Being in two places at once: Plotinus and Augustine

One of the odd -yet regular- aspects of Catholicism is that one finds oneself in two levels of existence at once. One exists in a Church that has been responsible for some of the highest flights of intellect and art; one finds oneself in a Church surrounded apparently by the work of five years olds. Byrd wrote Mass settings for our Church; the Praise Band warbles on accompanied by a kazoo...

And so, for the Ascension Day Mass yesterday, I find myself in a rather ill-judged 1970s' building, listening to a priest with a tendency to the folksy. But he has obviously said his Office of Readings today because there is a strong reminder of Augustine in the homily:

Today our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven; let our hearts ascend with him. Listen to the words of the Apostle: If you have risen with Christ, set your hearts on the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; seek the things that are above, not the things that are on earth. For just as he remained with us even after his ascension, so we too are already in heaven with him... 

Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith,  hope and love that unites us to him? While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on earth are with him...

[From today's Office of Readings: attributed to a sermon by Saint Augustine]

 

It's odd, sitting there in fairly unprepossessing surroundings, but hearing something which touches on a theme which runs through Plotinus: the soul's dwelling at the same time with the Divine but also on the earth (from the Mckenna translation here):

  

Many times it has happened : Lifted out of the body into myself ; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered ; beholding a marvellous beauty ; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order ; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine ; stationing within It by having attained that activity...yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

[Plotinus Enneads IV.8.1]

The entity, therefore, described as "consisting of the undivided soul and of the soul divided among bodies," contains a soul which is at once above and below, attached to the Supreme and yet reaching down to this sphere, like a radius from a centre. Thus it is that, entering this realm, it possesses still the vision inherent to that superior phase in virtue of which it unchangingly maintains its integral nature. Even here it is not exclusively the partible soul: it is still the impartible as well: what in it knows partition is parted without partibility; undivided as giving itself to the entire body, a whole to a whole, it is divided as being effective in every part.

[Plotinus Enneads IV. 1]

I'm sure the Dawkins brigade will sneer at ancient myth; I'm sure evangelicals will mutter about how the Catholic Church looks to Athens far more than it does Jerusalem. Well, so much the worse for them: this splitness of the human is as clear a fact of human experience as anything else and we should be talking about it. And, indeed: here we are, talking about it. A very ordinary, predominantly working class parish, with its priest talking about the way we live both with God in heaven and yet in time.

Catholics -well, I- don't deserve Catholicism. We squabble; we create ugliness; we're smug. If we can get through this generation without having completely destroyed the Church, it sometimes seems that would be achievement enough. That is indeed one of our main tasks: if we cannot appreciate Catholicism, not to destroy it for future generations who may be a better audience than we are. And yet, perhaps even for us, the occasional glimpse of our true life at  'rest with him in heaven even now'.

A belated happy Ascension Day!

 

 

 

 

Happy New Year

 The Year of the Whale

The old go, one by one, like guttered flames.
    This past winter
        Tammag the bee-man has taken his cold blank mask
             To the honeycomb under the hill,
   Corston who ploughed out the moor 
        Unyoked and gone; and I ask,
    Is Heddle lame, that in youth could dance and saunter 
        A way to the chastest bed?
The kirkyard is full of their names
              Chiselled in stone. Only myself and Yule
                  In the ale-house now, speak of the great whale year. 

This one and that provoked the taurine waves
    With an arrogant pass,
        Or probing deep through the snow-burdened hill
           Resurrected his flock,
                Or passed from fiddles to ditch
        By way of the quart and the gill,
    All night lay tranced with corn, but stirred to face
                     The brutal stations of bread;
While those who tended their lives
        Like sacred lamps, chary of oil and wick,
            Died in the fury of one careless match.

Off Scabra Head the lookout sighted a school 
    At the first light.
        A meagre year it was, limpets and crows
            And brief mottled grain.
               Everything that could float 
        Circled the school. Ploughs
    Wounded those wallowing lumps of thunder and night.
                The women crouched and prayed.
Then whale by whale 
        Blundering on the rock with its red stain
           Crammed our winter cupboards with oil and meat. 
    
     

George Mackay Brown

from The Year of the Whale (Chatto & Windus, 1965), and included in The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown (John Murray, 2005)

 

[from the Scottish Poetry Library here]

 

 

---------------------------------------



 

Joseph Pearce provides apposite commentary:

 

Rejecting the illusion of progress, which he believed would be “choked at last in its own too much”, George Mackay Brown wrote works of rare beauty in which the rootedness of place is seen as the wellspring of true culture. A native of the Orkney Islands who seldom left their shores, Brown drew on their rich history and ruggedly isolated terrain for much of his work.
[...]
In Brown’s poetry and prose, the soil and the soul are in mystical communion, the bread and the breath, shining forth the enduring glory of God in the midst of all that is mortal and mutable.

[Here.]

There is much that I'd like to say at the beginning of this New Year and will no doubt say some of it as the year goes on. But for the moment, I'll leave it at this reminder of permanent things, together with a plea that as Catholics and Scots (or whatever) we do not lose sight of them in the unavoidable yet dangerous seduction of chatter.





Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas!

On the Nativity of Christ (William Dunbar)


RORATE coeli desuper!
  Hevins, distil your balmy schouris!
For now is risen the bricht day-ster,
  Fro the rose Mary, flour of flouris:
  The cleir Sone, quhom no cloud devouris,      
Surmounting Phebus in the Est,
  Is cumin of his hevinly touris:
    Et nobis Puer natus est.

Archangellis, angellis, and dompnationis,
  Tronis, potestatis, and marteiris seir,
And all ye hevinly operationis,
  Ster, planeit, firmament, and spheir,
  Fire, erd, air, and water cleir,
To Him gife loving, most and lest,
  That come in to so meik maneir;
    Et nobis Puer natus est.

Synnaris be glad, and penance do,
  And thank your Maker hairtfully;
For he that ye micht nocht come to
  To you is cumin full humbly
  Your soulis with his blood to buy
And loose you of the fiendis arrest—
  And only of his own mercy;
    Pro nobis Puer natus est.

