In praise of … inconsistency

This piece picks up on the theme of my earlier post, ‘Of light and shadow’.

"Who wants to be consistent?”, asks Oscar Wilde. “The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I." Nor I. 

Those who allow themselves to be seduced by a procrustean desire to explain away inconvenient truths, to resolve every vital conflict in a spurious “higher unity”, or to render every paradox a platitude - the monomaniac, the reductionist, the system builder - can only ever realize a distorted and diminished view of the world, and however brilliant, elegant or persuasive their own peculiar species of blindness and folly, they can never wholly escape the taint of hubris, shallowness and self-delusion. This is why all truly great thinkers and artists are inconsistent. They are complex beings, within whom powerful opposing forces - good and evil, passion and reason, romantic and classic - are constantly striving for, but never quite attaining, supremacy. And they know that the price of consistency is intellectual dishonesty.

“All true opinions are living”, Ruskin tells us, “and show their life by being capable of nourishment, therefore of change.” But those obsessed with consistency - whether in thought or art or life - always assume a single unchanging truth, valid for all men at all times, and to deviate from which must be fatal. Isaiah Berlin describes this mindset, and its consequences, with admirable clarity:

The notion that there must exist final objective answers to normative questions, truths that can be demonstrated or directly intuited, that it is in principle possible to discover a harmonious pattern in which all values are reconciled, and that it is towards this unique goal that we must make; that we can uncover some single central principle that shapes this vision, a principle which, once found, will govern our lives – this ancient and almost universal belief, on which so much traditional thought and action and philosophical doctrine rests, seems to me invalid, and at times to have led (and still to lead) to absurdities in theory and barbarous consequences in practice.

But the inconsistency I speak of here shouldn’t be confused with mere incoherence or woolly-mindedness. Ideas and values should always be explored fully and rigorously, and pursued - in theory, at least - to their logical conclusions, for it is only in this way that they can reveal to us the aporia - the moral, intellectual or artistic impasse - that defines and limits their peculiar relation to the real world, and which is the seal of their authenticity. “I never met with a question yet, of any importance“, Ruskin declares, “which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer … For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself  at least three times”. 

Nor should it be confused with mere relativism, or taken to imply any kind of panegyric to the idea of progress.  There are shallow and superficial ideas as well as profound ones, and no truly great ideas are ever wholly superseded: the insightful exercise of what Burke called the “moral imagination”, or what Coleridge termed the “suspension of disbelief”, is all that we require to retrieve them from obscurity, as from Ariosto’s valley of lost things, and restore them to their former vigour and beauty.

Something of myself

Since the view of the world put forward in Plus ultra will be a highly personal one, it is perhaps appropriate at this juncture to say something of myself.

Picture to yourself the scene. It is a sultry midsummer evening in one of the Home Counties. A small party of guests has just adjourned to enjoy a few after-dinner drinks in a well-appointed drawing room in an old country house. There are gasps of affected admiration as the hostess is complimented on her skill and taste in furnishing the room in a sympathetic period style. This topic is soon exhausted, and the initial buzz of interest begins to die down. At this point, one of the guests - acting with a laudable resourcefulness and presence of mind to head-off an anticipated hiatus in the flagging conversation - volunteers what he supposes to be an innocuous observation on an uncontroversial subject. But just as he pauses with a not unbecoming modesty to receive the gratitude and compliments which are surely his due for so timely an intervention, there is the ominous sound of someone clearing his throat. Suddenly, everybody’s attention is directed towards a rather crumpled and dishevelled-looking figure, slouched indecorously in a corner, and evidently already somewhat the worse for wear with drink, of which he had been partaking liberally at table. Previously taciturn almost to the point of truculence, this preposterous individual now erupts with an impetuous volubility. Heedless alike of the embarrassment of his hostess or the consternation of his interlocutor, he proceeds with a self-assurance bordering on presumption ungraciously to question assumptions, peremptorily to demand explanations, and insidiously to divert the stream of conversation into uncongenial and recondite courses …

Max Stirner and the "almighty ego"

