Zowie. Hot news for Catholics.

Damian Thompson in his Daily Telegraph blog makes the following announcement  (via Seraphic Goes to Scotland):

Pope Benedict XVI has created an entirely new Church structure for disaffected Anglicans that will allow them to worship together – using elements of Anglican liturgy – under the pastoral supervision of their own specially appointed bishop or senior priest.

The Pope is now offering Anglicans worldwide “corporate reunion” on terms that will delight Anglo-Catholics. In theory, they can have their own married priests, parishes and bishops – and they will be free of liturgical interference by liberal Catholic bishops who are unsympathetic to their conservative stance.

There is even the possibility that married Anglican laymen could be accepted for ordination on a case-by-case basis – a remarkable concession.

The comments on the post are grumpy but interesting. Musette would like to ask Vladimir or Baduin to comment on the accuracy of the bit about the Didache. She wishes she knew more early Church history but there are so many frauds and charlatans in the business that she does not know where to turn for information. The discussion in the Catholic Encyclopedia doesn’t appear to touch upon the issues raised by the Telegraph commentator, though they may have been addressed long ago.

Some thoughts on female submissiveness

Today is a day in which the wild west wind that is the breath of autumn’s being is blowing with such energy and lustiness that it is invigorating to the hitherto tired and ennervated Musette, who is still waiting for Clio to reappear and inspire her with the desire to write about something or someone other than herself and her True Love.

This form of absorption in the particulars of one’s own life is said to be characteristically feminine, a view that Musette has always rejected in the past with some heat. She is not certain that she is prepared to accept it now, but it is clear that she must reconsider her position, and will perhaps make greater allowances in future when she encounters this kind of behaviour among her friends.

Recently, Musette has been following with interest the rise of a new blog called Girlgame. Its co-authors are five young women who want to discuss the ideas of “Game” as promoted by the “PUA community”. (PUA= pickup-artist.) All have found for one reason or another that feminism as they grew up with it has been at the very least an inadequate tool for the understanding of relations between men and women. That is the perspective from which their blog is written.

It is not exactly news that some women find much in feminist thought and activism annoying or burdensome. Women’s magazines and the lifestyle sections of our newspapers have for some years now been filled with accounts of young women who gave up careers to be full-time housewives and mothers, while op-ed writers pontificate about young women’s betrayal of the legacy of feminism, or else, taking another tack, insist that feminism never had any quarrel with some women’s decision to work as mothers and housewives rather than at paid careers. “It was all about choices“, they insist.

But all of the co-authors of Girlgame are career women in some sense, or else students. At least one is training in a very demanding profession. Only one appears to be religious in the orthodox sense . None of them is a stay-at-home mother trying to defend her chosen way of life; none of them is married. In their accomplishments, they are the kind of women to whom feminists would probably point with pride as a mark of the achievements of feminism. And yet there they are, rejecting much (not all) that has characterized feminist thought about the sexes since the 1970s.

Nor are all these young women white. Several are in fact of Indian descent (dot not feather, as current internet usage would put it). None of them is African-American – but by coincidence there is another, earlier but still newish blog with a similar title – Gameforgirls – one of whose co-writers is indeed African-American. It is sterner than Girlgame, and a little less polite in tone, but it covers much the same territory, and it, too, is impatient with most of what feminism has to say about male-female relations. The principal author, who goes variously by the names of Mamasan and Kthulah, has a post up about how recognise a good man that might have been written by my mother or grandmothers.

Musette first encountered most of these women at Roissy’s blog, and indeed it appears that it was reading Roissy that inspired most of them to begin blogging. Many of them were popular there, but Kthulah/Mamasan, for reasons that Musette has never quite understood, was given a very rough time by the Posse, which was odd because she was not hostile to the fundamental tenets of Game theory, though often critical of the way it was applied by some men, including Roissy. Perhaps the problem was that she never tried to ingratiate herself with them. Or perhaps it was that she fought to challenge the racial stereotypes in which they so often indulged.

In any case, Musette must confess that she finds Mamasan’s point of view, as expressed in her blog, in many ways more appealing than the views of the sparky younger women on Girlgame, and this in spite of the fact that Mamasan is in certain respects a sexual radical, while Musette of course is not. The Girlgame women have not yet been tempered by hard experience, and Mamasan has.

Lack of tempering? Well, for an example of what Musette means, readers might check out a recent post on the Girlgame blog written by the charming and intelligent Aoefe. In it, she argues that women are in general (she does allow for exceptions), submissive by nature, and in order to flourish, they need a dominant man to lead them. This is a view that always gives Musette pause and fills her with a variety of conflicting thoughts and feelings.

Now, Aoefe is a young woman trying to grope her way towards a greater understanding of men and women, and trying to determine what she ought to keep, and what to discard, of the ideas and shibboleths of liberal feminism, but Musette does not think that in this case she is moving in the right direction. Must the fact that women do, in general, prefer men who are socially and sexually “dominant”, have as its obverse the implicit assumption that women are in general “submissive” and looking to be led by men? Musette disagrees quite sharply with these views. She suspects that Aoefe has either a) over-generalized from her own particular nature, or b) been misled by the language of the sexual subculture of “dom/sub” relationships, though she explicitly denies this.