All clergy do to him inclyne,
  And bow unto that bairn benyng,
And do your observance divyne
  To him that is of kingis King:
  Encense his altar, read and sing
In holy kirk, with mind degest,
  Him honouring attour all thing
    Qui nobis Puer natus est.

Celestial foulis in the air,
  Sing with your nottis upon hicht,
In firthis and in forrestis fair
  Be myrthful now at all your mycht;
  For passit is your dully nicht,
Aurora has the cloudis perst,
  The Sone is risen with glaidsum licht,
    Et nobis Puer natus est.

Now spring up flouris fra the rute,
  Revert you upward naturaly,
In honour of the blissit frute
  That raiss up fro the rose Mary;
  Lay out your levis lustily,
Fro deid take life now at the lest
  In wirschip of that Prince worthy
    Qui nobis Puer natus est.

Sing, hevin imperial, most of hicht!
  Regions of air mak armony!
All fish in flud and fowl of flicht
  Be mirthful and mak melody!
  All Gloria in excelsis cry!
Heaven, erd, se, man, bird, and best,—
  He that is crownit abone the sky
    Pro nobis Puer natus est!

Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk died on this day in 1994.

Wikipedia does a reasonable job of getting the basics right:


Russell Amos Kirk (October 19, 1918 in Plymouth, Michigan – April 29, 1994 in Mecosta, Michigan) was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post-World War II conservative movement. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. Kirk was also considered the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism.

Reactions to Kirk seem to fall between idolatry from young men in five piece tweed suits and carrying what the suspicious might take to be a sword cane to having absolutely no idea who he is. (The latter I suspect is much the most common in Scotland.) So why do I think that it's worth taking him seriously everywhere but especially in Scotland? Here are some suggestions:

1. Suspicion of change.  The Scottish political scene is entirely dominated by self-styled 'progressives' including the Conservatives. (The Independent describing the Tory paper on tax reform:  "the word “progressive” features (a nod to mainstream political discourse in Scotland".) Whatever reality lies behind the narrative, the only game in town is one which talks of bright, shiny futures. The biggest lack in Scottish political discourse is anyone who is even talking along the following lines:

[T]he conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise. [Here.]

2. An emphasis on imagination and 'seeing as' rather than party political success. If all of Scotland is now progressive, we are also all now gripped in a political culture where all that matters is effectiveness. The stream (trickle?) of voters away from Labour to the Conservatives is purely about the most effective opposition party to the SNP. Such calculations are of course inevitable.But unless there are the beginnings of a richer political culture with a greater variety of views and a willingness first to explore the nature of homo politicus before entering into the Machiavellian cut and thrust of day to day politics, Scottish public life will wither.

“Imagination rules the world,” Russell Kirk used to say. He meant that imagination is a force that molds the clay of our sentiments and understanding. It is not chiefly through calculations, formulas, and syllogisms, but by means of images, myths, and stories that we comprehend our relation to God, to nature, to others, and to the self. That is why William Wordsworth referred to the imagination as “The mightiest lever known to the moral world.” And that is why Dr. Johnson, in an earthier definition, quipped that imagination is “The thing which prevents [a man] from being as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as in the arms of a duchess.” [Here.]

3. Kirk loved Scotland (and Scott) and his sensibilities are in many ways much closer to Scottish culture than a Conservatism dominated by the London establishment. (At the very least, it is a relief to read a small town republican conservative rather than a scion of the Bullingdon Club.)

4. An emphasis on the transcendent. Although Kirk expresses this differently over the years, a sense of an order, rhythm or simple presence that stands outside the everyday world is a constant, expressing itself variously in his conversion to Catholicism in 1964, his writingof gothic ghost stories, and his Burkean sense of an organic unity of a tradition. This stands, I think, in contrast to both the mechanical Christianity of much of the modern Right in America and to the cynical pragmatism of much of the Right in Britain.

5. Finally, he is (as much as he presents) a 'patchwork' (to borrow Davila's phrase)  or (to borrow mine) a landscape of the mind. His affinities to post-modernism have been noted in that he created less a body of doctrine to be followed but a landscape to be inhabited. Moreover, it is a landscape that is in many ways highly individualistic: the landscape we inhabit in modernity is no longer a village that we can simply be born into, but one that has to be crafted by each of us as a bohemian:

I did not love cold harmony and perfect regu­larity of organization; what I sought was vari­ety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle. [Here.]

Linda Woodhead on 'no religion'

I've mentioned before that I find a lack of engagement with secularization theory one of the most problematic aspects of much reflection about the state of the Catholic Church. It's all very well suggesting that this or that change in (eg) liturgy has brought about a decline in Mass attendance etc, but that seems simply to ignore the wider changes in (particularly) Western Europe and the declining public place of religion in general there.

Lind Woodhead has been a central figure in that academic debate over the phenonomenon of secularization, and has, in broad terms, been a proponent of the view that religion is not so  much disappearing as changing into spirituality. Her recent British Academy lecture on the growth of the 'nones' (ie those who declare they have no religion) is well worth watching (an earlier parallel transcript of an interview is here):

I take the main messages of Woodhead's thesis to be thus:

a) The largest (and growing) religious identity in the UK is 'no religion'.
b) This identity is not the same as atheist or even agnostic. It is, in particular, not hostile to religion.
c) It rejects, in particular, religious authority figures and institutions, and is liberal in areas such as sexuality and family life.
d) 'Leadership' of this group is up for grabs. Unless churches adapt to this viewpoint, 'no religion' is likely to be captured by groups such as the British Humanist Association and steered into a more stridently anti-religious stance.
e) Churches such as those in Scandinavia and non-Western religions such as Buddhism have been more successful in influencing this group by turning themselves into spiritual paths which fit in with the 'nones' liberal ethos.

