St Catherine in Bruges

Jean our sacristan and her husband have been on holiday in Bruges and spotted this image of St Catherine in the city museum, part of a group from 1623 including St Barbara and the Magdalene. I like the fact that she's treading on a bit of the wheel.

To Put It Mildly I Remain Unconvinced

Late to the party as ever, I hadn’t heard of Accelerationism before Liber Faciorum decided to place before my eyes an article describing it. As a philosophy it’s nothing new: in a way Karl Marx was the original Accelerationist, positing the idea that the contradictions and conflicts within capitalism would intensify until they reached breaking point. Marxists, though, usually tend to prepare for the inevitable crisis rather than start monstrous capitalist monopoly businesses in an attempt to hasten it, which is the hallmark of all different brands of Accelerationism – that steps taken in the direction of breakdown and collapse are actually to be welcomed as they hasten us towards the catastrophic change we need. Contemporary sorts of Accelerationism spend time thinking about how technology fits into the picture, and they are often popular with those who work in, or are in charge of, tech businesses pushing the boundaries of what it can do.

The article pointed to the central influence of Nick Land. A philosopher at the University of Warwick in the 1980s and ‘90s, Mr Land developed a set of ideas about capitalism, technology, and how-we-know-what-we-know that eventually settled on the idea that we must ‘grasp the real by stripping it of all anthropomorphic dissimulations’, that is, by facing the inevitable fact that our truths, hopes, dreams, pleasures, pains and thoughts are all ended by death, and that any form of apocalypse is to be welcomed as it forces us up against the limits of our illusions. Death, for Land, becomes the ultimate test of the validity of any system of thought. I wonder whether anyone has written more than in passing about his gathering of like-minded souls, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, as anything that nuts sounds something of a hoot. Nick Land resigned from Warwick in 1998, went off his head on amphetamines, and resurfaced in Shanghai where he has become an inspiration to the alt-right. I was led inexorably from him to various sorts of pessimist philosophy – to David Benatar’s Better Never to have Been of 2006, Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race of 2010, Ray Brassier, the Dark Enlightenment, and other kindred distractions. You can look all that up should you choose.

Pessimist philosophies, of their nature, are convinced of the unbearable horribleness of existence and that regarding it as unbearably horrible is the only rational response to life. David Benatar has a neat set of logical propositions about the nature of pleasure and suffering which prove that human life (and arguably all life) inevitably comprises more of the latter, and that any feeling we might have to the contrary is delusional. Reading them you can almost picture him sitting back and dusting off his hands: job done.

Back in the days when I would argue how little we could rely on the evidence of our senses as bases for moral systems, my friend The Heresiarch used to say to me, ‘These are just philosophical problems, most people just get on with life’. I was annoyed with him then, as it seemed to me to amount to a refusal to think, but I have more sympathy now than I once did. Yes, they do just get on with life, and with more of it behind me I rather think they are right to. Even David Benatar’s deft syllogisms are a bit of a trick, as they sidestep what people actually feel about their lives and declare that they are incorrect to feel it. I suspect that at the root of such pessimistic systems of thought is something like the following: I am really clever, and I am miserable. How can it be that the great majority of human beings appear existentially untroubled by the sheer levels of misery which seem so obvious to me? It can only be that they are able to ignore it because they are stupid, because they have failed to grasp the reality of their situation in the clearsighted way I have.

You can see how this conviction that you are part of at least one sort of elite (nobody ever seems to imagine they might not be) could push you towards the kind of far-right position Nick Land now seems to espouse from his eyrie in China, but you can also glimpse it in all sorts of extreme ideologies, both political and religious, that absolutely require convincing everyone that human life is much more wretched than they think it is. If this means you, you run the risk of falling into your own pit, as Nick Land did, and succumb to the logic of your misery. I think, perhaps, of William Perkins, the Puritan divine who, to accommodate the fact that Christians could say all the right things and maybe even feel all the right things and still remain inescapably sinners subject to the inscrutable and unaccountable will of God, developed the idea of ‘temporary faith’. This looked exactly like real faith even down to the internal feelings of conviction a believer might experience, and could conceivably last all the way to death; but it would not be the kind of faith that saved a person and you might pass beyond the Bar only to find you were damned after all. Not surprisingly, because he was not a psychopath, Perkins seems to have ended his life in a sort of depressive breakdown as a result of his own thought.

WH Auden was fond of dividing human beings into contrasting categories, and one of these was what he called Alices versus Muriels. Muriels, he described, were sensitive souls so shocked by the failure of the world to be perfect that they ended up regarding it as hopelessly corrupt and compromised, while Alices were pragmatic characters who just got on with life. You can imagine which group he thought he fell into. I suspect that much of my time I have been a bit of a Muriel, but strangely while being a Muriel has I think propelled me towards Christianity – how do I find a sense of meaning in a world which seems unable to support one of itself? – it has refashioned me into more of an Alice. Whether ‘life is worth living’ judged by balancing values and disvalues seems to me a meaningless question, and I am less interested even in the strictly existential question of ‘meaning’; I may have sought one, but I can easily see how the great majority of human beings rub along without one beyond what they experience.