Musette’s own view of these matters is difficult to articulate, in part because the concept of feminine submission awakens such a maelstrom of negative feelings in her. She does not think that women are in general submissive, though she agrees that women do prefer socially and sexually dominant men (like Aoefe on the other side of the issue, she allows for exceptions in both cases). This preference, she believes, does not in itself indicate a wish to submit to male authority. Rather, she thinks that it is a sign of women’s wish to find an equal partner in life and in the bedroom. This apparent paradox is not, properly understood, a paradox at all.

One of the basic problems with the institution of marriage is that it is easy, all too easy, for men and women to fall into a mother-son relationship to each other. The reasons for this may have to do with the fact that for both sexes, the mother-child relationship is nearly always (except in extraordinary circumstances) their first experience of loving and being loved. That is what it means to be a mammal: mother is our first love-object. Once courtship is over and their lives together have begun in earnest, and especially once a couple has children, the mother-son template is so easy and natural to both sexes that it may require conscious effort to avoid it. Some men accept it with resignation; others fight against it and behave like rebellious teenage sons. Neither approach is desirable in marriage: mother-son overtones in marriage effectively kill desire, and leave too much responsibility on a woman’s shoulders. That is why a wise woman either chooses a strong, dominant man (and even they have been known to fold under pressure), or does her best, by a process of subtle encouragement, to teach her man how to become dominant without becoming submissive herself.

Submission cannot encourage a man to become or to remain dominant. In fact, a man who looks explicitly for a submissive woman is quite likely, though not necessarily, to have a fragile sense of masculinity, to need not mere respect, but the continual “stroking” of his ego, to remain strong. Writing of St Paul’s notorious comment that wives should submit to their husbands, one very orthodox Catholic blogger I know of has written that this may be a woman’s duty, but that she regards it as a purely private duty of conscience against which a woman should make her decisions, and that any man who goes so far as explicitly to demand obedience from a woman, or worse yet compel it from her either by physical force or by making decisions that affect them both without consulting her, is not to be trusted.

Musette stresses that she does not think that women should be disrespectful, rude, bullying, or unkind to their men. Nor does she think that the only equal relationships between men and women are those in which they parcel out the housework and childcare according to a strict schedule, or both work outside the home, nor any of the other forms of crude egalitarianism that some feminists support. She is saying that husbands and wives both need to take their spouses into consideration, and each respecting the sexual differences – whether anatomical or emotional – that make us men and women.

Below readers will find a few paragraphs from a story, a sort of fairy-tale, that was a childhood favourite of Musette’s. It is about female pride (and male pride), and indeed its title is “Proud Rosalind and the Hart Royale”.

After a little Harding began to speak. “Are you satisfied, Rusty Knight,” said he, “with what you have done in Proud Rosalind’s honor?”

The Rusty Knight did not answer.

“Did ever lady have a sorrier champion?” Harding laughed roughly. “She would have beggared herself to get you a sword. And she got you a sword the like of which no knight ever had before. And how have you used it? All through a summer you have brought laughter upon her. She would have beggared herself again to get you a bow that only a god was worthy to draw. And how have you drawn it? For a month you have drawn it to men’s scorn of her and of you. You have cried her praises only to forfeit them. You have vaunted her beauty and never crowned it. And what have you got for it?” The Rusty Knight was as dumb as the dead. Harding stepped closer. “Shall I tell you, Rusty Knight, what you have got for it? Last Midsummer Eve by the Wishing-Well the Proud Rosalind forswore love if heaven would send her a man to strike a blow in her name for her fathers’ sake. She did not say what sort of man or what sort of blow. She asked in her simplicity only that a blow should be struck. And like a woman she was ready to find it enough, and in gratitude repay it with that which could only in honor be exchanged for what honored her. Yet I myself heard her swear to hold herself bound to the sorry champion who should strike for her in the tourney. And you struck and fell. Did you tell her you fell when you came to her, crownless? And how did she crown you for your fall, Rusty Knight?”

The Knight sprang to his feet and stood quivering.

“That moves you,” said Harding, “but I will move you more. The Proud Rosalind is not your woman. She is mine. She was mine from the moment her eyes fell. She was only a child then, but I knew she was mine as surely as I knew this hart was mine and no other’s, when first I saw it as a calf drink at its pool. But I was patient and waited till he, my calf, should become a king, and she, my heifer, a queen. And I am her man because I am of king’s stock in my own land, and she of king’s stock in hers. And I am her man because for a year I have kept her, without her knowledge, with the pence I earned by my sweat, that were earned for a different purpose. And I am her man because the hart you have defended so ill, and hampered for a month, was saved to-day by my arrows, not yours. It was my arrows slew the hounds from the top of the cliff. It was my arrows split the bows of the seven knights. And it is my arrow now that will kill the White Hart that in all men’s sight I may give her the antlers to-morrow, and hear my Proud Rosalind called queen among women.”

