William Edward Hartpole Lecky: his 'Rationalism in Europe', his lands and the strange story of his birthplace Cullenswood Hous.

 

There can’t be many universities in the world who have a statue showing him sitting with an open book of an alumnus who escaped with a pass degree and a second class divinity testimonium.  A fine monument of William Edward Hartpole Lecky is in the front square of Trinity College Dublin.  After his student days (1856 -60) he spent some years on the continent enjoying a species of literary vagabondage which culminated in a rather remarkable two volume study of ‘Rationalism in Europe’ pub.1865..  This at the age of 27. It runs to over 800 pages of small but quite readable font.  I have it before me now in the authorised edition of 1910. He writes in Vol.II on Persecution:

"is to determine the judgment by an influence other than reason; it is to prevent that freedom of enquiry which is the sole method we possess of arriving at truth. The persecutor never can be certain that he is not persecuting truth rather than error, but he may be quite certain that he is suppressing the spirit of truth.”  (The gravamen of the charge of persecution and the inculcation of blind faith falls on Roman Catholics)

Prior to this observation he discovers the milder forms of encouragement that can wrought a change of belief:

"he firmly resolved to make any sacrifice rather than profess what he does not believe, yet still his affections will endow their objects with a magnetism of which he is perhaps entirely unconscious.”

Have we not seen this recently with those who have donned the white alb of science, the lab coat, to promulgate doctrines which are without foundation? Farther down:

"Indeed, the simple fact of annexing certain penalties to the profession of particular opinions, and rewards to the profession of opposite opinions, while it will undoubtedly make many hypocrites, will also make many converts. “

I wonder if this may not reflect on his own ancestors who first came to Ireland in the 17C. as Quakers and who as dissenters would have suffered debilities. Obviously lightened by the time of William Edward who ended up owning 721 acres at Aughanure, Bestfield and Kilcock and via the Hartpole side 1,200 acres at Shrule Castle, Co. Laois.  The Hartpoles remained Catholic until 1640.  It seems that part of the plantation of Munster was not aligned to religion.

In a curious inversion of history Cullenswood House where Lecky was born in 1838  became Scoil Eanna set up by Padraic Pearse as a Gaelic academy.

“In 1833 Cullenswood House was bought from Charles Joly, the then proprietor, by John Lecky, grandfather of the historian. John Lecky was succeeded by his eldest son, John Hartpoole Lecky; and John Hartpoole Lecky’s son, William Edward Hartpoole Lecky, was born at Cullenswood House on March 26th, 1838. So our school-house has already a very worthy tradition of scholarship and devotion to Ireland; scholarship which even the most brilliant of our pupils will hardly emulate, devotion to Ireland, not indeed founded on so secure and right a basis as ours, but sincere, unwavering, lifelong.”( from an essay of Pearse -Pearse on Cullenswood

Pearse may have been a little charitable here for Lecky regarded Home Rulers as murderous ruffians and agrarian incendiaries.  In the end however it was the Black and Tans that burnt Cullenswood House.

It seems to have been repaired and in the 1990‘s was functioning as a Gaelscoil and again becoming delapidated due to neglect.  The story of its renewal and refurbishment is told here

as gaeilge

lios na nog

Nach Iomaí Cor sa Saol

 

Ps. Since blogspot decided to change its site html is awry and formatting is exasperating. 

von Hugel, the Mystical, Bergson, and Nisargadatta.

 Baron Von Hugel in his magisterial work ‘The Mystical Element of Religion’ considers the apparently inescapable dilemma of the Subjective versus the Objective.  How do you know that your ‘rapt to the highest heaven’ is not an illusion?  Can you ever know?  Are they those peak experiences breadcrumbs to find our way home or pebbles?  Can the illusory really be transformative or is that only an apparently deep question which evaporates like a puddle in the sun?  

“And this objection is felt most keenly in religion, when the religious soul first wakes up to the fact that itself, of necessity and continuously, contributes, by its own action, to the constitution of those affirmations and certainties, which, until then, seemed, without a doubt, to be directly borne in upon a purely receptive, automatically registering mind, from that extra-, super-human world which it thus affirmed. Here also, all having for so long been assumed to be purely objective, the temptation now arises to consider it all as purely subjective. “ (Mystical Element)

……And finally, this doubt and trouble would seem to find specially ready material in the mystical element and form of religion. For here, as we have already seen, psycho-physical and auto-suggestive phenomena and mechanisms abound; here especially does the mind cling to an immediate access to Reality; and here the ordinary checks and complements afforded by the Historical and Institutional, the Analytically Rational, and the Volitional, Practical elements of Religion are at a minimum. (op.cit. below)”

Are we stuck with this analysis or is it vyavaharika  (conventional/mundane/relative) rather than hewing to the ‘paramarthika’  (absolute) line as the Vedantin puts it?  As long as we think in terms of the usual accounts of truth as correspondence or coherence we will be trapped in an inescapable aporia.  We are stuck on that reef and no tide will lift us off.  Berkeley was right you know when he held that there need be no matter that is the cause of our representation if that was what we were relying  on for our experience of the world.  Representations beg the question. There had to be a way of allowing for the ‘external’ world, a way that was properly founded.  God keeps the game in play and when Samuel Johnson kicked the stone God underwrote the ouch.

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But does all that really matter to the mystic who lives in the heart of being even when his epistemology is flawed.  As Bergson who is frequently referred to by von Hugel points out we move from intuition to conceptualization and not the other direction which is the path that philosophical inquiry takes.  Conceptual analysis is useful while at the same time being an engine of alienation.  It spawns paradoxes and oppresses us with mental fidget.  In that hedging  locution favoured by philosophers - ‘we worry’.

Nisargadatta the Sage of Bombay achieved self-realisation following the instruction of his guru to continuously keep his mind on the reality - I am.  I AM THAT the great saying of the upanisad is almost a forced conclusion compared to the immersion in being of I AM.