Favourites in 2023: Music

Early in the year I acquired a few enormous boxes of music: an anthology of live performances by Sviatoslav Richter made by the Soviets (50 CDs), Fritz Reiner’s collected recordings made with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (63 CDs), and Charles Munch’s complete discography for RCA that he made mainly with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (86 CDs). Collectively, these took over a significant chunk of my listening this year — and I’m not close to getting through them yet. In a sense, this has been great, because they are fantastic performances in (in the case of Reiner and Munch) spectacular sound, but, on the other hand, they are mostly standard repertoire, with quite a bit of overlap between them, and, perhaps just because I listened to too much of them, nothing in these sets comes to mind at year’s end as having been especially memorable or wonderful.

My favourite recordings from this year, therefore, came from elsewhere, and here they are.

***

Hildegard of Bingen: Sacred Chants
Grace Davidson
(Signum, 2023)

The music of St Hildegard of Bingen first came to many music lovers’ attention in the early 1980s through a famous recording made by Emma Kirkby. Her light, luminous voice was the perfect vehicle for these wandering, ecstatic songs. Over the years the music has been pushed and pulled, stretched and stressed by a variety of different musical approaches, much of it quite wonderful. But here, on this record, we have something special: the English soprano Grace Davidson has stripped the music down to its essential core: voice alone. Recorded in her own home in 2021, these performances have a remarkable intensity and intimacy. The singing is stunningly beautiful, and this is my favourite record of the year.

**

An Old Hall Ladymass
Trio Mediaeval
(NativeDSD, 2023)

Years ago the Hilliard Ensemble made a recording of music from the Old Hall manuscript, and it was my introduction to this important source for pre-Reformation English (and French) music. It was made in the 15th century, and contains mainly music from the century prior. Most of this music disappeared in the iconoclasm of the English Reformation, and might have been lost forever had not this particular manuscript been discovered in the 19th century in a Catholic seminary. On this recording, the exquisite Trio Mediaeval brings the Old Hall music into conversation with both Sarum chant, which is its natural habitat, and modern music, which isn’t. But the modern pieces on this record, by David Lang and Marianne Reidarsdatter Eriksen, are somehow sound-adjacent enough that they provide contrast but do not jar. It’s a wonderful programme, elevated by the unbelievably stark and beautiful singing for which Trio Mediaeval is so justly revered.

In this excerpt they sing David Lang’s “Alleluia”:

**

Imaginario
Maria Cristina Kiehr, Ariel Abramovich
(Arcana, 2019)

The vihuela is a little-known instrument that might be aptly described as a “Spanish lute”. Popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many composers of the time wrote for it, and this recording gathers together a number of pieces for vihuela and voice by the likes of Josquin, Willaert, Morales, and Vasquez. It is lovely, small-scale music-making. Maria Cristina Kiehr has been an elite singer for many years, but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard her to better effect. Somehow this music strikes me right in the heart, although I confess that I have, for the most part, no clear idea what she is singing about. Good, clear sound.

Here she sings Qué sentís, coraçon mío by Juan Vasquez. I don’t like how the camera drifts around, but the music is the point.

**

Bach: Goldberg Variations
Vikingur Olafsson
(Deutsche Grammphon, 2023)

Every notable pianist makes a recording of Bach’s Goldbergs eventually, and there are many superb ones in the catalogue. Since it came out about twenty years ago my favourite has been Murray Perahia’s, and this new one by Vikingur Olafsson doesn’t change that, but it is worth noting all the same. He’s a wonderful Bach player, bringing out the counterpoint with marvellous clarity. There’s a fleetness to his playing that reminds me sometimes of Glenn Gould, but he’s a lighter touch and, dare I say it, more musicality than Gould. Honestly, music doesn’t get much better than this.

**

Bach/Malloch: The Art of Fuguing
Lukas Foss, Sheffield Ensemble
(Sheffield Labs, 1979)

Bach’s Art of Fugue is one of the great masterpieces of contrapuntal music, and over the centuries it has been re-imagined for a variety of different instruments and ensembles. This year I encountered for the first time William Malloch’s delightfully deranged orchestration of the music. He doesn’t stop at just orchestrating what Bach wrote, but adds percussion, choral parts, and even, at certain points, interpolations of his own. There is a wonderful section, for instance, in which the music takes flight and runs through a medley of major fugues written since Bach’s time. It’s a riot. Here is the orchestration of the final “Contrapunctus No.20”:

**

Bruckner: Symphony No.8
Gunter Wand, NDR Sinfonieorchester
(RCA, 1987)

This year I was finally able to lay hands on this famous recording of Bruckner’s Symphony No.8. Recorded live in 1987 in Lubeck Cathedral, it has been out of print despite having a sterling reputation among at least some Bruckner aficionados. It was worth the wait. The sound of the strings is lavish, and the brass have tremendous punch and presence. The acoustic of the church is fairly resonant, with a long decay, and this adds to the monumental feeling of this monumental symphony. A thrilling musical experience.