As a description, I think much of this is simply true. I do have severe doubts about e): Buddhism isn't terribly influential in Britain and I suspect that the lingering influences of churches in Scandinavia are more about lip service to a tradition than anything else. If that's the best that churches can do, I think I'd rather go down fighting than humoured as a marginal cultural tradition.

Where I do agree is that Catholicism (and frankly I don't much care what other ecclesial communities do) needs to offer itself as a spiritual and cultural path: in other words, we need to offer people a Catholic culture without insisting that they become fully signed up members of the Church. I say that, not because I don't think becoming a fully practising Catholic doesn't matter -it does- but because I think (normally, not always) full conversion is preceded by seeing the point of Catholicism as a belief system and as a practice. In a fight (or a culture war) I'd put my money on a culture armed with Alasdair MacIntyre. Walker Percy, James MacMillan and even Andy Warhol (and that's only a start) against one armed with Judith Butler and TOWIE. You can add to that personal colourful spiritual practices such as lighting candles and saying the rosary.

In other words, even if one accepts Woodhead's view that institutional Christianity needs to become a spirituality, it is possible to argue that Catholicism can offer this as an ancilla to rather than a replacement for the full religion. The Church teaches what it has always taught, undiluted and unchanged. But it encourages (hold the vomit) 'people where they are'. So you don't want an authority figure? Fine. Say a rosary and read Dionysius the Areopagite whilst listening to Byrd. Nobody's going to drag you to Mass if you don't want to go. Some will remain stuck there in a sort of aesthetic limbo. Well, no worse than many now and better than Dawkinsian know nothings.

The City of God will remain surrounded by the City of Man. A City of Man in which some of the spirituality of Catholicism is recognized and valued will be better than one which is overtly and consistently hostile. In other words, we need to practise a culture war (or at least a culture ooze) which is not directly aimed at getting people to be Catholics but at getting people to be catholicized. (By all means do the direct evangelism as well. This is not an either/or but both/and.) It might not work, but really it might. At the very least, people will get closer to their natural end and earthly flourishing, even if they do not attain their supernatural end.

The whole of Catholic art, philosophy and mysticism against... Well, after all, what?

Preaching to the unconverted

                                               
I'm embracing my inner hippy on this one...

I've been struck a couple of times recently chatting to the 'young' (as one does) that a not uncommon type is 'pretty decent half Catholic'. You talk to a twenty year old or so, get thinking that they've pretty sound on a lot of things (solid grasp of the importance of family; not too materialistic; just a fundamental sense of decency) and, you sort of half suspect that or wonder whether they've had a Catholic upbringing. And 9/10 (based on an entirely objective, scientific statistical sample) they have. (They might even still go to Church.)

Now it's quite likely that this 'pretty decent half Catholic' (PDHC) will also hold views that make any orthodox Catholic squirm. Typically, they'll be in favour of same sex marriage, abortion (though perhaps only allowing the freedom for other women to choose), aardvarking outside marriage etc etc. If you push on this, you'll probably get some sort of response along the lines of 'well, no one takes the official line on this seriously anymore' or the sort of blank look that anyone could still be so homophobic and sexually repressed whilst not painting themselves in woad.

I mentioned in my last post the strategy of 'Aesopian Catholicism' (basically disguising your true thoughts, and, in the broad sense I'm going to be using it here, 'keeping your head down'.) Although there's more to be said about this, I'm not advancing this as a particularly good strategy. But it is certainly a current one. And if you're a moderately serious young Catholic who, while not rejecting Christ or the Church, is probably more interested in the opposite sex and in the daily business of life, it's entirely understandable. ('No one takes that seriously anymore' is probably translatable as 'Look, let's drop this subject' in many cases.)

There's a knock on effect among the clergy. If you have a congregation of PDHCs, even if you're the most orthodox, fire breathing priest imaginable, you might wonder precisely what to do with them. Get too rigorous and you'll probably drive what are, after all, sinners needing mercy and the sacraments across that line that takes them completely out of the Church. Say nothing and you're simply complicit in their slackness and ignorance and removing any possibility of maturing in the faith and morality. I think this explains much of the fairly well known 'Father Nice' syndrome: just as it's easy for a PDHC to forget the teaching of the Church in the effort to keep out of trouble, so it's easy for the Father Nices of this world to forget what the Church actually teaches in an effort not to drive off the (half) well -disposed but ignorant.

Solutions? Absolutely no idea. Screaming at them they're all unbelievers and are going to roast in Hell probably won't work in more than a few cases. Keeping silent about the depth of the Church's teachings and vision is cheating them of a chance of growth. But again the Benedict option is useless as a total solution. (It might work as a reservoir for PDHCs, but you then need to talk about how you establish aqueducts to distribute the water/teaching to the parched.)

Mediaeval Catholicism has often been mocked as presenting itself as a) a spiritual elite  who b) sneaked sinners into Heaven by a mechanical application of sacraments (grace) instead of effecting true conversion. Whatever the truth of this criticism, it's perhaps worth reconsidering the merits of such an approach. Whatever its dangers, such a view does correctly acknowledge the state of most people (and I include myself in this). I need grace and frankly I need a Church that is going to try to save me as a PDHC myself. And since (given the absence of autos-da-fe) I'm not liable to be frightened into submission, I'm gong to have to be persuaded, seduced even. From my standpoint, you could have sermons on sexual morality till the cows went home: the advantage of age is that stops being so much a problem. But being a smug comfortable git? Well...

More the setting out of a problem than a solution. But here's a suspicion. The priesthood, certainly in its everyday parish variety, is not well placed to seduce into the depths of Catholicism. In part, this is a matter of time. If you have few priests and a decline in non-Sunday contact with parishioners, there simply isn't the number of hours required for such a seduction to work. In part it's a matter of position and formation. This is tricky to articulate, but perhaps one can get a sense of the difficulties here by imagining the problems of a priest or religious enthusing over Rubens' portrayal of flesh and sexual allure. (If it's done, I bet they'd only go and ruin it by going on about sacramental presence and the like. You need rather more of the earth and Crazy Jane's 'Love has pitched his mansion/In the place of excrement' and perhaps just the simple joy of being alive.)

