Recently, Brent Barnes, a friend from Houston, gave me three handsomely bound volumes from a London edition of Samuel Johnson’s essays in The Rambler. Already in 1801 this edition was the fourteenth in this famous series. Barnes found these well-preserved volumes at a sale someplace. The fourth volume was missing. The first essay was posted on Tuesday, March 20, 1750. The last one in volume III, number 159, is dated Tuesday, September 24, 1751. The set is printed by A. Straban, Printers’ Street, London. It leaves us with a sobering self-reflection: “He that considers how little he dwells on the condition of others, will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself.” No doubt we have a salutary lesson here. Johnson was called a moralist for good reason.

Each volume begins with the following citation from Horace: Nulla addictus jurare in verba magistri, quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes.” Roughly this means that we are not obliged by the words of a teacher to go wherever it leads us. But we can return the argument as a guest. That is, we return on the basis of our own judgment even when we agree with our teacher. We no longer agree because of the authority of our teacher but because we see the truth of the argument that we both now understand in its own logic.

Usually, each of Johnson’s Rambler essays was from two to six pages of print, full of humor, satire, and wisdom. In these 1800s editions, at the bottom of each page, is found an extra word, which is the first word of the next page. This extra word appears to be the way the printer guaranteed the correct sequence of pages. Each of the volumes that I have has been previously owned. I cannot quite make out the script, but the date is July 4, 1813, with a second name and date of “Aug. 74,” though it could be “Aug 14.” No markings are found on the pages of the text itself.

Johnson, like many earlier writers, was not afraid of long sentences. He begins essay 128, for Saturday, June 8, 1751 in this way:

The writers who have undertaken the task of reconciling mankind to their present state, and relieving the discontent produced by the various distribution of terrestrial advantages, frequently remind us that we judge too hastily of good and evil, that we judge only the superficies of life, and determine of the whole by a very small part; and that in the condition of men it frequently happens, that grief and anxiety lie hid under the golden robes of prosperity, and the gloom of calamity is cheered by secret radiations of hope and comfort; as in the works of nature the bog is sometimes covered with flowers and the mine concealed in the barren crags.

Prosperity does not mean that we have no grief; nor are the goods of nature evenly distributed among us. It may be best that they are not.

Johnson was particularly adept at keeping the man of many talents humble. Essay 75 of Tuesday, December 4, 1751, begins: “Sir: The diligence with which you endeavor to cultivate the knowledge of nature, manners, and life will perhaps incline you to pay some regard to the observations of one who has been taught to know mankind by unwelcome information and whose opinions are the result not of solitary conjectures but of practice and experience.”

We more commonly prefer to know our fellow man by his virtues and the deeds that proceed from it. Yet, quite clearly, we can also “know mankind” by “unwelcome information” about the character of what we see that they do. Whether we like it or not, the downside of human existence cannot be ignored. Johnson is careful to distinguish himself from guesswork. He bases himself on experience and practice. Men do these things. It is folly to deny it.

This means that, to have a full picture of man, we must account for the “unwelcome information” that our practical living brings forth about how men live. Johnson does not intend to be morbid here. Facts, including moral facts, need to be known and dealt with.

Johnson has already touched on the Augustinian view of original sin. He notes that the goods of the world are not evenly distributed. He also notes that publicly manifested prosperity might well hide a deeper sorrow than we at first could imagine. He advises us to keep our own judgment even when our famous teachers beckon us to follow them. The experience and practice that we garner from our own experience will make us “guests” and not just solitary speculators with no handle on what mankind really does to itself.  

Fr. Schall died on April 17, 2019 at the age of 91. May he rest in peace, and may we see his like again.

In The Tolkien Reader is found his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories.” At the end of the essay, we find some explanatory “Notes” listed according to letters—A, B, C, and so on. The Note listed as “H” is the one that interests me here. Note “H” has to do with the beginnings and ends of tales and stories as we find them in our literature. The very fact that Tolkien thought it might be helpful, or even necessary, to call our attention to something we already mostly know is itself perceptive. Often, we really see for the first time things or persons that we observe about us all the time. Our world is filled with “seeings” but also with “seeings-again.” Some “seeings,” such is their wonder, we do not want to cease seeing, however pressingly we must attend to other things.

But to grasp what Tolkien is driving at in “Note H,” it is well first to recall the memorable lines at the end of the essay “On Fairy-Stories” itself. Few better lines have ever been written. “But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending’.” It is the “happy ending” that is both the most hoped for and, in the light of so many of our actual human choices, the most dubious story ending of all.

Tolkien’s last words of the essay are as follows: “All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the form that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen [man] that we know.” We know the tales that take place amidst our fallenness. We sometimes blame God for creating a world in which we can fail and fall, as if to say that, in the end, we should prefer not to be free. Man “fully redeemed” will be like and unlike ourselves. If redeemed man were necessarily to turn out to be exactly as he was before, there would be no purpose in creating him. If he were absolutely different, he would not be the same person who once lived in this world.

In “Note D,” Tolkien had remarked: “Nature is no doubt a life-study; or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not ‘Nature,’ and which is not therefore obliged to study it, and, in fact, is wholly unsatisfied by it.” Here we have the distinction between, as some call it, reason/science and intuition. Both are natural to us, but the things that have no matter connected to them cannot be known by the methods of science. We see some things directly. Among these latter things are those that do not depend on matter. This is why, briefly, we cannot really know another person unless he chooses to reveal himself to us. In this sense, we cannot have “happy endings” unless the other, including God himself, chooses to reveal to us the interior life of the reality we encounter.

“Note H” begins with these words: “The verbal ending—usually held to be as typical of the end of fairy-stories as ‘once upon a time’ is of the beginning—‘and they lived happily ever after’ is an artificial device.” What is the point here? What is “artificial” about “living happily ever after”? Is that not the whole purpose of romance, indeed of our lives? This “living happily ever after,” Tolkien tells us, “deceives” no one. Everyone knows that the end of romance is the beginning of life together and all the problems that arise for those who are indeed happy.

A “happy ending” is rather the beginning of a story within a story. It is but a “fragment” of the “seamless Web of Story.” A “happy ending,” in other words, ends nothing but begins everything that we might desire. Stories and lives that have “happy endings” have a “greater sense and grasp of the endlessness of the World of Story than most modern ‘realistic’ stories, already hemmed within the confines of their own small time.” We have, in other words, the sense that the narration of the lives that we live and encounter are indeed “endless.” They are not simply confined to our own time, even though we are given four score years and ten in this world.

All things, Tolkien thinks, should have names. The very purpose of man in the universe is to name things, because each “this” thing is not that thing. “Namelessness is not a virtue … and should not [be] imitated; for vagueness … is a debasement, a corruption due to forgetfulness and lack of skill.” Things are luminous with their own light that we are to recognize and name. For things that are not ourselves also show us what we are not and therefore, at the same time, they show us what we are—beings who are to know what is not themselves in the very knowing of themselves.

Timelessness is something else. “Once upon a time” and “they lived happily ever after” drop our lives into the flow of time that is already going on and will go on with us in it, our story. “The beginning is not poverty-stricken but significant. It produces at a stroke the sense of a great uncharted world of time.” We look back, with memory, on what did happen. We live the story of what we are and where we were, with whom we met, with whom we spent time.

We are also aware of those with whom we did not have time enough or occasion to catch more than a glimpse of another story in the endlessness of the eternity in which we already dwell, even in the time in which we live, in the “once upon a time” of our time, in the “living on happily ever after” of the end of our own days. The one final thing that the story of our own lives leaves us with is its need of judgment. How indeed have we chosen to live once we appeared in the “time” of our time, in the “endlessness of the World Story” in which we happily find ourselves, unless we persist in thinking that we are indeed ourselves the “nothing” from whence all that is has appeared.  

“There is no substitute for strength of character, and in boys, or men, this requires two things increasingly rare in our time: knowledge of the past and a vision of the future. Of the former much has been written, and no compleat gentleman will deny that history is the most essential aspect of a sound education.”

—Brad Miner, The Compleat Gentleman, 2009.

“Master Robert, this is what I think upon the matter: I desire to be called by men a ‘loyal gentleman,’ but much more to know that I am one.”

—Hilaire Belloc, “The Conversation of the King,” 1900.

