Reading Trollope in the Rubble.

Reading Trollope (The Prime Minister) in the wee hours is the best time to savour the skilful pacing and alternation between the world of the righteous lawyer Wharton and the yeoman Fletcher and the vain world of the meretricious meddler Lady Glencora. At the same time in this dimension towns are being rubbelised. Some of those blocks will be cleaned of mortar to be reused for new builds. A survivor child will write that novel that moves between the earnest kibbutz armed socialism - marrying a settler - or having an affair with a Palestinian in Berlin - a newspaper in Tel Aviv covering the story - Scots Jew known as Rabbi Burns and Ali Baba doing stand up in Islington. You see,it’s easy.

If we only had old Israel over here

repost from 2017:  Has anything changed since then?  The Israelis are creeping up to the Amalekite option. God in smiting mode:

"Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." (1 Samuel 15: 1)

However God was cross with the Israelites for sparing King Agag and some livestock:

"But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed."

Bibi has mentioned Amalek but didn't indicate what if anything might be spared.  There is a gas field off the Gaza coast, so there's that. 

If we only had old Israel over here

How far can you trust the moral sense of someone who thinks that Israel is a modern and liberal democracy? That is an obvious big lie, the whopper so big the stunned mind thinks there might be something to it. After a cup of strong tea you recover your wits and realise that this is the belief of someone who is so blinded by sectarian interests that the truth is beyond their reach. Like a man lost in a snowstorm they are moving in a circle thinking that they will eventually arrive in a place of safety. I often consider what the situation in Northern Ireland would be today if Israeli tactics as applied to Gaza had been used. Assassinations, razing of the family homes of convicted terrorists, drone bombs and the disregard for civilians that the Israelis attempt to justify. To qualify: their justifications are a function of their contempt in that they are not intended to persuade. 'You need this kind of thing, we don't care. Every now and then the grass needs cutting.' The Israelis are at the Cromwellian phase of dealing with the natives who are offered the choice of 'to Hell or to Connaught (Gaza)'.

At this point even the liberal voices in Israel itself that deplore I.D.F. and settler actions in the Occupied Territories seem to be part of the plan to convince doubters that there is a reasonable element that can be talked to and will listen to reason. Meanwhile expropriation and extirpation can go on. They really don't care.

I once bought by mistake an Israeli product. A packet of razor blades. The good news is that they were useless.

The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

Lizzie is a liar, no three ways about it, confabulating like a good‘un from morning till night and coming to see in the end there might be some truth in her story. Money, rank, and beauty give her licence to paint a poetry over the prose of this world. She is a widow whose sickly husband died within a short time and being a baronet left her a lady with a £4000 pa. income for her life and a son who is the heir to the title. Lady Eustace had a diamond necklace valued at £10000 put on her neck by her husband and she intends to make her own of it and not let it sink back into the estate as her bete noir the family solicitor Camperdown insists. It is an heirloom and therefore cannot be taken as personal property. Was it in London that she first received it or in Scotland at the home castle of Portray? If at home then it might be counted amongst the paraphernalia of the home and therefore property of her own. The law is uncertain on these fine points. Best let it be in Scotland. Yes it was in Scotland. 

 

 Lively as a goat amongst the crags she leaps from fable to fib to buttress her stratagems getting increasingly confused as stern truth advances towards her. I read the Palliser series out of turn so I have foreknowledge of certain events and as I read I wondered how was this wrought. Simple when you know Lady Eustace and her mutability and invention all centred around the pole star of her own aims. Is it wrong to attempt to draw her first cousin Frank away from his true love Lucy. Not at all, in her computation it would suit them both,with her money his career as an M.P. and rising barrister would be enhanced. At that time MPs were not paid a salary and besides Frank Greystock is not a very good manager of his money. He’s in debt but still lives the life of a wealthy young man about town. His £2000 p.a. and her £4000 would be a fine basis for easy living. All his relations think so, a ‘poor’ man marrying the very plain governess for love, what is the sense of doing that. As ever the marriage mart is a theme of Trollope’s.

 

 It’s a very long novel but the narrative tension never slackens. As I wrote having read the books out of turn I wondered about certain outcomes but the author makes it all character centred and credible. The meddling Lady Glencora and Palliser’s quint farthing is a continuing theme from earlier books. An insinuating satire on the mores and manners of Victorian society twenty years before the Queen’s jubilee (1860‘s). George Gissing wrote ‘In the Time of Jubilee’ from the perspective of the lower middle classes if you want a more astringent version of of high Empire when the map was pink. Absolutely superb controlled writing but do read the Palliser novels in sequence.

