Originally Presented at Text & Talk, August 15, 2020

George Orwell, Democratic Socialism, and 1984

Eric Arthur Blair, who later became George Orwell,  was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, British India.  His great-grandfather, Charles Blair, was a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of plantations in Jamaica. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman. Eric Blair described his family as “lower-upper-middle class.”     His father was in the opium department of the British imperial civil service.  His mother was the daughter of a French entrepreneur with interests in French Indochina.  

            The family, without their father, whom they would not see again until 1912, returned to England in  1904, and Eric began his school career at Wellington, which he hated, and Eton, which he admired.  When his classmates were at Oxford and Cambridge, Eric was in the Burmese police, perhaps the first notice of his interest in justice and fairness, a disposition his sister claimed was characteristic even of the boy.   In  his late twenties he made the investigation of the poor and of poverty a principal project, visiting the East End and similar scenes in Paris. 

           These experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London; the book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. One critic catalogs Orwell’s early novels thus: “Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell’s next novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves.”

       Orwell’s first socialist book, The Road to Wiggan Pier, published by Gollancz in 1937 was a two-part work, the first describing the lives of a Sheffield family who lived at the top of the category called “the poor.”   The second was a defense of what he later called Democratic Socialism, and which he would persist all his life.  The boy born into the imperial civil service was moving away from that culture and into a life-long defense of the poor and of the system he believed would bring them relief.   It was a complex mission, for although Orwell had the acuity to see that although oppression may begin, as he, in common with about a million upper middle-class Englishmen saw it,  with poverty, there was a deeper darkness afoot.   

       1984 is not a critique of any particular regime, although one can see in it references to elements of the Marxist terror and to the rise of Fascism in Hungary, Italy, Romania, and Spain.  It is a futuristic dystopia built of demonic uses of communications technology to provide universal surveillance; appropriation of all property and all means of production by the party; the systematic destruction of the past so that memory cannot challenge the present, partly through the direct ‘correction’ of history, more significantly through the conversion of English (and presumably every other language) into Newspeak so that Oldspeak and the ideas it carried with it are simply unavailable—recall that Winston’s friend Ampleforth had been sent to Room 101 for using in desperation, there being so few rhymes for ‘rod,’ the word ‘God;’ the sewing of distrust and fear among the population so that no one quite knows who has betrayed whom; the use of what we would recognize as deconstruction so that there is no objective reality that might challenge the party;  political control through a single ideology supported by a single party; dark uses of psychology, and above all the use of terror, all justified by the endless pursuit of unwinnable wars the purposes of which have been forgotten.  Who would like to argue that these policies and ideas are not represented somewhere in the political temper of the West today?  Perhaps triumphant in the various Marxist regimes (China, Venezuela, North Korea), perhaps as a shadow on the horizon in most western democracies. If Orwell was wrong about anything, it was his assumption that sexual pleasure would wither away.   It has its uses; in directing desire toward this pleasure as destructive of Oldspeak. 

       If the above is even in part an apt analysis, it is difficult to see why Orwell so consistently supported Democratic Socialism.  Understand first that there are a dozen well-represented Socialisms.  Social Democracy (Norway and some other European states) is not Democratic Socialism.   In the former the state does not own the means of production; in Democratic Socialism the state may and often does.   The 1945 government of Clement Atlee exemplified Democratic Socialism, with the government owning mines, railroads, airlines, and gas and electrical services.  Presumably, George Orwell approved of this.  But the controversy centers around the fact that socialism is always a threat to property, and while it does not always exert its power to the fullest extent, it may at any moment do so.  And property. As Richard Weaver wrote, is essential to personality.   Orwell knew this: “Everywhere, always, the eyes watching you, he voice enveloping you . . . .  Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your head” (Winston,  BNW, 26).

       Was Orwell correct in seeing capitalism as the cause of poverty?  One may wonder if there is any other society on earth in which home ownership stands at 64%? 

