Benefit of Clergy

 

Let me ask you about a couple of words, and one three-word phrase.  Do you know what a dirge* is?  How about a placebo**?  You probably know both those words, the one a funeral lament, and the other a fake medicament, as illustrated in a couple of quotations in the notes.  How about the phrase “benefit of clergy”?  One of Rudyard Kipling’s most arresting stories is entitled “Without Benefit of Clergy.”  It has been much admired, and twice made into a movie, but it is by no means easy to describe or to understand.  Its setting is British India of the Victorian period.  Its subject is the socially impossible union of an unmarried English civil servant engineer (John Holden) and a young Muslim girl (Ameera) whom he has purchased from her mother!  Given its date (1890) its themes seem prophetically relevant to many current discussions of race, gender, religious identity, and cultural diversity.  Holden has to hide his chattel-love out of sight of the British community.  The whole situation is dangerous and doomed, as Holden knows.  The phrase “benefit of clergy” is one not infrequently found in historical literature.  When I first encountered it and tried to make sense of it, I supposed it referred, as it seems to in Kipling’s title, to an irregular sexual union outside the religious sanction of marriage: cohabitation, “common law marriage”.  It is a frequent ploy of the mind to try to force the unfamiliar into submission, however absurdly, into categories of the familiar.  The phenomenon includes words and phrases we hear but do not understand.  I wrote an essay sometime ago about the phrase “to beg the question,” for which the absurd new meaning has become “to pose a question”.  But of course if it works, it is no longer absurd.

 

            It is the title of Kipling’s story rather than the troubling issues raised in it that is the stuff of this essay.  Its subject will be aspects of the reflection of the biblical book of psalms in odd corners of the cultural landscape—including the phrase “benefit of clergy”.  Returning to dirge and placebo, most people know the words, but few are likely to know their etymological origins. Both of them come from the Vulgate,  the medieval Latin translation of the Book of Psalms!  The first two “hours” (or parts) of the Office of the Dead were known as Dirige and Placebo. These were the initial words of the first antiphon (liturgical chant) in the morning “hour” of the Office:  Dirige me, Domine Deus meus… This is a paraphrase of a verse in the fifth psalm.  “Dirige” means guide or lead in the imperative mood.  “Guide or direct me O Lord my God…”  A dirigible airship was so-called because it could be steered.  The Latin imperative dirige eventually wandered off into the English noun dirge, meaning a funereal lament.  Placebo means I shall please or be pleasing.  A psalm verse (114:9), Placebo domino in regione vivorum… (“I will please the Lord in the land of the living…”) likewise was prominent in the liturgy of death.  The English language swallowed placebo whole, so to speak, though the specialized medical application is pretty oblique!  You are pleased to think that the vacuous pill is making you feel better.  The Book of Psalms has had an enormous cultural influence over the last two thousand years.  In terms of musical “albums” judged in the long view of history, it would be a platinum encased diamond disk like no other.

 

            And what has any of this to do with benefit of clergy, the English translation of a medieval Latin legal phrase, beneficium clericale?  An ordained churchman (cleric) was someone with education or (in Anglo-Norman French) clergie, English clergy.  Hence, clergyman.  In medieval Europe there were two parallel but separate systems of law.  There was the ordinary secular law, in England called the common law; but there was a separate set of ecclesiastical courts.  Lay people could be hauled before these courts for certain infractions--Chaucer’s Summoner makes a good living from this racket—but mainly they were used to adjudicate cases involving the clergy.  In general, the punishments meted out for convictions in the ecclesiastical courts were less severe than those in the King’s court, in which capital punishment was very common.  So if you were in serious trouble, there was a great advantage, privilege, or benefit to being tried in church court, for which all clergy were eligible. The term benefit of clergy properly refers to this ecclesiastic privilege.  There were plenty of clerical felons to claim it, not to mention plenty of lay malefactors who sought to escape their just fates by claiming to be clerics.  Q: How can you to tell that someone is clergy (of clerical status)? A: by demonstrating that he has clergy (learning, education).  He does that by reading aloud and correctly translating something from the Latin Bible.

 

The canonical text for this purpose was the initial verse of the fiftieth psalm: Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.  “Have mercy upon me, God, according to thy great mercy.”  This psalm was usually called simply the Miserere.  Its exegetical “story” is that it was written by an abject King David as he contemplated his sinful behavior with Bathsheba—adultery aggravated by homicide.  As the most important of a group of seven poems within the Psalter known as the penitential psalms, the Miserere has a rich liturgical and musical history.  According to one famous anecdote, the fourteen-year old Mozart was so taken by hearing the version of the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) that he transcribed it from memory!  This verse has also a colorful legal history.  It was commonly if irreverently known as the neck verse because an accused malefactor who could read it in plausible-sounding Latin and translate it correctly into the vernacular, might establish his “clergy” and claim its benefit: being tried not in the secular but in the ecclesiastical courts, thus probably saving his neck.  There are many reflections of it and its spiritual implications in European literature.  The first three words actually spoken by any character in the Divine Comedy (Inferno 1:59)—the  address of the terrified Dante to the shade of Virgil—are “Miserere di me”!  The first word is good Latin, the next two an accurate translation of Latin to Italian.  This lost soul knows he is in desperate trouble; so he recites the neck verse!

