Category: Book reviews

Ape-like South American Indians, Chinamen, Dagos: terms cancel culture Democrats want to ban!  But…

If cancel culture zealots succeed in banning this book, they’ll miss an important feminist narrative: a woman who overcomes the hate of vicious men.  Why would anybody reject women’s literature like that—all for the sake of a ridiculous political correctivity?

Biblical imagery abounds in Conrad’s 1915 novel, so it is imperative for the twenty-first reader deprived of the literary foundation of the Western world by secular humanists to read the Book of Genesis first (you know, the beginning of the Jewish and Christian Bible).  Other religious imagery, like the “wood of the Cross” scenes on pages 285 and 380, will be obvious to any practicing Christian.

Of course, contemporary readers will find certain Conrad maxims (even the deceptively simple ones) not only delightfully worded, but also worth a prolonged conversation with intelligent friends (Republicans and Democrats who vote Republican, i.e. people who don’t fear intellectual activity).  I recommend the following for your conversation and enjoyment:

“An island is but the top of a mountain” (3)

“Consummate politeness is not the right tonic for an emotional collapse” (17)

“Liking is not sufficient to keep going the interest one takes in a human being.  With hatred, apparently, it is otherwise” (24)

“It is failure that makes a man enter into himself and reckon up his resources” (64)

“There is an unholy fascination in systematic noise” (66)

“The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears” (79)

“Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog” (89)

“Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end” (91)

“A meditation is always—in a white man, at least—more or less an interrogative exercise” (163)

“Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation” (185-6)

“There is a quality in events which is apprehended differently by different minds or even by the same mind at different times.  Any man living at all consciously knows that embarrassing truth” (234)

“Womanlike, she felt the effect she had produced, the effect of knowing much and of keeping all her knowledge in reserve [….]  Thus encouraged, directed in the way of duplicity, the refuge of the weak [….]  Duplicity—the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the disarmed, too!” (278)

“Diplomacy without force in the background is but a rotten reed to lean upon” (298)

“Diplomacy doesn’t go well with consistent contempt” (305)

“Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!” (383)

Thoroughly researched and eminently readable, Perry J. Cahall’s The Mystery of Marriage: A Theology of the Body and the Sacrament is an impressive scholarly work, whose writing style reads as mellifluously as a contemporary whodunit.  Applying St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body as the best philosophical foundation supporting the sacrament, Cahall reviews major steps in the millennia-long progression of marriage from the Hebrew Scriptures to our understanding of marriage as the primordial sacrament.

The result of years of teaching and research, Cahall’s catalog of theological concepts pertaining to marriage consists of six major subdivisions, most of the twenty-one chapters generally progressing in chronological order.  Chapter 1 defines the first major concept of the book, mystery, and how it relates to marriage.  Chapter 2 discusses the importance of the ancient understanding of humanity being created imago Dei, gifted with a body and a soul.  As Cahall indicates, these ideas from the first two chapters that constitute Part I are not new teaching; however, contemporary Catholics, bereft of orthodox theological training over the past few decades, may find these ideas, necessary to appreciating arguments on behalf of the Catholic view of marriage, novel.

The four chapters constituting Part II concern marriage “in the Order of Creation.”  Chapter 3 discusses the uniqueness of human beings as male and female beings, the contemporary distortion of gender, and some commentary on what constitutes true freedom.  Chapter 4 elaborates the categories of love from C. S. Lewis’ Four Loves from a Catholic perspective, most notably emphasizing that Christianity empowers us as being “purified by a higher love” (49).  This chapter also demonstrates how marriage is not a private agreement, but one with a social context.  Chapter 5 affirms the nature of marriage in natural law, which ineluctably leads into the explanation of the telos of marriage.  Chapter 6 introduces the idea of marriage as the primordial sacrament, based not only on its natural law foundation explicated by scholars, but also on the common knowledge derived from the experience of ordinary lay people.

The two chapters of Part III consider marriage in the Old and New Testaments.  Chapter 7 reviews the Old Testament foundations of marriage, where married love was likened to a covenant love with God.  Chapter 8 then analyzes marriage as a sacrament of the New Testament, emphasizing the importance of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.

