75 - Post-Religion
Matthew Arnold on the death of the old world, a Sports Report on Lewis Moody's diagnosis, and three film reviews
Post-Religion
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
Show’d me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?
Forgive me, masters of the mind!
At whose behest I long ago
So much unlearnt, so much resign’d—
I come not here to be your foe!
I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,
To curse and to deny your truth;
Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone—
For both were faiths, and both are gone.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side.
Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl’d forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again;
Till free my thoughts before me roll,
Not chafed by hourly false control!
For the world cries your faith is now
But a dead time’s exploded dream;
My melancholy, sciolists say,
Is a pass’d mode, an outworn theme—
As if the world had ever had
A faith, or sciolists been sad!
Ah, if it be pass’d, take away,
At least, the restlessness, the pain;
Be man henceforth no more a prey
To these out-dated stings again!
The nobleness of grief is gone
Ah, leave us not the fret alone!
But—if you cannot give us ease—
Last of the race of them who grieve
Here leave us to die out with these
Last of the people who believe!
Silent, while years engrave the brow;
Silent—the best are silent now
- from “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” by Matthew Arnold
Let me begin by saying that, on the face of it, Arnold’s expectation of a more rational and less religious future has not been realized. Secularisation leads, eventually, to post-secularisation, to reversal and change; of course, the wheel come round again and vindicate Arnold, but History has rather disappointed its 19th century Rationalist friends.
Arnold’s poem, though, has value quite separate from its (seemingly poor) predictive value. It was not written, really, as prediction. Nor does one have to agree with or share the sentiment to engage with it.
What Arnold gives us – what is invaluable here – is a high and austere and serious emotional and intellectual experience, given to us in really excellent artistic form.
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
Show’d me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?
If we do not agree with Arnold – if we do not oppose faith and Truth – we can still engage with him as, if you like, a character. Imagine this as a Browning dramatic monologue. Arnold gazes, full of emotion, at the great Carthusian Abbey.
We may perhaps reflect on the language here against the reality then and since: Arnold’s mentors call the Abbey a “living tomb”, full of monks no doubt but embodying something dead. We see that Arnold hardly disagrees. The French Government of 1901 agreed, and banned large-scale religious establishments, forcing the monks into exile. Arnold’s mentors, Arnold, and the French Government of 1901 are all quite dead, and in deathly tombs, but the monks returned to the Grande Chartreuse and their successors remain.
There is an unintended dramatic irony, then. Our speaker’s own teachers are dead, but dismiss the Abbey as dead; it was not then and is not now.
Forgive me, masters of the mind!
At whose behest I long ago
So much unlearnt, so much resign’d—
I come not here to be your foe!
I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,
To curse and to deny your truth;
Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone—
For both were faiths, and both are gone.
Arnold is keen even to deny friendship to the monks, which gives us the idea of our speaker as a rather cold, even arid man. Then again, he is trying to be faithful to his own fathers in the faith – he does not to deny their truth, the deposit of rational faith taught to him.
He does pity the monks, though. (The monks pity him.) Arnold, interestingly, does cast himself here as a Protestant, by metaphor. He is a Greek looking at a fallen runic stone, toppled by Christianity; both sets of gods are gone. “\Both were faiths, and both are gone.” This is not the Rationalism he has converted to, but something older and now dead. Protestantism and Catholicism are dead, even if they don’t know it.
There is a certain blindness to our narrator, eloquent though he be; the runic stone is fallen, but the Grande Chartreuse was not. He is racing ahead of events.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side.
This explains his glaucomatic moment: the old world is dead, even if a remnant twitches. Arnold is a man of the future, but the future has not yet arrived. He feels a strange sympatico with the monks: neither of them have a world to live in. It was, perhaps, better when Christianity ruled supreme; it will be better when Arnold’s secular eschaton occurs and the new world is revealed. Right now, in between moments, everyone suffers.
Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl’d forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again;
Till free my thoughts before me roll,
Not chafed by hourly false control!
For the world cries your faith is now
But a dead time’s exploded dream;
My melancholy, sciolists say,
Is a pass’d mode, an outworn theme—
As if the world had ever had
A faith, or sciolists been sad!
Our speaker is not so cold or arid – an emotion quite beyond Reason has seized him, and he contemns the “sciolists” who stand above it all. He briefly posed, but it was only a pose; they have detached themselves from humanity and live in the dream future, quite abstracted from reality. The monks below have more sympathy, more time for Arnold, or so he imagines – he could hide there and his heartbreak would not be mocked or dismissed.
Ah, if it be pass’d, take away,
At least, the restlessness, the pain;
Be man henceforth no more a prey
To these out-dated stings again!
The nobleness of grief is gone
Ah, leave us not the fret alone!
But—if you cannot give us ease—
Last of the race of them who grieve
Here leave us to die out with these
Last of the people who believe!
Silent, while years engrave the brow;
Silent—the best are silent now
Arnold was, I think, being quite sincere in declaring the old faith dead and false, and his pity for the monks was seriously felt. Nonetheless, he – almost against his better reason – prefers to make a stand with them. If grief is noble, if the best are silent – well, then, what is this new world worth? He does not quite state the question, but he doubts this new faith. He may not believe, but at least he grieves, and there is a better and truer place for him here with the Carthusians than with the “masters of the mind”.
There is subtlety and seriousness here, and I think we can extend understanding to Arnold. Not only does everyone, surely, feel such moments of doubt, in this our doubting world – but there is something in Arnold which is not swayed by disembodied Reason, and which cannot quite turn upon the old world. Arnold would not, perhaps, be surprised in his inmost self at the reality of the Fallacies of Hope, and of the Failure of Reason.
