Good will is not a virtue of history. Consider granting toy soldiers some space around the manger.

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With liturgical regularity, Christmastide brings the magic of The Nutcracker. This is the perfect season for it. By December, the year’s worth of adult disdain for all things enchanted has reached a crescendo. “No, Virginia, you’ve been had,” galumph uncomprehending gradgrinds who dismiss fantasy as lying. Childhood’s sensitivity to wonder is put to the test this time of year. Children are made to suffer obtuse grown-ups who refuse to believe that toys come alive, that mice have queens, or have forgotten that nightmares, too, have their bewitchments.

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s own illustration for Nussknacker und Mausekònig (1816). University of Oldenburg.

We owe The Nutcracker to Ernest Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, celebrated among the German Romantics of his day. As much a changeling in careers as in name, he was born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann in Königsberg, Prussia, in 1776. Sometime in his thirty-seventh year, he changed his middle name in honor of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Though he continued to use Wilhelm on official documents, he wrote and composed under the name E. T. A. Hoffmann.

Hoffmann had a variegated career as a stage manager, musician, music critic, librettist, artist, and, early on, a law officer in the Prussian army. He wrote and staged a ballet of his own, Arlequin, in 1816, the year in which he wrote what would later become the basis of The Nutcracker. To the extent that we remember him today at all, we are most familiar with his name as the writer of short stories. He was the fictionalized protagonist of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, based on three Hoffmann fables.

Illustration by Gannady Spirin (1996). 

Awake to the singular and inexplicable, Hoffmann disliked that breed of rationalists incapable of recognizing even the demonic. He intended The Nutcracker and the Mouse King as an unsettling novella for adults, not children. His seven-headed Mouse King is easily recognizable as a märchen variant of the Beast of the Apocalypse so famously depicted by Dürer. (The Nutcracker ballet, first performed in St. Petersburg, in 1892, to Tschaikovsky’s music, is based on Alexander Dumas père’s later and lighter adaptation of the tale.)

Hoffman created the story in opposition to what he saw as the Enlightenment’s assault on the imagination. He championed intimations of the extramundane, those veiled realms of the empirically unverifiable. A poet in words, music, and line, he defended the authenticity of realities existing outside the scientific world view. This passage from Hoffmann’s “The Perfect Stage Manager” is a sly guide to his aesthetic objectives:

If perhaps you have not already noticed it yourselves, I will herewith reveal to you that the poets and musicians are in an extremely dangerous league against the audience. For their aim is nothing less than to drive the spectator out of the real world where he is so well off . . . when they have completely separated him from everything that he previously knew and liked, to torment him with all possible emotions and passions extremely prejudicial to his health.

As preface to his  astute review of the score of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Hoffmann wrote that music “reveals an unknown kingdom to mankind: a world that has nothing in common with the outward, material world that surrounds it, and in which we leave behind all predetermined conceptual feelings in order to give ourselves up to the inexpressible.” Doing so, we enter the dark.

Illustration by Artus Scheiner (1924). Prague.

Shortly before Christmas this year, The New York Times permitted itself a guest appearance by Eric Kaplan, author of Does Santa Exist? A heavy thinker, Kaplan explains what it would take to induce belief in Santa: “Maybe I could take psilocybin and have a group of my friends chant, ‘Santa exists! Santa exists!’ while I am tripping my brains out.” He arrives at a boilerplate insight exquisitely fit for threadbare times: “Each belief is the beginning of a voyage of self-discovery.”

Poor Kaplan. The dolt has it backwards. Any Sugar Plum Fairy could tell him that self discovery has nothing to do with it. Not with belief, and certainly not with art. Hoffmann understood that true artistry originates in those ineffable modes of self transcendence that accompany genuine struggle to create. To believe.

Illustration by Dagmar Berkova (1964). Prague.

Before the season ends, try to spend some time with E.T.A. Hoffmann and The Nutcracker. Althea Bell’s translation is lovely, still available as a used book. Any edition with illustrations by Gannady Spirin, Dagmar Berkova, or—my very favorite—Artus Scheiner will get you through the humbug of the coming year. The edition with Maurice Sendak’s lively illustrations is everywhere but not nearly as captivating as others for lovers of book arts.

Jacket illustration for Althea Bell’s translation.

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There is a great temptation today to confuse sociological evolution with spiritual progress, and Christians are the first to succumb to that temptation. Nevertheless, the Bible expressly tells us that the history of mankind ends in judgment. It does not give place to the Kingdom.
                                                             Jacques Ellul, False Presence of the Kingdom

Conformity to the world is expressed by the passion for politics, by the politicizing of Christian thinking, manners and action.
                                                             Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment

In the cap and bells of Flip Wilson’s Church of What’s Happening Now, Pope Francis is readying an encyclical on climate change. He will address the world’s latest mutation of the grail quest: human ecology. Abandoning nuance for apocalyptic alarmism (“If we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us.”), Francis has signaled the tenor of his utterance.

