A call to rebellion

"... because personalism drew upon Catholic social theory, its notion of community drew upon a heritage of corporatist thinking that linked the person to the intermediate collectivities of family, church, and nation. In this way, the individual would be protected from the depredations of the modern state. Significantly, in contrast to Fascism, which also deployed a communitarian, corporatist language, it refused to countenance the swallowing of these "natural" communities by the political state." (The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970, by Michael Gauvreau p 24)

In theory anyway. In practice, the social activists and politicians who grew out of the Quiet Revolution were only too willing to allow the government to swallow up organic communities. The wonderful thing about the Gauvreau book is that he gives us some inkling of why that happened. For the clerical activists pushing Action Catholique groups in Quebec in the first half of the twentieth century encouraged young Catholics to think of their parents' religious beliefs as empty.

Any evaluation of the cultural impact of Catholic Action must therefore take as its starting point the meaning of words such as "solitude," "community," "anxiousness," and "authentic," which recurred over and over again in Quebec between 1931 and the mid-1950s. What was significant that these words represented religious values that were always positively attributed to young people, and always in reference to the negative qualities of conformity, complacency, individualism, hypocrisy, a sterile obsession with moralizing, and bad faith, all of which marked the religious experience of the previous generation. (Gauvreau, p 15)

And I can testify that it didn't stop in the 1950s. These are the values my parents taught me when I was growing up in Quebec in the 1970s. It was also what I was taught in Religion (they stopped calling it "Catechism") classes at the Catholic High School I attended in Quebec in those years. And you can still hear this stuff from the pulpit of many Catholic churches in Quebec today (preached to mostly empty pews).

And the effect this was to have was disastrous for the church. To teach young people that institutions need to be preserved while, at the same time, teaching them that the people currently running these institutions are a bunch of lazy, moralistic hypocrites who have subverted those institutions was a recipe for that disaster.

And note that this was all going on before Vatican 2! There was, within the ranks of priests, monks, friars and nuns serving the church, an active rebellion ready to pick up the ball and run with it long before Vatican 2.

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.

That's Raymond Chandler describing a world that, at first glance, seems utterly unlike the Catholic Church, although he is talking about the same period in history, the 1930s to 1950s. And it would be unfair to simply brush off this generation of reformers as deluded and selfish. They grew up with a church that had lost its way and needed to be reformed. On the other hand, it is painfully obvious, with the benefit of hindsight, that there reforms were a disaster. (Well, it should be, Pope Francis seems to think that the solution is to drive off the cliff again only faster this time.)

But what is the solution? There has been a lot of talk of a "hermeneutics of continuity" that is to be preferred over a "hermeneutics of disruption". But that needs content. What should be the basis of the continuity. Talk to some Catholic traditionalists and you will leave with the impression that "continuity" means to not reform at all.

Whatever a worthwhile reform is, it cannot be an abstract exercise and it cannot be a political exercise. It needs to draw on something deeper than that. That is why I favour a Catholic Romanticism. Not Romantic Catholicism because I don't want Romanticism to modify Catholic. I think Romanticism is the right way to approach the past but not any Romanticism. Romanticism needs to be modified and Catholic aims and goals is what it needs. I'm sure all that will seem silly to some. I don't blame them but I think the notion can be given real content.

Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul

Image of The Conversion of Saint Paul" by Caravaggio is courtesy of Wikipedia.

"Paul, more than anyone else, has shown us what man really is, and in what our nobility consists, and of what virtue this particular animal is capable."

Chrysostom, quoted above from today's Office of Readings, is speaking of Paul's conduct, of the way he lived his life. That's why he says that Paul has "shown" us. But Paul also told us. There is no better place to start reading about theological anthropology and morality than Paul.

Now, if you had told me that thirty years ago, I would have called you crazy and quoted bits of Paul that made him look like a nasty piece of work. It took until three years ago to really understand Paul.

Constancy

Just a few pages past the quote discussed in my last post, we get a contrast between Elinor and her mother. It's an interesting contrast because both are in agreement about what should be done. The difference is not the outcome of their decision-making but the way the decision lines up, or not, with their feelings.

Mrs. Dashwood has been greatly upset by Fanny who has suggested to her that Elinor may be attempting to win her brother Edward's affection. And there can be little doubt that Elinor could easily wish for such a thing and it is only through considerable restraint that she is keeping what she might wish from becoming a hope. Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters believe that love should be allowed to run its course and, should a man in line to inherit a fortune (or one already in possession of one) fall in love with a girl of only small fortune so be it. Fanny, on the other hand, can only see a girl after a fortune and she seeks to warn Mrs. Dashwood that such a thing will not be allowed.