It is a strange paradox that the concept of the individual should turn out to be a social artefact, when for centuries the opposite was held to be incontrovertibly true. Whether as a nightmarish vision of a bestial state of nature, or a delightful myth of a golden age, the natural state of mankind was universally represented as anarchic and atomistic; and, depending on whether original human nature was perceived as essentially good or bad, the transition to civil society was explained either as an act of deliverance by divine providence or a heroic will, or as an unfortunate descent from a primitive rationality and ingenuity into a mode of life corrupted by luxury, blinded by superstition, and enthralled by tyranny. The individualism of the social contract theorists of the early modern and Enlightenment periods was accentuated by Romanticism, with its celebration of the cults of the hero and the genius, and it is towards the high-water mark of this movement that we find Stirner, with his bizarre and nihilistic philosophy of the ego.

Stirner's peculiar vision of "ownness", or self-mastery, involves an absolute autonomy, not only from the external constraints of law, morality and custom, but also from those internal forces - ideas, passions, or appetites - which might otherwise "possess" the ego, and turn it into "a tool of ... [their] realisation". "I am my own", he says, "when I am master of myself, instead of being mastered ... by anything else". Stirner claims his philosophy reflects our true and original human nature. He urges us to "shake ... off" the "thousands of years of civilization [that] have obscured to you what you are", and to "recognise yourselves again ... recognise what you really are". So, who are we, and what aspects of our true and original nature does Stirner draw upon to explain our world, both as it is and as it should be?

His belief that "ownness" is consonant with our true and original nature appears to be based on little more than the false premise of a primitive individualism, appropriated more or less uncritically from the social contract theorists. (This is despite his claim elsewhere that it is society, and not the ego, which represents "the state of nature" - a claim which appears to owe more to a desire for his twin "dialectics" of historical and individual development to tie in felicitously than anything else, and which he never attempts to reconcile with his position on human nature.)

His argument from human nature is supplemented by a highly schematic account of human history. This purports to demonstrate that it is the destiny of the ego to throw off the yoke of dependency and self-delusion, and embrace "ownness"; but the absence of any kind of objective analysis, its reliance on anecdotal evidence, its fixation on a pseudo-scientific "dialectical" method, and its consequent subdivision into factitious epochs (i.e. "Negroid", "Mongoloid", and "Caucasian") corresponding to the analogous phases of individual development (i.e. childhood, youth, adulthood), make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that it assumed what it was supposed to prove all along.

In a word, Stirner claims that his philosophy is grounded in human nature and history, but for all his ostentatious display of sham and superficial scholarship, he makes no serious attempt to investigate either. So where, if not in human nature or human history, should we look for the roots of Stirner's philosophy? Perhaps we should examine Stirner's own motives. Stirner's is a philosophy of the ego, recognising no separate realm of truth or morality to contrast with the private sphere of the ego, so his personal motivation would apear to be a good place to look for insights into his philosophy. Why, then, if not motivated by "love to men", love of truth, or indeed any other disinterested motive, would he condescend to share his thoughts with us? "I write", he tells us, "because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world"; "I sing", he decalres, "because - I am a singer. But I use you for it because I - need ears". Something does not quite add up here. Neither statement offers a very compelling, or even a plausible, motive for a self-sufficient ego, whose avowed aim is "ownness" or self-mastery, and for whom "all things are nothing". If we follow Jane Austen and define pride as relating "more to our opinion of ourselves", and vanity as pertaining "to what we would have others think of us”, then vanity would appear to offer the better description of Stirner's motivation here. For all his hubristic rhetoric about banishing illusions, Stirner appears to be essentially parasitical upon those towards whom he affects indifference. His nihilism wouldn't even appear to have the merit of intellectual honesty to recommend it.