**

Fantasia
Igor Levit
(Sony, 2023)

Igor Levit is a pianist who I follow with a good deal of interest, and he’s appeared before on my year-end favourites lists. He makes big “statement” records, more often than not running to two or three hours long, but his playing is not flashy or self-important; he’s an intensely concentrated and intimate musician. I’d love to see him in concert some day. In the meantime, though, we have recordings, and this year he made one called “Fantasia” that is constructed around four masterpieces: Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, Berg’s Piano Sonata, and, the dark horse, Busoni’s gigantic Fantasia Contrappuntistica. The programme is filled out by one shorter piece by each of those four composers. It works extremely well as a programme, as you can immediately start to make connections between the various works. Splendid playing, of course, and impeccable musicianship.

Here is Levit playing the piece that opens the record: the famous Air from Bach’s Suite for String Orchestra No.3:

**

Sanctissima
ORA Singers, Suzi Digby
(Harmonia Mundi, 2023)

The British choir ORA Singers are among the finest in the world, and one of the most remarkable for the number of commissions they make; they must have money from somewhere. Over the years they have made quite a few recordings in which they pair up compositions by Renaissance masters with newly commissioned works on the same or similar texts, allowing us to compare and contrast different approaches to the text. Sanctissima is similarly conceived. They have assembled music for Vespers and Benediction for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. The backbone of the music is plainchant, but they have interpolated polyphonic pieces by composers old and new setting the same plainchant texts. It’s beautifully done. The older composers represented are Palestrina, Guerrero, and Anerio, and the new composers are David Bednall, Olivier Tarney, John Joubert, Giles Swayne, Kim Porter, James MacMillan, Julian Anderson, Matthew Martin, and Sven-David Sandstrom. Nine of the pieces receive their first recordings here. It is heartening for me to see such accomplished music being commissioned for the liturgy and delightful to hear it performed so superbly. The tradition is alive and well.

Here is Sven-David Sandstrom’s setting of Tantum ergo:

**

Messiaen: Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus
Bertrand Chamayou
(Erato, 2022)

Messiaen’s Vingt Regards is a piece that I love, a big, 90-minute piano extravaganza that seems formidable at first but which grows more endearing with greater familiarity. I listen to it regularly, but I see that it has been five years since I put a recording on my year-end list. This one, from Bertrand Chamayou, is wonderfully played and recorded, but earned a special place in my heart for its inclusion, at the front and back ends, of five additional pieces written in memory of or in homage to Messiaen, including Kurtag’s …humble regard sur Olivier Messiaen, Jonathan Harvey’s Tombeau de Messiaen, and Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II, written “in memoriam Olivier Messiaen”. It’s a programme that touched my heart this year.

**

Nowakowski: Metanoia
Various Artists
(Dux, 2023)

I’ve talked before about the music of Mark Nowakowski. He’s a modern composer who writes for a variety of different ensembles, vocal and instrumental, and he is, I would say, among the most talented composers currently writing sacred music for the Catholic Church. He has written some really lovely and impressive pieces. This new recording is a kind of showcase for his versatility, including, as it does, a piece for cello octet (Metanoia), a piece for piano trio (Reaching), and one for instruments and electronics (Bogurodzica: Meditation). Usually I don’t like music for electronics, but I didn’t mind it here. The main piece is a long (~20 minutes) setting of a section from Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis?, and the programme is rounded out by several gorgeous choral works. You might not think such a varied programme would make a satisfying package, but I found it has grown on me. In any case, the individual pieces have convinced me that I’d like to hear more of Nowakowski’s music.

***

Honourable Mentions:

Amour et Mars: I’ve been getting to know the ensemble Theleme’s recordings over the last few years, and this one, of music by Clement Janequin and Claude Le Jeune, has mightily impressed me. My gold standard in this wild Renaissance repertoire has been the records made by Ensemble Clement Janequin years ago, but Theleme gives them a run for their money in monstrously complicated and entertaining pieces like Le chant du Rossignol and La Guerre. Elite ensemble singing.

Bach’s music is often reframed for instruments other than those Bach had in mind, but this is the first time, I think, that I’ve seen his pieces for solo violin adapted for an ensemble. The Brodsky String Quartet take Sonata No.2 and Sonata No.3 and work magic with them. It’s a fascinating experience to hear this familiar music spread out in different tonal registers and timbres. I judge it a successful experiment, and I hope they’ll follow up with similar adaptations of the other solo violin pieces.

Weinberg: String Quartets No.5 & No.6 (Silesian Quartet): The Danel Quartet was the first to make a complete cycle of recordings of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s splendid string quartets, and I love those records to bits, but it has been heartening to see other quartets taking up Weinberg’s banner as well. If this amazing music is to become part of the standard repertoire, this is the way in which it will happen. I’m aware of at least two other quartet cycles that are in process, one of them from the Silesian Quartet, who in this recording lay down two of the early-ish quartets, as well as the newly discovered Improvisation and Romance for string quartet, a lovely little piece that has thoroughly charmed me.