And here we might, as difficult as this may seem, pause to show a little charity towards Fanny. Her job in life is not to distribute wealth or to promote social equality but to look out for the interests of her family. She would have known, as would have all of Jane Austen's readers, that even great fortunes could be lost. In the modern west, we can be egalitarian because we are relatively well insulated from destitution. We imagine that everyone could give something up and we'd all still be comfortably well off. Fanny is cold and calculating to be sure but being cold and calculating is a matter of degree; we can be certain that Mrs. Dashwood, Marianne and even my beloved Elinor, do not imagine a world in which any of their class might marry a male servant out of love. By the standards of the day, Fanny is no better than she ought to be but she is at least as good as she ought to be.

What all that adds up to is that, much as we might wish her more open-hearted, Fanny's attitude is not so unreasonable as to be simply dismissed. Even today, it is entirely reasonable for a parent (or other relative acting on their behalf) to respond with some suspicion towards someone who seeks their son's or daughter's love. And so, even though we are on her side, we might wonder at the strength of Mrs. Dashwood's reaction to what Fanny has said.

In any case, it is while so stirred up that she receives the offer of a cottage some distance away from Norland and that makes a difference in how she decides.

She needed no time for deliberation or inquiry. Her resolution was formed as she read. The situation of Barton, in a county so far distant from Sussex as Devonshire, which, but a few hours before, would have been a sufficient objection to outweigh every possible advantage belonging to the place, was now its first recommendation. To quit the neighbourhood of Norland was no longer an evil; it was an object of desire; it was a blessing, in comparison of the misery of continuing her daughter-in-law's guest; and to remove for ever from that beloved place would be less painful than to inhabit or visit it while such a woman was its mistress. She instantly wrote Sir John Middleton her acknowledgment of his kindness, and her acceptance of his proposal; and then hastened to shew both letters to her daughters, that she might be secure of their approbation before her answer were sent.

Her decision, as it happens, is a good one. We can see, however, that, in another mood, she might just as easily have made a bad one. Contingency has played a huge role in what she does. And, had her mood inclined her to make a bad decision, she would have made it irrevocably.

Elinor supports the decision but the role her feelings play is very different.

Elinor had always thought it would be more prudent for them to settle at some distance from Norland, than immediately amongst their present acquaintance. On that head, therefore, it was not for her to oppose her mother's intention of removing into Devonshire. The house, too, as described by Sir John, was on so simple a scale, and the rent so uncommonly moderate, as to leave her no right of objection on either point; and, therefore, though it was not a plan which brought any charm to her fancy, though it was a removal from the vicinity of Norland beyond her wishes, she made no attempt to dissuade her mother from sending a letter of acquiescence.

There are a lot of words here but they do not carry equal weight. Notice the emphasis on "that". It was Jane Austen's choice to do so. The point we are to take is that there are other heads on which she might well oppose her mother's decision. And we should be able to figure out what those are for the second most important word in that paragraph is "wishes". Elinor has always thought it prudent for them to settle "at some distance" from Norland but this is rather more distance than her "wishes" would have it.

She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.

Austen is too careful a writer for us to not take her word choice very seriously. It matters a whole lot that Elinor's feelings towards Edward at this point are wishes and not hopes or expectations.  Had she allowed her feelings to proceed so far, she might have stood against her mother's choice.

Another to think about it would be to ask ourselves whose decision is most in line with their feelings. At first glance, we might say Mrs. Dashwood for her decision is in complete harmony with her feelings at the time she made the decision. To put it that way, however, is to see the problem for, at other times, it would not be in line with her feelings. And how strong can your feelings really be if they are there one minute and gone the next? Elinor, on the other hand, recognizes that she has a divided self. She realizes that her feelings are often at war with one another, pulling her in two directions at once. Her feelings, I would argue, are stronger for they don't wax and wane depending on shifting circumstances.

The third most important word in the paragraph describing Elinor's feelings and choices above is "prudent". Prudence is a virtue and we could not deny that Elinor has it. But prudence is a matter of degree as seen by Austen's choice to modify it with the word "more". It is not a foregone conclusion that Elinor will make the more prudent choice; in some cases, she might allow her feelings to overrule prudence. Not because she would abandon sense for sensibility alone (we might say "sola sensibility" here because Austen's theological position vis a vis traditional protestantism is very much to the point here) but because she possesses another virtue, to a degree that her mother does not, that is more important than prudence.

