Clerical Error

 Archbishop Justin Welby

Among the steadying qualities of Anglicanism, a certain reliable boringness has always rated high on my list of admirable clerical qualities.  Very little ecclesiastical business makes it to the pages of the National Enquirer or the News of the World.  In the last couple of weeks, however, a sensational story concerning the maculate conception of the sitting Archbishop of Canterbury has raced like a cheetah through the Anglophone press.

The Most Reverend Justin Welby himself remains, we have every reason to believe, above reproach.  But a large blot has appeared in the ‘scutcheon.  For all these years he thought himself the legitimate issue of his mother and Gavin Welby, an international whisky salesman.  But DNA testing has proved beyond doubt that his actual father was Sir Anthony Montague Browne, one of the confidential aides and high-level secretaries of Winston Church in the post-war years.

So far as historical records might indicate, replacing Gavin Welby with Sir Anthony Montague Browne as one’s father could definitely be regarded as “trading up”.   Gavin Welby was an alcoholic poseur who had abandoned the name (Weiler) of his German Jewish forebears and successfully infiltrated himself into a very okay Anglo-American social set that on the Anglo side included important Conservative politicians and on the American important Democratic politicians.  He almost married Patricia Kennedy in America and Vanessa Redgrave in England.  Between the might-have-beens he actually married a blueblood named Jane Portal, who was one of Churchill’s post-War low-level secretaries.  The future archbishop was born almost exactly nine months following the exchange of vows in Baltimore, where the couple had eloped.  While I hate to be unAnglican or prurient, I do conclude that there must have been an intimate exchange between high- and low-level secretaries no more than about forty-eight hours before the prelate’s mother and long supposed father eloped.  Learning about all this for the first time years after the deaths of both an unknown actual father and an imperfectly known, mistakenly assumed father would have been a shock for anyone.  In an age in which we are all obsessed with the question of “identity”,  Justin Welby has handled the astonishing revelation with what I must regard as great aplomb; and he has become of the object of well-deserved sympathy and admiration.  As the great poet of ancient Jewry put it so many centuries ago, and as the entire Church sings today: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”

Not that a medievalist is likely to be shocked by evidence of irregularity in the sexual histories of the higher clergy.  In general, it is true, we are dealing with irregular begetters rather than the irregularly begotten, but there are numerous examples of the latter class as well.  One of the more distinguished archiepiscopal bastards of medieval England was Geoffrey FitzRoy, Archbishop of York from 1189 to 1212.  He was one of the several illegitimate children of King Henry II, more famous for his dealings with Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury.  Geoffrey had managed to become Bishop of Lincoln without ever having been ordained a priest—which was a pretty good trick even in those days.

The REVE was a sclendre colerik man

There were large numbers of priestly offspring in the good old days, and they had to be cared for.  In fact clerical paternity could have a good deal of social cachet. In Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” the thieving Miller who is the chief butt of the satire is said to have a high-born wife (“ycomen of noble kyn”), since the local parish priest is her father.  She can boast of having the “blood of Holy Church” flowing through her veins.  The priest, who is wealthy, intends to leave the parish treasury to his handsome granddaughter, who is the other female lead in the fabliau.

As the Welby news was breaking I was as usual in the midst of some random reading.  I happened to pick up Du Pape by Joseph de Maistre, the arch-conservative thinker of post-revolutionary France.  This book argues that the rescued unity of Europe, indeed of the whole world, depends upon a recognition of a supreme papal power subject to no secular authority on earth.  But it includes, almost incidentally, a learned dissertation upon, and warm defense of clerical celibacy, here regarded as essential to the health of the body politic.  De Maistre considered a married clergy among the worst horrors of Protestantism, and it is doubtful that a viewing of Spotlight would have changed his mind.

 Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821)

His argument jogged my memory, and took me back to records of the trial of one of Welby’s more eminent predecessors in Canterbury, Archbishop Cranmer, who was burnt at the stake in Oxford in 1556.  One of the papalist prosecutors, the oleaginous Thomas Martin, a doctor of civil law from Bourges, and the author of an admired work on clerical celibacy, sought to amuse the court by asking Cranmer, with obvious sarcasm, whether the prelate’s children “were bondsmen to the see of Canterbury”.  Without missing a beat the archbishop responded with a question of his own: “whether, if a priest at his benefice kept a concubine and had illegitimate children, those children were bondsmen to the benefice or not”.  Merry England was still pretty merry, and the milieu of the “Reeve’s Tale” had by no means disappeared.  “I trust you will make my children’s cause no worse,” said Cranmer.

The New Provost

Since I will not long be able to disguise the genre of of this post, the parental brag, I must at the very least make a few preliminary remarks by way of extenuation.  I recognize that the most important thing I have done with my life is to have been a father.  Years of experience and observation, however, have led me to a tempered and perhaps even pessimistic view of parental agency.  It is this.  While there is nothing parents can do to guarantee that their children will turn out well, there are about a dozen things they can do to make it likely that they will turn out badly.  While it is only natural to delight in the achievements of one’s offspring, it would be folly even in imagination to take credit for them.  One can, however, be grateful for the hand of Providence.  Furthermore as a student of classical culture I am aware that not everybody wants to hear you going on about how great your kids are.  One could cite numerous instances in which parental boasting got so out of hand as to cross the line between bad manners and actual tragedy.  Think of poor Niobe transformed forever into a weeping statue!

Now, having dutifully laid out the prefatory required legal boiler-plate, I have to report that it was announced two days ago that our daughter, Dr. Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, is to be the new Provost of New York University.  This is a really big deal, and the reason I am putting it in my blog is that the message is too long to fit onto a bumper sticker on my pick-up truck.  “My Daughter is an Honor Student” just doesn’t cut it.

There is a quaint, old-fashioned character to many of our academic titles—our deans and vice-chancellors and such—that recalls the real or imagined medieval origins of the offices they denote.  A provost, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, means simply an “official set over others (in various specialized senses).”  Some version of the word appeared quite early in most of the European languages, including Old English, deriving from the Latin pre + positus, “set before”.  Like numerous other such words, provost “came into” English twice, one through the Latin and once through French, so that in certain settings it is pronounced in the French manner, without the concluding consonants, as in the military term provost marshal, or Provo, Utah—named after an early French trapper, Etienne Provost.  The top academic official of Worcester College, Oxford, is a “provost”, and in my time there the Latin pronunciation vied with the French.

What the word means in contemporary academic English is a dauntingly challenging and important job.  In 1963 Clark Kerr, the President of the University of California, gave a series of lectures at Harvard in which he introduced the term multiversity.  It was needed, he argued, because the incremental complexity of American higher education had in effect left the comparative simplicity of the university behind.  How do you?—how can you?--govern an institution that has within it, not always harmonious as they jostle for finite resources, a liberal arts college, advanced scientific laboratories, an engineering school, a law school, a medical school, a business school, a dozen other professional schools, etc., etc.

By chance that was the very year, 1963, that I took my doctoral degree; and it was about that time that most of the larger American institutions of higher education adopted the position of provost.  Certainly my own years of active academic life were ones in which the demands on college presidents expanded nearly to the breaking point.  Almost all large schools in this country have now gone through an administrative restructuring designed to liberate the President for the already crushing responsibilities of the unique leadership role.  The provostial job description varies somewhat from institution to institution, but the job’s major elements are the same. “The Provost is the University's chief academic officer,” reads the official NYU document “who is responsible for setting the University's academic strategy and priorities, working closely with the deans of the schools, and identifying and cultivating interdisciplinary areas of excellence and collaboration within and between schools.  All deans and directors of schools and institutes report to the Provost. The Provost also has direct responsibility for all academic support units. In addition, the Provost has institutional responsibility for the allocation of financial resources in accordance with academic priorities, working closely with the Office of the Executive Vice President.”

