“Because there was no room for them at the inn.”

Those words, some of the most poignant in all of Western literature, words which have inspired countless treasures of music and iconography and devotion, may be a mistranslation.

That is the suggestion of Ian Paul, an Anglican theologian who argues that the Greek word kataluma which St. Jerome rendered diversorium and most English Bibles translate “inn” may well mean simply, as it does elsewhere in the Gospels, “upper room.”

… the actual design of Palestinian homes (even to the present day) makes sense of the whole story. … most families would live in a single-room house, with a lower compartment for animals to be brought in at night, and either a room at the back for visitors, or space on the roof. The family living area would usually have hollows in the ground, filled with straw, in the living area, where the animals would feed.

—mangers, that is, which would provide a natural place to rest a baby.

Paul provides a few other reasons, aside from the philological one, as to why the traditional picture of the Holy Family alone in a stable or cave may be lacking in historical accuracy: most notably, the hospitality customs of the Middle East would have made it nearly impossible for St. Joseph not to have been received by some of his relatives.

Read the rest at the Register.

In Excelsis Gloria

When you have children, you rediscover things.

For example: the Wee Sing recordings (the older ones, anyway), some of which can be found on YouTube and Archive.org.

And other things you discover for the first time, like their Christmas recording, which like any good Christmas album contains a mixture of predictable standbys and mildly exotic old folk songs.  Among the latter was one I hadn’t heard before, but which the narration explained had been written by a priest in the 1600s to teach the Indians about Jesus.

I liked the song enough that, a brief internet search later, I had my title: the “Huron Carol,” also known as “’Twas in the Moon of Wintertime.”  It is the oldest Canadian Christmas hymn, having been written by the Jesuit missionary and martyr Jean de Brébeuf.

At some point in my research the cynical thought occurred to me that, were anyone to do what Brébeuf did today, and adopt another culture’s language and forms to convey their culture’s information, it would be deemed both cultural appropriation and colon(ial)ization.  On the other hand, one generally imagines appropriators to be casual users; Brébeuf’s commitment to learning the language and culture of the Indians he sought to convert was anything but lackadaisical.  And however great his temerity in proselytizing, one can hardly come up with a greater penalty than martyrdom …

On the other hand (for it is Christmas), it is interesting to consider that the most universally appropriated culture on earth is Christianity.  Oh, I know the history of forced conversions; I am referring to the main of Christianity’s spread.  From a slaves’ religion two thousand years ago to the courts of the empire by 300 A.D. to wherever we are now …

But Christians have always wanted to share their “culture,” their cultus.

And Christianity has a way of revenging itself upon those who appropriated it merely to mock it.  The story of St. Genesius is instructive.

But this is straying far from Jean de Brébeuf and the Hurons.  Here is a solid recording of the song.  The usual English lyrics are not an especially good translation; the one below the video is supposedly more accurate.

 

 

Have courage, you who are humans, Jesus, he is born
Behold, the spirit who had us as prisoners has fled
Do not listen to it, as it corrupts our minds.
Jesus, he is born, he is born; Jesus, he is born.

They are spirits, coming with a message for us, the sky people
they are coming to say, "Rejoice" (ie., be on top of life)
"Marie, she has just given birth. Rejoice."
Jesus, he is born, he is born; Jesus, he is born.

Three have left for such a place, those who are elders
A star that has just appeared over the horizon leads them there
He will seize the path, he who leads them there
Jesus, he is born, he is born; Jesus, he is born.

As they arrived there, where he was born, Jesus
the star was at the point of stopping, he was not far past it
Having found someone for them, he says, "Come here"
Jesus, he is born, he is born; Jesus, he is born.

Behold, they have arrived there and have seen Jesus
They praised (made a name) many times, saying "Hurray, he is good in nature"
They greeted him with reverence (i.e., greased his scalp many times), saying "Hurray"
Jesus, he is born, he is born; Jesus, he is born.

"We will give to him praise for his name"
"Let us show reverence for him as he comes to be compassionate to us."
"It is providential that you love us and wish, ‘I should adopt them.’"
Jesus, he is born, he is born; Jesus, he is born.

How to Say “Thanks” for that Honorary Degree

But it’s Wednesday, you’re saying.  But it’s time for MidWeekMuse!