And as he spoke Harding drew back suddenly, and fitted a shaft to his string as though he would shoot the hart where it lay.

But the Rusty Knight sprang forward and caught his hands crying, “Not my Hart! you shall not shoot my Hart!” And he tore off his casque, and the great tawny mantle of Rosalind’s hair fell over her rags, and her face was on fire and her bosom heaving; and she sank down murmuring, “I beg you to spare my Hart.”

But Harding, uttering a great laugh of pride and joy, caught her up before she could kneel, saying, “Not even to me, my Proud Rosalind!” And without even kissing her lips, he put her from him and knelt before her, and kissed her feet.

Readers are asked to note that Harding was not being submissive here, but joyfully acknowledging that he had found a woman worthy of him. Those who wish to read more can find the story (it is part of a collection called Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard) here.

The Catholic Church and the modern world

From a discussion in the comments thread of Musette’s “Late marriage” post, between reader Vladimir and Clio, who seems to have crept back for a visit without announcing herself:

aliasclio:

As for John Paul II, I don’t think that most people, esp. most North Americans, are yet able to see how revolutionary his leadership really was. Because he was a “conservative” regarding sexual matters, they cannot see that his concessions to liberalism in other areas, including immigration, represented an enormous change in the Church’s attitudes to the modern world. One example: in the 19th century the Church was instructing Italian Catholics not to participate in any way in democratic elections or face excommunication, and that isn’t really that long ago. Vladimir appears to know more of the modern (post 18th century) Church than I do; perhaps he could step in to comment?

Vladimir:

Thanks for the invitation to comment; it’s an honor coming from an author such as yourself.

The 19th century Church was in a specific situation because the unification of Italy in the 1860s included, among other things, violent annexation of the Papal States. In the period of 1861-1929, the papacy refused to recognize the authority of the newly unified Italian state, in my opinion rightfully. The Papal States had ruled Rome for more than a thousand years, with only occasional brief interruptions, not as some aberrant theocratic phenomenon. (In fact, the whole idea of unified Italy is a product of 19th century romantic nationalism. Before that, Italy was a patchwork of smaller states and peoples with very different local customs and languages, and many of these states and local identities had many centuries of tradition and legitimacy behind them. Much of the trouble that Italian governments have had with Cosa Nostra and other mafias stems from the fact that in many places, the local populations never really accepted them as their true legitimate sovereign, relying on their informal traditional networks of authority instead.)

As for the modern Catholic concessions to liberalism, in an important way it has been a reprise of the same story that’s been repeated many times through history, only this time with a different response from the Church authorities. There have always been movements with the Church that attacked the Church hierarchy and doctrine from a radicalized and self-righteous standpoint, some of them with significant success, like e.g. the 16th century Protestant Reformers. Yet, the Church had always met such challenges heads-on, not budging an inch in any significant matters of doctrine, and even if they resulted in crushing defeats leading to a great shrinking of Church’s extent and influence, at least the doctrine remained pure and uncompromising. The last such occasion was the 19th century Modernist movement, which was dealt a crushing blow by Pope St. Pius X a century ago.

The revived post-WW2 modernist tendencies in the Church have been merely one more such episode of radicalized self-righteous rebellion. Unfortunately, this time the response was far more lenient and, even more catastrophically, these tendencies have been allowed to influence the Church doctrine and ritual. Even when it comes to the greatest abominations that have been rightfully condemned by the recent popes in unambiguous terms, such as e.g. the “liberation theology” or the “pro-choice Catholics,” many of their proponents have been tolerated in practice and allowed to speak while maintaining their prominent positions within the Church. In my opinion, the most disastrous consequence of these trends has been the near-complete destruction of Catholic spiritual art and architecture and the sad degradation of the beauty and dignity of the Mass. (With sadly few honorable exceptions.) Alexander Borgia might have been one of the most depraved men who ever lived, but even he could never have even dreamed of wreaking such destruction during his papacy. It should be noted that while sedevacantists and others who claim that the Second Vatican Council was heretical are in an obviously absurd position, it is true that the wording of many documents of the Council was unfortunate in that it permitted extremely liberal readings without too much of a stretch.

But what’s the reason for all this? Why did the Church always fight resolutely against such trends in the past, only to succumb to them to a large degree this time? There are, I believe, several reasons.

The first one is the seductive allure of the Anglo-Saxon liberalism. The Anglosphere has been at the undisputed forefront of Western civilization for almost a century now, and especially after WW2. Thus, it’s nearly impossible for any intellectual, Catholic or not, to avoid the temptation to succumb to its intellectual trends, rather than to stick to traditionalism and be branded a troglodyte by the fashionable opinion. So, we’ve ended up in a situation where the Church leaders, all the way up to the Pope, are bending over backwards to be as PC as possible on all questions except those few ones where it would mean out-and-out heresy or apostasy. Thus, they’ll hold the line when it comes to, say, abortion, gay marriage, or woman priests, but they’ll frenetically try to make up for it on all issues that the Church has traditionally considered as a matter of free personal opinion and a free choice of the secular authorities, such as e.g. mass immigration, death penalty, or the policies and attitudes towards Islam. Of course, like all appeasement, it only feeds the beast and creates further pressure to abandon the traditional doctrine on all other matters where it might conflict with the PC worldview.