To me, that is a rather terrifying document.  New York University has an annual operating budget of several billions of dollars.  Even in the context of New York City it is a huge private employer.  It has nearly sixty thousand students, fifty thousand of them undergraduates.  The administrative apparatus required of such an operation is formidable.  Furthermore, it is an ambitious institution at a major inflection point.  A new President, Andrew Hamilton, the former Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, has been in office for only a few months.  Our daughter—my little girl!—is going to be his lieutenant in guiding such a great enterprise.   The concept of parental pride, as expansive as it is, seems inadequate to the task.  You can see why I had to write about it.  Once every five years is, I hope, not excessive.

Shield the Joyous

           

Egged on:  John Henry Fleming and Ruby Fleming in hot pursuit

        

            The giant Easter egg hunt sponsored by the Pez Candy company of Orange, CT promised on paper to be an imaginative initiative of corporate outreach as well as a jocund community event.  The candy mavens had hidden—or at least distributed—as many as 10,000 eggs over several adjoining fields in such a way as to present graduated levels of challenge for mixed age groups of youngsters beginning with toddlers.   According to press reports, alas, it all went terribly wrong.  Too many of the parents who showed up with their little kids proved unable to contain their own hyper-competitiveness.  Without waiting for the official starting whistle, several hundred large persons, who combined the worst excesses of Little League partisans and bargain-hunters in Filene’s Basement, rushed into the happy hunting grounds intent on scooping up as many pigmented eggs as they could carry.  The infants who simply got left behind were the luckier ones.  The less lucky were jostled or trod upon in the stampede.  There is one report of a four-year-old not merely muddied but bloodied. 

In the late morning of Easter Sunday in our own back yard in Princeton we had a rather less sanguinary event.  Five of our six grandchildren—the sixth being a young professional woman who as it turns out was on her way to the beach in Southern California at the time—were gathered, along with their parents, at our house.   The five grandchildren, young cousins of three families, were of two generations: three of them in the toddler to kindergarten set, and two somewhat older sisters just on either side of the cusp of teenagerism.  The older girls had played the principal role in the coloring of the eggs, and, without having lost a certain sense of excitement in the search itself, took on the more detached public role of preceptor to the infants.  The closeness and camaraderie of the cousins, who are but rarely all together,  is a particular source of pleasure for their grandparents.  “How good and pleasant a thing it is,” says the Psalmist of this familial harmony, which he likens to the ointment running down from Aaron’s beard onto the hem of his garment—a particularly apt image for youngsters in a nearly continuous state of drip and ooze from nostril or lip.

There is a beautiful old prayer now assigned to the infrequently experienced evening service of Compline that goes as follows:  “Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.”

One phrase in the prayer might seem a little puzzling both in meaning and in context: shield the joyous.  If you have ever seen a toddler at an Easter egg hunt, however, you certainly will know the meaning of “joyous”; the account given above suggests why the joyous might need shielding.

We had dyed about three dozen real eggs, mostly in unambitious solid colors, though there were a few daring polychrome experiments.  I had supplemented the offerings of the battery hens with a couple dozen more cheap and nasty plastic simulacra from the Dollar Store.  Experience had taught me that by no means all of the eggs would be found, that some would remain in the elements for many weeks, and that on the whole it is better to fertilize the garden in a more conventional and less odiferous manner than that afforded by the sulfurous exhalations of decaying ova.  Also, plastic eggs at least have a chance of surviving being found by a four-year-old.  I doubt that any of our infants noticed the difference.  Those completely captivated by the Spirit have scant time to worry about the Letter.