Two of the essays in Belloc’s Miniatures of French History concern King St. Louis of France (d. 1270), one on his conversations and one on his death. Brad Miner’s comment that a “compleat gentleman” finds in history what is essential in his education recalls St. Louis’s place in the history of gentlemanliness. One aspect of being a gentleman concerns the matter and manner of his speech, as well as what he listens to. “St. Louis, the King, loved quiet speech, meeting the speech of others,” Belloc writes. “He loved rallying and conversed with all as though with peers. Pomp wearied him, even when it was necessary for the dignity of so great a state. Those jests which complete a question and leave little more to be said he was amused to hear” (161). Aristotle had said in his Rhetoric that a man should be able to defend himself with words as well as with the sword. King Louis, crowned at the age of twelve, later went on the Crusades, where he died. Even as a youth, Belloc writes, the king’s eyes looked weary, for there was “too much questioning of himself and of the world.”

Men about him felt the “play of his intelligence upon theirs.” The first conversation that Belloc records concerns one Robert of Cerbon (from whom the Sorbonne in Paris is named. King St. Louis chartered this academic foundation). The issue discussed is the propriety of a man’s dress, whether it is too splendid or not splendid enough. “The wise man says that we ought to dress ourselves,” St. Louis avers, “and to arm ourselves in such a manner that neither shall the good men of this world blame us for extravagance nor young blades for meanness” (165).

A second story tells of King Louis being at sea with his whole retinue. A heavy storm comes up during which the ship almost sinks. The King betakes himself to the place on the boat where the Blessed Sacrament is kept. The winds die down and in the morning all is well. He wants to know the name of the wind that almost dispatched “the King of France and all his people.”

It turns out that it was no great wind. It did not even have a name. To this information, King Louis is said to have remarked: “See how great is God and how He shows us His power. Since one of His little unimportant winds, which hardly has a name, all but destroyed the King of France, his children, and his wife, and all his household in peril of the sea.”

King Louis liked to tell the story of a “master of divinity who had disputed for the Faith.” He went to the Archbishop of Paris “in great distress” as he had come to doubt the real presence in the Eucharist. The wise bishop tells this doubter a parable. Suppose the King of England is at war with the King of France. The King of France assigns one of his subjects to the place where the fighting is most intense, and sends the other to a safe place in the rear. To which is the greater honor shown? The obvious answer is to the man in the thick of battle. Thus, the King said, one should never speak ill of any man.

While on the Crusade in Cyprus, the King asked a man why he put water in the wine. The first reason the man gave was that he was following doctor’s orders. The second reason was that he did not want to be drunk. King Louis compliments him for learning this discipline as a youth. “If you do not learn this custom in youth, you will not practice it in age, and if in age you drink your wine unmixed, you will, without doubt, be drunk every evening of your life; which is horrible thing to see in a valiant man.” One wonders how this sage advice relates to the incredible growth in the wine industry in recent years.

The King next asks a young man: “Would you be honored in this world, and then have Paradise?”

When the young man says that he would, the King gives this advice: “This is the rule: Neither say nor do what you would fear that all men should know.” This advice sounds rather like lessons drawn from hearings for political positions.

At another Crusade in the East, the King asks a young man: “Tell me what you would rather be—a leper or in mortal sin.”

The young man, afraid to lie to the King, replies: “I would much rather have committed thirty or forty mortal sins than be a leper.” The King does not immediately answer this, but the next day he calls the man aside.

“You spoke yesterday like a wild man in a hurry, for all ills of the body are cured in a little time, when a man dies; but if your soul is tarnished, and you cannot be certain that God has pardoned you, that evil will last forever, as long as God sits in Paradise.”

Then, turning to the youth, the King asks whether he has ever washed the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday. He hasn’t. The King tells him: “You are wrong again, thinking yourself too grand to do what Christ did for our enlightenment. Now I pray you, for the love of God and for the love of me, get yourselves into the habit of washing poor men’s feet.” Belloc adds: “For this king loved all kinds of men, whatsoever kind God had made and Himself loved.”

Finally, at table one day, the King turns to a man: “Tell me the reason that a ‘loyal gentleman’ is a good thing to be called.” This query causes much conversation. After a time, the King turns to Robert of Cerbon, the man who dressed well, and explains what he thinks about these things, namely: “I desire to be called by men a ‘loyal gentleman,’ but much more to know that I am one.” King Louis concludes: “And if you would leave me that, you might take all the rest; for that title is so great a thing and so good a thing that, that merely to name it fills my mouth.”

One wonders if the recovery of so great and so good a thing as a “loyal gentleman” is not where we need to begin in any return of our culture to a sane and healthy civilized life.  

David Yost mentioned a famous essay of Robert Louis Stevenson, “Aes Triplex.” He said that it was a favorite of Chesterton and assumed that I had read it. I had not. But the better-late-than-never doctrine certainly holds in this case. It reminds me again of just how great the literary form of the essay is. As in this case, it enables us to talk about things we probably would not otherwise think about, however much we should.

I found a collection of Stevenson’s essays, edited by William Lyon Phelps, from 1906. “Aes Triplex” was in that collection. Originally, it was published in the April 1878 Cornhill Magazine. The reference in the title is to the Latin poet Horace. It refers to a triple-plated brass breastplate. Really it is a symbol for great courage. Courage, as we recall from Aristotle, is the virtue of staying in being, of the control of our fears and pains so that we might do that which is worthy of our doing.

Why is great courage needed? The essay is really about death, the act that requires, no doubt, great courage if it is to be done well. Stevenson even refers to some of Samuel Johnson’s great comments on this unavoidable topic. In a way, I think, “Aes Triplex” should be read along with Cicero’s famous essay, “De Senectute,” on old age, an essay also not to be missed, even if we are young, perhaps especially if we are young.

The Stevenson essay begins with an account of the great separation that death constitutes. It has “no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them.” When death happens, many things are closed off. “When the business [of death] is done, there is sore havoc made in other people’s lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night.” Stevenson is very blunt. Whether we deal with the poor or the powerful, our “ceremonials” try to make death’s reality sensible to us. But, on this solemn topic, the fact is that poets and philosophers have themselves “gone a long way to put humanity in error.” Fortunately, the suddenness of death and burial leaves little time for these erroneous ponderings to break forth.

But the fact is, Stevenson goes on, if we look at the way people act, in spite of its absoluteness, death has little influence on the conduct of their lives. He uses the analogy of the people who live in a Latin American town located on the side of a volcano, which rumbles and may go off at any moment. They hardly give death a second thought. “It seems not credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of supper within a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could hardly be relished in such circumstances without something like a defiance of the Creator.” How odd, in other words, were these Latin Americans who enjoyed the good things of life on the side of an active volcano.

However, Stevenson immediately pointed out, this living on the brink of death, no matter where we live, is the lot of us all. “When one comes to think of it calmly, the situation of these South American citizens forms only a very pale figure of the state of ordinary mankind.” There is danger everywhere including in what we eat. The “dinner table” is statistically closer to death than battlefields. More people in fact die at the former than at the latter. Abstract “ideas of life” will never do.

Stevenson’s advice to old men seems particularly pertinent. “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner under our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through [the ice]. By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day.” But does the elderly gentleman see it this way? Not at all. When he sees someone his age or even younger die, he takes “a child-like pleasure at having outlived someone else.” He does not change his ways.

“It is a memorable subject for consideration, with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Stevenson says that nature acts something like the infamous Roman Emperor Caligula, who, for amusement at his villa, invited crowds of revelers to the bridge over Baiae, when, at his signal, the Pretorian Guard tossed them off into the sea. Nature seems to choose our deaths with the same tyrannical arbitrariness.

What particularly irks Stevenson in all this consideration of death is the philosophers. “We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness. We have no idea what death is, apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to others …” We do not much know what living is either. And is there a “Definition of Life?” The best the sages can do, evidently, is found in Mill: “life is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation.” Stevenson is aghast at this definition.

Stevenson makes a distinction reminiscent of Chesterton. “We may trick with life in its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true throughout—that we do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living.”

And those who are most concerned about merely keeping alive, to go back to the virtue of courage, are likely to miss life altogether in their narrowness. “For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.” Stevenson insists that the “love of living” almost requires a view of life that does not think that just staying alive is the highest good. Aristotle had said, after all, that the purpose of culture and politics was not just keeping alive, but in living well, nobly.

“As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man’s cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact.” Stevenson contrasts a kind of selfish “prudence” with courage. Plato somewhere recounts a man, an athletic trainer, I think, who spent his whole life taking care of his health. He never lived for a single moment that was not taken up with curing or caring for himself. Plato thought it a wasted life. Stevenson prefers Thackery and Dickens, who started on monumental writing projects in advanced years

Stevenson can contemplate nothing worse than to “live in a parlor with regulated temperatures” just so we would be healthy. Life needs some risk:

“It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means begin your folios; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour.… All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it.”

Stevenson sees the energy that life imports. He knows that we will die, but does not see that as a paralysis against doing something while we can. He has a grudging admiration for the Latin Americans on the volcano for carrying out their daily duties and small pleasures even while ignoring death.

