An Open Letter to Cardinal Wuerl

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To Donald Cardinal Wuerl, the Archbishop of Washington.

Your Eminence: peace be with you.

I’m Gabriel Blanchard, and I entered the Catholic faith under the ægis of your archdiocese, though I've since transferred into the Ordinariate under Bishop Lopes. I have a lot to say and none of it is likely to be very pleasant reading. I hope and ask that you read it anyway, prayerfully, because it is deeply important. I am not an ideal person to write this; I have some seriously ugly skeletons in my closet. I am not meaningfully different from a prostitute, speaking to a prince of the Church. But given the role of the blessed Magdalene on Easter morning, I am bold to write anyway.

Here is a (partial) transcript of an interview you gave just a few days ago for the convention of the Knights of Columbus.

Fr. Rosica: You’re playing a very important role right now … It’s a moment of crisis, but it’s also a moment of new beginning. Tell me how you’re coping with the situation—your predecessor, we’re well aware of it in Canada, and the message of hope that you’re giving to your people, to your priests, your seminarians, but also to the American Church.
Card. Wuerl: Well, it is a moment of new beginning. Remember, when we had the first crisis of the realization that clergy were being abused by priests, back in 2002, we took a very strong stand. We created a charter, the Holy See provided for us the essential norms. Let me just say, it’s working. Right now, when you hear of abuse, when you hear of a case of abuse, when you hear of—they’re talking about things that happened decades ago, for the most part. So, the charter worked. Now what we’re realizing is, we need to have something that would also be a mechanism for when a bishop isn’t as faithful as he needs to be, even if the charge goes back forty, fifty years. So, what I’m suggesting, what I have proposed to our conference of bishops, is, we already have that statement of commitment we all did back in 2002. Let’s put some practical measures to it, to make it work. What I’m suggesting is, we already have a National Review Board made up of laypeople. Why don’t we take from our conference a number of bishops from different committees, to work with it, invite the National Review Board to join them, so now we have a permanent body; and if someone has an accusation they want to bring, they can bring it there. We now have two things at work.
Fr. Rosica: Well, what you’re dealing—you’re talking about the nature of the Church. That the Church is not only clerical, only laypeople, it’s this unity. Your diocese is a perfect example of that. Some of the most competent laypeople I’ve met in my life are in the leadership positions in your diocese. You’ve done that.
Card. Wuerl: But isn’t this what Pope Francis is saying. Pope Francis has been saying, we’re all missionary disciples … It doesn’t make sense: a shepherd without a flock, and a flock without a shepherd. They’re co-relative terms, they go together. This is what we’re saying needs to be done today, when we have—I don’t think this is some massive, massive crisis. It was a terrible disappointment.
Fr. Rosica: For all of us. For you, for me. He was a friend to us.
Card. Wuerl: So, we’re saying now, well, what do we do in the future to see there’s a mechanism so if somebody wants to say something about a bishop, they have a place to go.

Here is a selection of a story from the Boston Globe that ran in April of 2002:

Over the last several days and weeks, prominent church opinionmakers, including two cardinals, have suggested that the clergy sexual abuse crisis is a relatively minor phenomenon that is being turned into a major scandal by the media and others with an ax to grind.
Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, for example, told The Washington Post this week that some newspapers are having a ‘heyday’ with the issue.
‘Elements in our society who are very opposed to the Church’s stand on life, the Church’s stand on family, the Church’s stand on education … see in this an opportunity to destroy the credibility of the Church,’ he said. ‘And they’re really working on it—and somewhat successfully.’
Cardinal William H. Keeler of Baltimore made a similar point … saying, ‘It’s really the news media of the United States that has made this an American problem. We’re in this feeding-frenzy situation right now, where the coverage of cases of 20, 30 years ago is being plastered in the headlines.’

This is not a good look for you.

It does not look bad because of a merely accidental resemblance between sentiments you’ve expressed, and the blame-shifting lies of a then popular and respected pedophile. I dare say that the resemblance really is accidental; but the echo of your predecessor is the thing least wrong with what you said.

Beginning with the optimistic sales pitch ‘This is a moment of new beginning’ is beyond crass and tasteless. It is the first smack in the face to the abuse victims whom you almost entirely ignore here. I say the first, because there are more, such as the assertion that this is not a massive crisis. Speaking as a survivor of molestation, any number of victims greater than zero should not be spoken of in a tone of dismissal. And for an abuse victim, I was fortunate. I was never whipped or made the subject of child pornography, and I could not be impregnated or forced to get an abortion. You can read about more than a thousand less fortunate victims of over three hundred priests in this sickening report just released by a Pennsylvanian grand jury; and that is only about Pennsylvania. This is absolutely a massive, massive crisis.