Ah, mon frères, I am glad that you pay attention to these details.  It indeed time for midweek muse.  Today, it comes to you with a story.

When Johannes Brahms was in his late forties, the University of Breslau (now the University of Wrocław, Poland) awarded him an honorary doctorate of music.  “The degree came with a pompous Latin sentence describing Brahms as ‘the foremost composer of serious music in Germany today.’”  (Source.)

Usually these days one gets honorary degrees in return for speaking at a commencement or some such occasion, but Brahms was a composer, rather than a public speaker, so they expected him to do what he did best: write music.

“Apparently he initially wrote them a simple thank you note but the conductor Bernard Scholz, who had nominated him for the degree, convinced him that protocol required him to make a grander gesture of gratitude. The University expected nothing less than a musical offering from the composer. ‘Compose a fine symphony for us!’ Scholz wrote to Brahms. ‘But well orchestrated, old boy, not too uniformly thick!’” (Source.)

Can you imagine writing that to a world class composer, as if you were ordering up a pudding?  No, neither can I.

Alas, no new symphony was forthcoming.

“Rather than composing some ceremonial equivalent of Pomp and Circumstance—a more standard response—Brahms crafted what he described as a ‘rollicking potpourri of student songs,’ in this case mostly drinking songs. It is easy to imagine the amusement of the assembled students, as well as the somewhat less-amused reaction of the school dignitaries, to Brahms’s lighthearted caprice.

“The Academic Festival Overture showcases four beer-hall songs that were well known to German college students. … It was the first melody, however, that was most notorious in the composer’s day. ‘Wir hatten gebauet’ was the theme song of a student organization that advocated the unification of the dozens of independent German principalities. This cause was so objectionable to authorities that the song had been banned for decades. Although the proscription had been lifted in most regions by 1871, it was still in effect in Vienna when Brahms completed his overture. Because of this ban, police delayed the Viennese premiere of the Academic Festival Overture for two weeks, fearing the incitement of the students.”  (Souce.)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, what what?

Play by play of the songs (pun intended?) can be found here.

I’ve always (by which I mean, for at least a few years now) wanted to found my own university, which will be practically perfect in every way and one hundred percent free of politics and only hire my friends.  Now I have reached a further decision: Our graduates and deans and boards will never, never march to “Pomp and Circumstance.”  Gaudeamus juvenesdum summus!

And a final fun fact: This is the piece that is used as a leitmotiv for the delightful and very Chestertonian movie People Will Talk, which I described some time ago in another blog post.  (There, I called the music Beethovenian—my sincere apologies to both composers.)  If you haven’t seen the movie, find a copy—it is delightful.  Kitschy?  Only if you decide it’s kitsch as opposed to brilliance that you happen to enjoy.

And so it is with the Brahms.  Play on, Johannes.

Bonus on top of the boni: Bernstein a delight to watch.

Kings, Bad Guys, and Propaganda Misfires

At Mass yesterday, Father recalled the recent feast of St. Miguel Pro, and remarked on the relation between that priest’s martyrdom and the present feast of Christ the King.  It was Fr. Pro who, sent up before a firing squad, stretched his hands in a cross and cried out ¡Viva Cristo Rey! (“Long live Christ the King!”).

And last week the (thankfully-not-permanent) deacon’s homily treated of the same martyr.  Deacon observed that this is a rare situation in which we have photographic evidence of the events—a fact of which I had long been aware.  The deacon supplied the reason for the photograph’s existence, and made me shake my head at myself for my long-time incuriosity on the topic.  Apparently Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles wanted evidence of the cowardice that he was sure Pro would show while being shot, as a way of discrediting Catholics and Catholic clergy.  Instead, the world got this:

There are many other pictures as well, 
but they are not for the faint of heart.

Reportedly, Calles tried to recall the photographs, but they had already been released to international news organizations.  Pro’s display of heroism—and his reminder that no government can claim to hold sway over Christ’s kingdom—was a matter of historical record.

As was another reminder, to the rest of us.  One writer (whose piece on Pro is well worth reading in full) relates seeing a depiction of the martyrdom in a church:

Not being an especially pious fellow, my first thought when I saw this wonderful window was: “Can you imagine being the guy with the gun? I don’t suppose he thought, ‘I’m going to be in a beautiful stained-glass window some day for doing this—as the bad guy!’” This should give us all pause about things we’re ordered to do.

