Darken the corner where you are!

(Hannibal Crossing the Alps, J.M.W. Turner)

“[Some] say it is best to dispel the gloom, not make it worse, and stick to the cheery side. I happen to have a small vocation for spreading gloom; my favorite Protestant hymn, slightly emended from the way it is sung even at Catholic Masses today, is ‘Darken the corner where you are!’ because I think, though life is funny, it is not for fun; and we have blurred the distinction between being happy and being blessed.” —John Senior

We ambulate now in the gloomy half-light of a perpetual cloudiness by day, and of a too bright, washed out starlessness by night. Without the sun beating down on us at noon and the stars delighting us at midnight, we lose our way. Everything seems to be a shapeless murk. Light is no longer light, darkness no longer dark. Our celestial signposts are imperceivable. It is the spiritual equivalent of living in one of the urban Sodoms of the American Northwest.

We could look on the cheery side of things—God is still on his throne, the pope is ravaging the last shreds of ultramontanism in his wrath, and Evelyn Waugh was taken from this world before the Novus Ordo could drive him to apostasy—but we look for a more immediate comfort. We want to see evil overthrown. We want to restore the influence of the Church upon the world. We want to have one stupid sermon where the stupid priest says something that isn’t stupid. We want not to worry about whether or not Fr. is going to groom our sons in the confessional and make his advances in the sacristy. We want to not have a sinking feeling every time someone relates that, “Today Pope Francis said…” We want, we want, we want.

God sends us out as sheep in the midst of wolves, and we need to toughen up.

We are not given the Church for our consolation, although it possesses consolations beyond imagining. We are not given our little rare islands of traditionalism and good spiritual fathers so we can simply huddle away from the aerial bombardment of the Enemy.

God sends us out in the midst of wolves. We are not out there solely to save ourselves but to save our brethren. Be as clever as the Devil and as pure as the Virgin.

A city on a hill cannot be hidden, neither from our friends nor from our enemies. In order to be a beacon for the lost and imperiled, it cannot hide itself from the armies of Hell. A hidden stronghold speaks lies to those who hide within; it lies that hiddenness is sufficient for safety, that they can trust on hoarded wealth and unpracticed arms.

Be as gloomy as you please, but do not let that be an excuse for sloth. The ancient Jews were conquered by Rome and fenced in on all sides. By the time of the Incarnation they had ossified and used this oppression as an excuse for an ouroboros-like ethic of scrupulosity. Sloth is sadness at the thought of real spiritual practice, a repulsion against spiritual action that penetrates into the inner man and reaches out for the betterment of others. It is easier to condemn a cardinal than to practice a cardinal virtue.

The early Church faced oppression from without; we are learning what it is means to be oppressed from within. The Roman martyrs could ask, “Why do the nations rage?” We learn to ask, “Do you betray the son of man with a kiss?” We encounter Iscariots everywhere. We are sheep sent out in the midst of wolves. Learn how to survive or be devoured.

A Benedict Option for Laymen?

A recent short essay published by Crisis Magazine examines the problems that come with an "Abundance of Benedict Options," playing off the social engineering schema popularized by the ex-Catholic Rod Dreher:

The most famous [option] is certainly the Benedict option popularized by author Rod Dreher. But others have written about the Dominican option, the Dorothy option, the Escriva option, the Buckley option, the Boniface option, etc. I have no problems with these suggestions or reflection on this question. It is vital and important to prepare for the full flowering of western liberalism and its possible collapse under its own weight. However, most who are writing on this topic miss the contingency of this question, the participatory nature of the Church, and Ecclesial unity.

The essay by Dr. John Meinert is both short and good, basically trying to calm the contentious option-holders from beating on one another in public, in favor of admitting a variety of valid options within the Catholic sphere of moral orthodoxy.

