A little light culture: "Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth"

That's a line from a Pharrell Williams song that redefines inane. I don't mean to discuss the song here. It's called "Happy" and I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. It has some merits. Williams does a good job of sounding like Marvin Gaye and you can dance to it. (And Williams may be having fun here as the above-cited line could have ironic intent. We can only hope so.)

What fascinated me about the song is that some people I know praised it on FaceBook. They are feminist people and were, just a few months ago, condemning the song "Blurred Lines", which Williams cowrote, produced, sang in and appeared in the video, as promoting date rape.

And all it takes is one empty bit of sentimental tripe for them to forgive and forget!

Unless, of course, they never really believed what they were saying in the first place. Going from "this guy is promoting rape" to "I just love this song" isn't just being a cheap date so much as it is not actually believing anything in the first place.

I'd humbly suggest that is the real problem. The outrage against "Blurred Lines" was tribal. It was a way to declare yourself a part of a tribal group and not a real threat to anyone. That is the way we do politics and public morality these days.

I use the "we" advisedly—we are increasingly tribal in our politics.

Saint Elizabeth: Turning the picture back into words

I will not put the picture up with this post. If you want to see it or see it again, it is here.

Phillip Hermogenes Calderon, the painter, was the son of a man who left the priesthood and the Catholic church to get married. He may have had no choice on the second decision after having made the first. One suspects his son Phillip wasn't taught to view the Catholic Church in a positive light.

He got the inspiration for the painting from a play about Elizabeth of Hungary by Charles Kingsley. The play sticks pretty close to the events of Elizabeth's life, as best as they can be known, but takes liberties with the ending. I'll get back to that ending at the ending of this post.

Okay, so what do we know about the real Elizabeth? I've been calling her a "Queen" but the truth is considerably more complicated than that because European royalty is complicated and weird. To give you a notion of how weird, sometimes a Duke can be more important than a Prince. Suffice to say that her husband, Louis, was the leader of Thuringia for ten years until his death.

At which point, Elizabeth became a terribly inconvenient figure on the local political scene. The widows of deceased rulers always were. The problem is that opposition to the new ruler tended to coalesce around the old Queen.

There was a well-established roles for such women to play in medieval society. In the first place, wives of rulers were encouraged to live lives of piety and generosity while their husbands were still alive. This fitted with accepted notions of womanly behaviour and it helped a positive image of the ruling family in the eyes of the people. Of course, the actions could be and probably usually were absolutely sincere. We still see today wives of powerful men who throw themselves into lives of good works.

At the same time, the great lady was also the subject of much erotic interest and it was not uncommon for stories with implicit erotic content to surface about them (implicit because telling a story with explicit content could get you dying a horrible death real fast). For example, there is the tale I cited before of the poor woman whom Elizabeth helped decamping with all her clothes and Elizabeth being unable to leave her bed because she was naked. There is also the story of Elizabeth putting a leper in the conjugal bed and her angry husband pulling back the covers to find a crucifix.

If their husbands died, a very likely outcome given medieval violence and medicine, women in Elizabeth's place were often encouraged to enter convents, sometimes quite forcefully encouraged.

Elizabeth is a bit of a rebel in that she becomes a tertiary, which is to say a lay-member, of the newly founded Franciscan order.  The Franciscans, and the Dominicans founded about the same time, did not stay inside convents but ventured out to serve the needs of the poor. That may have been less convenient to the man who replaced her husband as leader.

Another thing that may have been less than convenient to others was that Elizabeth took her considerable dowry with her. This was accumulated wealth her family had spent generations acquiring; her family might well have preferred to set her up in marriage that would consolidate both their wealth and power. Much of the legend about Elizabeth turns on this.

I should note that Elizabeth was far from unusual in not wanting to marry someone arranged by her family. And it's not hard to think why this might be. They would have arranged the marriage for their convenience, not hers, and shown up with this guy she didn't know or like who would then have the right to do to her everything a medieval husband had a right to do. And while her dowry would have given her family considerable incentive to set up such a marriage, it would also have given her more power to evade such a marriage.

