Dr. Robert D. Hickson
11 February 2007
Our Lady of Lourdes
The Vitality of Mammon
in the Decline of a State
The historic Christian Faith and the historic
reality of Christian culture – Christendom – from the outset
rebuked with severity, and aptly punished, those who “trafficked
in spiritual things.” The hucksters of Simony and Usury were
condemned and often shunned, because the things of the spirit
were understood to be qualitative matters, and quantitative
judgments did not apply.
The essential principle is that “there is an
inherent incommensurability between Spirit and Mammon.”
There is no common measure – no fungibility – between Spirit and
Money, or the Inordinate Rule and Love of Money. This
distinction is still somewhat preserved in the Academic
differentiation of the Liberal Arts (Artes Liberales)
from the Practical or Servile Arts (Artes Serviles); and
also in the incommensurate differentiation between an
Honorarium (as a gracious recompense for an intrinsically
unrepayable debt of gratitude) and a Wage (due in
justice).
Mammon itself – not just “the Mammon of
Iniquity” – was therefore seen to be a disordered desire (libido)
or destructive (and self-destructive) concupiscence. Mammon was,
also, often personified as an idol, or a false god, in various
admonitory Parables and even in lighter Satires and forms of
playful Humor.
The exuberances and consequences of Mammon –
both in individuals and in the ethos of their larger societies
or dominant plutocracies – have often been deftly presented
through Moral Comedy. Those who have read Geoffrey Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales, for example, will know this well. Or,
we may consider the impishness of Cervantes' Picaresque Tales
and “Sharpsters”, as well as his Don Quixote. Other such
works include: Ben Jonson's Volpone; Molière's
Tartuffe and The Misanthrope; John Dryden's
mock-heroic satires like Absalom and Achitophel;
Alexander Pope's The Dunciad; and, in the twentieth
century, Hilaire Belloc's ironic tale, The Mercy of Allah
(1922).
This last tale concerns the Ninth-Century
A.D. adventures (and misadventures) of Mahmoud the Merchant, the
wealthiest man in the Baghdad Caliphate, and his corrupting
instructions to his impecunious brother's seven children,
telling them, with serene pride, how he made all of his Money,
often through swindling and the other arts of lying! (Mahmoud
the Merchant was, it should be noted, the ninth-century
contemporary of those other Missionary Brothers, Saints Cyril
and Methodius, who are, along with Saint Benedict, the Patrons
of Europe!)
When such literature of Moral Comedy is
forgivingly generous and truly good, then a Moral “Course
Correction” is thereby effected in its audience through its
artistic “Comic Catharsis” (as distinct from a darker
Tragic one). For we come to see and shun some of our own baser
inclinations or temptations. Such a purification often comes by
way of laughter and the condignly embarrassing or
self-sabotaging actions of the fictional characters involved.
The cathartic effect of comedy is especially enhanced by the
exquisite irony of its language.
Hilaire Belloc's brief essay, “A Few Kind
Words to Mammon,”
will exemplify and support such a view, and perhaps also chasten
the spreading Mammonite Ethos to be seen today, for example, in
the current and growing Privatization and Outsourcing of
American National Security. This includes the Privatization of
the Military and the New “Security Services,” and the growing
formation of a Neo-Feudal Order of Merchant-Banker-Paramilitary
Companies, analogous to the British East India Company, which
was an effective (though shady) instrument of the historic
British Empire once upon a time.
Today's Mercenaries are often called
“Corporate Warrior's” or “Private Military Companies” and they
also have a “trans-national reach” with their new technologies,
as well as a fearsome capacity for very disturbing “global
effects.” Indeed, the increasing steps now being made towards a
“North American Union,” to include a new currency, “the Amero,”
recall to us the grand-strategic operations of the British East
India Company and its own Private Militias and Financial
Schemes, even in the trafficking of drugs (not only to China!).
In his multi-volume work, A Military
History of the Western World, Major General G.F.C. Fuller
wrote about the British East India Company, and about its
prosperous merchant-bankers and paramilitary (mercenary) forces.
He also showed how, especially in the Nineteenth Century,
“Mammon now strode into supremacy to become the unchallenged god
of the Western world” and, for almost 200 years, had brought
about “the economic serfdom of the Oriental world.”