But Stirner's apparent insincerity isn't the biggest problem here. Mightn't he who would strive for "self-mastery", without first having attained to some reasonable degree of self-knowledge, risk falling into the trap of self-deception? - isn't this the very fault with which Stirner reproaches his benighted contemporaries? His account of self-mastery, or "ownness", is sketchy in the extreme. It would appear to be a state of absolute autonomy, where the "almighty ego" - supposedly freed from all trammelling constraints, internal and external - can realise itself as pure will and instinct. The only limit Stirner would impose on the ego is that it should not allow itself to fall into what he describes as a "one-sided ... narrow egoism", a state of monomania or "possessedness", where one idea or passion threatens to turn it into a "tool of its realisation". It is perhaps significant that his favourite example of such a controlling and consuming passion was "avariciousness", hardly a vice to which the profligate Stirner would be likely to succumb. Apart from this sole admonitory injunction, he is content to dismiss the problem of evil and allow us to follow our instincts: after all, does not "the beast, which does follow only its impulse (as it were, its advice) ... [nevertheless take] ... very correct steps"? But while the advice to avoid obssessiveness and monomania is fine in so far as it goes, it is hardly adequate to deal with the dangers posed by the many complex emotional states - anger, hatred, sadism, envy, pride and vanity, to name but a few - to which a human being is subject, and "the beast" is not. Instinct alone is not enough to ensure that we take "correct steps".

Not content with leaving us a broken compass, Stirner would also have us use a woefully incomplete map. His wholesale and arbitrary dismissal of every part of the great spectrum of human emotion which corresponds to any kind of altruistic or disinterested sentiment leaves us with vast tracts of unelucidated terra incognita, of which Stirner, following the best traditions of medieval cartography, has nothing better to say than "there be illusions". Stirner's cavalier and Procrustean treatment of the human psyche blinded him to the fact that man is naturally a social animal, and that the concept of the individual - his "almighty ego" -is just as much a social artefact as the laws, the morals, the customs, and the rest of the institutions of civil society he would have us destroy.

Anthropology and psychology have long ago debunked the myth of primitive individualism. Man has always existed as a social animal, and the spectrum of human emotion, comprehended as a whole, reflects this fact very clearly. It is not difficult to see that the individual, as an entity regarded as enjoying certain basic rights, and from which the state and other social institutions ultimately derive their authority, is a social artefact, and one of fairly recent manufacture. But it is far harder to understand how the same could be true of our very existence as independent self-conscious entities, capable of rational thought. And yet it is true nonetheless. Oscar Wilde was wiser than he knew when he said that "language ... is the parent, and not the child, of thought". And, of course, language is indubitably a social artefact. Wittgenstein famously demonstrated the impossibility of a so-called "private language" in his Philosophical Investigations. The only medium through which we can articulate rational thought is a public language, one which evolved through interaction with our social and physical environments, and which is potentially intelligible to others. Without this, individuality as we understand it is quite literally inconceivable.

This is not to say that we should place a lower value on individuality, only that we should attempt to understand it for what it is, rather than pretend to ourselves that it is something else. There's nothing wrong with following a path of self-realisation or self-fulfilment, as long as one makes a detour via self-knowledge on the way. At the risk of stating the obvious, Stirner is not a guide I would choose.

Hecate

The Greek religion is one of those very few subjects that seem to become stranger and more fascinating the deeper one delves. The course of its convoluted development, from its earliest origins in the Minoan-Mycenaen period to its final eclipse by Christianity in late antiquity, is not always easy to follow. The biographies of gods can sometimes be complex affairs: part exogenous borrowing, perhaps in multiple stages and from different sources, and part derivation from or development of an existing attribute of an indigenous deity. Gods may be transformed, promoted or demoted within the pantheon, or even disappear without trace (like the unfortunate Drimios, son of Zeus, who is recorded only in the Minoan script). The history of Hecate and her cult is more complicated than most.

In the words of Lewis Richard Farnell, "A great obscurity hangs about the name, the origin, and the character of this goddess". And what we do know is often derived from conflicting sources. We know that Hecate is a comparative latecomer to the Greek pantheon. She is not mentioned at all by Homer. Her first appearance in literature is in Hesiod, where she is described as honoured by Zeus above all other deities, having dominion over earth, sea and sky, and being capable of conferring prosperity and success on the enterprises of mortal men. No mention is made of her later associations with the realm of the dead, sorcery or cross-roads (although Farnell believes that Hesiod may have deliberately suppressed these darker traits in the interests of promoting the wider adoption of her cult). Hesiod traces her origins through her father, Perses, back to the Titans.