Your description of ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s behavior as ‘disappointing’ is an appalling understatement. He was not a disappointment; he was not just not as faithful as he should have been. He was a liar, a vow-breaker, a hypocrite, and a rapist, who manipulated men and boys for sexual release and destroyed the faith, hearts, and lives of an untold number of them. As a shepherd, it is your job to say that, in those words. Acknowledging the truth straightforwardly is your duty to them and to God. Euphemism, minimizing, and indirectness are harmful to the flock. Those who are recovering from the trauma of sexual and spiritual abuse need that trauma to be honestly acknowledged by Catholic authorities. Polite dining room language does not make the Church look better, and even if it did that would not make her be better: at best such language scandalously appears to, and at worst it really does, exacerbate the atmosphere of denial that was so largely responsible for these abuses going unpunished in the first place.

But then, where, in this interview, are the victims? You mention ‘clergy being abused by priests’ early on—I take it this is a reference to the fact that many or most of the victims revealed in the scandals of 2002 and later had served as altar boys and were thus, in the older and broader sense of the word, clergy. This is the only direct allusion you make to the boys and girls who were manipulated, coërced, lied to, molested, threatened, gaslit. All by people whom they’d been taught to hold in the highest esteem as the instruments of God. But you and Fr Rosica do find a moment to pity yourselves about how sad this was for you, having a friend engulfed in scandal.

This suggests a myopia that may explain why you see no problem with putting a group of bishops effectively in charge of an investigation into a habit of concealment among bishops. For of course, if you combine a group of bishops with a group of laymen on any ecclesiastical task, the latter will be expected (by everybody concerned) to defer to the former; and we know from the horrible history of your predecessor’s two careers, the public and the private, that bishops show a pattern of covering for their priests and for each other. We know it, too, from the Church’s disgraceful treatment of Frank Keating, the first head of the National Review Board, whose severe words about the American bishops led to his being pressured into resigning—which he did, but without once apologizing for or modifying his remarks for the last fifteen years. A bureaucratic, episcopally overseen approach to this problem is obviously useless.

But even from a purely practical viewpoint—is there any reason the National Review Board could not be made a permanent institution with competence to examine cases about bishops? The original draft of the Dallas Charter applied to ‘clerics,’ but was altered to say ‘priests and deacons’ in order to exclude bishops; why? Your Eminence speaks, rightly enough, of the need for fraternal care for one another among bishops. But that is not enough. Absolution without confession and indulgence without penance are acts of corruption, not mercy, and they rob the victims of evil shepherds of any scrap of justice. 

Additionally, I do not share your confidence that you ‘took a very strong stand’ and ‘it’s working.’ For one thing, the prominent role played by Theodore McCarrick in drafting the policies for dealing with abuse casts quite a shadow over this ‘strong stand.’ What confidence can the laity possibly have in a document designed to deal with predatory priests, which was drafted by a predatory bishop?

Moreover, yes, the cases of abuse that are coming out of the woodwork are decades old; that’s normal. Victims of abuse frequently take a long time to report the abuse, for a wide variety of reasons. Abuse nearly always involves a power dynamic, in which the abuser has some kind of control over the victim, so that reporting it is a very dangerous thing to do. The abuser may also have power over other people the victim cares about, and can thus emotionally blackmail them. Many victims are groomed and manipulated into believing that the experience is consensual, or that it is primarily their own fault, or both, so that talking about it seems like exposing oneself rather than the abuser: they may be so conditioned that they simply don’t recognize what’s happening as abusive. Victims are frequently disbelieved or ignored, especially when the abuser has any kind of public stature, like a successful coach, a popular comedian, a respected politician, or a prestigious Christian minister. A given victim might be subject to any number of these inhibitions; that so many victims do manage to speak up forty or fifty years later is itself a mercy and an act of courage. We will not really be able to know how well the Dallas Charter is working for decades yet.

As a shepherd yourself, this is information about abuse you ought to know already. It is Your Eminence's duty as a spiritual father, and to ignore or neglect it is sin.

But above all: words, words, words. Beloved, let us not love with words or tongue, but with deeds and in truth. It’s fine to talk about charters and propose committees and so forth, fine and easy and worthless. The words that matter most right now are not ‘We’re implementing a mechanism for anyone who wants to bring a formal accusation against a bishop,’ spoken to the public in general. The words that matter most right now, properly addressed first to the victims and then to the Church and the world as a whole, are these. ‘We as a body, and I as a member of it, have committed terrible sins. I am sorry. I hope you can forgive me for the part I have played in this; and that you can forgive all of us for our neglect and betrayal of the trust that you, and God, placed in us. As a Christian and especially as a prelate, I will do whatever I can to make amends to you for the horrible agony you’ve suffered.’ Public penance from the whole college of bishops is called for, and public apology, and whatever reparations can be made (whether the apologies are accepted or not). Literal sackcloth and ashes would not be an excessive beginning.