Further commenting on this strategic system
of “merchant princes and adventurers” and the “complex system of
credit” and manipulated debt-bondage that “sprang up,” General
Fuller says:
Thus a system [especially in England from
1693-1694 onwards] was devised whereby the prosperity of the
future was underwritten in order to ease the poverty of the
present, and war was henceforth founded on unrepayable debt.
The banker merchants of London steadily gained in
political power over the landed interests, and, therefore,
increasingly into their hands went the destinies of the nation
and the Empire, whose frontiers had become the oceans and the
seas.
So, too, is it the case today with the
operation of Mammon and the system of Unrepayable Debt, as it is
increasingly to be seen in the “Emerging American Imperium” with
its own new strategic system (and Arcana Imperii) of
Private Military Companies and “Security Services.” Some of
these “Special Operations Forces” are explicitly in contact with
foreign groups of “Narco-Guerrillas” and their “Overlords;” and
some of them are in the service of High Finance and their
associated Energy- and -Strategic Minerals Cartels, or other
Managerial Elites and Guiding Oligarchies.
(The mere salary – without perquisites – of a current
Vice-President of one such Private Military Company, someone
personally known to me, is $ 750,000.00 per year – a very good
portion, some would say, of discretionary and useful Mammon! As
such companies have often explicitly said, “War for us is good
business.”)
As we may better come to see, Belloc's
self-irony and irony of language are instructive and
high-spirited and suffused with charm and surprise. He will
approach his great enemy, Mammon, and the servants of Mammon
with the deft weapon of Irony.
H.W. Fowler's general definition of Irony is
still the best one known to me:
Irony is a form of utterance that postulates
a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall
hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more
is meant than meets the ear, is aware of that more and of the
outsiders' incomprehension.
And this essential “double audience” applies
also to the “special senses” of irony, such as “Socratic irony,”
“dramatic irony,” and “the irony of Fate.”Through Belloc's deft use of his Ironical Narrator, he
will try to obscure the comprehension of his audience, in order
to surprise them at the end and to give insight by way of
indirection.
Belloc's good friend, G.K. Chesterton, once
wrote, with characteristic modesty, that “we are not generous
enough to write great satire.”
But Belloc was – and so was Chesterton himself! And Chesterton
then adds, for our reflection, an insight more:
To write great satire, to attack a man so
that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice, it
is necessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity
which realises the merits of the opponent as well as his
defects. This is, indeed, only another way of putting the simple
truth that in order to attack an army we must know not only its
weak points, but also its strong points.
In Belloc's own essay we shall see, in the
words of Chesterton, “how a great satirist approaches a great
enemy”:
namely the great Mammon, who has a formidable power of seduction
and corruption.
We who are sometimes ourselves the target of
good satire, Chesterton says, are profoundly affected, and in a
special way: “We might be angry at a libel because it is false,
but at a satire because it is true.”
What will we come to say of Belloc's own
ironic treatment of Mammon and of the servants of Mammon? Or, is
his artful indirection and cautionary charm to be ignored or
condescendingly dismissed for its “lack of seriousness”?
At the outset, Belloc introduces us to a
companion of his, and a man of purported discernment:
A friend of mine once wrote a parable ....
But in its verbal form it was something like this .... A number
of candidates were offered what they would choose. But they
could choose only one thing each. The first chose health.
And the second, beauty. And the third, virtue. And
the fourth, form. And the fifth, ticklishness,
which means an active sense. And the sixth, forgetfulness.
And the seventh, honesty. And the eighth, immunity
from justice. And the ninth, courage. And the tenth,
experience. And the eleventh, the love of others for
him. And the twelfth, his love for others. But, the
thirteenth (they were thirteen, including Judas) chose
money. And he chose wisely, for in choosing this, all
the others were added to him.
As in the case of Jonathan Swift's ironical
(and often irrational and increasingly unravelling) “Narrative
Personas” (in Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal,
and others), Belloc's own narrative persona gives us further
dubious hints about his suspect Peremptory Unwisdom:
If ever I complete that book which I began in
the year 1898 called “Advice to a Young Man” (I was twenty-eight
years of age at the moment I undertook it) it will there be
apparent by example, closely reasoned argument, and (which is
more convincing than all) rhetoric, that Money is the true
source of every delight, satisfaction and repose.