        Of course there are other problems.  One is the inability of African-Americans to move above 42% home ownership since 1994, while Asian ownership in the same time-period has increased almost 10%, and this in a period when black applications were seldom turned down.  Another is the inability to control the monopolistic drift that characterizes capitalism.  There have been many federal anti-trust laws, but there is a tendency not to use them.  And never to be forgotten is the cash nexus between politicians and donors.  A swing senate race may cost a cool million, or more.  And donors consider themselves worthy of a little respect.  

             Even if one considers Orwell’s politics as contrary to his broader goals, his political insight is a permanent treasure. Consider:

• “Television will tell them what to believe and they will believe it.”
• “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people something they do not want to hear.”   
• “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
• “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
• “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” 
• “War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”
• “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
• “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
• “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
   

       This last quote is an opportunity, obliquely,  to consider Orwell and  religion, specifically  Christianity.  Of course he disliked Roman Catholicism.  Sometimes he called Christianity the lesser of evils.  When he died, he surprised his executors by commanding that he be buried according to the rites of the Church of England, that he not be cremated but buried in the church yard.  In the hospital he befriended Waugh and Muggeridge, who was asked to write Orwell’s biography but failed.  This is, like almost everything Orwellian, complicated.  Let me add as a subscript that I understand  only superficially the pleasures of power for its own sake. Perhaps others can shed some light.

Presented at Text & Talk with Dr Patrick – Saturday, 18 December 2021

Fasting is about disciplining our appetites, and especially about offering such discipline as a sacrifice to God, an action that at the same time purifies the heart and expresses our sorrow for our sins.   It is not directly about repentance from sin but about foregoing some good or some good pleasure.  It makes us ready to know God more deeply. Moses fasted for forty days in the presence of God when he wrote down the Ten Commandments.   And again Moses lay prostrate in prayer for the Lord’s mercy after his people worshiped the golden calf (Deuteronomy 9:18); he neither ate bread nor drank water. 

        The vow Paul took in Acts 18:18 was a Nazarite vow; cutting off his hair, was a sign of pious humility.  It probably required that he abstain from wine.  Paul was always in a fight, sometimes doing the thing he really did not want to do, in which battle the best defense was the discipline of his ‘bodily’ desires, inclinations to lust and gluttony.  “Therefore I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight like I am beating the air. No, I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.”  We are not told that Paul observed or recommended certain fast days, but in Acts 13:2 fasting is associated with worship, presumably the Eucharist.   But not long after Paul’s death in 60 AD the Didache, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, recommended:  8.1. “Let not your fasts be with the hypocrites, for they fast on Mondays and Thursdays, but do you fast on Wednesdays and Fridays” (8.1).  There is some thought that the hypocrites were the Pharisaic party, but in any event the advice of the authors has been carried out for 2000 years and the Friday fast is  still required in the Roman Church, while I think it is true that the Orthodox still fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.   Often fasting consists of giving up something that is good in itself, a favorite food, as a small sacrificial recognition of the times we may have given our senses too free rein.   

       Saint Thomas says fasting has a threefold purpose:  killing lust, setting the mind on heavenly things, and encouraging sorrow for sins.  Fasting survives in the Latin Church in the rule that every Friday is a fast day. The Friday fast is done in commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Good Friday.  As such, all Fridays of the year have been historically kept as a day of strict fasting and abstinence from meat.   Even the most nugatory of fasts is capable of giving great spiritual power. 

       All this is papist practice, but while Protestants generally had no schedule of appointed fasts, the practice was not foreign to the American religious psyche.  Lincoln could decree in 1863 that the last Thursday in September would be “a day of humiliation, prayer, and fasting for all the people of the nation. And I do earnestly recommend to all the people, and especially to all ministers and teachers of religion of all denominations and to all heads of families, to observe and keep that day according to their several creeds and modes of worship in all humility and with all religious solemnity, to the end that the united prayer of the nation may ascend to the Throne of Grace and bring down plentiful blessings upon our country.” There is still a national day of prayer, but humiliation and fasting is not mentioned.     But Lent, I think, has bled over into Protestant Churches in what seems a beneficent way.    

