Reading 2024 - The Hardest Problem by Rupert Shortt

I believe, sometimes with more or less difficulty, in Catholic Christianity. I understand that part of my obligation as a Catholic is to explain why I am a Catholic, in the hope others may join the faith. Yet I have to admit that I do not find faith explicable in a simple way. It is for me a mysterious response to mystery. I recognise that, especially now, in this age of technology, believing in something called God seems preposterous, let alone the idea that the being we call God decided to bring into the world via virgin birth an incarnation of himself whom he then allowed humanity to kill - and as for the proposition that whenever I go to mass I am spiritually renewed by eating a wafer that is Christ trans-substantiated, I am left only with the statement that that is what I believe, ever more so as I experience the certainty that consumption of the sacrament makes me a (slightly) better person. 

The one faintly rational argument I have ever come up with is that the Christian doctrine of love and self denial demonstrates such an accurate understanding of what humans are bad at and need to be good at that I can't help feeling only a greater power could have constructed it. Jesus's Lord's Prayer seems to me a similarly miraculously clear articulation of an entire religion, suggesting to me it was not formulated by a mere human. 

All this is not enough to make me confident to try to persuade, especially as I am possibly one of the least persuasive people around on any subject. I rarely lay out an argument succinctly or with clarity, and my fondness for meandering off point is a major fault. 

Thus, I decided to read The Hardest Problem by Rupert Shortt. I hoped to arm myself with excellent arguments for faith, in the face of the sometimes scornful disbelief of most people I encounter.

The book begins with Shortt quoting David Hume: 

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

My immediate thought on reading this was that Hume has not defined evil. Shortt does not go on to do so either, but simply remarks that people of faith should be chastened by Hume's remarks. He then quotes a scientist, Freeman Dyson, who says: 

"to worship God means to recognise that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether passes our comprehension."  

Shortt concludes from that that: 

"we should move through the world in somewhat the same way as we move about in someone else's home, noticing that we are the guests and someone else is the host."  

He goes on to suggest that a specifically Christian framework regards self-sacrificial love as necessary for happiness, so that "service is perfect freedom" and "endurance is a spur to salvation in a longer perspective." 

Shortt goes on to look at Hobbes and his misuse by Richard Dawkins, at Jonathan Sacks on Auschwitz (he said God was there "in the words 'Thou shalt not murder'"), at Joseph Ratzinger, at the actor Matthew MacConaughey and at a journalist called James Marriott, before arriving at Schopenhauer who, Shortt tells us:

"is only one of a posse of major philosophers to have seen as clearly as any theologian that a grown up life necessarily involves struggle softened by periods of contentment." 

Shortt then quotes Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who said: 

"The world is an immense groping, an immense search...It can only progress at the cost of many failures and many casualties."

Shortt passes on to cosmological arguments - as he describes them, "a recognition that it is not possible in the terms naturalism allows to say how anything at all can exist." 

He cites a physicist called Peter Hodgson, who wrote:

"Simple or complicated, small or large, the passage from non-existence to existence is the most radical of all steps...the transition from non-being to being is beyond the power of science to detect."

Shortt adds the observation of a philosopher called Denys Turner who wrote:

"'Nothing' has no process, no antecedent conditions, no random fluctuations in a vacuum, no explanatory law of emergence, and, there being nothing for 'something' to be 'out of', there can be no physics, not yet, for there is nothing yet for physics to get an explanatory grip on."

The mind-boggling mystery of existence versus non-existence is for me a compelling argument for a higher power than man, but it does not address Shortt's "hardest problem."

Nor, I think, does his next set of arguments - those for moral truths. He looks at the question of why most humans do have a sense of some things being morally right and some wrong, and points out that a creditable life can be led without religious convictions, but it is hard for an atheist to explain why a moral compass is not simply arbitrary. Shortt ends this section by in a sense returning to the cosmological, stating that "Abrahamic monotheism starts with the fundamental intuition that in the beginning God created."

The next section of the book is largely devoted to Iain McGilchrist's insights into left and right brain interaction, or lack thereof, and their relevance to religion. Shortt observes that: 

"One of the things good religion can do is remind us of how contentious it is to take for granted a model of human beings as greedy minds and wills roaming about a passive world in endless search of stuff to satisfy ourselves."

At last, Chapter 3 comes to the matter in hand, "God, Evil and Suffering". Aquinas scholar Timothy McDermott is quoted, Rowan Williams is quoted, CS Lewis's The Efficacy of Prayer is quoted. Shortt points out that while the Gospels (specifically Matthew 7:7, "Ask and it shall be given you") suggest that there is "a simple equation between faithful discipleship and the realisation of one's goals" the refusal of Jesus's prayers for deliverance in Gethsemane rather undermine that possibility. 

