I suppose that Mueller turning his report in on a Friday is a mere coincidence. Perhaps his assistant finished proof reading it that morning, they printed it out, he got out his vintage Shaeffer military fountain pen, inked it in blue ink, and then pickup up his hat and coat and on his way out the door told the runner to run it over to Congress on her afternoon errands. And then maybe he took the bus home, ate a Chick-Fil-A fish sandwich with waffle fries, avoided watching the news, turned off the cell phone, and popped his copy of The Third Man in the blueray after pouring himself a glass of Scotch.
Maybe.
But what a guaranteed way to leave folks hanging over the weekend.
And hanging they are. Trump supporters were already chanting taunts about there apparently being no more indictments, one liberal news personality had a on air fit, and so on.
But nobody really knows what it says. And just because you turn in your work on Friday doesn't mean that indictments, if there will be any more (and I doubt there will be) won't come on a Monday.
Hopefully the whole thing is released. That won't end this story, but after all of this, it needs to occur.
On this day in 1919, President and Mrs. Wilson toured the former front, taking in a gun emplacement that had been occupied by the Paris Gun.
As readers here will recall, the Germans were supposed to destroy the huge artillery pieces but instead they carted them off, where they disappeared into chaotic post war Germany.
Readers of the New York newspaper The Sun saw a photo of Princess Patricia of Connaught's wedding party.
The princess had a huge US and Canadian following, in part because she had travelled in Canada in her youth. Canada honored her by placing her image on a one dollar bank note in 1917 and then again in 1918 when Canada contributed Alexander Hamilton Gault's privately raised and equipped Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry to the Great War in 1918. The unit, in which she was an honorary colonel in chief, was the British Empire's last privately raised unit, and the fact that it was successfully raised when the Irish Canadian Rangers really weren't, even though both were raised from Montreal, says something in and of itself. In February 1919 she married Royal Navy Commander Alexander Ramsey, who was of royal blood. He would live until 1972, she until 1974. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Cap badge of the Princess Pat's. The unit still exists.
Roads to the Great War: Thanks, CIA. . .: for the great articles on espionage before, during and after the Great War. Here are some of the articles the agency has made available a...
I'm not a huge fan of the New York Times. Indeed, over time, I've come to see its adopted editorial policy, in which its headlines tend to reflect a political view and its editorials speak of an imagined self importance that the paper and the city that it is located in hasn't had for years and years, as nearly emblematic of the dense way that some large city elites view the entire rest of the country. When newspapers like the Times cry about a fellow New Yorker they detest as President, they ought to realize that it was views like theirs that helped put him there.
Among the NYT columnist I generally am not impressed with is Paul Krugman.
Krugman was published in the NYT the other day with this editorial:
All of this really symbolizes the thick nature of urban analysis combined with the thick nature of American economic thought in general.
Lets start with the second to last paragraph. Eastern Germany, that part of Germany that used to be the German Democratic Republic (the DDR), the Communist satellite state set up by the Soviet Union shortly after World War Two, isn't generally rural and therefore doesn't provide any sort of useful analogy at all. Communism itself never figured out how to deal with rural populations and rural people at all, which is why is general approach to rural topics was to industrialize and wipe them out, or simply wipe them out if that approach wasn't successful.
East Germany was an economic backwater, to be sure, but that was due to Communism itself, which did a pretty good job of making almost every region it held sway in, after an initial outburst of forced industrialization, an economic backwater. Communism, it might be noted, was hostile to rural life. Indeed, Marx, who thought up his nifty ideas while taking up seating space in British libraries rather than going out and actually working, grew so frustrated with rural people that he declared rural life "idiocy", which probably nicely reflects that in most rural communities some guy who showed up in the library every day and showed no sign of working would probably be asked to go do something else.
Indeed, the rural hallmark of the introduction of Communism in rural Russia was to halt an evolving transfer of the land to the rural residents and terrorize the most successful individual farmers with famine being the predictable result. Farming in Germany in general was doing well enough throughout the 20th Century prior to 1945 to the extent that the Nazis didn't really touch it that much during their horrific reign as they were somewhat afraid of doing so and rural Germans never embraced the Nazis, unlike their urban fellows. While Nazi economic policies would have created long term disaster for German farming and real horrors for rural areas, including farmers, for the rest of Europe, had the Allied victory not ended them, the introduction of Communism in the East certainly didn't' create economic bliss of any type.
Not that the approach in the Western world has been a lot better, but analysis like by Krugman are so dense to the economy that they can't be expected to grasp that.
Indeed, that's long been the case with American economic pundits and economists in general. The United States has long had, and all of the Western World now has, a Corporate Capitalist economy.
That's not a free market economy, even though we think it is. As a Corporate Capitalist economy we have long had state intervention in favor of business consolation which favors large entities in central locations over small ones that are decentralized. We don't have to have that sort of economy, we simply do as long ago we determined that this is the economy we wanted as it very much favors the increase and consolidation of wealth and that's what our leadership has always viewed as a desirable thing, irrespective of whether it is or not.
Save for a minority of Millennials who think they have suddenly embraced the rotting stinking corpse of Socialism, there's hardly anyone who will consider anything else or even recognize that anything else exists. The entire economic world boils down to Capitalism and Socialism, in our narrow minded view, and even economic pundits and economist themselves see it that way. And they all also assume that Capitalism equates with a free market, when in fact an economic system that requires state intervention in order to simply exist must also by implication favor some businesses over others and not really feature a free market.
Simply put, if there's a rural crisis, it's because we planned it that way.
Indeed, an honest look at Krugman's topic would, first of all, ask if there's an actual rural decline, or, rather, a decline in general.
The better evidence is the latter, and distinctly.
The decaying American rust belt, which isn't rural, and an American urban economic environment so bleak that the darling of the new American left in Congress declares herself to be a Socialist and maintains that Capitalism must be destroyed would suggest that the problem isn't rural at all, but rather simply economic. Something in the American economy isn't working.
For that matter, yellow vests protests in Europe, which are rural centered, would suggest that something in the Capitalist system everywhere isn't working very well, as we've addressed here before.
And if that something has featured a long running population depletion from some, but only some rural areas, it's also featured an economic decline from manufacturing areas and an economic backwater in some of the United State's oldest cities.
While that's gone on, the decay of the intellect and sense in reality in those more benighted classes in cities has lead to a very real and ongoing decay in American and western society in general. In the 1970s this expressed itself with a desperate effort of those in those cities and in that economic class to stone themselves into numbness, something previously really only a feature of the lives of the desperately poor in urban areas. This has never really abated and now its gone so far that marijuana, the drug of the pre World War Two ethnic and urban underclass has evolved to legality so that the monied middle class may more easily stone itself and escape reality. In other areas, people who previously were concerned with making do in life have reduced their identity to their sexual appetites and want to be known by them so that they define their existence. All over in the same class personal standards have declined to where features of former working class life that actually conveyed a message, such as tattoos, have become standard in a desperate effort for identity and people change their appearance in all sorts of ways nearly weekly.
Things are so bleak that the USA Today recently ran this headline:
U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began
And the niftiness of our present economic direction was looked at by the Atlantic in an article published under this headline:
Fascism, which Paul alludes to, and its identical cousin Communism, don't come out of rural areas either. Rater, politics in rural areas tends to be defined by a distinct "leave me alone" attitude that the current "validate me and my beliefs" ethos of the urban white middle class simply can't stand.
About the only thing that Paul got right in his missive is that there has indeed been a long term, indeed very long term, shift of the rural population to urban areas and its technology based.
And its based in that alone. Nothing about large cities is otherwise enviable or really a long term draw to anything. The reason that it happens is economic and political. It's not, as people like Paul would seem to assume, simply natural.
This has everything to do with a system that encourages consolidation over everything else. Even while we fret over this, lawmakers do everything to make it easier and easier.
Legal roadblocks in the form of licensing that at one time partially arrested such things have been removed, thereby shifting the provision of all sorts of services, both professional and otherwise, to city centers and large entities. Consolidation of retail through the use of the corporate business form, combined with the total decay of local statutory forms on such things as land use and zoning, has operated to wipe out local retail through state fiat. Funding of transportation systems, which are always taxed based in some fashion, has encouraged and then practically required the movement of everything into the dense city center. Statutory provisions that would address some of this have failed to pass, as in the example of the the Big Box tax that failed in the Legislature recently, or have gone unused, as in the case of the seemingly dormant Sherman Anti Trust Act.
