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His Soul is Marching On

“When the spring sun has gained so much power that the snow-fields of the mountains begin to send rivulets into the valley, destruction threatens from every cliff and crag. The report of a gun, a loud call, are said to be sufficient to push over the ridge a small mass of snow, which as it falls grows to an avalanche, and may cover up whole villages. In the same way it happens sometimes in the life of nations that things have been slowly growing ripe for a catastrophe, which is finally brought about by a deed whose significance, considered in itself, stands in ridiculous contrast to its world-wide effects.”

Hermann Von Holst, John Brown (1888)*

When a small deed triggers an avalanche, we call it the catalyst of the great disaster.  To catalyze is to break down or dissolve (cata [down] + lyein [to loosen, divide, cut into pieces]).  It is of course closely related to the word catastrophe, which is a sudden downturn, and more strictly speaking a reversal of fortune by which everyone is greatly surprised (cata [down] + strephein[turn]).  

The unexpected dissolution and destruction of a world is a catastrophe and the spark that ignites the holocaust is the catalyst of that change.

Herman von Holst was a German professor and the catalyst of which he speaks was John Brown’s plot to seize the Harper’s Ferry arsenal, arm neighboring slaves, and commence a slaughter that would catalyze a catastrophe that would, Brown hoped, change the world.  After the war, Yankee mythologists said Brown’s design in arming Virginia slaves was to “lead them quickly along the Appalachian chain to Canada,”** but today even Wikipedia concedes that Brown’s design was to “move rapidly southward, sending out armed bands along the way that would free more slaves, obtain food, horses, and hostages, and destroy slaveholders’ morale.”

The morale of the slaveholders was not all that Brown would have had those armed bands of ex-slaves destroy.  His aim, which many Yankees subsequently stricken with amnesia very well knew at the time, was to catalyze a slave revolt by which the Southern world would be dissolved in a holocaust of blood and fire.  His aim was to trigger what historians of old called a bellum servile or a servile war.

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What Can You Expect From The Orthosphere?

Very little output, apart from our workhorse JMSmith, so show him some love! (I’m channeling my best American rah-rah manner). Unlike me, he repeats himself very little, which is quite an achievement, often finding some obscure 19th century pamphlet and the like, of true antiquarian provenance, to comment on. One can picture him rifling through the discard box of some neglected library in Texas somewhere or some forgotten archive.

Its writers share what Thomas Sowell calls the tragic vision of life, which distinguishes the conservative disposition from the utopian. The utopian travels on a sea of blood and never reaches his destination someone wrote.

JMSmith has called us glum sourpusses, or something like that. Curmudgeonly malcontents ripe for satire might work, too.

None of us have any solutions to the problems that face us, but sit on the sidelines heckling. Continue reading →

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We Live in the Paradise of Fools

“Material improvement is closely linked, in the early days, with intellectual ascendency.  It continues, however, after the ascendancy has been lost.  For one thing, it is quantitative, the later railways being merely copies of the first.  For another, it is transmissible, people being able to import what they could never invent.  With foreign aid they can also import what they could not otherwise afford.  Governments based upon practically illiterate populations have their own television and radio.  Aircraft of identical pattern bear the brightly painted insignia of Mumbojumbo Airlines and Air Nitwitzerland.” 

C. Northcote Parkinson, Left Luggage (1967)

As a man of advancing years and declining powers, I am naturally disposed to see my melancholy condition reflected in the world around me.  The poet Wordsworth noted a counterpart disposition of ebullient youth to see in the world the progress and promise they feel bubbling up in themselves.  Thus, to ebullient youth, the bloody beheadings in revolutionary Paris were a hopeful sign of good times that were right around the corner—even severed heads being signs of hope to hopeful youth.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.”

Whereas to hopeless old men of advancing years and declining powers,

“A darker shadow falls upon the gloom,
Like I, the world quakes with impending doom.”

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Stick It to the Man and Fly First Class

“A class in which the revolutionary interests of society are concentrated, so soon as it has risen up, finds directly in its own situation the content and the material of its revolutionary activity . . .”  

Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 (1851)*

I spotted this living irony in the Houston airport last week.  We live in an age when the people in the First Class cabin dress in tee shirts and plan to burn the world down.

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*) Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 42-43.

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Missions to the Skraelings

“’Tis Greenland! but so desolately bare,
Amphibious life alone inhabits there;
‘Tis Greenland! yet so beautiful the sight,
The Brethren gaze with undisturb’d delight:”

James Montgomery, Greenland (1819)

Greenland, as everyone ought to know, is a large but inhospitable island in North America’s far northeast.  Its capital, Nuuc, lies just over two thousand miles from Washington, D.C., although the traffic between those two places has always been meager.  Nuuc is slightly closer to Oslo, Norway, capital of the first European power to plant a colony on that frigid and forbidding shore.

This was in 982 when Iceland got too hot for an obstreperous Norseman named Eric the Red.  Banished from Scandinavia’s El Dorado, that intrepid ginger sought greener pastures in the west.  He found those pastures, then (and briefly) tolerably green, on the far southern tip of a land whose interior was sorely (perhaps symbolically) oppressed by a great mass of frigid whiteness. Continue reading →

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Orthodox After the Way they Call Heresy

“When the word ‘orthodoxy’ is used here it means the Apostles’ Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself a Christian until a very short time ago, and the general historical conduct of those who held such a creed.”

