Comments on StAR Nov/Dec 2016, Vol.16.6

“Laughter and the Love of Friends”

By Peter Milward SJ

 

On the Editorial, Fine as usual. Sadly I have to begin with an apology. I didn’t know this title was originally the wording of Belloc. I thought it was the title of a book by the celebrated English Jesuit philosopher, formerly Master of Campion Hall and Provincial of the English Province SJ, Father Martin D’Arcy, published posthumously in 1991. But we live and learn. One of my favorite sayings of Belloc is recorded here, “When I am dead, I hope it may be said, His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.” I myself prefer the second line as “Of me let it be said”. In this connection I am sad to find not an article in this issue devoted to the Humor of Belloc, as especially in his Cautionary Tales and his Cautionary Verses for Children. Otherwise we all too often think of him as all too serious in contrast to his humorous friend GKC. Another saying of GKC that might well have deserved mention is, “We have grown old in sin, and our Father is younger than we.”

 

p.4. Maria Devlin aptly notes how Dante smiles at human kind from his height in Paradise, and that reminds me of how Chaucer similarly makes Troilus laugh after his death and ascent into heaven. That is the truly Catholic view of death, not sad or solemn but glad and joyful. So I remember a homily preached in our St Ignatius church at the funeral of Fr Dan McCoy. In life he had been such a funny man from New York, and in death that homily was charged with episodes from his life that had the large congregation in fits of laughter. That is just how I would like to be remembered at my funeral and afterwards.

 

p.7. Like Jason and Belloc and Waugh, I may claim to have been yet another fan of PG Wodehouse. For relaxation I would choose the novels of either Wodehouse for comedy or Agatha Christie for tragedy, not to mention the Father Brown stories of GKC for tragi-comedy. Many years ago (in 1964) I was hospitalized with TB, when at first the doctor wouldn’t allow me to read anything, but then as my condition improved I was allowed some light reading. At first I asked for Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning, but as it made me laugh so much I feared it would do injury to my lungs, and so I asked for the Father Brown stories, which put me in such a good humor that my many visitors were surprised – and I was soon discharged from hospital.

 

p.10. Sadly I have never met Mgr Fulton Sheen or heard any of his broadcast talks, but I am fond of his joke about the Irish lady who was found with a bottle of whisky and exclaimed, “Glory be to God, a miracle!” But I never ascribed the story to Fulton Sheen.

 

p.18. With Kevin O’Brien I was deeply disappointed by Rowan Williams’ play onShakeshafte. Well before the play was performed at Swansea, I wrote to the episcopal author offering him my varied research both on “the Shakeshafte” theory, which I regard as much more than a theory, and on the probability of the young William, then aged 16 and in the employment as tutor to the recusant family of Alexander Houghton, meeting the experienced Edmund Campion, who was then staying in the neighborhood with Richard Houghton. Then while Campion might have taught William the elements of dramaturgy from his experiences at Prague, he would have also directed this promising young man in the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. Sadly, however, Rowan Williams made no response to my offer, and the result was the flop described by Kevin.

 

p.20. I quite agree with Donald (no connection with DT) that “When we laugh we come closest to levitation” – which reminds one of GKC’s quips that the angels flew up to heaven by virtue of levity. No doubt St Joseph of Cupertino was gifted with a notable sense of humor! From the Bible, when read between the lines, we have the other story of Adam asking God, “Why did you make Eve so beautiful?” and God replies, “So you would marry her.” But then Adam insists, “Why did you make Eve so stupid?” and God replies, “So she would marry you.” Another story is about the way Adam introduces himself to Eve, “Madam, I’m Adam.”

 

p.21. What fine poems they are by Trevor Lipscombe! I very much appreciate poetry that combines rhyme with reason – like the poems of CS Lewis. May I add a poem of my own, composed during my stay in hospital with TB, when the doctor didn’t prohibit the composition of poems? “All day I lie ruminating/ Supine, in no Buddha pose,/ Nonchalantly contemplating/ Not my navel but my toes./ If within the even flowing/ Of my mind there enters aught,/ Tis no dark cloud of unknowing/ But a white celestial thought.”

 

p.22. How I agree with CS Huffman about the way the secular world has suffered the degradation “of having all criteria removed by which any true art is judged, and so art is whatever one says it is.” And so modern artists, as well as poets, are thumbing their noses at the ignorant public, including all so-called connoisseurs. Also the statement that “the role of the artist is to point people to more than the mere surface of things, reminding them that behind all that is, is the One who made all that is.” As for poets, including (I am sorry to say) Heaney, I wish they would leave the constraints of city life and look into the life of things in the world of Nature.

 

p.25. Again, what a wonderful article is this of Fr Dwight on “The Playful Power of the Pun”, with the opening observation that “The Pun is mightier than the Sword.” All I would add is that he follows into the footsteps of that Prince of Punsters, William Shakespeare, whose similar addiction to puns was criticized by the serious Dr Johnson as his “fatal Cleopatra”. Sadly, however, Shakespeare didn’t come to Japan with William Adams in 1600 or learn the Japanese language, since then, with both English and Japanese at his command, what a punster he might have been! So I may claim to have taken his place with Japanese audiences, who are much more appreciative of puns than the English or the Americans.

 

p.28. John Beaumont aptly quotes Maurice Baring’s words about “Catholic England”, as being “Chaucer’s England, to which the whole of Shakespeare was a dirge” – words that are no less aptly echoed by GKC in his book on Chaucer (1636), “That Shakespeare was a Catholic is a thing that every Catholic feels by every sort of convergent common sense to be true.”

 

p.30. I am afraid the phrase “serious joy”, however much supported by the German Pope Benedict XVI (whom I otherwise admire), is too much of an oxymoron for me – perhaps because I myself am a simple “moron”. I also disagree with Belloc for his misery “after Chesterton’s funeral”, when he should have been filled (as this issue maintains) with “laughter and the love of friends”.

 

p.36. Finally, there are two reviews, one by Carl Hasler on the speeches of Pope Benedict XVI, with its memorable quotation from GKC, that once a person loses his faith in God, he also loses his common sense. Also with its memory of the Pope’s controversial reference to Islam, with which I completely agree. The other review by Michael Hanke on The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise is most convincing, in contrast to the academic silence on the historical truth of the matter. The paradise implied by such scholars is rather to be found in Toledo under Christian rule than in Cordoba even in the age of Moses Maimonides. (I myself have visited both places.)

 

p.40. I am sorry to end these comments on a note of disagreement with the Anthology of Religion in Tudor England by Ethan Shagan and Debora Shuger. I know both editors, and I regard them both as unreliable guides to the situation of Catholics in Tudor England. I do not regard John Jewel as an intellectual luminary in the Elizabethan church, or that he was in any way an inspiration to the Tractarians of the nineteenth century. He was an early upholder of the new Protestant regime against the Catholic Thomas Harding, whose writings are much more deserving of inclusion in such an anthology. I know this very well, as I have read most of their writings. Also to say that the Elizabethan church “toyed with Calvinism” is a rank understatement. Centred on Cambridge, Calvinism came to be the orthodoxy of that church, as represented not only by the Puritan William Whitaker and the Anglican John Whitgift, but even Richard Hooker expressed his agreement with Calvin in theological matters, though not in church government.