The second one is the frog-boiling principle. The modern PC liberalism has acquired its present extreme characteristics only slowly and gradually. There was no single point at which mainstream politicians and public intellectuals started advocating things grossly incompatible with the Catholic faith, which the priests and bishops could then recognize as the time for a decisive break with them. (Like, for example, the Church in Eastern Europe suddenly found itself under an openly hostile regime in 1945.) Rather, the priests and bishops have stuck to their prominent social roles, even if this required tolerating (and endorsing by silence) more and more grossly heretical and sinful views among the social elite whose part they wanted to remain. Thus, we have slowly drifted towards a situation where Catholic bishops cavort with pro-abortionist politicians without daring to mutter a single word against their views, and a priest gets arrested for protesting against abortion on the campus of a supposedly Catholic university, lest the reverend fathers running it might be deemed uncouth by their social peers. On a more mundane level, the same prideful lust for social prestige leads to the disgusting modern church architecture and art that will win praise by the modern art establishment, even if it’s at the same spiritual and aesthetic level as an abandoned warehouse. (How anyone can have any respect in the first place for this bunch of obnoxious poseurs and charlatans and their nauseating output is beyond me, but that’s a topic for some other discussion.)

The third one is that many Catholic hierarchs, theologians, and other intellectuals have committed the same ignorant errors that have pushed the Mainline Protestant churches into de facto dechristianization. By this I mean the naive conflation between the traditional Christian virtues of charity, mercy, justice, and love of neighbor and the modern PC/Universalist sugary liberalism, and the similarly naive conflation between traditionalism and fascism/Nazism. Thus, many of them actually believe that even the most abominable and extreme left is preferable to even moderate traditionalism. These days, among liberal Catholics, one will certainly draw much more controversy by being a fan of the Tridentine Mass than the Clown Mass, and one will be considered far more evil for giving un-PC comments about issues such as multiculturalism than for outright heresy and apostasy aimed at making one’s views more PC. For various reasons, some of them discussed above, the present power of such currents of thought among Catholics, both laymen and clergy, is at a historically unprecedented level, as well as the favorability of the surrounding environment for their growth.

There is much more to be said about this topic, easily enough to fill a whole book, but these would be some of my preliminary thoughts on the matter.

Late marriage

This is a more personal story than is usual for this blog. Those who are embarrassed or bored by such material can skip it, if they like. Musette promises the rest of you that there’s nothing actually salacious here, and that she has kept the gritty details of her folly to herself.

When Musette was six years old, she received a Barbie wedding-dress as a Christmas present from a friend, and for a few weeks she thought she had died and gone to heaven. Like most little girls, she was delighted by, even in awe of, the glamour of the Bride in her white dress and veil. The first wedding she ever attended in real life took place perhaps a few months later; the bride and groom were friends of her parents. She was bitterly disappointed to find that the bride, though not Indian, was wearing a blue and white sari rather than a Swan-Lake style wedding dress with full tulle skirts. (We lived in New Delhi at the time and saris, far from being exotic, were an everyday fact of life. )

That feeling for the glamour of the bride and the wedding ceremony is still said to push girls to idealize and romanticize marriage. Some feminists insist that it encourages many of them to marry too young (surely not so much any more); or too soon during the courtship phase; or too often; or too thoughtlessly. Perhaps. Musette, however, who was an odd child in some ways, did not find herself over-eager to get married once she had reached an age when such a thing was possible. Her mother had always told her that she would not make a good housewife, and she suspected this was true, although of course, by that time, it was becoming common for women to be married and mothers but also to have a career. Musette saw these new women and how busy they always were, and how chaotic their households often seemed. She wondered what it would be like to grow up in one of them, and was not inspired by the idea.

In fact I often wondered (to switch voices) about having children in general. It frightened me, not because I disliked children or didn’t want to be bothered by them, but because I feared I wouldn’t be a good mother. In young adulthood I was the victim of short, but frequent and intense bouts of depression. I could never be certain where my moods would take me from one hour to the next. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the vast array of anti-depressants now available scarcely existed, and those that did were tricky to use and infrequently prescribed unless you were literally suicidal. Meanwhile, one of the things I used then to lift my spirits was dressing up, especially dressing up to go to parties, where I could usually count on getting a little infusion of gaiety (in the, er, old sense), and vitality, as I talked to new people and flirted a little. But married mothers, I understood, didn’t dress up or get out much, except to work, and they weren’t supposed to flirt. How would I cope with the sense of confinement that inevitably comes to young couples with babies? What if I visited my mood swings on my children? I wondered. What if I was one of those needy and possessive mothers who drive their children to distraction? I had terrible bouts of guilt over my non-existent children and what I might do to them.