Can you imagine, decades later, one of those soldiers showing the famous images to his grandchildren, pointing exuberantly, and saying: “You see that rifleman third from the left? That’s me! Look; there’s your grandpa shooting a saint down in cold blood!” Not likely.

I’m not sure I can improve on all these insights, so I’m just going to leave this right here.

Nature and Supernature

At Mass yesterday Father remarked that it is not the heart but the crucifix which is the real symbol of love.  A truism, perhaps, for a practicing Catholic, but one worth repeating to oneself from time to time.

I am working on a dissertation that deals—in a more direct fashion than I expected it would when I began—with the clash of medieval and Renaissance views of nature and society, or natural and human law.  The older medieval view was that nature and natural law were responsible for much of what was good in man; in the high Renaissance this view was sometimes warped into a Pelagian worship of man-as-natural being, in much the same way that post-Cartesians worshipped man-as-thinking-thing.  One of the many facets of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation was a reaction to this excessive Renaissance optimism.  Thus reformers of both stripes and secular Renaissance skeptics joined in emphasizing the insufficiency of human nature for salvation, and perhaps even for social and political life.  The later, Hobbesian view of a warlike state of man has real connection to the strong Calvinist notion of man as totally depraved.

Between their ideas and the Platonic-Aristotelian image of simple shepherds, devastated by the elements and bonding together to ensure survival for themselves and their families, gapes a wide gulf.  For the ancients and medievals nature was lively and dangerous, and human beings bonded together to find their natural place in it.  But beginning with the early modern era, nature became subject to the conquering techne of man, while human beings themselves became less and less worthy of trust and less and less natively inclined to order.

Who is right?  Both; neither; I’ll get back to you on that.  I have strong sympathies with the older view, of course; but … This much I will grant to the modern view.  On a day-to-day level, mere human virtue however advanced seems to be but rarely sufficient to deal with the trials and tribulations of ordinary life.

Too bad I wrote an undergraduate thesis arguing in the opposite direction!

But the older I become, the more convinced I am that sanctity is necessary not merely for entry into heaven, but also to live a tolerably happy life on earth.  At a certain point after being woken up for countless times in the middle of the night, nature is no longer sufficient; supernature becomes necessary.  The heart will always remain, but it can only beat on the blood of the cross.

Patria

At Mass yesterday Monsignor made the observation (based on his welcome upon his first visit to Italy) that home is not so much where one is born and raised as where one feels most at home; the paradigmatic case of this truth, he added, is that earth is less our home than the heaven that we have never seen.

Thomas Aquinas, of course, calls heaven “patria,” the homeland or, more literally, the fatherland.  For the Jews there was the promised land of Israel, for the Romans the patria—that is, Rome and its Empire.  Christianity, adopting the eschatological significance of Jerusalem and the Roman term patria considered its true home to be heaven.

But the pull of earth is strong, and the desire for patria remains even amongst those who have left Christianity behind.  Thus, of course, the Nazi conception of Vaterland took on a salvific edge that the Romans, to whom the Nazis preferred to liken themselves, surely never included in their thoughts.  Thus the mild error of many nations, of crediting their earthly polities with more longevity and significance than belongs to any institution of human nature, was taken to a deadly extreme.

There is, of course, an equal and opposite error (as Aristotle and C.S. Lewis would surely remind us), perhaps more common in the West today, of insisting that there be no human patria.  Mostly people label this as a liberal or progressive or leftist or globalist error, even as people consider too excessive devotion to the human patria to be a vice of the right.  What people tend to forget is that—as the former U.S.S.R. showed—the “liberal” error can be just as deadly.

I suspect it is not a coincidence that Stalinists and Nazis produced more horrific versions of their respective errors than, say, the Whigs and the Tories, or than anything we have see yet in America today.  The Whigs and the Tories were still Christian, by culture at least, and the idea of the heavenly patria hovered in the air they breathed like a friendly miasma, an inoculation of sorts against too great an excitement at secular political solutions.  America today, in contrast, is post-Christian, and while the heavenly patria is a legend for most and a fact for only a few, it is not a real rival to secular ideals; American secularists on either side of the aisle have no great religious concept of patria on which to model their acceptance or rejection of nationhood.  It was only the age that actively rejected Christianity that saw both the exaltation and the negation of political patria take on a demonic shade.  Whether the rejection and the demonization (demonification?) were effect and cause, and which was which, or whether both were caused by some third thing, I cannot guess; but surely the coincidence was no accident.