Finally, Stevenson cites the famous Greek statement: “Those whom the gods love die young.” Stevenson adds, “For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart.” That is, he lives as if he will not die, as a child who thinks that his life is always just beginning. Stevenson wants the vivid awareness of our mortality not to paralyze us while we still live.

There is little reference to the revelational view of death in Stevenson. He speaks of what is the condition of man in this world, wherein he can expect only death at the end, whether it come sooner or later. But he does want our spirit, even if it begins a great opus a week before we die, to “shoot into the spiritual land.” Stevenson wants us to “love living,” not the abstraction of life, with its absurd scientific definition.

Yet, Stevenson wants us to die well, even if thrown off the bridge by the local tyrant or blown up by the local volcano. The ice gets thinner under our feet as the years pass. “By the time a man is into the seventies, his continued existence is a miracle.” The fact is, it was always a miracle from his very conception. The “spiritual land” in which he finds his destiny is not hindered by his death, whenever or however it occurs. But the lesson of death that concerned Stevenson does not avoid the question of how we live. This is perhaps why we know not the hour. This is why we still need the aes triplex, the triple shield of courage.  

Heywood Broun’s very short story, The Fifty-First Dragon, was published in 1921 by Harcourt Brace. It concerns a medieval school for the formation of knights. Matriculating in this school is an apparently inept candidate by the ironic name of Gawaine le Cœur-Hardy. Gawaine seems to have been physically fit enough for the noble school, but he lacked “spirit.” He did not take to jousting, even the watered-down variety with ponies and padded lances. Most of the school’s faculty, except for the Headmaster who seems to have had some faith in him, wanted to expel Gawaine as unfit.

The Headmaster, surprisingly, put Gawaine in the specialized program that trains knights to slay dragons. In fact, in the woods and hills surrounding the school, dragons were in plentiful supply. They were big beasts, six or seven hundred feet long, and busy devouring local peasants for lunch. Something had to be done. If he could overcome his lethargy and hesitation, Gawaine seemed to be the man for the job.

The Headmaster subjected Gawaine to the study of the history and habits of dragons. Gawaine seemed to relish the training. For a weapon, he carried a heavy battle-ax, no mean weapon. After detailed preparations, the Headmaster figured that he could send Gawaine after the marauding dragons if he could first instill confidence into the lad. The young man, recalling Plato, wanted a cap that made him invisible, but when Gawaine found out that there was no such thing, he was frightened at the prospect of his chances among the six-hundred-feet-long dragons.

The Headmaster, however, told him of a secret word that, so he said, would protect Gawaine at all times—if recited correctly. The word was “Rumplesnitz.” It took a lot of practice for Gawaine to pronounce and remember this word, particularly when he needed it at the approach of a dragon. The Headmaster made it clear that all Gawaine had to do to be safe was pronounce the word, “Rumplesnitz.”

So the die was cast. Gawaine believed the Headmaster. Next step was to make his first foray into dragon-land. Thus far, it was only a matter of faith. About a mile from the school a big dragon spotted Gawaine and charged him. The knight yelled “Rumplesnitz” while swinging his battle-ax. Zip, no more head on the dragon. Gawaine collected the ears and a piece of dragon tail and took them back to the school as proof of his feat. As the days passed, Gawaine killed more and more dragons with the aid of the magic word. His fame spread. Fellow students studied his technique.

Gawaine began to go out dragon hunting on his own. The day came when he was to kill his fiftieth dragon. He had begun to wear all his medals while dragon hunting. But the fiftieth dragon was a special case. He was an old dragon and apparently had heard that Gawaine had some magic about him. So he did not charge the knight but waited for the knight to come to him. But as he tried to kill the old dragon, Gawaine forgot his magic word.

Gawaine became frightened. Despite thinking it unfair that the knight had magic assisting him, the dragon himself tried to help Gawaine to remember. He knew it began with an “r,” but it was not “Republican.” Seeing the knight’s perplexity, the dragon naturally asked him if he surrendered. If so, the dragon would eat him. Indeed, it would eat him if he did not surrender—and if Gawaine did not surrender, the dragon thought, he would taste better. Gawaine became more and more frightened; his old timorous self was returning. The dragon was in the act of devouring the knight when Gawaine swung his battle-ax and cut off the dragon’s head. Suddenly, Gawaine remembered the magic word, but only after he had killed the dragon. This puzzled the knight very much. Something was wrong.

Gawaine carried his concern to the Headmaster, who was delighted to hear these developments. The Headmaster explained that the word “Rumplesnitz” really did not mean anything. Gawaine had killed the dragon by virtue of his own power and skill. Logically, then, credit for killing these fifty dragons went to his skill, not to any magic word. The knight was now as free of faith and superstition as was the Headmaster. Gawaine was his own man, with his own power. He was no longer dependent on anything beyond himself.

Gawaine realized that the Headmaster considered all along that the dragon killings had nothing to do with magic, only with the skill instilled by the school’s training. The Headmaster had, in fact, lied to him to overcome his fears. The battle-ax, not the word, was at the center of the action. All of this confusing information bothered Gawaine very much. He returned to his old ways. He did not get up in the morning. He realized that if he had not struck the dragons when he did, any one of them would have eaten him alive. He was just lucky.

The next day found Gawaine cowering in bed. He had no real confidence in his own battle-ax without the protection of the magic word. While the school officials were worried about what was bothering him, they dressed him up anyway and shoved Gawaine out for his fifty-first dragon. It was spotted not far from the school—a smallish, older beast. But Gawaine never came back. After a couple of days, they found tatters of his uniform and medals scattered around one of the outlying fields.

The Headmaster and his assistants had the problem of explaining what had happened to Gawaine. His disappearance was noted. They shrewdly decided, however, that, for the sake of school spirit, the never-to-be-equaled record of fifty killed dragons would be memorialized. No mention of the fifty-first dragon would be forthcoming. The ears and tails of the dragons that Gawaine killed would be prominently displayed in the school’s main hall. But silence was kept on how Gawaine died.

When we reach the end of this tale we are left to ourselves to speculate about the manner and point of Gawaine le Cœur-Hardy’s life and death. The knight who had killed fifty huge dragons was killed by a small and unimpressive one.

Did Gawaine forget the magic word again? Probably not. Even if he remembered it, he was told by the Headmaster, who had deliberately lied to him, that it was not magic.

Or was Gawaine so disillusioned by this deception that he did not even try to save himself?

Or was it necessary to believe in the word in order to succeed in killing the dragons? His own strength and battle-ax were not really enough. The fiftieth dragon was killed before the word that was supposed to save him could be uttered. From this account, the Headmaster concluded that all the previous dragons were also killed by the skills acquired at the knights’ school.

Gawaine le Cœur-Hardly himself concluded that, if his faith was a lie, he had no way to defend himself. His strength did not depend wholly on himself. The bond that holds things together was broken. Meanwhile, back at the knights’ school, the young men are taught that all depends on their own strength, which is developed in their training. No one who attended the school ever heard of the fifty-first dragon. Their education was complete without the word.  

The second essay of Samuel Johnson’s entries in The Rambler was published on Saturday, March 24, 1750. The essay begins with what must be called a general experience of all mankind, thus including one’s own self-knowledge: “The mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment and losing itself in schemes of future felicity.” This unsettled condition causes us to misuse the time available to us. We continually deal with things that never will happen.

Surprisingly, Johnson is at pains to criticize those many wits and pundits who mock this tendency to wander off into the unknown future. “It is so easy to laugh at the folly of him who lives only in idea, refuses immediate ease for distant pleasure and, instead of enjoying the blessings of life, lets life glide away in preparations to enjoy them.” As a result, we do not “live” our lives but only prepare ourselves to live them.

The ironic “folly” of living only “in idea,” of course, is that ideas lie at the root of all future enterprise by which we can improve our estate. The only hitch is that the present from which we set out exists in a real place within the flow of a given time. What we need to ask and estimate of our ideas is whether in fact they “lead to truth.”

We are the kind of being whose progress is gradual. We act amidst alternative ways of doing the same thing. “The end therefore which calls forth our efforts, will be found, when it is once gained, to be only one of the means to some remoter end.” Such a passage, no doubt, is very close to Aristotle’s discussion of deliberation and decision, all of which are devoted to a final end that we seek in all our actions, the real root of our freedom. Johnson adds, in a memorable passage: “The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.” Pleasure is itself always an invitation to a final delight found only in the origin of our being in the Godhead.

Too much emphasis on either the distant future or the immediate present can be debilitating.