Sports Report – The Risk of Long-Term Disease After Sport
Lewis Moody, former England rugby union national team captain, has announced he has been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease, a really horrible degenerative disease which I look forward to seeing humiliated by medical discovery science in the coming years.
People who suffer traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) – so, definitely all professional rugby players, per what a TBI actually is – are twice as likely as the genpop to develop MND. Correlation is not causation. Perhaps the genetic predisposition to MND gives a subconscious life urge and such people are greater risk-takers. It is natural, however, to suspect chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a factor, as it is seems to be for dementia, paralysis issues, personality changes, and so forth.
Should we read the writing on the MRI (…magnetic resonance imaging), then, and ban such sports? Especially in the context of Britain, with a failing nationalised health service which looks to be introducing assisted dying to reduce costs, destructive behaviour is both a local social burden but also a significant financial one. Smoking and drinking cost me and you money, even if we don’t do them. Motorbike riding is essentially a bit of petrol duty up front and then lifelong injuries to be managed, usually with plenty of taxpayer money. Lewis Moody is probably wealthy enough to add some private help in, but isn’t this his whole fault, really – or at least, possibly?
I don’t pretend to know the solutions to the travails of the NHS. I leave that to my old acquaintance Wes Streeting, and much enjoyment may he have of it. Yet I am quite sure I don’t want to stop young men risking their health in such activities – not just, as to prudence, because they may find even more negative things to spend their time on, not just as to utility because maintaining a risk-taking cadre more than repays in discovery a society’s likely costs from said cadre, but more and most that it is a proper end and aim for humans to press the limits of their ability, courage, strength. Removing this area of end-seeking because of the attendant risk is to miss the point; the attendant risk is part and parcel of the action. We are lessened and smallened, made less than fully human, when we refuse to allow striving because it is dangerous (or “unfair”, or inconvenient, or any similar excuse).
What we may say – aside from prayers for Lewis Moody, of course – is that though he is bearing a severe cost, he has come closer to his proper ends, and he and we are (hopefully) better for it.
Dr. Doolittle and His Animals, d. Reiniger (1928)
Delightful back-lit paper cutout puppet stop-motion by an innovator in the form. Only three short films were made before the studio pulled the plug due to cost – these were slow to make, basically, and therefore expensive – but we get much of the story of the good Dr heading to Africa to cure the monkey folk. The animation is surprisingly fluid – more so than Wallace and Gromit, say – and there is a certain magic in the simple ingredients. There is genuine humour and some excellent little set pieces. A lovely family experience.
4/5
Alexander Nevsky, d. Eisenstein (1938)
There is something tutelary in this, where we see Eisenstein’s artistic instincts yoked to a temporary political cause in a way that does not serve the film. This is true of all of his work, of course; art under the Soviet Union is often tainted by an inability to simply make the argument or depiction it wants. In music, more encoded meaning can be hidden – we see this with Shostakovich most famously – but in film, subtlety can be more easily spotted if not understood and so eliminated.
There is plenty to enjoy: Prokofiev’s soaring score, some really beautiful cinematography, and a bevy of good performances. Nikolay Cherkasov excels as a Socialist Realist Nevsky, strikingly embodying the tropes of that art style in his physical and vocal performance. Andrei Abrikosov gives a surprisingly subtle and quite traditional performance as Gavrilo, one of the lesser heroes of Novgorod – initially a slightly comic figure but growing into heroism against the Teuton foe.
The exaggerated sets and Teuton costumes, as tied in as they are to the tedious propaganda purpose behind the film, are also great fun. There is a directness and clarity that fits the tone of the film.
However, we cannot claim that there is much depth here, outside of Abrikasov’s performance; the Teutons are more one-dimensional than the Indians in Stagecoach, and when a political point needs to be made – explicitly or by pointed omission – the film accomplishes this in bald terms. The people are the heroes and judges, but sometimes need a strong Caesar-type. The Germans are evil and their Christian religion is evil. This is all simply stated, and thereby convinces less than if the point was made more by discovery. It is pretty clear that there is no convincing explanation forthcoming for why Nevsky never fought the Tatar. We are channelled in one direction, and Eisenstin often struggles to make that interesting or compelling.
3/5
The Three Musketeers, Part II: Milady, d. Bourbolon (2023)
A largely successful continuation of the first part, albeit with a fairly bizarre and faintly nonsensical rewrite of the final events and Milady herself. I could do without the constant mud filter, but the action scenes are exceptional (especially the raid on La Rochelle), the sets are beautiful, the pace is unrelenting, and the performances are fantastic. Eva Green is in the midst of her career performance here as Milady herself, and the musketeers (Francois Civil, Vincent Cassel, Pio Marmai, and Romain Duris) are all pitch perfect. Louis Garrel as Louis XIII is, as in the first film, the perfect mix of regal and vulnerable.
There is also a legitimately effective and funny piece of “diverse casting” – how rarely is that true? – as a black Musketeer comes to give news to our four heroes. Dartagnan, evidently baffled, asks him who he is, to which he discovers he is a Musketeer; trying to politely make #up the faux pas and work out what is going on, Dartagnan asks “Are you…from Gascony?” to which the other fellow says “Yes,Equatorial Gascony!” Hannibal (based on the real-life Aniaba) is a good addition to our Musketeer heroes, led by their heroic Captain Treville.
The ending plainly sets up a sequel which Bourbolon has not admitted is happening or intended yet.
4/5