I wonder if Dreher's repurposing of St. Benedict's name in naming his own social-religious philosophy is unnecessarily confusing. It seems that Dreher is constantly fighting off concerns that he wants laity with family to live like monks. Why invoke the Rule of the great Benedict if you are only going to abstract a few applicable ideas for the common layman? "I came up with the concept," Dreher says, "and I'm not sure what it means."

John Senior was more intentional with his invocation of the ancient Benedictine way of life. He argued that the larger Catholic culture (lay and clerical) can only find a revival if first the monasteries are purified by returning to a strict obedience to the Rule. Fix the monasteries, and the rest of the world will follow. Dr. Senior, I suspect, would accuse Mr. Dreher of putting the cart before the horse. Senior wrote in The Restoration of Christian Culture:

We are creatures of habit, as the nuns used to say. In the moral and spiritual order, we become what we wear as much as what we wear "becomes" us—and it is the same with how we eat and what we do. That is the secret of St. Benedict's Rule which in the strict sense regulated monasteries and in the wider sense, through the influence and example of monasteries, especially in their love of Our Blessed Mother, civilized Europe. The habits of the monks, the bells, the ordered life, the conversation, the music, gardens, prayer, hard work, and walls—all these accidental and incidental forms conformed the moral and spiritual life of Christians to the love of Mary and her Son. (130-31)

While Senior's vision demands a top-down purification of culture, Dreher's vision is born of an impatience with the failures of those in higher states of life in the Church. This is no surprise, considering that clerical corruption was the cause of his own schism. There is something unnatural about creating a "rule" for Catholic families that is divorced from the daily, weekly, and yearly life of a parish or monastery. It is the kind of thing one would expect in a place like pre-20th century Japan, where pockets of Catholic communities were forced to perpetuate themselves without the help of clergy of any kind after the expulsion of Western influences, not in the cybernetically connected 21st century.

Certainly, at times families need to keep themselves Catholic in spite of the local parochial influence. Dreher's vision of the family besieged on every side, even the ecclesiastical side, is not without merit. But it is dangerous to cultivate a lifestyle of seclusion, where the laity arrive at the church once a week for Sacraments, but otherwise refuse to engage with the life of the Church. I worry mostly that Dreher is implicitly recommending a kind of Protestant spirituality, wherein each family is an island that develops a habit of suspicion against all outside influence.

The health of the Church Catholic depends heavily on the holiness of her monasteries, and to a marginally lesser degree on the holiness of her priests and bishops. Any spirituality that places the natural family at its center I consider suspect, and I say this as one recently married and hopeful of a fruitful life, and who also regularly bemoans the disintegration of family life in the West. Our spiritual life revolves around the Household of Heaven, in which the Son is paradoxically greater than the Mother, in which our familial relations become mere metaphors for a more perfect life. Sacramental though our marriages be, they are not intrinsically paradigms for the life of Heaven, where we will neither marry nor be given in marriage.

I am not insensible to the need of securing the moral and traditional aspects of family life. It is an important problem, and one urgent enough that it will not simply wait for the hopeful Benedictine revival in the West. In this respect, I think families need to make peace with the fact that any moral corrections they make against the culture or against malign ecclesiastical influence are going to be limited, imperfect, and temporary. Whatever "option" we take, we should not think it to be a permanent or wholistic solution.

Epiphany and Esotericism

“Clouds and darkness are round about him.” (Ps. 96)

Little is known about the three Magi who visited the Christ Child in Bethlehem. The Western tradition names them Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. Some traditions hold that St. Thomas the Apostle baptized the Magi in his oriental journeys, and that they were made bishops of the Catholic Faith. Western iconography eventually began to depict the Magi as being of three different races (European, Asian, and African) to symbolize the three continents, and of three ages (young, middle aged, and elderly) to symbolize the fullness of man’s life; in this respect, the Magi are a synecdoche of man in his natural, pre-Christian state.