Favourites in 2023: Books

My reading this year was largely structured around a few ongoing reading projects: on ancient Greek history and literature, on early-ish modern drama, and on the plays of Tom Stoppard. A did quite a lot of reading (and re-reading) for a class that I have been teaching, and a friend and I continued an informal book/film/whiskey club that was the occasion for reading a few excellent novels. And of course I read a number of things that didn’t fall under these umbrellas — just over 100 books in total this year, which is surprisingly high, although that number includes shorter works like plays and dialogues which might not, by some reckoning, rise to the level of full-fledged books in their own right. I count how I like.

Today I’ve selected ten that stood out in one way or another. I list them in no particular order, although I have picked one as my favourite of the year.

***

Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP proffers himself as guide through Gerard Manley Hopkins’ intricate poems in Hopkins: Theologian’s Poet. Following a biographical sketch of the poet’s life, he offers commentary on about two dozen hand-picked poems. The section on the Terrible Sonnets significantly improved my understanding, while I appreciated having his sturdy arm to lean on when running the gauntlet of Hopkins’ most ambitious poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland. Although some personal favorites like The Habit of Perfection and Spring and Fall were not included in the book, I nonetheless enjoyed it very much. Commentaries on poetry are rarely rewarding, in my experience, but here is an exception. [Notes]

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates confronts the view that rational management of love is superior to the loss of composure that comes with “being in love”. In response, he explores different types of mania: prophetic ecstasy, cathartic mania, poetic inspiration, and erotic mania, and argues that such “irrational” experiences nonetheless have much to teach and to give. In particular, Socrates argues that love can bring about an experience of longing and recollection that opens a window to transcendence. It’s a rich exploration of philosophy, love, and our relationship to the divine. [Notes]

Wiker and Demarco’s Architects of the Culture of Death digs into the roots of modern thought that shape what Pope St John Paul II called our “culture of death.” Contrasting two major tendencies of modernity — self-exaltation and self-abasement — the authors explore several key elements in the architecture of modern thought: atheism, an absolutization of freedom, an obsession with sex, and a loss of the sense of human dignity. Examining influential figures from Schopenhauer to Singer, they describe the philosophical developments that have led to, among other things, eugenics, sexual liberation, and euthanasia. It’s a well-argued, wide-ranging book that underscores the unity of the many ways in which this cultural project expresses and unfolds itself. [Notes]

Xenophon’s Anabasis is a 4th century BC account of the Persian prince Cyrus’ ambitious plot to seize the Persian throne from his brother, Artaxerxes II. Xenophon was one of the Greek mercenaries who signed on to help him. The narrative follows the perilous journey of the “Ten Thousand”  as they marched through hostile terrain to fight the Persians. The Battle of Cunaxa, however, resulted in Cyrus’ death, and shifted the Greeks’ focus to returning home safely. In time, Xenophon became the de facto leader, and he offers a detailed and engaging account of their perilous and circuitous journey home. The beautiful Landmark edition enhances the experience with maps, notes, and essays that does full justice to this remarkable story.

Josef Pieper’s Living the Truth is the title under which two short philosophical works are collected.  In the first, The Truth of All Things, he explores the meaning and implications of the medieval philosophical maxim that “All that exists is true.” He argues that it means that all things are intelligible, possessing intrinsic rational structure. Intelligibility is not an added quality but inherent to being. To say a thing is true, therefore, is to declare it knowable by a mind, and so to emphasize the orientation of things toward knowledge. Pieper explores the distinction between creative and receptive knowledge, linking the intelligibility of the world to God’s creative knowledge. Ultimately, the book unveils how this principle shapes our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos, and underlines theism’s status as a deep form of rationalism.

The second work, Reality and the Good, probes the relationship between moral judgement and objective reality. Rooted in St. Thomas Aquinas, Pieper contends that “Reality is the foundation of ethics.” The book explores the connections between theoretical reason, conjoined to an inherent moral awareness, and practical reason, which evaluates means and ends. Although it is a challenging read, the book underscores the rational foundation of morality and its vital connection to what is real.

*

Iris Murdoch’s The Bell unfolds in the English countryside, where a nascent lay religious community attempts to live a life of prayer and work in proximity to an ancient convent. Nora, estranged and not religious, joins the community, offering us as readers a unique perspective on the goings-on. The ensemble cast grapple with their checkered pasts, mixed motives, and present temptations. Murdoch navigates complexity with clear-eyed evenhandedness, and I found her precise and lucid style captivating. The Bell is an absorbing, delightful exploration of life lived in community, both for better and for worse. [Notes]

In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Tess Durbeyfield is a young woman who stands at the terminus of a declining noble lineage, impoverished and facing a difficult life. Echoing Hardy’s earlier work, “Far From the Madding Crowd,” the novel depicts a woman torn between flawed suitors, and all the while harbouring a secret shame that threatens her future. Hardy crafts a masterful character study, portraying Tess as a woman whose life is marked by personal failings and, possibly, the influence of ancient powers. Beyond its philosophical depth, the novel stands as a beautifully written, heartbreaking masterpiece depicting a woman’s struggle for love amid adversity. Certainly I count it a highlight of my ongoing tour through Hardy’s major novels. [Notes]

