Shakespeare

Few Elect?

Few Elect? on January 22, 2011

Why is it so seemingly difficult to save one’s soul? Why – as we are told – are relatively few souls saved in comparison with the number of souls damned? Since God wishes for all souls to be saved (I Tim.II, 4), why did he not make it somewhat easier, as he surely could have done?

The swift and simple answer is that it is not that difficult to save one’s soul. Part of the agony of souls in Hell is their clear knowledge of how easily they could have avoided damnation. Damned non-Catholics might say, “I knew there was something to Catholicism, but I chose never to go into the question because I could see ahead that I would have to change my way of life.” (Winston Churchill once said that every man runs into the truth at some time in his life, but most men turn the other way.) Damned Catholics might say, “God gave me the Faith, and I knew that all I needed was to make a good confession, but I reckoned it was more convenient to put it off, and so I died in my sins . . .” Every soul in Hell knows that it is there by its own fault, by its own choice. God is not to be blamed. In fact looking back on their lives on earth, they see clearly how much he did to try to stop them from throwing themselves into Hell, but they freely chose their own fate, and God respected that choice . . . However, let us delve a little deeper.

Being infinitely good, infinitely generous and infinitely happy, God chose – he was in no way obliged – to create beings that would be capable of sharing in his happiness. Since he is pure spirit (Jn. IV, 24), such beings would have to be spiritual and not just material, such as animal, vegetable or mineral. Hence the creation of angels with no matter in them at all, and men, with a spiritual soul in a material body. But that very spirit by which angels and men are capable of sharing in divine happiness necessarily includes reason and free-will, indeed it is by the free-will freely choosing God that it deserves to share in his happiness. But how could that choice of God be truly free if there was no alternative to choose that would turn away from God? What merit does a boy have in choosing to buy a volume of Shakespeare if there is only Shakespeare for sale in the bookstore? And if the bad alternative exists, and if the free-will is real and not just a pretence, how are there not going to be angels or men who will choose what is not good?

The question may still be asked, how can God have foreseen to allow the majority of souls (Mt.VII, 13–14; XX, 16) to incur the terrible punishment of refusing his love? Answer, the more terrible Hell is, the more certain it is that to every man alive God offers grace and light and strength enough to avoid it, but, as St Thomas Aquinas explains, the majority of men prefer the present and known joys of the senses to the future and unknown joys of Paradise. Then why did God attach such strong pleasures to the senses? Partly no doubt to ensure that parents would have children to populate his Heaven, but also surely to make all the more meritorious any human being’s putting the pursuit of pleasure in this life beneath the true delights of the next life, which are ours for the wanting! We need only want them violently enough (Mt.XI, 12)!

God is no mediocre God, and to souls loving him he wishes to offer no mediocre Paradise.

Kyrie eleison.

Sick Claims

Sick Claims on May 23, 2009

Another friend of mine tells me that on the occasion of some anniversary of Shakespeare (1564–1616), numbers of people, no doubt to battle “homophobia,” are maintaining once more that he was one of “them.” For proof that the Bard belonged to what is often called the Lavender Brigade, they are resorting as usual to the Sonnets, many of which were indeed lovingly addressed to a certain young man. Let us attempt to disentangle the mess.

Firstly, for men to misuse with men or for women to misuse with women that process which God gave to both to use properly with one another for the reproduction and continuation of the human race, is so grave a sin against God and human society that the Catholic Church calls it one of the four sins “crying to Heaven for vengeance.” To ensure that mankind continues, God gave to every one of us a deep and natural repugnance for man on man, or woman on woman. To whitewash the sin by blackening the repugnance for it as “homophobia,” is mentally and morally sick.

However, “to them that are defiled, and to unbelievers, nothing is clean” (Titus I, 15). For sick minds, there can be no such thing as a clean love between man and man. Therefore when Scripture (I Kings I, 26) presents to us such a love as noble in the extreme, as when David grieves for his dead friend Jonathan – “I grieve for thee, my brother Jonathan: exceeding beautiful, and amiable to me above the love of women. As the mother loveth her only son, so did I love thee,” these sick minds will declare that such love is to be approved of not because it could be void of sin, but only because to condemn it as sin is “homophobia.”