It wasn’t just having children that I feared, though. It was marriage itself. I was convinced that marriage was death to any feelings of romance and passion between husband and wife, and replacing marriage with “living together” didn’t seem to help much with the problem. Older women, including my mother and aunts, assured me that it was true but that it didn’t matter, that a new kind of love came along to replace the old feelings of being In Love. This didn’t reassure me. I had the teenage romantic’s belief that being In Love was the greatest state in life, and besides, like parties, that sort of love was a terrific cure for depression, a feeling that could suddenly flood a grey world with brilliant colours, warm a cold heart, and infuse life with meaning and purpose. What would I do if I lost that capacity? Or worse yet, if I lost it for my husband but retained it for other men? As with my imaginary children, I had guilt-ridden visions of myself as an unfaithful wife (emotionally, at least), a modern Emma Bovary dreaming of a less drab existence.

Astute readers will see that I had a great deal of growing up to do before I was fit for marriage, and that perhaps my first need was to cultivate my sense of humour.

All the same, by the time I was 25 or so, I thought I might be able to manage it. I did want children and, thanks to my reading of much-maligned women’s magazines like Glamour, I knew that it was easier to have them in one’s 20s and that fertility drops sharply after age 35. I didn’t want to be alone all my life. Looking at my friends in their “long-term relationships” (I didn’t have any married friends until I was in my 30s – a sign of the times?), it seemed to me that In Love didn’t die quite as quickly and completely as I had once believed. Anyway, if it did, I thought I would be able to cope. My moods were more stable than they had once been, and anyway I had learned how to control them to some degree.

But then tragedy struck my family. My brother G., six years younger than I and still only a teenager, had been showing signs of distress for a year or two. In the summer of 1986, his symptoms became acute, and a doctor suggested that it was probably schizophrenia. A short time later he suffered a complete breakdown and had to be hospitalized for a few weeks.

Although none of us suffered anything much compared to G. himself, we were, of course, stricken with a terrible grief. In my own case, my carefully cultivated optimism and emotional stability vanished. I found myself suddenly as eager to fall In Love as I had been as an adolescent, but with an added sense of urgency or desperation for commitment that had never been there before.

This is not a good state of mind in which to date. I won’t say much about my misadventures over the next few years, except that, although I always chose men who were presentable, attractive to look at, and seemingly stable, were also often deeply disturbed under their appearance of normality. I was drawn to chaos and to staring into the Abyss, and as with Nietzsche, the Abyss began to stare back at me. In my own unhappiness I ended up driving away such love as I might have found. I’m not sorry about it, in retrospect, because I doubt that I would have been happy with any of the men I dated in my dark years, but at the time my repeated failures only added to my distress.

Going back to graduate school in my early 30s was my salvation. It gave an outlet to my passions: instead of falling In Love with a man, I was In Love with history. I gave it all the furious, intense devotion I had tried and failed to invest in a man. I thought that I had at last found my place in the world, and my purpose: I was a scholar. I would be a celibate scholar, too, if I had to be. I didn’t think I would mind. Though I continued to date, it was light-heartedly, without the passion of previous years,  and with a determination to avoid emotional chaos.

For a long time, this approach was successful. Although it didn’t exactly lead me to a lasting love, I didn’t really care. I was happy. I still suffered from bouts of depression, but if they threatened to become severe, I could turn to Prozac or Paxil or Welbutrin or any of the new anti-depressants that seemed to have been invented for people like me. With their help, if necessary, I looked forward to a long career as a professor of history at some university. I refused, however, to stay on them for more than a few months at a time. I didn’t like the emotional numbness of Prozac, or the sleeplessness induced by Paxil.

When my parents returned from what was to be their last posting, I found that my mother was deeply distressed over the prospect of having to care for my brother without help. Abroad, she had housekeepers and could go out freely when she needed or wanted to do so. In Canada, this would be much harder to manage. As I watched her and sympathized, it began to dawn on me that I wouldn’t be able to leave Ottawa to pursue my university career, which was tantamount to accepting that I wouldn’t be able to pursue it at all. Academic careers require you to pick up courses as a sessional lecturer wherever you can, travelling  from one school to another, week in and week out, and, if lucky, acquiring a reputation for good teaching, all the while publishing papers and attending conferences. This is what leads to full-time jobs and, perhaps, tenure. But I couldn’t do this and continue to provide my mother with company and emotional support. 

Although I finished my dissertation, and got my doctorate, I gave up my dreams of Academe, and got a job in a related but non-academic field. I was by now nearing the age of 40, supposedly a time when women cease being attractive to men, or so I had always thought.  All the same, I was pursued – almost stalked – by a charming but sociopathic (I don’t call him that lightly) colleague, in whom I invested all the emotions that I had for so long safely ploughed into my scholarly work. I’m saving that story for my fiction, so I won’t tell it here, though I will say that I think he lived to regret it. I was his victim for a time, but I don’t believe he ever tried anything of the kind again. It’s the one satisfaction I can take from the episode, which cost me several years of the most severe depression I ever experienced, not through heartbreak, but through furious rage at myself and at him.

