My Catholic faith teaches that Beauty and Truth go hand in hand, but Truth is faring no better. Indeed, if we only look at the obvious failings of the likes of The Ducky and Johnson, the leaders of our 'great democracies', then clearly the very idea of truth is, to say the least, under serious threat. If we turn, politically, in the opposite direction, and consider for instance the 'progressives' in my own country of Ireland, we find that the 6,666 lives lost here last year in the first year of legalised abortion are simply not to be remotely considered by them as of the same species as the 1,706 lives lost so far through Covid19, mainly at the opposite end of life. Meanwhile even getting the right balance between prudence with regard to the pandemic, and showing the necessary resolve to overcome it rather than letting it overwhelm our economy, seems to have fallen foul of politics. What is going on in this strange world, how come we are being pulled apart by this ridiculous split between 'left' and 'right', how could Beauty possibly provide a remedy and where does Truth come into it?
Staying with politics, why does the centre ground so often seem insipid and uninspiring? If we look to artists, so rarely able anyway to inspire us these days for all sorts of reasons, we find them mostly fiddling in some fantasy la-la land. They will probably associate the political centre with flat, unimaginative and insipid people. Might we find solace and inspiration in Nature? Well maybe, but how very depressing a close consideration of what is happening to it can be! Can we find Beauty perhaps in other people, love, family life and what not? Maybe again, but again also, often with difficulty, for what family does not have its disasters these days? Sometimes we fear that the very idea of marriage is dying.
We may appreciate the truth of Dostoyevski's saying better when Beauty does shine through, like shafts of sunlight when the cloud is breaking up; then we are more likely to be inspired to actually change our ways than by any amount of abstract, rational considerations, however much we may allow them to be true! The most 'enlightened' of progressives could hardly truly contemplate the reality of a woman deliberately destroying the fruit of her womb, nor the state of her mind, without that shudder of horror which is the very opposite of our delight in beauty.
Maybe it is the ugliness and horror to be found on all sides, and the instinctive desire to overcome it, that can motivate us to find another way. The summer gale that is blighting our flowers (again) challenges us and, after all, they do need the rain that comes with it, bursting out with renewed vigour afterwards!
Yet there is still something lacking, which is needed to put the steel into our resolve; something that can transform the mere flat, insipid 'middle of the road', where we basically are more concerned with staying safe than with actually getting anywhere, into passionate commitment! There is needed a third element to complete this dynamic power we are seeking in order to save the world! Let us call it Merciful Justice, sympathy and consideration of others! This is where we find the third strand of the rope, the passionate commitment and strength that might perhaps enable us to haul civilisation back from the brink of catastrophe.
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| Heather's out! |
Is such apocalyptic language merely a silly old man's talk? Well it is a funny thing that old age appears to provide one with access to ancestral memories, even indeed one's own. My father in hallucination, between the strokes that killed him, evidently recalled long-buried memories of the war that he had fought in, and I found myself recalling in the early hours this morning, not indeed for the first time, memories that he transmitted in a few brief allusions (in the course of sailing of course, which seemed to be the one activity that enabled some access to such memories for him). In Cherbourg he had mentioned tramping through the streets with a gang of disheartened Tommies, being booed by the locals as they made for a destroyer which would take them back to England. It was only years later that I heard of the fate of the comrades he had left behind, who had been in the rearguard of the retreat to Dunkirk and had been massacred by the SS in a barn.
I experience the present slide towards a 'no deal' Brexit as just such a retreat, only this time, by a strange reversal, it is the Germans who are on the right side of history. The shame and misery is self-inflicted this time, but the fact is that again, the wave of Anglo-saxon engagement on the Continent is ebbing out, and in danger of sucking the life out of the Continent itself if it is not reversed. Here on my little Irish island, I find myself clinging on to the Main, a bit like the seaweed that I like to watch down on the shore, clinging to its narrow zone of life between the ebb and flow of the tide and the washing of the waves.
America is there, behind the suck and flow; it is there across the ocean that the tide will turn first! We may have this pandemic to thank for it, strangely enough. I am come back to boring old politics, though it is not in any particular party sense; lofty ideas about saving the world do need to be brought down to Earth. It is in fact in the desire to give to my faith a practical and political relevence that I am, as you may have guessed, groping for a 'secular' expression of the concept of the Holy Trinity, which to me is not just a doctrine but the most complete and satisfactory representation available of the fundamental structure of reality, of everything from electricity to love. It is only by situating ourselves correctly within that dynamic that we can thrive. That famous, level-headed Centre is going to have to visit territory that it has long eschewed if it is to survive these times!