Gilead is the first book that I have read by Marilynne Robinson, and I was mightily impressed by it. The Reverend John Ames shares reflections and wisdom that he hopes his seven-year-old son will someday read, when Ames himself has gone to his reward.  The novel unveils the richness of an ordinary life, and prompted me to reflect on my own experiences and what counsel I would like to pass on to my own children. It’s a very rewarding novel. [Notes]

A phenomenon I’ve noticed at online review sites (like, for example, Metacritic) is that people tend to give television programmes higher ratings on average than they do films, and I think this might be because people who’ve invested more time in something are more likely to speak well of it, if only to avoid admitting that they wasted their time on something unworthy. Something similar might be going on in my selecting Boiardo’s gargantuan poem Orlando innamorato for this year-end list. With more than 5000 stanzas populated by brave knights, cunning magicians, fearsome beasts, and terrible adventures, it is truly “a brilliant and copious production”, and a reader, like myself, who ventures through its tangled pathways and emerges from the other side is likely to look back with gratified satisfaction. At least I do. [Notes]

The highlight of my year of reading in 2023 was, however, my encounters with the plays of Molière. Early in the year I acquired Richard Wilbur’s translations of ten plays in a handsome new edition from Library of America, and I began to read without having any clear idea of what I was likely to find. What a surprise and a joy it has been! I’ve been thoroughly charmed by Molière’s witty comedies, made doubly great by Wilbur’s dazzling renderings. These are among the most impressive translations I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Not that I can judge their fidelity to the French, but I can judge their merit as comic verse in English, and by that measure they are superb. I believe I read seven of the plays this year, and I look forward to finishing off the collection in the coming months. [Notes]

***

Read again: Homer, Odyssey; Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War; Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Antigone; Aristophanes, The Birds, Lysistrata; Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Symposium, Phaedrus; Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline; C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian; Thornton Burgess, The Adventures of Grandfather Frog, Mother West Wind “Why” Stories, Mother West Wind “When” Stories, Mother West Wind “How” Stories, Mother West Wind “Where” Stories; Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers; Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine Madness; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Multiple things by the same author: Tom Stoppard (15), Thornton Burgess (10), Plato (9), Molière (7), Aristophanes (6), Josef Pieper (3), P.G. Wodehouse (3), Sophocles (2), Xenophon (2), William Shakespeare (2), Pierre Corneille (2), Arthur Conan Doyle (2), Cormac McCarthy (2).

Molière: The School for Wives

The School for Wives
Molière
Translated from the French by Richard Wilbur
(Library of America, 2021) [1662]
112 p.

These Moliere’s comedies have been delighting me each time I have picked one up, so you can imagine my surprise when I picked up The School for Wives and found Richard Wilbur saying, in his introduction, that it is “Moliere’s first great verse comedy”.  His what? And what, then, were those others? I didn’t know we were still shy of the summit.

Perhaps one thing that elevates this play is its central character, Arnolphe, an older man, a selfish man, set in his ways, a planner, a practical man, and a foolish man. He is also a single man, never married, and overfond of mocking those who marry a woman who turns out to be unfaithful. It’s an unbecoming trait, and his friend chastises him for it:

CHRYSALDE: Since with your jeering tongue you plague the lives
Of men who are unlucky in their wives,
And persecute them like a fiend from Hell,
Take care lest someday you be jeered as well.
(I, i)

The warning is apropos because Arnolphe is, in fact, planning to marry, but he, in his wisdom, has prepared the ground carefully. For over a decade he has been guardian of a girl, now of marriageable age, and he intends to take her to wife. Yet because, he says, “I know men who’ve undergone much pain / Because they married girls with too much brain.” (I, i) he has taken pains to have her brought up far from the influences of the world, and carefully shielded from things that might put bad ideas — indeed, any ideas — into her head:

“In a small convent, far from the haunts of man,
The girl was reared according to my plan:
I told the nuns what means must be employed
To keep her growing mind a perfect void,
And, God be praised, they had entire success,
As a grown girl, her simple-mindedness
Is such that I thank Heaven for granting me
A bride who suits my wishes to a T.
(I, i)

Arnolphe’s views on marriage are, unfortunately, not likely to excite the admiration of any young woman. He explains them one day to his intended, Agnes:

One half commands, the other must obey;
The second serves the first in every way;
And that obedience which the soldier owes
His general, or the loyal servant shows
His master, or the good child pays his sire,
Or the stern abbot looks for in the friar,
Is nothing to the pure docility,
The deep submission and humility
Which a good wife must ever exhibit toward
The man who is her master, chief, and lord.
(II, ii)

(Let’s pause, parenthetically, to admire this verse. Notice how he sets up repeated enjambments that displace the rhythm to mid-line pauses, and then, in the last several lines, as he’s getting to the main point, loosens the reins and lets the words flow out in one long breath before pulling up, at the very end, with a series of emphatic, self-admiring accolades. It’s very fine English comic verse in its own right.)

Yet, as he is planning his proposal, a wrinkle appears that threatens his happiness, for a younger man has taken a liking to Agnes, and has also, in a convenient maneuver that puts the third side on the love triangle, taken Arnolphe into his confidence, unaware that Arnolphe is his rival. It’s a wonderful set-up.