The experience purged Musette once and for all of false romanticism, of flirting with the Abyss. When she met the man who is to be her husband, some years later, she discovered that he, too, had once been drawn to the Abyss, but had learned that the Glamour of Evil – so well-represented in her own life by her sociopathic colleague – quickly faded to dullness and despair. When together, they talk, laugh, and tell each other stories. He teases her incessantly, and she returns as good as she gets. They attend Mass. They have learned how to love.

Perseverance…sigh

As temperance and its annexed virtues remove from the will hindrances to rational good arising from sensuous pleasure, so fortitude removes from the will those obstacles arising from the difficulties of doing what reason requires. Hence fortitude, which implies a certain moral strength and courage, is the virtue by which one meets and sustains dangers and difficulties, even death itself, and in never through fear of these deterred from the pursuit of good which reason dictates. (See FORTITUDE.) The virtues annexed to fortitude are: …

….Perseverance, the virtue which disposes to continuance in the accomplishment of good works in spite of the difficulties attendant upon them. As a moral virtue it is not to be taken precisely for what is designated as final perseverance, that special gift of the predestined by which one is found in the state of grace at the moment of death. It is used here to designate that virtue which disposes one to continuance in any virtuous work whatsoever.  — Catholic Encyclopedia

A few days ago, I left a comment at the 2Blowhards’ website on the subject of the difficulty of perseverance. Because this is an issue that much occupies Musette’s mind at the moment, as she struggles with certain intractable bad habits, she has decided to re-post the comment here in an edited format:

Why do some people succeed in some great effort of self-reform, and then give it up? Why do others not appear to try at all?

I think the answer may be the same in both cases, and that it’s something to do with the psychology of perseverance in human beings. It’s one thing to see reason, like the perception that one is after all too fat, or ill-tempered, or drinks too much; undergo a conversion to better eating, or giving up alcohol; and reform your life. It’s another thing to know that you’ve done it all already, and failed. It may be worse yet to know that you’ve done it all already, succeeded, and then relapsed into your former ways.

I suspect that the people one sees who appear never to have tried, or never to have succeeded at, reforming their lives, have in fact done so many times over, something we can’t really know unless we’re on intimate terms with them. They are worn out by the cycle of desperation, renewal, and relapse. As John Cleese groans at a pivotal moment in the movie Clockwise, “It isn’t the despair that crushes you. It’s the HOPE!”

Resignation to one’s bad habits or vices may hurt less, in the immediate moment, than hope and the renewal of effort. Perhaps there’s something in evolutionary pscyhology to explain this, and perhaps it is, after all, the consequence of the Fall.

Perseverance is one of the “moral virtues”. There are also “intellectual virtues” and “theological virtues”, the last of which comprise faith, hope and charity: “these three”, as Paul says in one of his most famous passages. It may be that in order to overcome any really disordered desire, like that of the serious alcoholic, it’s necessary to call upon not merely the natural virtues (that is, the intellectual and moral ones), but upon the three supernatural virtues, the theological ones. Most of the most serious alcoholic and drug addicts do not manage to break free of their addiction without calling upon these. That’s why the most successful treatment programs for such people tend to involve a great deal of God talk, sometimes to the discomfiture of the people who turn to them in desperation.

Oddments

As Musette does not wish to disappoint readers who may be hoping to see her blog and its (often very good) commenters get going again, she is going to post more frequently even when she has little but trivialities to discuss. This may happen more often now, at least for a little while, because Clio is still sulking at the news of her upcoming marriage, and refusing to grace Musette with her usual mixture of inspiration and insouciance.

What shall we talk about today?

So: “qu’allons nous discuter aujourd’hui?” as a cousin’s little classmate once said as he sat down to lunch at my aunt’s apartment in Grenoble, many years ago. According to her, French children were the oddest mixture of primness, among adults, and meanness, when they thought themselves unobserved. In fact, France itself is an odd place, since its culture appears to blend the Germanic and the Latin elements of western Europe. Latin ease and charm and humour; Germanic discipline and pride and precision.  You can see this blend of characteristics in French painting, I believe. It always drew much from both traditions. Northern and southern European paintings are nearly always easy to distinguish through a number of hard-to-summarize but instantly recognisable traits. When you look at French painting, these traits recognisably blend and dissolve into something uniquely French.

Women, vanity, modesty

The presence of veiled Muslim women in the cities of Europe and North America has made feminine modesty a public issue in recent years, for the first time perhaps since the  miniskirt in the 1960s shocked the sensibilities of the older generation. But now, of course, it – feminine modesty and what it signifies – is acquiring a greater cultural and even political weight than it ever had before. 

On the one hand, there is a purely home-grown and largely feminine discussion of a “return to modesty”, as championed by writers like Wendy Shalit. The essence of their argument is that many girls and women have grown weary of always being expected to put themselves on sexual display, and at an ever-earlier age, too. They don’t demand that all women follow their example, but they do suggest that this tendency might be self-defeating for women who do not wish to be seen merely as sexual objects.