Part IV, the bulkiest portion of Cahall’s work, covers six intense chapters of Christian (Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant) discussion of marriage, culminating in St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.  Chapter 9 summarizes the theology of marriage in the Patristic period.  Cahall’s etymological discussion of “sacrament” and “divorce” are especially beneficial at this point to understand not only the chronology of the development of sacramental marriage, but also of later Protestant secularization of the sacrament.  Chapter 10 is devoted to St. Augustine’s three goods of marriage.  Chapter 11 reviews Orthodox Christianity’s view of marriage, the medieval period’s generally negative view toward marriage, marriage as the “remedy for concupiscence” (a concept as misunderstood then as it is now), and a detailed analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical speculations on marriage (expressed in language surprisingly close to St. John Paul II’s ideas).  Chapter 12 evaluates Martin Luther’s hermeneutic of sola scriptura as it relates to marriage, an idea which setback the theological understanding of the sacrament by centuries.

Closer to our own times, chapter 13 considers why the Catholic Church has written so much on marriage in the twentieth century and reviews the treatment of marriage in the 1917 Code of Canon Law.  This chapter reinforces contemporary concepts in the understanding of marriage (such as that love is the meaning of the sacrament and how personalism helps to reorient the sacrament) and ends with brief commentary, expanded later, on St. Paul VI’s Humanae vitae.  Chapter 14 expands on the notion of marriage as the primordial sacrament, based on St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians (especially 5:32, the mega mysterion passage).  Cahall then discusses two terms long discussed but not well known to contemporary Catholics, the form and matter of a sacrament.  In marriage, the words of the sacrament are the form, and the man and the woman are themselves the matter of the sacrament; the implications of this centuries-long philosophical formulation obviously conflict with those who argue, for example, for same-sex marriage or any other distortion of heterosexual normativity.  Cahall ends the chapter with a discussion of how the 1983 Code of Canon Law and the 1993 Catechism emphasize the newer appreciation of marriage.

The two chapters of Part V review some specific aspects of the sacrament.  Chapter 15 comments on the “‘smells and bells’ of Catholic liturgical life” (295) and begins to turn the entire work towards the practical experience of married couples, what Cahall calls their living “in the thick of the world” (296).  Chapter 16 reviews several defects of matter and form regarding contemporary marriages, affirms that civilly-divorced persons cannot receive the Eucharist (a position much debated over recent statements by Pope Francis), and ends the chapter with a discussion of sex as prayer.

The remaining five chapters which constitute Part VI involve marriage in practice.  To help persons who wish to determine if marriage is appropriate for them, chapter 17 defines “spirituality” as the basis for their discernment and offers two lists of questions to help them in their exploration of marital commitment.  Presuming the couple is nearly decided on marriage, the chapter ends by reviewing the remote, proximate, and immediate stages of preparation for marriage.  Chapter 18 begins with commentary on tenderness and conjugal relations, considers the notions of gift and suffering in marriage, addresses emotional aridity in marriage, and argues for the irrevocable commitment that married persons express to each other in marriage.  Chapter 19 identifies four principles of sexual morality and three objective features of human sexuality.  Chapter 20 addresses responsible parenthood, counters erroneous claims about what the Church does not say about family size, and reviews the “many just reasons” why married persons would use Natural Family Planning to avoid pregnancy (423).  Chapter 21 discusses consecrated celibacy, viewing it as another expression of how some persons address the “ache” of conjugal love (451), and elaborates on the marriage of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph.

The concluding chapter of the work contains Cahall’s recommendation that “our modern culture needs to recover its roots and return to an outlook that will allow us to see the glorious mystery of marriage once again” (470).

The above highlights are, admittedly, eclectic and idiosyncratic; the electronic notes made from scribbled markings on note paper and the markings that this reviewer made on the book itself may differ from other readers.  However, it is virtually certain that every reader will find something in Cahall’s work which is a new insight (if not new theological knowledge), interesting, or pertinent to contemporary discussions of marriage, especially since most Catholics have, consistent with the rest of the culture, lost their common knowledge database of things Catholic.