John Henry and Ruby, both of whom have entered the Tromping Ages, high-kicked and goose-stepped around the yard in a state of high excitement, spotting at least one in three of the bright ovoids so preposterously resting on grass tufts, in flower pots, or at the base of trees.  Frequently their older cousins offered helpful hints of considerable subtlety, such as “I wonder if there could be any on the gravel path?...I wonder…”  Their baskets grew heavy, but so great was the bounty and so great the excited urgency to move on to the next, that there were still plenty for toddler Hazel as she came like a modern Ruth, a gleaner following the harvesters.

Innocence, wonder, joy.  How often do we see such things truly on display?  “Verily”, says Jesus, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”  To my mind this is not a threat, not even an admonition, simply a statement of the way things are.  Wordsworth puts it in a slightly fancier way that demonstrates the Romantic habit of rationalizing Transcendence:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

            Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

            He sees it in his joy…

Shield the joyous.

Photo: Joan Fleming

Breakfast of Champions

Frank Norris

            Now and again in a spare moment I will take from a shelf one of my beautiful volumes of the Library of America—not exactly at random but with a certain element of caprice.  It is never hard to find new things that need and reward reading.  Recently I took down the volume of Frank Norris’s Novels and Essays.  In college I learned that Norris (1870-1902) was a “naturalist” and a “muck-raker,” but as we never actually read him, that didn’t mean much.  Years later I did take up The Octopus in a “social novel” binge mainly centered on Dreiser.  I just read Norris’s first novel, Vandover and the Brute; it turned out to be pretty good for a book written in a Harvard undergraduate writing course.  The setting is fin-de-siècle San Francisco—young men about town.  Its subject is moral decay.  To one anesthetized by post-modernism, it is almost shocking in its moral clarity.  Norris seems entirely unembarrassed to use words like depravity, degeneracy, corruption, etc., and to analyze the sins of the flesh from a perspective other than the merely quantitative.

            It is, however, a very minor aspect of the material culture described that is the inspiration for this post: the carnivore breakfast.  Vandover and his pals spend a good deal of time chowing down in various Frisco taverns and bordellos.  Standard evening snacks are large platters of oysters and “Welsh rabbits”—neither Welsh nor rabbits, of course, but a delivery system for scrumptious, cheesy calories devised by our ancestors before the blessings of pizza came to the land--washed down with goodly quantities of beer or champagne.  But they regularly start off their days with a huge chunk of quadruped flesh.  The standard conversational gambit for chums meeting up during the course of the day is a report on the avoirdupois of the morning’s meat.  The fourteen-ounce beefsteak is apparently the favorite breakfast, though the odd chop or cutlet will do in a pinch.  Pork products—ham, bacon, sausage—are for people on strict diets.

            If you are used of a morning to facing half a grapefruit, a few choice grains of granola, or even a whole bowl of steel cut oats, the young carnivores of Frank Norris may be a cause for alarm.  But it was not always thus.

            In the autumn of 1958 I sailed for Europe with a cohort of my fellow Rhodes Scholars-elect.  The ship was very grand, a floating city block from the Upper East Side; and though we were in the twilight of the Age of the Atlantic Crossing, everything about the arrangements seemed specially designed to boggle the mind of a young man from the sticks.  The food, served up by an abundance of waiters clad in bright, starchy white, was endless in its variety and apparently inexhaustible in its quantity.

            I was eager for knowledge of the old culture I would soon be encountering.  Someone had given me a light-hearted book full of advice for Americans about to visit the Mother Country for the first time.  I cannot remember its title, and I lost the book itself ages ago.  Still one or two of its gobbets of advice have stuck with me.  “It is quite easy to get three good meals a day in England,” said my author, “so long as you eat three breakfasts.”  The gastronomic scene in the British Isles has long since undergone a revolution, but in the late Fifties, if you happened to be taking most of your meals in a college dining hall, the advice proved prescient. 

While I never disdain the information offered by textbooks, I try always to test theory with observed practice.  I discovered on shipboard that the “full English breakfast” invariably included—in addition to fried eggs, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes, and apparently deep fried bread—both sausages and bacon, the bacon being of the genre usually called “Canadian” on this side of the Atlantic.