If we are going to a certain place, we must from time to time think of the destination to which we order our actions. “In agriculture, … no man turns up the ground but because he thinks of the harvest.” Johnson is aware that too much emphasis on either the distant future or the immediate present can be debilitating. “Few maxims are widely received or long retained but for some conformity with truth and nature.” In reading Johnson, one is always conscious that what Johnson says conforms with the common experience of mankind, an experience that checks our own tendencies to put our hopes only in our own ideas.

“It frequently happens that, by indulging early the raptures of success, we forget the measures necessary to secure it, and suffer the imagination to riot in the fruition of some possible good, that the time of attaining it has slipped away.” Obviously, Johnson is aware of the relation between what we want and the effort that goes into attaining it.

In fact, Johnson thinks that as a class, authors are the ones most susceptible to an exaggerated hope of success for their work. He offers some advice from Epictetus to counter this danger. We should think of the worst thing that can happen to us to prepare ourselves for the disappointment of not becoming as famous as we expected of our work.

“There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which reproach, hatred, and opposition are names of happiness; yet this worst, this meanest fate every man who dares to write has reason to fear.” No doubt this same concern will be found in the heart of every politician. Johnson here was concerned with how his own initiative in the newly formed Rambler would be received. If we go to the catalogue of any library, we will see, as Johnson pointed out to prove his point, name after name of men who expected to be great but who are now unknown.

“But, though it should happen that an author is capable of excelling, yet his merit may pass without notice, huddled in the variety of things, and thrown into the general miscellany of life.” Johnson was aware that literary fame was dependent on more than the quality of an author’s writings. Many things go into making a book a success that are outside of the writing itself. If we survey the potential readers, we find that “Some are too indolent to read anything, till its reputation is established; others too envious to promote that fame, which gives them pain by its increase.” This latter definition of envy is right on the mark. Much more of the world’s problems are caused by envy than we are wont to recognize.

Johnson concludes his reflections on the nature of writing in this way: “He that finds his way to reputation, through all these obstructions, must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes besides his industry, his leaning, or his wit.” The art of writing flows from the mind of man as it encounters the myriads of things that cross it.

On examination, nothing that crosses out path fully satisfies us. The passage from initial pleasure to hope retains its inner logic. Some indeed pass from pleasure to despair. But the existence of any good depends on the existence of the Good. This is why, in our writings and in our lives, we pass from hope to hope.  

Aristotelian Interpretations
by Fran O’Rourke.
Irish Academic Press, 2016.
Hardcover, 376 pages, $75.

JAMES V. SCHALL, S. J.

“The power of symbolic signification is possible only because the human mind has an unlimited openness to the entirety of reality, and can thus create a connection between any two entities. Aristotle expresses this openness in the De Anima when he states: ‘The soul is, in a sense, all things.’ The mind has the ability to intentionally receive any reality in mental form and intentionally fabricate countless modalities of meaning. The mind, he states, can become everything and make everything.”^[1]

“To accept that we have a genetic propensity to behave morally does not yet explain why we are obliged to act morally. Applying Aquinas’ comment on the individual nature of knowledge (hic homo intelligit), we may affirm: hic homo deliberat et agit. Moral action is a matter of personal motivation, resolve, action, responsibility, and consequence. It requires a sense of personal identity and continued moral commitment over time. The center of moral behavior is the individual person, consciously aware of herself or himself as motivated for individual reasons, and aware of the responsibilities and consequences attending on one’s actions.”^[2]

—Fran O’Rourke, Aristotelian interpretations

Liberal education means insight into what things are, into the truth of things, and into how they fit together, how and why they act. The word “liberal” in “liberal education” means freedom from ignorance, coercion, and vice in order to discover the whole of reality. It never properly means doing or thinking as we please with no relation to reality, including our own nature. The best way to acquire a “liberal education” today might well be simply to imitate James Joyce’s early 1900s sojourns in Paris. There, as Fran O’Rourke recounts, Joyce set himself down in the Bibliothèque de Sainte-Geneviève to read a French translation of most of the works of Aristotle. He had already begun reading Aristotle in his earlier academic life in Ireland.

Of course, today nothing more countercultural could be imagined than a “liberal education” consisting of a careful reading and rereading of Aristotle to understand both present and past times and minds. And yet, when we come across a writer like Fran O’Rourke, who does know his Aristotle, we begin to suspect that, just maybe, we best begin here with Aristotle, whose ostentatious rejection is often held to be the foundation of the modern world. But as Henry Veatch wrote in his incisive 1974 book on Aristotle, when this same modern world has exhausted itself in following the consequences of what happens when we reject Aristotle, it may be best to return to the sanity that always prevails when reading Aristotle.^[3] This view was also that of Leo Strauss, who understood that the recovery of our souls involved recovering the sanities that we find in Aristotle.^[4]

But doesn’t the main problem in Paris today revolve around Muslim terror, not the condition of European philosophy? Yet, if we recall Avicenna, Averroes, al Ghazali, and other Muslim philosophers, we will soon see that Aristotle was very much pertinent to most of the issues that we have with Islam today. I recall hearing the famous Lebanese philosopher and politician, Charles Malik, once remarking in conversation that the main intellectual link between Islam and the West was precisely Aristotle. To understand why Islam did not, in the end, follow Aristotle is to understand why terror can be and is claimed to be a good.^[5] The main problem with Islam does not concern its terror, but its ideas about truth and terror.

To read Aristotle is to begin to know how things are. And to know how and why things are is to be educated liberally.

Aristotle is himself a liberal education. He is the one who best explains to us why we seek to know things “for their own sake,” why we need to know the order of things. No one, even to this day, works his way as carefully though the whole range of reality as carefully and clearly as does Aristotle. And when other thinkers come close, it is usually because they are themselves first readers of Aristotle. To read Aristotle is to begin to know how things are. And to know how and why things are is to be educated liberally.

We cannot deal with Muslim voluntarism, itself a rejection of Aristotle, if the root of our own philosophy—as it has mostly been since the fifteenth century—is basically but another form of the same voluntarism. The initial problem with Islam is, in fact, the rejection of the central teaching of Aristotle that man is a rational animal in which will follows intellect. The will cannot create its own contents. It must first receive then from reason open to what already is. Man cannot define what is real or good apart from his knowledge of what is. Aristotle and Islam do not come up in O’Rourke’s book as Aristotle and Ireland/Europe do.^[6] But still, we would not be wrong to suspect that the present problem of the soul both of Europe and of Islam is linked to each other by the rejection of what is central in Aristotle, who, more than anyone, stood at the origin of the mind of our civilization.

Fran O’Rourke is a man of many parts, even a singer of Irish folk music. He retired in 2014, after thirty-five years teaching in the philosophy department of University College, Dublin. He studied in Cologne and Vienna. His doctorate is from Leuven in Belgium. He has written on Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, and James Joyce. This book, in fact, ends with a chapter on the influence of Aristotle on Joyce. The chapter serves as a summary of the work of both men. “True genius discerns both the singularity of the grand unity and the minutiae of multiplicity; for that reason it is exceedingly rare,” O’Rourke writes.

The brilliance of [Joyce’s] Ulysses is that of a universal panorama woven from the torn threads and broken shards of multifarious living; its success derives from the writer’s mastery of creative analogy. Joyce is himself proof of Aristotle’s conviction that analogy is a sign of unique genius, a natural gift that cannot be acquired. Joyce effected in art a fundamental insight gained from his study of Aristotle. (238)

Analogy and metaphor can bind all things together, even the most disparate ones. This capacity is due in large part to the mind’s ability to abstract the forms of concrete, individual things

One of the most remarkable themes in this book is how analogy and metaphor can bind all things together, even the most disparate ones. This capacity is due in large part to the mind’s ability to abstract the forms of concrete, individual things and in that spiritual form to see the relations that exist between even the most remote or unsuspected things.

For an academic book, it begins unexpectedly with a nostalgic account of the author’s family experience on the farms and lands of Ireland. At first, this introduction seems out of place. Yet it is a very poetic chapter. “I loved the wonderful landscapes of the west of Ireland, especially the mutual proximity of land and sea,” O’Rourke writes.

Coming from the flat Irish midlands, I was immediately attracted to the mountains of Connemara. Martin Heidegger once remarked that the philosopher should also be a good mountain climber. This is true not only in a vague metaphorical sense; there is a keen affinity between mountaineering and philosophy, a parallel between the physical activity of one and the spiritual activity of the other. (10)

In this passage, we already glimpse at work that analogous relation of things that enables us to understand one thing by its similarity to another.

We may be tempted to think we are pure spirits, but we are not—and it is best that we are not.