Not at all, however, does he “advise the
young to seek money in amounts perpetually extending.”
Rather, he says: “I advise the young (in this my uncompleted
book) to regulate their thirst for money most severely.”
For, he said – and does yet still – that
“Great sums of money ... are only to be obtained by risking
ruin, and of a hundred men that run the risk ninety-nine get the
ruin and only one the money.”
Such was – is yet still – his Adamantine Cautionary Advice!
Nevertheless, he immediately adds – lest we
be distracted and confused – his apt and emphatic (not to say
hyperbolic) reassurance:
But money as a solid object; money,
pursued, accumulated, possessed, enjoyed, bearing fruit: that is
the captain good of human life.
However,
When people say that money is only
worth what it will purchase, and that it will purchase only
certain things, they invariably make a category of
certain material things which it will purchase .... and
then its power is exhausted. These fools leave out two enormous
chapters – the biggest chapters of the lot. They leave out
the services of other men [like Mercenary Soldiers], always
purchasable. And they leave out the souls of other men
often purchasable. With money in a sufficient amount you can
purchase any service, and with money you can purchase many
individual souls. Now, that is important.
First, we must consider the especially
advantageous owning of a newspaper, for example, and then
consider “the purchasing of services with money,”
inasmuch as the Narrator now reveals his personal knowledge and
wide experience of such things:
I have known very many extremely rich
men whose writing was insignificant – never persuasive or
enduring in effect. The greater part of them cannot write
for more than a few minutes without breaking down. Just as an
elderly man cannot play Rugby football for more than a few
minutes or so without breaking down. But they can hire
men to write. And they do .... Often enough have I had a
pleasant talk with one of these serfs in private when his
daily task was done ... concerning the vices of his master [or
Neo-Feudal Media Overlord] and the follies which he (the serf)
had had to defend with his pen. But to be able to purchase the
services of men thus ... is a category ridiculously
neglected by those who pretend that money brings nothing but
material enjoyment. It brings, for instance, immunity
from the criminal law. At least it does to-day.
For, how many men, says he, do you
know who “have been sent to prison during your own lifetime
while possessed (not after having possessed) of”
Great Wealth?
Our Narrator then cheerfully moves on to the
second neglected category where Money is of great
advantage, namely in the purchasing of souls:
But if money can purchase services it can
also, with less certitude, but on a very large scale, purchase
those other little things we noted – the souls of men.
Here there is a distinction.
For, he adds:
You only purchase a soul when, by the action
of your money, you corrupt an individual. I do not say
“corrupt him beyond all salvation,” but, at any rate, beyond
any remaining desire for salvation .... When by the action
of money you make a man fall into certain habits
[especially by way of subjection to his overmastering vices]
which at last become his character, you are
purchasing a soul.
Further distinctions are now required to
establish the Narrator's desired meaning:
I say that money, acting thus [to promote
their corruption and men's moral vices], purchases souls. It
purchases souls not only in regardant, but in gross.
In regardant, I may explain, means “as regards the particular
relation between one soul and its purchaser,” while in gross
means [the purchase of souls] “of the world in general.”
Thus a man may be a serf regardant when he is a serf to a
particular lord [e. g., to a Media Lord, or a Lord of
High Finance, or of a Private Military Company], but not a serf
in his general status. Or he may be a serf in gross, that
is, a serf to anybody who comes across him .... And still more
is there a coward regardant and a coward in gross.
For instance, a man may be a general coward, and that is
being a coward in gross, or he may be a particular coward
in the matter of riding a particular horse, and then he is only
a coward regardant. I say, then, that the power of your money
to purchase souls may be in gross or regardant. It may
purchase a particular soul, in which case, God help you!
If, however, your money would only have “a
general effect upon ... the generality of mankind, for whom I
postulate souls,” then, “in this case you are not perhaps very
much to blame. It is rather their fault than yours.”
