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KARL KEATING'S E-LETTER
TOPICS:
UNITARIANS AND WHINERS
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Tomorrow my wife departs for a month in Japan. She will visit her sister and longtime friends and will attend a reunion of her primary school class. I am not at liberty to reveal how many years it has been since she and the others first met, but let's say it was after the Roosevelt Administration and before the Kennedy Administration. Some of these folks have not seen one another since they were twelve. It should be an interesting gathering!
In the meantime I'll be on my own. Well, not entirely on my own. I'll have the dog, who will take me on a daily walk. In any case, I will not be bored. It's spring, and I plan a massive spring cleaning of the house and garage. The goal is to eliminate five percent of the stuff we have accumulated, measured in pounds. The result will be a sense of accomplishment in me and a smile on the face of the fire marshal.
FREE FROM THOUGHT
Years ago I freelanced for a local "alternative" newspaper. It was published once a week (and still is) and covered mainly arts and entertainment, but it had plenty of feature stories on other topics. The editor, a solid Catholic, asked me to attend lectures and discussions around town and to show how silly and unthinking the participants were simply by quoting them. There was no need for editorializing. It was enough to give the ipsissima verba. Let the speakers hang themselves.
One time it was a talk given by Jane Fonda at a local university. Another time I watched a presentation on crystals at a New Age book store. But the most fertile ground was the Unitarian church downtown. The church sponsored several talks or discussion groups monthly, and it was easy to sit in and, in an hour, get plenty of material for an article.
Unitarians style themselves rationalists. They think of themselves as thinkers. Not a few of them join Mensa, which is the organization for people who want other people to think they are smart. Many Unitarians call themselves Freethinkers, which is an old term for atheists.
This may seem strange--after all, Unitarianism is a religion (as the name implies, members reject the Trinity), and religion implies belief in God, but don't worry about the inconsistency. After all, one can be an Episcopalian who believes in anything, so why not a Unitarian who believes in nothing?
The odd thing about Freethinkers, whether Unitarians or not, is that their name suggests originality in thought, but no one is more predictable than a Freethinker. Maybe it's because atheism is so boring--and therefore atheists are so boring.
A local newsletter called the "Freethought Forum" noted that May 1 was "being promoted as a National Day of Reason, an alternative to the National Day of Prayer favored by President George W. Bush and his 'religious right' supporters."
Now, really--was this necessary? If you don't believe in prayer or even in God, is there any need to poke believers in the eye by touting a National Day of Reason? Setting aside the issue of faith vs. reason, doesn't this proposal seem petty? I think so, and that's because Freethought and atheism and Unitarianism are petty; there is so little intellectual substance to them.
The same issue of the "Freethought Forum" included an article by Michael Newdow, the plaintiff in the lawsuit to remove "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. He says, "I have also learned how deep is the antipathy toward atheists. According to a 1999 Gallup Poll, half the population would refuse to vote for atheists like me." What I want to know is this: Why would the other half of the population even consider voting for whiners like him?
MUST-READ BOOKS, PART I
In response to my April 22 E-Letter, some readers asked that I provide a list of the top five or ten books that Catholics should read. "Great idea!" I thought, until I looked at my shelves and realized that I could spend endless hours trying to weigh this book against that. How does one work up such a list?
I'm not worried that you or he or she might not agree with my inclusions; I'm worried that, after a night's sleep, I might not. I can foresee this exercise ending in considerable frustration. I therefore will decline the suggestion, but I will undertake something similar.
Periodically I will mention books that I think you should read, with no representation that they are the Best Catholic Books of All Time. I'll start with three titles:
1. Ronald Knox, "Let Dons Delight."
Written in 1939, this arguably is Msgr. Knox's most intriguing work. At least it is a literary tour de force. I know of no one who has tried anything remotely similar.
The protagonist falls asleep in a common room at a fictitious Oxford institution (Simon Magus College) and finds himself waking up at fifty-year intervals, beginning in 1588 and going all the way to 1938. Each time he wakes up, he overhears the dons' conversations regarding portentous events, both political and religious. What is remarkable is Knox's ability to reproduce convincingly speaking styles (and prejudices!) that change over time.
As any reader of Knox might expect, the book is packed with wit and literary allusions, some of them almost true, such as this, part of a description of one of the dons:
"This is all I have been able to collect from the 'Athenae Oxonienses.' But I may be allowed to add some further notice of Mr. Lee, which I came across in a catalogue of names less remembered, yet perhaps not less memorable--Bishop Challoner's 'Memoirs of the Missionary Priests.' The entry is to be found under June 31, the feast of Saints Promiscuus and Miscellaneus."
If you have heard me speak about the exodus to Fundamentalism, you might recollect a passing reference to "St. Miscellaneus Church," which is the one Catholics leave for "Good Book Baptist." I owe to Knox the name of the parish. (By the way, did you catch the date of the feast?)
"Let Dons Delight" is a devastating look, through fiction, at the way religious belief mutated and declined at Oxford over the centuries, but the story is about much more than Oxford. It is about our entire intellectual elite during four centuries of estrangement from the Old Faith.
2. M. L. Cozens, "A Handbook of Heresies."
This short book--less than 100 pages--looks at the chief heresies that bothered the Church during nineteen centuries. Here is what Frank Sheed wrote about the author in his autobiography, "The Church and I":
"We talked theology with one another all the time--at the meal we ate together before the Catholic Evidence Guild class, on our way to and from the outdoor meetings (some of us spoke at four or five meetings a week). A powerful theological influence was one of the speakers who earned her daily bread scrubbing floors.
"Louisa Cozens had as gifted a theological mind as I have met. She had only a primary school education but had read and thought and lived theology. From her I first heard Boethius's definition of 'person'--'a complete individual substance of a rational nature.' With a Cockney accent but with an utterly lucid choice of words she told me what it meant.
"In 1928, after Maisie Ward and I were married, she came to our apartment after her day's scrubbing (having no quiet place of her own), and without reference books wrote 'A Handbook of Heresies,' which is still in print. More than anyone she helped me to see the value of precision. The last conversation I had with her was on the problem of how the infinite simplicity of the divine mind could know individuals."
Sheed gives no further information about Louisa Cozens. I wish he had. An Internet search turned up a remote possibility: A Louisa Cozens was born in Wiltshire, England, in 1875. Could this be the same person? From Sheed's account I take it that Cozens was a fair amount older than he (he was 31 in 1928; if born in 1875, she would have been 53).
"A Handbook of Heresies" may have been her only writing. I will not call it a profound book, because it is not, but I will call it a convenient gathering of the basic facts. I think it deserves reprinting.
3. Louis Chaigne, "Paul Claudel: The Man and the Mystic."
Perhaps I came across this biography at an auspicious moment. I can't remember. What I do remember is that, on finishing it, I thought it the best biography I had ever read. If I were to reread it today, I might think the same thing.
Paul Claudel served France as consul or ambassador to several countries, including Belgium, Japan, and the U.S. Simultaneously he was a deep and successful poet and playwright (his play "The Satin Slipper" has been called the best of the twentieth century). Then there was the Christian side of Claudel.
He came to the faith through a long struggle and kept it through continual application of his mind and will. He was a man of practical affairs--as an administrator he actually liked filing systems, archives, and forms--and wide knowledge of human nature. He was a good example of a man who was very much in the world but not of it.
These may not be the three best books on my shelves, but, if I had to unload all but a few dozen books, these would make the cut. Unfortunately for you, all three are out of print. You might find them at your local public library and might have better chances at a university library. It would not hurt to try to track them down through a used-book dealer. Pay whatever the dealer might demand--these books are worth going into debt for.
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