 

The special homage paid by law to erudition survived the medieval church and even the Reformation.  There are some interesting episodes from English literary history.  The theatrical world of Elizabethan England could get rowdy.  Christopher Marlowe was killed in a barroom brawl in 1593.  Details, as they say, are lacking.  Five years later the then fledgling playwright Ben Jonson fought a duel with an irascible actor named Gabriel Spencer and killed him dead.  We know a few more details about this incident, which was in  the eyes of the law manifestly a capital manslaughter.  Jonson was arrested, imprisoned, and almost certainly headed for the gallows.  But he miraculously produced a kind of Get-Off-the-Scaffold card.  Jonson was a bricklayer, but a particularly erudite one.  He made a plea for benefit of clergy.  He could read and write Latin—which is what the word literate then chiefly meant.  Remember that the word clergy meant both the clerical caste and the learning for which they were distinguished.  The plea was accepted.  He would not be subjected to the jurisdiction of the common law courts.  We see here the laicization of a medieval religious privilege that a college professor must necessarily applaud.  That did not shield Jonson from all criminal liability, but it saved his neck.  How he wiggled out of the remaining situation is not entirely known.

 

*”A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young”: E. A. Poe, in Lenore

 

**”Research shows that if patients believe they are taking the real drug, they are more confident of improving and, so, improve even if they are actually on the placebo.” John Cornwell

Justicia

 

John Newman

 

 

John Newman (1936-2023)   

 

We have suffered a death in the family.  On April 19 my brother-in-law and Joan’s only sibling,  the architectural historian John Newman, 86, died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Wye, Kent, a few miles from Canterbury.  He had long been ill and in his last days in obvious terminal decline.  But death is no less final for being expected.  His widow Margaret, and his two daughters Elizabeth and Hilary and their families survive him in England.  And here his slightly younger sister Joan is left to balance grief and many happy memories.

 

This personal tribute to John will not compete with that currently on the blog page of the Courtauld Institute in London, of which he was a post-graduate alumnus, a long-time teacher, a one-time Deputy Director, and a distinguished emeritus fellow.  I encourage you to consult this lovely memorial (https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2023/john-newman-1936-2023/), which surveys the main currents of John’s extraordinary professional career.  I merely want to add a few of my own remarks and personal and affectionate memories.  The Courtauld Institute is sometimes described as the Art History Department of the University of London.  It is actually an independent college of that university, and one of the most distinguished art historical institutes in the world.  It is appropriately housed in one of Britain’s most distinguished buildings, Somerset House (near the Savoy and Temple tube station).  Many visitors to London are familiar with the Courtauld’s fabulous art gallery which is also housed there.

 

John Newman and his sister Joan, my wife, were born respectively in 1936 and 1938, the only children of Arthur and Wynifred Kate Newman.  His father was a scientist, an industrial chemist, and an executive in a prominent pharmaceutical firm.  My dear mother-in-law Kate Newman was a homemaker and domestic horticulturist with considerable musical talent who imbued her children with broad cultural interests.  Naturally the War loomed large in the children’s earliest memories.  The family removed for a while to Derbyshire, but John spent several of his early years in rural Kent.  It was there that he nurtured his lifetime fascination with the English built environment, travelling on solitary bicycle tours through the villages and countryside on the trail of big houses, old churches, indeed of any architectural monuments of interest or distinction.

 

The family moved nearer to London, and John attended Dulwich College, where his classical education prepared him perfectly to pursue the Greats (classical studies) course at University College, Oxford.  He seemed to be following a well-beaten path when he became a classics master at the Tonbridge School in Kent.  He was by training well suited for this career, and good at it.  But he then did something very courageous under the circumstances of those times.  His love was architecture, and he chose to follow his bliss.  Giving up his nascent and safe career as a teacher of classics, he applied to, and was accepted into, the postgraduate program of the Courtauld Institute.  This was a bold move, not without financial risks, that led to no certain or even likely employment prospects.  But the rest is, as they say, history.  So conspicuous were his talents as an architectural historian that he never left the Courtauld, merely moving to the other side of the desk, so to speak, and to the outstanding career outlined in the memorial notice to which I have referred.

