Forgetfulness of God led to the abandonment of man

Pope St. John Paul II, Ecclesia in Europa, June 28, 2003. Just substitute America (or Western Civilization) as needed.

This message is also addressed today to the Churches in Europe, often tempted by a dimming of hope. The age we are living in, with its own particular challenges, can seem to be a time of bewilderment. Many men and women seem disoriented, uncertain, without hope, and not a few Christians share these feelings. There are many troubling signs which at the beginning of the third millennium are clouding the horizon of the European continent, which “despite great signs of faith and witness and an atmosphere undoubtedly more free and unified, feels all the weariness which historical events – recent and past – have brought about deep within the hearts of its peoples, often causing disappointment”.

Among the aspects of this situation, so many of which were frequently mentioned during the Synod, I would like to mention in a particular way the loss of Europe’s Christian memory and heritage, accompanied by a kind of practical agnosticism and religious indifference whereby many Europeans give the impression of living without spiritual roots and somewhat like heirs who have squandered a patrimony entrusted to them by history. It is no real surprise, then, that there are efforts to create a vision of Europe which ignore its religious heritage, and in particular, its profound Christian soul, asserting the rights of the peoples who make up Europe without grafting those rights on to the trunk which is enlivened by the sap of Christianity.

Certainly Europe is not lacking in prestigious symbols of the Christian presence, yet with the slow and steady advance of secularism, these symbols risk becoming a mere vestige of the past. Many people are no longer able to integrate the Gospel message into their daily experience; living one’s faith in Jesus becomes increasingly difficult in a social and cultural setting in which that faith is constantly challenged and threatened. In many social settings it is easier to be identified as an agnostic than a believer. The impression is given that unbelief is self-explanatory, whereas belief needs a sort of social legitimization which is neither obvious nor taken for granted.

This loss of Christian memory is accompanied by a kind of fear of the future. Tomorrow is often presented as something bleak and uncertain. The future is viewed more with dread than with desire. Among the troubling indications of this are the inner emptiness that grips many people and the loss of meaning in life. The signs and fruits of this existential anguish include, in particular, the diminishing number of births, the decline in the number of vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and the difficulty, if not the outright refusal, to make lifelong commitments, including marriage.

We find ourselves before a widespread existential fragmentation. A feeling of loneliness is prevalent; divisions and conflicts are on the rise. Among other symptoms of this state of affairs, Europe is presently witnessing the grave phenomenon of family crises and the weakening of the very concept of the family, the continuation or resurfacing of ethnic conflicts, the re-emergence of racism, interreligious tensions, a selfishness that closes individuals and groups in upon themselves, a growing overall lack of concern for ethics and an obsessive concern for personal interests and privileges. To many observers the current process of globalization, rather than leading towards the greater unity of the human race, risks being dominated by an approach that would marginalize the less powerful and increase the number of poor in the world.

In connection with the spread of individualism, we see an increased weakening of interpersonal solidarity: while charitable institutions continue to carry out praiseworthy work, one notes a decline in the sense of solidarity, with the result that many people, while not lacking material necessities, feel increasingly alone, left to themselves without structures of affection and support.

At the root of this loss of hope is an attempt to promote a vision of man apart from God and apart from Christ. This sort of thinking has led to man being considered as “the absolute centre of reality, a view which makes him occupy – falsely – the place of God and which forgets that it is not man who creates God, but rather God who creates man. Forgetfulness of God led to the abandonment of man”. It is therefore “no wonder that in this context a vast field has opened for the unrestrained development of nihilism in philosophy, of relativism in values and morality, and of pragmatism – and even a cynical hedonism – in daily life”. European culture gives the impression of “silent apostasy” on the part of people who have all that they need and who live as if God does not exist.