And that is where the story gets a little icky. I say "icky" because stories like hers are fun to tell; stories like hers are the basis of fireside legends because they generally feature obvious black and white moral distinctions and brave heroes and heroines who fight for good and truth against tremendous odds. Enter into this otherwise story one Konrad von Marburg. Not matter how you try to spin his tale, Konrad is one nasty piece of work. He is a severe ascetic given to self flagellation. Like a lot of such people, he also seems to have enjoyed inflicting deprivation and pain on others. He was an inquisitor and  perfectly lived up to the worst stereotypes that go with that role. Even the old Catholic Encyclopedia, which did its level best to make Konrad look good reluctantly concluded there were serious problems:

In the exercise of this authority, even according to the sympathetic accounts of contemporary annalists, Conrad proved too severe and harsh. His assistants, Conrad Dorso, a Dominican lay brother, and John, a layman, were ignorant fanatics unqualified for such work. Conrad believed too easily the declarations of persons accused of heresy; on the strength of their statements, and without further investigation, others were arrested and treated as heretics. The accused either confessed their guilt and had their heads shaved for penance, or denied their guilt, were delivered as obstinate heretics to the secular arm, and perished at the stake. How great was the number of victims cannot now be ascertained.

That's a very roundabout way of admitting that Konrad was a ruthless fanatic who killed innocent people.

He could be a stock villain in a story like Elizabeth's. The problem is that he was her friend and confidant and that he owed much of his initial rise to power to her. After her death, which may have been hastened by the severe asceticism that he encouraged her to undertake (although we should not assume he did so against her will as the opposite is more likely), Konrad wrote up the case for Elizabeth being named a saint and the case was successful.

Jump forward to the 19th century. Saint Elizabeth's story is now viewed differently. Ann Radcliffe would have had a field day with the story and ended it with an Elizabeth-type women escaping her Konrad into the hands of the man who really loved her. And that is more or less the trajectory of her novel The Italian. Of course, she couldn't do that with Elizabeth herself as everyone knows Elizabeth dies. But what you could do is have the dying Elizabeth change her mind and renounce her renunciations on her death bed and tell Konrad that she looks forward to an afterlife of erotic bliss in the arms of her husband when she meets him again in heaven. Why am I so sure you could do that? Because that is exactly what Charles Kingsley did with the story.

More next Tuesday.

How do you get to be a sexy saint?

Before I begin, let me state the obvious point that "sexy saints" are the work of the fevered imaginations of fans who come along after the saint dies. As with the many homoerotic images of Saint Sebastian and Saint John the Evangelist, the above portrayal has no credible connection to the real Saint Elizabeth. On the other hand, there is no reason a saint cannot be sexy nor is there any reason a sexy person cannot become a saint (although, alas, I must admit I have no personal experience of the challenges of being a good Christian while being a sex object). Perhaps God's grace is at work in these sexy portrayals of his saints?

The key element for a saint being transformed into a sexy icon, as near as I can tell, is for them to be young and plausibly vigorous. Saint Elizabeth was only 24 when she died but was most likely quite sickly in real life. The artist's imagination soon fixed that; people who kick off that early rarely look as strong and healthy as the young woman pictured above, whose image suggests healthy food and regular exercise rather than sickness and fast-approaching death. And this portrayal is far from unique. Check out images of her and you will notice that she is usually presented as young and beautiful. And often with breasts and hips. That's unusual in portrayals of female saints where the breasts and hips tend to be small and hidden behind drapery.

As we will see in coming posts, this also applies to the literary tradition associated with Elizabeth where stories of her hiding secrets under her cloak and in her bed abound.

It is true even in very recent portrayals. Consider A-M Religious gifts who offer a six inch high carved statue of Saint Elizabeth. The carving is the work of Conrad Moroder. Take a moment to go visit the image. Then go to this page and look at the other female saints he has carved. Moroder is not averse to carving the women saints as beautiful women and girls but he gives Saint Elizabeth a little extra sexual oomph that he does not bestow on others. I won't violate his copyright by reproducing the whole image here but I think this little portion of the larger image constitutes fair use:

As they used to say in the 1980s, Is she cold or happy to see us? That is a deliberately erotic image.