 

 

John’s most notable public scholarly role was that of successor to Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as supervisor (and author of several volumes) of the monumental Buildings of England series.  Once again, we see the serendipitous pattern of John’s life.  The relationship between these two giants of British architectural history began when Pevsner put a notice on a message board seeking a chauffeur to drive him around the county of Berkshire looking at buildings to write up.  John, then a student, leapt at the chance.  Sir Nikolaus died in 1983.  By then John was driving the Buildings of England in a very different sense.  One of my own happiest memories of John was attending the festivities about ten years later—held in an amazing medieval crypt on the High Street of Canterbury—celebrating the publication of his second fat volume devoted to Kent, his home county.  I am sure that Sir Nikolaus, his early patron and colleague, was beaming down from the empyrean.  The breadth and range of the architectural expertise displayed in the Kent and other volumes wholly written by John must be described as awesome.

 

Public eminence and achievement deserve our honor and our admiration, but the best part of a man’s life, as Wordsworth reminds us, are his “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”  Around such acts John’s life seemed to be organized.  He was almost culpably modest and self-effacing; and I don’t think he had a mean bone in his body.  He was kind, equably tempered, quietly energetic, socially concerned, an unostentatious but ethically engaged Christian.  He and his life partner Margaret were the unassuming regents of a happy, well regulated, culturally rich life lived in modesty and calm.  Their two lovely adult daughters, now on the cusp of middle age, are living monuments to their upbringing.  John was very proud of his accomplished children and grandchildren and particularly pleased, I think, when one of his grandsons matriculated at his old Oxford college.

 

Relations with one’s inlaws are often the stuff of lame mirth.  One of my own father’s favorite quips was this: “Of all my wife’s relations, I like myself the best.”  Friendship almost perpetually practiced across the width of the Atlantic has its own special character.  We had a few episodes of happy professional collaboration.  I remember teaching one of his classes at Tonbridge; I tried, not altogether successfully, to summarize the Latin literature of a thousand years of the Middle Ages in fifty-five minutes.  On two of our alumni tours of Britain I prevailed upon John to lecture about the extraordinary medieval church and alms houses at Cobham in Kent.  Of course there were hard-wired differences between of us, temperamental and national, of which we were not unaware.  Our friendship was different from the  easy intimacy of childhood chums.  But all the same qualities that won the admiration of another father, the professional acknowledgement and praise of other deeply learned and productive experts, and not least the affectionate esteem of generations of Courtauld students whom he had taught, guided, and encouraged, made their enduring impression also on a brother-in-law. John was indeed my only brother-in-law.  The sense of loss is deep and—how to put it?—mature.  Various circumstances have led to the postponement of the funeral until mid-May; and even then I shall not be able to accompany Joan and our son Richard to England for the ceremony.  (“Uncle John” was important figure in Richard’s early ornithological career, among other things.)  But my own heart and mind will indeed be there to bid farewell to this man of such admirable independence of character, such steady quality of mind and, indeed,  spiritual character of such unwavering decency.  May he rest in peace.  Peace, too, to all who loved him.

 

                                            

 

American Tragi-Comedy

 

One of the great English writers of the last century, Dame Rebecca West (1892-1983) became fascinated with the psychology of treason as committed by some British turncoats who aided the Nazi cause in World War II.  In 1947 she published a remarkable book entitled The Meaning of Treason.  Particularly brilliant is her long section on William Joyce (better known perhaps as Lord Haw-Haw), a complicated Irish fascist who made English language  propaganda broadcasts for the Germans through the course of  the war.  Some years later she returned to the theme—this time dealing with Communist spies—in The New Meaning of Treason.  These are two important books of lasting merit, both as “true crime” and as penetrating psychological and historical studies.  How much it is to be regretted that Dame Rebecca is no longer with us to write The Even Newer Meaning of Treason, or perhaps The Meaninglessness of Treason.

 

Rebecca West in her youth

 

Such musings are inspired, of course, by the reported activities of the puerile Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Texeira, who leaked all sorts of top secret military documents to a group of his adoring acolytes, one of whom then became a super-spreader and the instigator of a massive American embarrassment and an international incident with still unforeseeable implications for further death and destruction in the Russo-Ukrainian war and for the future effectiveness of American military intelligence.  There is probably more disturbing news to come.  The latest press reports are that Texeira actually began leaking secret information about the Russian invasion within days of its commencement.  Nobody seemed to notice at the time, but people have noticed now.  A PBS interview with a Ukrainian military leader I saw last week was disquieting.  This official was of course being diplomatic  and understated , but you could tell that he was inwardly fuming over the stupidity of the leaks.  Altogether the episode is an American tragi-comedy that briefly turned my eccentric professorial mind to another great book actually entitled An American Tragedy (a novel by Theodore Dreiser, 1925).