Nonetheless, in a certain way, our Narrator adds, “you are
worshipped for your money,” not unlike “the worship men give to
their country,” and we cannot justly or validly “shuffle
out of this valuable truth” merely by pointing out a few
exceptions.
For, in support of this point, we will
observe that
The ruck of men with large fortunes are
respected for all those things which money is supposed to
bring – justice, kindliness, humour, temperance, courage and
judgment. And even the very few rich men who are not respected
are still admired for some mystical quality. “There must have
been something in that man for him to have made half a million
[English Pounds] before he was forty.”
The Narrator – suddenly slipping a little,
and admitting that “I am here deliberately the devil's
advocate, and I know that I have not a leg to stand
on” – shows himself to be a coward, too, and dares not to
say the truth about this very same Disrespected Millionaire,
namely that “there must have been something lacking in other
men for this guttersnipe [our Millionaire] to have
got so much of them,” i.e., by way of cunning
exploitation or extortion.Belloc thereby subtly discloses his Narrator to be in
fact, the Devil's Advocate in Defense of Mammon! It is a
deliberate slip that points to Belloc's deeper purpose and
prepares us for his unexpected ending.
However, were our Narrator to have made such
a frank and open-hearted accusation against “Dives” (as,
for example, against the biblical “Rich Man”), he himself
concedes that he would thereby have had “no leg to stand on”; no
valid ground of support for his moral position. For, he
emphasizes:
If you are possessed of great wealth, I say
you are, in a plutocracy, a great man. You are both loved and
feared; everywhere respected and also admired. Your good
qualities are as enduring as stone; your evil qualities are
either transformed into something slight and humorous or
sublimated till they disappear.
What is important, once again, is “great
wealth,” and he then reminds us, parenthetically:
(Digression: Little wealth is disgusting,
like mediocrity in verse. If you are going in for being wealthy
you must be very wealthy or not wealthy at all.)
But, as a man of Great Wealth, you have also
other advantages, especially a solid self-admiration and other
improved feelings about yourself!
Something goes on within yourself.
Because you are respected and admired you become more solid.
You envisage your faults sanely. You are far from morbid. If you
have the manhood to correct your failings, you correct
them temperately. You have poise and grasp. If, more
wisely, you indulge your foibles – why, that
is a pardonable recreation. Your judgments are
well-founded. You are tempted to nothing rash or perilous. You
may be led, for the relief of tedium, into some slight
eccentricity or other, but that will give you more
initiative and a strong personality: not exactly genius, for
genius is a zigzag thing, burning and darting, unsuited
to the true greatness of wealth. It has not enough ballast
and repose.
(In this pleasant context, we might recall
C.S. Lewis' later, witty Screwtape Letters (1942) and the
advice that Uncle Screwtape gives to the Minor Devil, his cousin
Wormwood, for the temptation of man and for his benumbing
self-satisfied “consolation,” so as to remain slothfully stuck
in his own state of sin.)
Even now, however, our wise Narrator had not
completely conveyed what is most important for a man of
the “true greatness of wealth” and of his active patronage or
corrupting power. For, indeed, he says:
What is most important of all, those
whose permanent affection you ardently desire, those whose good
you crave, those whose respect you hunger for like food, will
all of them at once respond to your desire if money
backs it.
Belloc's now more obviously ironical (and
increasingly self-revealing) Narrator clearly shows that he, at
least, believes in the Commensurability or Fungibility of Money
(Mammon) and Spirit. He himself does not appear to see that they
are, however, intrinsically incommensurate.
What is going on here? What's Belloc up to?
Concerning such persons who have been
condescendingly patronized by the rich and are thereby beholden
to them, the Narrator then continues, as follows:
You [Mr. Mammon] can give them what they
really need, and you can give it them unexpectedly
when they really need it [the Money]. Thus do they associate
you with happiness. You, meanwhile, can behave with the leisure
that produces their respect. Gratitude will do the rest, or, at
any rate, security, and the habit of knowing that
from you proceeds so much good.
And what is the kind of good which really
proceeds from Mammon and from his beguiling Patronage? It would
appear to be, indeed, of a rather great and momentous kind!
