Sin before suffering

Wrapping up the Jarrett. I've never read a book like it and the further I get into it the more bizarre it becomes. I don't know where its academic utility would be exactly - perhaps not for history; more, I think, for training people in how to be literary critics or commentators or psychoanalysts, which I think was his idea too, to some extent. I do know that I would love to write books in this one's style, but I don't have the general knowledge, or the in-depth understanding of a given era.

A history of the imagination, it calls itself, from Victoria's accession to World War One; a history of the more changeable bits of collective thinking that seem so immutable when you're the one thinking them. A self-confessedly Jungian history, with an unexpectedly dramatic tone - almost something serialized about they way he organizes it, the way Conan Doyle and Victoria and Gladstone and Disraeli pop in and out of focus . . .

The other night I was struck by an account from the "Watchers upon the high towers" chapter, which is full of apocalypse. Many people before 1881 thought the world would end that year, and many people after 1881 thought the world had ended - that they were now in post-Rapture chaos or the reign of Christ on earth (I can never keep all those Christian stories straight). Jarrett mentions one extremely popular lecturer and author, Josiah Strong, who I'd never heard of before, who believed that the Christians of the United States had it in their power:

". . . during the next ten or fifteen years to hasten or retard the coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years." But first they must stop letting members of inferior races into America, since only the Anglo-Saxons were "exponents of a pure spiritual Christianity". Then they must steer clear of idleness, atheism, popery, alcohol and above all socialism, "which attempts to solve the problem of suffering without eliminating the factor of sin". . . the Librarian of Congress later said the book had an impct second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Looking into this sort of thing strikes me as incredibly important, and incredibly underdone in terms of how history is presented to dilettantes like myself at least. . . the beginnings of ideas, the emotional bases of what we're convinced is our rationalism, seem to me like one of the most important things you could know about history. Socialism isn't just a problem because the rich have to sacrifice some of their wealth, it's an emotional problem because you don't know that the people it benefits have done anything to deserve that we attempt to relieve their suffering - there's a moral angle to the history of the massive resistance to socialism in the United States that needs to be understood, if not admired . . .

No fat chicks, or meat

Last night Derek Jarrett introduced me to Frances Cobbe, who invented Freudianism long before Freud, equal in many details besides that of being ass-backwards, much more appealing and I suspect potentially a great deal more useful in terms of the treatment of mental disorders. But, you know, Frances being a chick, and a fairly fat chick at that, nobody cared and generations of men and women have been confidently informed they'd really like to fuck their parents if they could. You can read about it from here. I'm sick and working from home so no monster posting today.

Also last night I was already starting to feel like ass, but the F-word took me out for dinner just coz anyways to our favourite vegetarian place here, a little shopfront called L'Element Terre. Get it? Get it? Isn't it beautifully twee? Every time we go I think I'd like to open a restaurant just like it with the same name in the city we settle down in, but my guess is that if we do so in Australia we'll get gay-bashed. Anyways, it's Belgian vegetarian, which means lots of cheese and fish, I don't think there was more than three or four vegan options on the menu, but that's alright for us. For the second time - first was at the Berber place further up the same road - I had harira. Man, that is a fucking good soup concept. I think I'll make some today.

My one bitch was that everything, while delicious and made with obviously excellent ingredients - fresh, fresh, fresh - was fucking inundated with salt, just like it is at every veggie restaurant I ever go to. Why is that the choice - meat or salt? Why is the assumption that if you dump great big piles of salt into food people will forget they're not eating meat? And why is it important to forget you're not eating meat? Sigh. Oh well. I guess as far as humanitarian tragedies go it's no worse than everybody paying attention to a crackhead narcissicist like Freud instead of a fat chick who had all Freud's good ideas first and few of his bad ones.

I'll see you in a receptacle where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored, motherfucker

This account of metaphysical bureacracy and the defeat of Satan Himself in the highest court of English law is sourced from 'The New Harrowing of Hell' chapter from Derek Jarrett's The Sleep of Reason.

According to Anglican doctrine, hell froze over in 1864 and the Devil lost his groove in 1876. A couple of court cases did the trick, one of them featuring a priest who'd been a bit too nice in his thinking, and another featuring a man who wanted to take Communion despite his lack of belief in the Devil.

It started in a sense with Charles Darwin, or rather with geology and the necessity of acknowledging that the world was rather older than the Bible suggested. Essays and Reviews was published some time thereafter and went a ways to reconciling Christian faith with the new discoveries, but in a way many people thought was heretical. And the objections to it weren't all about the new science; some were about a new compassion.

For example, Henry Bristow Wilson, one of the contributing priests, had offered what Jarrett calls the 'kindly and comparatively harmless suggestion' that, rather than counting on the existence of Hell and eternal damnation for the naughty, '"we must entertain the hope that there shall be found, after the great adjucation, receptacles where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored."' A less kindly church court found Wilson guilty of heterodoxy for the suggestion.