 

Not enough people know this book today; so I’ll tell you a tiny bit about it.  An American Tragedy is the highly fictionalized descendant of a famous murder case of 1906, the fictionalized anti-hero being one Clyde Griffiths, the child and impressed factotum of impecunious street evangelists in Kansas City.  After his sister escapes her similar evangelical imprisonment by skipping town with a fancy man, Clyde finds work as a bellhop in an upscale hotel.  Though a low level and servile occupation, his job gets him away from his Bible-thumping parents, puts a little a money in his pocket, and inserts him into a group of young colleagues who in their spare time like to think of themselves as badasses in their pursuit of wine, women, and even occasionally song.  Clyde has a couple of particularly unsavory friends among this group, especially one Willard Sparser.  Sparser, who likes to impress his fellow bellhops, is responsible for cleaning and maintaining the expensive new car of a wealthy resident.  He “borrows” the car to take Clyde and some others on a day-off joyride into the countryside in search of booze and other assorted naughtiness.  But Sparser pays too little attention to how time is passing and discovers in alarm that he must drive at reckless speed back to the city in order to return the car and keep its unauthorized use undetected by its owner.  Alcohol impaired, he hits a young girl in the road.  Then, fleeing in terror from that crime he totals the car altogether.  Clyde tries to avoid association with these catastrophes by fleeing Kansas City, eventually arriving in Chicago, where after several hundred pages the actual main plot of the novel begins.  This is, as the Friar says to the Wife of Bath, a long preamble to a tale, but a preamble nicely exemplifying the motives of Jack Texeira, airman first class and “cyber defense operations journeyman”.  (The Air National Guard does not use the rank of Bellhop.)  Those motives were not the gnaw of conscience, intellectual conviction of the desirability of Communism (Alger Hiss, Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt); nor (self) righteous indignation at the criminal behavior of our government (Ellsberg, Assange, Snowden, Chelsea Manning); they had nothing to do with the frank venality of money  (Aldrich Ames).  Nor is motivation to be found in his political views, religious inclinations, or possible racial prejudices—topics that in the current climate have inevitably been suggested in several cultural commentaries.  Unfortunately, there seems to have been no serious social motive, noble or base, plausible or crackpot, in play.  No, Jack Texeira mainly wanted to impress a group of adolescent video game players, to show them that he was very, very cool.  He had the keys to a metaphorical fancy new car—top secret documents!  He would treat them all to a joy-ride!  Whatever be the legal fate of Cyber Defense Operations Journeyman Teixera—and while honoring a quasi -mythical presumption of innocence, I suspect it will be unpleasant—I am already prepared to declare it at least a demonstrated linguistic crime that such a fellow could be said to work in the field of Military Intelligence.  And as that is the same Military Intelligence whose digital wizards were in their search for the leaker scooped by two reporters for the New York Times, one does have to wonder if we have a more systemic problem.

 

1920s bellhop

 

Jack Texeira

 

Much has been made of Texeira’s youth (twenty-one), and some have suggested that no person so young should have access to state secrets.  (Of course there is a difference between youthfulness and callowness.  Stripling youths fought effectively at Bunker Hill, Shiloh, Belleau Wood, and Tarawa.  Kim—Kipling’s young hero, I mean, not Kim Philby—was an ace espionage agent at the age of twelve.)  Having been a college professor for forty years, I am aware that young people often do dumb things.  As a matter of fact I myself was once young and did many very dumb things.  Yet even mindlessness operates on a sliding scale, and this document dump is so deep in the red zone that lights are flashing.  According to news reports Mr. Texeira’s desire to commit to a military career is consistent with a significant family tradition of patriotic service.  But he devoted many hours to playing online video games, and in this avocation became a kind of leader of and guru to a group of “gamers,” including teen-agers and others of possibly arrested mental development, who were like-minded video game enthusiasts.  Mr. Texeira apparently sought to impress these acolytes, as the fictional Willard Sparser had set out to impress Clyde Griffiths, of just how cool he was by the flagrant abuse of something potentially lethal that he was supposed to preserve and protect.  Texeira had promised to do so in a formal signed document, his oath of office so to speak.  Having now exposed my own deep and perhaps mindless prejudices about video games and those addicted to them, I must admit that I actually don’t know squat about such games, having never played one.  I do vaguely recall reading a news squib once that claimed that Marine recruiters actually sought out video-gamers because so many had honed their digital reactions to warp speed.  Theory holds that such dexterity ought to be transferable from a game board to an M27 automatic rifle.  And I more distinctly recall reading in the press almost a decade ago of a disquieting international brouhaha involving criminal misogyny alleged to have been visited upon female game creators and players by young men who believed the gaming world should remain a male monopoly.  I don’t know how this episode ended, but I do remember the catchy name it was given: Gamer Gate!  Thanks to some bungling Republican burglars working on behalf of Richard Nixon in the early Seventies, many outrageous scandals are now Something Gates—the stuff of a future whimsical philological essay, perhaps.  Just now I am too annoyed by the fact that this great moniker “Gamer Gate”, which seems so perfectly suited for the shenanigans of Jack Texeira and his elvish crew, is no longer available.  I suspect that this same fate of unavailability, except on prison visiting days, awaits our airman first class as well.  He is not a whistleblower, just a guy blowing his own horn; yet he is not entirely without his defenders.  Representative Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, a believer in Pizza Gate, if you remember that one (pedophilia plus pomodoro sauce), has proclaimed his heroism.  Don’t you find it funny that so many things that are not at all funny are so—funny?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daffodils, One to Ten Thousand