It's happened not because we tried so many things and they failed, it's happened as we value money over everything else on earth and believe that buys us happiness, even though the long record has shown this isn't the case.
Indeed, that's been shown to so much be the case, that people who really succeed, and acquire wealth, use that to move to rural areas, albeit often sanitized ones where the realities of rural life, or just reality in general, have been removed.
So, Paul, it's not that we looked for solutions and they failed. We just didn't look. And now the long existing problems associated with the big cities are being ignored as well. So soon, indeed now, you'll be able to look much closer to home.
From Chesterton.
So, Paul, I agree. People, including yourself, should get real about rural America. But that would require getting real about economics in a really large sense itself, which few are willing to do, and which I don't expect the New York Times to do anytime soon.
Cpt. S. A. Mitchell, American Red Cross, demonstrates the can opener he invented to open jam cans for canteens. Ostensibly, Red Cross volunteers, mostly women, staffing the canteens were cutting their hands opening the cans which were opened at a prodigious rates due to servicemen's fondness for jam.
Cpt. S. A. Mitchell of the American Red Cross was photographed on this day with the can opener he invented for Red Cross canteens.
American servicemen visiting the canteens consumed jam at a prodigious amount. Indeed, servicemen in general did, and the uniformity, in terms of offerings, of jam in the British Army was a frequent source of jokes. At any rate, the Red Cross staff of canteens, mostly women, reportedly cut their hands frequently trying to open them, and Cpt. Miller put his inventive mind to work on the problem.
Bela Kun put his inventive mind to work and came out on top, briefly, in a struggle in Hungary that saw the Hungarian People's Republic become the Hungarian Soviet Republic and then seek aid from the Soviet Union against the French and others.
The Hungarian Soviet Republic was a dangerous development but not a large one. It controlled only 23% of the country whereas the rest of it was either under Allied occupation or under control of other entities. It occupied a region of large cities and therefore not surprisingly it had a lot of Socialist under its jurisdiction.
The Socialist in fact had caused the change in government to come about when they merged, without their leader's knowledge, with the Communist party in a move that they thought would increase their strength. It did not. The leader of the Communist, Bela Kun, was a mere tool of Lenin's and Lenin effectively ran the new state from afar and by way of radio contact with Kun. One of its first moves was to purge the Socialist. The government was hugely unpopular in the countryside where resistance to it was massive and in turn it utilized increasingly brutal measure to try to enforce its will.
The Hungarian Soviet Republic existed only for 133 days and only for that long as it at first had the support of Hungarian nationalist as it promised to restore Hungary's borders, which were decreasing due to post war adjustments. It attacked areas in the north that had been given to Czechoslovakia but then its formation of a new Czech soviet republic caused it to lose nationalist support as it was realized that the governments only goals were Communist. A war against Romania went badly and the government fell to armed opposition.
Kun fled to the USSR and lost his life in Stalin's purges, a victim of the evil system whose stooge he was.
Flag of the Organisation International de la Francophonie.
And that's not a typo. It's Fraconphonie.
Roughly speaking, that the countries and cultures that speak French, and this is their international organization's day. There are 88 entities in the organization, reflecting the heritage from the day when the lingua franca really was the language of the Francs.
Some of the members are surprising, not because the French weren't there and left their language, but because the post World War Two history of French departure from their colonial lands wasn't really a very happy one. People must have gotten over it, however, as, for example, Vietnam is a member. Most of France's former colonies are. Algeria, however, is not.
Greece is, which would suggest that membership may be a bit broader than language alone.
Smoking strong pot daily increases psychosis risk, study finds
No kidding.
That this headline is self evident isn't news. Nor is it that people who were campaigning for the legalization of one more mind numbing drug in a society that's drugging itself into a stupor ignored this, and no doubt will deny it.
Oh well, not to fear, sooner or later the class actions and individual suits will begin, and we benighted benefactors of all social folly will profit. And then the world, or at least the profits, will be as they should be.
King Albert and Queen Victoria of Belgium visited Gen. Pershing on this day in 1919.
In Mexico, Poncho Villa, who had taken a part of Mormon figures prisoner a few days prior, let them go. The released prisoners were residents of Colnia Dublan and still had a ways to go to get home, as he didn't return them to their town.
And news arrived that the 148th Field Artillery was soon to sail home.
The same news was printed in Cheyenne, along with a photo that appeared here sometime ago of a teenage plowgirl.
Both papers printed distressing news that the Soviets appeared set to invade Germany. That news was not merely a rumor. As the fronts swung wildly in the Russian Civil War it seems that those who saw the Russian Revolution as a global revolution to occur immediately were indeed planning just that.
From the vantage point of a century later, that goal seems insane, and there were those with in the Soviet power circles who disagreed with it then, such as one Josef Stalin. Those who backed it, such as Trotsky, were not without their own logic however.
The Reds were in fact gaining in the far north and were about to push the Allied mission in Northern Russia out of the country. At the same time, however, the White offensive in the east was meeting with huge success and observed from there, there were reasons to hope that the Whites would prevail. In the west, however, the Soviets were now fighting the Poles, who were doing well, but who also formed a wall between Red Russia and a Germany which seemed to be on the brink of falling into the hands of German Communists any day.
The really amazing thing, in retrospect, is that the Allies were rushing home their forces in Europe in the face of all of this. A Red victory in Germany, which was a possibility at the time, would have resulted in the spread of Communism throughout Europe fairly rapidly, with other countries teetering on the brink of Communist revolution. Even seemingly stable countries, such as the UK, were having some problems at this point.
Of course, long term, the Reds would prevail in Russia but not in Poland, although they nearly did. Their failure to win there meant that they were not able to proceed into Germany. It also meant that Stalin's star rose while Trotsky's fell.
News recently broke, and the media was accordingly astonished, that people have been passing large sums of money to big name universities to grease the admissions skids for their kids.
Oh really?
This is news in the same fashion that the Americans don't want to be ruled by the British is news, or that dogs bark is news, or that Justin Trudeau doesn't really have any qualifications for his job is news.
It isn't.
2 Stanford Students File Suit Over University Admissions
ScandalBy Ross
ToddLawyers for Stanford
students Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods claim that the value of their education
has been tarnished by the scandal. Their lawyers are also pursuing class claims
on behalf of applicants who were rejected by schools caught up in the scandal.
M'eh
I'm actually stunned that this is a surprise, or that there's been a big news outcry about it. Indeed, it's only been a very recent innovation that using influence to get into certain universities wasn't the absolute norm.
This of course has come up as it's been discovered that USC was involved in this, at least to the extent that an actress associated with a popular but second rate old sit com apparently passed a lot of cash to get her daughter into the institution. USC is a private university, and so once again I'm not sure why its supposed to be a surprise. Private means private cash.
Of course, part of this has to do with the American belief that everything in the world has to be perfectly fair all the time, which includes the world being so fair that people with a lot of cash don't use it for their own aims. Well, they do.
In USC's case this may have been compounded a bit by the name of the school, the University of Southern California. It sounds like it's a state school, but it isn't.
Now, state schools should have absolutely fair admissions policies, more or less. In truth they don't fully, but there's a reason for that. As state schools, they cater to the education needs of their states, which means that they weight admissions toward residents, and they very well should do that. Most people accept that.
But in our modern era universities, including private ones, have tended to go as far as they can in public pronunciations of extreme fairness that they actually operate unfairly. Efforts to balance out admissions have become so strained that they now operate to keep people out who in former years would have fairly gotten in. That encourages bad behavior to a degree.
Beyond that, let's be honest. The American association of some sort of super niftyness with private schools has lead to the demand that they let everyone in while at the same time their cache has grown. At one time graduating from a school like Harvard or Yale would have indicated that a person's parents had a lot of money, and it might not actually have meant much beyond that. Sure, the education was generally pretty good in almost every Ivy League school, but they were not all MIT.