In any case, history would seem to suggest that the rejection of Christianity, far from being a purely liberalizing phenomenon, comes with its own problems.  And anyone concerned over the return of an unhealthy nationalism would be wise to make Christianity their friend rather than their enemy; for in a right understanding, nothing could be more salutary in adjusting notions of the human patria than a firm belief in and a rightly ordered love of the patria that is the Christian heaven.

The Death Penalty and the Nature of Human Government

As the Register has reported, Pope Francis’s recent request for a reformulation of the catechism’s language on the death penalty (as relayed in the official CDF letter, which can be read here) has met with both cheers and concern among faithful Catholics.  While theologians and philosophers debate the proposed change and its implications for understanding the Church’s development of doctrine, a certain amount of confusion has arisen among ordinary lay Catholics due to the language used in the letter.  The key paragraph (#2) gives three reasons for revising the Church’s standard language on the death penalty.

If, in fact, the political and social situation of the past made the death penalty an acceptable means for the protection of the common good, today [1] the increasing understanding that the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes, [2] the deepened understanding of the significance of penal sanctions applied by the State, and [3] the development of more efficacious detention systems that guarantee the due protection of citizens have given rise to a new awareness that recognizes the inadmissibility of the death penalty and, therefore, calling for its abolition.

The third reason is one that applies to modern states (if not, perhaps, to some third world countries), and constitutes a simple reiteration of an argument made by many Catholics, including notably Pope John Paul II — namely, that modern prisons being more or less break-proof and humane, the common good is equally protected by the incarceration of criminals as by their execution.  This is a prudential judgment—a claim that the death penalty is not necessary, rather than that it is absolutely wrong—and as such is readily aligned with previous generations of Catholic teaching.

The first reason is more complicated.  The wording—“the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes”—presumes (a) that the death penalty necessarily is more contrary to human dignity than life imprisonment and (b) that there is only one sense of human dignity.  It is largely on these two points that theologians and philosophers have their debates; and as I am only an amateur on this topic, I will not venture into that minefield.

The second reason, however, is a matter of history; and here I have something to suggest.  The CDF letter says that today we have gained a “deepened understanding of the significance of penal sanctions applied by the State.”  The words are vague.  One plausible reading is that we now realize (based on new psychological studies, etc.) that penalties such as life in prison are in fact appropriate and sufficient responses to crimes such as murder, while the penalty of execution is excessively cruel.  (Of course, what constitutes the appropriateness of a punishment is another question—one to which, again, the professional philosophers and theologians are welcome.)

There is, however, another sense in which the modern mind has gained a new notion of the state’s penal sanctions; and it has to do with our understanding of the nature of the state.

Read the rest at the Register.

Why the Martyr Wears a Crown

At the end of June and beginning of July the calendar of the universal Church is marked by the feasts of a number of well-known martyr-saints.  June 29th marks the solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, preceded on the 28th by Irenaeus and followed on the 30th by the First Martyrs of Rome; Thomas More and John Fisher had their feast the previous week; Oliver Plunket, Thomas the Apostle, and Maria Goretti the following week.  Mid and late July is thinner, but the little-known bishop St. Apollinaris has his feast on the 20th, and St. James on the 25th.

The presence on the calendar of so many martyrs raises the question—more striking with the martyrs of more recent eras—of the martyr’s crown.  The phrase is a familiar one, and the concept is old: a fifth-century fresco from the catacomb of St. Gennaro (unfortunately under copyright) shows Sts. Peter and Paul carrying their crown of martyrdom in their hands.

The crown is perhaps a puzzling symbol in our day and age.  The martyr’s palm is more easily explained: the palm branches from Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, linked to the suffering and the victory of his passion and death, makes their association with the martyr’s sufferings commonsensical.  But in our (almost) post-royalty age, the martyr’s crown may seem outdated: a relic of times when we thought leaders of countries required a shiny thing on their heads to impress their subjects, or possibly to mark them out in battle.