       Feasting is endemic to Sacred Scripture, in both present and future aspects..  Prophesying the coming reign of peace Isaiah wrote, “On this mountain the Lord of Hosts will prepare a banquet for all the peoples, a feast of choice meat of finely aged wine. On this mountain He will swallow up the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations.  He will swallow up death forever and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces (25:6). And Matthew: “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west and  sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (8: 11). Eating has been at the heart of Christianity since Jesus took bread and distributed it, and in the beginning the Eucharist was celebrated as part of the Christian love feast, a grand church supper that had to be abandoned because it was abused (Jude 12; I Corinthians 11:20-22).

       One may well wonder how the calendar of feasts was constructed.  Start with the fact that Easter, 14 Nisan in the Jewish calendar, was a known date, and Pentecost was fifty days later.   One can imagine that after the resurrection of Jesus research into his origins intensified.  The Church settled on March 25 as the Annunciation, so the birth of Jesus was nine months later, on  December 25th.  Or perhaps December 25th was chosen because it was the winter solstice, and Christmas effectively replaced the Saturnalia, the Roman feast of celebration and gift-giving that commemorated the Solstice.  Certainly the Lupercalia, a vulgar Roman feast that took place in early February was supplanted by the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin.   All of these represent what is called “sacred times,” whose religious purpose is to keep the faithful mindful throughout the year of the cardinal mysteries and of the heroes of the Christian faith.  The old Church has a calendar full of days on which the canonical saints, those believed to be in the presence of God, are to be remembered and their intercession sought.  To follow them carefully would be an education in itself.   Some are popular, some obscure, such as Saint Just de Bretenieres, whose feast day is September 20th, was beheaded in Korea in 1866.  Under torture he kept repeating, “I came to Korea to save your souls; I will happily die for God.”   Or Saint Casimir of Poland, remembered on March 4th, who was a heroic peace-maker.  Each saint, as being in God’s presence, intercedes for those who ask his aid.    

       In the old Church the communion of saints means that the barrier between those who died in grace and those living  is very thin or non-existent.    It is probably impossible to explain just why one would believe that, say, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, would add his intercession to my prayers.  Perhaps one could think of Saint Cyril as a senior and conclusively successful member of the family.  I think it would be right to say that in Protestant Christianity that wall is thicker, so that the saints, being perhaps in principle unknown and unknowable and in any event accessible have no purpose other than, perhaps, as examples.  After 1520 the calendar of fasts and feasts pretty much disappeared from northern European Christianity, although Easter and Christmas survived in even the lowest of low Church Anglicanism.  The United States had no Church Year save that found in the Book of Common Prayer.  So Virginia celebrated Christmas.  According to a 1631 account by John Taylor, the festival of Christmas Day began with church attendance. Following that, “some went to cards, some sang Carrols, many merry songs, some to waste the long night would tell Winter-tales …. Then came maids with Wassell, jolly Wassell, cakes, white loafe and cheese, mince pies & other meat. These being gone, the jolly youths and plain dealing Plow swaines being weary of cards fell to dancing to show me some Gambols, some ventured the breaking of their shins to make me sport – some the scalding of their lippes to catch at apples tied at the end of a stick having a lighted candle”      

       All this Puritans disapproved.  Christmas was made illegal in England in 1662, Massachusetts having done so in 1659.  There was no Biblical warrant for a Christmas celebration, and, as Virginia demonstrated, the behavior it elicited was not always pious.  The Massachusetts holiday was Thanksgiving.   Although a plausible case can be made that Thanksgiving was first celebrated in Virginia, the national narrative attributes the origins of the Thanksgiving feast to the Puritans.   It remains one of two national feast days.  The other being the glorious fourth, the celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776.  Christmas cannot be  separated from Christianity and has become mildly controversial.  It was not always so.  From the 1870s, when New York merchants took up Christmas as a sales event, to the 1950s, Christmas was like Thanksgiving a national holiday, with the lighting of the White House Christmas tree a national event.  