When we come to the end of this introduction to O’Rourke’s childhood memories of what he saw and did in Ireland, we begin to realize that what he is really doing is to introduce us to the world that Aristotle saw, not in Ireland, of course, but in Macedonia or any place where nature, human and otherwise, presents itself for us to observe it, to behold it, to think about it, what it is. All the way through this book, we are conscious of the fact that to understand what is we cannot bypass our own individual seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching things with the faculties that are given to us by the mere and wondrous fact that we exist and exist as human beings, body and soul, our own body and our own soul. And yet, we constitute one being, one substance, one person. We may be tempted to think we are pure spirits, but we are not—and it is best that we are not.O’Rourke wisely repeats the passage in Aristotle’s Ethics that reminds us that, given a choice, no one would want to be someone else.

Aristotle covers so much. O’Rourke systematically goes through how Aristotle looks on being, the causes, our final destiny, how we know, what mind means, what soul means, why there is a “First Mover” who moves by thought thinking itself. “Existence is naturally desirable; to be happy is to actualize human existence in the best possible manner” (86). We “actualize” our existence by living it. But as human beings existence is not just brought to its perfection automatically or by some outside agent, however much we depend on the cosmos and its origins for what we are initially. I was particularly struck by O’Rourke’s awareness that the drama of existence itself is what is played out in each of our human lives. The existence of millions and billions of human beings on this planet is not actualized in some collective form or ideal. It is actualized in each existing human being.

Though we exist as individual persons, because of our knowledge and our power to act on account of it, we are not deprived of the rest of the world.

“We do not have simply a vague desire for the fact of being,” O’Rourke writes. “Our happiness derives from the awareness of our own life as good; each man’s existence is desirable for himself.… Self-awareness is a certainty; it is concomitant self-awareness of ourselves in our knowing the world and as agents within the world” (86). Though we exist as individual persons, because of our knowledge and our power to act on account of it, we are not deprived of the rest of the world.Through knowing, we can become what is not ourselves without changing what is not ourselves. This fact is basically why it is all right to be a single, relatively insignificant human being. We desire our own existence, but this existence opens out onto all that is wherein we self-actualize ourselves in terms of our chosen relation to the good that is there and that we come to know, to accept or reject.

The chapters on the ethics and politics of Aristotle are very good. But in reading them, we are conscious of the fact that without that to which Aristotle has argued in his metaphysics, physics, De Anima, and logic, we will not catch just how ethics and politics fit into the whole—why man is such a unique being in the universe. Aristotle says that “If man were the highest being, politics would be the highest science.” But since he is not the highest being, his own highest practical science is politics. But this politics, at its best, is itself ordered to what is higher than man. He is ordered to what is higher through his own soul as it exists in his own personal being.

This ordering is the ultimate source of his dignity and why politics is ultimately limited, by the good, by the Socratic principle that it is never right, for anyone, including the statesman, to do wrong. “The city came into being that man might be able to live, but continues to exist that he may live well” (124). The living well includes all the practical and theoretical things that can manifest what it means to be mortal in this world. The common good means the effort to activation of all the goods man in his variety can bring forth in this world.

When politics has come to be what it ought to be, it turns us finally not to the practical life of this world but indirectly to the contemplative life, to our wonder about what it is all about and how to articulate what we can know about the highest things, even if, as Aristotle also said in the last book of the Ethics, it is small in comparison to other, more visible practical things. “There is ambivalence at the heart of wonder. It is not simply the absence of knowledge, but a knowledge that there is something beyond its reach. This finds its explanation in Aristotle’s distinction between what is intelligible in itself and what is evident to us” (32). We realize that we are limited beings with a power of mind that is capax omnium, capable of knowing all that is. Thus we must grant that “the intelligibility of the real far exceeds our understanding.” It is this realization that is no doubt the primary natural reason why something like a divine revelation might just be both possible and even actual.^[7] It also explains the “restless hearts” that we so readily associate with Augustine.

“Truth is the affirmation of reality as it is; in so far as something is, it necessarily is; in so far as a judgment is true, it is necessarily true. Truth has an absolute and necessary quality deriving from the unconditional character of existence itself. Once being is, it cannot not be: in so far as an assertion is true, it is true for all time” (91). The contemplative order—beyond politics but not bypassing it—and its relation to the virtues is the proper locus of the truth to which the mind is open. Truth is concerned with the things that are, with their affirmation. The practical world is filled with things made, spoken, sung, tasted, with the things that result from our capacity to imitate things, to find out how they work, what they are. The things that are and the things made need not be antagonistic to each other, though they can be when used by men out of their proper order.

O’Rourke, again, is fascinated with the relation of things to each other. He even catches Aristotle’s oft-quoted remark about the relation of humor to intelligence:

Most witty sayings, according to Aristotle, derive from metaphor and beguile the listener in advance: expecting something else, his surprise is all the greater. His mind seems to say, according to Aristotle, “How true, but I missed it.” Such discovery provides the pleasure of easy and rapid learning. (116)

Laughter is a sign, a hint that the universe reveals ultimately a joy that is both expected and unexpected.

We learn by distinguishing one thing from another, by recognizing that this thing is not that thing. We name things; sometimes very different things have the same name. There are many languages that name the same thing differently. Laughter is a sign, a hint that the universe reveals ultimately a joy that is both expected and unexpected. This truth was the marvelous point on which Chesterton ended his Orthodoxy. The possibility of wit, of humor, relates to the fact that we can hold in our spiritual souls at the same time words with different meanings, experiences with different understandings about what they are. The simultaneous seeing of all these possibilities makes us laugh.

The subject of wit and laughter again brings up a refrain in O’Rourke’s understanding of Aristotle that gets to the core of things. Aristotle’s view of the cosmos is that ultimately it is coherent. “Nature is inherently coherent; it is not, as he expresses it, a ‘series of episodes’ like a badly constructed tragedy. The perception of the world as an interrelated wickerwork of substances and causes gives foundation to the conviction that the cosmos is essentially and integrally united.” When we read these words, we are not reading the words of an astronaut or an astronomer. What we are reading are the words that flow out of Aristotle, who already sensed and understood how and why things fit together. What follows in line of our true knowledge is not something that Aristotle would not have recognized, but something that he argued to be the case all along.

In conclusion, let me return to the two initial citations that are found at the beginning of these reflections. The first concerns the mind that is found in each member our kind. It is because we have minds that we can worry about, wonder about, what is out there, what is not ourselves. And we can not only pay attention to it, but we can see its diversity and its unities. But we know with our mind not only what is not ourselves, but also the possibility that we can change, reshape many things. We even suspect that we can and should use things that are just there through no contribution of our own. Indeed, it suggests that the uninhabited world was in fact meant to be inhabited. It was meant to provide a place for a being that knew and acted. In so doing, it revealed his soul.

It is not the species man that thinks and acts, but its individual members, Socrates, Mary, and Henry.

The second citation concerns the fact that it is not the species man that thinks and acts, but its individual members, Socrates, Mary, and Henry. Human life exists in the form of lives of individual persons in given times and places, threescore years and ten. All such beings have talents and capacities that might differ somewhat. At bottom they know that what they do with their given span of time defines what they shall be. O’Rourke is consistent in his insistence that for Aristotle man has a soul but he is not just a soul. His senses and his mind work together to provide him with knowledge of what is not himself. “Responsibilities and consequences” do follow on our actions. These actions in turn are based on knowledge that we initially acquire from our beholding what is out there, what is not ourselves, whether it be in the Ireland of Joyce or the Macedonia of Aristotle.

When we reread Aristotle in the light of Fran O’Rourke’s “interpretations,” we quickly become aware that the most secure path we can find to a “liberal education” still begins with Plato and leads through the works of Aristotle, whether we read him in French, Greek, or Irish. Most of the reasons given about why Aristotle is out-of-date are either themselves now also “out-of-date” or were never understood with the clarity that Fran O’Rourke saw in the natural things in Ireland that led him to the wondrous things seen and recorded by Aristotle. Finally, this is where we need to begin re-evaluating what we mean by a “liberal education.”  

When my parents moved off the farm into the small, northwest Iowa town of Pocahontas during the early Depression, I recall that my father somehow had a job selling cookbooks. This endeavor is one of my earliest memories of a man who grew up on a nearby farm with its own varied chores. But once “in town,” he had to make a living in other ways than farming to keep us kids and our mother going. I recall boxes of these cookbooks. For the sale of each book, I suppose, he received a certain small commission. My father later worked for the Des Moines Register and Tribune, and then managed a Gamble’s hardware store. He was always a good salesman and conversationalist. I think my sister still has one of these cookbooks.