There was among our fellow passengers on the ship a middle-aged guy who struck me as the quintessence of Britishness.  He had a ruddy face adorned with a large russet moustache.  He was never seen without a coat and tie, and rarely without a suit of coarse-threaded tweed that looked about as thick as a Bokhara carpet and about as comfortable as a wire brush.  From his general demeanor one sensed he had not gotten the memo about having lost India.

Excess being addictive I was already by the fourth breakfast of the voyage looking for new worlds to conquer.  Eschewing the “full English breakfast” I boldly ordered from the meaty sub-section of the huge menu kippered herrings and something called “Köningsberger Klopse”.  How the waiter could accept this order with a straight face astonishes me in retrospect, but he did.  The Klopse turned out to be meatballs in a kind of caper-flavored gravy and could have on their own constituted an ample evening meal.  It’s not the kind of dish that required a supplement, especially a supplement of kippers.

Just as this breakfast was arriving under its gleaming metal dome the Imperial tweeded gentleman whom I mentioned earlier happened to be ushered in and seated at a nearby table in my sight-line.  We did not speak or even acknowledge each others’ presence; yet we shared a Jamesian moment.  I could not help noticing the slight recoil on this man’s face when he saw what lay on the plates before me.  He quickly recouped, averted his eyes, and gave his own order to his own waiter.  The distance between us was not great; I could not help overhearing his order.  “Please bring me a cup of tea,” he said.  “And a bowl of corn flakes.”

Historical Perspective

I remember clearly why, quite a long time ago now, I determined that Wednesday would be my regular blog day.  I thought of it as the appropriate day for what I had in mind.  Wednesday is intrinsically medial, and perforce therefore perhaps also moderate, as I fancy my topics and their treatment to be.  All well and good, perhaps, but I now see that I failed to anticipate a serious problem.  Not being of a particularly political turn of mind, I neglected to consider two salient facts: first, that in this country political elections normally take place on Tuesdays, and second, that if one lives on the East coast electoral results are unlikely to be available until well past my bedtime, let alone in time for me to incorporate them into some kind of sage or amusing commentary.

We now have the latest report on who's in and who's out.  That Donald Trump is still very much in is a cause of consternation to many in my circles.  While I have no punditry to offer, I might try to apply the balm of historical perspective.  Mr. Trump is a vulgarian whose indifference to actual facts is probably more founded upon opportunism and political indifference than on ignorance.  He conveys a tone, a spirit, an attitude.  His aim has been to represent a mood rather than to present a concrete program.  What he would actually do if elected president is hard to say, partly because his opinions stated at various times are contradictory, and partly because he seems challenged by the concept of the complete sentence.  But the idea that he has brought a new low to American presidential campaigns is a product of the shrinking historical memory.

In 1884 the presidential contest pitted James G. Blain (Republican) against Grover Cleveland (Democrat).  The rival camps had competing chants, which arose full-throated from rowdy mass meetings like football cheers today.  The Republican mobs would cry out “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?  Gone to the White House, haw, haw haw!”  The allusion here was to the bastard child sired by the Grover.  The Democrats could reply as follows: “Blain, Blain, James G. Blain!  The continental liar from the state of Maine!”  The reference here was to Blain’s denials of highly plausible charges of corrupt dealing on behalf of the railroad interest.

We can all deplore the coarseness of American democracy, but the complaints about its vanishing civility are historically ignorant.  As to political violence, of which there is a long and bloody tradition in American history, there is considerably less of it today than there was in earlier days of the Republic, even leaving unmentioned the awkward episode known as the Civil War.  I am an Arkansan.  At the first meeting of the Arkansas state legislature (1837) a heated discussion arose and the Speaker of the House stepped down from the podium at which he was presiding to engage in a knife fight with another legislator, whom he killed then and there.  Those were the good old days.