Anyway, back to the painting at the top. It is the work of a man named Phillip Hermogenes Calderon who was the son of a former Catholic priest. He was inspired to paint it by an anti-Catholic play by a hugely influential (but now forgotten) figure of the Victorian era named Charles Kingsley. Kingsley feared and hated Catholicism but he revered Saint Elizabeth. The story of how that reverence led to such an overtly sexual portrayal is an interesting one. I'll take it up Thursday.

"That all may promote authentic economic development that respects the dignity of all peoples."

Isn't it great to be able to pray for capitalism? Capitalism is, after all, the only system that can, although it will not necessarily do so, produce economic development that respects the dignity of all peoples.

That's Pope Francis's prayer intention for the New Year. I doubt somehow that he means capitalism, although he should.

For the first year of his papacy, Francis used the intentions that Benedict had already set out so we might think that this is our first sight of the real Francis. It isn't. The very fact that Benedict's intentions for the previous year were all set out already, tells us that these things are a bureaucratic exercise. Francis gives some guidance and then approves the final text but that line is the work of a clerk as in cleric as in the sort of person responsible for clericalism.

I mention that because it's important to regularly remind ourselves what clericalism really looks like. The giveaway is the word "authentic". As I've said many times before, "authentic" and "authenticity" make a certain sense when applied to objects but anytime you see the concept applied to people you can be sure that you're being conned. The word "authentic" placed before some human experience implies expertise in judging authenticity and if you trace that claim to its root, you'll find a cleric, although not always an ordained cleric.

If you wanted to proceed with this, the next step would be to set out what counts as authentic. That in turn would require a committee. Then you'd need to put controls in place that would allow authorities to take action to stop "inauthentic" economic development and so on down the line through all the steps to serfdom.

The good news is that the intention is vague enough that we can all pray for it and mean whatever we want to mean. I cheerfully prayed it yesterday at mass intending my prayer to be one for more economic liberty.

Love is ...

Those of my age will remember that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a line of panties that featured a painfully cute little cartoon character and a caption that always began "Love is ...". "Love" always turned out to be something saccharine and, as The Last Psychiatrist would add, something narcissistic because it was intended to make the wearer feel good about herself rather than encourage her to contemplate loving a man sexually, which, given the location of the printing, is what it should have been about.

Anyway, Dalrock, a blogger I know little about besides the fact that Instapundit reads him and often links to him has hit on something really important this week. I think he gets this one half right but that half is really good stuff:

One of the effects of feminism is that men of my generation have had a much wider opportunity to cook. I can’t think of any men my age or younger who don’t know how to cook. Moreover, I can’t think of any men of my generation or younger who don’t enjoy cooking. This is in stark contrast to the women of the same generations, who (typically) view cooking as an indignity. The reason for the difference in attitude boils down to what cooking is all about. Cooking is an act of love, an act of service to others. It is an opportunity to care for others in a very fundamental way, to literally nourish them through the work of your own hands. This is precisely what troubles the modern woman so much about cooking (or cleaning, or changing diapers). Serving others in the mind of a feminist is an indignity, so cooking, cleaning, or any other act of service and love is the object of revulsion. Women now actually compete to show off their miserliness in caring for others, each trying to outdo the rest in proving they are the greatest scrooge with love. It has gone so far that large numbers of women are quite proud of the fact that they have never learned to cook or otherwise care for others.

I say that this is only half right because he blames feminism for the problem. That's simply not true. The attitude he describes was already common in women of my mother's generation, which preceded second wave feminism.

I think the attitude at base here is very much like that attributed to Sex and the City, which was that women should be able to "F*&k like a man". The implication being that men had sex purely for pleasure without desire for love and commitment. The problem with that thinking is that while some men do indeed do that all the time and while most men try to do that at some times, most men don't do that most of the time. To really "F*** like a man in the way most men actually do it, a woman would need to want to care for, nurture, encourage and support the man she has sex with while willingly accepting that many of the times she wants his love he just isn't going to feel like it—in other words, it would mean going back to what our grand parents understood as married love.