Indeed, if you look at the degrees conferred they very often tended to be in the liberal arts and weighted towards educating individuals in a broad sense who would be entering a monied broad life. Most people didn't enter such a life and their educational focus would have accordingly been much different. Professional schools in these institutions did offer a professional education, but it must be noted that in a very real sense going to one of the former big private schools tended to indicate that you were of a certain class, more than anything else.
The confusion of class with education in the US, and the liberalizing effect of everything during the 1960s and 1970s, really opened these up, but at their core, that's what they were and there's an element of that which must remain. The focus on them, however, has become absurd. The United States Supreme Court, for example, is now an all Ivy League institution, and it shouldn't be.
At any rate, it's always been the case that parents paid big money to get their kids into big name schools. The fact that this still goes on isn't really news. If it didn't, that would be news.
Forks in the road. It appears Western society is taking the wrong one.
I've started and then stopped this thread at least three times. That isn't that uncommon frankly, I have about 200 threads of varying stages of non completion that are lingering. If they hang around, it's mostly because I intend to get back to them and just haven't.
I started this one shortly after the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, but I'd contemplated it before that. I've never really abandoned the thread, but as I track things of a century ago and I actually spend very little time blogging (darned near everything written here has been written before 8:00 a.m.), I just haven't gotten back around to it.
I got back to it, however, because the other morning I saw two Internet headlines that grabbed my eye.
The first one was a headline which noted that Americans are dying of suicide and alcoholism at all time record highs.
U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began
Alcoholism, if that's correct, would be amazing, and I'd at least somewhat question that figure as the alcoholic rates before Prohibition were stunning. But the suicide one deserves some attention, and an increasing rate of alcoholism also does.
Of course, we have to be aware that statistics are only relevant in the context of the period they address, and this one only addresses a fairly compact period of time. The USA Today article noted:
The number of deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide in 2017 hit the highest level since federal data collection started in 1999, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by two public health nonprofits.
The national rate for deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide rose from 43.9 to 46.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017, a 6 percent increase, the Trust for America's Health and the Well Being Trust reported Tuesday. That was a slower increase than in the previous two years, but it was greater than the 4 percent average annual increase since 1999.
Deaths from suicides rose from 13.9 to 14.5 deaths per 100,000, a 4 percent increase. That was double the average annual pace over the previous decade.
The other headline was one from the excellent magazine The Atlantic which stated:
For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver.
Yep. The Boomer affliction on American society.
Houston Texas, the very model of a modern American city. It seems we're not really meant to live like this.
I have an upcoming thread on that, which is morphed from a thread I was writing but which I'm hesitating to post, but which lead me to a wider view on where we are as a society. But then, like a lot of posts, I have a lot of posts on this or that coming up. . . maybe. But particularly interesting in The Atlantic's observations are this:
The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.
Anyhow, starting up where I last left off, I work in a profession in which there has been, over the past decade, an increasing awareness that its conditions are really messed up and something needs to be done. In fact, during the lapse of time from which I first started this thread and my current writing there's been at least two soul searching articles in our local bar journal about lawyer mental health, and one of them specifically references a lawyer suicide.
Not that something is effectively being done. Indeed, based on my casual observations, the conditions in which we work. . . i.e., lawyers that is, is worse now than it was ten years ago. Not that the profession has been idle either. Wyoming, like most states, maybe all states, has started a lawyer assistance program for those who are in distress. As part of this, in recent months, they've ran articles in The Wyoming Lawyer from lawyers who have been in crisis, which is a good thing for the bar and brave on the part of the lawyers.
There's an intrinsic problem with all of this, however, in that the profession around the country has gone from "problem, what problem?", to the concept that the approach to the problem is to run a self reporting field hospital. The solution, we've decided, is to have people who are in trouble come ask for help, and then patch them up and send them back into the legal battlefield.
Now, I've posted on this before, and that's not really my point in posting here. I'm going to do a broader topic this time. But I'm starting with the old one. What if the problem isn't that people have become wounded under the strain, but the profession is so broken that it's eating its own?
Indeed, as a minor example of this, I received Saturday evening an cheery post from an opposing lawyer sending me discovery that was noted as not served under some weird pretext. Sending it out then, even with a cheery message, is an example of either being a real jerk or that the sender is working late on a Saturday at a soulless task. I'm pretty certain the Bar Field Hospitals don't take something on like that with "why are you making yourself into a jerk and the profession worse?"
To carry on, however, as I've now modified what I'm addressing, what if not only that is the problem, but if there's an even wider problem, and that problem is an existential one in Western society as a whole?
Now, I'm not casting stones at these efforts such as noted above. I'm glad they've arrived. But here I'll go one step further. Indeed, I have on various occasions already, but as the news is full of the discussions on Katherine Spade and Anthony Bourdain, perhaps it's time to accept something even larger and more disturbing. Indeed, I touched on that more then once on this blog (and when I first started this post, referenced something posted "yesterday", which I no longer know what it was).
Modern society, or whatever we like to call it (the hip and cool like to call it post modern, even though nothing can be "post modern") is powerfully screwed up.* That's what's needs to be fixed. It's open and partially obvious, although it frankly is not fully obvious to those living in it today, who are highly acclimated and numbed to its decayed state. This seems to be becoming more and more obvious to some people, but only in part, and by and large the current trend is to amplify the ways in which our society is messed up to make it even more messed up.
A lot of what needs to be fixed in that is what was broken by "progress" and the "progressives". Indeed, progressives are busy breaking it even more, in the idea that once you have the patient in a coma on the floor due to the misapplication of the medicine you gave him, the solution is to give him more of the same. And then part of what needs to be fixed dates back to the commencement of the onset of the current progressive way of thinking but reflects it back in a mirror darkly, in the form of a culture and society that went from counter culture to consumer culture in its primary focus seemingly in a blink of an eye in the same generation.
Now, let me first state a disclaimer before proceeding. I don't know either of these people personally and I'd never even heard of Katherine Spade before she hit the news due to her death. And the death of Anthony Bourdain somewhat surprised me as his public personal simply didn't give us any clues, it seems to me, that he might be in despair.
But let's put this all in context.
There's a seeming epidemic of suicide in the Western World. In at least one area of the East, Japan, suicide has been at blistering levels for decades.
This is not true, however, of all societies everywhere. Most specifically, it isn't true of those areas of the world that remain more rural than the West, and frankly more agrarian, and more authentically religious. And by religious, I mean in the real sense, not the vague meaningless "spiritual but not religious" sense that Western "moderns" sometimes profess or in the Western Hollywood Buddhist sense.**
Our species has been around for a really long time. It'll turn out, I'm confident, that as a species we've been around a lot longer than we now believe we were. But we have only lived the way most of us do now for a very, very, brief time. For almost our entire history as a species we were nomadic. Following that, we were agrarians for a long time. We've become what we are not, urbanized, only very briefly and we've become urbanized in our current massive way only very, very recently.
Well so what, you may ask. Haven't sociologist determined that agrarian life was miserable and people moved to the cities to be super happy?
No, well not any more anyhow.
There was at one time a running line of sociological thought, propaganda really, that basically ran just that way. But more recent research has determined that nomadic people today, who are admittedly very few in number, are the happiest people on earth hands down. Next to them, people who are basically agrarian in nature fit that category. The least happy people on Earth are those who live in highly urbanized societies. And as we now know Western suicide is beginning to become a plague, meaning we're joining the highly urbanized Japanese in that tragic classification.
Why would that be?
It really doesn't require all that much thought. But we won't think about it as it runs entirely contrary to the concept of "progress" and the intellectual dictatorship of progressivism we are now in.
Let's break it down even further.
We're a really smart animal, but an animal none the less, and we were evolved to live out in the wilds. That's where, it truly turns out, we are the happiest. In our native state we hunted and gathered, which more accurately means we hunted, gathered and existed in subsistence nomadic agriculture. We at some point evolved the latter into a more fixed form, but often missed in that is that early agriculture was an adjustment of the existing pattern, not an abolishment of it. In hunter gatherer societies, the men principally engaged in hunting and the women in gathering and both in some farming, quite often. In agrarian societies, even fairly modern ones, the men engaged in the farming, the women supported the farming, but the men were almost always still hunters. If you look at a society that was agrarian fairly recently, such as Finland or Norway, you'll find that hunting and fishing is always common. Even in Ireland, which was agrarian to a large extent up until the Celtic Tiger changed that and began to change Ireland to its ultimate misery, that was more true than we might suppose, with fishing, bird hunting and small game hunting common in a land that was otherwise obsessed with depriving the population of the means of rebelling in the same fashion which it had only recently against the English.