Arnolphe, feeling the pressure to act or be displaced, goes ahead with his proposal. Of course, being the man he is, he makes a terrific hash of it:

Be ever mindful, Agnes, that you would be,
Without this union, a nonentity;
And let that thought incline your heart to merit
The name which I shall lend you, and to bear it
With such propriety that I shall never
Regret my choice for any cause whatever.
(II, ii)

An insult, a boast, and a threat: even Mr Collins was not this bad.

Anyhow, as things play out, Agnes and Horace fall in love, and do their best to keep their rendezvous secret from Arnolphe. Yet, whenever Horace sees Arnolphe on the street, he is always eager to share with his “friend” stories about his most recent or forthcoming assignation. The comedic potential of this confusion is well developed as the play proceeds.

ARNOLPHE: There’s one good thing about my present fix —
That I’m forewarned of all my rival’s tricks,
And that this oaf who’s aiming to undo me
Confesses all his bad intentions to me.
(IV, vii)

In the final Act, though, Horace is forced to abandon Agnes when his father arranges a marriage for him. Arnolphe, it seems, is saved, and everyone else is sunk! Yet, by one final bit of playful cleverness, the ship is righted again, and Arnolphe finds himself collaborator in bringing about his own miserable end. It’s a fine finish, attributed to “Heaven, which orders all things for the best.”

I loved the play, as I’ve loved all of these Moliere comedies so far. It has wonderful characters, a superbly humorous situation, and it rings the comedic changes like a champion.

An alert reader (thanks, Craig) pointed out that Ingmar Bergman’s adaptation of this play is available on YouTube. I began watching it, but the truth is that I found a Swedish language adaptation not much fun. The English subtitles lacked the wit and sparkle of Wilbur’s version. I watched a half hour or so, to get the flavour of the staging and the acting, but then I abandoned it.

*

[The power of love]
The miser’s made a spendthrift overnight,
The coward valiant, and the boor polite;
Love spurs the sluggard on to high endeavour,
And moves the artless maiden to be clever.
(II, iv)

Intellectuals and other rogues

Intellectuals
Paul Johnson
(Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1988)
385 p.

Architects of the Culture of Death
Donald Demarco and Benjamin Wiker
(Ignatius, 2004)
410 p.

“In seeking the deepest roots of the struggle between the ‘culture of life’ and the ‘culture of death’ … we have to go to the heart of the tragedy being experienced by modern man: the eclipse of the sense of God and of man.” (Pope St John Paul II, The Gospel of Life)

As a young man I used to assume that the world was run more-or-less along rational lines by people with good intentions. I assumed that influential people were probably competent and beneficent, and that seriously malign influences were probably shunned and sidelined, and that a general practical wisdom probably prevailed in most circumstances. It was a fancy that has died a long, slow death over the years, and here come two books to put the nails into the coffin. In a series of potted biographies of influential cultural figures — philosophers, scientists, writers, activists — over the past three centuries, we see a disturbing pattern: late modernity prefers the maladjusted, vicious, extreme, muddled, fraudulent, and foolish. Our who’s who is a rogues’ gallery of the first order. Although one has to be careful to keep things in perspective, it can be tempting to conclude that we never met a bad idea we didn’t like.

*

Paul Johnson writes about the lives of “public intellectuals”, those who thought themselves qualified to offer counsel to the rest of us about how to live and how to live together. He looks at their lives and asks how they themselves lived. Were they good people? How did they treat their families and friends? What virtues did they exhibit? What vices did they exhibit? Did they practice what they preached?

For example, we can consider the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Johnson calls the first distinctively modern public intellectual (a genus that arose to fill the vacuum created by the waning authority of the clergy). He presented himself as a gentle man, a friend of humanity. “His reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility,” Johnson wryly observes. His life was an appalling mess. He kept a mistress, Therese, for over three decades, but refused to marry her. With her he had five children, all of whom he compelled her to surrender to orphanages; it seems he put into practice his theory that the state should control social and economic life, including the rearing of children. Despite styling himself an educational reformer, and writing one of the most influential books shaping modern education, he appears to have taken no care for the education of his own children. He argued that the state should have a parental relationship to each child, and that parents should have no rights in the education of their children. No rights, and so no responsibilities, it seems. He at least was consistent.

In his wider social world he had a toxic reputation as well. He was noted, and, in a curious way, feted for being rude and belligerent to those who helped him. The novelty of the pose made him seem dashing, “a brilliant, highly intelligent Brute of Nature”. Johnson calls him “a practiced psychological con-man” for the manner in which he would systematically exploit the guilt of the wealthy and privileged to his own advantage. Those who knew him personally did not mince words: Hume called him “a monster who saw himself as the only important being in the universe”; Diderot pronounced him “deceitful, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and full of malice”; Grimm described him as “odious, monstrous”; and Voltaire said he was “a monster of vanity and vileness”.