In sum, it's the laity and the culture which have to do the heavy lifting here. And the key problem (well, an important one anyway) is not to construct communities of the saints, but to work out how -as the Middle Ages did so well (and let's give Rubens and Yeats a place in the long middle ages)- PDHCs immersed in the pleasures of this world can still be led to the next one. Because if there are neo-benedictine communities, I bet I'll be one of those left on the outside with my sloth and lusts and my box sets of Breaking Bad wishing that someone would drag me, half despite myself, into heaven.

Walker Percy, Biederkeit and phonies.

I've just emerged from a Walker Percy binge. (I've also just emerged from a William Shatner TekWars binge but the less said about that the better, perhaps.)

I hadn't read any Percy since my early twenties or perhaps even late teens, certainly before I became a Catholic. As one of the key Catholic novelists of the twentieth century, certainly in English, I thought it was probably about time to return to him and read the complete corpus. Doing that brought back, viscerally, the memory of dislocation: of reading a novel which to some extent embodies the alienated scratchiness of adolescent life. Which I suspect is not an uncommon experience for bookish youth: feeling alienated and somewhat out of joint with life, one reads a book which both describes and also provokes further feelings of alienation. I'm left with the feeling that Percy lacks in katharsis: one does not see a way out of the scratchiness, unlike (eg) Dostoyevsky who offers -at least as a vision in the distance- a promise of finding oneself at home with a wife, the Church and Russia.

Much of the sixties counterculture, and indeed, much of the specifically Catholic sixties counterculture which lives on in The Tablet and among 'the progressives', seems to be a reaction to dumb conventionality: the world of 1950s sitcoms or soccer moms. This is very much Percy's shtick: how, in an America which ticks all the boxes of material comfort and respectable advice, you can still feel like an animal caught in a trap and gnawing off your own leg. The crass end of this line of thought is Holden Caulfield's ranting against 'phonies' in The Catcher in the Rye: the sense that adults around you are living a hollowed out life of quiet desperation which they try to fill by a compensatory desire to control and punish others.

All good and true in its way. It is an important lesson. When my older children came back from university at Christmas, I found myself entering into those conversations about love and work that took me back to that adolescence. And I found myself uttering my standard line which is that a rich and fulfilling life depends on getting three things right: marriage and children, work and God. Good advice: I wish someone had said the same to me so explicitly. But in saying it, one catches the echo of Polonius in one's tone: the platitudinous, the old being out of touch with the young, the 'phony'. Part of the problem is the concrete: it's all very well saying that a good marriage is central to the good life (and it is unless you have a specific vocation to celibacy), but how does that help out the concrete detail? The unavoidable awfulness of trying to find a girlfriend or a boyfriend; the negotiation of a modern economy which breaks open families and crushes female fertility; the absence of any public language where this can be discussed, certainly, when you are twenty and most eligible partners (and indeed yourself) are heavily secularised. (But Polonius waves his hands: he has no idea what to say, but goes on saying anyway.)

The worst thing is that, for me anyway, it all worked out pretty well. I married someone whom I still adore and who, for some inexplicable reason, seems reasonably happy with me. We have delightful children whom I love. Work is purposeful and stimulating. Not much the result of my actions: blind, dumb luck or grace for the most part. But then we get back to Percy and alienation: however good the surface, however good even the substance, there is something wrong. 'Aber etwas fehlt...' Something is lacking...




The lesson from this...? Well, one of the lessons not to be taken is that the external doesn't matter. The 'progressive' wing of the Church and of society in general while noticing the slough of despond that exists in the human soul blames the structures and tries to recreate in the external the internal feeling of freedom they imagine as a solution. And so we dump the rigid form of the man-woman-children household in favour of the ad libitum flux. And we reject a traditional liturgy in favour of finger painting and expressive swaying. And we dump the 9-5 in favour of work as play and play as being on the end of a Blackberry 24/7. Form matters: a human being is in part a thing not a Dasein. It needs certain other things, certain patterns to inhabit. There is nothing wrong with Thanksgiving dinners, the Rotary Club and Soccer Moms. We need our chaff to lie down in....

But tick all those things off. There still exists that alienation from things that Percy identifies. No marriage, however perfect, will fill the emptiness. (We argue. We grow old. One of us is left when the other dies.) No liturgy, however, perfect can survive without a measure of boredom or distraction week after week after week. Work is always laborious. For Catholicism, life is a vale of tears: only God, now and in the life hereafter provides our true long home.

And of course for a secularist, that is so much baloney, the fantasy of the imaginary friend who makes it all right. Well, that's for another day. But for the progressives, secular or otherwise, there is a need to acknowledge the limitations of the external, the objective conditions of society that we inhabit as objects. They matter (and so (eg) economics and 'social justice' issues matter). But their necessary rigidity cannot reproduce the freedom of thought and the internal. And so Percy-ian alienation will always remain. And for Percy's 'knotheads', the conservative traditionalists, there needs to be a recognition that external rigidity can choke the internal, that while the charge of being a phony doesn't always hit home, it does sometimes. Secularists will have to live with these failures in some way without resolution. Catholics will find the promise of a resolution in God. But both need to be clear about what life is like in this broken middle of a life.

Wolf Hall

                                           
                                                                A wolf...

So everybody's talking about Wolf Hall. (Telegraph: here. Guardian: here.) We apparently like it.

I'll say something about the TV adaptation in a bit. But I wanted to try and say something about the books before I do. Treat this as part of an exercise in the phenomenology of reading rather than an exercise in close criticism. I read Wolf Hall pretty much when it first came out which means that I read it about six years ago. I read Bring Up the Bodies again roughly when it came out -so about three years ago. I read Wolf Hall in hard copy; I read Bring Up the Bodies on a Kindle.