 

In the Ouchitas

 

            In the third book of his Metamorphoses Ovid tells the tragic story of Echo, scorned by a beautiful but self-absorbed young man who, enamored as he stared into a sylvan pool, had no desire but for his own reflected image.  In this fit of erotic psychopathy he died.  Ovid says that his sisters, the Naiads and the wood nymphs, the Dryads, “were preparing the funeral pyre, the quivering torches and the bier, but there was no body.  Instead of his body they came upon a flower with white petals surrounding a yellow heart.”  Metamorphosis is a fancy word for “change”, and Ovid’s poem is a huge anthology of stories about human bodies changed into something else—flowers actually being one of the happier options.  This fellow’s name, of course, was Narcissus.  From this mythological name we now have, in the realms of medicine and popular psychology, the condition of extreme self-absorption called Narcissism.  In one of the most widely read poems of medieval Europe, the Romance of the Rose, Narcissus appears as a monitory reminder of the fatal powers of erotic passion.  There can often be a confusion between the scientific and the popular names of plants.  To botanists narcissus denotes a genus with more than sixty species of spring flowers, only some of which are called narcissi by gardeners.  In general, what we call daffodils are all yellow.  Certainly for my own plantings I prefer the more numerous all yellow blooms.  Call me a classicist.

 

 Narcissus

            Mythological and literary connections augment my love of the daffodil, which is my favorite flower for reasons both aesthetic and practical.  To begin with the practical, the daffodil has the great advantage of being unpalatable to deer.  Tulips, on the other hand, seem to be the caviar of our cloven-footed friends.  That reason might be enough on its own because it means that we actually have some chance of seeing spring color in the yard.  Practically all my other horticultural efforts, floral or vegetable, are frustrated by a small menagerie of quadrupeds that live on or circle our grounds.  But daffodils are safe from animal consumption, pretty easy to deal with, and pretty forgiving of indolence and incompetence.  They are very faithful and very steady, quietly spreading and multiplying.  The appearance of the daffodils each year is also one of the most reliable indications of the arrival of real spring.  In recent years the early spring weather has been variable in temperature.  A warm week, which brings out a brave showing of bright daffodils, can be followed by a lengthy cold period.  But unless it gets extremely cold, these circumstances only extend the life of the spring flowers.  It really is quite marvelous.  This year we had a good showing by Palm Sunday, with the appropriate climax appearing just at Easter a week later.  Just now an unusually warm week—temperatures in the 80s!—has pushed the flowers over the top and into decline.  The daffodil plays out the allegory of human life, all too soon displaying its mortality in the traces of its fading beauty.  But there is another allegory too, for there is  always a fresh one for my lapel button hole at the Easter Vigil. There can be no backsliding from spring now.  We must prepare for some months of heavy jungle green.  In particular I must prepare, if I am possibly up to it, for the annual battle of the bamboo.

            We have some of our daffodils in what might be called (generously) beds, but the gods intended them to grow wild.  The process of returning a bag of bulbs to the wild is called “naturalizing.”  In earlier years I have written a little about my own efforts to naturalize bulbs on the common ground of our neighborhood, called the Gray Farm, and at the beautiful rural property of our son Richard and his wife Katie Dixon up on the Delaware near Frenchtown.  Both of those naturalization projects are still works in progress, but they are very satisfying so far.

 

            Large fields of daffodils allowed to go (or stay) native can inspire awe.  They are to be found in many parts of the country, including my home state of Arkansas, where there are some much admired ones.  But the most famous daffodils fields on earth, I presume, must be those in the Lake District in England.  The person most responsible for their fame is the poet William Wordsworth. Anyone who knows his poetry at all is likely to know the lyric “I wandered lonely as a cloud…”  I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o’er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd/A host of golden daffodils/beside the lake—the lake of course being Ullswater, one of the two larger lakes in the “Lake District” of today’s Cumbria.