So Rousseau, it seems, was not a good man. Neither, according to Johnson, were Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Russell, or Sartre. If you idolized these men and wanted to be like them, the book would feel like a hard slap. They were promiscuous, greedy, and untruthful. They were, most of them, afflicted with the intellectual’s curse of thinking ideas more important than people, and so treated people shabbily or worse. Most, as you’d expect from those who think they have counsel to offer society, were massively egotistical.

Does this matter? It’s an important question because these biographical sketches, while not stinting in praise where it is due, are focused on the moral faults of the figures in question, and there is a risk of falling into mere ad hominem. Yes, so-and-so may have been a bad man in various respects, but his ideas can be evaluated on their own merits, and don’t depend on his moral rectitude. “Do not look to see where truth comes from” is a good Thomistic aphorism.

This would be a good rejoinder if these men were speaking on subjects about which they had expertise, but the matter is more subtle when we are in the realm of moral counsel. When I ask the question “How shall I live?”, I begin to care about not just the knowledge, but the wisdom of the one who answers. From how he lives I can discern something, at least, of the weight of consideration I should give his counsel. It is not true that a bad person can’t give good advice, but it is true that it would be rare and surprising if he could do so consistently. Committing evil harms and malforms the soul. Sin weakens the will and darkens the intellect. There is such a thing as a reprobate, who no longer sees the evil of what he does. It is the saint who sees moral hazards and faults most clearly.

So it is fair, I think, to make this line of inquiry, and to make judgments about whether we ought or ought not to heed the counsel of certain people based on how they conduct themselves. But it needs to be done cautiously, provisionally. It is a tricky business.

**

We are on firmer ground, therefore, when we turn from Johnson’s book to that of Wiker and Demarco. Though their book has a more provocative title, their focus is much more on the public acts and ideas of their subjects than on personal failings. It’s a more polemical book, for while Johnson often has admiring things to say about his subjects when he thinks it’s appropriate, we find little of that here; these men and women have been chosen for inclusion especially because of their baleful influence on our world. It’s also a deeper book, seeking out the philosophical roots of the ideas it opposes, and critiquing them from a broadly Catholic point of view grounded in the moral and philosophical writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope St. John Paul II (who coined the “culture of death” phrase cribbed for the book’s title).

They define a culture of death as one characterized by “self-willed eclipse of the true sense of both God and man”. It is, therefore, more basically a culture of untruth that manifests in various ways that bring death to body and soul. In our culture we find a paradoxical double movement: on one hand, there is a pressure to depersonalize human beings, eroding the dignity and sanctity that the tradition afforded us by reducing us to animals or even chemical phenomena, and, on the other, a Promethean exaltation of human beings as gods whose wills define or even create reality. These two movements are self-contradictory, but both are responses to our culture’s rejection of God, for human dignity was always rooted in our status as children of God, created and beloved by Him, and we knew we were not gods because we were God’s creatures.

The book explores five principal planks in the architecture of modern thought: “atheism, the isolation of the will from the consequences of its choices, an absolutization of freedom, an obsession with sex, and a loss of a sense of human dignity”. They reach as far back as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to excavate the roots, and follow the cultural evolution as far forward as still-living figures like Peter Singer.

When God was rejected by modernity, the self-exalting, divinizing branch sprouted before the reductive, self-destructive one. Schopenhauer understood the implications of atheism, and argued that reason was henceforth severed from nature, for nature is a realm of blind, meaningless forces. The will was untethered from nature, left drifting and unmoored from the world, free to do whatever. Nietzsche followed, and he, too, understood what his atheism entailed. Even reason, he thought, and the very concept of truth were anchored in God, and must fall away, yielding their place to will and power as the fundamental realities. Desire became sovereign. By the time Ayn Rand came along (as she does in the book), selfish individualism had become a topsy-turvy form of virtue.

Marx took atheism as his starting point as well, asserting that God and humanity were in competition: “Atheism is a negation of God and seeks to assert by this negation the existence of man.” But this attempt at aggrandizement very quickly inverted into its opposite, for Marx was also convinced that human beings were enslaved to their social conditions, unable to act in freedom, and not even properly subject to praise or blame for their actions. (We see already why these two branches of modern thought, the divinizing and the animalistic, are secretly connected under the surface.) God was ejected from Marx’ view of the world, and into his place came the blind forces of history. It has been oft remarked that Marx’s scheme of things retains many of the features of the Christian faith which it attempts to displace: a promise of justice, redemption, equality, community, and even paradise, all transposed into a lower register. (Parenthetically, it has not oft been remarked that Marx was little regarded in his own day; Demarco and Wiker say that only eleven people attended his funeral!) But when paradise becomes not a reward or a gift of God, but an achievement to be made by us or not at all, the tradition of reticence, patience, and trust in providence yields like a cracked dam. We all know that Marxism, in its political instantiations in the 20th century, produced death on a scale the world had never before known.

They pursue one more strand of the atheist thread up through Sartre and de Beauvoir, where it formed one of the foundation stones of the sexual revolution. Sartre, too, saw God as in competition with humanity; his denial of God was an assertion of freedom. His famous dictum that “existence precedes essence” was a nonsensical claim that there is no human nature: the expulsion of the Creator does away with creatureliness — that is, with a nature that we all share and cannot escape. “There is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it.” We are therefore freed up to define ourselves however we like. But Sartre, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche before him, was a clear-eyed atheist who looked the thing in the eye. He could see that if there is no concept of the “human” then neither can there be a concept of the “inhuman”, and a pit silently opened up. Late in life, he admitted that although he did not believe in God, he relied on those who did for the sanity and stability of society.

Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s longtime mistress, took his ideas and ran with them. (She said that his Being and Nothingness was “the only important influence” on her own feminist manifesto The Second Sex.) Her thought is a peculiar application of Sartrean atheism that introduces a number of bizarre and ultimately perverse ideas that might be only a curiosity if she were not so influential. She sets up dichotomies between men and women: men are associated with “transcendence” and women with “immanence”. Men are free and powerful; women are shackled and weak. Obviously, when this is how you see things, you conclude that women should aspire to be like men. Her “modern woman” accepts that the masculine virtues and values are the best ones. She took this so far as to actually argue that masculine violence was preferable to feminine nurturing. Her book is, in William Barrett’s words, a “protest against being feminine”. She advocated for positions that have since become central to modern politics: the family and maternal instincts are oppressive and should be opposed. (She even thought that women should not be “allowed” to stay at home with children because “if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one”.) Her loathing of maternity made her an abortion advocate of course, and so another, even vaster pile of bodies rose into view. All this in the name of feminism! The authors call The Second Sex “the most insidious and thorough betrayal that has ever been perpetrated against the female sex”.

And of course the sexual revolution continued in de Beauvoir’s wake. The authors focus, as an instance, on Elisabeth Badinter, who, like de Beauvoir, stressed conflict between the sexes instead of complementarity and promoted abortion and contraception as means to collapse the differences between women and men, but also advocated artificial gestation and proposed that even taboos against incest might naturally fade away as sex was dissociated from reproduction. Demarco and Wiker seem not to have anticipated the rise of transgenderism, which is likewise rooted in de Beauvoir’s (and Sartre’s) claims that nothing is natural. Where this train is heading is not clear, but it apparently still has plenty of momentum.

*

The second major project they survey is the one rooted in Darwin, and that is the project, running contrary to the first, to reconceptualize humanity as animal in nature. Of course, this idea was not alien to the traditional view, but had been augmented by the idea that a human being was a rational animal possessed of a rational soul (will and intellect) that distinguished us from other animals, and also by the intrinsic dignity we possessed as creatures made in the image and likeness of God. Those augmentations were bulwarks against treating human beings as mere animals, and their erosion has had wide, rolling repercussions. Demarco and Wiker discuss three main issues that have been strongly affected by this emphasis on our fleshly nature: eugenics, sexual liberation, and euthanasia.

It is sometimes said that Darwin was strictly a scientist, and that the political and social applications of his ideas were the work of others, but this is not true. In The Descent of Man he clearly described what he thought were the racist and eugenicist implications of his theory. “If we do not prevent the reckless, the vicious, and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing … the nation will retrograde.” “Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind.” Moreover, he came to believe that conscience was a product of natural selection and so, ultimately, contingent and arbitrary; many varieties of conscience will occur, and none can be judged better than another.

These notions were emphasized and extended by his cousin, Francis Galton, who advocated artificial selection for humans with the aim of ensuring the triumph of superior races over inferior ones. We know that programs of artificial sterilization of persons judged inferior were planned and implemented by governments, including my own. Galton’s ideas influenced the policies of the Third Reich through the work of Ernst Haeckel, who was an advocate not just of eugenics and racial extermination, but also abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. The association of eugenics with the Nazis tainted its reputation, and these eugenics programs were discontinued, but the principle has reappeared in other guises, as, for example, in prenatal screening.

The sexual liberation thread goes back at least to Freud. Obviously he’s a complex figure, but for present purposes we simply note that he put forward an anthropological theory in which people were subject to irrational and unconscious instincts and impulses that were merely masked by pretensions to reason and conscience. Wilhelm Reich (one of the most troubled and disturbing characters to be treated in this book) set out to combine Freudianism and Marxism with the aim of freeing people from the inhibitions that blunt the power of their animal desires, to strip away cultural repression and authority, including the restraining force of conscience. His ideal was a person who “satisfied his strong libidinal needs at the risk of social ostracism”. He was an early advocate of sexual education in schools, with the express aim of undermining the authority of parents over their children. It is fitting therefore that he is called the “father of the sexual revolution”.

Contributing to the same effort were quasi-scientists like Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey. (The latter probably takes the palm for being the most depraved person in this parade.) I say “quasi”-scientific because the scholarly quality of both is open to serious doubts. In the case of Mead, and her famous anthropological study of Polynesian tribes, it is perhaps debatable whether she was fraudulent or just incompetent; her conclusions were mostly wrong. Kinsey, on the other hand, was a fraud; his interviews and statistical studies of human sexuality enrolled high rates of sex offenders, male prostitutes, and other populations that biased his data. He pioneered a since-popular method of giving lurid sexual acts a scientific gloss of respectability, and treating sexual perversions as just observed variations in behaviour. What went on at his research institute would not, shall we say, be likely to receive ethical approval today.

