Jesuits On The Run

God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
by Alice Hogge

Alice Hogge’s book reads like a hagiography of Henry Garnet — nevermind that he was never beatified, let alone sanctified. The subtitle both reveals and elides the actual subject(s) of the book. Though indeed _God’s Secret Agents_ is the story of “Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests”, the Gunpowder Plot is ancillary to the main action. The first two-thirds of the work is a powerful, well-sourced description of The Mission, the Jesuit project to continue Catholicism in England despite the laws that made it criminal and the political opportunism that weakened the One True Faith over the last twenty years of the 16th Century. Though Hogge is careful to portray both the powerful faith of the English Catholics as well as the realpolitik that drove their oppression, her sympathies are obviously on the side of the Catholics caught in a Great Game between Britain and the Spanish, French, and Papal forces. The nobility of her heroes — Garnet and Gerard and Campion — is limned in every paragraph, while her objectivity sometimes seems forced as she writes, for example, of Robert Cecil’s surprising tolerance in his private letters at odds to his political invective against the Romish Church. The book hits surprising doldrums after Father Gerard’s escape from the Tower of London in 1597, as the author has to somehow traverse the next six years to finally arrive at the foothills of the Gunpowder Plot. The death of Elizabeth seems to cast a pall on the narrative as well, and Hogge’s lively tale of priests on the run becomes a fairly dry exposition of Catesby’s plotting and the tenuous, ambiguous connections of Garnet to the same. The use of these connections by the Government to destroy The Mission almost utterly is a foregone conclusion, and the book limps to a close like Frodo and Sam wending their way to Mount Doom. For all that, this is a very good book; the descriptions of the ‘hide holes’ constructed for the Catholic ‘Resistance’ are worth the price alone. Just don’t read it expecting to get more than a quick overview of the Gunpowder Plot (which is all it deserves, after all). Hogge’s work, instead, portrays the perilous world of the distaff faith, detailing the passions and tough moral choices that created the world in which Guy Fawkes could contemplate his terrible vengeance.

A Difficult Spot

As if the appliances didn’t demand more and more stories though I’m sure they’ve heard them all a dozen times or more, the toaster pops out a request for a story about Lady Lydia. “Please!” he says, “a Lady Lydia story?” But there’s always something else in the way. Today it was a pogo-stick and a garage full of pancake batter. The river of trolls that migrated from the northern mountains finds sweet solace in the maraschino cherries stored in the cupboards above the washer. Having sat through the Christmas season unused, it was surprising how much fight they had left in them.

It’s not a dream she had. Not a waking reverie of castles and clouds that sustained her across the many lonely days. For sustained she was not; her evil bargain no bargain at all. Doomed to each day forget once more the revelations of the night before, and slumping cold-shouldered into the uncaring grey world of dawn, to lose the heart anew. Each day’s dawning sounding the knell of a graveyard elegy, with its poetry removed and a checkbook in its place. And as if the cement walls were not solid and solemn enough, even the dreams grew ashes and confused and pointless, no safe harbor for the wracked wreck of lives not worth living, and not worth leaving.

A sponge fell between the stove and the counter. Left alone it sat cataloging the dusty, hair-wrapped small change and food jetsam beneath the stove. A pen cap lay mute under the gas line, its dead gaze fixed forever upon the tube above. The sponge imagined that back in the darkness, away near the floorboards, past sticky dusty unknown masses, imagined she saw an old, once shiny key. Though she knew it must only be another coin dropped carelessly to roll behind the stove, she pretended it to herself to be a long-lost key. Would it ever be found, to unlock friezes painted in Atlantis millennia before? And every day, in her dreaming, the dust settled on her porous surface and soul, until one day she dried completely away, leaving only her filthy abandoned shell, still staring at the ill illuminated shadow that might have been a key, but that was almost certainly a wayward coin.

Conspiracy Theorists Believe In God

We take as today’s text some sentences from the fourth paragraph from the end of Secrets of the Tomb, a fairly meaningless work (you can read my micro-review here), but in the closing lines the author, Alexandra Robbins makes some statements that illustrate the illogic of most conspiracy theorizing, both pro and contra.

“However sinister the notion of an all-powerful secret society might be, the existence of a Skull and Bones also brings us some measure of relief. The secret society allows us to believe that things don’t just happen: genocide isn’t just caused by one crazy individual, presidents aren’t just assassinated, family political dynasties aren’t just born. Even chaos, the society’s conspiracy theories tell us, has causality. The secret society — like the power of the elitist, old-school colleges, the small groups of mogul networks, and the political dynasties — survives because people like to believe that seemingly random events are orchestrated by someone or something in control. … Perhaps one of the reasons people are so fascinated with conspiracy theories, particularly the far-reaching networks associated with secret societies and old-school power, is that they need causality in much the same way as they need a God. People’s need for the Skull and Bones conspiracies to elucidate an underlying order is similar to the need for relifion to explain death and purpose. Underground control suggests order and order implies reason. Explanations, however implausible are somehow reassuring.”