However, Wilson appealed to the secular Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (something like the Supreme Court) and was cleared, partly on the basis of the committee's finding that eternal punishment was not part of the teachings of the Church of England. "He dismissed Hell with costs, and took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of eternal damnation," snarked the Spectator of the lead judge.

The reaction of the Anglican clerical heirarchy was furious, and following a synod and lots of rough talk the Convocation sent out a letter to all the priests in the land explaining that they really, definitely believed in hell and instructing them to sign a statement to that effect.

But Hell officially ceased to exist as a definite Anglican reality in the House of Lords on Friday July 15 1864 when Lord Houghton, esrtwhile suitor of Florence Nightingale and prodiguous pornography collector, pressed the issue by asking if the Convocation had had the right to send out a letter about how they all believed hell really, definitely existed and telling priests to sign it, whereupon the Lord Chancellor (head of the British judiciary until 2005) bitched that the Convocation was a futile, ridiculous body that had been suspended for its troublesomeness for a century and would be suspended again if it persisted in its hell-raising ways.

And the Anglican Church, whose highest echelon of authority is the political class, had to listen. State religion, baby; making the secular rulers of England the spiritual rulers as well was good for something besides letting Henry VIII stick his dick in Anne Boleyn with a clear conscience. Of course many Anglicans, lay and clerk, continued to insist hell was real and the world was heading there in a handbasket, but the dogmatic tide was against them.

In 1876 the Privy Council overturned another church council decision supporting a priest who had refused one Henry Jenkins communion on the basis of Jenkin's disbelief in the Devil, on the basis that belief in the Devil was not part of Anglican doctrine. The Devil - at least as far as Anglicans are concerned - disappeared in a puff of legal papers, with the unfortunate side effect that just under 120 years later Kevin Spacey managed to convince a generation of movie-goers he could act really well by delivering the line 'the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist' in the Usual Suspects.

Of course popular perceptions took much longer to change, with priests and parents continuing to use images of hell and the Devil to scare the fucking bejeebus out of their charges for decades and decades to come. But here we are some 150 years later, and Anglicans are finally complete fucking milksops about that sort of shit, and power to them.

So if all it took was a couple of court cases and a century and a half to get Anglicans to shut the fuck up about hell and the Devil, I wonder how long it will take them to shut the fuck up about how they're not comfortable with the ordination of women.

Teacher envy

I'm starting to have my doubts about Blogspot's search feature, because it's telling me I've never written about Derek Jarrett before, and I have. I adore Derek Jarrett; let me make that clear now, since I mentioned him only tangentially to his smashing book on Hogarth last time. Derek Jarrett is fucking ace.

It was the Hogarth book that done it. I picked it up when I was in a bit of an existentialist, historicistic pisser - you know, the sort where you're pissed off at your race for inventing ore smelting and you wish that you were all just living contented Stone/Golden Age lives, getting high in corridor tombs and not worrying too too much about man's inhumanity to man, and you're definitely super-pissed off about the Industrial Revolution. I like Hogarth so I thought the book would be a good antidote and have pretty pictures, but it was so much more.

Jarrett, who was a history teacher at the English equivalent of a high school once upon a time before moving off to teach history to undergrads at a London college, had an excellent way of discussing big and small picture aspects of a subject or question at the same time. Bewilderingly, in the one little book on Hogarth, you got a feeling for both the man's wider social context - through all the classes - and for the man himself. I'm dead jealous of the students who had him as a teacher. He would have been life-altering. I had my own life-altering teachers but Derek Jarrett, well, I'm dead jealous.

Anyways, I finally managed to get The Sleep of Reason: Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War after trying unsuccessfully to order it from three different Amazon vendors. It came all the way from New Zealand in the end. 50 pages in and it's awesome. It turns out this hero of mine may be, in part, so good at simultaneously communicating micro- and macro-concepts because of his awareness and use of another of my heros, Carl Jung (by the way, if anybody feels like blowing well over a C note on my upcoming birthday, this would be most welcome). He can comfortably explore from this vantage the way one set of myths substitutes in for another over time.

Conclusion to the introduction, concerning the first world war and persistent establishment arguments that the horrific slaughter it entailed was some sort of necessary sacrifice:

What was the God of the Christians to do? The truth was that if by some miracle he could have made the rulers of the warring nations follow Christ's precepts the values of civilized society might have been saved. The myth was that if he had done so the world would have been cursed and degenerate, dishonoured and disgraced. It was a harsh and terrible myth which defaced and distorted the image of God to suit the needs of men. The image of God never fully recovered. The First World War succeeded in doing what all the sneers and disbelief of the nineteenth-century sceptics had failed to do.