From Mead and Kinsey it is a small step to Margeret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. Her motives in promoting birth control and abortion were mixed: partly eugenic, partly to alleviate the suffering of poor women, and partly to liberate sexual desire. It is important to note that from the beginning abortion was seen as a necessary backstop for imperfect contraception; the one seems always to bring the other along behind.

The progress of the sexual revolution reached a uniquely American apotheosis in the person of Helen Gurley Brown, who first made a name for herself by promoting lust, avarice, and pride as virtues (under the more appealing names “sex”, “money”, and “success”) before taking the helm at Cosmopolitan magazine, which she turned into a vanguard of the revolution, popularizing all of its essential planks and giving them a glamorous, benign, glossy look.

The newest front in the advance of the culture of death is, arguably, euthanasia, which has been advancing politically through the West in the past several decades, and continues to do so. Demarco and Wiker discuss the work of three activists: Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society (now Death With Dignity [sic]), Jack Kevorkian, and Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. They argue that Kevorkian was less motivated by a desire to relieve suffering than by a hope that lives could be saved through organ donation from euthanized people. (This motive has not gone away.) Peter Singer is a notorious provocateur, but I’ve long considered him an ally of pro-lifers because he does not shy away from pursuing the logical consequences of his ideas. If the key to the value of life is not nature but capacity (as he argues, and as is implicit in eugenics and abortion practices) then his toleration of infanticide, for instance, makes perfect sense. He shows us that the culture of death still has territory to conquer.

***

Both of these books have a catalogue quality to them; we wander through a gallery of swindlers, clowns, and reprobates. Johnson is a fine biographer, and his book has a good deal of human interest to it, but, as I said earlier, as a pathway to evaluating his subjects’ influence on the world it runs perilously close to ad hominem, and would, in certain respects at least, fall under the umbrella of gossip. Demarico and Wiker are more objective, and mount more of an argument, going on the attack against a much wider swath of evils. Both books are, of course, highly negative in tone and content, and I confess I found that hard going after a while. (It is perhaps interesting to know that both Johnson and Demarco wrote companion volumes in which they are relentlessly positive — Heroes and The Many Faces of Virtue, respectively.)

What did I learn from reading them? A good deal of incidental detail, of course. A renewed awareness of just how disordered people’s private lives can be. A fresh sense that the world is governed with very little wisdom, and often enough with a good deal worse. None of the subjects covered by the books were my heroes going in; in some cases my negative opinion was reinforced, and in some cases my neutrality tipped to the negative side. I suppose I did, especially from Demarco and Wiker, get a clearer sense of how the “progressive” juggernaut advanced during the 20th century, and how the many fronts were traceable to common roots. I can’t say that anything in them really surprised me, unless it was Alfred Kinsey’s depravity. That such people should be granted wide influence in the world is discouraging, to say the least.

Maybe the main thing I take away is the basic conceptual framework that Demarco and Wiker use to organize their book: this culture of death — call it whatever you want, but there is a thing at which they are pointing — has arisen because God has been rejected, with two principal consequences: we have tried to assume his place by exalting our own power to create value, and we have lost the intelligibility of things, including our own nature and its dignity. That’s a sketch, but sometimes a sketch is what one needs.

Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Translated from the Russian by H.T. Willetts
(Everyman, 1991) [1962]
xxvii + 159 p. Second reading.

The book’s political importance is perhaps in danger of overshadowing its literary merits. Based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experience in a Soviet labour camp (where he was interred for 8 years for criticizing Stalin), it was the first Soviet novel to describe the Gulag camps, and it was a literary sensation in Russia. Surprisingly, it was not published in secret, but received official approval from Khrushchev, who allegedly saw it as serving his ambitions to knock Stalin’s reputation down a notch or two. A significant miscalculation, I would think. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not always sound reasoning.

The story, true to its billing, is about one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, an ordinary Russian sentenced to ten years in the labour camps. He was sent there on false allegations. We follow him as he wakes up, eats, works, and goes to bed. Nothing notable happens. It is one day like the others. There is no great cruelty or violence; just the rhythms of prison life, marking time, scheming for minor advantages, hoarding of worthless trinkets, bribery, and worry about breaking rules. There is little in the way of camaraderie among the prisoners; Shukhov has no friends. He has a family back home, but he’s asked them not to send him anything; they need it more than he does. He is alone.

As a portrait of the dehumanizing effects of the Soviet camps, it’s powerful. As a literary work, it has the drab texture of Shukhov’s life. We find few colourful adjectives or dramatic moments. The prose is as grey as the concrete. One long sequence describes Shukhov’s work crew building a brick wall, and the extended nuts-and-bolts description of the process captures something, at least, of the tedium. When I first read the novel, many years ago, I was disappointed by these qualities. Now I think I understand the rhetorical strategy.

I count myself an admirer of Solzhenitsyn, but my admiration is based mainly on second-hand appraisals of his social criticism and personal moral courage. It has been good to sit down for a few hours with the man himself. I’d like to read another of his novels, though their disconcerting resemblances to huge big doorstops frighten me.