This is the context for those attempts, including the most recent ones, to present European culture with no reference to the contribution of the Christian religion which marked its historical development and its universal diffusion. We are witnessing the emergence of a new culture, largely influenced by the mass media, whose content and character are often in conflict with the Gospel and the dignity of the human person. This culture is also marked by an widespread and growing religious agnosticism, connected to a more profound moral and legal relativism rooted in confusion regarding the truth about man as the basis of the inalienable rights of all human beings. At times the signs of a weakening of hope are evident in disturbing forms of what might be called a “culture of death”.(17)

Well-intentioned but bad moral theology

The picture below (minus the big red cross-out) is floating around the Internet. It’s well-meant, but it is wrong in significant ways.

Most significantly, the creator of the graphic appears to think that all of the seven “deadly” sins are mortal sins. I believe that the creator was misled by the name “deadly” sins to conclude that they are “mortal” sins. This is not the case; in fact, some of them are not necessarily sinful at all, and the rest are not nearly always mortal sins. Anger and hatred, for example, are passions, and passions themselves are morally neutral (see CCC 1762ff.). The other five “deadly” sins are lust, pride, sloth, envy, and greed, and they all appear on this graphic as well. While all of them can be mortal sins, given the proper conditions, they often (I am tempted to say, “more often”) are not. They are called “deadly” (or sometimes “capital”) because, left unchecked, they can lead to grave sins.

Also worth noting are the following:

It is not a mortal sin not to confess in the past year if you have not committed any mortal sins since your last good confession, though I should add that the odds of not committing a grave sin improve greatly if you go to confession much more often than once a year.
Though abortion is a grave sin, it is poor phrasing to say that it is wrong to “help in any way.” To sin by helping, one must have the intention of helping a specific person procure or carry out a specific abortion, or one must be in a position to prevent a specific abortion and refuse to do so. For example, a bus driver whose route includes a place that performs abortions does not sin by dropping off passengers unless he chose that route specifically with the intention of helping the cause of abortion.
Supporting abortion in general is also wrong, though I’m not sure whether or not the creator of the graphic had that in mind.

Book Review: The Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus Affair, Piers Paul Read

The Dreyfuss Affair was a critical event (or series of events) in forming France, but I must confess that I knew very few of the details. When I saw this book come up at a Kindle sale price (it’s back up to full price now), I jumped at it.

A few reviewers at Amazon said that the first fifty pages were slow. I didn’t notice that, and in any case, they’re essential. The Affair didn’t take place in a vacuum; it was a perfect storm of royalists, anti-Semites, army loyalists (people whose chief allegiance was to the French army because they didn’t like/trust the government), Jews (practicing and non-), Catholics (Jesuits and Assumptionists in particular, but plenty of plain old Catholics too), free-thinkers, freemasons, republicans (not the American political party, but advocates of the various French Republics), socialists, bankers, partisans of various regions of France, and more, in various overlapping combinations.

The gist of the story (spoiler alert) is simply told: Albert Dreyfus, a Jew from the Alsace region, was an artillery officer accused of spying for the Germans, court-martialed on very slim evidence (some of it forged), sent to Devil’s Island for four years (during which the true culprit was found but acquitted), granted an appeal, convicted again (on even less evidence), and then pardoned in an attempt to smooth the whole thing over.

Perhaps it sounds dry in summary, but I found it a most interesting book. Some individuals come out of the story looking good, but none of the groups in that laundry list above makes a very good showing, and my general sense is that not a lot of people outside of the Dreyfus family were concerned mostly for the facts; most of them seemed to seize upon the case to advance their own agendas. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It’s just as well Facebook didn’t exist back then.

Book review: Carrying the Fire

Carrying the Fire, Michael Collins (the astronaut)

I remember reading this book as a teenager, decades ago. Every now and then, I’d look for it on Amazon, but whatever copies were available were either badly beaten up or out of my price range. I am happy to report that the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 brought the book back into print, and so I got it. I’m even happier to report that it mostly has stood up over time. I enjoyed re-reading it.

Collins was the Command Module Pilot for Apollo 11, which means he’s the astronaut who didn’t land on the Moon. If he’d stayed in NASA, he’d probably have been able to make a later lunar flight and land, but he’d done all he needed to do and was ready to step away (though he admits watching carefully the mission that probably would have been his).