For example, understanding the historical development of the sacrament may shock readers when they realize that marriage was formally listed as one of the standard seven sacraments of the Church only in the twelfth century.  Cahall’s discourse on the formal recognition of that historical development is illuminating.  Similarly, contemporary Catholics may think that Cahall’s commentary on form and matter as constituent elements of a sacrament is new when those theological concepts have existed for millennia.  Whether contemporary Catholics are intelligent enough to apply this theological development to the aggressive demands for same-sex marriage or the ordination of women remains to be seen.

While the work is not meant to be a marriage or (what would most obviously sell in today’s publishing market) a sex manual, Cahall’s work is surprisingly relevant for married couples situated in a culture where sex is deemed the essential and apparently only reason for marriage.  Orthodox Catholics know better, but what Cahall provides is an intellectual frame and vocabulary which contemporary married Catholics can use to counter several cultural notions which distort marriage, such as the idea that marriage is “living-happily-ever after” when it really means being “committed-ever-after” (360) or the notion that every act of lovemaking must be “great sex”, obviously erroneous, especially when the years of marriage advance beyond the initial honeymoon stage (389).

Cahall’s conclusion could be expanded with an explicit recognition of a key element from the praxis of modern marriage: generations of Catholic men and women have lived by and followed the Church’s support and respect for marriage as a unique bond between husband and wife.  The living witness of Catholic married couples, remaining faithful to Church teaching on marriage, may be the best witnesses in the New Evangelization for the sacredness of marriage in a thoroughly secular world.

Read Marie Carré’s novel as you would George Orwell’s 1984.

The primary similarity between Carré’s novel and the more famous 1984 by Orwell is that both works are prophetic, the one a dystopia of a secular world, and the other a dystopia affecting the Catholic Church.

While Carré’s novel was published in 1972 when reaction to the misguided “reforms” of some people after Vatican Council II would have justified her conservative critique, the scandals affecting the Catholic Church since then and much more obvious now in 2019, nearly a half century later, qualify Carré to be as much a prophet as her more famous British counterpart.

Plot details are simple and can be read quickly on any other Internet site.  What I found important are the following.

The scene where the “man without a name”, the ostensible author of the memoirs which the narrator “found”, learns that he was adopted is pivotal as a psychological study for his eventual hatred of the Catholic Church and promotion within Communist circles (4).  His love-turned-hate baffles the reader throughout the rest of the novel.  Why should he necessarily hate his loving adoptive parents, even to the point of promoting a political philosophy hostile to his parents’ well-meaning faith?  Contemporary parents who have children who have fallen away from the Faith can find this part of the fictional study most compelling.

While the author focuses on the consequences of a new Mass devoid of sacred components, much more interesting is the anonymous priest’s/Communist agent’s effort to argue for contraception and abortion (60).  Every Catholic, whether he or she supports Church teaching on the dual purposes of sex or not, knows how effective secular (demonic?) forces have been in leading people to think that sex is merely for pleasure.  These forces have succeeded in having people think that the Church’s support for sex within marriage as a means by which the couple can engage in pleasure and be open to the possibility of children is false.  From the early twentieth century to now, we are still grappling with the consequences of the distortion of sexuality that the contraception and abortion business Planned Parenthood has forced on the culture.

All is not lost, though, as the publishing fact of Carré’s novel indicates.  Written in 1972, the Catholic Church still exists in 2019 and will so in 2020, 2030, 2100, etc.  How could the Church survive if it were infiltrated by Communist agents as the novel’s plot suggests?

Simple.  As many Catholics today have argued, especially when faced with yet another demeaning message from Pope Francis about the “rigidity” of faithful, orthodox priests and lay people, Carré points to one means by which such demonic forces in the Church can be overcome: the rosary.  I would add, also, that we who are ordinary Catholic lay people must never leave the Church—headed by bishops, cardinals, and a pope who just don’t seem to have our interests at heart.  Moreover, we must have the courage that St. John Paul II wrote about when he asked us to defend our faith in the public square. As Carré’s prophetic novel indicates, sometimes such courage needs to be in the religious square as well.

George Orwell, thank you for the dire prophecy of a dystopian secular world which helped readers understand how to counter totalitarianism in the twentieth century.  From your spot in whatever literary Heaven there may be, please help spread the religious dystopia that Marie Carré has depicted, if only to help us in the fight to lead an orthodox Catholic Church in this new century.