This is not a time to rehearse how much better we’re doing, if there ever is such a time. It is a time to confess and do penance. For the kingdom of heaven is, as ever, at hand. Innocence, compassion, and the truth will prevail, in this life or the next, and if you do not surrender yourself to them then you will experience them as judgment.

The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts. But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire: and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness. And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the widow and the fatherless, and fear not me, saith the Lord of hosts. For I am the Lord, I change not: therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. —Malachi 3.1-6

I shall pray for you. I ask that you also pray for me.

The peace of the Lord Jesus, the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep, be with you.

Gabriel Ian Matthew Blanchard

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Confiteor in Leather

We build in vain unless the LORD build with us.

Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?

A thousand policemen directing the traffic

Cannot tell you why you come or where you go.

A colony of cavies or a horde of active marmots

Build better than they that build without the LORD.

Shall we lift up our feet among perpetual ruins?

I have loved the beauty of Thy House, the peace of Thy sanctuary,

I have swept the floors and garnished the altars.

—T. S. Eliot, Choruses from ‘The Rock’

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It’s been a strange year—not unlike 2013, though less skull-crushingly awful (for me personally). I can’t tell whether my spiritual life is cyclical in an ascending-Mount-Purgatory sort of way, or whether I’m just in a rut. Probably the latter.

Diagram of Purgatory from Dorothy Sayers' introduction to the Purgatorio.

I’m entangled in a great many things that I should leave behind; most of them have to do with a leather bar here in Baltimore that I go to a lot.1 Now, before you flip your lid, gentle reader, allow me to assure you that Fifty Shades of Grey has as little to do with my life as it does with yours, and that in my (limited) experience, men and women in the leather world are some of the most sweet-natured people on earth. Kind of like people who work at Hot Topic. That’s a big part of why I am thus entangled: that bar is full of my friends. I like them, I like being with them, I feel lonely and bored when I'm away from them too long. And, like most millennials, they have to work so much to make ends meet that hanging out with them while they’re both off work and awake is a challenging, rare prospect.

There are less creditable motives, obviously. I like getting drunk; I like looking at men in leather, or out of it for that matter; I like fooling around with them. I have no desire to paint myself as some kind of compassionately conflicted saint—or rather, I have a great deal of desire to paint myself that way, but it wouldn’t be true, which is what matters.

Take that, pedestal.

All the same, as shabby a witness as I am (how credible, exactly, is a guy who will dance around in a jockstrap and a harness but won’t eat meat because it’s Friday?), I worry that there’s no other Christian presence in the lives of a lot of these guys; and that does matter to me. Messiah complex, probably. Foolishness, certainly: it’s neither my job nor my business to save anybody, and God is perfectly capable of reaching them without my assistance or my embarrassment. Is it better to be a scandal, or not be there at all?

Theologically that question is easy. Better not to be there. God can reach them as he pleases. Living in sin is destructive, by its nature; they are not (as far as I know) transgressing their consciences, whereas I am, and I should cut that shit right out. We know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal.

Yet I can’t get St Paul’s other strange words out of my head: I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh. That can’t apply here—can it?

I loathe easy answers, and perhaps that’s the problem. I have a deep-seated mistrust of any answer that dissolves one of the parameters of a paradox; my whole life, I’ve found paradoxes to be built into the fabric of the universe at every level—scientific, social, theological, personal—and accordingly look for them everywhere.2 Maybe I’m more addicted to paradox than I am to truth? Or maybe I’m looking for the wrong kind of paradox here, more invested in a romantically dark conflict than in illumination and harmony. It wouldn’t exactly be the first time I made a bad decision.

Jesus embraced whores. He didn’t pay them, though. How do I become that person instead of this one?

Christ and the Samaritan Woman (St Photini)

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1It ain’t to hand out tracts.

2What confirmation bias?

Dona Eis Requiem, Part VII

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

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This link will take you to Part VI, which also includes links to Parts I-V.

Throughout Dona Eis Requiem, I’ve touched on things that LGBT people need from Christians. To conclude this series, I’d like to make some concrete, practical suggestions. I’ve gone over those things that fall under the Works of Mercy (to pray for the living and the dead, to shelter the homeless, to comfort the afflicted), and some points of courtesy (in language and demeanor). Now, with those as the preparation, I want to turn to the realization of those guidelines.