       It is such events that make a nation, or in an analogous and deeper way, the Church.  They represent the rhythm of life.   There ought to be times of national happiness, and Christmas is such, a gift from the Church to the culture, encouraging generosity and gentling our ways here at the winter solstice. 

Text and Talk With Dr Patrick
09 January 2021

Small Hands

“Such is of the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

These are lines from (I think) Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings describing the condition of fallen mankind. Be it remembered that work is a curse: Because you have done this thing, “cursed is the earth in your work, with labor and toil shall you eat thereof all the days of your life” (Genesis 1:12). Throughout the ages a good deal of energy has been spent avoiding work, so that in every society there is a class of persons who are freed from the necessity of labor, these would be at present those who possess enough capital to invest, as well as members of the bureaucracy at the local or national levels, who, although they may be reassigned cannot be fired. In a broad sense members of the professions, although they may work very hard, are viewed as being freed of the necessity of laboring in order to pursue their vocation.
       The small hands who move the wheels of the world are thought of as having a job, not a vocation. In the Old Testament these were the people of the land, for whose protection here were special provisions. They are always there; land owning serfs in the middle ages, cobblers and millers and carpenters who possessed a skill but no property. Those who wove the Anjou Apocalypse tapestry in the 1370s, the builders of the great cathedrals, the principal activity of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, whose names are lost.
       This class of workers revolted in England in 1381; in Germany in the 1520s , where they were put down with violence. After the industrial revolution relocated labor from the land to cities, the peasants of industrial society constituted a group sufficiently large and sufficiently vocal to claim the interest of the governing class, and indeed “Labor,” after the near revolution of 1830, claimed the interest of politicians who would variously seek justice for the laboring classes, or appease them, or seduce them for the interests of the governing class.
       Viewed realistically, it is the small hands who make American society habitable. This essay began with a reflection of whoever it is who paints the white lines on the roads. They must do so in the early hours of the morning, for they are seldom seen, but without those white lines it is impossible to drive after dark if you are over seventy. Then there is the cleaning lady, legal or illegal, who makes $10.50 an hour. In recent days those who work through the night to stock the shelves in grocery stores. Plumbers’ helpers, you can make your own list. This is a class of persons no longer poor. The driver of an eighteen-wheeler may earn six figures, as may the operators of the digging and concrete crushing machines. But they are still members of the class I am trying to describe.  The cleaning lady and the backhoe operator are bound together by a common culture.  They watch television. They do not read books.  They do not know who or what Derida and Richard Rorty, subjectivism, deconstruction, or critical theory might be, and although they are perfectly capable of understanding these ideas, they do not find them interesting. They are not socialists because they have property, and yes, they are disproportionately white, although this class will include numbers of Hispanics and blacks. There are generally not socialists, although it has been pointed out that voting socialist would be in their own interest. And in an age of atheism they are disproportionately Christian. They are also disproportionately uneducated in the sense that they do not always go to college. In terms of the criteria that have been established by sociologists and politicians they are racists because they do not understand why black persons who seem to them to lead disorganized lives should be favored by the government, but those minority persons who work and who accept their vision are welcomed to the table by them. They are fiercely independent. Probably they are genetically disproportionately Scotch-Irish. They are a diminishing class, essentially doomed, because urbanism recruits them away from their often unconsciously held principles, because the drug culture ravages them, and because television , apart from Duck Dynasty, recruits their children into modernity.
       While those who say that the Founders established an order that benefited themselves have a point, it was on the behalf of this group that the nation was founded. Gordon S. Wood’s study of how a monarchical, hierarchical society became equalitarian in about ten years ends by pointing out that although what Burke would have called the unbought grace of life was abrogated, the American settlement brought unimagined benefits to the class I have been describing, Jefferson’s small, independent farmers and shopkeepers. Disproportionately, they work with their hands. But these are the people who about 2010 found a voice in the Tea Party: According to political analyst Scott Rasmussen. Tea party participants “think federal spending, deficits and taxes are too high, and they think no one in Washington is listening to them, and that latter point is really, really important.” But how can the political class listen, when once one goes to Washington one is recruited into a conversation run by lobbyists, a culture whose voice is PBS, and whose most important citizens are not the folks back home but the donors that make reelection possible. Historically, resentment of the Federal government’s bailout of everybody but themselves, was, oddly, the spark that ignited a small American fire. Not well-versed in economic theory, they stubbornly refuse to believe that printing paper money to fuel an expansive state will work out well. Their work is not valued. The small hands that do the work of the world are just supposed to be there, while what is valuable is technology, medicine, lawyering, and politics. And what is profitable is trading in non-existent money.
       What we have just been witnessing, over the last decade, culminating in last week, is another peasant revolt, a large group of the small hands who went to Washington convinced that the November election was rigged. Their movement has religious and economic roots. Opposition to it is fueled by hatred, or rather by something worse, by contempt. Hillary Clinton defined the peasants as deplorable. What will be remembered from last week will not be the riots but the words of the ?CNN commentator Anderson Cooper “Look at them, they’re high-fiving each other for this deplorable display of completely unpatriotic, completely against law and order, completely unconstitutional behavior, it’s stunning. And they’re going to go back to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn they’re staying at, or the Garden Marriott, and they’re going to have some drinks and talk about the great day they had in Washington. They stood up for nothing other than mayhem.” What will be remembered of Cooper’s remark is the tone; these people did not stay at the Ritz-Carlton or the St. Regis; they are the common lot.
       One may ask what fuels this attitude or superiority and its complement, contempt. It is the perfection of the attitude of Enlightenment philosophers, whose implicit claim was that they have seen through the dark superstitions of the past, to enter a world in which knew no bounds other than taste. Often the taste of the small hands does not measure up, and the wars of recent days can be seen as differences not over policy but over taste. The mere sight of the president throws the coastal elites into a state of inexpressible rage. He is and represents the wrong sort, so wrong that no rule of courtesy or honesty impinges upon attempts to remove and discredit him.
       The other thing that will be memorable from this disastrous week is the attempt to silence any criticism of the impending glory days. The capitol riots will be used by the left, as was the Reichstag fire, to justify extreme measures. I note that it unleashed the hatred of Peggy Noonan for the president and all his works. In any event, he will go away, and the troublesome small hands will remain unrepresented.