I would not deny that a crown serves those functions as well: like any singular article of clothing, it marks its wearer out.  But there is a significance to decorating, indeed, to glorifying the head, which goes beyond mere convenience.  The head contains the brain, the seat of the mind; it is associated with wisdom, insight, good judgment … Perhaps the king wore a crown not merely to impress, but to remind his people and himself that his job was above all to be wise, to rule justly, to judge with “epikeia” (roughly: “reasonableness”).  That perhaps is part of the reason why English judges long retained the practice of wearing enormous and ridiculous wigs: because (on some unconscious level) people felt that they looked more impressive and specifically more wise and therefore worthier to be judges.

Read the rest at the Register.

Of Artistry

The recently unveiled Obama portraits have sparked some mild, entertaining controversy.  There is no need for me to offer an artistic review.  I haven’t the credentials (not compared to my credentials for talking literature and philosophy, anyway); as for my taste, that is clear enough to anyone who has spent time on this blog.

But I did find it interesting when some people began to take note of the fact that Mr. Obama’s portrait may have been “outsourced to China.”  A cursory search (come, come, mon frowning frères, this is not my day job) indicates that bits of the work may well have been done in China, since the artist who painted the portrait, Kehinde Wiley, has a studio there.  According to New York Magazine …

Producing work in China cuts costs, but not as much as it used to, Wiley says. These days in Beijing he employs anywhere from four to ten workers, depending on the urgency, plus a studio manager, the American artist Ain Cocke. The Beijing studio began as a lark: After visiting an artist friend there and liking what he saw, he and a couple of his New York staffers flew out, rented some space, and started painting, “sort of like a retreat,” he says. One thing led to another—“another” being a five-year relationship with a Chinese D.J.—and eventually the Beijing studio became the main production hub as well as his second home.  (Source)

There has been some tut-tutting over this revelation—The Obama portrait may not have been painted entirely by the artist?  Quelle scandal!—but it really isn’t scandalous.  (By comparison, Wiley’s portraits involving severed heads—also discussed in the article above, and by the left-leaning site Snopes—are perhaps worthy of discussion.)  As the magazine observes, “There’s nothing new about artists using assistants—everyone from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons has employed teams of helpers, with varying degrees of irony and pride …”  At the same time, “Wiley gets uncomfortable discussing the subject.”

Should he?  I don’t know.  In the wise words (which I have quoted before) of Pitti-Sing, “Bless you, it all depends!”

For hundreds, probably thousands of years artists have used assistants to create their work.  It was common during the Renaissance for a master painter to run a studio where his assistants, themselves in training to become master artists, would fill in the details of large works under his direction.  (Here’s a quick primer on the topic.)  In fact, the practice was so common that museums sometimes list works as coming “from the workshop of —.”  (I don’t know for sure, but I assume there is some fairly sophisticated art detective work involved in determining whether an artist had assistance, and how much he had—in other words, when a museum decides to list a painting with that caveat, it may be a guess, but it is a well-educated guess.)

The same sort of attitude can be seen in pre-modern literature.  Shakespeare was famously not embarrassed to “steal” his plots from elsewhere—everybody did it, and everybody knew about it.  Such “theft” could even be a selling point for a new work.  During the medieval era a common trope was to claim “an ancient book” as the source for one’s own ideas, since readers attributed more authority to older works.  (Does the phrase “stood the test of time” ring a bell?)  The earliest collection of King Arthur stories was produced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who makes an “ancient book” source claim.  In his time, he was probably believed.  Today, though scholars think there may well have been a chieftain (more likely several) who inspired the Arthurian legends, it is generally admitted the Geoffrey made most of his stuff up.

A modern instance of this sort of thinking can be found in varying attitudes towards plagiarism.  For many non-Western students (middle Eastern, Indian, and Asian), the idea that you oughtn’t repeat another person’s words without attribution is strange.  For some Asian cultures, there is an assumption that if a thing is worth repeating it is also the sort of thing that everyone would recognize.  One does not put Confucius in quotes because to do so would be insulting to one’s readers.

It is the West that changed, largely through the adoption of the Romantic idea of the Artist as Solitary Genius.  For figures as enormous as Byron or Beethoven, collaborating with mere mortals would have been absurd (and, probably, given the personalities involved, painful for everyone concerned).  Somehow this notion spread throughout the arts and among the consumers of art, so that today the idea that a painter—like Wiley—might not create every brushstroke seems practically scandalous to those outside the field.