What are the features of such a life?
Close connection to nature is one thing. Nature for such populations is everyday and immediate, not something that they encounter, probably in a sanitized form, on vacation somewhere. Not the safe nature that people who pay to ride on a zip line in Costa Rica encounter either.
Archangel Russia, 1919. Even in that then modern city, transportation and life was closer to nature, as it was in much of the world. Indeed, as it was in all the world compared to now. We can't put happy faces on what was tense, this was a Russia in the midst of civil war. But several elements here of what made for a happier life for many people than offered today are symbolized by this photo, including outdoor occupations, a life close to animals in their real, not "comfort animal" sense, and a church.
With that a profound sense of religion is another. Among such populations an immediate sense of the divine is always present. American Indian populations prior to 1900, Quebecois prior to their urbanization, the Irish prior to the Celtic Tiger, and Scandinavians before wealth, all had the sense of the immediate divine as evidenced by nature. It was the direct encounter with the divine that did that, not a remote metaphysical debate on it, no matter how metaphysical the definitions in the same societies were.
Shrine of St. Anne de Beapre in Quebec in the 1940s. At this time Quebec was more rural, more isolated, highly agrarian, deeply religious, and by all measured accounts, much happier than it is today.
That sense of the divine, moreover, was one in which it was acknowledged that the divine was just that, not man was divine. There was no concept that God operated on democratic principals, but rather that man had to conform his being to God. And that went back to what we've just noted about nature. A Natural Law was conceived of as having been the creation of God which in turn had determined man's nature. People could and did act contrary to that nature, but that man had a right to do so was not a concept nor was there any concept that men could vote to change their natures or impose a change of view on the part of God.
And immediate purpose was another. Even now people who work in agriculture have an immediate purpose. People who subsistence hunt do as well. Knowing what you are doing and why that matters is common among all of these people.
And, and interestingly, among the less developed societies, leisure is common. Hunting and gathering societies hardly work at all, by the modern context. Agrarian ones certainly do, and did, but not to the same extent as we do today.
Indeed, in spite of urbanization being a long running trend in the West, and for that matter the East, where agrarian and agricultural pursuits remained strong near the cities much of this continued to be true well into the 20th Century. Small towns were full of people who in addition to their work day labors engaged in much of what we noted above. Indeed, usually all of it, or nearly so.
Now we've replaced that with an antiseptic world in which live surrounded by glass, concrete and steel and inject nature only in a very safe and often completely false fashion. As we've done that, in our despair, we've waged war on nature it self in the form of our natural selves. We have developed false diets as we've become unable to handle the fact of death in the bizarre belief that the more extreme and unnatural the diet the more likely we will be to live forever. As we've developed surplus income and have nothing worthwhile to do with it, we've become obsessed with doing whatever we want, particularly in regards to sex, which, through the introduction of pharmaceuticals, we've been able to defeat the nature of. As we've done that, we've become confused about the very nature of sex and have elevated an aspect of it to define our characters, particularly when our desires become disordered. And our work has lost its immediate meaning. Many people work because they must, with no concept that it has any extrinsic value. Added to it all, living surrounded as we are in what amount to near mausoleums, afraid of death, and resentful of anything that might restrain our desperate efforts to distract ourselves from the meaningless nature of modern life, we've rejected the lessons of faith even when they are obvious, replacing those in many instances with watered down religions that do little but cheer and not suggest any restraint or correction, or none at all, leaving ourselves to elevate our desires to deities.
Indeed, as we've noted the suicide rate climb we've also found ourselves in an accelerated phase of this. Progressiveness took on the last legitimate enemies of equality of man a couple of decades ago. That left the radical to keep on keeping on with no real purpose or focus, so new radical ones have been advanced. We keep "progressing", but to what? We now actually define who we are by our appetites, both our dietary and our sexual ones. People are always just people, but now people insist on having their appetites accepted as their defining characteristics.
And we wonder why so many have reached despair?
Well, back to the recent news. I don't know that I can relate either of these deaths to what I've noted, but I wonder. Katherine Spade may have simply been afflicted by a mental illness and nothing more. Indeed, there's real reason to suspect that. But I will note that she was employed in an industry, the "fashion industry", which is completely pointless. I don't know that she saw it that way, and I hope she didn't, but it really is. Fashion is a human triviality. And for decades now, while I know nothing of her work at all and therefore wouldn't characterize it in this fashion (indeed she personally dressed very modestly) it has produced clothing for women that often debased them. Again, I know nothing of her work at all.
I would note that, interestingly, the other details of her life are hard to come by, which is fine as she may have simply been highly private. She was married to just one spouse her in her adult life and had one child. Her funeral was in her home town in Kansas at a Catholic church, and she was raised Catholic. That tells me little, however. Did she remain faithful to a faith that is deep in metaphysical thought or did she stray? Did she fall victim to careerism, the snake oil of modern society that the Baby Boomer generation became addicted to, with men spreading it to women in the 1970s, after that generation's fascination with drugs waned? Was one child a conscious and regretted limiting choice or a personal tragedy? There's no easy way to know. What we do know is that her business has kept on keeping on without her, which is a bit of a tragedy in and of itself. An industry that is purely consumerist in nature keeps on without its founder in a field that's of little real importance hardly without a glitch. That tells us something.
Bourdain I also don't know much about, being only familiar with him due to television where he always seemed cheerful and where he was very interesting. He was obviously very interested in people. But if you look into his life you'll find that he grew up in a home of mixed heritage in terms of religion but where he was raised with no religion at all. As a young man he embraced drugs and alcohol, things that have a lasting impact and which some never really free themselves from (indeed on his show drinking was common, and it's the case that people who have suffered from alcohol addiction are urged not to partake at all). At least in his earlier life he seems to have struggled to grope for something and perhaps that struggle never left him. Sadly, the opposite traits seemed there as well as he was clearly outgoing and dynamic and had at one time a long lasting marriage before that fell apart and he remarried twice and then engaged in a non married relationship with a third woman.
On that, he was dedicated to his daughter whom he had late in life but I wonder about this element of our society now as well. So many simply try to avoid children, if they have some money and "careers" in the thought that those things will make life one big happy party. It doesn't, so you see them come to more meaning, and often children, later. But you can't have it all and life closes doors every single day without reopening new ones. Things delayed are frankly simply passed by, as a rule.
And as time has passed since his death, it's become more and more clear that Bourdain could not avoid the call of the natural in all things, because none of us can no matter how hard we try, while at the same time Bourdain's personal life is sort of oddly emblematic in that sense.
Bourdain's first wife was his high school sweetheart and he graduated early in order to follow her from high school. They were married for about two decades which suggests that the relationship was pretty stable, but it apparently lacked something, which I suspect was a greater foundation on something else. During that twenty years they never had children. His second wife was Ottavia Busia, a Sardinian mixed martial arts fighter with whom he had one child. They were married for about a decade and had one child, whom as we noted he was very close to. Following that he had a long relationship with Asia Argento, an Italian actress many years his junior and also divorced. At least according to the Rumornet Argento and Bourdain didn't have an exclusive relationship, at least in so far as Argento was concerned.
Now, a person may wonder what that has to do with anything, but at least at some level it has the appearance of probably reflecting Bourdain's deeper desires and instincts, which he never completely yielded to. Bourdain's father was Catholic, as noted, but apparently non practicing. His mother was a non observant Jew. Bourdain claimed not to believe in anything but none the less claimed to be Jewish, which woudl be problematic from at least the Orthodox prospective as at least hte Orthodox count Judaism paternally. Anyhow, Bourdain's family was non observant and that seems fairly clearly to be the missing large piece of the puzzle of his life. His first wife was an American actress of Polish, and tehrefore Catholic, extraction. His second wife was Sardinian, which is an Italian island which has been described as "fiercely Catholic" and a culture so defined in that sense that even non observant Sardinians observe religious feasts and festivals. His third wife likewise was Italian, which is a culture which has been so defined by Catholicism that it has been joked that even Italian communists, and at one time the Italian Communist Party was a fairly strong party, were Catholic in their outlook and behavior. So Bourdain seems to have cast out for cultures which are reflected by observance to a larger faith, even while choosing members of those cultures which left him safe from having to commit.