The Kingdom of Speech:  Tom Wolfe / Little, Brown Pub. / 200 pages

A complicated and brilliant book.  Perhaps the impetus for writing it came from the awareness that science, while in the 150 years that separates us from Darwin, had invented relativity and microbiology, despite intense effort had failed to produce even a compelling theory regarding  the origin of speech.   The story begins with the failure of Darwin, who having been enormously successful in presenting a theory fostered by William Wallace, never got further than, in his 1871 Descent of Man, suggesting that speech evolved from the human ability to imitate the song of birds.  Wolfe is a Darwinian (I think), but he believes on good evidence that Darwin stole his theory from Wallace, who had written Darwin asking him to forward his paper sketching a theory of evolution to Charles Lyell.  Wallace’s paper stirred Darwin into hurriedly writing the Origin of Species.     

After that a great silence on the question ensued until Noam Chomsky came on the scene proposing the existence in the brain, or as a function of the brain,  of a language organ containing a basic universal grammar.  Wolfe has a good deal of fun with Chomsky, whom he presents as a somewhat vain and pompous theorist. Then enter Daniel Everett, born in dry and dusty Holtsville, California, destined by his upbringing to a life of insignificance, something in the way of William Wallace, who somehow got saved by his future wife Karen, wound up at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, became a brilliant linguist and then became a missionary in the back of the beyond, in the Amazon basin, with a tribe of 350-500 people called the Piranha, pronounced with one short and one long vowel.  