Shortt goes on to quote Herbert McCabe, David Bentley Hart, Eleonore Stump and various others, in an attempt to answer the question posed by Dostoevsky in Brothers Karamazov - is the unspeakably violent death of one small child justification for the saving of all humanity? He makes many good arguments but from my point of view as a would-be proselytiser most of them seem to be arguments that rest on a Christian faith. He says himself at one point that he is arguing "from a Christian standpoint", whereas what I had hoped for was an argument to persuade others who as yet don't see "from a Christian standpoint".

Perhaps that is impossible though. Perhaps the very first step in being a Christian is to give up trying to solve "the hardest problem", opting instead for a humble acceptance that humanity will never know why anything, including suffering, exists, because these things are beyond human comprehension. It is this acceptance that can bring an individual to the recognition that there is something greater in the universe than human ingenuity. 

But much of humanity - including extremely intelligent individuals - seems not to have noticed the impossibility of understanding either eternity or infinity, nor to have recognised that the very fact of existence is profoundly mysterious. Without perceiving those things - (and also without accepting - [reluctantly and with constant difficulty and effort, as it is very hard to repress one's own deep belief that the centre of everything is oneself and one's happiness] - that we need to desire what God has created us for, even though it may not include getting what we want) - it is hard (and probably to most people, seems unnecessary) to think about anything beyond oneself and the pain we suffer or see others suffering, apparently unfairly. 

However, by recognising the mysteriousness of existence itself, the strangeness of eternity and infinity, I think we can begin to understand how much we do not understand - and at that point faith, (most particularly the faith described by St Anselm - "I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe but I believe in order to understand") can enter. After that, it may be possible to recognise that the hardest problem is not suffering but learning the habit of self sacrifice. And that's where Christ comes in.

Reading 2024 - The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

I admire Curtis Sittenfeld very much. I have not read her imagined tales of Laura Bush and Hilary Clinton and I probably won't, as I hate fiction into which real figures intrude (the big flaw of War and Peace, for me, is the appearance of Napoleon as a character within its pages).

What I have read by Sittenfeld is her novel Eligible,  an updating of Pride and Prejudice, which I really enjoyed - even couldn't put down, to be truthful. Purists hate that book, but I have always found Jane Austen unbearably waspish - never allowing a reader to intuit, always insisting on explaining who is absurd or irritating or silly - so anything written as a pastiche of her is not going to outrage me. Instead, I found Eligible clever and entertaining, and was amused by Sittenfeld's updating of some of the original's social dilemmas. I have also read several short stories by Sittenfeld and every one of them was both a pleasure to read and full of insight. Therefore, I was very happy to start 2024 with a novel by her

The Man of My Dreams tells the story of Hannah, who at the beginning of the novel is 14 or 15 and staying with her father's sister, as her family have been driven from their home by her father's temper. The novel follows the life of this lonely girl as she grows up, with little help or care from selfish parents, in a society that gives her the message that the most important thing for a young female is being able to attract young men and go to bed with them. 

Hannah does not fit the template of attractiveness necessary for this - or at least she believes she does not. She is also not at all sexually adventurous. She feels as if she is a misfit, although she is actually both wise and normal and probably far from alone, if only her contemporaries would be honest. 

I find Sittenfeld's writing so absorbing that I happily followed Hannah through almost 300 pages of not really getting what she has been taught to want and slowly learning that perhaps what she has been taught is wrong. I don't know how Sittenfeld does it but for me at least she is simply never boring. Perhaps one element of her charm is her truthfulness. An example of this is her description of teenage Hannah's reaction to being accosted by an older male stranger in the park. Instead of the simplicity of me-too outrage, Sittenfeld explains that Hannah felt "simultaneously alarmed, insulted and flattered."

I suppose I should register the suspicion that The Man of My Dreams might be of no interest to most male readers, chronicling as it does the coming of age of a young female. Although would anyone by the same token argue that Tom Jones would be of no interest to female readers?

The Horses by Edwin Muir

Dogs, cats, sure - lovely creatures. 

But horses - nothing matches horses for the quality of their companionship.

Feeling thus, I suppose it was inevitable I would love this poem:

The Horses by Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after

The seven days war that put the world to sleep,

Late in the evening the strange horses came.

By then we had made our covenant with silence,

But in the first few days it was so still

We listened to our breathing and were afraid.

On the second day

The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.

On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,

Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day

A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter

Nothing. The radios dumb;

And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,

And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms

All over the world. But now if they should speak,

If on a sudden they should speak again,

If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,

We would not listen, we would not let it bring

That old bad world that swallowed its children quick

At one great gulp. We would not have it again.

Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,

Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,

And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

The tractors lie about our fields; at evening

They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.

We leave them where they are and let them rust:

"They'll molder away and be like other loam."

We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,

Long laid aside. We have gone back

Far past our fathers' land.