Taking the focus out from the close to the larger, i.e, reducing our telephoto lens, what we have is that the entire West right now is really in denial about nature in every sense and has, instead, focused on the superficial. People have removed themselves from nature to glass and steel, even though they hate it. In order to compensate for that they have adopted a false plastic nature which doesn't reflect the real, and often bloody, one. As they've done that they've become hugely self indulgent focused on material acquisition and self indulgent sex removed from the nature of sex. Lately that's even expanded to self alteration in a hyper self focused way in which its imagined that temporary self reflection should be reflected in surgery to alter a person's very self and reinforced with pharmaceuticals to obtain a fake, non natural, reality. Capping it all off people have abandoned real faiths, which require a person to acknowledge the external and large and primary, for false self created individual ones that allow them to at least concede a "spiritual" while denying that the spiritual may in fact make demands on the individual.
There's no way that people can be happy in that condition.
If all of this is bleak on a larger scale, none of this has to be this way, either for society at large or for anyone individual. People who are in despair should seek help. Lifestyles that create despair need not be engaged in. Indeed, the entire concept of a "lifestyle" is absurd, and people should instead seek a life that's authentic. That would mean rejecting almost all of the popular concept of life in the Western World today, but so be it. A career will not make you happy, while a calling, which might mean much less in the way of income, will assist in that. You are not the center of the universe but there is such a center. There is no real liberty in being a libertine and a libertine society produces, instead, slavery to appetites which is slavery. If people seemed more content, quite often, in the past, that's because they really were, knowing those things.
*Modern is a word that comes to us from Latin, through French. It literally means "of or pertaining to the current time", having as its root "modo", meaning "just now". The Latin form of the word modernus was used in Roman times. The English version appears in Shakespeare. It simply means the current time. Whenever you live, you are in "modern times". Things can never be "post modern" as "post modern" is, by its very nature, the distant future that you will never live in, ever. When that time arrives, whenever you may consider it to have arrived, it will in fact be modern times.
**Save for Buddhist monks who have immigrated to the United States, there are no Buddhist in the United States. The sort of Buddhism that American Buddhist claim to profess isn't Buddhims, its a do it yourself pretend Buddhims that takes the discplined and scary parts out of Buddhism. It's a lot like modern "spiritual but not religious" in that fashion, or Christianity Lite that a lot of American Christians sort of profess.
A professional knows the limits of his knowledge. An amateur does not
know the limits of his knowledge. A dilettante does not know that there
are any limits to his knowledge.
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the
brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is
almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking
the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same
shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is
a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be
printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole
principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut
off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.
He
can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of
it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs
to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about
dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward,
and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will
be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of
furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet
drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this
romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done
so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in
the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance
between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the
sake of dying.
At Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it hath,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness
All these I place,
By God's almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.
The Rune of St. Patrick, condensed from the much longer Lorica.
St. Patrick's Day, the Feast of St. Patrick, is such a popular civil holiday that it practically drowns out the saint himself.
Indeed, that fact contributes to a lot of odd rumors and misimpressions about Patrick (I once had a high school chemistry teacher maintain that there was no evidence for his existence, which is a really remarkable statement about a man about whom so much is known and who left writings). For example, some uniformed professor who published an article in the Salt Lake newspaper recently wrote that "he's not really a saint as he's never been canonized", showing that he had a nitwit's understanding of the definition of "saint". None of the early saints were canonized, which is a more recent juretical process with the Catholic Church which does not, in any fashion, disrupt the saintly status of those who were saints before that.
St. Patrick is regarded as the Apostle of Ireland for establishing the Faith in that land. He wasn't the first Catholic missionary there, but he was massively effective. He was not Irish himself, but rather was Roman British, born near what is now called Kilpatrick near Dumbarton Scotland (which wouldn't have bee Scotland) in 387, prior to the Scots invasions of the north and prior to the collapse of the Roman Empire, but during that period of time during which Rome was becoming increasingly weak and had abandoned its British colony to its own fate. Indeed, the people who became the Scots, and who invaded northern Britain slightly after this period, were the Irish and Patrick, in his writings, referred to the Irish in Latin as the Scotti, the name that would later give us the term Scots for the people who live in Scotland today.
Patrick's actual name was Patricius, a name symbolizing that he was of significant patrician origin. He came from a line that had strong affiliation with the Church, and indeed by his own account his father, Calphurnius, was a Deacon in the church and his grandfather a Priest, this being of course well before the Latin Rite of the Church imposed a rule of celibacy upon Priests.
Patrick, by his own account, was not a religious man until he was kidnapped by the pirates as a sixteen-year-old and sold as a slave in Ireland. It's often claimed that he was sold as a youth, but at that time, he would not have been really regarded as so much as a youth as a young man. He spent six years as a slave in Ireland, the property of a cruel master. The experience was Providential, however, as the Roman youth learned Irish Gaelic and experienced a deep religious conversion. Indeed, a metaphysical one. He escaped, managed to return to Britain, having formed the intent to enter religious life and return. He did just that, and was remarkably able at this mission, being a very tough man who was readily capable of dealing with a very tough people. Remarkable in that, he lived a very long time in an age and occupation in which that would not have been expected, perhaps approaching or even exceeding a lifespan of 100 years.
In spite of that, at some period, Patrick suffered an attack by some who accused him of something of which we are now unaware. He therefore suffered the trial that so many who are orthodox and effective do today of coming under accusations by others, even within the Church. In his case, this motivated him to write his Confessio, in Latin, to defend himself. It's survived, but the accusations against him have not.
We can pick up his own words from there:
I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple
countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many,
had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a
priest, of the settlement [vicus] of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small
villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen
years of age. I did not, indeed, know the true God; and I was taken
into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people, according to
our deserts, for quite drawn away from God, we did not keep his
precepts, nor were we obedient to our priests who used to remind us of
our salvation. And the Lord brought down on us the fury of his being and
scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where
I, in my smallness, am now to be found among foreigners.
And there the Lord opened my mind to an awareness of
my unbelief, in order that, even so late, I might remember my
transgressions and turn with all my heart to the Lord my God, who had
regard for my insignificance and pitied my youth and ignorance. And he
watched over me before I knew him, and before I learned sense or even
distinguished between good and evil, and he protected me, and consoled
me as a father would his son.
Therefore, indeed, I cannot keep silent, nor would it
be proper, so many favours and graces has the Lord deigned to bestow on
me in the land of my captivity. For after chastisement from God, and
recognizing him, our way to repay him is to exalt him and confess his
wonders before every nation under heaven.
For there is no other God, nor ever was before, nor
shall be hereafter, but God the Father, unbegotten and without
beginning, in whom all things began, whose are all things, as we have
been taught; and his son Jesus Christ, who manifestly always existed
with the Father, before the beginning of time in the spirit with the
Father, indescribably begotten before all things, and all things visible
and invisible were made by him. He was made man, conquered death and
was received into Heaven, to the Father who gave him all power over
every name in Heaven and on Earth and in Hell, so that every tongue
should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, in whom we believe.
And we look to his imminent coming again, the judge of the living and
the dead, who will render to each according to his deeds. And he poured
out his Holy Spirit on us in abundance, the gift and pledge of
immortality, which makes the believers and the obedient into sons of God
and co-heirs of Christ who is revealed, and we worship one God in the
Trinity of holy name.
He himself said through the prophet: 'Call upon me in
the day of' trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.' And
again: 'It is right to reveal and publish abroad the works of God.'
I am imperfect in many things, nevertheless I want my
brethren and kinsfolk to know my nature so that they may be able to
perceive my soul's desire.
I am not ignorant of what is said of my Lord in the
Psalm: 'You destroy those who speak a lie.' And again: 'A lying mouth
deals death to the soul.' And likewise the Lord says in the Gospel: 'On
the day of judgment men shall render account for every idle word they
utter.'