There has been a great deal of tisk-tisking over Trump’s truculently announced desire to punch somebody in the nose.   It does sound very unpresidential, but here again there are some advantages to having been around a while.  The consensus of recent American historians is that Harry Truman is among the ten greatest of our presidents.  The actual calculation of the Wikipedia chart devoted to this sweepstates has him coming in at Number Seven.  I don’t dabble in such pseudo-statistics, but President Truman is certainly high on my personal life-time list, coming in just after Franklin Roosevelt, whose unfinished term he inherited.  The President’s daughter Margaret was an amateur singer with professional aspirations.  Paul Hume, the music critic at the Washington Post, wrote an unflattering review of one of her concerts, which took place in December, 1950.  There was a certain amount happening just about then.  The President had declared a state of emergency against “Communist imperialism”.  Dwight Eisenhower assumed the supreme command of NATO forces.  The Dalai Lama had to flee Tibet in the face of an invading Chinese army.  Nonetheless the President of the United States took the time to write a threatening letter, on White House stationery, to the music critic who had panned his little girl.

“I've just read your lousy review of Margaret's concert. I've come to the conclusion that you are an ‘eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay’…” the president began.  “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!” Truman not merely had his finger on the nuclear button; he is the only person in history to have pushed the button.  His threat to beat up a journalist was regarded by some Republicans as pathetic and thin-skinned and by some Democrats as touchingly human.  But so far as I know nobody declared it the end of civilization as we have known it, nor did the editorial board of the New York Times melt into a puddle of ghee. 

Trump has called Bernie Sanders a “Communist”.  It is an index of historical change, I suppose, that this remark now seems ludicrous rather than incendiary.  He might as well have charged him with Monophysitism.  After yesterday's voting Mr. Sanders would appear to me to be practically out; but lexical responsibility need not follow him.  To the degree that he is indeed actually a socialist, which is debatable, he belongs to the distinctly American school of “social democracy” represented by Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas and execrated by real Communists as “social fascism”.  But of course Trump’s own adversaries call him a “Fascist” with equal abandon and equal lack of historical sense.  To refresh yourself on how real Communists and real Fascists conducted their electoral competitions I could recommend some choice pages from Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night in which he offers an eye-witness description of the political campaign of 1932 in Hamburg.  “Early one morning a squad of seven young Nazis were on their way to distribute propaganda to the dockers at the harbor gates.  Johnny Dettmer’s crew sauntered up behind them on Admiralty Street, and shot all seven in the back…On [May 19, 1932] one Nazi had his eyes stabbed out with a screw driver… Fourteen Nazis and Communists were killed on July 31, the day of the new Reichstag election…” etc.  This too will pass.

San la Muerte

I spent many years studying the fascinating figure of Saint Francis Assisi and his impact on the religious life of the later Middle Ages.  He remains the most popular post-biblical saint not only in the Roman Catholic Church but also among the general public, including the irreligious and even the anti-religious.  Just at the moment I have been revisiting Francis’s best loved poem, his “Song of Brother Sun” (Cantico di frate sole), a lauda or vernacular hymn of praise inspired by the sub-genre of “praise poems” in the Psalter.

Francis was not a learned man.  He called himself an idiota—a word not to be polluted by its modern English reflex—using the same term applied to Peter and John in the Book of Acts.  It meant a person without formal education or intellectual pretension.  In my opinion, however, he was more simple of soul than simple of mind; and I have been trying, with mixed success, to persuade my colleagues of the literary evidence of his intellectual sophistication.  He wrote the “Song of Brother Sun” late in his life in various stages.  His hymn commands that God be praised through/by/on account of numerous items of the physical creation: sun, moon, wind and water, fire and earth.  As he neared the end of his life, he added some final lines that have proved rather mysterious, beginning Laudato si, mi signore, per sora nostra morte corporale…Be praised, my Lord, on account of our sister, corporal death…This stanza, which has puzzled some of his admirers, seems rather a downer for a nature mystic.  Hold that thought, to which we shall return.