1. Balanced preaching, including preaching against homophobia. I’ve rarely, if ever, heard a homily against gay marriage that did not include a reminder that it’s wrong to hate gay people. I have also never heard a homily against gay marriage that left me with the impression that the preacher liked gay people in the slightest. Not that I was sure he didn’t; but, apparently, love and respect weren’t important enough to merit more than a reminder. To put the same problem another way: though it would be at least equally orthodox, I’ve never heard a sermon about showing love to LGBTs that included a mere reminder of the Church’s teaching on marriage.

This matters for several reasons, one of them being the risk of scandal it gives to those outside the faith: a casual reminder sounds like saving face, not conviction. But it also matters because—if I may trust my own limited experience—the sort of person who listens to and tries to heed a homily, is not often the sort of person who needs to be told that the Catholic Church doesn’t approve of same-sex marriage. They know that already. There are people who don’t know what the Real Presence is, or what infallibility is, or the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth, who can tell you that the Church is against gay marriage. Preaching to the choir is not only boring and useless, it carries a danger within it: that of reinforcing and exacerbating any homophobia, active or latent, that the choir has within it. If the message they hear is consistently heavy on political opposition and not at least equally heavy on love, love that doesn’t need to be explained in order to look like love, a distorted relationship between Catholics and LGBT people is likely to result. Homilies against arrogance and prejudice are as important as homilies against fornication and heresy.

2. Teaching on virtue, celibacy, vocation, and discernment. Last week I spoke with a priest who gave me a much better perspective on celibacy and vocation (not that I’m ready to embrace it, exactly, but I’ve got a less unhealthy notion of what I would or will be embracing). He brought up a question that I don’t think I’d ever considered before, that of why Jesus was celibate. The obvious answer is that, if He had had a wife, His principal love would have had to go to her: Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor, and keep her, forsaking all other? With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow. That is an exact statement of His relationship to the Church. Marriage would have meant giving Himself totally to one person; celibacy allows him to make that total gift to humanity.

Moreover, every virtue, chastity included, is a positive quality rather than an exclusion of something else; it excludes sin as something that inhibits the positive quality, not arbitrarily. Chastity has to be not only believed but preached as the integrative, coïnherent self-mastery of soul and body together. And again, while a vocation can’t be forced, it’s also not exactly a choice in the conventional sense. It’s what you were made for, and, if freedom means the power to do what comes naturally (and sin, objectively speaking, is that which interferes with our natures, whether obviously or subtly), then freedom comes from obeying and pursuing your vocation, not from the opportunity to pick between options.

In the language of the monastic fathers, all prayer, reading, meditation and all activities of the monastic life are aimed at purity of heart, an unconditional and totally humble surrender to God, a total acceptance of ourselves and of our situation as willed by him. It means the renunciation of all deluded images of ourselves … Purity of heart is then correlative to a new spiritual identity—the ‘self’ as recognized in the context of realities willed by God. … What am I? I am a word spoken by God. Can God speak a word that does not have any meaning?1

All of which is genuinely great, and it explains a lot about celibacy. What it doesn’t do—and maybe no book or homily could do it—is give us content for living as celibates. Give yourself to God is a universal command, but we live in particulars, and have to fill the time somehow. Discerning our specific vocation as celibates can be difficult, confusing, and dreary, and being given the universal command over and over is, well, only so useful. Not being the Savior, how do I give myself to humanity-in-general?

This lack of content shows through in the language used to describe the four main states of life: marriage, priesthood, consecrated life, and ‘the generous single life.’ That phrase, at least to me, is soggy with afterthought. That doesn’t mean non-consecrated lay celibacy isn’t a real vocation; but I don’t think it’s unfair either to say that the Church has given little of her energy and time to any living and life-giving theology of what that is. Because, as it stands, it sounds just as negation-centered as defining celibacy in terms of not having sex. Doubtless each one of us has his or her own peculiar mission as a celibate; but we need guidance to find it, we need to be given tools to discern the concrete. General platitudes, however true, leave us as rudderless as we were before.

3. Speak and act against the oppression of LGBT people. For the American, this will above all mean the oppression of LGBTs in other countries: Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania all have laws against homosexuality ranging from restrictions on freedom of speech to the death penalty, and the cultures that undergird those laws frequently exhibit anti-gay violence. Speaking against that sets a good example, to those inside and outside the Church, and is consistent with the Christian teaching that all men are made in the image of God and should be treated with dignity; and, more to the point, acting against it (Rainbow Railroad is one way of doing so) saves people’s lives. It’s no small thing to help a person escape a Chechnyan concentration camp or a Ugandan prison.