Back to the article on Wiley himself:

… Wiley gets uncomfortable discussing the subject [of his assistants]. “I’m sensitive to it,” he says. When I [the reporter] first arrived at his Beijing studio, the assistants had left, and he made me delete the iPhone snapshots I’d taken of the empty space. It’s not that he wants people to believe every brushstroke is his, he says. That they aren’t is public ­knowledge. It’s just a question of boundaries. “I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen,” he says. “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”

So, Wiley is embarrassed by his studio.  And I ask again: But should he be?

Here’s a question that would resolve that question—and I don’t know the answer; and I should emphasize that: I don’t know the answer.  Does Wiley’s work as a master artist actually overflow into the work that his assistants do?  Or, to put that another way: How much of the style we see in Wiley’s work is owing to him, and how much to chance?  Film directors are not ashamed to admit that their cameramen contribute, but that’s because they give the cameras well, direction.  How directed are Wiley’s assistants?

But that’s just what he doesn’t want to show.  “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”  I very much doubt he actually has anything to be embarrassed about.  He just thinks he does.  It would probably be to his benefit if he embraced the reality and let people like his friendly interviewer into the kitchen.  But our Romantic ideas are in the way.

Of course, the other question, and the other possible difference between Wiley’s method and that of Michelangelo et al., is that there was a presumption that the assistants of Renaissance masters were learning the trade in order to become masters themselves.  Some of them did—del Sarto, Romano, Botticelli, Perugino …  Some even surpassed their teachers—Michelangelo himself was the student of the less famous Ghirlandaio.  One of my favorite examples of “group work” is a painting of “Tobias and the Angel” attributed to the workshop of Verrocchio; the painting is famous in part because some of the detail-work may have been done by a young Leonardo da Vinci.

That, of course, is what takes the sting out of the terms “master” and “assistant.”  If the relationship is not exploitive, but more that of teacher and apprentice, there is every reason to applaud the practice of studio work.  Hopefully, Wiley’s Beijing studio meets that description.  Will we be seeing portraits of Asian women à la Judith and Holofernes in ten or fifteen years?  Time will tell.

The Count Is Seville

Today we got some fresh farmer’s market fruits and vegetables from a neighbor.  And today, researching how to use three enormous and very green oranges, I finally understood what had long been one of my favorite neglected Shakespearean lines.

It’s one of those difficult lines for actresses, thanks to pronunciation changes from Shakespeare’s day.  Any playgoer who consults his footnote will understand its meaning, but conveying the sense to a nube in the seats is nearly impossible.  It’s one of those fruity Shakespearean jokes that are, alas, ripe for the cutting.

In Much Ado About Nothing, poor Claudio has been informed that his Duke has stolen his girl Hero.  In fact, the Duke has interceded on Claudio’s behalf, and persuaded Hero to agree to marrying the handsome young soldier.  When Claudio’s friends go to collect him so that the Duke can break the good news, Claudio is, understandably, in a sour temper.  He puts on a show of indifference—after all, he can’t very well take a stand against his duke—but underneath he’s seething.  Hero’s cousin Beatrice explains Claudio’s ambiguous humor to the puzzled Duke in the following words:

The count is neither sad, nor sick, nor merry, nor

well; but civil count, civil as an orange, and

something of that jealous complexion.

The basic joke, as I mentioned, is explained in the footnote of any solid edition.  Beatrice is punning on the word “Seville,” which evidently in Shakespeare’s time must have sounded much closer to “civil” than it now does.  “Civil as an orange” would have been grasped by an audience as “Seville, like an orange,” the city in Spain being, presumably, known for oranges then as it is now.  (Incidentally, this is an interesting illustration of how changing vowel sounds are rarely so much of an issue as changing accents.  If, for example, we now pronounced “Seville” “SEE-vul,” the pun would still be easily rendered in speech.  The fact that we say “civil” “SIH-vul” and “Seville” “suh-VILL” is much more problematic.)