Those studying Post-Abortion Syndrome will find this fantasy novel delightful reading.  (The narrator’s gay friend suggests that this is the purpose of the novel when he claims that the existence of the bizarre dreams of the aborted mother, the main character, is a way to resolve her PAS guilt; cf. page 116.)  Moreover, while the religious elements are subsumed (for obvious reasons; the characters are typical moderns who must think religion has an inferior place in their lives), a contemporary reader would understand that “Rondua” is a vague dream space that sounds like Purgatory and that “Ophir Zik” approximates the theological idea of Limbo.  The novel ends satisfactorily; the main character’s quest for reconciliation leads her back home.  However, anti-life feminists would not appreciate this novel since the aborted child is not only personified, but also the aborted mother’s “savior” (he rescues his mother at novel’s end from an ax killer).  This novel is yet another instance of the genre that those who write about abortion use to delve into the horrifyingly sad, fantasy-driven, and lifelong experiences surrounding abortion.

Clemens Cavallin’s brief book lives up to its implied purpose.  Early on, Cavallin states that “I hope to show [Michael D. O’Brien’s] understanding and ideas more effectively than disjointed fragments would do, or which the analytical distance of a systematic work could achieve” (21).  Thus, the scholarly reader who wants a detailed analysis of O’Brien’s works and writing style should enter appropriate search terms in a database like Academic Search Premier for the relatively few scholarly articles discussing his oeuvre.

The merit of Cavallin’s work, however, rests in the conversational tone which clarifies his explicit purpose.  “In this volume, I would like to give particular attention to [O’Brien’s] art, and try to convey something of the same inspiration and healing that I myself experienced from it” (20).  Lest this stated purpose be reduced to the genres of autobiography and biography (the latter bordering on the hagiographic), Cavallin is aware of his audience, and thus the explicit purpose of the work should be expanded to include its persuasive function.  “While writing this book, I had in mind especially those of you who are now in their late teens or early twenties and feel drawn to art as an expression of a strong Christian vocation” (21).  St. John Paul II’s Letter to Artists (1999) may provide a better systematic philosophy justifying the Christian’s role in contemporary art, but Cavallin’s work illustrates the anxieties, frustrations, and joys of two artists (in both the visual and literary arts) who attempt to implement the saint’s ideas in their respective creative professions.

Although the book is ostensibly organized around a weekend that Cavallin spent with O’Brien at his home in Canada (the chapters are titled simply “Prologue”, “Friday”, “Saturday”, “Sunday”, and “Epilogue”), the two philosophical divisions of the book are suggested in the title.  The first two-thirds of the book dominantly discuss O’Brien’s pertinent biographical details and his philosophy of art.  It is only in the remaining thirty pages that the reader may become aware that Cavallin has shifted the conversation to the second division suggested by the title: the importance of sacrifice for the purification of artists so that they can create works in cooperation with their divine calling.  Scattered throughout these two main divisions are didactic statements which encapsulate O’Brien’s artistic philosophy, inseparable from his Catholic faith.

Autobiographic and biographic details about Cavallin and O’Brien are indeed interesting and would not necessarily be found in scholarly analyses of the latter’s work.  Cavallin’s inclusion of two specific details, therefore, serves an important function in the study of O’Brien’s novels.  First, O’Brien’s poverty throughout his career is mentioned numerous times.  O’Brien quit his secure job in 1976 to pursue his art, and he claims that since then “my wife and I, and our children, have lived on the bottom of the economic structure of Canada” and that the “sacrifice was a constant testing” (59).  Cavallin elaborates how severe that poverty was and cautions that “one should not romanticize the lack of resources” (15).