So it is that I should mightily fear, with terror and
trembling, this judgment on the day when no one shall be able to steal
away or hide, but each and all shall render account for even our
smallest sins before the judgment seat of Christ the Lord.
And therefore for some time I have
thought of writing, but I have hesitated until now, for truly, I feared
to expose myself to the criticism of men, because I have not studied
like others, who have assimilated both Law and the Holy Scriptures
equally and have never changed their idiom since their infancy, but
instead were always learning it increasingly, to perfection, while my
idiom and language have been translated into a foreign tongue. So it is
easy to prove from a sample of my writing, my ability in rhetoric and
the extent of my preparation and knowledge, for as it is said, 'wisdom
shall be recognized in speech, and in understanding, and in knowledge
and in the learning of truth.'
But why make excuses close to the truth, especially
when now I am presuming to try to grasp in my old age what I did not
gain in my youth because my sins prevented me from making what I had
read my own? But who will believe me, even though I should say it again?
A young man, almost a beardless boy, I was taken captive before I knew
what I should desire and what I should shun. So, consequently, today I
feel ashamed and I am mightily afraid to expose my ignorance, because,
[not] eloquent, with a small vocabulary, I am unable to explain as the
spirit is eager to do and as the soul and the mind indicate.
But had it been given to me as to others, in
gratitude I should not have kept silent, and if it should appear that I
put myself before others, with my ignorance and my slower speech, in
truth, it is written: 'The tongue of the stammerers shall speak rapidly
and distinctly.' How much harder must we try to attain it, we of whom it
is said: 'You are an epistle of Christ in greeting to the ends of the
earth ... written on your hearts, not with ink but with the Spirit of
the living God.' And again, the Spirit witnessed that the rustic life
was created by the Most High.
I am, then, first of all, countryfied, an exile,
evidently unlearned, one who is not able to see into the future, but I
know for certain, that before I was humbled I was like a stone lying in
deep mire, and he that is mighty came and in his mercy raised me up and,
indeed, lifted me high up and placed me on top of the wall. And from
there I ought to shout out in gratitude to the Lord for his great
favours in this world and for ever, that the mind of man cannot measure.
Therefore be amazed, you great and small who fear
God, and you men of God, eloquent speakers, listen and contemplate. Who
was it summoned me, a fool, from the midst of those who appear wise and
learned in the law and powerful in rhetoric and in all things? Me, truly
wretched in this world, he inspired before others that I could be-- if I
would-- such a one who, with fear and reverence, and faithfully,
without complaint, would come to the people to whom the love of Christ
brought me and gave me in my lifetime, if I should be worthy, to serve
them truly and with humility.
According, therefore, to the measure of one's faith
in the Trinity, one should proceed without holding back from danger to
make known the gift of God and everlasting consolation, to spread God's
name everywhere with confidence and without fear, in order to leave
behind, after my death, foundations for my brethren and sons whom I
baptized in the Lord in so many thousands.
And I was not worthy, nor was I such that the Lord
should grant his humble servant this, that after hardships and such
great trials, after captivity, after many years, he should give me so
much favour in these people, a thing which in the time of my youth I
neither hoped for nor imagined.
But after I reached Ireland I
used to pasture the flock each day and I used to pray many times a day.
More and more did the love of God, and my fear of him and faith
increase, and my spirit was moved so that in a day [I said] from one up
to a hundred prayers, and in the night a like number; besides I used to
stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before
daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to
feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit
was burning in me at that time.
And it was there of course
that one night in my sleep I heard a voice saying to me: 'You do well to
fast: soon you will depart for your home country.' And again, a very
short time later, there was a voice prophesying: 'Behold, your ship is
ready.' And it was not close by, but, as it happened, two hundred miles
away, where I had never been nor knew any person. And shortly thereafter
I turned about and fled from the man with whom I had been for six
years, and I came, by the power of God who directed my route to
advantage (and I was afraid o nothing), until I reached that ship.
And on the same day that I arrived, the ship was
setting out from the place, and I said that I had the wherewithal to
sail with them; and the steersman was displeased and replied in anger,
sharply: 'By no means attempt to go with us.' Hearing this I left them
to go to the hut where I was staying, and on the way I began to pray,
and before the prayer was finished I heard one of them shouting loudly
after me: 'Come quickly because the men are calling you.' And
immediately I went back to them and they started to say to me: 'Come,
because we are admitting you out of good faith; make friendship with us
in any way you wish.' (And so, on that day, I refused to suck the
breasts of these men from fear of God, but nevertheless I had hopes that
they would come to faith in Jesus Christ, because they were
barbarians.) And for this I continued with them, and forthwith we put to
sea.
And after three days we reached land, and for
twenty-eight days journeyed through uninhabited country, and the food
ran out and hunger overtook them; and one day the steersman began
saying: 'Why is it, Christian? You say your God is great and
all-powerful; then why can you not pray for us? For we may perish of
hunger; it is unlikely indeed that we shall ever see another human
being.' In fact, I said to them, confidently: 'Be converted by faith
with all your heart to my Lord God, because nothing is impossible for
him, so that today he will send food for you on your road, until you be
sated, because everywhere he abounds.' And with God's help this came to
pass; and behold, a herd of swine appeared on the road before our eyes,
and they slew many of them, and remained there for two nights, and the
were full of their meat and well restored, for many of them had fainted
and would otherwise have been left half dead by the wayside. And after
this they gave the utmost thanks to God, and I was esteemed in their
eyes, and from that day they had food abundantly. They discovered wild
honey, besides, and they offered a share to me, and one of them said:
'It is a sacrifice.' Thanks be to God, I tasted none of it.
The very same night while I was sleeping Satan
attacked me violently, as I will remember as long as I shall be in this
body; and there fell on top of me as it were, a huge rock, and not one
of my members had any force. But from whence did it come to me, ignorant
in the spirit, to call upon 'Helias'? And meanwhile I saw the sun
rising in the sky, and while I was crying out 'Helias, Helias' with all
my might, lo, the brilliance of that sun fell upon me and immediately
shook me free of all the weight; and I believe that I was aided by
Christ my Lord, and that his Spirit then was crying out for me, and I
hope that it will be so in the day of my affliction, just as it says in
the Gospel: 'In that hour', the Lord declares, 'it is not you who speaks
but the Spirit of your Father speaking in you.'
And a second time, after many years, I was taken
captive. On the first night I accordingly remained with my captors, but I
heard a divine prophecy, saying to me: 'You shall be with them for two
months. So it happened. On the sixtieth night the Lord delivered me from
their hands.
On the journey he provided us with food and fire and
dry weather every day, until on the tenth day we came upon people. As I
mentioned above, we had journeyed through an unpopulated country for
twenty-eight days, and in fact the night that we came upon people we had
no food.
And after a few 'ears I was
again in Britain with my parents [kinsfolk], and the welcomed me as a
son, and asked me, in faith, that after the great tribulations I had
endured I should not go an where else away from them. And, of course,
there, in a vision of the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus
coming as it from Ireland with innumerable letters, and he gave me one
of them, and I read the beginning of the letter: 'The Voice of the
Irish', and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at
that moment to hear the voice of those who were beside the forest of
Foclut which is near the western sea, and the were crying as if with one
voice: 'We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk
again among us.' And I was stung intensely in my heart so that I could
read no more, and thus I awoke. Thanks be to God, because after so many
ears the Lord bestowed on them according to their cry.
And another night-- God knows, I do not, whether
within me or beside me-- ... most words + ... + which I heard and could
not understand, except at the end of the speech it was represented thus:
'He who gave his life for you, he it is who speaks within you.' And
thus I awoke, joyful.
And on a second occasion I saw Him praying within
me, and I was as it were, inside my own body , and I heard Him above
me-- that is, above my inner self. He was praying powerfully with sighs.
And in the course of this I was astonished and wondering, and I
pondered who it could be who was praying within me. But at the end of
the prayer it was revealed to me that it was the Spirit. And so I awoke
and remembered the Apostle's words: 'Likewise the Spirit helps us in our
weakness; for we know not how to pray as we ought. But the Spirit
Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for utterance.' And again:
'The Lord our advocate intercedes for us.'