  No one had ever learned their language, but Everett mastered it, including that bird-song imitations useful for hunting.  So Everett had before him a living laboratory in which these tiny people spoke a language perhaps unchanged for thousands of years.   But it was a strange language, having only a present tense, no word for yesterday or tomorrow, just “other day,” and no word for up or down.  They made no artifacts other than the bow and arrow, the existence of which among them was part of the mystery.  They were merely irritated by Everett’s talk of Jesus, which they politely asked him to drop after a while.  They lived not even in huts but in shelters thrown together of tree branches, shelters the next high winds would destroy, which would make the Piranha laugh and laugh.    

But their chief interest for Everett lay in the fact  that they had no language organ containing a universal basic grammar.  This observation opened the way for the conviction that the Piranha language was a cultural artifact.  It had no recursion, a word coined by Chomsky to describe the ability of language to use complex sentences implying many ideas.  “Every sentence stands alone and refers to a single event.”  “The Piranha language comes from their culture, not from any pre-existing mental template.”   This claim was devastating to Chomsky’s theory, and a war of words between Chomsky and Everett ensued.  With the public Everett was the easy winner.  He wrote a best-seller with the title Don’t Sleep—There are Snakes,” which was Piranha for “Good Night.”  If Chomsky’s theory was not defeated it was highly qualified.  So after the silence of a century, during which grave scholars had admitted that they knew nothing of the origin of speech, the idea grew that speech was the ultimate cultural accomplishment, the tool that enabled man to master nature.  The thesis of Everett’s book Language The Cultural Tool was: “Speech is man-made.  It is an artifact and it explains man’s power over all other creatures in a way Evolution all by itself can’t begin to.”   Speech is the dividing line between man and other animals; only speech gives the human beast the ability to make plans . . . not just long-term but any plans, even for something to do five minutes from now.”   

The greatest achievement of words has been “the creation of an inner self, and ego.  Speech and only speech gives man the  ability to ask questions about his own life.”    “Only speech gives man the power to dream up religions and gods to animate them, and in extraordinary cases to change history, with words alone and without political backing.”  Jesus, Muhammad, John Calvin, Marx, and Darwin.  Marxism may now be discredited, but his idea of one social class dominating another will be with us forever.  Millions of sexual acts throughout the world would not be occurring were it not for the words of Sigmund Freud.   Mighty men might say the wrong words and tens of thousands of little men would die.  “Word are artifacts, and until man had speech, he couldn’t create any other artifacts, whether it was a slingshot or an Iphone or the tango.” You could lay aside your slingshot or your  Iphone and forget about it . . . But you could not make speech lie down once it had left your lips.   Wolfe suggests that we have entered a fourth Kingdom of Earth, After the ages of animals, vegetables, and  minerals we enter the Kingdom of Speech.  Wolfe concludes his account by telling of his casual page-turning of a book about evolution when, upon seeing the image of apes cuddling their young while the males stamp down under bush to make desks for the night, when he looked up and saw through his apartment windows the New York skyline, with the Marks and the Carlisle ($750 per night, Bose sound systematic, German brass fixtured) framed  against the peaks of the Chrysler Building, the empire State Building, and the Citicorp Building.” 

And there Wolfe’s story ends.

A story beautifully told, yet one in which it clarifies the nature and function of language still does not tell us much about the origin of language and speech.   Of course Wolfe could not  offer a theory that says simply that man, being created by the Word in the image of God, with the Word enlightening every man coming into the world, has never been without words and language.  Word does what Wolfe claims for them; he has a magnificent vision of their power, but of the origin of speech he tells us nothing.  