Thus does dear Mammon give us half a
Paradise on earth and a fine security within
[which is sometimes also mistaken for complacency, sloth, and
presumption!]. Mammon is an Immediate Salvation. And
the price you pay for that Salvation is not so very heavy
after all: only a creeping gloom; a despair,
turning iron and threatening to last forever.
With his devilishness, the Narrator finally
reveals himself more fully, and with a surprise and trenchant
parody, to include his own especially emphatic italics!
So the whole thing may be summed up
in a sentence that runs in my head more or less like this: “Make
unto you friends of the Mammon of iniquity that they may receive
you into their everlasting habitations.” My italics.
The lure of Mammon, as he suggests, likely
leads to Hell!
What seems, therefore, to be the vitality and
expansiveness of Mammon really implies a constriction and a
decline, if not immediately a fall. Moreover, a Mammonite State
also implies the Decline of a State. This is another topic on
which Belloc wrote an incisive essay, in 1911, but without any
playful irony! He seemed then to be writing especially about the
British Aristocracy (Oligarchy) which he already saw to be quite
corrupted, even before World War I.
In this 1911 essay, “The Decline of a State,”
Hilaire Belloc had noted, among other things, a plutocracy's –
or oligarchy's – “capacity or appetite for illusion” and the
consequent and complementary spread of a “lack of civic
aptitude,” and also the cumulative, dissolving effects of
general “avarice” and of a general “fear” throughout society.
For example, he says:
An oligarchic State, or aristocracy, as it is
called, will decline principally through two agencies
which are, first, illusion, and secondly, lack of
civic aptitude. For an oligarchic state tends very readily
to illusion, being conducted by men who live at leisure [often
with Mammon], satisfy their passions, are immune from the
laws, and prefer to shield themselves from reality. Their
capacity or appetite for illusion will rapidly pervade those
below them, for in an aristocracy [or plutocratic oligarchy] the
rulers are subjected to a kind of worship from the rest of the
community, and thus it comes about that aristocracies in
their decline accept fantastic histories of their own
past, conceive victory possible without armies, wealth to be an
indication of ability, and national security to be a gift rather
than a product of the will [i.e., the truthfully and
adequately informed will].
Concurrent with this kind of decline among
the elites, there is the apathy or incapacity of the citizenry
(who are sometimes, regrettably, merely serfs and numb
subjects):
Such communities further fail from the
lack of civic aptitude, as was said above, which means that they
[the oligarchs] deliberately elect to leave the mass of
citizens incompetent and irresponsible for
generations, so that, when any more strain is upon them, they
look at once [as Dostoievsky said] for some men [some Providers]
other than themselves to relieve them, and are incapable to
corporate action upon their own account.
For, they have been “infantalized,” as it
were, and underexercized; their faculties have atrophied and
their will and trust for combined actions have been broken or
even paralyzed.
Such perils as “indifference” and “ignorance”
in “a great State” come to permeate the citizenry, as well as
the elites, he says, whereas in “a small one” [i.e., in a
small State] the perils of “faction” and “private spite” more
easily prevail.
With the help of a French scholar, we can
apply Belloc's insights about the decline of oligarchies also to
the case of modern democracies – and hence to the current and
expanding United States, or to the new North American Union.
This application will be clear, especially when we consider the
candid analysis of François Furet, the distinguished French
Academician and leftist intellectual historian, as presented in
his book on the French Revolution and on the related
historiography of Augustin Cochin (1876-1916). Furet
forthrightly writes:
Modern democracy depends upon a hidden
oligarchy [oligarchie cachée], which is contrary to its
principles but indispensable to its functioning.
That is to say, Modern Democracy is based
upon a deception.
I consider François Furet's illuminating
insight to be almost perfect, except that I would change the
word “oligarchy” from the singular to the plural number, hence
“hidden oligarchies” (oligarchies cachées). For, it is
true, that there are acute – and often very destructive –
rivalries among the oligarchs themselves and their own
differentiated and ambitious “managerial elites.”
To return to Belloc. We must also consider
the operation of other permeating vices in a time of decline,
namely during the decline of a particular State, says Belloc:
In the decline of a State, two vices will
immediately appear and grow: those are Avarice [hence
Mammon] and Fear; and men will more readily accept the
imputation of Avarice than of Fear [which often implies
Poltroonery or Cowardice], for Avarice is the less despicable of
the two – yet in fact Fear will be by far the strongest
passion of the time.
