Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-7 The Inferno

...the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret, Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened. And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

TS Eliot, Dry Salvages

Reprise of a Girard Christmas Card

Four years ago René Girard was interviewed by Peter Robinson, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, for their Uncommon Knowledge weblog. We have every Christmas since then excerpted a short piece from the end of that interview where Mr. Robinson asks René to reflect on the Christmas narratives from the gospels.

René Girard was born on December 25, 1923. Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas!

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-6 The Inferno

As long as we can conjure up little facile reasons for hanging on to the small 'h' hope we would never come into the larger dimension HOPE.

"There is no end but addition, the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours:
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation."

          TS Eliot - The Dry Salvages

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-5 The Inferno

TS Eliot's Dry Salvages (one of the Four Quartets) is a running commentary on Canto 20 of the Inferno. Demolishing hope (with a small h) so that the theological virtue of Hope could come into its proper place.

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-4 The Inferno

The 'eleventh hour' is the temporal dimension that is appropriate to religious life, not the present, the past or the future. It is the 'eleventh hour' that is worthy of our religious longing and hope.

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-3 The Inferno

In the early nineteenth century G. W. F. Hegel introduced the 'divinization' of history and an intellectual concern to control or know the future. This is contrasted with Martin Buber's understanding of 'magic' - the attempt to have a religious life without having a relationship to God. Truth cannot be known, only encountered. William Stafford's poem "Glances".

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-2 The Inferno

The future is the only transcendental value for men without a god

Albert Camus

Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy - Pt 9-1 The Inferno

With this post we begin posting episodic excerpts from Gil Bailie's archival materials again. For the next long while these will be from Gil's 1984 24 cassette tape series on Dante's Divine Comedy which are being transfered into digital format. If you are interested in obtaining the complete MP3s finished so far please visit our webstore by following this link.

Those visitors who have shared contact information with us over the past years will likely in the days before Thanksgiving receive our annual Fall Appeal. We try to limit our fundraising appeals to once a year, and ask that you look kindly on our request for support for the coming year. If you are a new visitor to our weblog and want to learn more about our work please follow this link to our website.

In early 2015 Gil Bailie hopes to have the manuscript he has been working on lo these past four years in the hands of a prospective publisher. There will no doubt still be much work to be done. But when that happens we expect to see Gil back on the road. He has had to pass on numerous offers of speaking opportunities over the past few years in order to keep his focus on the manuscript. Next year that will change. If a publisher finds this manuscript worthy of publication we expect there will be some promotional trips involved following its debut. We will keep those interested in our work appraised of these events.

Thanksgiving blessings to all!

The Self and its Sources Revisited

For those who have availed themselves of the Self and its Sources audio materials posted on this blog, the June 2014 edition of The Atlantic has an interesting essay by William Deresiewicz entitled "How the Novel made the Modern World". This piece reviews two recent scholarly books on the novel. Considering that Gil Bailie's 'reflections on the art of the novel' were done over 20 years ago it is intriguing to read echoes of his analysis in this essay.

It also includes this humorous critique of academic prose:

Buell (the author of one of the books under consideration), whose careful terror seems to be the possibility of saying something politically incorrect—the book does so much posturing, you think it’s going to throw its back out—appears to have absorbed every piety in the contemporary critical hymnal. You can see him fairly bowing to them in his introduction, as if by way of ritual preparation. There they are, propitiated one by one—Ethnicity, Globalism, Anti-Canonicity, Anti-Essentialism—like idols in the corners of a temple.

Saying goodbye to Mary's month

This is the last day of May, Mary's month. While this web-log, "Reflections on Faith and Culture", has been dormant for the past while I have been working on bringing Gil Bailie's Reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy into the digital age. This is a series of 24 presentations he recorded in the mid-1980's. It was made at a time when Gil first became aware of the work of René Girard and before his own thinking and work were transformed by that encounter. One of the things a listener to these talks will hear is Gil's use of the poems of other poets as a foil for the poetry of Dante. So, in this vein, I am offering a few poems that have been companions in my journey through this past month of May.

The May Magnificat

May is Mary's month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season-

Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?-
Growth in every thing-

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature's motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring's universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfed cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all-

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

Gerard Manley Hopkins


The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe

Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that ’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.
Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.
So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

VISITATION

It was still easy for her in the beginning,
only when climbing she would
be aware of her heavy womb, -
and then she stood, breathing,

on the Jewish mountains. But not the land
spread about her, but her fullness; and
while walking she knew: nowhere
was there such fullness as hers.

And she felt compelled to feel with her hand
the womb of hers who was further along.
Toward each other they swayingly stepped
and caressed the dress and the hair.

Each woman was filled with sacred life
and safe and at ease with the relative.
And though the savior was hardly in bloom,
the Baptist in the cousin’s womb
already jumped for joy.

Rainer Maria Rilke

From the Archives: Part 121 of The Self and its Sources

The end of the novel.

While Virginia Woolf was writing “The Waves”, TS Eliot was writing “Ash Wednesday”.

From the Archives: Part 120 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard: a man without a self. The little light of dawn, seen as the Nietzsche's "eternal return", elicits a new desire to be tantalized and thwarted. The romanticism of death and nihilism

From the Archives: Part 119 of The Self and its Sources

Charles Taylor’s study of the modern self: the modern self insists on a position of subjectivity exclusively, to the extent that one can only refer to one’s self in the third person.

From the Archives: Part 118 of The Self and it Sources

Bernard stands at the back of St. Paul’s cathedral ready to verify and inform curiosity. Unable to rise on the shaft of someone else’s prayer he returns to the bustling street, swinging his stick, flowing with the stream of consciousness.

From the Archives: Part 117 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard at St. Paul’s Cathedral. He has come to the right spot for Virginal Woolf to end the novel. Can she do it? Bernard’s knee-jerk antipathy for received truth. Compare to Kierkegaard’s ‘purity of heart is to will one thing’.

From the Archives: Part 116 of The Self and its Sources

Studied nonchalance – the appearance of disinterest – pretending that one is not pretending. Hiding our lack of self-sufficiency

From the Archives: Part 115 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf’s attempt to conclude the novel: Bernard seizes his chance. At rush hour he dashes to the barber. It is shriving time. The melodrama is played out in mirrors.

From the Archives: Part 114 of The Self and its Sources

The difficulty of concluding the novel.

From the Archives: Part 113 of The Self and its Sources

Great novels always spring from an obsession that has been transcended.

– René Girard

From the Archives: Part 112 of The Self and its Sources

After Percival’s death Bernard sees with disillusioned clarity.