I mention all that because those details affect how I feel about the books. (And that's what I'm going to talk about.) If this were proper criticism, I'd be obliged to go back and check these feelings against the text. But I'm not going to. Which is why this post is simply about my (current) impressions of the book and doesn't claim to be criticism. However, it may be of interest for two reasons: first, I seem to be one of those rare Catholics who enjoyed both; secondly, I haven't seen what I'm going to say precisely echoed by anyone else (and I'm arrogant enough to think that I might have an interesting perspective).

A lot has been made about the books' being, in some sense, about the rise of modernity: a very modern man (Cromwell), who achieves his position by merit, not birth, and who operates with managerial efficiency rather than (as with More) from theology or (as with Henry) from his codpiece. I think that's basically right. But what is often missed is that the first person narration of the book and general form of the book itself embodies that rise of modernity. Cromwell's take on the world is oddly flat: he sees the world with disenchanted eyes; he is alienated from it. (The confusions noted by Mark Lambert  reinforce this Verfremdungseffekt: Cromwell's consciousness becomes the one still, Cartesian spot in a blooming buzzing confusion.) What others have taken to be dullness I took as part of the point: a sort of extended exercise in Vonnegutian 'So it goes', the careless flatness of the modern, disembodied ego. (I think perhaps there's a slightly false note in the narrative with the death of Cromwell's family (and indeed his abused childhood): instead of his disenchantment being part of the structure of modernity, it hints at a pathological psychology where the disenchantment and lack of emotional connection is the result of personal grief rather than cultural shift.)

As I said, I'm not sure how fair that impression is to the text, but it is nonetheless why I tell myself now that I enjoyed the books. (Wolf Hall more than Bring Up the Bodies, I think, in part because I think it did this 'disenchantment' thing rather better.) It also relieves any anxiety I might have had about the unsympathetic portrayal of More: of course he is a grotesque. All those with light and colour and character are grotesque (just as the Middle Ages are grotesque) in front of the unfeeling light of the modern, rational consciousness. Mantel's take on that appears to be that Cromwell is good because modernity is good. My take is that Cromwell is bad (almost psychopathic) because modernity is bad. (But so it goes no doubt.)

And what of the TV series? Well, aesthetically it's great. (Great use of light and dark, not afraid to let whole scenes (almost) vanish into the Tudor murk). And one is reminded again just how wonderful gifted actors are, disappearing into another human being with no sign of the effort it costs. I'll certainly go on watching it. But (given the books) I think what I'm going to miss is the relief of the flatness by the penetrating consciousness of Cromwell: instead of being the camera through which all the world is viewed and reduced to something to be manipulated or played with or just seen, he becomes instead just one more character within the camera's field. He too becomes part of the flattened, disenchanted world rather than the eye through which it is viewed.

Happy birthday, Cezanne. (Catholic.)

There are a great many things I don't like about blogging (the sound of my own voice -or whatever the correct digital, visual equivalent is- rambling on in feeble imitation of professional commentators can be just as grating for me as it is for you, dear reader), but one of the things I do like is the possibility of bringing out the interplay of the personal and the academic. I am, for example, quite happy to admit that, on most (all?) subjects, I write having entered in medias res and will stop writing ex mediis rebus: we always stand a little unsure of the dimensions of the room we inhabit and we never quite get a firm sense of the contents of that room. (But that doesn't stop us talking. Oh Lord, not in the slightest.)

And so, Cezanne. Brought up in a lower middle class, pretty philistine home, we just didn't do the visual arts. (Actually, I'm not sure we did much of anything except TV.) And not having any natural abilities in that area, I just didn't pay much attention to painting and the like until undergraduate courses on aesthetics forced me to engage. I remain pretty ignorant, not really even knowing what I like. But as I get older, I find the enjoyment of paintings, the sensual enjoyment of seeing, incredibly satisfying. I suppose this is all to say I dabble. And Cezanne, for a variety of reasons, is one of those painters I find most satisfying to dabble in...

When I realized that today was Cezanne's birthday, I turned to the Alex Danchev biography of Cezanne to find something helpful to tweet. And knowing that Cezanne was a daily mass goer, I thought I'd probably say something about that. So to Danchev's index. Nothing. Absolutely nothing on Catholicism. Freud, of course. Heidegger. Hegel. Even Billy Whitelaw. But nothing under 'Catholicism' or 'Mass' or 'God' or 'Christ' and so on. I did (by dint of extensive flipping) find the following exchange (p291) where Danchev contrasts his understanding of Cezanne with that of earlier biographers:

It constructs a helpless, almost childlike Cezanne in his dotage, a political simpleton, a preconscious pilgrim, clinging to le bon droit in all its forms -the Church, the State, the Army -even the Boers...It is tone deaf, to wit and to wisdom. 'I'm going to get my helping of the Middle Ages,' he would whisper, mischievously, near the font. 'To be a Catholic,' he told his son, near the end, 'I think one has to be devoid of all sense of fairness, but to keep an eye on one's own interests.'

And that, so far as I can see, is that: one paragraph exemplifying as much as noting a tone deafness to wit and to wisdom. (If you can't imagine all sorts of ways in which a devout Catholic might mischievously speak thus without stopping being a devout Catholic...) The reviews of the book (the Guardian here; Telegraph here; Waldemar Januszczak here) neither mention religion (which suggests that I'm not missing something in the biography) nor suggest that this is a failing (which suggests that Danchev is not atypical).

All this is particularly strange in that Cezanne is quite clearly an artist who is engaging in that very Catholic thing of trying to find form in the world: a form, not with the accretions of tradition or French bourgeois seeing, but 'the dearest freshness deep down things'. And coupled with a purification of the see-er, we have almost a perfect case study of Catholic art and the encounter of French Catholicism with modernity. (I look up Bernanos, Peguy. They're not there either. Weil gets a one line mention -but a throwaway (and certainly no reference to her religion).)