The case of Shakespeare’s love for the young man that he made famous in his Sonnets is surely similar. Many of them tell us how this young man was graced with a beauty comparable to that of women, or even more beautiful, says Shakespeare. And apparently those now trying to enlist the Bard in their ranks appeal in particular to Sonnet 20 for proof of his perversion. But I ask me: can they read? The first eight lines of this Sonnet may praise the young man’s feminine beauty, but the next four go on to tell how Nature endowed him also with a masculine feature which is (l.12) of no use to Shakespeare, but only to women (l.13). Conclusion? – “Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure” (l.14).

If people who have let themselves get caught in the vice against nature do all they can to get out of it, they deserve the sympathy of all sane souls. But if they so wallow in their perversion as to pretend that sane heroes of the past were like them, they need to be vigorously and clearly denounced – for as long as it is not illegal to do so!

Kyrie eleison.

Coriolanus Ouverture

Coriolanus Ouverture on March 7, 2009

Several of Beethoven’s most popular masterpieces give musical expression to a tremendous struggle within the human soul. Some, like the Third and Fifth Symphonies, finish in a blaze of heroic glory. The famous “Appassionata” Piano Sonata finishes in a storm of heroic destruction. The “Coriolanus Ouverture,” dating from the same peak of Beethoven’s creativity, ends in the hero’s undoing.

Beethoven loved reading Plutarch, whose parallel lives of great men of Greece and Rome have been called “a school for heroes.” Coriolanus was a conquering but proud General of the early Roman Republic who, considering himself at one point insufficiently appreciated by his fellow-Romans, offered his services to their enemy, the Volsci, and with a Volscian army advanced on Rome to tear it to pieces. Roman leaders, senators, friends and family begged him in turn to spare his own country. In vain. Only the pleading of his own mother at last broke down his anger. Sparing Rome, he doomed himself to exile and death amongst the Volsci.

Beethoven wrote his “Coriolanus Ouverture” to introduce the theatrical presentation not of the last of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, but of a play with the same title by a contemporary dramatist, H.J.v.Collin. The Ouverture is not programme music insofar as it stands on its own, purely as a drama of the soul in Sonata form, regardless of the story which inspired it. Nevertheless, it is easy to read the music in connection with that episode of Roman history:—

The Exposition’s first Subject in two parts would portray the General’s anger (bars 1–14) and his agitation (15–27), developed angrily (29–50), but running straight into the smooth and lyrical second Subject (52–77), which it is easy to visualize as the tender pleading of a strong and sure Roman matron. Anger returns (84–95), to fade into a little falling motif (96–100), which will quietly monopolize the Development (101–152) – mother winning the argument by gently wearing her son down? With the Recapitulation (152–229) the General’s anger breaks out again, more violent than ever (167–176), only to run into the pleading, also more insistent than before (178–206) – with Beethoven, a Recapitulation is liable to sharpen rather than soften the conflict which enlivened the Exposition!

The Coda, or tail of the piece (230–314), begins with mother again winning the argument (230–240), stalled by her lyrical pleading (242–254). A final confrontation (255–269) and argument (270–275) conclude in a last outburst of the General’s wrath (276–285), only this time it breaks down in a series of falling and quietening chords (286–294) for just the first phrase of the General’s agitation to re-appear four times (297, 299, 300, 306), each time slower and more subdued than the last, until the Ouverture dies away in silence. The General and his wrath are undone. Rome is saved!

Catholics, if you do not wish to tear Rome to pieces, listen to your Mother! Non-Catholics, if you do not wish to help to tear your country to pieces, listen to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of us all, from the foot of the Cross!

Kyrie eleison.

Anti-Culture Antidote

Anti-Culture Antidote on May 31, 2008

In the recent April 15 issue of “ The Remnant,” there appeared an article “Windy Blather and Lies” by a young man that I don’t think I have ever met, but saying what I have been saying for many years: movies are far and away the most formative influence on young people’s hearts and minds today, and they constitute a tremendous obstacle to the youngsters’ either growing up or acquiring any sense of reality, let alone getting to Heaven.