The Magi were likely priests of, or otherwise heavily involved in, the religion of Zarathustra, although in spite of their name they may not have been practitioners of magic or sorcery. Certainly they were astrologers in the sense of astronomical philosophers and speculators. The use of the lights of heavens as signs goes all the way back to the Hebrew creation account (Gen. 1.14), pagans though they were. The details of the ancient Chaldean religions are vague and perhaps tainted by the research of much later speculative philosophers, but it bears superficial similarities to many later heresies like Manichæism.

John Senior describes the aspects of Chaldean astrology in The Way Down and Out: “The cosmology of the sacerdotal schools fits the theological order exactly [That is, of the universe as an emanation of the Divine rather than a creation. –J.], the world in fact being a replica of heaven so that everything which happens in the one is reflected in the other. This accounts for the efficacy of astrology and allied forms of divination and of magic” (11). This doctrine of correspondence between Heaven and Earth, and of Man as an image of the universe, is the popular basis of belief in Man as Divine.

“The heavens declared his justice: and all people saw his glory.” (Ps. 96)

The religions of Babylon and Egypt would eventually be sprinkled with Hindoo doctrines and find a nesting place in Greece (through the Orphic mysteries) and later in Rome (in the rites of Mithras), but would also influence various Neoplatonist movements. In a sense, the world has never been rid of Chaldean errors. The theological dualism of Zarathustra provides a theodicy for the emotional insecure and simple-minded. The implied divinity of Man excuses all manner of vices, especially vainglory and lust, for it makes sexual union into a quasi-divine and magical act.

Still, the stink of Babylon lingers, and likely will until the end of time. Its practitioners call theirs the “esoteric” religion, mocking the public, Catholic religion as “exoteric.” The hidden (“occult”) religion is meant for the enlightened few, the public religion for the simple masses. This pride has diminished over time. Senior notes that the esoteric religion exists in the modern day, but not as the fruits of an unbroken tradition:

Because in the West there has been no “tradition” since the Renaissance, the symbolist doctrine has been in the hands of individuals rather than schools, amateurs rather than professionals; and this has led to a kind of esoteric protestantism, to the formation of individual sects, some wise, many foolish. (xiv)

The conversion of the Magi was not a deathblow to what Dr. Senior would later call the “Perennial Heresy,” but it did open an alternative to the temptation of vain curiosity. What the Magi sought were wisdom and enlightenment, and they were true lovers of wisdom (philo-sophia) in ways that those with itching ears are not. The doctrine of correspondence between Heaven and Earth, of Man holding within himself the Divine, came true in the humble city of Bethlehem of Judea. It came true in a way that the Magi could never have predicted, in a way that they would certainly spend their entire lives attempting to understand.

The esoteric had become exoteric—“the light shineth in darkness.” Lovers of obscurity hate the light and “do not comprehend it,” preferring the darkness of the occult. At best they are alchemists intent on improving their own souls; at worst they are sorcerers and worshippers of angels. The esoteric religion remains to be discovered by men restless and intelligent, like a chunk of arctic ice housing a deadly bacteria long thought to be extinct.

Jesus spoke in parables to darken the eyes and block the ears of grievously sinful men, not to prevent the humble and unlearned from entering in to the Kingdom. Some remain blind and deaf, in spite of the epiphaneia of the Gospel. Some wish to remain unenlightened.

“Light is risen to the just, and joy to the right of heart.” (Ps. 96)

Considering the Legacy of John Senior: Part 2

From the student-created IHP course catalog. (source)

[Part 1]

It was at the University of Kansas that Senior accomplished his greatest academic and spiritual work, his magnum opus which was also an opus Dei. The Integrated Humanities Program (IHP), founded in 1970 with Dennis Quinn and Franklyn Nelick, was a classics or “great books” program that passed down ancient Christian and pre-Christian wisdom as a true oral tradition.