To his extra credit, the book isn’t ghost-written, and it’s well-written. There’s not a whole lot in it about his childhood; the book pretty much jumps into his Air Force career, flying an F-86 Sabrejet, ejecting from a burning plane over West Germany, and entering test pilot school. (When his unit was first transferred to France, he notes, “Unbelievably bad weather and amply stocked bars made the going treacherous, and we arrived in Chaumont, France, some thirty days after departure in our supersonic jets, having averaged four miles per hour.” (Emphasis his.)

He tells the story of his two applications to be an astronaut (the second being successful, of course), what astronaut training was like. He tells of his space-walking adventures on Gemini 10, the back surgery that held him back from the Apollo 8 and fortuitously placed him on the roster for Apollo 11, and all the other things that went into getting him on the top of a Saturn V, headed for the Moon. And of course he tells the story of that lunar voyage and return home.

He wrote the book in 1973 and has wisely chosen not to revise it other than by adding a new preface (there’s also a 2009 preface for the 40th anniversary), so it’s a little dated in places, and the last chapter’s what-does-it-all-mean musings haven’t aged well. But don’t let that stop you from a fun read.

Book Review: Dante, tr. Esolen

All by Dante Alighieri, translated by Anthony Esolen.

At the dinner after Chrism Mass this year, the table discussion among the priests and seminarians was far-reaching, touching on things like Avengers: Endgame, baseball, and Dante. Apropos of the last, one of my brother priests mentioned that he was reading the Divine Comedy, translated by someone whose name he thought started with a C. (I suggested John Ciardi, but he said that wasn’t it.) At any rate, I confessed that I had never been able to complete the Paradiso, but felt encouraged/challenged to try it again.

My first attempt at reading the Divine Comedy was with the translation by Dorothy Sayers. (Amazon very helpfully tells me that I bought it in 1997.) I made it through Hell and Purgatory, but not all the way through Heaven, despite several attempts, so I thought I’d switch translations. Rather than look for an appealing translation by an author whose name might or might not start with C, I went with the translation by Anthony Esolen, whose book on hymns I reviewed earlier this year.

Translating Dante must be a daunting task. (Yes, I did that on purpose.) Translating at all is hard enough, but translating poetry brings with it expectations and opportunities, decisions about meter and rhyme and so on. Understanding the Divine Comedy also requires a broad knowledge of scholastic theology, ancient mythology, Church history, and Church/state politics in Italy.

Providing that background knowledge is key in a translation, and Esolen does a fine job of it. He provides just enough on-page footnotes to encourage a reader to keep going, but not enough to derail the reading process. Further explanations are given in the back of the book. I read those after completing each canto (a canto is more or less a chapter). He provides a brief summary of each canto before it begins, which helped me keep my bearings. Each volume has an introductory essay and includes appendices giving various pertinent material, often relating to Dante’s source material.

To understand how Esolen dealt with the poetic challenges, it helps to know how the Divine Comedy is structured. It’s broken into three books. Each book is broken into cantos (chapters); Inferno has 34 cantos and the other two have 33 each, adding up to 100.

The cantos themselves are of varying lengths, written in tercets–groups of three lines. The rhyme scheme appears to have been invented by Dante and is known as terza rima (third rhyme). It goes like this: ABA BCB CDC DED etc. This works well in Italian, which has lots of rhymes. Finding rhymes is more difficult in English, and attempting to stick rigorously to the rhyming scheme tends to produce contorted and hard-to-follow English. Dorothy Sayers preserved the rhyme scheme, and I think this is what finally stopped me from finishing her translation. The Paradiso is difficult to understand anyhow (Esolen’s introductory essay on it explores some of the reasons why), and a confusing translation doesn’t help any.

Esolen’s solution was to retain the tercet format, using iambic pentameter (Dante used eleven syllables to a line, but that’s awkward in English), rhyming only when it worked well. In the Inferno, he estimates that about 10% of the lines rhyme; in the Purgatorio, he estimates it’s about 40%; and, while he doesn’t give a figure for the Paradiso, he says it rhymes more often than the Purgatorio.