It comes as no surprise. Handwriting has been on the wall along the Viale Vaticano from the get-go. At the beginning of his pontificate, Francis revealed himself to be fastidiously attuned to image. He refused to give communion in public ceremonies lest he be photographed giving the sacrament to the wrong kind of sinner. So, when he agreed to pose between two well-known environmental activists and brandish an anti-fracking T-shirt, we believed what we saw.

It was a portentous image. Press toads hopped to their keyboards to correct the evidence of our lying eyes. Francis was neither for nor against fracking, you see. Nothing of the sort. He was simply using a photo-op to assert blameless solidarity with the victims of ecological injustice. (Both a decisive definition of such injustice and its particular victims went unspecified.)

If that restyling were true, then the more fool Francis. But Francis is not a fool. He is an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist. His clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba makes that clear. Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets, sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.

Later this year, Francis will take his sandwich board to the United Nations General Assembly, that beacon of progress toward the Kingdom. Next will come a summit of world religions—a sort of Green Assisi—organized to lend moral luster to an upcoming confederacy of world improvers in Paris. In the words of Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Francis means “to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”

There is a muddle for you. The bishop asserts a causal relation between two undefined, imprecise phenomena. His phrasing is a sober-sounding rhetorical dodge that eludes argument because the meaning is indeterminable. Ambiguity, like nonsense, is irrefutable. What caliber of scientist speaks this way?

Ronald Gunther. Soap Box Orator (c. 1935). Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma.

Conscientious concern for the environment is not at issue. Man’s stewardship of the earth’s resources is to be taken with great seriousness. But debate as how best to effect that stewardship is intricate and ongoing. There are hazards in unraveling divergent, often contradictory, ideas and undertakings bundled together by the media as a coherent movement.

Francis serves an environmentalist mindset that, unlike the traditional ethos of conservation, views man as a parasite (Western man in Francis’ marxisant variant) and understands wealth in pre-modern terms as a zero-sum game. It discards the West’s great discovery—realization that wealth can be created. The endgame is transfer of wealth from productive nations to unproductive ones.

Boris Kustodiev. Festivity for Opening of the 11th Comintern Congress (1920). Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg.

Orthodox environmentalism resents human sovereignty over the earth we inhabit. It begrudges ingenuity in the transactions we invent with nature and with each other. Its radical form, which beckons Francis and Vatican academics, is atavistic, even animist. Discount the gospel gloss. What matters is the spectacle of the Church imitating the world by justifying political agendas based on still-contended data and half-baked Gramscian dogma. Jacques Ellul, writing in the post-war decades, cautioned against introducing political morals into the Church as a springboard for unexamined action: 

Proof is of no avail in the face of the sociological trends which bring Christians irrevocably to do what everybody else is doing, and to think what everybody else is thinking.

Ferdinand Hodler. The Orator (1912). Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Man cannot destroy “Creation.” It is not within his power. Nor is “Creation” a willful entity with Doomsday on its mind. Francis sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda. Francis’s loaded abstractions—a planet “exploited by human greed,” a vague “economy of exclusion,” and that old goblin, “the god of money”—echo Reverend Wright’s “A world in need is run by white folks’ greed.” Explicit racial component is absent from Francis’ denunciations. Nevertheless, hearers know which world—First or Third?—prompts papal hostility.

The world is what it has been and will remain. Satan is still the prince of it. And Francis is imprudent.

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We do live in history, and this age is hard to bear.
Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment

To be of one’s time means to attend to the nature of the times. It means resisting the siren call of the day’s enthusiasms—zeal for environmentalism, sustainability, multiculturalism, global fixes, et alia—in order to stay mindful of the root character of those enthusiasms and their ultimate ends. In short, it means becoming a critic of one’s time. Jacques Ellul, devoted to the life of the spirit no less than the life of the mind, was a critic of the highest order. 

One of the major interpreters of the twentieth century, his name is less recognized now than it was before his death twenty years ago. It is certainly not as familiar as our own decade needs it to be. By sweet providence, Ellul was born on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1912. It was a fitting birthdate for a man whose insights are as revelatory now as in the years of their creation. A man with the courage of his intuition, he addressed fellow Christians with the passion—and dismay—of the Latter Prophets:

The Church is the Bride, but she can be an adulteress. The Church is a community founded by the Holy Spirit, but she may become a community in which the Holy Spirit can no longer speak.