Senior had become very seriously Catholic by this time. He encouraged his students to read the Rule of St. Benedict, and sent some of them on pilgrimages to the Fontgombault monastery in France, which was one of a few still celebrating the pre-Novus Ordo rites of the Church. Many of his students had converted to the Faith, some joined the religious life to found Our Lady of Clear Creek Monastery in Oklahoma (a daughterhouse of Fontgombault), and others are priests and bishops today (including Bp. James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska). His intellectual-spiritual children and grandchildren are seemingly as numerous as the sand of the sea.

The success of the IHP was hotly opposed by many in the administration, who had received calls from concerned parents that their children were being subjected to brainwashing by a cult figure. A local Unitarian minister formed the “Committee for Academic and Religious Freedom” with the aim of abolishing all religious freedom within the IHP. The local Catholic archdiocese was even convinced to oppose the program, which was finally abolished in 1979 by the Kansas faculty after a thorough witch hunt. Senior, Quinn, and Nelick soon filed a libel suit which was settled in their favor, but they continued to teach at Kansas.

Meanwhile, Senior had published The Death of Christian Culture in 1978 through Arlington House. Parts of the book were pieced together from previously published essays, and the final result is a mighty jeremiad against the suicidal literary-cultural movement of the West. Here, Senior condemns the “Perennial Heresy” which he had described with such affection in The Way Down and Out, and corrects it with the Perennial Philosophy. The various chapter titles—“Eastward Ho!—Hum,” “The Real Absence,” “The Emperor’s New Literature,” “Dark Night of the Church,” etc.—gives the reader a sense of his thoughts on cultural and spiritual matters.

He retired from teaching in 1983 due to a severe heart condition, and the same year published The Restoration of Christian Culture through Ignatius Press, a decision one can hardly imagine the publisher making today. In Restoration he more strongly pushes for a revival of Benedictine monasticism and Marian devotion. Chapters such as “The Air-Conditioned Holocaust” and “A Final Solution to Liberal Education” proved that he had lost none of his bitter wit.

Senior’s close relations to the Society of Pius X were a matter of some concern for his fellow Catholics, even to the traditionalists. He wrote articles arguing for the possibility that the Society’s break with the pope in the ’80s was justified (republished as “The Glass Confessional” and “Lost at Sea” in The Remnants by Remnant Press, 2013), and his son Andrew remained friendly with the Society and Dr. David Allen White, a brilliant English professor who is still a close collaborator with Bp. Richard Williamson. Both Andrew Senior and Dr. White wrote introductory notes to recent editions of Death and Restoration. On his deathbed, the elder Senior angrily dismissed a priest who tried to comfort him with the assurance that nobody really knows what happens to us after we die. “I may have lived awhile with the New Church,” he replied, “suffered under it, but I will not die in it.”

John Senior’s legacy deserves repeated consideration. Even the imperfections of his Christian Culture diptych cannot eradicate its moments of brilliant clarity. A short excerpt from one of them is enough to prove the point:

Generations brought up in centrally heated and air-conditioned homes and schools, shot from place to place encapsulated in culturally sealed-off buses, who swim in heated, chlorinated pools devoid of current, swirl or tide, where even the build-up from one’s own pushing of the water is suctioned off by vacuums so as not to spoil the pure experience of sport-for-sport’s sake... poor little rich suburban children who have all these delights, and living in constant fluorescent glare, have never seen the stars, which St. Thomas, following Aristotle and all the ancients, says are the first begetters of that primary experience of reality formulated as the first of all principles in metaphysics, that something is. (Restoration, p. 83)

The spiritual tradition he handed down bears fruit to this day, and shows little sign of stopping. He was perhaps right in warning his students and friends—if one can indeed separate the former group from the latter—to avoid his book on occult literary themes, but even that work can serve as an indirect warning against certain spiritual temptations. If the esoteric tradition is in fact the Perennial Heresy, it deserves a thorough explication to show that it is no mere passing Harry Potter-esque fad.

On April 8, 1999, Senior passed away and was buried in Our Lady of Peace Cemetery in Kansas by Fr. Ramon Angles of the SSPX. He was joined two years later by his wife, and their tombstone reads, “Love is strong as death.”