Navy blue: same-sex marriage legal

Cyan: same-sex marriages performed elsewhere recognized

Sky blue: same-sex civil unions legal

Pale blue: unregistered same-sex cohabitation

Grey: no recognition of same-sex relationships

Beige: restrictions on liberty of expression about LGBT issues

Yellow: same-sex activity illegal without enforcement

Orange: same-sex activity punishable by imprisonment

Deep orange: same-sex activity punishable by life imprisonment

Brown: same-sex activity punishable by death

Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.2

4. Let us work alongside you. Christians are much given to telling gay people not to define ourselves by our sexuality. Well and good; but we kinda need you to cut that out, too. Let us be teachers, priests, therapists, soldiers, youth pastors. Of course a person with psychological problems or sexual addiction wouldn’t necessarily be cut out for such roles, but psychological problems and sexual addiction don’t really have anything to do with being gay. They’re abundant among heterosexuals. Reluctance to allow LGBT people a role in ministries and leadership is based either in ignorance of the facts about us—an ignorance which, sad to say, is commonplace among Christians—or in bigotry. And neither bigotry nor ignorance is helpful to the Church, or to the person discriminating, or to the one discriminated against.

Whatever our vocations may be, we must fulfill them, and if we don’t then both we and the Church will be deprived of a good that God meant to give us: quench not the Spirit. If our attempts to pursue our vocations are thwarted by our fellow believers, the consequences can be tragic. A repressed vocation is as dangerous as a repressed passion, for both, being rooted in our natures, will find other and perverted modes of expression if their natural growth is cut. This doesn’t mean you don’t weed the garden of nature, but, as the parable of the wheat and the tares hints, weeding should not be undertaken prematurely or hastily.

To sum up the series: love us; and take care to think out how to love us in ways that we will recognize as love. God emptied Himself, taking on the likeness of a servant.

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1Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, p. 46.

2I John 3.16-18.

Prayers for Judas

Lilith, checked in her monotonous gabble by the radiant vision who let in the sun’s new light, stared at it with old and blinking eyes. She saw the shape of a woman; and did not know beatitude, however young. She supposed this also to be in need of something other than the Omnipotence. She said, separating with difficulty words hardly distinguishable from gabble: ‘I can help you.

‘That’s kind of you,’ Pauline answered, ‘but I haven’t come to you for myself.’

‘I can help anyone,’ the old woman said, carefully enunciating the lie. … Illusion, more lasting in her than in any of her victims, was in her. At the moment of destruction she still pressed nostrums upon the angelic visitor who confronted her. She broke again into gabble, in which Pauline could dimly make out promises, of health, of money, of life, or their appearances, of good looks and good luck, or a belief in them, of peace and content, or a substitute for them.

—Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell

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I’ve hit a wall. I would say I’m in despair, but I don’t think that’s quite true. I certainly feel despair; I honestly cannot tell by introspection whether I’ve surrendered to it; I haven’t given up my duties as a man and a Christian—I don’t fulfill them particularly well, but I acknowledge them and make some effort to observe them—so I think I haven’t succumbed.

The sensation of despair comes simply from the fact that I don’t want to be chaste, don’t feel bad when I fuck around, and don’t see why I should do or want otherwise. I don’t love Christ enough to obey him for his own sake, and I don’t fear him enough (or trust him enough, maybe?) to obey him for my own sake. All I have is the bare, cold principle that this ought to be done. And I’ve found out that, at the cost that principle exacts from me, I can’t do it. Or won’t. The strength of sin is the law.

Orthodox Chapel of the Holy Trinity, Mount Sinai

Being without a husband, being bereft of specifically erotic love, is agonizing to me. It isn’t just the depression: I’ve been on Zoloft long enough to know the difference. And I know the arguments about the sacramental meaning of sex like the back of my hand, but when you’re lonely any argument is a whole lot of bullshit, and no friendship can truly substitute for a lover—they’re just not the same thing, they don’t meet the same need, they don’t touch the same wound in the soul. I have yet to hear the Catholic doctrine of sex (which I accept categorically) articulated in a way that made that reality seem important enough to warrant the cost it imposes on me.

I wish I could say ‘me and those like me’ there. But I have a nasty suspicion that, if the shoe were on the other foot, I’d be totally prepared to be merely sympathetic to people who were suffering. To just feel so sad for them, but point out that emotions can’t be allowed to change principles, and leave it at that. In short, to be a complete asshole. So I guess that’s one good thing to come out of this.