And therein lies a problem. He notes himself that rhyming English in the way terza rima requires is difficult “unless one is willing to invert syntax, employ archaisms, or crack the meter.” In attempting more rhymes in the Paradiso, he made what was already the most difficult book to read a little more difficult.

But I did finish! Amazon says that I placed my order on April 16, and I finished on the evening of May 28, so it’s not a quick read. (If you’ve been wondering why the reviews slowed down, now you know.) But it was worth it, and cavils about the rhyme scheme notwithstanding, Esolen did about as good a job of translating, etc. as can be done.

Book Review: Bringing Columbia Home

Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew. Michael D. Leinbach and Jonathan H. Ward. Arcade, 2018

(Not a book about religion, but a book I found worth reading.)

On January 16, 2003, Michael Leinbach was the launch director for STS-107, the 113th space shuttle launch. On February 1, he was among those waiting in vain at the Kennedy Space Center for the return of Columbia. And by that evening, he was in charge of NASA’s Rapid Response Team as they began the enormous task of bringing Columbia and her crew home.

This is mostly a book about people. It touches on the debates surrounding Columbia’s last mission and what could or should have been done differently, but it’s mainly a story of the people who went out into the wilds of east Texas, battling terrible weather, difficult terrain, briars and stump holes, snakes, and their own emotions in order to find the remains of the crew and enough of the wreckage to keep the public safe and, if possible, to determine what had caused Columbia to come apart.

The search involved grid-walking–walking lines, with searchers ideally spaced evenly–across an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. The original searchers were a combination of local volunteers, law enforcement personnel, and NASA employees (many of them on their own time). Eventually, the search was largely turned over to Forest Service Incident Management Teams (who do much more than fight fires). All of these people had to come to emotional terms with what they were doing.

Perhaps the group of people with the hardest jobs were the astronaut corps. Whenever crew remains were found (the authors quite rightly don’t go into much detail about the condition of remains, but it’s clear that the bodies of at least some of the crew were broken apart on re-entry), an astronaut always went out on the recovery team. But no one had an easy job.

The support of the local townspeople is one of the highlights of the story. Whatever they could do for the searchers, they did–feeding them, giving them places to live, and in general letting them know that they appreciated the task the searchers were doing.

As the recovery effort wound down, the focus of the investigation switched to reconstruction of Columbia. Reconstruction, not rebuilding, because Columbia obviously would never fly again. But arranging recovered debris (by weight, they recovered about 38% of the shuttle and contents) according to where it had come from on the shuttle, the investigators were able to determine with great confidence what had destroyed Columbia.

The process of reconstruction was an emotional one as well. Many of the people involved in identifying where a scrap of debris had come from had spent their entire careers working on Columbia, and seeing it in pieces brought them to tears.

Yet the story is not a grim one. It is a story of people faced with a tough job and doing it anyway. It has its moments of humor, such as this tale from the early days of the search:

After Sowell’s crew found its first object of the day, his three new elderly volunteers broke from their positions to examine it. They argued over whether the object was a piece of the shuttle, because it appeared to have rust on it. Sowell began to lose his temper. “Look, guys, we’re not a bunch of rocket scientists here. You need to get back into line!” To his surprise, one of the men told him that, in fact, they were rocket scientists–retired Apollo-era NASA employees.

The last part of the book describes the long-term storage of Columbia wreckage in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, where it’s accessible to researchers. It also touches upon the winding-down of the shuttle program and the loss of institutional knowledge that came with it.

The link above is an Amazon affiliate link, but if you want to get the book elsewhere, that’s fine with me.

Book Review: An Immovable Feast

An Immovable Feast: How I Gave Up Spirituality For A Life Of Religious Abundance Tyler Blansky, Ignatius Press

All conversion stories are commentaries on St. Augustine’s famous saying, “You have made us for Yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”¹ What makes each story unique (and often fascinating) is how the restlessness appears in a person’s life, and how God moves to bring rest to a restless heart.