The author of the article, E.Z., teaches at a Traditional Catholic school for boys which is outstanding in the USA today, yet he says that when the boys come back from a vacation, the one question they are all asking one another is what movies they have seen! I am not surprised, nor do I blame the school. What else does the anti-culture of today’s dissociety have to offer to the youngsters for the feeding of their minds? Worse, what real grip can the Catholic religion have on minds and hearts marinated in such silliness and unreality? As Marcel de Corte puts it, how can someone who has no idea of real being have any real idea of the Supreme Being?

Not that reality will let itself be overwhelmed. Through finance, economics, soon politics and war, it is coming back at a rate of knots. The danger is rather of our children being so progressively caught up in the wilfully immature fantasy that it will be too late for them to re-adjust to reality. “Movies are all they know,” says E.Z., “they aren’t learning anything about life except from movies. How can they reconcile a phony Hollywoodian perception of reality with their Catholic Faith?” No wonder Conciliarism took over from Catholicism!

The whole of E.Z.’s article, especially for adults who may never have thought about the matter, needs to be read and pondered on (four copies available for 4 from Remnant Reprints at PO Box 1117, Forest Lake, MN 55025, USA), because not only was E.Z. himself in his youth, as he tells, totally trapped in movie-mania, but also he found a wholly practical way out – recordings of lectures on the classics, especially Shakespeare, by Dr. David White.

Says E.Z., “You’ll learn more about the world and more about yourself and more about your Catholic Faith by listening to those hundred lectures than in any school anywhere.” Strong words, but they make sense. Dr. White knows both where youngsters (and adults) are at today. and he knows his Faith, so that his tapes can provide an incomparable bridge between the two. Get the article, get the tapes (I get no commission).

Kyrie eleison.

Wagnerian Redemption

Wagnerian Redemption on September 1, 2007

Teaching some Humanities to pre-seminarians, I have again chosen to introduce them to Richard Wagner, German composer of famous music-dramas, and one of the most interesting characters of modern times. Straddling most of the 19th century (1813–1883), he was certainly not the greatest man of his time, but he was surely its most comprehensive artist. For breadth and depth of his world-vision, he must rank alongside Dante and Shakespeare, but not for truth, because he held up the mirror to an age falling away from God. Here was his greatness, and his misery.

Here was his greatness, because there is no question that he had a real sense of the heights and depths of man, crying out for religion. His misery lay in the fact that he came up with a non-religious solution to that religious need. However his substitute solution has been enormously popular to this day, precisely because he seems to satisfy that religious need while leaving the real God, as modern man wishes, out of the picture. Hence the veritable cult of Wagner by “Wagnerians,” for whom his music-dramas can act as a substitute religion.

What is that solution of his? Basically, the redemption of a fallen world by love between man and woman. In each of the four great works of his maturity, “The Ring,” “Tristan and Isolde,” “The Mastersingers” and (with a slight variation) “Parsifal,” the basic plot is the same. Up against, primarily, a social structure and authority unable to adapt and therefore stranded in unreality, and up against, secondarily, a kind of underworld also resisting, there arises a hero to love and win a heroine, united with whom in redemptive love he brings about a revolution which, through their love, rescues society and restores reality.

In other words, the authority figure or figures are ineffective and, if not themselves villains, at least seconded by villains, whereas if only the boy can find his girl, he and she will make everything happy ever after. Does anyone recognize the formula of numberless Hollywood films? Of course a good wife is a tower of strength to her husband and children (see Proverbs Chapter 31), but to rest the salvation of the world upon her shoulders is asking altogether too much – how long are households patterned primarily on Hollywood apt to last? Often not long.

Of course Wagner is not the sole source of Hollywood plots, but he is the main origin of a mass of its sub-Wagnerian music, and there is no denying the huge influence of that music and of Wagner’s mythology on modern times. Boys and girls, take heed. Wagner is a great musician, but there is no substitute for the true God. People in authority are not automatically antiquated, or villains; and neither of you is the complete solution to the other’s problems. You both need Our Lord Jesus Christ and the fullness of his Catholic Truth, and his sacraments.

Kyrie eleison.