The virtue that Mrs. Dashwood is weak in by contrast to her daughter is called constancy. I don't have time to prove it now but for Jane Austen, constancy is the key virtue, higher even than prudence and that is saying something. A good Christian, Austen would rate faith, hope and love above constancy but she would also regard those as graces, which is to say that they are virtues we can only hope to attain with God's help. Of the virtues we can attain through our own efforts, constancy is the greatest. That Mrs. Dashwood lacks constancy is clear from the above; in a different mood she would have chosen differently. That she, Marianne and Elinor all have strong feelings is counted in their favour—to have strong feelings is a virtue, perhaps even a grace—but virtues don't stand by themselves. Without the other virtues, no one virtue is any good.

That, and I'll finish here, also applies to constancy. Here is a dictionary definition of constancy:

the quality of being unchanging or unwavering, as in purpose, love, or loyalty; firmness of mind; faithfulness.

We can see that other virtues are listed. The definition does not speak of constancy in sloth, hatred or resentment.

Sense?

"She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect."

I've known people like that, men as well as women.

"She" in this case is Elinor Dashwood. There is no character in literature I identify with quite as much as I do with Elinor. Not that I lived up to her standards. It is more of an aspirational thing than a matter of commonality; I think I'm a lot like her but not so much as I should be.

The issue here is exactly what the title of the novel would have us suspect: sense and sensibility. Elinor is a perfect balance of both. That, I believe, is the key to understanding this novel. The key moment of Pride and Prejudice is the one where Elizabeth says, "Till this moment, I never knew myself." I had a moment like that myself this year. But that sort of moment could never happen with Elinor. Elinor already knows herself.

If we have a look at the full quote from Pride and Prejudice, we can see it all clearly.

``How despicably have I acted!'' she cried. -- ``I, who have prided myself on my discernment! -- I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust. -- How humiliating is this discovery! -- Yet, how just a humiliation! -- Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. -- Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.''

Elinor would never court prepossession and ignorance and drive reason away. Her sister Marianne, on the other hand, could easily do so. And does.

Exactly how she does so is what we see in the quote at the top. From conjecture to belief, what does that mean? The explanation comes after the dash in three progressive emotions: wish becomes hoping and hoping becomes expectation. But how?

Well, I know how I'd explain it. I'd go with Robert Solomon's argument that each emotion embodies a judgment. There is the judgment that leads to the emotion. Wishing is based on a judgment about facts. We always wish for something. But there is a second judgment that follows. We become aware that feel an emotion and that ought to imply a further judgment.

It won't lead to a further judgment unless we train ourselves to make it. There are natural progressions to emotions and Elinor, for we are surely in her head here, has diagnosed one accurately. I say progressions for they don't inevitably lead the way they do here. I've known people who go from wishing to resignation. The point is that it's an habitual way of proceeding. Elinor knows because she has seen it many times before. Marianne and her mother don't know because they don't have "sense".

"Sense" cannot, and does not, mean rationality here. All three of these women are equally rational.  They are, in fact, equal in both rationality and feeling. Sense is something else. I have some notions of what that might be but I'm withholding judgment for now. That is, after all, what Elinor would do.

Annie Gertrude Costigan

Her early life

In 1901, the Costigan family was destitute. The census has them living at an unspecified address in Duke Ward. They may have moved so as to be closer to the home for incurables where Denis Costigan lay dying. Of what he was dying we cannot be certain. The given cause of death was rheumatism but that is not a fatal disease. It is, however, possible to die from complications arising from rheumatism. We have no way of knowing whether that is what killed him. All we know is that he was suffering from rheumatism when he died.

Things had gone very badly for Denis (pronounced Dennie) in recent years. His empire of sailor boarding houses had slowly collapsed with the replacement of sailing ships by steam. The last had been closed and had reverted to a family dwelling. He would shortly die and his wife Mary would follow him a year later, a victim of tuberculosis. His eldest son, James, was a “clerk", which was probably just a euphemism for a boy who hoped to be a hustler as his father had been. (Shocking as this is to us, none of the Costigan children could have had more than a Grade 5 education, if that.) John and Mary, both in their teens, were apprentices at a bottle-brush factory—if that sounds Dickensian, it’s because it was. Catherine (so baptized but known to us as Kathleen) was seven years old and Josephine was five. None of these was earning enough money to support the family. Annie, more about her later, was not living with the family in 1901. In the normal course of events, the soon to be orphaned children would have been put up for adoption and the family would have disappeared. That isn’t what happened.

What did happen is that the family held together. They would get set up in life and would have children who would rise to prominence. That rise is so impressive as to be inconceivable. Even in the good times, the Costigans had been ghetto dwellers far excluded from polite society. And yet the children of the youngest surviving daughter Kathleen would be friends with the Hazen family, who were from the very upper crust of Saint John. No one living in the Irish Catholic ghetto in Saint John in 1901 would have thought such a thing possible and most people in upper reaches of Saint John society would have done everything in their power to prevent it happening.