But I’m left with the sheer, brutal, staring fact that I don’t want to be chaste, not because it isn’t fun (though, no, it is not fucking fun), but because as far as I know it’s both miserable and pointless. I assent to the thesis that it’s the limits of my knowing that puts that complexion on things. But here I am, and I resent God for asking this of me, because I don’t understand.

There is a demon that the saints, especially the desert fathers, recognized in this vein—the one that comes in the daytime, during our work, to propel us further into nothingness. He was called ‘the noonday devil’ … The name of the state he tempts us to is called acedia, which is a form of despair when life itself is seen as hopeless drudgery, even if it is a necessary drudgery. This again is why the drug addict is our prophet. The drug addict is not ‘idle’—he works diligently, but his work is a slow downward spiral and an accepted and acted upon despair. Acedia also knows and even believes that man was made for great things, but does not have the hope or magnanimity to reach them. He hates that they are reachable and wishes he was called to less.1

Which I recognize as the truth. And yet another part of me snipes back: if God wants me so bad, why does he make things so damn hard? Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior.

The difference between this and despair? I guess I am still waiting for him to answer me, to say something. I keep coming back to him—angrier and unhappier every time, it seems, but again and again. It’s been said that the Church is the cross on which Christ is crucified; I am the nails. It must hurt him horribly, the way I act, or am, but he is the one who refuses the twelve legions of angels in favor of staying close to Gabriel. That thou doest, do quickly, he said to Judas. It doesn’t make rational sense; but poetically, nothing else is possible.

For some reason this feels like a really good way to start Lent. Certainly it’s better to be frank—I mean, it isn’t like God doesn’t know what you’re thinking, so you might as well actually talk to him about it. I don't know how to break out of the illusion, but I know that I am subject to an illusion: we have a place to start.

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1‘The Name of the Demon That Steals Rest, Makes You Scroll, And Inspires Overworking’ by Jason Craig at Those Catholic Men. Read this piece thanks to a friend, and it knocked a little sense into me—my original concept for this post was much more bitter and hopeless, if you can imagine.

The Poems of Charles Williams, Part Two: A Fallacy of Rational Virtue

It is frequently asserted, by people who ought to know better, that according to Dante the natural perfection for which Virgil stands is sufficient in itself to guide the soul as far as the Earthly Paradise. On the contrary, Dante takes the utmost pains from the very start to make it plain to the reader that this is not so. Even in Hell, Virgil had to be commissioned by Beatrice; even there, he had to invoke powers greater than his own; even there, he could not force the gates of Dis without divine assistance; nevertheless, there he speaks with authority. Here, it is otherwise.

—Dorothy L. Sayers, Introduction to ‘Purgatory’

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Continuing from my earlier piece on this subject.

Logres, the realm of Arthur, does not achieve its goal; every version of the legend agrees on that, Williams’ own included. For instance, when the Holy Graal was introduced to the mythos,1 a favored few sometimes achieved it—Percival, Bors, Galahad—but most of the knights did not, in any telling, and at least one version even adds the terrible prophecy that When this rich thing goeth about, the Round Table shall be broken. There are literary reasons for this, of course; if all the knights, or even most of them, achieve the Graal, its value as a symbol is diminished. But for Williams there is a deeper significance to this failure, and one that he practically opens his own version of the cycle by suggesting.

In the season of midmost Sophia

the word of the Emperor established a kingdom in Britain …

Carbonek, Camelot, Caucasia,

were gates and containers, intermediations of light;

geography breathing geometry, the double-fledged Logos.

The blind rulers of Logres

nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue;

the seals of the saints were broken; the chairs of the Table reeled.

Galahad quickened in the Mercy;

but history began; the Moslem stormed Byzantium;

lost was the glory, lost the power and kingdom.

Call on the hills to hide us

lest, men said in the City, the lord of charity

ride in the starlight, sole flash of the Emperor’s glory.2

Rationality and virtue are of course naturally allied in a worldview like Williams’; and he makes a point of having Taliessin, the chief narrator, visit Byzantium, where the ancient line of imperial shapes / … the Throne of primal order, the zone / of visionary powers reside—the precise, if dazzling, exposition of the inner geometric exactitude of the glory—before he ever visits Broceliande, the great sea-wood of the southwest, which represents the unconscious reaches of man’s mind. What, then, can he mean by speaking of a fallacy of rational virtue?