By Avarice, Belloc does not mean “a mere
greed of gain,” but rather “a sort of taking for granted and
permeation of the mere love of money” – or, once again, the
denial of the intrinsic incommensurability of Spirit and
Mammon: an incommensurability which is, we must remember, at the
very heart of true, unattenuated Christianity, and is the
foundation of historic Christendom, or the Culture of the Faith.
By way of clarifying contrast, the corrupting
orientation towards Avarice and Money, says Belloc, results in
the situation where even history itself
will be explained by it [i.e., by
Money], wars judged by their booty or begun in order to enrich a
few, love between men and women wholly subordinated to it,
especially among the rich: wealth made a test for
responsibility and great salaries invented and paid to those
who serve the State [e.g., the Upper Servers or the
Praetorians]. This vice will also be apparent in the easy
acquaintance of all who are possessed of wealth and their
segregation from the less fortunate, for avarice cleaves
society flatways, keeping the scum of it quite clear
of the middle [the middle classes], the middle of it quite clear
of the dregs [like Marx's “Lumpenproletariat”],
and so forth.
It is a sort of segmented or three-tiered
“system,” like “the Brain Lords, the Upper Servers, and the
Lost” (which are the dubious words of Michael Vlahos in his
analysis of “the Information Age”); or like the old Gnostic
Hierarchy itself of “Pneumatikoi, Psychoi, and
Hyloi,” the last of which are essentially the “Untermenschen”
or “the Lost.”
Moreover, Belloc's analysis continues:
It is a further mark of avarice in its
last stages that the rich are surrounded with lies in
which they themselves believe.
More important, however, is the matter of the
permeation of Fear:
Of Fear in the decline of a State it may be
said that it is so much the master passion of such
decline [to include the further vice of cowardice or
poltroonery] as to eat up all others. Coming by travel from a
healthy State to one diseased, Fear is the first point
you take. Men dare not print or say what they feel of the judges
[as well as certain powerful “minority groups” and elites], the
public governors, the action of the police [or counter-terrorist
SWAT Teams], the controllers of fortunes [High Finance] and of
news. This Fear will have about it something comic, and
modifying with laughter the lament of the patriot.
Indeed, says Belloc, concerning a certain
corrupt but “powerful minister” of the State, it is always
somewhat intimidating to criticize him,
But under the influence of Fear, to tell the
least little truth about him will put a whole assembly into a
sort of blankness. This vice has for its most
laughable effect the raising of a whole host of phantoms
[including phanton warriors and a variety of terrorists], and
when a State is so far gone that civic Fear is quite
normal to the citizens, then you will find them blenching
with terror at a piece of print, a whispered accusation [e.g.,
“homophobic,” “anti-Semite,” “pre-Conciliar”].
This description of the new, perverse
“normality” reminds one of G.K. Chesterton's keen insight from
his 1920 book, The Superstition of Divorce, where he
proposes the distinguishing mark of Modernity. He says that we
now “suffer from the modern and morbid weakness of always
sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.”
Recalling Belloc's ironical argumentation in
“A Few Kind Words to Mammon,” and the everlasting destiny
of Mammon's own friends which our Belloc presents – especially
those corrupt and dependent “friends of the Mammon of Iniquity”
– we may better appreciate, also, the end of his essay “The
Decline of the State”:
Moneylenders
under this influence [i.e., “the influence of Fear” and
the widespread “civic Fear”] have the greatest power, next after
them, blackmailers of all kinds, and next after these
[are] eccentrics who may blurt or break out
[i.e., blurt out the truth or break out of the bondage,
so spontaneously and so unexpectedly!]. Those who have least
power in the decline of a State, are priests, soldiers, the
mothers of many children, the lovers of one woman, and saints.
Léon Bloy's novel, The Woman Who Was Poor
(La Femme Pauvre – 1897), begins with the shocking
words: “This place stinks of God.” (These are the words of one
of the novel's minor characters, a very base character, indeed.)
But, the novel's final words are also trenchant and unexpected:
“The only sadness is not to be a Saint.”