Tyler Blansky grew up in a believing and practicing Baptist household. He accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior at the age of 12, at church camp. He never backed away from that; in fact, the story of his restlessness is the story of his desire to live what he believed.

He rejected what he called “ ‘suburban Christianity’, a therapeutic deism in pursuit of the American Dream,”² in favor of a desire to live an authentic Christian life, and soon thereafter, he found himself rejecting “religion” in the name of “spirituality.” By the grace of God, he was never quite comfortable with that either; God put people in his life to challenge him (most notably, eventually, his wife Brittany). His desire to live what he believed led him to the Episcopal Church, and then onto the path toward ordination as an Anglican priest, intending to do a church plant in Minneapolis. Just a few months before graduating from seminary, he and a nine-months pregnant Brittany set all that aside to enter the Catholic Church.

Of all the books I read while I was on retreat, this is the one that has stayed with me the most. A constant theme is the necessity of trusting God, even (especially?) when we lack clarity in understanding.

The book is engagingly written, reminding me a bit of a 21st Century Thomas Howard,³ though I doubt that Howard ever wore dreadlocks or listened to quite the eclectic range of music that Blansky did. The narrative is interspersed with apologetical sections explaining what he was learning that led him to change his beliefs, step by step. I admit to skimming portions of this material since I was familiar with it, and I confess that I wish he were less taken with Scott Hahn’s Fourth Cup theories, but that’s not too significant in the grand scheme of things.

Readers who never spent time as High(ish) Church Anglicans might not recognize some of the names that Blansky drops along the way: “I loved Keble and Newman and Andrewes and Webb and Pusey and Ramsey.” He also assumes a certain familiarity with Scripture, with hymns, and with Anglican and Catholic prayers–at least, he includes phrases from them regularly without pausing to point out what he’s doing. Neither of these is a bad thing, but they might slow some readers down.

I will conclude with an excerpt, as he and his wife move into married student quarters at the seminary:

Brittany unpacked her library and I unpacked mine, and we realized we did not have enough bookshelves. The next morning, our mattresses on the living-room floor, our little apartment crowded with stacks of books, Brittany rolled her eyes when the mailman arrived bearing gifts: Dulles’ The Priestly Office, Balthasar’s Priestly Spirituality, Pope Saint John Paul II’s Ordinatio Sacerdotalis,⁴ and an anthology on the subject with essays by Thomas Hopko, Alexander Schmemann, and Kallistos Ware.

“Do we need more books?” Brittany said.

“Think of it as we get more books,” I said.

As always, a reminder that I am an Amazon affiliate and get a small reimbursement (costing you nothing) if you purchase from the link in the review. Feel free to buy elsewhere, if you like.

Confessions, I.1.↩
Page 19.↩
I was a bit surprised not to encounter any references to Howard in the main text. He does show up in the acknowledgments.↩
He has to be exaggerating a bit here. Ordinatio Sacerdotalis isn’t long enough to make a good pamphlet, let alone a book. Perhaps this was an edition with accompanying documents.↩

Book Review: Deathbed Conversions

Deathbed Conversions: Finding Faith at the Finish Line
Karen Edmisten, Our Sunday Visitor, 2013

In brief (12 pages, max) stories, the author tells of the conversion of 13 famous (or notorious) people who became Catholic near the end of their lives. Not all of them are literal deathbed conversions–Gary Cooper, for example, converted two years before his death. But all of them were conversions at the end of lives that one might not have expected to end in conversion.

The whole idea of deathbed conversions is intriguing, as the back cover blurb notes. Doesn’t it seem like cheating somehow? Edemstein addresses this well in an introductory chapter; the short answer is that, while it may seem like cheating, the conversion is often the result of a long process of internal change.

Take the case of Oscar Wilde. To quote the book:

This vision of Oscar Wilde–the happily unrestrained hedonist who once told a customs agent that he had nothing to declare but his genius–is a common one. But there was infinitely more to this fascinating and complicated man who also once said that Catholicism was the only religion worth dying in. He had a lifelong romantic dalliance with the Catholic Church, and he finally succumbed to her as he lay dying.