And then I was attacked by a goodly number of my
elders, who [brought up] my sins against my arduous episcopate. That day
in particular I was mightily upset, and might have fallen here and for
ever; but the Lord generously spared me, a convert, and an alien, for
his name's sake, and he came powerfully to my assistance in that state
of being trampled down. I pray God that it shall not be held against
them as a sin that I fell truly into disgrace and scandal.
They brought up against me
after thirty years an occurrence I had confessed before becoming a
deacon. On account of the anxiety in my sorrowful mind, I laid before my
close friend what I had perpetrated on a day-- nay, rather in one
hour-- in my boyhood because I was not yet proof against sin. God
knows-- I do not-- whether I was fifteen years old at the time, and I
did not then believe in the living God, nor had I believed, since my
infancy; but I remained in death and unbelief until I was severely
rebuked, and in truth I was humbled every day by hunger and nakedness.
On the other hand, I did not proceed to Ireland of
my own accord until I was almost giving up, but through this I was
corrected by the Lord, and he prepared me so that today I should be what
was once far from me, in order that I should have the care of-- or
rather, I should be concerned for-- the salvation of others, when at
that time, still, I was only concerned for myself.
Therefore, on that day when I was rebuked, as I have
just mentioned, I saw in a vision of the night a document before my
face, without honour, and meanwhile I heard a divine prophecy, saying to
me: 'We have seen with displeasure the face of the chosen one divested
of [his good] name.' And he did not say 'You have seen with
displeasure', but 'We have seen with displeasure' (as if He included
Himself) . He said then: 'He who touches you, touches the apple of my
eye.'
For that reason, I give thanks to him who
strengthened me in all things, so that I should not be hindered in my
setting out and also in my work which I was taught by Christ my Lord;
but more, from that state of affairs I felt, within me, no little
courage, and vindicated my faith before God and man.
Hence, therefore, I say boldly that my conscience is
clear now and hereafter. God is my witness that I have not lied in
these words to you.
But rather, I am grieved for my very close friend,
that because of him we deserved to hear such a prophecy. The one to whom
I entrusted my soul! And I found out from a goodly number of brethren,
before the case was made in my defence (in which I did not take part,
nor was I in Britain, nor was it pleaded by me), that in my absence he
would fight in my behalf. Besides, he told me himself: 'See, the rank of
bishop goes to you'-- of which I was not worthy. But how did it come to
him, shortly afterwards, to disgrace me publicly, in the presence of
all, good and bad, because previously, gladly and of his own free will,
he pardoned me, as did the Lord, who is greater than all?
I have said enough. But all the same, I ought not to
conceal God's gift which he lavished on us in the land of my captivity,
for then I sought him resolutely, and I found him there, and he
preserved me from all evils (as I believe) through the in-dwelling of
his Spirit, which works in me to this day. Again, boldly, but God knows,
if this had been made known to me by man, I might, perhaps, have kept
silent for the love of Christ.
Thus I give untiring thanks to God who kept me
faithful in the day of my temptation, so that today I may confidently
over my soul as a living sacrifice for Christ my Lord; who am I, Lord?
or, rather, what is my calling? that you appeared to me in so great a
divine quality, so that today among the barbarians I might constantly
exalt and magnify your name in whatever place I should be, and not only
in good fortune, but even in affliction? So that whatever befalls me, be
it good or bad, I should accept it equally, and give thanks always to
God who revealed to me that I might trust in him, implicitly and
forever, and who will encourage me so that, ignorant, and in the last
days, I may dare to undertake so devout and so wonderful a work; so that
I might imitate one of those whom, once, long ago, the Lord already
pre-ordained to be heralds of his Gospel to witness to all peoples to
the ends of the earth. So are we seeing, and so it is fulfilled; behold,
we are witnesses because the Gospel has been preached as far as the
places beyond which no man lives.
But it is tedious to describe in detail all my
labours one by one. I will tell briefly how most holy God frequently
delivered me, from slavery, and from the twelve trials with which my
soul was threatened, from man traps as well, and from things I am not
able to put into words. I would not cause offence to readers, but I have
God as witness who knew all things even before they happened, that,
though I was a poor ignorant waif, still he gave me abundant warnings
through divine prophecy.
Whence came to me this wisdom which was not my own, I
who neither knew the number of days nor had knowledge of God? Whence
came the so great and so healthful gift of knowing or rather loving God,
though I should lose homeland and family.
And many gifts were offered to me with weeping and
tears, and I offended them [the donors], and also went against the
wishes of a good number of my elders; but guided by God, I neither
agreed with them nor deferred to them, not by my own grace but by God
who is victorious in me and withstands them all, so that I might come to
the Irish people to preach the Gospel and endure insults from
unbelievers; that I might hear scandal of my travels, and endure man
persecutions to the extent of prison; and so that I might give up my
free birthright for the advantage of others, and if I should be worthy, I
am ready [to give] even m life without. hesitation; and most willingly
for His name. And I choose to devote it to him even unto death, if God
grant it to me.
I am greatly God's debtor, because he granted me so
much grace, that through me many people would be reborn in God, and soon
a after confirmed, and that clergy would be ordained everywhere for
them, the masses lately come to belief, whom the Lord drew from the ends
of the earth, just as he once promised through his prophets: 'To you
shall the nations come from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Our
fathers have inherited naught hut lies, worthless things in which there
is no profit.' And again: 'I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles
that you may bring salvation to the uttermost ends of' the earth.'
And I wish to wait then for his promise which is
never unfulfilled, just as it is promised in the Gospel: 'Many shall
come from east and west and shall sit at table with Abraham and Isaac
and Jacob.' Just as we believe that believers will come from all the
world.
So for that reason one should, in fact, fish well
and diligently, just as the Lord foretells and teaches, saying, 'Follow
me, and I will make you fishers of men,' and again through the prophets:
'Behold, I am sending forth many fishers and hunters, says the Lord,'
et cetera. So it behoved us to spread our nets, that a vast multitude
and throng might be caught for God, and so there might be clergy
everywhere who baptized and exhorted a needy and desirous people. Just
as the Lord says in the Gospel, admonishing and instructing: 'Go
therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to
observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always to
the end of time.' And again he says: 'Go forth into the world and preach
the Gospel to all creation. He who believes and is baptized shall be
saved; but he who does not believe shall be condemned.' And again: 'This
Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached throughout the whole world as a
witness to all nations; and then the end of the world shall come.' And
likewise the Lord foretells through the prophet: 'And it shall come to
pass in the last days (sayeth the Lord) that I will pour out my spirit
upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your
young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams; yea,
and on my menservants and my maidservants in those days I will pour out
my Spirit and they shall prophesy.' And in Hosea he says: 'Those who are
not my people I will call my people, and those not beloved I will call
my beloved, and in the very place where it was said to them, You are not
my people, they will be called 'Sons of the living God'.
So, how is it that in Ireland,
where they never had any knowledge of God but, always, until now,
cherished idols and unclean things, they are lately become a people of
the Lord, and are called children of God; the sons of. the Irish
[Scotti] and the daughters of the chieftains are to be seen as monks and
virgins of Christ.
And there was, besides, a most
beautiful, blessed, native-born noble Irish [Scotta] woman of adult age
whom I baptized; and a few days later she had reason to come to us to
intimate that she had received a prophecy from a divine messenger [who]
advised her that she should become a virgin of Christ and she would draw
nearer to God. Thanks be to God, six days from then, opportunely and
most eagerly, she took the course that all virgins of God take, not with
their fathers' consent but enduring the persecutions and deceitful
hindrances of their parents. Notwithstanding that, their number
increases, (we do not know the number of them that are so reborn)
besides the widows, and those who practise self-denial. Those who are
kept in slavery suffer the most. They endure terrors and constant
threats, but the Lord has given grace to many of his handmaidens, for
even though they are forbidden to do so, still they resolutely follow
his example.