Googling a little more, I find this essay by Patrick Reyntiens. Reassured to notice that I'm not going mad in noticing something is a little odd here:

An aspect of Cezanne's personal life not much harped upon is that he was a staunch Catholic. He was a daily Mass-goer. Such aberrations are best left unemphasised in the structure of the myth of the Modern Movement. But it explains a great deal. Cezanne's religion, however conventional it may or may not have been, constituted the prime basis for his sense of identity, stability and personal probity. This in turn fuelled his obsession with painting to heroic lengths.

None of this matters much to Catholics, at least educated ones. I guess most of us are used to suspecting the airbrushing that goes on in cultural history (my children tease me for my adding, when possible, 'He's a Catholic' to any passing description of this or that celebrity) and can look (search) past it. But if you enter this world in medias res, unless you're a Catholic on the look out for lacunae, you find yourself in a world that has been scraped of its Catholicism in the same way that Protestant reformers scraped our churches of paintings and colour; and, unless you have it continually pointed out to you, you start to think that the normal state of the world is this barren remnant, smashed ruins being mistaken for the complete original. Cezanne's a small, relatively insignificant case study of that secularization, which is not simply an absence, but an act of positive violence, a distortion of what our Lebenswelt, the cultural environment we inhabit, is really like.

Happy birthday to Paul Cezanne. Requiescat in pace.

Baroque scholasticism and the aesthetics of theology (and liturgy)

                                              Rational structure, slightly foxed

Slightly half-baked this one, but bear with me... (Well, can't blame you if you don't!)
There are two elements in Radical Orthodoxy which are really one. The two elements are, first, suspicion of the intellectual life of the Catholic Church particularly in the way Scholasticism was (allegedly) reconstructed on rationalist lines by (eg) Suarez in the Baroque period (and, a fortiori, in nineteenth/twentieth century neo-Scholasticism); and suspicion of the reconstruction of the liturgy on rationalist lines in the twentieth century by Vatican II and the Spirit thereof. (For the first see (eg) John Montag's paper in Radical Orthodoxy and for the second see (esp) Catherine Pickstock's After Liturgy.)

So we have here, fundamentally, an objection to the way that modern rationalism tidies up mediaeval and patristic mess. If one wants to dig a little deeper (or perhaps merely to put a philosophical gloss on all that), one starts talking of how modern rationalism prioritizes essence over existence -the conceptual over the raw stuff of being, whilst the pre-modern gives full weight to the unassimilable, uncapturable life. (Or theologically, God.)

If this were just the stuff of Radical Orthodoxy as a movement, I wouldn't worry so much. But  it strikes me as something that one hears quite regularly from a number of different directions: a need to return to the less rationally streamlined Extraordinary Form (and even to the even far less systematic pre-Tridentine liturgical situation); a need to return to Patristic theology  or mediaeval theology rather than the later, rationalist reconstructions.

Now, I find myself pulled in at least two different ways on this. Liturgically, I'm sympathetic (although lazy in actually doing anything about it) to the Traditionalists. I like Latin. I like old forms. I don't like Clown Masses, 1970s English and chumminess. So, on the one hand, I'm pulled towards the anti-modernizing case liturgically. On the other hand, intellectually, I'm pulled to the systematizing of the 'modern' forms of neo-Scholasticism. In particular, I find Suarez's ambition and comprehensiveness immensely attractive.

We arrive at the climax of Baroque Scholasticism -indeed of Scholasticism as a whole- the integration of two systems, a philosophy and a theology, into a single system, or super-system, with the former the basis of the latter. This again was the creation of Suarez, who was the first, and apparently the only, Scholastic thinker to systematize both his own philosophy and theology. If the medieval systems remind us of the Gothic cathedrals, the Suarezian reminds us of the cathedrals of the Renaissance and Baroque, like St Peter's in Rome. (From Pereira's Suarez: Between Scholasticism and Modernity.)

I'm terribly, terribly suspicious of a narrative of discontinuity between the modern and the pre-modern. Whenever anyone suggests this or that feature of modernity (individualism, secularization, globalization, rationalization) I keep thinking of one or other analogy (or identity) in the pre-modern world. In other words, although (of course) life in the 21st century is different from (eg) 4th century Athens, there is also a heck of a lot of continuity -and even more so when the abyss of separation is postulated somewhere between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. So I don't see all this as a matter of history, still less an historical mis-step, but rather an enduring contest between system and the inadequacy of system.

Insofar as I can make any sense of this, I settle on something like Gillian Rose's Broken Middle, which attempts to do justice to (as far as I understand it) law and grace, the explicit and the unsayable by pitching our intellectual tent in the lived tension between these two poles. So we need (eg) the tension between those who advocate the neo-Scholastic systematization of theology and philosophy, as well as those who advocate a turn towards narrative and Patristics. We need the tension between a rationalized liturgy as well as a liturgy which has been accumulated over the centuries.

Intellectually, I think that leaves me pretty much where I thought I was. I think the neo-Scholastic drive towards system is beautiful and needs to be re-energized in the modern Church. I don't think it has all that can be said philosophically or theologically, but it is (at the moment) an element that needs additional weight placed on it.

Liturgically, I suspect that doesn't take me very far on either. I've always thought that Pope Benedict was right in Summorum Pontificum: we need both the EF and the OF in some sort of symbiosis (or even creative tension). But, personally, I suspect that I'm attracted to those very elements of order and decorousness in the EF that might be seen as examples of modern rationalism, and rather less to the repetitions and discontinuities that (eg) attract Pickstock to the EF. If that's right -and if, as I've suggested above- it is a preference that is intellectually defensible, then my beefs with the OF are less beefs with modern systematization and rationalization, but rather with failures in that rationalization: the irruption of clowns and dinosaurs into a coherent structure.

                         Decorous and modern. (Vermeer was a Catholic, of course.)

Dumpy and unappealing: The Tara Erraught Case

There is, of course, only one Inspector Morse plot. Morse goes to concert and sees female singer. Enchanted by her, he starts behaving like a stage door Johnny. Unfortunately, he discovers she's murdered her gardener/lover and he has to put her in the chokey. Fade out on Morse listening to said Diva on record whilst looking wistful and wondering où sont les neiges d'antan.