The heroine of this story lived at this address in 1901.

I can’t be certain it was that house because I don’t know when it was built. Streets also get renumbered. But the address we know for certain: 264 Germain Street. This was the home of John S Thomas. A ship’s pilot, he lived here with his wife, his brother, his sister in law a lodger and an Irish servant, Annie Gertrude Costigan.

As a maid of all work, Annie’s day started at six am, when she would have gotten up to light the fire. Then she would make breakfast and, while the family was eating, she’d make all the beds. Her day would continue like that until the family had all finished dinner and the dishes were cleaned and put away. That’s 13 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. She would have been allowed to leave the house to go to church on Sunday morning for mass and perhaps to attend a dance on Saturday night after her work was done.

In 1901, Annie Gertrude was thirteen years old!

We look down on domestic service now but her getting that job was a major achievement on her part. Domestic service was the best-paying job an Irish girl could get in those days. She was the principle breadwinner for her family. When her brother James died, Annie was the one who purchased a grave. She kept working as a domestic until all her brothers and sisters were set up in life. Only then, in her early thirties, does she gets married. Once married, she gets the heck out of Dodge, and who could blame her. Now, Annie Campbell, she moves first to Halifax and then to Boston. Her story after that is pretty well known in the family. I don’t know that she ever told anyone about her time in service.

Her name

In later years, Annie gave her name as “Anna” when filling out official documents, probably out of shame thinking that her parents had made a mistake in baptizing were with a diminutive. They had not. “Annie” is a good Irish name (one that would be good to bring back in the family). It is derived from “Nainsí” which is the Gaelic form of Agnes. That, in turn, is derived from the Greek hagios and Hebrew qâdosh. When applied to a person, it meant “hallowed, consecrated, set apart for a sacred purpose or office, made ‘holy to God’.” (It’s the feast of Saint Agnes today.)

Aunt Annie had a harder childhood that you can imagine. At home, she lived in conditions that you only find in third world countries today (the atmosphere on Germain would have, despite the hard work and long hours, been considerably more sanitary than the cholera- and tuberculosis-infested slum she grew up in and that may have saved her life). She saw her mother and father and nine of her twelve siblings die horrible, lingering deaths. She worked long, hard hours to support her family when no one else could and she put off her own happiness until everyone else was taken care of. If you are descended from her, her sister Kathleen, or her brother John, you owe her a huge debt.

Emotions, rationality, morality and "Catholic Romanticism"

We easily allow ourselves to be persuaded that our emotions are irrational. When someone tells you that "you're being emotional" they mean that your judgments are unreliable because your emotions are governing you. The implication is that it is immoral to be emotional.

On the other hand, we also recognize that the person incapable of feeling emotions is likely to be, as Jane Austen described Mr. John Dashwood, "cold-hearted, and rather selfish". Here, emotion is a prerequisite for being moral. The Gospel tells us that Jesus was moved with pity.

Robert Solomon argues that emotions are judgments but also dispositions. To be afraid is to be afraid of something, to love is to love someone and so on down the roster of emotions. At the same time, to be angry or jealous or suspicious is often the consequence of a life-time of training ourselves to be that way.

In addition, there are feelings that, unlike full-blown emotions, aren't directed at anything in particular. Anxiety is the feeling that bad things are about to happen—when I am anxious I have no idea where the crap is going to come from but I'm sure it will hit soon. Similarly, Thos. was telling me a while ago that he has patients who suffer from severe stress problems that are triggered by their own body responses to stress—they notice that their heart is running fast and that makes them nervous so their heart starts running even faster so they get more nervous so they break out in a sweat which makes them even more nervous ... lather, rinse, repeat until they have to take you away in an ambulance. I've done something like this on a smaller scale when I've had too much coffee and my own stress level makes me think that something must be wrong even though there is no fact or situation to justify my concern.

This all happens because our emotional responses are unconscious—a right-brain phenomenon. We often become aware of being uneasy without being consciously aware of what in specific is making us uneasy. We can focus on the feeling rather than looking for what caused it. You could say that feelings don't rise to the level of an emotion. I once heard someone say that anxiety is what you feel when you don't have the courage to have an emotion; that's too broad a generalization but it is true some of the time. (It took me a longer time than it should have to become a real adult because I lived in an almost constant state of anxiety because I was scared to have actual emotions towards the people closest to me.)

Cognitive?