If all you want is to lament how awful humans are and human life is, and you’re not interested in how it could be better, I really don’t want to know. Do shut up, and don’t expect a research grant.

Back to Painshill

It is fully twenty-one years since I was last at Painshill Park, with Dr Bones on that occasion. That was blazing summer, but a rainy weekday ('holy well weather') works just as well to follow the walks, wonder at the follies, and muse around the lake. Here and there I could glimpse other visitors, but no more than a dozen of them.

On our last visit the Grotto - the largest in the country - was still being restored and on walking through it it's boggling to remember that it had been entirely ruined, the roof falling in during the 1940s. In fact many of Painshill's features were even more ruinous than they were intended to be, as the garden's designer Charles Hamilton did things as cheaply as he could, often using timber painted to look like stone - and even then he couldn't repay the colossal sums he'd borrowed (from the bank run by his fellow gardener Henry Hoare of Stourhead) without selling the estate and having to leave the very landscape he'd created. The Painshill Trust has in many cases not just restored the follies and features, but actually reconstructed them. 

I'd not really noticed what a superb composition Painshill is - how carefully the views are arranged, how skilfully the experiences are built on until you reach the fairytale Gothic Tower right at the far end of the estate, how the lake is constructed to look like a huge expanse of water here, a tranquil pool there, or a river in a third place, because you never see it in its entirety. It doesn't count as a 'Gothic Garden', but it's a huge delight.

As you approach the Gothic Tower you can hear the A3 thundering just beyond the trees, which explains part of Nia Broomhall's strangely moving poem displayed outside:

Ave Verum, in Different Ways

For Corpus Christi I made my way to St Nic's in Guildford for Mass and Benediction. The service started late for these things, at 8pm, and it was a lengthy do, including three processions - a big one carrying the Blessed Sacrament round the church, a small one returning it to the aumbry, and a middle-sized one to the statue of the BVM to sing the Angelus. There was also a new idol of Our Lady of Walsingham to be dedicated so there was a lot to pack in even without the music, most of which was very pleasing though I could have done with the Gounod Sanctus being shorter by, say, the whole of its length. Just taste, I suppose. The congregation wasn't large but there was an appreciable number of people in their twenties (probably) - and not just chaps, and not a stitch of tweed in the place.

Our Evensong and Benediction at Swanvale Halt was somewhat more modest - no extended cast of ordained people, servers and choristers, and only four of us altogether. I'd slipped the celebration to the eve of Corpus Christi so I could accept the invitation to Guildford, but I don't think that made a difference. And yet these days I prefer the gentle, lower-key, and lower-stakes.

Speak For Us, Papa Leo

Every ordained person knows the story of the medieval monastery whose report to their Bishop Visitor went ‘the community hears a sermon every Lord’s Day, excepting Trinity Sunday, owing to the difficulty of the subject’. Marion our curate used to complain that she seemed to be down to preach every time Trinity Sunday came round, which I maintained was merely an accident of the rota. This year I decided to go for broke and combine the theme of Trinity Sunday with Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the ‘response to Alternative Intelligence’ as it is billed. ‘Can you do a précis for us?’ a member of the church had asked, and I wasn’t sure I could. I opened the pdf on my laptop and was greeted with the popup ‘This seems to be a long document. Would you like an AI summary?’ No I wouldn’t! That’s the point!

M.H. is about much more than AI. It takes in work, truth, democracy, war, and what it means to be human. Andrew Brown in the Church Times came up with a response which seemed to be written for the sake of disagreeing with it, but stumbled across one interesting point, that the Pope ‘seems to be the last defender of 20^th-century social democracy’; there is some truth to this, as it struck me how much 20^th-century social democracy, one way or another, derives from Catholic social teaching (Leo quotes his namesake’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum in many places, the XIV paying tribute to the XIII).

I also found myself wondering why the See of Canterbury (‘not quite a Patriarchate but more than a Metropolitanate’) never comes up with anything similar to the teaching documents that emerge from Rome. Whatever you may think of the current incumbent or her immediate predecessor, whose talents may lie elsewhere, Rowan Williams demonstrates that there is no necessary gap in intellectual ability across different sides of the Tiber. The Pope certainly has more people immediately around him to feed into the process that produces an encyclical document, but that wouldn’t be impossible to overcome. I wonder whether the collegial (or to put it less warmly, committee-based) operational ethos of Anglican structures militates against something that really requires a single shaping mind, no matter how many people funnel in information. It must also be the case that the ABC sees themselves far less as representing a tradition than balancing and uniting traditions, or trying to, that are themselves very disparate. It is far harder to speak authoritatively (or indeed interestingly) in those circumstances.