Etienne Gilson's Realism

 I’m reading a lot of Etienne Gilson at the moment, dropping in and out of his books on Realism and Neo-Thomism.  He rightly scorns the idea that Cartesian methodic doubt can lead anywhere. Idealism has burned the bridge to anywhere and yet it fascinates by its apparent lucidity.  It establishes the problem field and keeps us stuck there with the endless toing and froing of the external and the internal world that act like the two ends of a seesaw.  

He writes of a Fr. Noel:

“Here we have finally come full circle, but the reader will be excused if he wonders why so much effort was expended creating the sensation of movement when in reality we have gone nowhere. First, we were told that we had to carry out an exhaustive, methodic doubt, but, since we were not permitted to doubt either thought or the fact of the existence of sensible reality, what did we actually doubt? Descartes’ doubt at least doubts something, but Monsignor Noel’s doubts nothing.”

It has been a notion of mine that Idealism is catching because it is easy to understand and modern psychology offers a specious basis.  Realism as offered by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas is a difficult complex philosophy which starts out in the difficult terrain of ontology going from being to the real and knowledge of it.  Descartes as Gilson holds begins with epistemology and tries to catch hold of the real with Deus as the deus ex machina.  

Another point that Gilson controverts elsewhere is the doctrine of Jacques Maritain’s that an intuition of being is essential for a true comprehension of metaphysics.  He seems to me to have a strong argument.  I shall have to go back to ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ to try and comprehend the different levels of abstraction involved in the intuition of being.  I have this idea that Maritain may be conflating Aristotle and the Cartesian critical method moving from the initial judgement or apprehension i.e. it is and it is this, what is called an intuition.  Gilson maintains that the true Thomistic realism goes from Being to the Real.  

 

The analogies between this way of thinking and the Advaitic Realism are many.  Gilson’s clarity and explanatory power is excellent.  More anon.

'Phineas Finn' and 'Phineas Redux' by Anthony Trollope

 

So without working deliberately at it over the years I’ve read a fair bit of Trollope but this is my disordered venture into the Palliser series. First I read ‘Phineas Finn’ and directly afterwards ‘Phineas Redux’.  They are big novels, serialized and therefore with dramatic nodes, shifts in the pace, side bars and disquisitions.  Trollope is a master of maintaining narrative tension and moving the story around so that the illusion of the absent for the moment characters are always there in the wings being busy and about at any moment to inflict themselves.

It would be silly of me to tell someone who reads a bit that Trollope is mandatory.  If you are about to find that out then I will restrain myself from urging him on you like a big friendly dog. Here I will just offer some points about Phineas Finn which may escape the British or American reader.  He is an Irishman and a Catholic and therefore an outsider.  In the circles in which he moves in he is also a commoner and that counts for a lot.  Unlike the other Irishman in the novel, Fitzgibbon, he is not of the landed gentry class even if his family is regarded as sound stock by that Anglo-Irish class.  He is an exotic bird, very handsome, affable, witty, charming and with a touch of gallantry which appeals to the members of that element in English society, the Barbarian; huntin’, shootin’, fishin’; and if you get involved in a duel with them they will try to kill you. The other Arnoldian categories of the Hebraic and the Populace are supplied by Robert Kennedy and Bunce his landlord.

I found him at first a bit of a cipher.  Where’s the politics, will there be sticking points, will he turn balky over the Irish Land question or disestablishmentarianism? There is envy at his rising to minor office but he shows his capacity for work.  However he is unlucky in love or unrealistic about his chances as a poor man and a commoner with aristocratic women.   The portrait is limned in over the two novels and life’s tragedies and injustice hew the block closer to the finished man.

Another outsider and exotic is Madame Max, the rich young widow, a Jew by marriage, from somewhere out there where abroad is bloody, Vienna.  Excellently drawn as are all the women.  Lady Laura and Lady Glencora are political kitchen cabinet types promoting, through the blandishment of dinner parties, their policies.

That’s all I have to say about that.  I have no key to the characters of the political drama in the House of Commons.  It is a time of great change and reform.  Votes for all, the position of the Church established by law, the scurrility of the popular press, libels and injunctions.    Good speeches and some comedy to temper the stateliness.

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.