We cannot simply dismiss emotions as irrational. The tendency to do so is rooted in a number of things. It is undeniably true that emotions can be wrong, even very wrong. I can be angry at my sister but later discover that she had not done the thing that I did not like. It's also true that emotions are hard to reverse—once I'm worked up into a state of high dudgeon, I can't easily calm down even when shown that my original reasons for being angry are unjustified.

But lots of human activities can sometimes be wrong without being qualified as irrational. Courts occasionally convict innocent people and instruments occasionally give incorrect readings. Our faith in these things is not based on their being infallible but rather on their being correct much more often than not. (A false conviction rate of even one percent would be regarded as ridiculously high.) The same should be true of emotions. We notice when emotions are unjustified because that is a relatively rare phenomenon. We don't notice the many, many times our emotions are correct. And it must be this way: if our emotions were not highly reliable cognitive indicators they would have been evolved out of the human race centuries ago.

Anterior and posterior emotion

When we worry about the rationality of an emotion, we typically do so as a posterior phenomenon. I start to feel anger and stop and ask myself whether the anger is justified. Even if I decide that my anger is justified, I should think carefully about how I react and I might, I often do as a personal matter, do my best to hide my anger even though I I believe that anger to be justified.

We think less often about the anterior rational process. We don't worry so much about the habits and ways of thinking that incline us to have certain emotional responses in the first place. But the first way people jump tells us a lot about them. In The Philadelphia Story, Tracey Samantha Lord rejects George because he suspected her of infidelity on the eve of their wedding. His suspicion is not ungrounded. Tracey was drunk and isn't entirely certain what she did or didn't do. She certainly did something—she flirted with and amorously kissed another man. She did not, however, have sex with him as George suspects and she herself fears. In the end, after she is cleared and George is reassured, she leaves him because she thinks that his initial response should have been to trust her. She would prefer a husband who would instinctively take her side.

That's analogous to the way Catholic moralists talk about conscience. That is the opposite of the way we usually think of conscience. In our culture, we think of conscience as a posterior phenomenon: I do something and then start to question whether I should have done it. Catholic moralists recognize that that is part of conscience but believe and argue that anterior conscience is the more important thing; that it is more important to have a disposition to react in a certain way in the first place rather than to correct mistakes afterward.

Emotions have to be part of this. Empathy is a trained emotion; we have to spend years learning how to be empathetic. This is true of a wide range of emotions, both good and bad. I had a relative who spent her entire life training herself to lose her temper when others failed to respond as she wished. She was highly intelligent and she never changed so it obviously worked for her. People got scared off and didn't challenge her. Of course, they also got scared off and kept their distance so she ended up having very few close friends despite having a very large social network. (She also, and this was probably narcissism, rejected other people's emotions as illegitimate any time they did not line up with her assessments.)

Emotional disposition is a kind of moral fitness. It isn't a matter of making moral choices. That is a cold activity, something like a moral calculus. The relative I mention above also used to exhort others to "be more charitable". What she meant by that was to make more effort to see the good in others. I don't think she realized, however, that she herself was not a good role model in this regard. She grasped the principle perfectly but hadn't done the moral training to make herself better at it. Charity was not an anterior emotion for her.

Moral fitness is hard work because we don't have direct access to the thing we are trying to change. We can't adjust it the way we can move the thermostat or put on a sweater when we want to be warmer. It's more of a long-term project that involves changing our habits and showing constancy much as is the case if we want to get into better physical shape.

Catholic Romanticism

One of the things that a certain kind of romanticism did was to value emotions as rational ways of being human. The Enlightenment emphasized rationality but the rationality it emphasized was a narrowly proscribed rationality. That is to say, Enlightenment thinkers set out to be rational by outlawing a lot of human behaviour as irrational. That produced a counter-reaction. At first the reaction was to reject rationality and embrace feeling (the term at the time was "sensibility") as something separate from and superior to rationality. For many people, this is what Romanticism did. Others argue that it was an attempt to expand what counted as irrational so as to include some emotional responses.

(At the same time, this sort of Romanticism, as Oakeshott argued, would have to expand what counted as irrational. Some kinds of activity that meet the Enlightenment requirements for rationality perfectly should be recognized as irrational and monstrous.)

That sort of Romanticism appeals to me. It is not what everyone means by Romantic. I would, even though many would refuse to do so, recognize Jane Austen as Romantic and even have tendency to see her as the exemplary Romantic.

I would further, however, modify Romanticism with the adjective "Catholic". I would not accept "Romantic Catholicism" even though there are aspects of it that I mind find congenial because I think that when we redeem Romanticism from most of its sins when we modify it with Catholic. This will be, I hope, something of a theme of this blog as I go forward.