The Monthly Salon: July
Last chance for a summer chinwag
Hello all, and welcome to the monthly salon, your regular opportunity to set the agenda at the Abbey of Misrule.
Before I go on, let me alert you to a couple of new things. Firstly, for readers in Ireland, I will be talking next Thursday at the Percy French Festival in Roscommon, about taking inspiration from the early Christian desert saints. The whole day is full of interesting speakers, and it’s a great little gathering.
For those who can’t make it, you can see a video of the same presentation from my recent Dublin event with Jonathan Pageau and Martin Shaw. Unfortunately, the audio quality is poor, which is a shame. But that’s technology for you.
Back to the present. Next week, as I explained recently here, I’ll be suspending all subscription payments until September while I take a summer break from words. You don’t have to do anything about this - you will remain subscribed - but it means there won’t be any more ‘content’, as we have all learned to call it, for the next six or seven weeks. I’ll be too busy drinking tea and watching the Ashes. You can take the man out of England, but you can’t take England out of the man.
So this is your last chance to start some conversations until the autumn begins. As usual, the floor is entirely yours. You can talk about anything you like, other than Johnny Bairstow’s disappointing form with both bat and gloves. That’s hate speech, and I will deal with it accordingly.
Summer best to all of you,
Paul
I was recently reading the book "The God of Jesus Christ" by Pope Benedict and I came across this passage:
"What then does 'the name of God' mean? Perhaps it is easiest to grasp what this entails if we look at its opposite. The Revelation of John speaks of the adversary of God, the 'beast'. This beast, the power opposed to God, has no name, but a number. The seer tells us: 'Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.' It is a number, and it makes men numbers. We who lived through the world of concentration camps know what that means. The terror of that world is that it obliterates men's faces. It obliterates their history. It makes man a number, an exchangeable cog in one big machine. He is his function - nothing more. Today, we must fear that the concentration camp was only a prelude and that the universal law of the machine may impose the structure of the concentration camp on the world as a whole. For when functions are all that exist, man, too, is nothing more than his function. The machines that he himself has constructed now impose their own law on him: he must be made readable for the computer, and this can be achieved only when he is translated into numbers. Everything else in man becomes irrelevant. Whatever is not a function is - nothing. The beast is a number, and it makes men numbers. But God has a name, and God calls us by our name. He is a Person, and he seeks the person. He has a face, and he seeks our face. He has a heart, and he seeks our heart. For him, we are not some function in a 'world machinery.' On the contrary, it is precisely those who have no function who are his own. A name allows me to be addressed. A name denotes community. This is why Christ is the true Moses, the fulfillment of the revelation of God's name. He does not bring some new word as God's name; he does more than this, since he himself is the face of God. He himself is the name of God. In him, we can address God as 'you', as person, as heart."
The paragraph goes on just a bit more, but that is its essence. When I read it, it felt very resonant with many of the themes shared in The Abbey of Misrule, so I thought it might be worth sharing.
Ok, I have a great vacation book for you! If you have any sense at all, you must appreciate the comic genius of Wodehouse (I just read Something New, his first Blandings book, hilarious). Looking for one of his for my yearly summer Wodehouse read, I came across and was scared away from his early book Mike and Psmith - all the American reviewers say they have no idea what’s going on, apparently it’s chock full of cricket terms, which we are constitutionally forbidden from understanding. So have a wonderful break and, as a cricket connaisseur, do what I can’t and enjoy that Wodehouse humor!
Ps whatever y’all do, don’t be a normie!
https://gaty.substack.com/p/dont-be-a-normie
“ If you view child sacrifice as a self-limiting anomaly, the trans craze as a phase, and identity politics as a passing fancy, you’ll be tempted to sit back, relax, mind your own business, and wait for the madness to subside. Those tactics will get you nothing but a nonbinary grandchild. I am imploring you to realize that, in the absence of God, the madness is the norm. You cannot wait-and-see your way out of it, you can only repent-and-revival your way out of it. Our godless elite are not leading us into brave new worlds of depravity, they’re taking us back to where we started. ”