The second important biographical detail from O’Brien’s life has had such a major influence on him that it is necessary to mention the circumstances in some detail, as Cavallin does over the span of three pages (which, in a volume of only 93 pages, is a significant quantity of attention).  When he was twenty-one, O’Brien

sensed the presence of radical evil.  I was confronted by a spirit which was powerful, extremely malevolent, and wished to devour my soul.  It was a being that suddenly appeared to me.  I was not hallucinating: I was sane.  But I—I who had completely rejected any notion of the transcendent or the spiritual—was suddenly confronted by a spiritual being who wanted to destroy me—or at least to devour me.  (29)

If it were not for “something deep in my soul [crying] out: ‘God save me!’”, he would have succumbed.  This crucial event in O’Brien’s life led to his spiritual transformation, encapsulated in the statement that “I realized in that instant that there was a great war in the heavens” (30).  The event is perhaps the moment in which O’Brien understood further that “the darkness that afflicts the modern era is dismantling Western Civilization, Christian civilization, into something far more sinister than the pagan age—into an apostate age” (30-1).

Cavallin offers his own autobiographical detail throughout his conversation with O’Brien, suggesting that the two men have many things in common: “My own story was so different, but at the same time so similar” (17).  While it is obvious that O’Brien enjoyed his interaction with the younger Swedish scholar, Cavallin (who is a faithful Catholic in a Sweden which lost not only its Catholic, but also its Protestant Christian roots on the altar of secularism) discloses much more the therapeutic effect of his collaboration with O’Brien in the composition of this book and in their communications throughout the years.  “Being in Canada and listening to Michael O’Brien was, then, part of a healing process: a quest for personal and professional wholeness” (19).

Sometimes, Cavallin’s descriptions of his interactions with O’Brien border on the awkwardly poetic and hagiographic as when he writes, “I sensed a cloud of grace surrounding Michael, something of which, I think, he was quite unaware” (13) or when he recalls “that first day of our meeting in 2011, when after lighting the candle, he walked by the portraits of Jesus and Mary.  It was as if he had sunk into water, was submerged for a moment, and then came back to normal life, with something of that luminous water still clinging to him” (16).

Despite these flaws in language, Cavallin’s work includes numerous statements summarizing O’Brien’s ideas about art which can assist the researcher and avid literary fan in trying to appreciate his ideas, if not understand why most of his fictional works are massive and often, as some critics have pointed out, verbose tomes.  For example, an image of a sapling growing out of rocks manifests for O’Brien not only his love of nature, but also God “speaking through nature” (33).  O’Brien’s analysis of the major fault of contemporary philosophy and art aesthetics—deconstruction, whereby art is viewed as a social construction and that “True Art” is “not God-given but made by us; and therefore unstable”—leads to his ineluctable conclusion that “As their creations could not partake of what they signified, they became signs of the only thing their creators were sure of, that is, themselves.  The anxiety that then naturally crept up on the wannabe artists, like a malicious black shadow hiding in a remote corner of the studio, biding its time, was precisely this impossibility to stretch out and establish a link with the real, with the pulsating nature of life” (35, 37).  The “black shadow”, of course, refers to the signal episode of the “spirit which was powerful, extremely malevolent, and wished to devour my soul”; thus, including this vocabulary (the simile could have easily been edited out) reinforces that crucial spiritual event which frames O’Brien’s world.

Besides recording O’Brien’s negative comments on modern art, Cavallin’s work is notable for containing the positive tenets of O’Brien’s philosophy of art, whether visual or literary, and the affirming statements span the range of assertion to grander hope.  For example, although the secular world wishes to obliterate its Christian roots and silence faithful persons, O’Brien recognizes in a simple assertion that “We are marginalized, and not allowed to enter the mainstream of culture—to speak the word.  But we are speaking.  We are speaking” (52, italics in original).  In contrast, O’Brien expresses a grander hope when he argues that, in order to accomplish the desire “to make true, beautiful, and good work, we must be willing to sacrifice.  We must risk losing everything” (63).

O’Brien’s novels are reportedly popular; ranging from 500 to 1,000 pages per volume, they are lugubrious works as well.  Evaluating the literary merit of O’Brien’s work, as Cavallin himself noted, is not the intention of his brief book and thus must be relegated to someone who has the interest and time to plow through O’Brien’s thick novels.  However, the busy person of faith may want to postpone reading O’Brien’s novels and read Cavallin’s much briefer (by 400 pages) summary of key tenets of the novelist’s beliefs.  Doing so may intrigue the reader to investigate at least one of O’Brien’s novels to determine whether the philosophical statements offered in Cavallin’s weekend conversation matches the literary artifact.