So much for the footnote.  Claudio is of the same jealous complexion as a Seville orange.  Recalling that jealousy is supposed to be green-eyed (itself a Shakespearean coinage—see Iago’s lines to Othello), one naturally supposes that Seville oranges must have arrived in England green, perhaps plucked green from trees by Spanish matadors in the off-season, and shipped to England unripe in order to survive the arduous voyage that even an Armada could not withstand.  Some tough fruit, that.

But no.  As I learned today, oranges are normally green.  I had only been getting half of Beatrice’s joke all these years.

The moral of this story?

(1)  Don’t put green oranges in the windowsill to ripen.

(2)  Never assume Beatrice is telling a lousy joke.

(3)  Always trust a duke named Pedro.

(4)  Shakespeare scholars don’t know everything, even the ones who get paid to write footnotes.

(5)  Someone should hire me to edit a new edition of Much Ado About Nothing.

(6)  We will never really see Shakespeare “the way his audiences saw him.”

(7)  Emma Thompson is an amazing actress.

Saints Also Belong to Their Times

I am rereading St. Francis de Sales’s Treatise on the Love of God (which, by the way, I recommend to anyone who has or can muster a tolerance for flowery language).  The circumstances of my first reading are somewhat shrouded by the mists of time, but I think it must have been about the period when I started graduate school.

No, it hasn’t been that long; it just feels that way.

Graduate school certainly has had its effect, however; for the preface and first chapter, which I remember finding a bit dull, proved “quite the opposite, in fact.”  The more you know, the more you catch.  This time, two things struck me, both on a purely secular level, but both having perhaps spiritual morals (if I may so speak).

The first was the following passage:

Soon afterwards his Highness came over the mountains, and finding the bailiwicks of Chablais, Gaillard and Ternier, which are in the environs of Geneva, well disposed to receive the Catholic faith which had been banished thence by force of wars and revolts about seventy years before, he resolved to re-establish the exercise thereof in all the parishes, and to abolish that of heresy, and whereas on the one side there were many obstacles to this great blessing from those considerations which are called reasons of State, and on the other side some persons as yet not well instructed in the truth made resistance against this so much-desired establishment, his Highness surmounted the first difficulty by the invincible constancy of his zeal for the Catholic religion, and the second by an extraordinary gentleness and prudence. For he had the chief and most obstinate called together ,and made a speech unto them with so lovingly persuasive an eloquence that almost all, vanquished by the sweet violence of his fatherly love towards them, cast the weapons of their obstinacy at his feet, and their souls into the hands of Holy Church.

And allow me, my dear readers I pray you, to say this word in passing. One may praise many rich actions of this great Prince, in which I see the proof of his valour and military knowledge, which with just cause is admired through all Europe. But for my part I cannot sufficiently extol the establishment  of  the  Catholic  religion  in  these  three  bailiwicks  which  I  have  just  mentioned, having  seen  in  it  so  many  marks  of  piety,  united  with  so  many  and  various  acts  of  prudence, constancy, magnanimity, justice and mildness, that I seemed to see in this one little trait, as in a miniature, all that is praised in princes who have in times past with most fervour striven to advance the glory of God and the Church. The stage was small, but the action great. And as that ancient craftsman was never so much esteemed for his great pieces as he was admired for making a ship of ivory fitted with all its gear, in so tiny a volume that the wings of a bee covered all, so I esteem more that which this great Prince did at that time in this small corner of his dominions, than many more brilliant actions which others extol to the heavens.

It’s a beautiful bit of prose, and a lovely little tribute to … well, if I’ve got my dates right, King Henry of Navarre.  Yes, that’s right: the dude who was reviled in England for becoming Catholic when he ascended (in order to ascend?) the throne of France, reportedly observing that Paris was “worth a Mass.”  (Talk about Machiavellian ragione di state!)  He also, of course, in his younger Huguenot days, narrowly escaped the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  As Catholic king, he extended toleration to Protestants and (wait for it) was assassinated by a fanatical Catholic.  Apparently some people called him “Good King Henry.”  Who knew?  St. Francis, at any rate, seems to have thought his conversion sincere.  And no: it probably wasn’t royal boot-licking on St. Francis’s part, because Henry had been assassinated six years earlier, in 1610.  (The Treatise was published in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death.)