            Poets are usually afforded what is called poetic license, so I will cut Wordsworth a little slack.  If I am correct, I am writing this little essay exactly two hundred and twenty-one years to the day after the actual experience being described.  On that day, most fortunately, he was not quite so lonely as a cloud.  His walking companion was his formidable sister Dorothy, the keeper of a journal that is itself a little treasure of English literature.  Here is what she had to say of that day: “I never saw daffodils so beautiful.  They grew among mossy stones….Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness, and the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing.  The wind blew directly over the lake to them.  There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up, but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway.”  The daffodil walk took place on April 15, 1802.  The poet wrote two versions of his experience, both of them quite some time later.  It is clear that both texts must have relied on the actual words of Dorothy’s journal.  It is fitting that one of the poem’s finer images is that of dancing daffodils.  At a stretch you might call the poem itself a kind of collaborative dance.

Turner, "Ullswater"

            Of course as we can learn from Turner, Ullswater is quintessentially “picturesque” with or without daffodils.  I visited the Lake District in, I think 1959, though not in the spring flowering season.  I did see some daffodil greens—but ten thousand?  I doubt it.  I came much closer once in an Ozark meadow.

wild meadow in Arkansas

Hillsdale College

 

 

The current issue of the New Yorker features a lengthy article by Emma Green, identified in the contributors’ notes as the writer covering “education and academia” for the magazine, entitled: “The Citadel: Why conservative politicians love Hillsdale College.”  Hillsdale College is a small old Christian liberal arts college in a small town at the bottom of   Michigan.  There are dozens of rather similar institutions scattered throughout the country, but Hillsdale has separated itself from the pack in the national consciousness, so to speak, through ambitious and successful programs of  fund-raising and self-advertisement.  Hillsdale presents itself, accurately, as founding its education on the study of the liberal arts as an ethical and spiritual enterprise.  It is unapologetic in linking its educational theory and practice to the Christian cultural traditions that gave birth to the medieval universities and to practically all the institutions of higher education founded in this country before the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, which aimed to advance the “agricultural and mechanical arts” so necessary to western expansion.  So you could say that Hillsdale maintains many of the characteristics of the mainstream of American liberal arts colleges in earlier generations or that it has become a conservative outlier in the scene as presently evolved.  The canny exploitation of this status by Hillsdale’s president and trustees, together with effective fundraising and public relations, has thrust the institution into an ambiguous national prominence.

 

 

The reason I presume to write about Hillsdale is that I do have a little personal knowledge of the place based on a three-day academic conference in which I participated in the fall of 2017.  That is not much experience, but more than that of some of the school’s public critics.  The general theme of the conference was the rise and fall of the Soviet Union as viewed from a century after the Bolshevik Revolution (or coup d’êtat) of October 1917.  My own lecture was about the content, publication history, and reception of Arthur Koestler’s famous novel Darkness at Noon (1940), a book that had an unusually powerful political and cultural effect, especially in its post-war French language edition first published in Paris in 1945.*  Leaving my own contribution aside, I thought the quality of the papers excellent.  Were they “conservative”?  Undoubtedly, if you equate anti-Communism with conservatism, as many intellectuals strangely continue to do.  “Every anti-Communist is a dog,” said Jean-Paul Sartre.  To which one can but reply “Bow-wow” and footnote The Black Book of Communism (Harvard, 1999).  A public hyperconservative like Roger Kimball talking about the Polish anti-Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski or the traditionalist Roman Catholic theologian Daniel Mahoney analyzing Solzhenitsyn’s epic history of the Soviet slave labor camps is likely to come across as “conservative.”  Both gave excellent lectures packed with facts and ideas, neither of which are a “conservative” or “progressive” monopoly.  The speaker with whom I hung out the most was Sir Antony Beevor, the only military historian whose works I have read extensively.  One of his many famous books is Stalingrad (1999).  His talk for the conference considered the Soviet role in the World War from a more comprehensive point of view.

 

There was to be sure lots of “conservative” stuff all about us.  The trustees had put up big bucks for the construction of a new house of worship; the work was in progress.  I doubt if many other colleges are building chapels at the moment.  There was a statue of Margaret Thatcher.  I doubt if there another campus with one of those.  The student dress code took me back to my own undergraduate days in the ‘Fifties—though perhaps it reflected not a daily norm but the special occasion of a campus conference.  The students were courteous and alarmingly deferential to a visiting professor they had never heard of.  While I had no deep conversation with any student, I was impressed by their general knowledge of the major events, personages, and geography of the European theater in the second World War—subjects as opaque to most undergraduates I know as the battle plan at Thermopylae.