Finally it strikes me that, although we all look to the See of Rome to come up with thoughtful analysis on behalf of the whole Christian world, it seems to me that it’s really only done that since about the time of Leo XIII. Before that, the Papacy was concerned with matters of power and authority, and of shoring up traditional forms of it; of course it was, being until 1870 the ruler of a state in its own right. Depriving it of the Papal States was the best thing that ever happened to it.

Half Term Conversations

It has been deathly quiet in Swanvale Halt over the last week. Not only is it half term so as usual everyone who can be absent is, but the heat has ensured that those souls who are around hardly dare stir abroad. Each time I have tried, if I had any choice about it, I regretted it, apart from the Bank Holiday walk around the lake which furnished this nice photo.

Yesterday I tried to visit someone who I haven't seen for ages, and either they weren't in or weren't responding. Returning home my weariness (though I'd gone no further than a quarter of a mile) was interrupted by glancing into the windscreen of the parked truck of a gardening contractor and seeing a tatty Bible on the dashboard. The young fellow concerned appeared around the side. 'Must be an issue for you wearing all black', was his opening gambit - though it's a mild inconvenience compared to doing actual physical work while sweating through a reflective tabard. As one of the sessions at the Clergy Conference had discussed what seems to be a doubling in the purchase of new Bibles in the last five years (outstripping any Harry Potter volumes - The Bible! Less transphobic than JK Rowling!!), I asked him about his. He'd been given it by a customer after admitting he'd been having a hard time lately. 'I'm not much of a reader', he went on, 'but I follow some extracts on my phone and I've been finding it really helpful'.

That evening in my capacity as Bishop's Surrogate for Oaths I was seeing a couple applying for a licence to marry on Saturday having discovered their banns hadn't been read in their home churches; they assumed the church marrying them would arrange it, so it hadn't happened. Still, it's easily sorted out. Not only do they live in different parishes and are marrying in a third, but they actually attend an independent congregation in Guildford, so one might expect a little bit of Biblical literacy. It was decided that the groom would swear the oath, and I handed him a Bible with the customary instruction to take it in his right hand - 'the rule', I said, 'specifies the New Testament but this includes it so that's all right' - he did question how justifiable that was. I said we could deal with the theology on a different occasion if need be (once I'd thought about it). 

Two conversations with laypeople about the Bible must use up at least a season's quota in just one day! 

"Escape to Danger"

Well, if not danger, mild irritation, anyway. At the beginning of the Clergy Conference at Swanwick it is now the custom to ask everyone to stand, and then those whose first conference it is to sit, and so on until the longest-serving (or -suffering) clergyperson is left standing. This year our suffragan bishop had brought along a bar of chocolate which he claimed had been in his fridge for nine years to reward the final upright cleric and it went to Barry who actually retired three years ago and is house-for-duty so had the perfect reason not to be there. Can't he find anything else to do? I forget whether it was my seventh or eighth Conference: they blur. 

I ran away on two occasions, after breakfast on each morning. On Wednesday I went to the convenience store in the village as I was desperate for digestive biscuits, and on Thursday my destination was the same but I wanted a sandwich to take away for lunch as I was anxious to get back to Swanvale Halt for Ascension Day as soon as I could. On the way I spotted what looked like an ornamental drinking fountain in a Classical arch erected to celebrate the Golden Jubilee in 2002, but on inspection it turned out, disappointingly, to be a seat. Or a niche, anyway, with no obvious purpose if it wasn't a seat. I suppose you could put a vase or something in it to mark a notable occasion, but only if you could get through the iron railings surrounding it.

There was mercifully little breaking into small groups during the sessions. There was one occasion during a presentation on statistics about public attitudes to faith when we were encouraged to talk about ways we felt the environment for faith had changed, and I and two colleagues from mainstream moderate evangelical churches were rather taken aback by another gent none of us knew who stated 'As far as I'm concerned the bishops should be repenting for leading the Church into disaster with all this liberal garbage'. There wasn't really a good reply to that as it wasn't really what we were discussing, but in the spirit of engaging with those I disagree with I should have said something like, 'So do you speak to people outside your congregation who tell you that they would come back to church if only the bishops would be tougher on the gays?' but in fact we ended up talking about the Bible as this chap clearly felt he'd succeeded someone who was so liberal they were barely Christian at all and having found a bookcase of Bibles facing the wall his first act as incumbent was to turn them round to face outwards instead. I quite approve of people reading the Bible so that was a point of contact, anyway.

The highlight of the conference wasn't quite my two visits to the corner shop but the short meeting of the SCP chapter we were able to squeeze into Wednesday afternoon between lunch and the afternoon session on Wellbeing. Seven of us gathered in an upper room and had what turned out to be a very pleasant hour in which we heard about a couple of Catholic-side-of-centre churches served by members which had grown very considerably over the last couple of years through nothing more than faithfulness and diligent care of the things of the Spirit. 'A bit of a life saver' said one colleague.