Monday 13 February 2012

The Power And The Glory

Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith writes:

My Mexican wanderings are now drawing to an end, and I find myself in the country’s second city, Guadalajara waiting for my flight back home via the United States. Guadalajara, or GDL to use its popular acronym, is a sort of Mexico in miniature. It has some splendours, but many squalours. The most picturesque places in this country are the small colonial towns, such as San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato and Zacatecas, places with real charm. GDL, by contrast, may have started out as a small colonial town back in the sixteenth century, but it has grown and grown, and swallowed all its near neighbours. It is not the size of Mexico City, but it is as big as London in its extent – a vast sprawl in every direction, consisting mainly of single story houses.

GDL does not have the world class museums that grace Mexico City, or some of its astonishing Art Nouveau architecture, but it does have some rather nice things to see. There is the former orphanage, now called the Instituto Cabanas, used as an arts centre, perhaps one of the finest colonial buildings in the country. Built in the classical style, it consists of a series of austerely beautiful patios, with a deconsecrated chapel in the form of a Greek Cross at its centre, decorated with murals by Jose Clemente Orozco, one of this country´s great twentieth century artists.

The Cathedral is in a melange of styles, gothic, baroque and classical, its interior painted white. But for something all of a piece one should go to the Templo Expiatorio some twenty blocks from the centre. This is Mexico´s finest example of neo-Gothic, indeed it probably counts as the finest piece of neo-Gothic anywhere on earth. As the name suggests, the church was a conceived as an expiatory temple to the Blessed Sacrament, in the late nineteenth century. It took almost a hundred years to build. The nave is lined with rose windows, which is most unusual. The buoilding next door has some tracery that is clealry modelled on the Papal Palace at Viterbo, but the main thrill is to be had by approaching the main altar and raising one’s eyes to the vast spire above one, which consists of tracery and coloured glass – the nearest thing one will get to to a gothic dome.

One reason the Temlo Expiatorio took so long to build is that the construction was held back by the Mexican revolution and the attendant persecution of the Church, along with the financial collapse that the revolutionary years brought in their wake. The church was not built to expaite the crimes of the revolution, being conceived before that, but the martyrs of the revolutionary period, most of whom were from Jalisco, the state which has GDL for its capital, are commemeorated in the stained glass.

Funnily enough the Mexican revolution is something we English think we know quite a bit about, as we have all read Graham Greene’s
The Power and the Glory which to me will always be one of the greatest books ever written. The novel deals with the persecution of the Church in Tabasco, where it was especially fierce, and where many churches were demolished, but most of the martyrs come from the north of the country, Jalisco and Zacatecas in particular; there church furnishings were destroyed, but buildings were spared, though, as the Cabanas Institute and other places around GDL show, there were plenty that were deconsecrated.

If you have not read
The Power and the Glory, please do read it. Don’t let the author’s reputation put you off. It is the greatest argument for Catholicism ever made: and it bears all the signs of being made in Mexico!

In his 2003 book, The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, Fr Ian Ker devotes the first three pages on Greene to the question of whether or not Greene “ever believed in hell and mortal sin”, rather than in, as Greene himself put it, “a sort of purgatory.” This is because “the two themes, together with the possibility of forgiveness in Confession and the unlimited mercy of God, are integral to his finest writing, which is what makes his denial so paradoxical.” In order to explore Greene’s use of these themes, it is necessary to “see how he blends these most traditional Catholic motifs with two very contemporary influences on the novel to create an altogether new kind of fiction in the English language. These two related influences, of which Greene was very conscious, are the cinema and the thriller.”

Cinematic technique is more conducive to Catholicism, which engages all the senses and is particularly concerned with visual culture, than to classical Protestantism, which emphasises, practically to the exclusion of all else, the written and preached Word, so that it could not have spread as it did but for the invention of the printing press. In the new, visual age of the late twentieth century, even Evangelical churches moved in a Pentecostal and Charismatic direction, the more to encourage “physical body movements rather than cerebral preaching and reading”.

But in that century’s middle years, there was simply no doubt that Catholicism, with its “stained-glass windows, pictures, and statues” appealed to the camera in a way that the reading out of long Biblical or Prayer Book passages, incorporating extended preaching on the former, simply did not. In the post-Conciliar age, there is a lesson here, for all the importance now attached, perfectly correctly and fully within Sacred Tradition, to Scripture and to Holy Preaching. This reviewer recalls here Jean Baudrillard, who sees in the dispute over the Postmodern celebration of the image the conflict between the French Jesuits and Huguenot iconoclasm.

The thriller, in turn, lends itself especially well to the cinema, and vice versa, as Greene illustrated so powerfully in The Third Man, actually written with a view to the screen adaptation that it did indeed so famously receive. Greene’s use of cinema and of the thriller genre is very Chestertonian, and Chesterton enables us to see it as fundamentally Thomist: great art, communicating great ideas, is made possible, even most possible, by adapting the medium and the genre that speaks most powerfully to Toots, to Miss Podsnap, to the Misses Pecksniff, to Sam Weller and the rest (in a word, to Saint Thomas’s rusticus), because it speaks most powerfully of them and for them.

Today’s demonisation of the white working class (many of whom, as in Greene’s or Chesterton’s day, are Catholics) represents the spectacular failure of the well-meaning but ill-grounded attempts by George Orwell, Christopher Hill and E P Thompson to rescue that class’s (largely Catholic) culture from what Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”. Instead of the Marxism of Hill and Thompson, or the most peculiar ideological mélange of the overrated Orwell, it was necessary then, and is necessary now, to look to the tradition – the Sacred Tradition – of Saint Thomas, of Chesterton and Chesterton’s Dickens, and of the Catholic Greene; the Sacred Tradition of Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism; the Sacred Tradition that speaks the most powerful truths through means such as the thriller and the cinema.