In any case, Anne Burleigh has just privately published The Family Kitchen: Through Five Generations. She thought long about a proper title until one of her grandsons came up with the present well-chosen one. At this point, the “desk” and the “table” meet. She had kept the recipes of her mother, grandmothers, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, aunts, other relatives, and friends. They were often in hand-written notes, or sometimes personal modifications of more famous recipes as those of Julia Childs.

Even her husband, Bill Burleigh, is recorded to have become adept at making Thanksgiving stuffing and gravy, a fine art to be sure. Her son David perfected a version of the “Orange Julius,” while her son-in-law, also a David, tells how to cook “Stagle Creek (Michigan) Trout.” We also have Bill’s cousin, Amy Oberst’s “Goulasuppe.” It turns out that Amy was German by birth and rearing, married to Bill’s cousin. So, as we become hungrier and hungrier with each dish pictured in our imagination by reading this book, we also sense a touch of the personality of those who handed on the recipes. It says much also of someone who would keep them, organize and classify them for later generations.

Then there is “Yankee Pot Roast.” Here is its explanation: “Pot roast is quintessential American food, the ultimate in soul-satisfying eating. When your teenage sons and grandsons come looking for what’s simmering in your ‘big red pot,’ a hefty red Creuset cast-iron Dutch oven, the answer could be a beef pot roast.” That “eating” should also “satisfy” the soul is simply taken for granted. While there are diet cookbooks, the subject of “over” eating is not proper to a good cookbook, which presupposes both the virtue of temperance and the delight that things in moderation are as they are. Foods that are well selected, prepared, and cooked cannot help but satisfy us. It takes a sick mind to think that food ought to taste rotten.

Anne Burleigh had also written a life of her father, Ralph Husted. Somewhere in that book, I recall that the family—it may have been her mother’s family, the Waldens, a family that goes back to early New England times—owned and operated an orchard in Indiana. In The Family Kitchen, wehave “Gonga’s Apple Cake”—also we have Gonga’s “Lemon Meringue Pie,” “Ham Loaf,” and “Cranberry Sauce.” Gonga turned out to be Anne’s grandmother Walden.

The introductory comment to Gonga’s Apple Cake is worth repeating as it gives something of the spirit of the whole book:

This cake is identical to the cake that my Grandmother Walden made, except that Gonga used applesauce instead of chopped apples. She served it plain, dusted with powdered sugar, or with a caramel icing. When I was growing up, this was one of my favorite cakes, especially with caramel icing. When the leaves begin to turn in the fall, make this fine cake that fits the season.

A recipe for making the caramel is also later included. What is to be noted in such a passage is not just how we remember things that taste so good, but the seasonal realization that what we eat often goes along with the time of year and its moods. The “hearty” soups and foods found in this book obviously know something of winter and its snows—thus, “L. S. Ayer’s Chicken Velvet Soup” and “Margaret Brecourt’s Meat Pie.”

Somehow, having strawberries or pears, almost always green, every day of the year misses the exquisite taste of ripe pears or strawberries and the pies that go with them. And to me, the pie is the art of all culinary arts. So there are even directions on “Basic Pie Crusts.” Without a good pie crust, you cannot have pie. Of course, having strawberry jam every morning is quite all right. One of my nieces makes sure that good jam and preserves are made when the season is nigh for making them. We do have here recipes for “Peach Kuchen” and “Plum Torte,” both of which are best with ripe peaches and plums.

Another thing about kitchens and cooking is the smells—of coffee, of cookies baking, of chicken frying. In Belloc’s The Four Men, he says that the one thing that babies hear in their cradles and old men hear as they die is the boiling of water in the kitchen. With modern plumbing, we do not have this experience so much, but the smells are still there. I recall my friend Dorothy Warner, herself a fine baker and cook, once telling me of the effects on a family of children, adults too, of coming home and smelling something being baked, of the almost irresistible drive that especially hungry boys have to eat what their mother has thought to bake for them. It does not much lessen, I have noted, as the boys grow older.

It is at the table, where we eat, that so much of life and its memories happens. The old monastic practice of reading at table that was still practiced in my early days in the Order turned out to be one of the fondest memories of later life—the mispronunciations, the stories, the voices. I recall a wonderful lecture that Patrick Deneen gave at Oxford one summer on manners. He talked about the importance of the four-pronged fork in the teaching of children, especially boys, what manners might mean. They were not to gorge things down, like feeding sharks. They were to think of what they were doing, the others around them.

Leon Kass’s The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature is a book that teaches so well what it means to be a soul existing in a body. The two come together in eating and dining. That we enjoy what we eat is one of the most remarkable things about our relation to the world. I remember once reading a short news item from Australia. It said that the early Australian settlers had nothing to do with mussels. But when Italian immigrants made it there, they began to produce the most marvelous seafood pastas and chowders, almost as if a miracle had happened. We do have in this book “Charlotte Ann’s Fish Chowder.” This is Anne’s sister-in-law, whose daughter said that the original recipeseems to be from a 1950s Woman’s Day Magazine. How many good recipes are cut out from some obscure source? But among us, good things to eat exist in abundance, though we often need a cookbook to make them so. To be concerned with the poor does not mean that we feed them bad food.

I look over these recipes from the point of view of one who might eat what they propose, but not make them. Aristotle said that the gentleman should be able to cook. But like playing a musical instrument, he should not be able to cook or play the flute too well. What strikes me about this cookbook is that it is a product of a particular family’s tradition.

Yet it is designed to enable almost anyone to follow directions. I confess, however, that the directions under “Apricot Brandy Pound Cake” baffle me. They read: “Beginning and ending with the flour, add the flour in thirds to the creamed mixture, alternating with the sour cream in halves, beating on low speed until blended.” To klutzes like myself, this is pretty much like the directions on how to assemble a computer—unintelligible unless you can read Chinese.

This book is privately published. Though it has a copyright and is in handsome format, it is intended to be a family book, the traditions of a particular family, which as it goes forward and backward in time includes more and more kinfolk. We have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents. We can have oodles of cousins, who have their own lines. One of our siblings may marry someone with six siblings. This family connection puts us in contact with all sorts of traditions and people within the family circle where they are known as relatives and friends. They have family reunions every so often. We thus have “Catherine McCray’s Chicken Tetrazzini,” “Old World Sauerkraut Supper,” “Krista Edison’s Kansas City Casserole,” “Mexican Lasagna,” “Belgian Beef Stew,” “Beef & Onions Braised in Beer,” “Adah Jackson’s Spoon Bread,” and “Julia Walden’s Date Pudding.” Nothing eaten or cooked, in the inspiration of this book, is off by itself without a home in which its very eating makes us glad.

In conclusion, I will resist the temptation to name other dishes that I should definitely like to try. Their very listing makes one realize the shortness and complexity of lives that good food keeps passing through their allotted years. This book even makes “Succotash” look appealing, not to mention “Wisconsin Baked Beans.” I am a fan of pastries and notice that the “French Croissant” does not come up, but that is because it does not exist outside of France. This book makes us realize the intimate relation between good food, the table, the understanding, the family, and the art of cookery. Following its directions enables almost anyone, if they spend the time, to become capable of preparing good food for their families, not just for their bodies, but also for their souls.

The title of Kass’s book, The Hungry Soul, is correct, as is the title of Anne Burleigh’s book, The Family Kitchen. We are reminded, as even Kass touches on, that the title of our tradition’s highest act of worship took place at a “Last Supper.” To know what this “Last Supper” might be,it is necessary that we have some inkling of what a good family supper might be. It is this latter that Anne Burleigh presents for us in this marvelous cookbook that covers “five generations” of her family and looks forward to the next five generations, many of whom have already appeared and have eaten at her table.  

Fr. Schall reflects on cooking, and eating, inspired by a new family cookbook assembled by Anne Husted Burleigh.

On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation

“We walk the same block as dogs yet see different things. We walk alongside rats though each of us lives in the dusk of the other. We walk alongside other people and do not see what each of us knows, what each of us is doing—captured instead by the inside of our own heads.”

—Alexandra Horowitz, On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation.

Several years ago, knowing my proclivities, Anne Burleigh, for Christmas, gave me Alexandra Horowitz’s book on walking and looking or looking while walking. I have written a number of books that, in some sense, can be called “walking books”—Idylls & Rambles, The Sum Total of Human Happiness, and The Classical Moment. But for me, the great introduction to walking is found in the essays of Belloc. Of course, Belloc was also a sailor, as his Cruise of the Nona reminds us. But sailing is nothing else but a continuation of walking only on water with the help of a boat. I tried to capture some of this almost mystical sense of how walking looks into everything in my book, Remembering Belloc.