Those who advocate infanticide (the killing of the handicapped newborn) would despise Cobb’s account of the brief life and death of his son.  The rest of us normal people, however, recognize the beauty of the child’s life as seen through the memoirs of parents and a sibling who loved him.

Cobb’s biography of his son Samuel, who lived for five hours after birth, is not only a moving account, but also a deeply philosophical investigation of the value of suffering.  For the emotional impact of the book, I highly recommend reading these 118 pages.  I guarantee that readers will find some questions addressed and answered.  For the philosophical power of the book, I offer these quotes and some commentary.

Making the most of their time with Samuel, Cobb recounts “the weekly visit in which we took Micah [the couple’s first child] with us so that he could hear his brother’s heartbeat and see the ultrasound” (17).  Anti-lifers would recoil at these words, knowing that technological advances continue to make the pro-life case more effectively than mere words in argumentation.

The “We can avoid suffering by refusing to love well” paragraph (beginning on page 23) reads as a testament for those who assist the dying and fight for the value of all human life, especially the handicapped.  Of course, Cobb’s point is that “Choosing to suffer in these times is a sign, an indication of something deeper, something good, something worth pursuing, something worth upholding, someone worth valuing” (24).  Cobb’s affirmation of the value of love is repeated throughout the book.

I applaud Cobb for bold statements such as “There are in fact great goods in our dependence, in the recognition of our limitations, and in our burdening of others with our lives” (54; emphasis added).  When did society abandon the idea that the so-called “burdens” we supposedly hoist on each other are bad things instead of, as Cobb points out, opportunities for us to manifest our love for each other?

A final powerful quote is written by Samuel’s mother: “I’m supposed to be the mother of three children, but only one lives with me” (86).  (She had miscarried a child before Samuel.)  Every parent who has lost a child by miscarriage knows the pro-life truth that the miscarried child should be counted just as the born children are.

Finally, it is admirable that Cobb and his wife affirmed life when certain medical professionals recommended abortion (which, as Cobb notes, was euphemistically termed “interrupting the pregnancy”).  Some doctors, who should be intelligent, simply cannot understand that abortion is not a cure for any child with Trisomy 18.

Coffin neatly summarizes the growing opposition to artificial birth control in this 130 page book that can be easily read in about three hours; notetaking would extend the reading to four.

Some memorable items and ideas include the following.  A list of twelve items in a quiz (xviii) and their answers [77ff] will shock contemporary readers who think that contraception was wanted by everybody in all places at all times.  Coffin makes the case that sex which is not burdened by contraception is as “organic” and “green” (xxi) as the social movements that these terms signify.  He cogently argues that contemporary society suffers from “sexual schizophrenia” (48).

Some trenchant quotes include the following.  “Despite sincere protestations, those who accept contraception implicitly accept every other sexual coupling that is shorn from conception” (49).  Natural law, the basis for sex au naturel, is simple and can be defined as “that which rational beings must do in order to perfect their natures” [63].  “The Church has never commanded families to propagate into poverty” (84).  Sex on infertile days is not the same as birth control because God designed the “natural rhythm of fertility and infertility” (114).  The Church never forbade sex on infertile days (115).  Finally, “Rich is the irony that an over-sexualized, anti-baby culture should excel at producing technologies aimed at making babies without sex!” (122).

Couples who sterilized themselves may especially want to reach chapter nine [99ff] for a discussion of how that serious abuse of their sexuality can be overcome.

I recommend this book for young people seeking the sacrament of matrimony, those who have contracepted themselves surgically, and those husbands and wives who think that contraception is necessary when they have sex with their spouses.  Protestant Christians will be especially encouraged to know that many are not only rediscovering what the Reformers said about contraception, but also abandoning the sexual distortions of late twentieth-century theologians on the matter.

Creative sex scenes, clever ejaculation imagery, and deep thoughts for godless societies.

Burgess offers wonderful sex scenes to illustrate that God’s favorite activity for married humans can be rendered into beautiful words.  That this novel was written over half a century ago testifies to his enduring literary power.