So it is that even if I should wish to separate from
them in order to go to Britain, and most willingly was I prepared to go
to my homeland and kinsfolk-- and not only there, but as far as Gaul to
visit the brethren there, so that I might see the faces of the holy
ones of my Lord, God knows how strongly I desired this-- I am bound by
the Spirit, who witnessed to me that if I did so he would mark me out as
guilty, and I fear to waste the labour that I began, and not I, but
Christ the Lord, who commanded me to come to be with them for the rest
of my life, if the Lord shall will it and shield me from every evil, so
that I may not sin before him.
So I hope that I did as I ought, but I do not trust
myself as long as I am in this mortal body, for he is strong who strives
daily to turn me away from the faith and true holiness to which I
aspire until the end of my life for Christ my Lord, but the hostile
flesh is always dragging one down to death, that is, to unlawful
attractions. And I know in part why I did not lead a perfect life like
other believers, but I confess to my Lord and do not blush in his sight,
because I am not lying; from the time when I came to know him in my
youth, the love of God and fear of him increased in me, and right up
until now, by God's favour, I have kept the faith.
What is more, let anyone laugh and taunt if he so
wishes. I am not keeping silent, nor am I hiding the signs and wonders
that were shown to me by the Lord many years before they happened, [he]
who knew everything, even before the beginning of time.
Thus, I should give thanks unceasingly to God, who
frequently forgave my folly and my negligence, in more than one instance
so as not to be violently angry with me, who am placed as his helper,
and I did not easily assent to what had been revealed to me, as the
Spirit was urging; and the Lord took pity on me thousands upon thousands
of times, because he saw within me that I was prepared, but that I was
ignorant of what to do in view of my situation; because many were trying
to prevent this mission. They were talking among themselves behind my
back, and saying: 'Why is this fellow throwing himself into danger among
enemies who know not God?' Not from malice, but having no liking for
it; likewise, as I myself can testify, they perceived my rusticity. And I
was not quick to recognize the grace that was then in me; I now know
that I should have done so earlier.
Now I have put it frankly to my brethren and
co-workers, who have believed me because of what I have foretold and
still foretell to strengthen and reinforce your faith. I wish only that
you, too, would make greater and better efforts. This will be my pride,
for 'a wise son makes a proud father'.
You know, as God does, how I went about among you
from my youth in the faith of truth and in sincerity of heart. As well
as to the heathen among whom I live, I have shown them trust and always
show them trust. God knows I did not cheat any one of them, nor consider
it, for the sake of God and his Church, lest I arouse them and [bring
about] persecution for them and for all of us, and lest the Lord's name
be blasphemed because of me, for it is written: 'Woe to the men through
whom the name of the Lord is blasphemed.'
For even though I am ignorant in all things,
nevertheless I attempted to safeguard some and myself also. And I gave
back again to my Christian brethren and the virgins of Christ and the
holy women the small unasked for gifts that they used to give me or some
of their ornaments which they used to throw on the altar. And they
would be offended with me because I did this. But in the hope of
eternity, I safeguarded myself carefully in all things, so that they
might not cheat me of my office of service on any pretext of dishonesty,
and so that I should not in the smallest way provide any occasion for
defamation or disparagement on the part of unbelievers.
What is more, when I baptized so many thousands of
people, did I hope for even half a jot from any of them? [If so] Tell
me, and I will give it back to you. And when the Lord ordained clergy
everywhere by my humble means, and I freely conferred office on them, if
I asked any of them anywhere even for the price of one shoe, say so to
my face and I will give it back.
More, I spent for you so that they would receive me.
And I went about among you, and everywhere for your sake, in danger,
and as far as the outermost regions beyond which no one lived, and where
no one had ever penetrated before, to baptize or to ordain clergy or to
confirm people. Conscientiously and gladly I did all this work by God's
gift for your salvation.
From time to time I gave rewards to the kings, as
well as making payments to their sons who travel with me;
notwithstanding which, they seized me with my companions, and that day
most avidly desired to kill me. But my time had not yet come. They
plundered everything they found on us anyway, and fettered me in irons;
and on the fourteenth day the Lord freed me from their power, and
whatever they had of ours was given back to us for the sake of God on
account of the indispensable friends whom we had made before.
Also you know from experience how much I was paying
to those who were administering justice in all the regions, which I
visited often. I estimate truly that I distributed to them not less than
the price of fifteen men, in order that you should enjoy my company and
I enjoy yours, always, in God. I do not regret this nor do I regard it
as enough. I am paying out still and I shall pay out more. The Lord has
the power to grant me that I may soon spend my own self, for your souls.
Behold, I call on God as my witness upon my soul
that I am not lying; nor would I write to you for it to be an occasion
for flattery or selfishness, nor hoping for honour from any one of you.
Sufficient is the honour which is not yet seen, but in which the heart
has confidence. He who made the promise is faithful; he never lies.
But I see that even here and now, I have been
exalted beyond measure by the Lord, and I was not worthy that he should
grant me this, while I know most certainly that poverty and failure suit
me better than wealth and delight (but Christ the Lord was poor for our
sakes; I certainly am wretched and unfortunate; even if I wanted wealth
I have no resources, nor is it my own estimation of myself, for daily I
expect to be murdered or betrayed or reduced to slavery if the occasion
arises. But I fear nothing, because of the promises of Heaven; for I
have cast myself into the hands of Almighty God, who reigns everywhere.
As the prophet says: 'Cast your burden on the Lord and he will sustain
you.'
Behold now I commend my soul to God who is most
faithful and for whom I perform my mission in obscurity, but he is no
respecter of persons and he chose me for this service that I might be
one of the least of his ministers.
For which reason I should make return for all that
he returns me. But what should I say, or what should I promise to my
Lord, for I, alone, can do nothing unless he himself vouchsafe it to me.
But let him search my heart and [my] nature, for I crave enough for it,
even too much, and I am ready for him to grant me that I drink of his
chalice, as he has granted to others who love him.
Therefore may it never befall me to be separated by
my God from his people whom he has won in this most remote land. I pray
God that he gives me perseverance, and that he will deign that I should
be a faithful witness for his sake right up to the time of my passing.
And if at any time I managed anything of good for
the sake of my God whom I love, I beg of him that he grant it to me to
shed my blood for his name with proselytes and captives, even should I
be left unburied, or even were my wretched body to be torn limb from
limb by dogs or savage beasts, or were it to be devoured by the birds of
the air, I think, most surely, were this to have happened to me, I had
saved both my soul and my body. For beyond any doubt on that day we
shall rise again in the brightness of the sun, that is, in the glory of
Christ Jesus our Redeemer, as children of the living God and co-heirs of
Christ, made in his image; for we shall reign through him and for him
and in him.
For the sun we see rises each day for us at [his]
command, but it will never reign, neither will its splendour last, but
all who worship it will come wretchedly to punishment. We, on the other
hand, shall not die, who believe in and worship the true sun, Christ,
who will never die, no more shall he die who has done Christ's will, but
will abide for ever just as Christ abides for ever, who reigns with God
the Father Almighty and with the Holy Spirit before the beginning of
time and now and for ever and ever. Amen.
Behold over and over again I would briefly set out
the words of my confession. I testify in truthfulness and gladness of
heart before God and his holy angels that I never had any reason, except
the Gospel and his promises, ever to have returned to that nation from
which I had previously escaped with difficulty.
But I entreat those who believe
in and fear God, whoever deigns to examine or receive this document
composed by the obviously unlearned sinner Patrick in Ireland, that
nobody shall ever ascribe to my ignorance any trivial thing that I
achieved or may have expounded that was pleasing to God, but accept and
truly believe that it would have been the gift of God. And this is my
confession before I die.
This isn't Patrick's only surviving writing, amazingly enough. Some people have claimed that the Confessio is short, but given the nature of writing at the time, it's actually amazingly long, given the ordeal that writing such a long letter entails. Patrick himself notes that he was rustic in nature, which downplays his patrician origin, but if we consider that he had been kidnapped when only sixteen years old, there was no doubt truth to his claim.
He left a very long letter in addition to the Soldiers of Coroticus complaining about the violent treatment given to some recently baptized converts and instructed that it be openly announced. A prayer, the Lorica of St. Patrick, also survived and is believed to have been authored by him.
One of my favorite saints, for a variety of reasons, and one whose is more contemporary in terms of our present needs than we sadly realize.