One of the things about live theatre and particularly opera is that it is very easy to get enchanted by a physical presence of an actor. Unlike cinema or TV -where, although one can be obsessed with a Star, far more is due to the simple arrangement of flesh, perhaps as a result of the close up- on stage, how the actor moves and speaks is often far more striking. In opera, the case is even more complicated: one is primarily struck by a voice and the voice can lead you to see the physical presence as attractive or, perhaps more exactly, the attractiveness in that presence.

As I've said before, the correct male gaze at women is one that finds that enfleshed individuality attractive. Falling in love is being enchanted by a person. That includes the flesh, but it's not reducible to the flesh. A lot is sometimes made of how men are supposedly obsessed by female appearance whilst women (fortunately for us) are less fussy. Whatever truth there is in that, most men who haven't been corrupted by pornography to see women as just lumps of moving (or even static) meat still end up falling in love with people. To put it bluntly, idiots aside, even men, provided a woman is in the normal range of appearance, end up being entranced by more than just meat.

And so on to the case of Tara Erraught. I suppose it does have to be admitted that performers need to develop a thick skin: critics in general are not noted for their sensitivity or people skills. And whatever might be said about the specifics of any review, it's not unreasonable for a critic, in principle, to comment on the stage presence and physicality of an opera performer.

There are a number of different layers here. First, Tara Erraught is really rather straightforwardly attractive even in photos.

If we've reached the stage that our understanding of female attractiveness rules her out simply on the grounds she can't fit into a size 0 and isn't 6 foot + tall, so much the worse for us. Secondly, everyone seems to admit that she's a brilliant singer and actor. Even Rupert Christiansen (who seems to be at the centre of this storm) acknowledges this.

There is no doubt of the talent of this young Irish mezzo, based in Germany, who sings with vibrant assurance and proves herself a spirited comedian. But she is dumpy of stature and whether in bedroom déshabille, disguised as Mariandel or in full aristocratic fig, her costuming makes her resemble something between Heidi and Just William. Is Jones simply trying to make the best of her intractable physique or is he trying to say something about the social-sexual dynamic?

So, at the next level, is it simply that this role isn't right (physically) for her? This appears to be Christiansen's considered opinion in his defence of the original review:

So let me make myself clear: she is a very pretty girl with a delightful smile and an endearing stage presence. I would love to hear her sing Rossini’s Cenerentola or Rosina. But she cannot visually embody any conventional idea of Octavian, and I feel the production has wilfully, perhaps ironically, cast her against type. 

There is perhaps a rather better point here. Any actor will bring her personality (including her physique) to a role. The sort of 'taller more strapping' Octavian that Christiansen seems to prefer would provide a different interpretation of an adolescent male in love than someone of a different shape and personality. Christiansen, whilst acknowledging that a different interpretation may be intended here, doesn't really follow this through. (What does the different interpretation say 'about the social-sexual dynamic'?) At a superficial level, it seems implausible that Erraught couldn't play travesti roles with charm judging from the photo above.

High art is perhaps essentially Incarnational. By showing how the divine meets and illuminates the human individual, we forget that we are meat and become persons. (And take that vision outside the theatre into the world of everyday romantic encounters.) When a 'dumpy of stature' woman sings like an angel, we ought to forget the meat and see a Diva. Perhaps this is all (as I heard Kiri Te Kanawa suggest on the Today programme this morning) about a failure of the costume department to provide suitable dress. Perhaps it is about a (successful/unsuccessful) directorial vision that sees Octavian as a schoolboy uncomfortable in his own body. But let it not be about reducing singers (and humans in general) to the superficially attractive rather than vehicles of the transcendent.

Back to looking wistful and wondering où sont les neiges d'antan.

Zurbaran and death: art and order

Luminous order

I was slightly irritated on Friday by the LRB review of the Zurbaran exhibition in Brussels.

Creative artists, whose calling is to negate nothing by making something, can prove strangely drawn to inexistence – their own, if not the world’s in general...

A couple of versions of the lamb by Josefa de Obidos, strongly marked by Zurbarán’s influence, have the lamb in a similar pose on a slab that bears the tag: ‘occisus ab origine mundi’. [Killed from the beginning of the world.] It’s hard not to conclude that for de Obidos as for Zurbarán, dead is best, and, as the motto suggests, that things went bad from the get-go. 

For me, Zurbaran is one of those painters who precisely gets right the intensity of life and meaning, and describing this as a hankering for death -except insofar as it is an acknowledgment that this intensity points to a supernatural end rather than simply a natural one- gets him just completely wrong. But in getting him wrong, it reminded me of why the visual arts are essential to understanding the world, including the world of morality and politics.

For us -and 'us' here means those conservatives who believe in a perennial philosophy (as Webster's puts it) which is 'the philosophical tradition of the world's great thinkers from Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas to their modern successors dealing with problems of ultimate reality', there is a fundamental order to the world. Precisely how that order is conceptualized will differ according as you are a Thomist, a Platonist, a Confucian, a Stoic etc etc. But all these schools will share a sense that the human task is to discern and imitate that order. 

Discernment of order is under the aspects of truth, goodness and beauty, and, of these, it is perhaps beauty which is, in the modern world, most neglected. Art, when done properly, makes manifest that order: the rationality of the world becomes visible (or audible) rather than merely understood or desired.

Zurbaran's manifesting of order can be seen both in the form of the individual objects and in the relationship between them: to see his paintings aright is to be sent back into the world to discern a rational order which is not yet perfectly there: an order that exists in potentia, but not in actu. Moreover, that order, the astringency the review talks of, is also an order in our psychology: to see the world aright, we too have to be cleansed.

