By Anthony Esolen
My wife likes well-made and beautiful objects for the house, so when I look for gifts for her, I go to antique shops or establishments that sell unwanted items from estates. Even if it’s just a trinket box, I make sure it’s assembled with dovetails and not with cheap nails that end up loosening. Bakelite, for old kitchen utensils, is better than plastic; it weighs a little more and over the years acquires a soft tone. We have pastel oil paintings, framed behind that kind of old glass that makes it seem like a window opens to a world beyond.
I could say the same about books and their covers. Because yes, I judge books by them. It’s inevitable when you face entire shelves and don’t have all day to examine the volumes one by one. I judge by those strident covers that started to impose themselves in the sixties, sometimes for good books, but much more frequently for trash: think of the latest hack job, written on commission for the forgettable politician of the moment.
Old books aren’t like that. That doesn’t mean they were all good. It does mean, from my experience, that at least they weren’t stupid. Even the old Doubleday Image series of Catholic classics, when the seventies arrive, suffers a collapse in quality, evident in a cheap and banal flashiness of the covers. It’s like what happened with the ten- and twenty-five-cent coins after 1964, when they switched from silver to the zinc and copper sandwich. Silver has a sober milky white sheen, and a silver coin rings when you spin it on a table. Zinc has a dull gray glow. It doesn’t ring. It clunks.
As for art, the revision of the Mass after Vatican II couldn’t have come at a worse time. Today, many have learned to value what existed before the great leveling, whether in music, art or architecture, or even in humble household utensils and the look of a backyard garden. But in those days? I recall the satire of high modernism’s nonsense in the comedy The Odd Couple. Félix gets rid of Oscar’s old and modest furniture and replaces it with minimalism and absurdities. One of the pieces is a chair shaped like an open palm, with a thumb as an armrest and four fingers as a backrest.
I can spend an entire afternoon in a room full of old books, not because they are old, but because most of them will be real books. I can take my time. They don’t hammer my head with noise. I can’t spend more than a couple of minutes in a room full of books with those dazzling covers, whose content is usually just as shrill, cheap, and noisy.
I can sit at the piano for an hour and play old hymns, with lyrics written by people for whom the tradition of English poetry was always present, as a formative and continuous influence in their lives. I can’t do it with hymns whose poetry is cheap, clumsy, and sometimes stupidly heretical. Abide with Me, composed by Henry Lyte a few days before he died, truly abides with me, and if I retain consciousness in my final hours, I hope to be able to pray with its words: “Hold thou thy Cross before my closing eyes”. It’s a better verse than any written for a Catholic hymn in the last sixty years.
What brings all this to mind? Christmas; not the feast itself, but the translation of John’s prologue, the Gospel reading at Mass on the day. I often pray that prologue at night, as the old translators nobly rendered it, building to that grand and mysterious revelation: “But to all who received him, he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name; who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”.
Do I understand those words? It depends on what we mean by understand. They are not meant to be understood as if they were a medical report, nor can I fix their meaning in a single interpretation. So it is with all great poetry. I can go where Shakespeare directs my mind and heart when he says that Love “bears it out even to the edge of doom”. But I cannot, indeed I must not, reduce that powerful image, “the edge of doom”, to something flat and prosaic. We are at the edge of eternity.
So when I hear, as I did at Christmas Mass, that those who believed in the name of Christ were born “not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by decision of a man, but of God”, I feel like I’ve been made to sit in Félix’s modernist chair, in a bare-walled apartment.
It’s bad enough that the phrase doesn’t make sense, since “decision of a man” is redundant after “human choice”, and thus anticlimactic, ending with a cough and a thud. What has become of the “blood”? Or the “flesh”? These words stir the soul with their elemental force; they are at the heart of John’s poetry. Isn’t the “blood” one of the evangelist’s most crucial motifs? Isn’t the “flesh” taken up in the very next line? Why must all the mysterious suggestions be reduced to the bald and banal, as if John were transcribing the minutes of a committee?
If something like this is considered inseparable from the Novus Ordo, along with the rest of the leveling—if it were so—then novus would be the wrong word. Praeteritus, rather, for a fashion that’s passed, like shrill polyester pants or that palma Felicis. Bishops, I beg you, pay attention.
About the Author
Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, and Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and most recently The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is a distinguished professor at Thales College. Be sure to visit his new website, Word and Song