Ellul lived an extraordinary life, leaving a rich and masterful legacy. Active in the French Resistance and deputy mayor of Bordeaux in the immediate post-war years, he was a professor of law and social history at the University of Bordeaux and its Institute of Political Studies from 1946 until 1980. A Marxist at 19, he converted to Christianity at 22. He came of age intellectually in the 1930s within the circle surrounding Emmanuel Mounier and his journal L’Espirit. Ellul drew on  Mounier’s personalist philosophy of individual engagement. A Protestant, he was initiated into the same tenets of French personalism which took flesh in this country in the Catholic Worker movement under the tutelage of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. 

Ellul became known here in the 1960s for The Technological Society, published first in France ten years earlier. It is an astringent assessment of the threat to man’s personal and spiritual freedom posed by the technological world and the reach of its imperatives. But the range of his criticism and theological insight was far wider, cutting deep into the totalitarian aims and conceits of modern bureaucracy. By la technique, he meant the drive to rationalize and make efficient the myriad workings of human society. He cited politics—la politique—as another manifestation of the technicians’ illusory quest for political solutions to everything, including moral and cultural problems. Like Karl Barth, he took the fall of man with great seriousness.

As someone who had lived politics from the inside, he did not dismiss politics. Hardly that. His aim was to demythologize it, rein in its totalizing impulses. He wrote The Political Illusion in the spirit of the biblical prophets who called their own times to remember that the true essence of history resides not in political victories or defeats  but in God’s judgment on man’s dealings. Rejecting politics as the ultimate guidepost, he cautioned against powers that collectivize man via political channels. Such powers are supported by the Church at great risk to the gospel. By collaborating with the confusion of political or ideological symbols for religious ones, the Church unwittingly subordinates man’s ultimate end to temporal ones. And confounds his freedom.

The New Demons (1973) has a penetrating chapter on Christianity’s subservience to the sociopolitical milieu. A key passage:

[Christians} rush to the defense of political religion, and assert that Christianity is meaningful only in terms of political commitment. In truth, it is their religious mentality which plays a trick on them. As Christianity collapses as a religion, they look about them in bewilderment . . . hoping to discover where the religious is to be incarnated in their time. Since they are religious, they are drawn automatically into the political sphere like iron filings to a magnet.

Ellul was unsparing toward the ardent irrationality—“purely religious and mythical”—exhibited by men of science when they go political. At the same time, he was equally severe on religious men who confuse politics, including the political postures of men of science, with an avenue to the Kingdom of God. He was harsh toward what he deemed an illusory regard for the absolutizing pretensions of modern bureaucracy, secular or ecclesiastic. Ellul was no friend to the reach of the managerial state, to ideological drift toward collectivism, or to the hubris of schemes for world management.

The Meaning of the City (1970) is first among my favorites. For Ellul, the city, from the days of Cain to our own, represents both the pinnacle of man’s handiwork and the prime site of his rebellion. Charged with the poetry of biblical allusions, the book remains a startling theological reflection on modern urbanized culture. Babylon is his synecdoche for the historical sweep of mortal man’s monumental, and monumentally flawed, instincts and achievements. Rome, Berlin, Paris, Venice, New York—add Vatican City, as well—they are all the same city for there is “only one Babel”:

 All the cities of the world are brought together in her, she is the synthesis of them all (Dan. 3 and 4; Rev 14 and 18). She is the head and the standard for the other cities. She is the very home of civilization and when the great city vanishes, there is no more civilization, a world disappears. She is the one struck in war, and she is the first to be struck in the war between the Lord and the powers of the world. 

While his The Betrayal of the West (1975) acknowledges the West’s historic sins, Ellul understands them as the common sins of every civilization. What is peculiar to the West, and to it alone, are its virtues. In his words, the West “represents values for which there is no substitute. . . . The end of the West today would mean the end of any possible civilization.”

We are caught up by a kind of doom from which, it seems, nothing can rescue us, for even the disciples of Christ are rushing headlong to destruction. Only the rejection of everything Western, of everything the West has produced, can now satisfy the very men of the West. Throughout Europe and America we are watching a kind of mystery unfold; we are swept along in a vast procession of flagellants who slash at themselves and each other with the most horrendous of whips. .  .  . We have smeared ourselves with paint and blood to show our contempt for all that created the great civilization from which we spring. We even scourge ourselves hysterically for crimes we did not commit. In short, we show enthusiastic joy only at what denies, destroys, and degrades all the works of the West. 

Despite early attachment to Marxism and continuing sympathy with aspects of its critiques, he rejected its solutions and mourned its encroachment on Christian thinking: “Christianity celebrates its marriage with Marxism and proceeds to slay the old, impotent flesh that was once the glory of the world.” 