Somewhere, I remember reading a story about a couple, they might have been English, who had made some sort of vow to walk the streets of the great and not-so-great cities on every continent of the world. They did not seem to have written any journal or reflections about what they saw. Somehow that bothered me, that walking without seeing, or, at least, not telling us what was seen. Yet, as C. S. Lewis said, if we tried to record everything that happened to us and about us in strict detail during any twenty-four hour period of our lives, we would fill volumes and volumes with little time for the events of another day. Only if we do not see or hear everything can we see and hear something. For us, the reality of everything can only begin with the reality of a something. This human inability to name everything is probably one of the proofs for the divine existence. When it is due to lack of time, we call it eternity.

So it was with some pleasure that I read this charming book of Alexandra Horowitz. I must confess, though, that I am not much of a dog lover. When walking in strange parts, I follow that sage advice attributed to Theodore Roosevelt for politicians, to “walk softly but carry a big stick.” I learned from sad experience that, when an owner of a barking hound says in a friendly voice, “Oh, my Fido does not bite!”—to be prepared for action. A large, long walking stick is as good as an atom bomb when it comes to deterring hungry bulldogs who confuse your left leg with their daily portion of Purina Chow. Though they are reputed to be man’s best friend, and may well be, I prefer dogs out in the jungle somewhere hunting rabbits or being hunted by bears. “Love me, love my dog” I have always considered an immoral aphorism, though, I confess, you lose a lot of friends questioning its worthiness.

So it was also with some trepidation when I read that Horowitz “teaches animal behavior and canine cognition at Barnard College.” I always wondered what the young ladies studied there. She has a previous book entitled Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. My confidence in the special status of mankind among the other denizens of this earth was considerably reassured when I learned that only human beings took this aforementioned course at Barnard. Though I do recall the story of some students—at the University of California at Berkeley, I think—who, to prove a point about the nature of bureaucracy, registered a dog as a freshman, went to all his classes, wrote all his papers, and saw him graduate cum laude four years later. That is one dog that I should have enjoyed meeting without my usual walking stick.

The present book is indeed about walking, walking in cities, especially in New York, though we see Philadelphia also. Indeed, this is a teaching book. We do not have to move to Manhattan, where Horowitz lives, to practice what she preaches, which is, basically, that much is to be seen on your very own block, your very own street. In some ten accounts of walking around a single city block, often beginning from her own front door, Horowitz circles, or squares, or rectangles a city block. On each turn around the block, she is accompanied by someone else who teaches her by example, word, or gesture what to see that she might have otherwise missed.

Horowitz begins by walking with her little toddler son. What is it that little kids see and hear? If you walk around a city block with a child and let him look at or walk over to what interests him, you will see all sorts of things that you otherwise would have missed. “A ‘walk’, according to my toddler, is regularly about not walking. It has nothing to do with points A, B, or the getting from one to the other. It barely has anything to do with planting one’s feet in a straight line. A walk is instead an investigatory exercise that begins with energy and ends when (and only when) exhausted” (21). This passage reminds me of an article I once read about a highly trained and conditioned athlete who submitted himself to an experiment. He was required to stay with a very young child and imitate every motion that the child made with his hands, legs, head, and body. It turned out the athlete was completely “pooped out,” as they say, before the day was half over.

Horowitz is systematic. She walks with a blind lady who taps her way around the block, who hears when an awning is over her head as she passes under it. Horowitz walks with a man who is a specialist in rocks and geology. She ends up realizing that the rocks, cement, and stones she walks over or around every day come from quarries all over New England, even Italy. They go back thousands and millions of years to reveal the remnants of ancient shellfish. She then walks with a doctor and next with a physical therapist. Just by looking at the gait of an old man, or the complexion of a lady, or the speed of other walkers that they meet, one notices people who need a hip replacement or display other disorders.

Horowitz manages to find a gentleman who specializes in bugs. If we take a walk around the block on Manhattan, of all places, we find slugs, lady bugs, beetles, various leaf insects, worms, cockroaches, heaven knows what. She tells of a man who wrote a paper about the many different kinds of ants found in a mile of a New York street. Too, many kinds of animals besides the human variety are found on the island. Rats, the rodent kind, seem to enjoy living and flourishing among men. Even raccoons are prevalent. While no bears or mountain lions have been sighted in recent decades, evidently coyotes have been spotted; and, if not in Manhattan, certainly in other cities numberless protected deer enjoy dining on the local flowers and plants.

With other companions, Horowitz goes into private public places like homes for the aged. She does not do any shopping on these jaunts, but windows are noticed. They do go into one church. They notice the flow of traffic and the walkers, especially the more recent menace of cell-phone users who are prone to bump into trees and other pedestrians. The busy cell-phoners have taken the place of the man who walked down the street reading a newspaper or book.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on sounds that we hear outside in streets. Horowitz cites the composer John Cage. I recall being struck with Cage’s book Silence, in which he notes that there is really no such thing as silence. There are always sounds of one form or another, including the sounds within our own bodies. Doctors listen to our internal sounds with stethoscopes or other listening devices. The last chapter is on the smells of the city, a walk with her dog. We all know about K-9 Corps and drug-sniffing dogs.

But a city is filled with all sorts of things—bugs, rocks, plants, sounds, smells, sights—things to touch and feel with our hands, wind on our cheeks, the sound of rain on an umbrella, the smell of a lawn after a rain. The sense of smell is probably more important than we realize. Much of our eating has more to do with smell than taste. We identify people with certain smells. Smell seems instantaneous. Like the sound of a voice, smell can transcend time. A certain perfume will remind us of our grandmother if we catch it on someone else later in life. The unforgettable stench of my uncle’s hog lot, now long turned into a cornfield, comes back when I happen to run across hogs in some farm lot.

When we look at what Horowitz has done in this very good book, it is to go through our five senses. Sometimes I had the impression that Horowitz thinks it is our brain that knows instead of we ourselves knowing in the way we do because our souls are forms of bodies with highly organized parts. It reminds me of the chapters in Leon Kass’s book The Hungry Soul, in which he explains why each sense organ—eye, nose, ears, mouth—is placed where it is precisely so that we do know what is not ourselvesin all its details. Reflecting on the book, I kept thinking of the passage in Psalm 94: “Does not he who made the ear hear? Does not he who made the eye see?” A walk around a city block should also, I think, cause us to wonder why we see, hear, smell, taste, or think at all.

The walk, alas, did not include stops at local New York delis. Horowitz did not walk around the block with her local rabbi. New York in many ways is a Jewish city. A rabbi would easily recall the songs, the smells, the bricks, the sounds of the Hebrew Bible as they walked these streets. Nor did she walk with a policeman or fireman. With each, she could have looked at the locks, bars of windows, alarms, emergency phones, as well as being mindful of the darker side of human existence. Amusingly, she does mention the fire hydrants, but these mostly in the context of dogs.

Each of these possible companions, plus numerous others, I am sure Alexandra Horowitz knows and realizes that her rounds could always add a new nuance to her seeing. But she accomplishes her purpose with the walks that she does take. It is simply that there is so much to know in the very place that we are, that we have, probably not just from “evolution,” the coordinated mind and senses whereby we can know what we encounter about us.

In the end, what we are left with is simply the delight of knowing, indeed, of being taught or reminded of an ever new way to know what we think we already know. This “Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation” is, I think, a happy treatise on what it entitles itself, “On Looking”—and also on smelling, touching, tasting, and hearing, on bodiesendowed with senses and minds that enable each of us to know that we know—know that smelling is not hearing, that observing is not tasting, that seeing is also believing. For it is we ourselves who see and look and wonder at what is, even on a given block in New York City where we happen to live.  

Father Schall enjoys Alexandra Horowitz’s book on walking and paying attention to what you encounter.

I probably would not have paid much attention to these headlines were it not for the fact that a neighbor had just given me a photocopy of Msgr. Ronald Knox’s famous satirical essay “Reunion All Round,” an essay found in his 1928 Sheed & Ward book, Essays in Satire. Even back in ancient times like 1928, we find rumblings about the reunification of the Christian churches and other religions into what has come to be called in our time “The World Parliament of Religion.” World government, it seems, prefers to have these myriads of religious fanatics under one management roof. All believers, no matter what they maintain, should come together in a spirit of brotherly love to solve the world’s problems, which, to tell the truth, are mostly caused, according to their critics, by their stubborn and insignificant differences.

Knox’s essay is most amusing. The text is printed in that old Germanic script that for the letter “s,” as in “ss,” prints “ff,” with “ct” joined by a curve from the “c” to the “t.” The essay, in fact, is filled with theology, canon law, liturgical practices, and the history of religion. Right away, we catch the flavor of the proposal from the initial dedication: “Being a Plea for the Inclufion within the Church of England of all Mahometans, Jews, Buddhifts, fubmitted to the confideration of the British Public.” Definitely, this is a “modest,” refined proposal, on the model of Swift.