 

           

There was one possible ambush.  At a plenary lunch or maybe dinner there was a short lecture by a distinguished Hillsdale alumnus, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, a sort of private army.  His articulate lecture gave a thumbnail sketch of the history of military mercenaries and extolled the efficacy of what he claimed was a sizeable mercenary component in current use by our government under the euphemism of “private contractors” in the War on Terror.  As a child I had read with enthusiasm Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company, about dashing mercenaries in the Hundred Years' War.  Contemporary privateering was not a subject I had thought about before, and I was not immediately persuaded that private armies are by and large Good Things today.   But then I was never a Navy Seal.  The talk was certainly off the topic of the conference--if indeed it was ever conceived to be a part of it.  But even Erik Prince—brother of Betsy DeVoe, as he is usually and irrelevantly identified in news stories--had no visible horns sprouting from his brow.  However, let the search continue.  I see that Mr. Prince has just failed to prevail in a libel suit about an anonymous, indeed Q-anonish charge that he attempted to collaborate with Putin’s favorite mercenaries, the murderous Wagner Group.  Does anyone ever win libel suits in this country?

 

As would be true of any “adult education” event at any college, there were many probably wealthy alumni in the audience.  The difference I noted here was that most of them were not alumni of this college.  The two with whom I had the most serious conversations were from Harvard and Yale!  Our conversations were not about conservatism or liberalism, Trumpism or anti-Trumpism, but about historical issues raised in my lecture; yet both made clear in other ways their belief that their “own” institutions already had plenty of money, and that they chose to direct their personal support toward the concept of the “liberal arts” such as they believed was being followed at Hillsdale.

 

In the last two presidential elections the split in the gross popular vote between the two top contenders was roughly 52% (D)//48%(R), with the recipient of fewer votes actually winning the presidency in the first instance—election being determined constitutionally not by popular vote but by the votes of duly authorized electors.  By any measure, these figures reveal a closely divided electorate along a   “conservative”/ “progressive” axis.  I need hardly point out that similar ratios will not be found among the administrators and faculties of America’s liberal arts colleges.  It is, of course, a strange way to talk about college faculties—strange, but unfortunately highly relevant and probably even necessary in the current cultural and political moment.  The tenured faculties of humanities departments are in effect highly independent, closed, self-perpetuating corporations for whom the word “diversity” as applied to intellectual and cultural disposition generally means “more people like me.”

 

What has made life on our campuses seem to so many to be increasingly monotone, constrained, and timid has, however, created opportunities for a few visionaries.  A number of prominent politicians are now extolling the virtues of an old-fashioned liberal arts education they may show scant evidence of possessing themselves.  A glowing future is guaranteed for that college that can establish itself as the Numero Uno brazenly conservative, unwoke, politically incorrect, morally traditional, and full-throated patriotic institution in the country.  It will have nearly half the nation as its potential donor base for starters.  There actually are quite a few schools with some aspirations in that direction, but I’m not sure they are aware that the race is on.  The savvy President and other administrators at Hillsdale seem very much aware, and they are way out in the lead.  Just think of how the PR people at some of our most respected liberal arts colleges--Wesleyan, Mount Holyoke, Davidson, Rhodes, Grinnell, or Reed, say-- would savor a long New Yorker article--even one treating them as anthropological curiosities.  So long as the extraordinary variety of American institutions of higher learning, traditionally one of our great strengths, is in cultural contraction, and it is now, places that are really different have a chance to be noticed.  The long expected consumer backlash  inevitable with seventy thousand a year tuitions and endless administrative bloat may well have a cultural as well as a financial dimension.  Let a hundred flowers bloom.

 

*The talk was a much shortened adaptation of  a chapter of my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (N.Y., Norton, 2009).

Hospital Reading

                                             Richard Chevenix Trench

After long and importunate knocking at the door, Covid has finally got into the house this week: Joan first on Thursday, followed by me on Friday.  And for me prudence dictated hospitalization—again.  I must repeat the shopworn advice: do not, under any circumstances, grow old.  Wearing the bottoms of your trousers rolled will be the least of your problems.  After brief respiratory drama countered by brief medical wizardry, I was back to “normal Covid,” which seems to mean feeling sort of lousy and flu-like.  But once you are in the Medical Maw, you’re in until some mysterious authority decides that you are out.  The varieties of infantilization are many.  I suppose a man of my age ought to make the most of the opportunity to revisit childhood, and I am trying to adapt.