A similar false parallel was drawn with work. The assumption was that men went to work for self-fulfillment and  that what women did while "trapped in the home" was done "for others". Women, tired of living for others, wanted to be "like men". The problem with that is that while some men no doubt did behave as imagined, most didn't. Millions of men went to jobs they hated as an act of love. They did it to nourish others by the work of their hands.

And thus the recurring issue of women wanting "to have it all". Women, rightly, sought the right to join the workforce but expected that, in doing so, they would find a way to be truer to themselves only to discover that even the best jobs consist mostly of tedious, boring work that can only be made meaningful if we do it as a service to others.

One of the many paradoxes of love is that you must experience the one you love as an obstacle to really love them. This so because it is the sense of their being an obstacle that allows us to recognize them as a truly other being whom we need to reach out to love. The person with whom we never felt frustrated or angry with, the person whom, indeed, we didn't sometimes wonder if life wouldn't be better without them, isn't a real person at all but a projection of our narcissistic fantasies. (And this applies most of all to our attempts to love God.)  Everytime we find ourselves crashing into them as an obstacle, that is an opportunity to love.

Remember Kate Bolick?

I’d spent the past year with a handsome, commitment-minded man, and these better qualities, along with our having several interests in common, allowed me to overlook our many thundering incompatibilities. 

Everyone of those "thundering incompatibilities" was an opportunity to love.

But feminism, despite its many problems, didn't create the sense that the most important thing in life is to be true to yourself and that we should try to eliminate from our innermost circle all the people who prevent us from being true our "authentic selves". Feminism is often ugly because it is a symptom of that disease but it is not the disease itself. Women and men were already starting to think the way before feminism and the ugly sort of feminism that is rightly deplored would not have been possible is we hadn't already made that prior move of thinking that the most important thing in life was to be true to ourselves instead of what it really is, being true to another.

(And, no, Shakespeare did not advise us to do this; Polonius is an idiot about everything else, that this spectacularly bad advice is exceptionally credited as a "modern" way to think tells us a whole lot about what is wrong with modern life and nothing about Shakespeare.)

That is Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. I've left her too big for the frame on purpose.

Or, to put on our Magritte hat, that is not Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. I know, Magritte and his fans are such tedious bores.

So let's take another tack. The men responsible for that picture—there are two, one who painted it and the other who wrote the play that inspired him to paint it—had never actually seen Saint Elizabeth because she had been dead some six hundred years before they came along. The event portrayed is Elizabeth's great renunciation of all her wealth and possessions when she set out to live a new life after the death of her husband.

What we know for sure is that she knelt before an altar and placed her hands on it to make a great renunciation of all she had in this world, and she had a considerable amount to renounce being a queen. Did she actually take all her clothes off? It's possible but not likely; it's almost a certainty that she did not get naked, that part being a Victorian fantasy about her.

That said, getting naked is a recurring theme in the pious tales that are told of Elizabeth. For example, in Charles Forbes René de Montalembert's account of her life there is a tale of Elizabeth bringing home a poor woman she found collapsed from sickness in the street. After Elizabeth has taken care of her and nursed her back to health, the woman decamps stealing all of Elizabeth's clothing. The good Count de Montalembert concludes this anecdote with Elizabeth unable to leave her bed because she has no clothes but praying in gratitude because she got to be naked just like her Lord.

Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that this story sounds suspiciously like the sort of elaborate tale that might be told to cover up some royal hanky-panky except that the count was also writing some six hundred years after the events. The truth is that that Saint Elizabeth, like Saint Sebastian, was one of those saints that sexy stories accumulated around. It's not difficult to imagine the scene above spinning out into some elaborate sexual fantasy. It was, in fact, part of a sexual fantasy of Charles Kingsley's, he is the man who wrote the play that inspired the painting. I thought I'd spend some time writing about this aspect of the memory of Saint Elizabeth this January as this is the month of the Saint Agnes. More to come as the month progresses ...

A picture to ponder (without comment or explanation for the present)