Of course, contemporary society may not appreciate how the author writes about sexuality since some misguided souls think that sex is just a pastime instead of a fulfilling part of married life.  Oh, well, that’s their problem.

The rest of us can enjoy this novel not so much as a philosophical treatise on the sanctity of marriage and how Shakespeare broke that sanctity, but as linguistic revelry equal to any Shakespearean drama or sonnet.  Therefore, if you can’t tolerate Shakespeare’s antiquated language just yet, read this novel instead.

What linguistic revelry?  Well!

For example, stating that he “loosed into her honey his milk” (33) is simply clever language for ejaculation, as is the imagery that “a thrust of opal drops in animal ecstasy unleashed a universe” (191).

Burgess uses such literary expression of sexuality to expose the inherent disruption of Shakespeare’s society, a time which “cracked order in State and Church” (267).  Beyond the snickering fun of the above examples of coitus, the author writes some serious condemnations of that milieu.

“That lust and filthy fornication and sodomy and buggery roam this realm, beating their lewd wings and raising a coughing and stinking and blinding dust to lead reason astray [….]  You may take one man’s sinfulness to be the type and pattern of all” ([184]) is not merely creative language.  The ideas apply to our time as much as it did to Shakespeare’s, and no amount of protestation from those who think they are “liberated” today can ignore that the sexual activity detonated by the terms “fornication” and “sodomy” (established for millennia) remain sinful and immoral.

The saddest sections of the novel are Burgess’ suggestions that Shakespeare was a man who utterly lost his faith, whether the “Old Faith” of Catholicism or Anglicanism, which the Tudor monarchs forced on the nation in the sixteenth century under threat of death.  Shakespeare is someone who “kept quiet about his own weak faith in anything” (53).  He may have been a master writer of drama and sonnets, but Shakespeare was a fornicator, an adulterer (with boys, men, and women), and a coward.

Now wonder, then, that a genuine hero in the novel is Shakespeare’s father, who says, “I see that there is more truth there [in the Old Faith of Catholicism] than I formerly thought, and that men have been cruelly burnt for nothing” (200).  Maybe Shakespeare himself found his father’s faith eventually.  After all, the novel ends with the capitalized words “My Lord” (271).

But that would be trying to force a happy ending on a fictionalized account of a life that had great literary merit yet is a piss-poor example of how one should live.

We must thank Burgess, then, for a fun read with didactic value.

Biden should read this to learn how he doesn’t follow—in fact, opposes—Catholic social doctrine.

Rod Dreher recently said in his Live Not by Lies that Catholic social justice is different from totalitarian social justice (63-4), so I read Benestad’s book to learn more about what Catholic social justice means.  (Benestad calls it “Catholic Social Doctrine” or CSD throughout his book.)

What I read convinces me that Joe Biden is far from being a “Catholic” anything, let alone a Catholic social justice advocate.  Benestad’s magnificent review of Catholic social doctrine damns Biden as an opponent of Catholic social justice, not as one of its advocates.

It’s obvious why Biden opposes Catholic social doctrine.  Biden supports abortion throughout the nine months of pregnancy for any reason whatsoever and wants American taxpayers to fund abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood here in the US and around the world.  Thus, Biden opposes the keystone of CSD: “the sacredness of life and the dignity of the human person” (2).

Benestad’s discussion of historicism may also account for another flaw in Biden’s character and policy, his support for genocide.  “According to historicism,” Benestad writes, “truth is simply a function of the time period in which you live.  What is true for one culture may not be true for another” (52).  Biden thinks that the Communist Chinese genocide of the Uyghurs is “a cultural norm”; therefore, Biden is just another politician who doesn’t believe the eternal life-affirming truths as his Catholic faith teaches.

Benestad argues well throughout his book that no social justice effort—no policy, no program, no government initiative, nothing—can be successful if it doesn’t involve changing people’s minds and lifestyles.  In other words, “nothing in life is more important than virtue” (61).  Maybe this is why Biden opposes Catholic social justice.  The evidence against Biden being a man of virtue is obvious; consider, for example, his bribing and threatening foreign officials and his cover-up of his son’s illegal activities.