It is to be regretted that Wolfe did not or could not go on to remember that Christianity believes that creation exists through God’s speech, that he did not fashion the world but spoke existence where before there was nothing.  And Christianity would agree most specifically with Wolfe’s conviction that words divine and even human have nuclear potentiality.  It was man’s use of speech to defy God that caused the destruction of the tower of Babel and the subsequent linguistic divisions. And there is nothing in Scripture more frightening than the promise that every word we have spoken is known to God and will be heard again.   And above all is the glad fact that the name of the second person of the Blessed Trinity, the savior of mankind, called faithful and true, is “clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is the Word of God” (Revelation 19:13-14). 

Questions remain.  What is the relation between speech and writing, which is the attempt to make speech live and be shared through time.  And what is the relation between words and thought.  Wolfe suggests that one might try to count to ten, just mentally, without using words. And there is the mystery involved in the sudden ability of two-year-olds to speak their language, recursively, a phenomenon that supports Chomsky’s language organ thesis.  But Everitt was surely right that speech is a cultural inheritance, still an irrefutable witness to who you are and where you are from and how you will manage the world.    

  Finally, this book seems to be Wolfe’s own working through of the meaning and power of speech, a kind of revelation to himself about what he has been doing.                              

Presented at The Lewis Tolkien Society’s weekly Text & Talk meeting on Zoom, 05 December 2020.

The second decade of the second Christian century saw the Church go through a crisis during which that which before was unresolved was clarified and established.   The topics thus canvassed were the status of the Johannine literature, especially the Gospel but also the Apocalypse in the emerging canonical literature of the cosmopolitan Church, the uses and abuses of the gift of prophecy, the management of souls with respect to the forgiveness of sins, and in a broader sense the relation of Christians to the post-Hellenistic world as the Church moved into the culture and the culture into the Church.   

The career of Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus cut across in a controversial way each of these issues but the first.    Born in 155, son of a centurion of the proconsular legion, Tertullian began as a lawyer, an advocate, necessarily well-versed in the literary inheritance of Rome, a skilled rhetorician.   We do not know why he became a Christian in 193 at about the age of thirty-eight, but we do know that he brought to his new profession all the zeal, every talent, and a lawyerly intellectual formation that caused him to write as though arguing a case, giving no quarter and always expecting a decisive judgement.   Between 193 and 207 Tertullian was part of the Catholic Church of Carthage,  For the last thirteen years of his life he was a member of and advocate for the New Prophecy, called by its opponents Montanism with reference to its putative founder.    

The New Prophecy may be understood in dramatically different ways.   Its advocates saw it is the perpetuation and development of an ancient and essential gift, a gift encouraged by Paul, instantiated in the office of prophet in the apostolic order by apostles, prophets, teachers, and defended by Irenaeus.  That two of the principals of the movement were women would not have necessarily counted against it; the prophetess Anna is quoted in Luke, the Apostle Philip’s prophetic daughters were famous in Hierapolis Salutaris in Phrygia.  From a somewhat different angle the New Prophecy, sometimes called the Phrygian heresy, was viewed by the regular hierarchy as bearing an ineradicable heretical taint.  The great prophetesses of the New Prophecy, Maximilla and Priscilla, admired by Tertullian were considered dangerous if not immoral.   One senses that  the existence of the New Prophecy threatened a hard-won ecclesiastical order for that was the history.  In the Didache prophets are viewed with great reverence and a certain distrust, for while their charismatic gifts made them impressive, especially when compared with the newly important order of bishops, there must have been a history of abuse, for the great liturgical latitude granted   prophets was matched by the caution that they should not stay longer than three days.  So the New Prophecy may have been defended as the perpetuation and development of ancient practice.  