Not all of the conversions worked that way. Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody) married a Catholic, though the marriage was a troubled one. But toward the end of his life, he wrote that in his old age, he had found God. His was truly a deathbed conversion, as he was baptized the day before he died.

Then there are the two sides of one of Hollywood’s most notorious affairs: Gary Cooper (mentioned above) and Patricia Neal. Toward the end of Neal’s life, Gary Cooper’s daughter Maria forgave her for her part in the affair with Cooper. Neal told her that she had been angry with God for some time. Maria suggested that she visit the Abbey of Regina Laudis, where she began to find healing for her anger. She visited the abbey repeatedly for many years but wasn’t ready to convert until just a few months before her death.

Here’s the complete list of people whose stories are told:

King Charles II of England
Oscar Wilde
Buffalo Bill
Dutch Schultz
Alexis Carrel
Wallace Stevens
John Wayne
Kenneth Clark
John von Neumann
Aubrey Beardsley
Heywood Broun
Patricia Neal
Gary Cooper

You may be surprised at some of the names on that list. Certainly some of their friends, relatives, and contemporaries were surprised by their conversions.

How God chooses to deliver His mercy is not up to us. Thanks be to God that some people manage to find Him after so many years of looking, often in all the wrong places.

I am an Amazon affiliate and receive a small amount if you purchase a book from the link in this review, but you’re welcome to buy the book any way you please.

Book Review: Further Up and Further In

Further Up and Further In, Joseph Pearce. TAN Books, 2018.

Fans of the Chronicles of Narnia will recognize the title of this book as a quotation from The Last Battle. Its subtitle is “Understanding Narnia,” which is an apt title. I’ve read the Chronicles dozens of times (I don’t think that’s an exaggeration) and still learned things from reading this book.

Joseph Pearce, the author, made his name through biographies of English Catholic and Catholic-leaning authors. This gives him a sympathetic understanding of the environment that produced C.S. Lewis and his writing.

Pearce starts with a standard defense of “fairy stories”, a phrase given prominence from its use by Lewis and Tolkien, but not perhaps in common usage, particularly in the US. Whatever we might choose to call them, Pearce explains why reading them is worthwhile, even for adults.

He then turns to the Chronicles proper, devoting one chapter to each of the books, except for The Last Battle, which gets two chapters. He covers the books in order of their internal chronology, based on the claim that Lewis wanted it that way. I’m not so sure this is a good decision (Lewis also said he wanted to revise them to put them into order), but it’s a minor cavil on my part. I can’t think of anything in the present volume that would have to be presented differently if the books were covered in a different order.

A few topics of interest (to me, at least):

Why Lewis (much like Tolkien) denied that his works were allegories, and in what sense we nevertheless correctly call them allegories. The simple answer is that they are not strict allegories, like Lewis’s own Pilgrim’s Regress, in which characters stand for abstract things like justice and purity; but things in the book are meant to parallel things in the real world–Aslan as a Christ-figure being the most obvious example. Pearce points out many of these parallels as they occur.
What the description of Eustace’s parents is supposed to tell us. In short, they’re Fabian Socialists under the influence of George Bernard Shaw. Lewis’s original readers might well have picked up on that, but I never did until I read this book.
Why the portrayal of Calormen and the Calormenes is not racist. Pearce himself was a white supremacist before his conversion (see his autobiography, Race With the Devil), so he knows what a racist looks like. One telling point is that Aravis is Calormene and yet a heroine of the book who ends up marrying the crown prince of Archenland, which would be unacceptable to a racist.

He says on several occasions that he could say more about something but needs to move on; the book would benefit from being longer, and this is my chief criticism of it. At the very least, The Voyage of Dawn Treader could have used another chapter. Too often, Pearce writes to the effect that he must pass on from a point, or omit it altogether. I don’t know if he thought he had a time limit or a page limit, or what else influenced that choice.