“But genius and sanctity do not survive
except by suffering.” (So wrote Evelyn Waugh in his 1959
biography of Monsignor Ronald Knox, the Catholic priest who was
himself one of Hilaire Belloc's literary executors.)
What is our choice?
What are our standards? (The standard of
Mammon? The standard of Marcion (the Gnostic)? The standard of
Mohammed? The standard of Messianic Democracy? The standard of
Christ?)
In 1961, two years later, after his book on
the saintly and learned Monsignor Knox, Evelyn Waugh published
Unconditional Surrender, the final volume of his Sword
of Honor Trilogy, his three poignant novels about World War
II, in which Waugh himself had been a Commando Officer and
Parachutist, after first having been in the Royal Marines.
Near the beginning of Unconditional
Surrender, the protagonist's father, Gervase Crouchback,
wrote a letter to his son, Guy, dated 20 September 1943. This
serene and saintly father had known many sorrows himself,
including the loss of his wife and two sons, one of them killed
in World War I, the other dying of starvation and madness.
In his letter to his son, shortly after Guy's
recent visit to him on the seacoast, Mr. Crouchback commented
further upon Captain Guy Crouchback's inordinately critical
remarks concerning the Papal Concordat which had been made with
the Italian State of Benito Mussolini (the Lateran Treaty),
which Guy had thought excessively compromising of the Church and
defectively resistant to the State, and even unprincipled.
Gervase Crouchback wrote:
My Dear Guy,
I haven't been happy about out conversation
on your last evening [of your visit]. I said too much or too
little. Now I must say more ....
Most of the Romans we know kept it up,
sulking [i.e., kept up their hate for the invading
Piedmontese and other interlopers]. But that isn't the Church.
The Mystical Body doesn't strike atttitudes and stand on
its dignity. It accepts suffering and injustice. It is
ready to forgive at the first hint of compunction.
When you spoke of the Lateran Treaty did you
consider how many souls may have been reconciled and have died
at peace as a result of it? How many children may have been
brought up in the faith who might have lived in ignorance?
Quantitative judgements don't apply. If only one soul
was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of “loss of
face.”
Throughout the final volume, again and again,
Guy Crouchback remembers these words, especially his father's
final words “Quantitative judgements don't apply.” And these
words from the heart of his father later led Guy Crouchback
himself to save and sustain the life of a child who would have
been otherwise “born unwanted.” (That is to say, “born
unwanted in 1944”,
amidst the devastation of war.)
At his father's funeral, moreover,
As the nuns sang the Dies Irae with
all its its ancient deprecations of divine wrath, Guy knew that
his father was joining his voice with theirs:
Ingemisco, tamquam reus:
Culpa rubet vultus meus
Supplicanti parce, Deus...
That would be his prayer [the prayer of
humility of his beloved father], who saw, and had always seen,
quite clearly the difference in kind between the goodness
of the most innocent of humans and the blinding, ineffable
goodness of God. “Quantitative judgements don't apply.”
As a reasoning man, Mr. Crouchback had known that he was
honourable, charitable and faithful; a man who by all the
formularies of his faith should be confident of salvation; as a
man of prayer he saw himself as totally unworthy of divine
notice. To Guy his father was the best man, the only entirely
good man, he had ever known.
Mr. Crouchback had his own very special
qualities of resistance in those times of disorder during
the protracted and devastating war; and he possessed, as well,
many charming and enduring eccentricities!
What will be our resistance? Our moral and
strategic resistance to huckstering Mammon and its intrusive
culture today?
And what will be our serene (yet daring)
eccentricity? Our resilient spirit amidst the Decline of a State
in America and our pluck amidst its decomposition even unto
the Tumescence (or Tumor) of Empire.
For in times of disorder and circumambient
decline, as Belloc noted, certain kinds of spontaneous
eccentrics are not so much paralyzed with fear, nor
terrorized as others are; and they somehow often just blurt
out the candid truth and, with winsome robustness, break
out from the bondage and asphyxiation of untruth.
For Mammon is an idol, a false god.
And the Human Spirit and Mammon (Money) are
incommensurate.
--FINIS--
© 2007
Robert D. Hickson
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