Then there is a traditionalist conservative men’s movement – I am not certain how influential it is – whose adherents include writers like Lawrence Auster and F. Roger Devlin. Devlin has written about how the increasing immodesty of female clothing is an insult to men in that it assumes their emasculation. I have to admit that I have only a very limited sympathy with this point of view. Men’s sexual responses are multi-faceted, and when women hide parts of their bodies they often find that these parts become the focus of fetishistic male attention, leading to requests that we cover up still more. When women wore long skirts, a glimpse of a stockinged ankle was, er, something shocking, i.e. titillating, for men. In some societies today the mere glimpse of a woman’s face or hair is regarded as a sexual provocation. Thus I don’t want to encourage this understanding of modesty, I mean as an indicator of women’s respect for male sexuality and its power, for fear of where it might end, though I don’t dismiss the idea altogether.

Catholic modesty was never intended mainly to discourage male lasciviousness, because both sexes were expected to be modest, although that was one of its secondary purposes. Rather, the Church used the term in its broad rather than its narrow sense: to be modest was to refrain from boasting, whether about one’s wealth or one’s status or one’s physical endowments. A man who boasted of his wealth was as immodest as a woman who insisted on flaunting her cleavage. Physical immodesty in women was also connected to another vice in the eyes of Catholic moralists, the vice of physical vanity. The Church disapproved, and still disapproves, of the expensive, self-absorbed, time-wasting fuss of women’s concern for their appearance, as well as of the perpetual self-display it supports and encourages. Even if such self-display didn’t involve much skin (and of course elegant women aren’t necessarily crudely sexy), it was still, in Catholic eyes, immodest. Or so it sometimes seems when I read Catholic moralists on this subject, who often seem to want to see women clothed in garments as shapeless and drab as possible, to judge by the way they dress themselves.

Musette has to admit to being almost hopelessly compromised when it comes to this form of modesty, and perhaps the following comments should be read in that light. You see, she loves clothes; she loves dress as a (minor) art form – that is, not just the making of beautiful clothes, but the assembling and wearing of them. She loves to see people well-dressed and looking their best, whether in casual or formal contexts. What’s more, she is distressed to see that so many women feel guilty spending any money at all on their appearance, or taking any time to make themselves look good.

I realise that many women, particularly the mothers of young children, literally do not have the time to take a shower. It’s not them I’m thinking of, though. It’s the women who do have a little spare time but who clearly think that it would be wicked to use it on any form of self-care. I often watch both the English and American versions of “What Not to Wear”, and am often struck by the way that many of them appear to feel that it’s both wicked and somehow embarrassing to take pride in or time for their appearance. It’s perhaps the most common problem for the women who appear as the guests on these shows. (The other most common problem, paradoxically, is women with wrong-headed ideas about how to dress sexily for men…) Equally, I’m struck by the way so many of them glow with what seems to me to be a legitimate pride in their appearance after they have been “made over” by their hosts. Few of the women turn out to be beauties – though there are a surprising number of exceptions to this – but they do not expect to do so. Even when I think some part of the makeover was a mistake (bad choice of hair colour, etc.) I have a sympathetic thrill when I see them abandoning the Modesty of Drabness ethic and enjoying the way they look in their new clothes. I cannot think this kind of enjoyment is wrong.

Some news from Musette

Because she mentioned it in passing on Roissy’s blog just yesterday, Musette thought she ought to drop by her own blog to tell her remaining faithful readers (and anyone else passing through) the reasons for her long absence. Aside from her lingering bout with pneumonia, which really put a damper on her enthusiasm for blogging and which only really ended in the middle of August, she has been somewhat preoccupied, because she is going to get married. Clio, who doesn’t much like love or marriage because she prefers her mortals to concentrate exclusively upon her, has been less inclined to visit Musette in consequence.

When I started this blog in April 2007, I was under great stress, still in mourning over my mother’s death two years before, with a bed-ridden father, an impossible job which required me to work at home but made doing so difficult, and a feeling that I could never leave the house. In a fit of frustration and loneliness, I thought I’d try writing not about my problems but about the things that I liked best. Favourite poems, historical anecdotes, good books, I would muse about these and follow wherever my speculations led me. Gradually, I began to comment upon public affairs as well, although always guardedly, in part from natural caution and in part because I didn’t want to deal with the kind of anger and confrontation that gathers around political bloggers. Anyway, blogging was an effective cure for both the frustration and the loneliness, and brought many new friends into my life.

The conditions that once led me to blog are long since behind me. My father recovered from his back troubles; I lost my job, to my great relief (I had savings to fall back on and I was still living rent-free with my father); and I’m able to come and go much more freely. While we still all miss my mother, visitors no longer sense a family in mourning the moment they enter the door. All these changes made blogging a less pressing interest to me. Another important issue was the problems I began to have with blogger in the spring of 2008, problems which put a forcible halt to blogging for a time and led me to switch to wordpress. Once you lose the habit of everyday blogging, it can be difficult to pick it up again.