Over the weekend we were in Brooklyn at my son’s house.  The official agenda was a quick visit with the eldest granddaughter Sophia, in for a flying visit from L. A., and a delightfully wacky play (Nice Fish) at St. Ann’s Warehouse.  My son Richard is partially responsible for my blog.  He encouraged me to start it six and a half years ago, and I haven’t missed a week since.  He is a considerable expert on the popular culture of the Caribbean.  His book Walking to Guantanamo, the travelogue of a long walk through millennial Cuba,  is already an underground classic, and can only become more valuable as Cuba rapidly becomes better but less interesting.  I expect to see his current project on Haitian barber-shop art to show up eventually in one of the New York museums.

He has a library somewhat smaller than mine, but stocked with intriguing books I would never stumble upon in the daily round.  I picked up one of these in an idle moment between grandchildren and could not put it down: Prof. Frank Graziano’s Culture of Devotion, Folk Saints of Spanish America (Oxford, 2007).  The concept of the “folk saint”—a figure venerated outside the Church’s process of canonization and often enough in the face of active ecclesiastical hostility—is well known to most medievalists.  Many popular medieval cults honored mythic, imaginary, or etymological saints—like Saint Christopher the Dog-head, Saint Veronica, the Seven Sleepers, Saint Nicholas and the Pickled Boys, or Saint Scholastica.  In the German-speaking areas of late Middle Age the Vierzehn Nothelfer (fourteen saints with individual specialized helping powers, twice the repertoire of the Magnificent Seven) enjoyed wide popularity.  Many of these imaginary but earnestly venerated saints were born of the marriage of the textual traditions of nascent Christianity and ancient pagan history, folklore, or philology.

As I learn from Graziano’s fascinating book the process had a modern rebirth in the Americas with Spanish Catholicism’s coercive encounter with Amerindian religions and folklores.  The cultural historian documents a number of fascinating cults.  Old Argentina was a particularly fecund incubator of dubious saints.  There is in Argentina elaborate devotion to “the Little Cowboy” (Gaucho or Guachito Gil).  There is another, an off-the-books holy woman known as Difunta Correa who died in the desert (as Hagar would have done without angelic help) but continued to suckle her babe from her dead teat.  Her shrines are decorated with used auto parts and old tires. But the one that leapt off the page for me was San La Muerte, Saint Death, the holy skeleton, known also by half a dozen other names (San de la Muerte, Señor La Muerte, San Justo [the just one, great leveler], Pirucho [from Guaraní word for “skinny”], San Esqueleto [Skeleton], etc.)  The cult of San la Muerte moved north from the vast homelands of the Tupí-Guaraní, crossed the isthmus, and is now widespread in Mexico and our own borderlands.  San la Muerte has a strong appeal among liminal groups, including narco-gangsters.  San la Muerte tattoos are common.

Despite the shared iconography of the ossuary, the cult of San la Muerte seems independent of the macabre festival of the Day of the Dead (All Hallows’ Eve), for which there are clear liturgical antecedents in many parts of Europe.  But I am left wondering about the Franciscan “Sister Death” viewed by Francis as he approached his own demise not as the Grim Reaper but as a comforting and natural force—as natural as the very material elements of Nature itself, earth, air, fire, and water.  There are many things to puzzle me about the Mexican Muerte, beginning with gender.   The figures in Francis’s poem are “brother” or “sister” in accordance with their grammatical gender.  This is the norm for early personification allegory generally.  But the Amerindian cult turned a feminine abstract noun into a male saint, then complicated things further with gender-bending ambiguous clothing.  Like so much else in Graziano’s book, the Muerte cult is obviously a syncretism, a cultural blending of Iberian Christianity and probably unrecoverable traditions of the Tupí-Guaraní peoples.  Yet I would suggest, tentatively and without the necessary anthropological knowledge, that the beneficent aspects of San la Muerte—a helper in difficulty, a comforter in distress, an inspirer of penitential pilgrimage—may have had medieval European Catholic antecedents in the complex mind of Francis of Assisi.