Most damning for Biden, however, is the fact that he is hypocritical when it comes to living what he thinks is his Catholic faith.  Benestad quotes St. John Paul II, who said, “The legal permission to kill the unborn is really a tyrannical decision by the strong against ‘the weakest and most defenseless of human beings’” (170-1).  His successor, Pope Benedict, noted that public officials have a duty to be “a public witness to our faith” (107).  Specifically, the pope says, “it is especially incumbent upon those who, by virtue of their social or political position, must make decisions regarding fundamental values such as respect for human life” (107).

Benestad offers a compelling comparison of the hypocrisy of anti-life politicians like Biden when he writes that “Catholic” politicians who say they are personally opposed to abortion are like politicians before the Civil War who were personally opposed to slavery (232).  A question that Benestad rhetorically asks readers at the end of his book is trenchant and directly relates to anti-life politicians like Biden: “How can people, especially Catholics, speak passionately of social justice and the dignity of the human person without embarrassment, when they have no problem with Roe v. Wade, which allows the killing of unborn children for the whole nine months of pregnancy?” (451).

Biden fails miserably regarding this first criterion of Catholic social justice, respect for human life.  His zealous support for abortion, especially giving American taxpayer dollars to abortion companies here and overseas, negates any respect for human life that he claims to have.

Of course, Biden fails the remaining other criteria of Catholic social justice, all of which are predicated on the first (respect for human life).  The Catholic approach to economics favors capitalism as the more effective means of eliminating poverty, criticizing socialism and communism for its opposition to biblical support for private property (318).  Catholicism considers welfare as a temporary measure (336), has much to say about illegal immigration (340-1), and asserts that states have a right to “control their borders” (340).  Finally, orthodox Catholic social justice theorists note that population control advocates believe in coercion (whether it involves forcing contraception or abortion on them); such coercion is contrary to respect for the individual’s free will and conscience (348).

Biden’s political agenda, of course, opposes these tenets of Catholic social justice.

Benestad’s review of Catholic social justice is necessary, if only to understand how leftists have distorted the ancient concepts of care for fellow human beings.  The leftists who distort Church teachings on social justice include Antifa domestic terrorists and Democratic politicians (both of whom would rather destroy the Western world that Judaism and Christianity have built instead of perfect it).  The distortion of Catholic social justice also comes from leftist clerics (including Pope Francis, who seems to care more about a straw floating in the Atlantic Ocean than he does urging all to care for the three victims of abortion: the mother, the unborn child, and the father).

Fortunately, students and ordinary readers can rely on Benestad’s book as a succinct and accurate source on what Catholic social justice/Catholic social doctrine means.  The book (nearly 500 pages) is scholarly, yet readable, and all readers will appreciate the book’s thorough footnotes and comprehensive bibliography and index.

A remarkable collection, sure to anger cancel culture zealots but be applauded by the rest of us.

At first, I wondered why this book was necessary at all.  I mean, if any student or reader wanted to look up a phrase, a maxim, or a quote, then he or she would just use DuckDuckGo and search the internet.

Then I realized just how valuable Borden’s collection of maxims is.  In 2021, when cancel culture zealots want to destroy seemingly everything that made human culture (and Western culture especially) great, I think it is imperative that we resist those who would destroy our history by reading, learning, studying, and remembering some of the worthy quotes which inform our millennia-old human civilization.

In short, Borden’s compilation will assist all of us to appreciate the good, the true, and the beautiful as expressed by some of humanity’s most forceful people.

Borden’s introductory material clarifies the definition of “maxim” so that readers will understand why this genre of writing is the focus of the book instead of, for example, correspondence or literary works from the people he studied.  Moreover, Borden justifies admirably why he selected only eighteen of the billions of human beings who have dwelt on the planet.

The book also benefits from providing extensive biographical information for each of the eighteen sources whom he consulted.  Best of all for faculty, students, and ordinary readers, Borden provides footnote citations where warranted.  I can hear students around the globe thanking him for helping them to write masterful research papers!

The 241 pages are mellifluously written and would take about two days for a standard reading, four or more days if one concentrated and studied the quotes provided.  Either way, Borden’s book is exemplary and worth anyone’s time and effort.