And then, that evening

Late in the summer the strange horses came.

We heard a distant tapping on the road,

A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again

And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.

We saw the heads

Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.

We had sold our horses in our fathers' time

To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us

As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.

Or illustrations in a book of knights.

We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,

Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent

By an old command to find our whereabouts

And that long-lost archaic companionship.

In the first moment we had never a thought

That they were creatures to be owned and used.

Among them were some half a dozen colts

Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,

Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.

Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,

But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.

Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Happy Christmas and a blessed new year to all.

Unintended Consequences

The Observer newspaper reports today that owners of recent Volkswagens are encountering an unexpected difficulty - their cars are seizing up because rats have eaten through wiring on the underneath of the vehicles. 

This is a new phenomenon apparently, created by Volkswagen's desire to create more environmentally friendly products. To further this end, Volkswagen have started casing car wiring in a plant-based material that rats find delicious.

I suppose encouraging rats to flourish is achieving some kind of blow for the environment versus mankind. And manufacturing cars that don't work must reduce emissions. Honda and Toyota are using soy-based insulation which is apparently the equivalent of KFC for vermin, so switching to them provides no escape for car owners. 

What Colour was Montmorency*?

The Guardian's list of best books is out for 2023

What a feast of joy it isn't. Among the recommendations are:

1. The story of a trio of gay Americans looking for their ancestral roots in Ghana 

2. A propulsive thriller responding to the climate crisis

3. A harrowing testimony from a slave plantation. 

4. An auto- fiction deeply engaged with the horrors of colonialism

5. A shadow history of queer desire and erasure 

6. A hypnotic journey into the dub reggae scene

7. The tale of young Vietnamese refugees in Thatcher’s Britain 

8. A chronicle of Soweto under and after apartheid, 

9. A tale of gay "pioneers" in 1890s London 

10. An excoriating account of Contemporary Britain, which sets one woman’s desire to return to the Nigeria of her youth against the backdrop of the Grenfell tragedy

It's all a very long way from Three Men in a Boat.

Do people in other countries also dedicate most of their publishing industry to self-hating fiction and books challenging heterosexuality? If it's just us, why do we do it? Are publishers responding to the market or trying to indoctrinate their customers? 

Are they successful? Personally, I avoid anything published since this century began, buying books only secondhand. I pray there will be a reset to normal very soon and I can go back into bookshops with optimism and excitement about what enjoyable new novel I might find inside.

*Montmorency is the fox terrier in Three Men in a Boat.

Reasons to Like Twitter - an Occasional Series

Commenting on footage of today's umpteenth Saturday afternoon pro-Hamas March in London, someone Tweeted, 

"Oh I'd forgotten it was Jihaturday again. The weeks go by so fast".

In reply someone else Tweeted:

"Before you know it, it'll be Christhamas".

Dark humour, yes, but we live in dark times, and a sense of the absurd is a useful instrument of survival 

The two Tweets I've mentioned were accompanied by footage of the redoubtable Peter Tatchell, fresh from his dressing-up box, looking for all the world like a boy on his first day of kindergarten:

His poster shows that if only he ruled the world all our problems would be swiftly and simply sorted out.

At the Liszt Academy

During the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, like everyone else I missed a great many things. Most of them were of the unremarkable day-to-day variety, small rituals and interchanges that I'd completely taken for granted until they were taken away. 

Something I'd never taken for granted though, but definitely missed, was going to concerts, especially those at the Liszt Academy, not far from where I live in Budapest. 

Of course the music at a concert is the most important element, but when the concert hall itself is lovely it enhances listeners' experience of the music. This link will give you an idea of just how sumptuous the Liszt Academy building and its concert hall are. The separate elements are not all necessarily beautiful in isolation, but together they create a dazzling splendour, conveying a sense of confidence and optimism, a verve that has since been lost.

That loss is unsurprising when you realise that the concert hall was first opened in 1907. The people who commissioned its riot of decorative details had no idea that in less than a decade war would break out and their ordered world would be shattered. Their innocence is for me most poignantly expressed in the design of the stained-glass ceiling panels that proclaim the virtues of song and poetry, rhythm and beauty. The people who created these do not appear to have suffered from our contemporary inhibitions; no one seems to have suggested they restrain themselves, toning their enthusiasm down a bit in order to try to seem cool.

I think that when human beings gather to listen to music, we are at our most civilised. At the Liszt Academy last week, my mind was still full of the news that a wave of primitive violence had been unleashed on civilians in Israel, the murderers exhibiting the kind of demonic joy I associate with Charles Manson's acolytes. Then out came the orchestra, a group of people who devote their lives to the discipline of musicianship. Following them came the conductor, a great favourite with the Budapest audience, now approaching 90 years old. The music began and as we listened it seemed to me that everyone in that room was striking a blow for civilisation. We must never let the barbarians win.