Two interpretations are possible. One is that, fine Dantean scholar that he was, he was reproducing the doctrine Dante expresses in the persons3 of Beatrice and Virgil, and in the infernal circle of Limbo, in the Divine Comedy. No matter how good and exalted, reason is not the same thing as divine grace, and cannot earn it (that being part of what grace means: it is a gift; it can’t be claimed as a right by any creature). Rational virtue is a good thing, and grace urges us to practice rational virtue. But, because it’s a good thing, virtue is one of the most plausible idols in the world. C. S. Lewis touched on this theme in The Great Divorce when he had his guide say, ‘The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.’ And, we may add, lust and the other appetites are easier idols to smash, since (as a rule) they don’t claim the defense of the conscience, whereas the more dignified idols do.

And the Graal is not only a symbol of divine grace, but a peculiarly fitting symbol of that sacramental economy in which Williams so fervently believed. For a sacramentalist, the Incarnation is the central mystery, the beating heart, of Christianity; the Eucharist, accordingly, is the prime experience of the Incarnation, and the Graal is the supreme artistic symbol of the Eucharist.4 The Holy Graal and rational virtue are not opposed to each other, but the latter cannot achieve the former of its own powers; and apart from grace, rational virtue, maybe more than anything else, is apt to dismiss grace as an unnecessary addition to what it already possesses—not knowing its own tendency to be incurvatus, to decay and break apart into irrational virtue and rational vice,5 and finally into total incoherence. Nor is Williams unaware of the strength of idolatry; he goes almost out of his way to address it:

The Archbishop stayed, coming through the morning to the Mass,

Hast thou seen so soon, bright lass, the light of Christ’s glory?

… The household kneeled; the Lord Balin the Savage moved

restless, through-thrust with a causeless vigil of anger;

the king in the elevation beheld and loved himself crowned;

Lancelot’s gaze at the Host found only a ghost of the Queen.6

That’s one interpretation. But another, which I find more convincing, runs a little differently, and digs deeper into Williams’ attachment to Dante.

Cryptically, as ever, Williams writes of the meeting of Arthur and Guinevere at his crowning as King of the Britons:

So, in Lancelot’s hand, she came through the glow,

into the king’s mind, who stood to look on his city:

the king made for the kingdom, or the kingdom for the king?

Thwart drove his current against the current of Merlin:

in beleaguered Sophia they sang of the dolorous blow.

… At the door of the gloom sparks die and revive;

the spark of Logres fades, glows, fades.

It is the first watch; the Pope says Matins in Lateran;

the hollow call is beaten on the board in Sophia;

the ledge of souls shudders, whether they die or live.7

The link to Dante lies in the line, the king made for the kingdom, or the kingdom for the king? For Dante answered this question very clearly in his treatise On Monarchy, where he says that the proper operation does not exist for the sake of the essence [the individual being], but vice versa—i.e., a person’s vocation doesn’t exist to give them something to do, but rather they exist to fulfill their vocation.8 And here, at Arthur’s coronation and his betrothal to Guinevere, we already see him thinking of his operation in terms of his own glory, instead of directing himself to the glory of his operation.

This is why there are, in the midst of the heraldic banners, the bright torches, and all the majesty of Camelot, two sudden signs of the final darkness that swallows up Logres in the end. One is referred to the household of the Emperor: In beleaguered Sophia they sang of the dolorous blow; in Byzantium, they are already mourning the decline and fall of Logres that the barbaric honor-code, pride, and intemperance of the knights will bring about. And those things are all rooted in the dreamy, secret egotism of the King—or rather, the King was the one who should have rooted those vices out by both precept and example, and his dreamy egotism is what will keep him from doing so.

The other is briefer and subtler. Mordred was Arthur’s son, but not the son of Guinevere. Before his marriage, Arthur fornicated with Queen Morgause of Orkney—a common enough vice in any age, a harmless one in some ways, but Morgause (unbeknownst to Arthur9) was his half-sister. The incestuous child, Mordred, became as twisted as his parentage; Morgause herself was eventually killed by her eldest son, for adultery with Sir Lamorack. In The Crowning of Arthur, as the procession leads Guinevere to Arthur and one heraldic banner replaces the next, Williams pans up to a window for a moment:

Driving back that azure a sea rose black;

on a fess of argent rode a red moon.

The Queen Morgause leaned from a casement;

her forehead’s moon swallowed the fires,

it was crimson on the bright-banded sable of Lamorack.10

As the King of Logres is crowned and betrothed, Mordred is forming in his mother’s womb. And that mother, the terrible Queen whom he later calls the schism and first strife / of primeval rock with itself, Morgause Lot’s wife (doubtless mindful of the wife of a more ancient Lot), sums up in herself all the vices that will destroy Logres: the pride of the knightly code of honor, the lust that courtly love is rarely quite free of even at its best, and the implacable wrath that drives many even of the heroes toward murder, betrayal, and sacrilege.