Nel mezzo del campaign trail

Yesterday was so-called Super Tuesday.  As the readership of this blog is international, I might explain that the portentous adjective “Super” is used to designate the day on which numerous states hold their “primary” elections, those designed to arrive at a single party candidate to run in the general election in November.  I have to admit I have gotten caught up in the political excitement and was prepared to stay up late to learn the news.  This may not sound to you like a dramatic evidence of deep political commitment, but as I am definitely a Morning Person with a vengeance, it really is.  However two factors worked in my favor.   Most of the voting was being done in my own time zone, so that the voting day was done about the same time as my energy was depleted.  Secondly, we have advanced beyond the Bad Old Days of the “hanging chads”.  The technology of the voting machines now reliably yields almost instantaneous results, so that I knew all I needed to know before falling into a deep and restful sleep.

What made yesterday “super” for me had nothing to do with the voting or its results.  What made the day “super” for me was the first meeting of a six-week course I am offering on Dante’s Inferno.  The venue for this seminar is the Evergreen Forum of Princeton, one of the hundreds of Geezer Colleges that now dot the landscape of the American Senior Community.  I have written about “adult” or “continuing” education on this blog before.  I regard its vitality an impressive sign of social and cultural health.  On a day on which various pundits were predicting the results of Super Tuesday in terms of the frustrations of embittered old white people, I was standing up in front of a class of mainly old white people full of cheerful intelligence, eager expectation, and the thrill of discovery.

I asked for a show of hands.  “How many of you will be reading Dante for the first time?”  At least a third of the students—there are in perfect harmony with Dante’s own numerological aesthetics thirty-three of them—raised a hand.  I actually felt a pang of jealousy.  The cruel fact is that you can read a great work of literature for the first time only once.  And while older students are often at first a little timid and diffident, uncertain of intellectual and spiritual capacities dormant since their college days, they have a huge if unrecognized advantage as readers of serious books.  That advantage—our advantage—is a cumulative life experience for which there is no artificial substitute.

I am amused by our common use of the word adult in such phrases as “adult themes” or “adult movies,” usually signifying sexual content dealt with at an adolescent level.  If you want adult themes, let me recommend the Divine Comedy.  Its subject, according to its author, is “the state of the souls after death”.  It deals with the traditional four Last Things of Catholic theology: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell. 

Centennial years always command a special attention.  The year 1300 perhaps held more than most.  The pope had declared it a special year and offered special inducements to attract pilgrims to Rome.  They came in large numbers.  Dante’s poem, written a few years later, uses the Jubilee of 1300 as its historical setting, so that the journey of the poet-narrator has a universal symbolic suggestion as well as an intensely personal focus.  The famous opening lines of the Inferno begin thus: “Midway in the journey of our life,  I came to myself in a dark wood…”  The interplay of a shared plurality (our life) with the singularity of a first-person narrator invites, perhaps requires, that readers find their own journeys within the fantastic description of the pilgrim’s.

As is typical of this poet, what he means by midway is both personal and universal.  Life’s journey is something of a cliché and already was when Dante first picked up his pen: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...  But there is more.  Suppose that an author happened in fact to have been born in the year 1265.   Then in a poem set in the imaginary year of 1300 that man would be in fact thirty-five years old.  That is indeed exactly at the midpoint of a canonical lifespan of seventy years.  “The days of our years are threescore years and ten”, says the Psalmist; “and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”  There is a certain pleasing lack of dogmatism in this verse.  Seventy is the norm, but you might make it to eighty.  It still has a sobering impact, especially should you, the reader,  just happen to be seventy-nine years and nine months, say.