My intended and I haven’t yet set a date, although we should be able to do so soon. Meanwhile, now that Musette is recovering a little from the strange sense of exaltation that has prevented her from putting her feet to the ground (when she wasn’t sick, at any rate), she thinks she’ll be able to return to blogging a little more frequently again. If readers are still interested, they are of course always welcome to come by and to leave comments or, if they prefer, to contact Clio at aliasclio-weblog at yahoo dot ca.

Jottings

C.S. Lewis is best-known for his fantasy writings, but he had a remarkable talent for satire and for character sketches of both humans and animals, sometimes with what seem to me to be startling moral insights. Here is a passage from a memoir he wrote about the parents of his friend, Arthur Greeves:

…I do not know how it is – Mrs Greeves was a better woman than any true account of her would lead you to believe. Much she did that was bad, and all that she said was foolish: but somehow it was all forgiveable. One does not love the domestic cat less because it is greedy and thievish. Somehow these facts do not reach the heart of the mystery.

Musette hopes that when she dies someone is generous enough to say of her that “She was a better woman than any true account of her would lead you to believe.” Beyond that craven hope, however, I’m struck by Lewis’s comment about “these facts do not reach the heart of the mystery”. It’s a pity that more writers of realist fiction don’t seem to realise this in their creation of characters.

The story still doesn’t make any sense…

When Musette first heard the news story of the family of  three teenage sisters and their aunt who drowned in a peculiar car  accident in the Rideau Canal, in the Kingston area, the hairs on the back of her neck bristled. They bristled still more when she read that the dead women were Muslims. The accident was “peculiar” in that it would apparently have required much ingenuity and deliberate intent to get the car into the canal, because of the various barriers and gates barring easy access to the waterway. The girls’ family explained that the eldest daughter liked to drive the family car, though she had no license, and that her aunt had gone along to give her driving lessons.

Then, just the other day, she read another news story in which a family of Muslim women – a mother and two young daughters – drowned in an indoor pool at a motel in the Kingston area. None of them were swimmers and the pool was closed at the time. “Oh, come on,” Musette said to herself. “Tell me another.” Clio, always keen to see patterns in history, whispered in her ear a reminder of the previous story. What was going on in Kingston, anyway?

Now it seems as if the former story did in fact awaken the suspicions of the police, as well it might. According to Mark Steyn,

La Presse is now reporting that the girls’ father, mother, and brother have been arrested en route to Montreal Airport, and that the deceased “aunt” or (alternatively) “cousin” was, in fact, the girls’ father’s first wife. The words “crime d’honneur” are beginning to creep into newspaper accounts.

An honour killing? Well, all right. But the explanation still doesn’t make the story make any sense. Why kill all the girls, the youngest of whom was only 13? Why kill their “aunt”, who now turns out to have been, according to some sources, their father’s first wife? And why has their father been going about with red eyes? Most perps of honour killings appear to exult in their deeds, if the news stories about them are correct. And then there’s the fact that the mother of the girls either engineered or cooperated in the killing of her own children, which, while not by any means impossible, is still surprising. It would seem less odd if mother and daughters had been dispatched together.

The hows of the case are as mystifying as the whys. How does one persuade a middle-aged woman to go out in a car late at night with her stepdaughters (if that’s what you call them), and to drive that car, with much difficulty, into a canal?

The logistics of the second story, the motel-pool drowning, are less baffling. If the woman and her girls were murdered, which seems rather likely, I don’t suppose it would have been that difficult to push or entice them into the pool. But – and this really floored me at first – why Kingston, again? As Mark Steyn says, 

There would seem to be a statistically improbable number of multiple drownings of female members of Muslim families in Kingston [Ontario] this summer. If you’re a young female Muslim, and you have any say in the matter, you might want to vacation elsewhere.

The Kingston angle, though, is a bit of a red herring.  Steyn was writing with a degree of poetic license when he said the second incident occurred in Kingston; in fact, it took place in Ganonoque, which is about 30 km away, so what seems at first to be a striking if meaningless coincidence is rather less so upon a second glance.

Pewmonie

It looks vaguely sinister, doesn't it?

Your Musette is afflicted with what may or may not be pneumonia. She has been to a doctor in which she received this as a possible diagnosis, one which she had already guessed because of the pain deep in her chest, and the rattling in her lungs when she draws a breath. But in order to determine what she actually has, she would have to go to another address some four blocks away, a “lab” at which they do x-rays, blood work, and other such tests.

As Musette was sick enough to have some trouble walking any distance, and would have had to walk back another 9 blocks again to catch a cab, she decided to forego the test. Fortunately, the doctor had taken her at her word (not without a struggle involving two separate visits and much argument), that she recognised the symptoms as typical of a bacterial infection, and has given her a prescription for an antibiotic without the x-ray.

Sigh. Musette is sorry to bore her readers with this unsolicited account of her symptoms, but she is irritable and feeling sorry for herself. If any of you would be willing to take over the latter task for her, she would be grateful. Meanwhile, she is getting better, thanks to the antibiotic, but her voice still resembles the sound emitted by a bagpipe (did you know that “musette” is a medieval French word for a small bagpipe, btw?) when sat upon by a large and heavy person.