But if the worse criticism I can make is that I wish it were longer, you know it’s a pretty good book! I also found the references to Chesterton a little overly frequent (Pearce made his mark with a biography of GKC, and it seems to have left a deep impression on him). But neither of these things should keep you from reading the book.

Truth in blogging: I have an Amazon affiliate account and get a small payment if you buy from a link in these reviews.

Book Review: Real Music

Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church. Anthony Esolen, TAN Books, 2016.

I love hymns. It’s probably a side effect of growing up with the Greatest Hymnal Ever, the Hymnal 1940. When I’m traveling, I often listen to hymns along the way, singing along much of the time.

One of the rudest shocks I encountered on my way into the Catholic Church was the barren wasteland of modern Catholic hymnody (apologies to real barren wastelands everywhere). It didn’t help that the parish hymnal at the time was the execrable Glory & Praise (apologies to everything that is merely execrable). The new “hymns” in it were abysmal (apologies to abysses everywhere) and the old hymns it included had almost universally been wrecked in the name of modernizing them and making them more singable.

The only cure for the bad is to replace it with the good, and Dr. Esolen’s book does a remarkable job of showing why the good hymns are good. He begins with a survey of the Psalms and how they’re constructed. Since the Psalms have been the hymns of the Church from the beginning, this is the right starting point.

From there, he moves into hymns by category (e.g., the Nativity; penitence and supplication)–eleven chapters’ worth, 56 hymns in total. Many of the hymns I already knew, and a few were new to me. But if I ever took a course in poetry, I have long since forgotten it, and his analysis of the way the poems are constructed, drawing in themes from Scripture, using rhyme and meter and word order to highlight ideas, was new to me, and eye-opening.

When necessary, he also shows how the “modernizers” went astray. For example, he looks at the destruction of “For All the Saints” (Glory & Praise, I’m looking at you, but you’re not alone) and shows how the editors made choice after choice that weakens the force of the hymn. Look at “Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine” vs. “Yet all are one within God’s great design,” and try to tell me that the second one is better. As Dr. Esolen puts it: “There’s nothing personal or heartwarming about a design. Builders and plotters have designs; the devil has designs. That wasn’t the point.”

I must confess that I am not quite as much a fan of his analysis of music. Perhaps this is just that he occasionally opts for a hymn tune other than one true tune I learned for that particular text, but I’m not sure. To return to “For All the Saints” as an example, the editors of Glory & Praise were not content with destroying the text. They also made the musical rhythms consistent from verse to verse. Ralph Vaughn Williams made them irregular on purpose, with good reason, and it would have been helpful to point that out.

A discussion of the various standard Church meters (Common Meter, which he generally calls “ballad meter,” Long Meter, etc.) would have been helpful as well. But that’s a minor cavil.

The accompanying CD is not an asset, sad to say. As I mentioned above, I enjoy listening to hymns as I drive, so I put the CD into the player as I was driving to Peoria yesterday. The musicianship is high amateur/low professional level. I have recordings of hymns that do far worse, and while it would be nice to have King’s College Cambridge quality recordings, there’s only one King’s College Cambridge and they were probably busy.

The problem is that the words are incomprehensible, most of the time. When I already knew the hymn, I could tell myself, “Oh, I can understand this.” But when I didn’t know the hymn–even if I knew the words but not the music–I could understand the words only rarely. If I had to pinpoint the problem, I would say that the consonants are mostly missing. I don’t know if that’s the fault of the choir or of the recording. Whatever the cause may be, the point of the CD is to accompany a book exploring the words to the hymns, and it’s a significant issue. (I think they also used inclusivized language in one place in “Come Down O Love Divine,” singing “wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling,” when it should be “His” dwelling. But maybe I just misunderstood the words. The book gets it right.)

But don’t let the CD problem discourage you from buying the book. You can search YouTube for the hymns if you want, though be warned that many hymn recordings of YouTube are also unintelligible. The Church should be singing to the real glory and praise of God, and this book helps point the way.