 

Leaving the house in a rush, I grabbed up only a note pad and a couple of books, one of which is a true Golden Oldie, volume 788 of the old Everyman’s Library: two philological books by Richard Chevenix Trench.  These are On the Study of Words (1851) and English Past and Present (1855) here republished under a single cover in, I believe, 1927.  The editor, George Sampson, makes a virtue of their obsolescence…“In short, Trench’s two most famous books, like the Odyssey, the Divina Commedia, and Paradise Lost, are out of date…”.  And the books were indeed famous, commanding a significant popular audience and earning their spot in Everyman’s Library.  There is an oft-cited quotation from Goldsmith, perhaps his only oft-cited quotation, in which an amiable character in The Vicar of Wakefield says this: “I love everything that is old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines”.  This pretty well expresses my own temperament.  For me the category of old books by no means excludes works of scholarship.  Few if any works of scholarship are entirely without error; and most probably soon become  hopelessly outdated.  But is there anyone with a lively mind who will not find nourishment for it in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Darwin’s Origin of Species?

 

Trench was a pre-Darwinian Anglican clergyman who lived long enough to see most of his cherished ideas overthrown or abandoned.  His work in history and philology is not infrequently errant.  It is no less brilliant and rewarding for all of that.  We shall not scorn Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne because it is not Audubon’s Birds of America or scorn Audubon’s own writings because they are not the latest publication of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.  Trench and Gilbert White, men of very different temperament and social prominence, exemplify a major phenomenon in British cultural history that deserves an ambitious study of its own.  I am thinking of the remarkable contribution in practically all fields of study in history, literature, and the natural sciences made by members of the Anglican clergy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  One might even conclude that these men were rather underemployed in their officially pastoral vocations.  White was a modest country parson. Trench held several important ecclesiastical positions, including that of a major prelate (Archbishop of Dublin).  Both were of course “amateurs” in the fields for which they are still remembered today.  It is perhaps difficult for us to believe that there was in Victorian England a club of amateur philologists with cultural clout (the Philological Society), but there was, and Trench joined it in 1857. He made an immediate impact by delivering a paper on “Some Deficiencies of Our English Dictionaries” and then, in another meeting, offering the proposal that the Society sponsor a new and improved one.  This can rightly be regarded as the originating moment of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, usually called the Oxford English Dictionary or OED.  Trench thought of himself chiefly as a theologian and a poet; but his copious poetry now goes unread, and his theological tomes mainly gather dust.  Yet he deserves to be held in memory as an originating force of the greatest dictionary the world has yet known—and the author of two still engaging books about our mother tongue.

 

                                                             Richard Whately

 

 St. Patrick’s, one of two Anglican cathedrals in Dublin, has a rich literary, scholarly, and cultural history of its own.  Jonathan Swift among the most important writers in the traditional literary canon and one of the world’s greatest satirists, ordained a priest in 1695, was the Dean of Saint Patrick’s from 1713 to 1745—the period that saw the appearance of his best-known works, including the most famous, Gulliver’s Travels.  But my personal favorite among the Victorian Anglo-Irish clerical celebrities is someone very few people have ever heard of: Archbishop Richard Whately, who was Trench’s immediate predecessor, and who died in office in 1863.  Whately was a serious intellectual and philosopher whose writings on logic and rhetoric are still in use today.  In the first half of the nineteenth century,

 

Oriel College, Oxford, where Whately was first a student and then a teacher, played an important role in English ecclesiastical history as the center of the so-called Oxford Movement, in which Cardinal Newman, recently canonized a Roman Catholic saint, also played a major role.  Whately, though friendly with many of its leaders, was not sympathetic with its High Church or “ritualist” tendencies.  He belonged to an intellectual circle called the “Noetics,” which would seem to mean something like “the brilliant and witty ones.”  He battled against the infidelity of contemporary Continental theological literature not by being medieval but by being funny.  The attack on the veracity of the gospel miracles, often explicit in the (then) new German biblical criticism, had been anticipated in Britain by the Scottish  philosopher David Hume in 1748.  Hume’s argument, at heart, is based in the theory of probabilities.  Is it more probable that a man walked on water or that there is a mistaken or, worse, a fraudulent report that a man walked on water?  In the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first two of the nineteenth, the most famous man in the European world was Napoleon Bonaparte.  He was a colossus, his rise, rule, and fall a vibrant epic.  But Whately, using Hume’s genre of argumentation as regards the gospels, “demonstrated” that it was impossible to be confident of the truth of any of his reported exploits, or indeed of his very existence.  Historical Doubts Relative to Napoleon  Bonaparte, one of the most widely read pamphlets in literary history, enjoyed a runaway success in 1819 and repeated reprintings in the decades thereafter.  We lack reliable evidence as to what Napoleon Bonaparte, who was of course still alive in 1819, though rather isolated, made of the work.  Historical Doubts is a very droll production—if only you are into what Victorian clerics thought was drollery.  The cogent theological argument comes as a bonus.

 

 

 

It is well known that the hospital is no place for a sick person.  One needs a little extra help to get through the experience.  Reading some engrossing pages by one scholarly archbishop and simply thinking about the humorously trenchant pages of another got me through my most recent experience.  Not to mention another blog essay.