At first sight, of course, the differences of religious belief and practice appear insurmountable. Things like marriage customs and metaphysical perceptions hamper the way. But this proposal comes from that “liberal mind” that sees all things happily reconcilable with proper attention to compromise, compassion, and, yes, contradiction.

Openness to everything is the key operative concept in resolving all ecclesial difficulties. “There is no progress in Humanity,” we read, “without the surmounting of Obstacles; thus we are now all agree’d that Satan, far from meaning any harm to our Race when he brought Sin into the World, was most excellently dispos’d toward us.…” Needless to emphasize, this rendering Satan benevolent is a definite advance in theological thinking. It has been too long since anyone has put in a good word for Satan.

What was Satan up to, then? He did not want the human race “languishing” in that state of innocent bliss in which the poor angels found themselves bored to death. He wanted to put a little “excitement” into our lives. So we can all now agree to set aside this slander too often perpetrated by the preachers against the Angel of Light that Lucifer was.

With this understanding that the causes given for divisions within Christendom are all illusory, a new future seems open. “I conceive, then, that within a few years of the present Date [1928], the Division of Christians into Sects for purposes of Worship will have utterly disappeared, and we shall find one great United Protestant Church extending throughout the civilized World.” Even though we are now some ninety years away from this pioneering endeavor, we see, as I intimated, signs that its spirit is not wholly dead.

With confidence in progress, we may still find problems with odd branches like the Seventh Day Adventists. They demand that Saturday be a day of rest. The solution is easy. Make both Saturday and Sunday days of rest. We thus have “two days instead of one in every seven in which we can lie abed till Noon, overeat ourselves, go out driving in the Country, and dine away from home under the colour of sparing trouble to our Domesticks.” We have here both an eminently practical solution and an unexpected view of the status of Sabbath spiritual activities of the faithful on the days of rest throughout the Empire.

The Orthodox, then as now, seem to present a special problem for the unifiers. This “Filioque [controversy about the Creed] will clearly have to disappear.” Since the Creed is made up of reactions to differing heresies, most of which still need reconciling, the solution would be for a communal recitation of the Creed in which one only says that part with which he agrees. The Russian solution, which could be assigned also to the Sultan of Turkey, of letting state power decide doctrine seems likewise possible.

But a further problem arises with the Orthodox, namely their Liturgy, in which fireworks are set off at New Year’s. The Orthodox are hundreds of years out-of-date with their ancient language, their “Mumblings, Bobbings, Bowings, Shutting and Opening of Doors, Kissings, Gesticulatings, etc.” Also all icons need to be lifted high on church walls so that “nobody will worship them.”

In the treatment of what to do about Muslims, the reform proposal was clearly far ahead of its time. We see the same problems today, after the 2016 immigrant-invasion of Europe, that were envisioned in this unification proposal. We definitely cannot any longer call Mohammed a “false Prophet.” His only real quarrel with the Christian sects was over “Mariolatry and some unduly strict views they held about marriage.” Again this controversy could be solved. The Muslim practice of four wives and the Christian practice of one could split the difference, with each having two. This would solve the problem that the Muslims had with the supply of enough women to meet the demand of four to each man.

This compromise, this reliance on Mathematics to solve irreconcilable issues, applies to another area of Muslim and Christian differences. “We shall, of course, adopt at the same time the Mahometan Rule, by which a man may at any time turn his Wife out of doors, upon finding her displeasing to himself, and take a new one, modifying it only so far, as to extend the Privilege equally with the Wife, so as to the Husband.” This solution seems quite reasonable.

Another issue came up about liturgical practices. The Muslims like to chant from their Sacred Book. So some compromise could be worked out in the First Reading in the Christian Liturgy. “Since we have nowadays so little use for the Old Testament, Readings from the Coran should be substituted for it in the Divine Service.” Lest we think this approach might lead to some problem, we have the following rationale, which follows some of the recent discussions about a German critical edition of the Qur’an:

If any man object that this [reading of the Coran at Liturgy] might lead to a superstitious Belief in the Facts therein alleg’d, I would point out for his Comfort that in a very short Time the Critical Study will come to be expended on the latter Book [Coran], which has hitherto investigated the former [the Old Testament], with such happy Results; and consequently within twenty years’ time we should be in no more danger of giving Credit to the Miracles of Mahomet, than we are in now of stomaching the History of Joshua.

On another contemporary note, mindful of the pleas for dialogue, we recall the fact that “There are the [Muslim] Assassins, who hold it to be just and lawful to kill a man in virtue of a Disagreement about Religion, and did lately murder a man very horribly in the city of Paris.” The advice here, however, is not to treat these killers as public Enemies, but “as erring Brethren.” These Assassins should be admitted into the community of religions. And we should preach to them from our sacred books. They will see that such killing gives rise to “blood-feuds” and its widespread practice makes the “Tenure of Life” for all of us less secure. When we reason with these violent gentlemen in this pious way, “doubtless in a very short time they would have learned to take a more lenient view of doctrinal Irregularities.”

But the Muslims are not the only ones needing reconciliation. Most of the early heresies came out of the notion that matter is evil. Such a doctrine is simply unheard of among the “Thinkers of our Time.” It seems that ”Enlightened People like ourselves” are more interested in things that we do “with Fists, Feet, and Muscles … than any activity of the Brains.” If matter were evil, we would not “seek bodily Health by every possible means.” The way to avoid this evil Manichean thesis is to recognize that all the bad things are “necessary evils” and thus have no moral import for us.

Whether the Church of Rome can be accommodated is a special problem. “I know we are commonly told, That this will never be achiev’d, by Reason of Extreme Obstinacy and Perversity of this Sect.” This Roman stubbornness is based on numbers. When the Papists see their numbers declining, they will become more flexible. “Science helps us. We know “now that all Survival in the World is a Survival of the Fittest, and that two Instincts chiefly make an Organization fit to survive, namely the Will to Live and the Desire to propagate its kind.” The Roman cult of Martyrs and Celibacy should soon take care of this problem. The then noted increase of Catholic numbers was not due principally to conversions but to the immigration of the Irish. These prolific folks at the time were busy “stocking five Continents with Papists.”

To halt this danger, it was proposed at the time (shades of the future abortion industry and one-child Chinese law) that “We should make it a criminal Offense for the future, that any Papist should be allowed to marry, or have Issue: the Offense itself to be punished with Death, and the resulting Issue to be expos’d on some Hill-side, lest it should grow up infected with the gross Superstition of its Parents.” If we look today back on the present condition of the Papists in Ireland, we can see that this worry of an Irish take-over of the world was grossly exaggerated.

In this coming unified world religion, only one doctrinal issue would be required. Everyone is to take a “Declaration of Loyalty to the Church.” It would be an Affirmation of a general Dissent from the Doctrines contain’d in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.” Surely anyone could agree to make such a “dissent”: “I firmly dissent from any doctrinal statement.”

What to do about the Pope and the Cardinals? “The Pope himself I would allow to take the rank of a retir’d Military Bishop, thus leaving him with the Insignia of Power, without any Sphere in which to exercise it.” And “the Cardinals I would disperse among the Common-rooms of Oxford and Cambridge where they could exercise their Talent for Intrigue without having any serious effect.”

Finally we come to the Atheists. They present a lesser problem than the religionists who differ on all sorts of minor inherited doctrine and practice. The Atheists have “only one single Quarrel to patch up, namely, as to whether any God exists, or not.” All we need to do is to “ease” their “conscience on this single matter.” They have no real reliance to any inherited view of what to profess.

If we could get our theologians to agree that God is both “Existent and Non-Existent,” then we could each affirm with confidence our position without hurt to the other view. With this marvelously illuminating approach, we can all live together and profess a common Creed. We can “recognize the Divine Governor of the Universe as One who exists, yet does not exist, causes Sin, yet hates it, yet does not punish it, and promises us in Heaven a Happiness, in which we shall not have any Consciousness to enjoy.” This solution, no doubt, is the perfect resolution of the famous controversy between negative and positive theology about whether we best affirm what God is or what he is not.

The concluding exhortation is admirable. It could in fact have been written by the present Justices of the Supreme Court, or by the philosophical faculty of most any expensive university in the world. It reads: “Thank God in these days of Enlightenment and Establishment, everyone has a right to his own Opinions, and chiefly to the Opinion, That nobody else has a right to theirs. It shall go hard, but within a century at most we shall make the Church of England true to her Catholic vocation, which is, plainly, to include within her Borders every possible Shade of Belief.”

On finishing such an inspiring treatise, we can perhaps wonder whether the satirical essay is not, in fact, a form of prophecy.