Ellul understood that the powers and principalities St. Paul warned against are changelings. They mutate with the times, costumed in new movements, sporting new slogans.  In his later years, Ellul turned his attention to the dangers of a resurgent Islam. Forthright and prescient, he kept his eye on the enemy as it advanced. And he had the courage to name it.

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Beauty is my business as thoroughly as trouble is Raymond Chandler’s. Still, you will never catch me talking about “the beautiful.” I have no idea what it is or what it might look like. A transcendental is a bit like a virtual “friend”—you never get to see it. In the lived life, beauty is sensible. It resides in individual things, in matter, the stuff of the world and of man’s hands.

Making things is the artist’s métier. Reflection on the appearance of particular things, and opinions on them, is within an artist’s bailiwick. But the marshlands of aesthetics are not. Neither are the umbras and penumbras of St. Thomas, where adepts scout out what he did not say but might have if he had been born later. This is sacred ground; artists should stay off the grass. Besides, post-Enlightenment steeplechases are no help in the studio.

Praxiteles. Hermes Holding Infant Dionysus (c. 330 BC). Archeological Museum, Olympia, Greece.

The most enduring part of Clive Bell’s influential 1913 essay Art and Significant Form is its opening lines:

It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that. It is certain, however, that about no subject with which I am acquainted has so little been said that is at all to the purpose.

Several centuries of intellectual hunting and gathering have been pledged to the effort to rationalize and systematize discussion of beauty. It is a mischievous topic, better left to philosophers and theologians. Yet even they can skid on it. Listen to Hans Urs von Balthasar:

[Beauty] is that aspect of reality without which the ancient world refused to understand itself. But ‘beauty’ has now become a mere word; while beauty herself has finally now bid farewell, imperceptibly and yet unmistakably, to our brave new world of commercial interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.

It takes chutzpah to make a pronouncement like that. Yet the quote is repeated with worshipful nods of assent, signaling the reciter’s break from the undiscerning masses. But is Balthasar’s allegation as consequential as it sounds? It is confident, sonorous, Germanic. But is it believable? Did the ancient pagan world—with its hot bull’s blood, temple slaves, and envious gods—hold to beauty in the conduct of life more intimately or adroitly than our own? Or is it simply that Balthasar prefers Praxiteles to Elie Nadelman?

Elie Nadelman. Tango (1920-24). Whitney Museum of Art, NYC.

Balthasar’s imperious assertion begs all evidence. Beauty has certainly not left the world. Like grace, it is everywhere. We have only to keep our eyes open. The philosophical mind is under no such obligation. It greets essences, not things. Its forte is speculative, not practical, not empirical. It owes no generosity to the tackle and trim of the workaday world.

When it does descend to things, speculation is often colored more readily by status—a socioeconomic bias—than by perception. Remember Henri de Lubac’s comment that Balthasar, his acolyte, was “perhaps the most cultivated man of his time.” It is tempting to ask if the flattery might have been less fulsome if Balthasar had whistled and played the harmonica instead of the piano. Even if he performed with the eloquence and delicacy of the great Belgian jazz musician Toots (Jean-Baptiste ) Thielemans, odds are that de Lubac’s tribute would have had a dent in it.

There exists tremendous beauty in man’s ingenuity in creating the ravishing abundance of goods that deliver us from mere subsistence. All the implements and resources that permit us to live longer and more easily deserve honor in discussions of what constitutes beauty. In reality, there is no inherent opposition between beauty and serviceability. Those who presume to hold a measure—the aesthetician’s sword of Merlin—by which to determine true beauty and fix it in place pride themselves unnecessarily.

James E. Allen, The Builders (1932). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

Things created as objets d’art can be quite dreadful; something as ordinary as a salt shaker can be beautiful. It is that very respect for utility that informed the life’s work of Shoji Hamada (d. 1978), the great Japanese ceramicist. Dedicated to the production of everyday wares, he had been drawn initially to painting. He explained his fateful reversal: “Even a bad pot has some use but with a bad painting there is nothing you can do but throw it out.”

Shoji Hamada. Bowl.

When I turn on hot water or come in from the cold, I am reminded of the functional beauty of the network of copper pipes connected to my boiler. And the boiler, in its homely, hard-working boilerhood, is itself a thing of beauty. High intellectual elegance imagined the ignition system that gets it going. A congeries of creative intuitions are hidden in the nerve patterns of vigilant gauges that alert the oil company, several towns away, when my fuel tanks are running low.

We sin against ourselves by believing that beauty has gone out of the world. It has not. Too many of us simply dislike acknowledging how much the ability to create and maintain it on a modern scale is owed to the loveliness of mechanics. To bushings, bearings, cranks, carburetors—every imaginable category of mechanical design—and to commercial enterprises like Weil-McLain and Honeywell  who make our boilers and our gauges.

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