And what could be more powerful than treatments of sin and damnation, and of the possibility of redemption therefrom with the sacramental system provided by a Church which, in Britain at that time, still found Her following overwhelmingly from among the people who most frequented the cinema and most read thrillers, whom Dickens might have created, whose wisdom was recognised and articulated by Chesterton and by Saint Thomas? And is not evil the stuff of which thrillers are made?

Greene saw the connection between this and Catholicism when he witnessed the latter’s persecution in Mexico and during the Spanish Civil War: “the four key ingredients of Greene’s most creative period could now gel together – evil, Catholicism, the cinema, and the thriller.” While this remained most vital to him, he produced his best novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. It is those who actually believe in hell and the devil that are closest to them. In Britain in the middle twentieth century, those were the Catholics.

Would that they still were, and that Catholics still recognised the reality of evil in the midst of what Chesterton, Dickens and Saint Thomas recognised as the flawed beauty of this world. In today’s Anglophonia, the reality of hell and the devil, and the consciousness of personal and societal sin, is most evident among those who do not share that Chestertonian, Dickensian, Thomist optimism, while that optimism has become perverted into Pelagianism, universalism, antinomianism, and an essentially Whig or Marxist belief in the perfectibility of this world by purely human efforts.

Alas, Greene was to head down that road, and even to lead others down it, in his later life. The Catholic who reads, admires, marvels at and even loves Greene’s Catholic quartet must constantly be asking “Why?”, looking for the seeds of future degeneration from orthodoxy, and prayerfully taking care to avoid ingesting those seeds. A not conspicuously pro-Catholic cultural elite’s exaltation of Greene as post-War Britain’s pre-eminent and definitive Catholic writer has achieved its end, and made Greene’s later views de rigueur for the Catholic middle class that was only beginning to appear at the peak of Greene’s powers, but which has come to predominate among British Catholics.

Thus, in his Conclusion, Fr Ker opines that “Greene’s reputation … is inflated because of interest in his colourful private life and because so many of his novels were so topical at the time of their setting”, whereas Waugh’s “unfashionable views and cultivated eccentricities have helped conceal his greatness as a novelist”. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that, while there was merit in much of what he articulated about how liturgical changes were often gone about in the immediate post-Conciliar period, Waugh’s (reactionary) response to Vatican II is almost as problematical as Greene’s. But of that, another time.

10 comments:

  1. This reviewer recalls here Jean Baudrillard, who sees in the dispute over the Postmodern celebration of the image the conflict between the French Jesuits and Huguenot iconoclasm.

    This what I mean. It is an honour to have sat at your feet.

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  2. Yes, he began by pouring us all the first of soooo many drinks, but the good stuff and served with good food, and telling us that he was there to stop our degrees from getting in the way of our education. We were so young, we had never heard that line before. But to David, it was no cliché. A true intellectual yet without a hint of snobbery, we learned as much from him as we ever did from our degrees. Was it you who said yesterday that he was the reason why Durham had colleges? You were right. Reading this post brought it all back to me how right you were.

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  3. One tries one's best.

    My one hundred per cent success rate as a referee now extends, as you might know, to people who are long gone in student terms, although of course the real world does not conceive of time in quite that way, but who still see me as the obvious man to ask. What can I say? Well, enough to get each and every one of them whatever they have wanted so far, anyway.

    Now, on topic, please.

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  4. I hope this comment counts as on topic, David. It comes from another fully satisfied customer of your reference service.

    The ability to post this on your overall blog shows why you are exactly what political life is missing. Commentators who are activists and activists who read the New Statesman and the Spectator are rare enough. But commentator-activists with an appreciation of literature and history, philosophy and theology, high culture and popular culture, including working class culture? Hen's teeth amongst the upper middle class boys who have been political monomaniacs since they were prepubsecent.

    Well done Durham for carrying on with tutors appointed at college level instead of by the university centrally, interacting directly with undergrads whilst issued with staff library cards so they can carry on with scholarship undisturbed by government or corporate interference. Truly delivering an educational experience to the tutees.

    You might forget a lecture. You might forget hundreds. You never forget a conversation with David Lindsay and you never forget anything by him if you read it. I cannot imagine my university memories without you and I cannot say that about any other member of staff.

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  5. And that, like this post itself, is why you are far too good to have a pop at Damian Thompson on the back of your next book. If you got wind that one of us was planning to pull a strole like that, you would rightly give us a piece of your mind and you would be right. None of us would do it after that. Nor should you.

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  6. Spoilsport.

    Now, does anyone want to talk about Graham Greene?

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  7. Not for the first time, we have nothing to add and are all in awe.

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  8. First time that I can remember!

    That would have led to some very dull evenings, and I certainly don't recall any of those...

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  9. Very young people can be a bit in awe of you, but you have a brilliant knack of easing them out of it. You like being argued with as long as people can back it up and cope with being argued back at. God help them if they can't.

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  10. I dunno, you are pretty scathing towards the people who take up your time while unworthy of your attention. They can go and have tantrums in Palatinate or somewhere, I suppose. The total lack of any effect from that proves that you were right about them, but they are too thick to see that.

    You don't have an English degree, and I doubt that Fr. Lucie-Smith has, either. Apparently he is a moral theologian. You both read something like Graham Greene just because you read books, it's what you do. There is a definite Durham sort of person, very rich but not as posh as they would like, and they just don't get that. University is just like getting a driving license as far as they are concerned, except they plan to keep driving after they have passed. They hardly read a book before, they don't read many now and they'll never read a book afterwards.

    They expect the place to be organised for their convenience, and too much of the time it is. But then they meet you. Some of them are even thick enough to pick a fight with you. And then they are put firmly in their place.

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