There is, however, another conflicting myth of the origin of Hecate (there are actually several others, but I find this one by far the most interesting). In it she is born a mortal, and acquires her divine status and name only after being miraculously restored to life by the goddess Artemis. The manner of her death - suicide by hanging - is significant. For according to Frazer, Artemis herself was known as the "hanged one", on account of her being hanged in effigy once a year, and he suggests that this myth may have released the senior goddess from that degrading ritual, at least at the great centre of her cult in Ephesus. The motive for her suicide is also revealing. Artemis, provoked by some unspecified insult, is said to have transformed the unfortunate woman into a dog, an animal regarded by the Greeks as unclean; such was her shame that, upon regaining human form, she took her own life. Hereafter the dog was held to be sacred to Hecate, but to her alone, retaining its generally profane and uncanny associations elsewhere.

This version of the origin of Hecate served to place her firmly in subordination to Artemis, some of whose attributes (such as her association with the moon and wild nature) she shared, and to whom she was therefore perceived as a potential rival. This belated eclaircissement of the relationship of the two goddesses, with its intimations of some of the hitherto repressed, darker attributes of Hecate, led Farnell to believe that her cult originated outside Greece - most probably in the north or Asia Minor, because of its early roots in Thessaly (with its long association with witchcraft and sorcery).

There is another tradition where Hecate helps Demeter search for the abducted Persephone. That Hecate appeared to play no part in the celebration of Demeter's mysteries at Eleusis suggests that this myth is of late origin; it is nevertheless important because it serves to link her both with the earth (Demeter was goddess of corn and fertility) and the infernal regions (because of her assistance in finding Persephone in the underworld), in addition to her existing lunar associations, thus completing her famous triple aspect of maiden (lunar), mother (earthly) and crone (infernal).

This threefold dominion over the lunar, earthly and infernal realms was to assume a much greater importance in later mythology and iconography, but it cannot explain the origin of the peculiar triple form of Hecate's representations in sculpture from the fifth century onwards. After all, many other deities possessed multiple aspects, so why was it that only Hecate should be represented in this way? Farnell believed the answer lies in her primitive role as guardian of the cross-roads (typically the meeting place of three roads in the ancient world). From her tutelage of the meeting of roads, it was but an easy step to her function as facilitator of movement between worlds, particularly between earth and the underworld. Like Hades, Hecate's iconography often depicts her with a key; but whereas the key of Hades could only lock, Hecate's key could also unlock. And this was to be the unique attribute that would firmly establish her position among the gods. There was a vacuum in the Greek pantheon and Hecate expanded to fill it.

The picture painted so far, based narrowly on the account of a few Greek scholars, suggests an essentially endogenous development of the cult of Hecate up to the end of the classical period, by which time she was well-established within the Greek pantheon, and it might therefore be supposed that any later accretions would be marginal. But is this picture a reasonable one? What of exogenous influences between Hecate's introduction into Thessaly and her attaining more or less established form towards the end of the classical period? There is certainly some evidence of such influence. For instance, there is an episode in the mythology of Ishtar of Babylon where she descends into the underworld to rescue her lover, Tammuz. It is certainly tempting to think of the descent of Ishtar as the inspiration for Hecate's role in the search for Persephone, particularly in view of the fact that there seems to be no other obvious source for this vital development in the aggrandisement of the Greek goddess. And yet, in other respects, the links between Ishtar - goddess of fertility, love, sex and war - and Hecate are tenuous to say the least. True, both are to some degree associated with the moon and fertility. But within the Greek pantheon the lunar associations of Selene and Artemis are far stronger than those of Hecate, and Demeter is clearly pre-eminent in the area of fertility, so they would appear to have a greater claim to be linked with Ishtar, even if the predominant associations of that deity with love and sex did not identify her most closely of all with Aphrodite. So it would appear that the idea of a link with Ishtar must remain problematic at best.