And all this because Arthur was considering the kingdom for the king, and not the king for the kingdom. Had he done the latter, he might still have fornicated with Morgause, in ignorance, out of ordinary human weakness; but his repentance might have had the quality of perfect contrition,11 rather than of the baptized yet egotistical soul seeking to avoid hell. But he did not master ‘the golden Ambiguity,’ the paradox that is the principle of the Incarnation—that to give up one’s life is to save it, that obedience is liberty, and that whoever would be great must be the servant of all. Which is understandable. It’s not an obvious lesson; though secretly logical, it isn’t common sense, and though secretly magnificent, it isn’t common decency.

The fallacy of rational virtue is the attempt, not only to cultivate virtue apart from grace, but to cultivate one’s own vocation as if it were one’s own property. Which, logically, makes a nonsense of vocation: Let us rise to the height of God and the Emperor, / let us gaze, son of man, on the Acts in contention. As a gift, vocation cannot be demanded; as a command, vocation cannot be controlled; our joy and peace consists in accepting and pursuing it—better to say, our vocation is our individual joy and peace.

✠     ✠     ✠

1The earlier versions of the Arthurian cycle feature no Graal, only of Arthur fighting the Saxons for the preservation of a Romano-British, Christian kingdom, and Mordred’s subsequent attempt at usurping the throne. The Graal is first known to feature in the matter of Britain in the late twelfth century, in the work of Chrétien de Troyes; its role was expanded in the thirteenth century, which provided the source material for Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, arguably the definitive version of the mythos. (The spelling graal instead of grail is an archaism I’m fond of. Williams usually prefers this spelling but is not quite consistent.)

2Prelude I.4-5, 7-9, II.1-9, from Taliessin Through Logres. The name Carbonek refers to that castle from which the journey to the secret resting-place of the Graal departs; Sir Lancelot made it as far as Carbonek, but he was detained there (spiritually, because he put Guinevere before God; literally, because, under a spell, he mistook another woman for Guinevere and slept with her, thus fathering Galahad, and was driven mad when he discovered what he had done), and hence never achieved the Graal.

3I almost wrote characters here, but that isn’t quite right. Dante’s masterpiece was precisely to find actual people who served as ideal symbols for psychological and spiritual facts, without ceasing to be fully themselves. This is part of what makes his poetry so convincing. It may be from St Paul that he drew this, since the Apostle’s allegorization of Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4 does exactly the same thing.

4As far as I know, anyway. My knowledge of Christian literature has been confined almost entirely to the West.

5Gawaine and Mordred, in general and especially in Williams, serve as good icons of irrational virtue and rational vice respectively. Gawaine is driven entirely by the honor code, to the point of killing his mother Morgause to preserve his family’s reputation, and of revealing the love of Lancelot and Guinevere to Arthur despite the catastrophic consequences for the Round Table and all of Logres; he is prompted to do the latter by Mordred, who is driven only by revenge and ambition, and is willing to manipulate everyone and violate every principle (even marrying his stepmother Guinevere) to get what he wants. This serves as a very neat depiction of the power that rational vice has to control, and eventually destroy, irrational virtue.

6The Star of Percivale ll. 19-20, 33-36, in Taliessin Through Logres. Balin the Savage was the knight who, in a rage, struck the infamous Dolorous Blow, which wounded the Fisher King who served as a guardian of the Graal; because of the mystical connection between the Fisher King and the land, the realm became a wasteland because of the Dolorous Blow, and only the achievement of the Graal could revive it. C. S. Lewis uses the Fisher King as an important motif in That Hideous Strength, though his version of the Dolorous Blow in that context is quite different.

7The Crowning of Arthur, ll. 61-65, 71-75, in Taliessin Through Logres.

8In fact, Williams set the original Latin of this very line as the epigraph to his first Arthurian volume: Unde est, quod non operatio propria propter essentiam, sed hæc propter illam habet ut sit.

9In some tellings, Morgause did know it. Malory has them both ignorant; I don’t know what Williams’ take on the matter was.

10Argent, azure, fess, and sable are technical terms in heraldry: argent is white (which is treated as equivalent to silver), azure is blue, and sable is black, while a fess is a horizontal band across the center of a coat of arms.

11Perfect contrition is contrasted in Catholic theology with imperfect contrition. Perfect contrition mourns sins because they deprive us of communion with God; imperfect contrition repents because of the ugliness of sin, or even out of the bare fear of damnation. Of course, perfect and imperfect contrition mix in our hearts all the time, though most of us probably experience imperfect contrition more often and to a greater degree.