(source)

Considering the Legacy of John Senior: Part 1

Curiously, Dr. John Senior is remembered today less for his work in the traditionalist movement than he is for a book list that appeared as an appendix in his great work, The Death of Christian Culture. This list of “The Thousand Good Books” is meant to be something of an antidote to the extreme demands of the many “Great Books” lists popularized by many academic programs—the “merely good” books that are useful for fertilizing and tilling the soil of children’s souls from the nursery to youth.

Dr. Senior’s own youth is shrouded in a bit of mist. He was born in 1923 in Stamford, Connecticut, and grew up in Long Island, New York. In the 1930s he was enamored with Marxism. He married Priscilla Wood in 1945, and received his BA (1946), MA (1948), and PhD (1957) in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. The Seniors had three children, Penelope, Matthew, and Andrew.

In 1959, Senior published The Way Down and Out: The Occult in Symbolist Literature through Cornell University Press, apparently while teaching at Cornell. In this volume he acknowledges a great debt to Raymond Weaver, a professor at Columbia University who was instrumental in first bringing the works of Herman Melville out of obscurity and into the world of academic appreciation. Weaver’s book Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic was the first major study of the American novelist, and it was encouraged by Carl Van Doren (himself the brother of Mark Van Doren, another mentor of Senior’s).

In The Way Down and Out, the nearly forty year-old Senior shows an obsession with the subject of the occult. He spends half the book describing esoteric traditions in detail, with the rest attempting—and, I think, succeeding—in finding occult intent in the works of many poets and novelists: Blake, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Yeats, and others. The symbolist poets, he says, were attempting to revive the ancient esoteric priesthood by becoming priests themselves through the composition and promulgation of poetry. Most if not all of them failed in the attempt, Senior argues, but such was their intent.

Later in life, Senior asked people not to read this book. It is not difficult to understand why. Orthodox Catholics could easily be scandalized by the writings of the pre-Catholic Senior, for The Way Down and Out is the work of a still half-pagan mind. To take but one example, he writes that Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal is “a book as pure as that by any monk, and the fact that it was suppressed as immoral is a bitter joke, like a lesser burning of St. Joan” (p. 96). This is a far cry from the condemnation of Baudelaire that would appear in The Death of Christian Culture (1978).

Senior described his own conversion in an essay written shortly before his death,

My conversion started at thirteen, when, having visited the orchard of forbidden pears, I followed Marx and Freud, as most students of my generation did, until, through the good offices of an extraordinary teacher at college met my Socrates and truth, from whence I followed Plato to Platonism and, in the depths of intellectual if not moral despair, Oriental doctrine which brought me face to face with Nothing. Many of my friends and colleagues from this time, driven by the thirst for truth beyond Existence ended in insanity and death from overdoses of drugs and bogus Buddhist meditations. By what then seemed merely chance, my Angel interfered: Meditating on the famous proposition of Heraclitus that the “way up and the way down are the same”—which the Gnostics take to mean that, since opposites are one, the law of contradiction is void—I happened (oh happy chance!) to take up St. Thomas who says the way up and down are indeed the same, except as to direction. 

To my astonishment, as I mounted up the gangplank to the Ark, I was all but trampled by a horde of crazy Catholics rushing to embrace in the name of “Renewal” the very horror I was leaving. (“The Last Epistle” from The Remnants, p. 128-9)

Senior was received into the Church soon after the publication of The Way Down and Out, in 1960. That year he also moved west to teach at the University of Wyoming. Esquire Magazine named him one of the country’s top fifty teachers in 1966. In 1967 he relocated again to take a position at the University of Kansas, where in 1970 he founded the Integrated Humanities Program with Dennis Quinn and Franklyn Nelick. It was a program doomed to fail dramatically and yet succeed in ways beyond Senior’s wildest hopes.

(to be continued)