Antigone

George Huxley is speaking this afternoon, on Piety and Power in the Antigone of Sophocles.
Text translation online at http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html

Antigone, on the gulf that separates her from her sister Ismene: "One world approved thy wisdom; another, mine."

Who rules?

On Q. 161 of
the Catechism .

According to this, the bishop has authority, inter alia, to rule the faithful. The answer does not indicate any limits on the scope of this authority, except that it must be exercised in subjection to the Pope, and in accordance with the laws of the Church. It seems to me that this has caused a lot of trouble.

The logic behind this goes back to Q.138.

The relevant Articles of our Constitution run as follows:

Article 5.
Ireland is a sovereign, independent, democratic state.

Article 6.
1. All powers of government, legislative, executive and judicial, derive, under God, from the people, whose right it is to designate the rulers of the state and, in final appeal, to decide all questions of national policy, according to the requirements of the common good.
2. These powers of government are exercisable only by or on the authority of the organs of State established by this Constitution.

There has been some criticism lately that our constitution does not say that the state is a republic, but in fact it does better: 'republic' is only a word, but Article 6 spells it out. God's sovereignty is acknowledged, but it is quite clear that there is only one way God can influence our policy: through the people. Moreover, the bishops are not organs of state established by the constitution, so they don't get to rule, or decide on national policy, or exercise any powers of government.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid that since the days of the emperor Constantine, the clerical hierarchy has lusted after temporal power, and as a result the failure to be explicit about the limits of clerical power was deliberate, not careless. It ought to be spelled out explicitly. I note that in Pope Benedict's pastoral letter of the 19th of March, he says only one thing relevant to this concern of mine, and he says it not in the section addressed to people like me, but in section 11, addressed to the bishops. He gives a direct order:

Besides fully implementing the norms of canon law in addressing cases of child abuse, continue to cooperate with the civil authorities in their area of competence.

This certainly recognises the existence of an area of competence, but we need completely explicit recognition of the sovereign competence of civil society in the appropriate areas (those specified in Article 6). We seem to be getting this recognition from individual bishops, but it should come from the Church as a whole, and be addressed to all people, and it should be repeated on occasions like this.

Two novels and an autobiography

Cormac McCarthy. The Road. 897-0-330-44754-6. Most people seem to enjoy this story about the efforts of a man to protect his son during the final stages of a global extinction caused by a nuclear winter. I found it a curious mixture of sentimentality and pessimism about humanity.

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Seamus Murphy. Stone Mad. 1-903464-81-1. Wonderful book. Exposes the vanished world of Irish stone-carvers, in which Murphy trained. Completely changed the way I look at the city. I went out of my way on Sunday, to walk across downtown and examine some of the work he writes about, such as the rivers on the Custom House. He records a great deal about the men who carved what we see about us in this country: who did what, where the stones came from, their characteristics. The discipline, the hardship, the pleasure of working in stone. "Getting to like doing what you don't like doing." I've long thought that "art" is nothing more than "craft". And nothing less. Murphy says: "Art grows out of good work done by men who enjoy it." Much of the book records, or recreates, the conversations and anecdotes of his elders and peers in the stoneworks, quarries, churches and graveyards of the first half of the last century. There are many good lines. For instance: "What are we doing, but making dust for time to rub away?", and "Once you realise that life isn't important anymore, departing from it takes on full significance." It was amusing to learn that Stephen is the patron saint of stone-carvers. This is, no doubt, for the same reason that Lawrence is the patron of cooks.
There is a fine bust of St. Patrick in the cloister in Maynooth, by Murphy. Just inside the President's Arch.

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P.D. James. Shroud for a Nightingale. Penguin. f.p. Faber & Faber, 1971. A beautifully-crafted murder mystery.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Anna, Soror...
with
An Obscure Man
and
A Lovely Morning
0-00-271222-9
Translated from French (Comme l'eau qui coule..) by Walter Kaiser.

Fast-moving stories, set in the 16th and early 17th, visceral, revolving round sexual relationships. Not prurient, the account is matter-of-fact.

AOM and ALM go together. They are about this dutchman Nathanaël, who is swept though life, and never really knows what's happening to him. Not quite like any other chronicle. I liked it. Anna, Soror... is an intense and troubling tale of consensual incest, in the family of a spanish aristocratic occupying Naples, in which the principals are tortured by religious scruples, and tragedy reigns.

The book includes very interesting 'Postfaces', in which Yourcenar writes about the process of composition. It includes a survey of incest in literature, and this:

With Anna, Soror..., I tasted for the first time the ultimate privelege of the novelist, that of losing himself completely in his characters, or of letting himself be possessed by them. Thoughout those few weeks ... I lived uninterruptedly within those two bodies and those two souls, slipping from Anna into Miguel and from Miguel into Anna with that indifference to sex which is, I believe, that of all creators in the presence of their creations, and which silences with shame those who would express astonishment that a man could excel in depicting a woman's emotions -- the Juliet of Shakespeare, the Roxane or Phédre of Racine, the Natasha or Anna Karenina of Tolstoy ... -- or the rarer paradox that a woman could create a man in all his essential masculinity, whether the Genji of Lady Murasaki, the Rochester of Jane Eyre, or the Gösta Berling of Selma Lagerlöf.

MY was the first woman elected to the French Academy. She died in 1987.

Shelving it, I saw and remembered Zeno of Bruges. This was a gift from a friend who tries to improve my mind, but my mind proved resistant to improvement. I found it unreadable, at the time, and set it aside, implementing my 'life is too short' policy. Perhaps, if I live, I will give myself another chance with it, someday. But right now, the to-read shelf is 2.5 linear metres, and that doesn't count all sorts of other books that are likely to interlope. Besides, one should read french writers in french.

Robert Harris: The Ghost

ISBN 9780099527497.
Enjoyable quick read. Witty. Not in the league of Pompeii, Archangel,
or the Cicero novels.