I’ve mentioned in the aforementioned review how distasteful the ‘logical’ argument being made here that genocide is just caused by one madmen; Robbins replaces the mysterious causality of conspiracy with not only an uncaring randomness in the universe, but a febrile, insanely powerful randomness. “Well, too bad that one guy, all alone and unaided, caused the Holocaust. What can you do?” and the shrugged shoulders get back to their place at the grindstone…

But what really interests me here is the synonymy between Conspiracy Theories and religion. Weak-minded people believe in these crazy things, she seems to say, because it gives comfort and meaning to their otherwise random lives. I can see her point. If I imagined myself a pinball being slapped by the random flippers of chance, I too would search for some explanation, “however implausible”, to assuage my fear of the haphazard bolts of force which seem otherwise to lash out at me and my world without cause or reason. These fables (conspiracies and religion) are the solace only of those unable to stomach the harsh, chaotic reality of the world in which all real men and women live. Not only that, but this desperate longing for meaning is the true source of the awful power these weaklings fear: “political dynasties … [survive] because people like to believe that seemingly random events are orchestrated by someone or something in control” (my emphasis). Apparently, if Conspiracy Theories did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.

So we are left with Hobson’s choice: either we are deluded into believing in secret forces in the universe behind every rock, chair, or tomb; or we rationally realize that the secret forces feared by the masses are actually called into being by the hoipolloi’s selfsame fears. The closed universe closes in tighter, as conspiracies provide an order that does not exist, and God explains away death “and purpose”[?]. And, Robbins does not go on to say, belief in the superiority of those who “see through” such chimaeras goes a long way to explain away any disparity in wealth and access to power. Reassurance is only for the weak; if you can live without needing solace, power will surely follow you all your days.

A new hope

Once again taking up pen to virtual paper, agonizing over the first scratches against the unforgiving blankness of the truest messenger of God, we prepare anew to launch into the black seas this small craft. Too little for true sailing, yet disdaining to hug the shoreline, we take bearings a last moment, and then set out…

The White Line

From spawn to that moment of clarity,
The salmon lives in, through, and with the water.
To swim thoughtless to the open sea
And hunt and hide in the river’s daughter,
And to wend its way back again,
Borne by ancient yearning,
Is fused within eye, tail, scale, and fin —
To evermore be returning.
Shining in the dappled sun
Or nestled in cloudy seas,
No pensive mariner, but with the water one;
Celebrant of the oceans’ mysteries.
But comes the moment when the oneness fails.
The thoughts recoil across the years to birth
And joyous cycles of spawn
And, turning again, careen forward to futures unlived —
One more race against the river (there is always one more).
But memories and dreams are ended
As the salmon is hauled into the choking air
By that white line that casts its fate.
So were my thoughts upon my first gray hair.

Works Without Faith

Was reading Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope a while back. Quigley is a bête noire of US conspiracy theorists, who use a single sentence from this massive (over 1300 pages!) to build an edifice of exposing a supposed massive conspiracy of British and American bankers (or whoever) who control every event of the last century. Anyway, I found myself particularly interested in his exposition of events up to the modern area, especially his description of the role of the Christian church in the West versus that of Russia.

According to Quigley, the Western Church focused on the importance of “good works” — which led to the efflorescence of science and progress seen in Europe in the second half of the past millenium. The Orthodox Church, on the other hand, depended upon the grace bestowed from God on high as its method of salvation. This stems, Quigley argues, from a deep-seated Manichean outlook on the universe, the heritage of Saint Augustine, that portrays the world as Good vs. Evil, with the material world being irremediably Evil. Now, this is part of a larger argument by Quigley demonstrating the paucity of Russian ideals with that of the West: Russia has always been dominated by outside nobility, the Russian people have always been taught just to accept their fate, and they are focused on the world to come — as they should be, having been given so little hope for this one.

I don’t want to get too heavily into Quigley’s explanation of Russian character; after all, he was writing at the height of the Cold War, and not only did the East-West demarcation seem more distinct at that time but also the best minds of the time saw the entire world in Us vs. Them, Russia versus the West dimensions. The axis of Judeo-Christian vs. Muslim was not seen as significant — though that has changed. (And no doubt will change again)

What interests me more is his own Manichean perspective on the religious paths chosen by East and West (though “choice” implies perhaps too much). Coming down so hard against the Orthodox Church for its dependence on grace, and asserting that the Western Church promulgated “good works” at its fundament — well, this seems rather simplistic. This simplifying dualism is also characteristic of the conspiracy theorists that Quigley unintentionally nurtures, but here it seems even more egregious. The debate about faith vs. good works is part and parcel of the Christian ethos, and is a classic dialectic which is perhaps insoluble in logical terms.

Perhaps “good works” will only get you into heaven if you have faith that they will do so. This is similar to a question that troubles me to this day: How can God be both transcendent and immanent? It’s a poser, all right

Valentine’s Day 2006

The words will disappear,
The memory fades.
The eternal is fleeting — Catch it!
And only the ephemeral abides.
The deepest truths vanish when spoken
To unlistening ears.

And if two gaze at the moon
From far flung ends of the globe,
They see different eddies of light
In the ever-changing river.
The orb moves on across the sky
Unconcerned.

And yet…
The dark gathers round,
Embracing her pale bright glow
Oh! The moon!

Isolate this!

President Bush’s straw-man argument against “isolationism” was perhaps the biggest revelation in his State of the Union speech Tuesday. Rarely are we able to see talking points being born, and this latest fight against a non-existent enemy is interesting only for the call to arms against an enemy which should leave most Americans asking, “Who is he talking about?”

Andrew J. Bacevich saw through this shell game in his article in the Los Angeles Times . Likening the cry against “isolationists” to red-baiting, Bacevich noted that “scaremongering about nonexistent isolationists preempts a much-needed debate over the principles that ought to inform our behavior as a world power.” Presumably we won’t be presented with lists of “known isolationists” in the State Department anytime soon, so only time will tell the utility of this latest distraction from debate