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1909)

“But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets.”

Acts 24:14.

Readers have from time to time complained that it is false advertising for me to publish my posts at a website that calls itself the Orthosphere.  What these lovers of the tried-and-true hope to find in the gaudy bazaar of the internet I cannot say, but I readily confess that some of my posts may surprise a reader who infers too much from the name Orthosphere.  And some  of my posts will certainly shock a reader who equates the word orthodoxy with one definite system of eternal truth.

As I have written more than once, I was not one of the happy band who founded the Orthosphere fourteen years ago, but I understand that the name was proposed by Bruce Charlton as a means to advertise the fact that the Orthosphere was a group blog (hence “sphere”) that combined writers who were in some sense traditional (hence the “ortho”).  The tradition from which this group wrote was, very broadly. orthodox Christianity, but it was always a latitudinarian orthodoxy and by no means exclusively the orthodoxy of Rome.

“Latitudinarian orthodoxy” may strike you as an oxymoron, but there are equally serious problems with a strict definition of orthodoxy as one particular and eternal truth.  In my first epigraph, Chesterton defines orthodoxy as the creed and conduct of “everybody calling himself a Christian until a very short time ago,” and thereby owns the paradox that the men he calls “orthodox” had become heretics with respect to the authorized truth, the conventional wisdom, the respectable morality of Chesterton’s age..

They had in fact become heretics in opposition to the teaching authorities that by 1900 ruled the public mind.

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Many Truths are Fictional

“Truth is that kind of error without which a certain species of living being cannot exist.  The value for Life is ultimately decisive.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901)*

“‘What is history,’ said Napoleon, ‘but a fiction agreed upon.’”

James Anthony Froude, “The Science of History” (1864)**

We are told that God accosted Moses with the emphatic declaration, “I AM.”  We may infer from this salutation that God lays great weight on the importance of his being.  God did not, for instance, anticipate Descartes and introduce himself to Moses by saying, “I think” (and therefore am).

He instead effectively reversed Descartes formula and said, “I AM” (and therefore think).

A similar reversal should be made when speaking of a member of our species, assuming we are indeed made, as we are told, in the image of God.  Existence is our independent variable, or as the old Romans said, our sine qua non.  Many men exist without thinking, but history furnishes no instance of a man who thought yet did not exist.

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An Epitome of Scientism

From the introduction by Father William Lockhart, RI, to his English translation of A Short Sketch of Modern Philosophies & of His Own System, by Father Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, RI:

Now the preliminary difficulty in understanding the Rosminian philosophy is that it goes deeper than what are popularly assumed to be the first principles of human thought. It undertakes to account for ideas. But to many people it has never occurred that there is any difficulty in this matter requiring explanation. They have been used to assume with Locke and others, more or less of the same school, that the formation of ideas is so simple that it does not require to be accounted for. It is assumed to be a simple fact like sensation. They say, “We have sensations, and we have ideas; the sensations come first, and they are transformed into ideas by the faculty of reflection.”

Those who talk thus are not aware that between sensations and ideas they have jumped a gulph which is not less than infinite!

This mental condition reminds me of a conversation once overheard in a railway carriage between two countrymen. “John,” said the one, “how about this railway telegraph; how do they send messages by it?” “Oh,” said the other, “it is very simple. You see them wires along the line? They runs from Lunnon to York. They are fastened to a thing at each end with a dial plate and hands to it like a clock, with letters all round, and when they turns the hands in Lunnon this ‘n and that ‘n, the hands in York goes that ‘n and this ‘n.” “Ah,” said the other, “it seems very simple when you have it explained.”

Dormitive virtue alert! “Sensations come first, and they are transformed into ideas by the faculty of reflection;” this of course is no more than a way of saying that sensations are transformed into ideas by the faculty that transforms sensations into ideas.

Chuckling at that story of Lockhart’s, I remembered a similar tale of two rural Hoosiers of Norwegian extraction, learnt in my childhood.

Ole says, “Hey Sven, what do you think is the greatest human invention?” “Well, Ole,” says Sven, “That’s a hard question to answer. There’s fire, of course, if that counts, and the wheel; and then also the aeroplane, of course, and the telephone, and now the television. But I think it must be the Thermos bottle.” Astonished, Ole replied, “The Thermos bottle! How do you figure?” Says Sven, “Well, Ole, just think about it. The Thermos bottle keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold.” Ole answered, “Yah, so what?” Patiently, as if to a slow child, Sven settled it: “Well, Ole, here’s the thing: how do it know?”

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The Son of the Bondswoman Shall Not be Heir with the Son of the Freewoman

“Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.”

Galatians 4: 30

Commenter C. A. Peterson cautions me to eschew “replacement theology,” which is essentially the doctrine that the Christian Church has replaced Jews in God’s providential plan.  The inheritance of father Abraham has passed to his heirs “in spirit and truth,” and not to his heirs in the flesh, be they spurious or real.  I will not here wrangle with C. A. Peterson or plunge into the briar patch of Old Testament prophesy, since I do not wish make an enemy the former or to let the later drive me mad.

Old Testament prophesies have for me only historical interest because, where not superseded, I presume they are adequately summarized in the life, teaching and living spirit of Christ.  I do not understand those who scour the Old Testament for scraps that Christ somehow failed to epitomize.  I am, to state the matter briefly, in the whole-hog Church of St. Paul and not the half-way Church of St. James.

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