In any case, St. Francis notes his previous tendency, “while I was not yet bishop, having more leisure and  less  fears  for  my  writings,” to dedicate his works “ to  princes  of  the  earth,” avowing a new intention:

but  now  being weighed down with my charge, and having a thousand difficulties in writing, I consecrate all to the princes of heaven, that they may obtain for me the light requisite, and that if such be the Divine will, these my writings may be fruitful and profitable to many.

There’s the Renaissance for you: patronage, independence, and the reformation of one’s life in a few short paragraphs.

The second thing I noticed was the way in which the first chapter rung changes on common themes in Renaissance culture: paradox, order, the macrocosm/microcosm, beauty as a telos … To make a comparison for modern readers: It would be like a priest today mounting the pulpit to deliver an opening salvo dealing with Minimalism and Karma. St. Francis is trendy, in a sixteenth-century sort of way.

Since it’s Sunday, and you may be in want of a good sermon, I’ll just leave that complete first chapter right here.

CHAPTER I.

“That for the Beauty of Human Nature God Has Given the Government of

All the Faculties of the Soul to the Will.”

Union  in  distinction  makes  order;  order  produces  agreement;  and  proportion  and  agreement,  incomplete and finished things, make beauty. An army has beauty when it is composed of parts so ranged in order that their distinction is reduced to that proportion which they ought to have together for the making of one single army. For music to be beautiful, the voices must not only be true, clear, and distinct from one another, but also united together in such a way that there may arise a just consonance and harmony which is not unfitly termed a discordant harmony or rather harmonious discord.

Now as the angelic S. Thomas, following the great S. Denis, says excellently well, beauty and goodness though in some things they agree, yet still are not one and the same thing: for good is that which pleases the appetite and will, beauty that which pleases the understanding or knowledge; or, in other words, good is that which gives pleasure when we enjoy it, beauty that which gives pleasure when we know it. For which cause in proper speech we only attribute corporal beauty to the  objects  of  those  two  senses  which  are  the  most  intellectual  and  most  in  the  service  of  the understanding—namely,  sight  and  hearing,  so  that  we  do  not  say,  these  are  beautiful  odours  or beautiful tastes: but we rightly say, these are beautiful voices and beautiful colours.

The beautiful then being called beautiful, because the knowledge thereof gives pleasure, it is requisite that besides the union and the distinction, the integrity, the order, and the agreement of its parts, there should be also splendour and brightness that it may be knowable and visible. Voices to be beautiful must be clear and true; discourses intelligible; colours brilliant and shining. Obscurity, shade and darkness are ugly and disfigure all things, because in them nothing is knowable, neither order, distinction, union nor agreement; which caused S. Denis to say, that “God as the sovereign beauty is author of the beautiful harmony, beautiful lustre and good grace which is found in all things, making the distribution and decomposition of his one ray of beauty spread out, as light, to make all things beautiful,” willing that to compose beauty there should be agreement, clearness and good grace.

Certainly, Theotimus, beauty is without effect, unprofitable and dead, if light and splendour do not make it lively and effective, whence we term colours lively when they have light and lustre.

But as to animated and living things their beauty is not complete without good grace, which, besides  the  agreement  of  perfect  parts  which  makes  beauty,  adds  the  harmony  of  movements, gestures and actions, which is as it were the life and soul of the beauty of living things. Thus, in the sovereign beauty of our God, we acknowledge union, yea, unity of essence in the distinction of persons, with an infinite glory, together with an incomprehensible harmony of all perfections of actions and motions, sovereignly comprised, and as one would say excellently joined and adjusted, in the most unique and simple perfection of the pure divine act, which is God Himself, immutable and invariable, as elsewhere we shall show. God, therefore, having a will to make all things good and beautiful, reduced the multitude and distinction of the same to a perfect unity, and, as man would say, brought them all under a monarchy, making a subordination of one thing to another and of all things to himself the sovereign Monarch. He reduces all our members into one body under one head, of many persons he forms a family, of many families a town, of many towns a province, of many provinces a kingdom, putting the whole kingdom under the government of one sole king. So, Theotimus, over the innumerable multitude and variety of actions, motions, feelings, inclinations, habits, passions, faculties and powers which are in man, God has established a natural monarchy in the will, which rules and commands all that is found in this little world: and God seems to have said to the will as Pharao said to Joseph: Thou shalt be over my house, and at the commandment of thy mouth all the people shall obey. This dominion of the will is exercised indeed in very various ways.