Art is central to politics because it teaches us to see properly. When presented with 'the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate', the traditionalist (or perhaps more exactly the Daily Mail) simply sees the correct order of things and the progressive simply sees a wrong to be righted. We see -well what do we see? We see through a glass darkly, and to see clearly requires a katharsis of self as well as intensity of focus. Wrestling with art is wrestling with that order which is obscured: it is learning to discern. In Zurbaran, not only does his chiaroscuro serve to illuminate the luminous form against a dark background (the still life above) but it serves to obscure the form (below): a reminder that, on earth, order exists only as a dimly glimpsed future promise and never as a fully achieved reality.

                                                       Through a glass darkly.

Sky Fairy Dust

Chesterton in Orthodoxy talks about the child's delight in tinsel and glitter and how this natural delight carries over to Catholicism and, in particular, to its liturgy and art. (Well, I think he does. But I've had a quick look and can't find the passage I remembered. Perhaps this is one of the many things people ought to have written.)

Frankly, most of the weekend was rather a drag: too many things done which I'd rather not have done; too many things done badly. And I've compounded the gloomy feeling which has remained on Monday morning by having a quick look at twitter and staring into that particular abyss which the World's view of serious Catholicism and its defenders. But despite all that, part of me -a rather unreasonably large part of me- feels as cheerful as possible after Sunday's canonizations.

I'm not going to try to rationalize it. It's just a sheer human delight in seeing lots of people in a good mood celebrating good things. There's something magical in seeing around a million people gathered to celebrate a uniquely Catholic occasion.

At this level, all the New Atheist sneers about 'sky fairies' have a point. Being a Catholic at times is like living in a fairy tale. Except, it's a fairy tale where a billion people live and worship in a two thousand year old institution, which in the twenty first century can attract one million people to a square framed by the glories of Renaissance architecture. (And has dancing Polish nuns. I didn't see any, but I'm sure it would have had dancing Polish nuns.) It's the paradox of a real fairy tale.

So, Nay Sayers of every kidney,  away with you for at least one day! It's a feeling of joy for which I claim absolutely no evidential value. But it's the inheritance of every Catholic in this season of Easter and I'm going to enjoy it.

O tempora! O mores!

Apologies for being rather quiet recently. (Not that, I suspect, such a blessed relief is the sort of thing one needs to apologize for...) Not only a large slab of work to be got through, but a slight detachment from the blooming buzzing confusion of the internet brought on by the normal emotional flatness after too much food and booze and too much squabbling on comboxes before Christmas.

Anyway, to ease myself gradually back into the white heat of the culture war that is Catholicism contra mundum...

I was flipping through The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse in the loo (as you do), when I came across this rather optimistic passage in the introduction:

I have given references in a good many cases to easily accessible English translations, especially when they are to be found in the English Hymnal or Hymns Ancient and Modern (penultimate edition), as one or other of these is to be found in most cultivated English households.

Now putting aside any nationalist quibbles about suspected hints that we beyond the Border would be content merely with back numbers of the Broons annuals in our libraries, it is unimaginable that anything similar could be written today (the first edition of the Book of Medieval Verse was 1928 but my printing is 1946). It's difficult to know where to start. A book of music? A book of Christian music? Any book that all educated people would be expected to have? Would we even expect cultivated homes to possess a copy of the Bible these days? (I'm afraid when mulling this over that the only book I suspected most 'cultivated' Scottish homes might be expected to possess these days would be Trainspotting. I'm simply going to ignore this thought as a rather troublesome nightmare.)

Without a shared (and deep) artistic culture, the world we inhabit is diminished. Our ability to pass on accumulated wisdom and solidarities to our children is also diminished. Religion of course isn't just a matter of culture: it is primarily about an openness to a real intelligence and agency that transcends the world. But human flourishing is a matter of our natural as well as our supernatural end. And access to that supernatural end is itself restricted if we live in a culture that at best ignores and even actively frustrates that supernatural end.

It's pretty clear that Pope Francis is not an obvious recruit to the sort of conservative, culture warfare that I generally espouse on this blog. That doesn't really bother me: Popes don't have to do everything; and, moreover, culture warfare needs the corrective of a constant reminder that the centre of our concerns isn't Virgil but Jesus. Moreover, the sort of popular piety that Francis clearly does strongly favour is itself a conservative cultural tradition: the sort of simple trust in established forms that leads an illiterate peasant to a traditional veneration of a shrine ought to lead the 'cultivated' to a veneration for traditional high culture (but which also ought to include veneration of that shrine).

Grace does not abolish nature but perfects it. Christianity does not abolish culture but perfects it. It is easy for conservatives to get trapped in traditional forms for their own sake and not see beyond them. But there is an equal danger in thinking that you can abolish culture and get to God without it. And that danger is particularly acute when the culture we would do without is precisely one that was shaped with reference to that supernatural end of the Beatific Vision.

I'm not sure what the Catholic equivalent of the English Hymnal would be. But in any case, I've got a copy of it, so I guess that means I'm cultivated, innit?

Advent antiphons: O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel


O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

Isaiah, viii, 14:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

(For explanation, see here.)

Advent antiphons: O Rex Gentium

O Rex Gentium

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.


Haggai, ii, 7:

And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the LORD of hosts.

 

(For explanation, see here.)

Advent antiphons: O Oriens

O Oriens

O Morning Star

splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness
and the shadow of death.

Wisdom. 7, 26:

For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness.

Hebrews, i, 3:

Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high

Malachi, iv, 2:

But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

(For explanation, see here.)

Advent antiphons: O Clavis David

                                                        King David

O Clavis David


O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.


Isaiah, xxii, 22:

And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.

Revelation, iii, 7:

And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write; These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth;

Isaiah, xlii, 7:

To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.

 

(For explanation, see here.)

Advent antiphons: O Radix Jesse

                                                              Jesse

O Radix Jesse

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.


Isaiah xi, 10:

And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.

Revelation, xxii, 16:

I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.



(For explanation, see here.)

Advent antiphons: O Adonai

                                                    God the Father


O Adonai


O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.


Exodus iii, 14:

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.


John, viii, 58:

Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

 

(For explanation, see here.)