And above all the New Prophecy stood for moral renovation based on  willing distancing of Christian life and manners from a culture seen as “the world.”    Central to Tertullian’s theology was a polemic against what he perceived as failure of discipline under the influence of what he saw as a newly emergent practice of forgiving serious or mortal sins such as adultery freely upon evidence of contrition and the acceptance of some form of penance, a penance that might, or over time might not, involve exclusion from participation in the Eucharist for long periods.  The forgiveness of mortal post-baptismal sin, never, or only one, or freely was an issue unresolved that had much occupied the Church in the second century.  Perhaps part of the problem was the realization of the implications of the subjectivity of the Sermon on the Mount, the command that Christians were to be pure in heart.  Perhaps an early appearance of a popular literature that vexed the question of the meaning of purity of heart was a novella-like book called the Shepherd of Hermas. In it the danger of luke-warmness that Tertullian opposes in the early third century is evident in outline.  Hermas is chilled because his involvement in business is driving him away from God and because he has not governed his family with strictness, so that his children may be lost to the faith.   But more than these concerns there is the anxiety caused by the fact that he has looked with impure desire upon the lady Rhoda.  Can this be forgiven, or forgiven more than once?   The Shepherd may not give a decisive answer. It seems to hold the line on the proposition that serious sins may be forgiven only once but in its parables and images it seems to hold out hope of mercy.

Tertullian’s Christian is made of sterner stuff.  A crisis was provoked, or this is one common interpretation, by the election of Callixtus to the see of Peter in 217.  Callixtus believed that even serious sins could be forgiven, and that perhaps more than once.  Hippolytus called this the practice of the school of Callixtians.    The bishop whom Tertullian upbraids for following this practice may or may not have been Callixtus, for the practice spread.   It is not possible here to review the subtleties of penitential practice in the Ante-Nicaean Church, but one can see that the generous forgiveness of even serious sins would  militate against the very existence of the pure Church Tertullian the Montanist envisioned and believed he had inherited.  

Tertullian saw this weakness as the result of a demonic surrender to the culture, and to stave it off he wrote.  In his catholic days he wrote against heresy, against the pseudo-Paulinist Marcion and against the Valentinians and the Monarchian Praxeas.    In his Montanist days he considered the catholic Church his opponent, and wrote in favor of what we might consider an unwarranted rigorism, against any attendance at the arena or the racecourse, where passions would be aroused, in favor of modesty in dress, condemning the use of pigments and jewelry, in favor of the veiling of virgins, by which he apparently meant the covering of faces as well  as heads.  He wrote that it was the higher way not to flee from persecution and wrote in praise of the soldier who would not wear the emperor’s garland on dress parade because Christ was his crown, and who as a consequence was martyred.   Tertullian forbids to Christians many professions,  that of magician or enchanter of course, but also  excluded are teachers and professors of literature. 

So the project, especially of Tertullian’s Montanist days, can be described as an attempt, made just on the cusp of the cultural victory of Christianity, to prevent the weakening of moral discipline, and to maintain distance from the culture of decaying Hellenism.  Not an ignoble project by any means.    Involved is the relation between Christian discipline, the discipline of the sacraments, and the Christian virtues.   If Tertullian can in principle be criticized it is on the suspicion that he thought human culture should always be resisted rather than penetrated and in a sense converted.   Dicey.  Which works best is probably a work of inspired imagination, and providence.  The world today has plenty of recent graduates who have set out to write for Christian television but it seems never to come to much, at least not that I have noticed.   When the culture is penetrated by Christian faith you get Dante’s Divine Comedy and Piers Plowman and Shakespeare and in a small, local, and ironic way Flannery O’Connor and Evelyn Waugh.  

But when Christianity loses entirely the Tertullianesque  stance, it becomes flaccid and impotent.   The Church of the decades after Tertullian did not follow the path he might have predicted.   What followed as the Church moved into the imperial culture was the unlikely flourishing of the monastic life, in the desert, at Lérins, Marseilles, and especially Nursia, the monastic life being the medicine against dissolution and absorption into the culture, the communities of those who have shut out the world in order to find God.