Other evidence of exogenous influence is more convincing, if less interesting. In his The White Goddess, Robert Graves cites Aristophanes, writing towards the end of the classical period, as authority for the Empusae and Lamiae being regarded as "emissaries of the Triple Goddess Hecate". He continues: "The Lamiae, beautiful women who used to seduce, enervate and suck the blood of travellers, had been the orgiastic priestesses of the Libyan Sea-goddess Lamia; and the Empusae, demons with one leg of brass and one ass's leg were relics of the Set cult - the Lilim, or Children of Lillith, the devotees of the Hebrew Owl-goddess, who was Adam's first wife, were ass-haunched."

The conquests of Alexander made the Greeks of the Hellenistic period receptive as never before to Asiatic and Egyptian influences, a tendency continued by the still more deliberate syncretism of the Roman era. But borrowings were mainly peripheral, had little impact on the primary characteristics of the more or less mature Greek cults, and could just as easily occur in the other direction. It was probably in Ptolemaic Alexandria where Hecate acquired her associations with the Egyptian goddesses Heket and Isis. The frog-headed Heket (or Heqet), a deity chiefly connected with child-birth (an area also associated with Hecate for a number of reasons), was probably linked with Hecate only because of the similarity of their names; speculation that she may have been the original source for the Greek goddess is otherwise without foundation. Isis was also sometimes connected with Hecate, principally because of her reputation as "greatest in magic among the gods" (from the Metternich Stele, quoted by Mueller), but she remains far more closely associated with Ishtar-Aphrodite.

It remains only to discuss the special significance of Hecate for the Chaldean Oracles and the theurgic magic of late Neoplatonism. The Oracles - purportedly the work of Julian, an inspired Syrian, who served in the Roman army at the time of Marcus Aurelius - survive only in fragments. But their influence on philosophical paganism in late antiquity, particularly the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (third/fourth century) and Proclus (fifth century), was comparable with that of the Gnostics. The Oracles represented the universe as the creation of a lower demiurgic god, where the soul is contaminated by matter and enmeshed by fate. Whereas earlier Neoplatonists had believed that philosophical contemplation alone could deliver the soul from this unfortunate condition, the hierarchy of being described in the Oracles was rigidly separated into absolutely distinct spheres, and movement between them was impossible without the aid of theurgic magic. Hecate was the obvious deity to invoke in order to facilitate movement between these spheres. Not only was she goddess of sorcery, she was also mistress of the infernal, mundane and lunar realms, guardian of boundaries and liminal points, and holder of the great key to unlock the formidable barriers between the intelligible and sensible worlds. But according to the Oracles, she was far greater than even these, her traditional attributes, could signify: she was "born of the Father" (the First God, not the Demiurge), and she was "fount of founts, a womb containing all things", from whom the transcendent World Soul was derived. She had apparently metamorphosed into a great "Mother Goddess", a kind of archetypal female principle, usurping the position more traditionally occupied by Ishtar-Aphrodite-Isis. Van den Berg has argued that Proclus may even have gone so far as to identify her with Rhea, the mother of the gods herself.

The Platonic Academy and paganism were finally suppressed by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. Although there is no reason to believe that the exalted status of Hecate in the Oracles was ever anything more than an esoteric doctrine with a small following, a cult within a cult, it nevertheless retains a special interest on account of its influence on the Western esoteric tradition, where she continues to occupy a prominent place.

Of light and shadow

William Blake never spoke more truly than when he said, "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence." I have a print of his 'The Good and Evil Angels' hanging on my wall to remind me of this profound and inescapable truth. Whether we like it or not, we are all of us creatures of both darkness and light. It is folly and hubris to attempt to deny or repress the darker side of our nature. Without our shadow, without the chiaroscuro that reveals the planes and the masses of our personality, how could we know our true selves? Without knowledge of darkness, how could we choose the light? I do not mean "choose" in the radical and exclusive sense which one would choose between Manichean antinomies; I mean, rather, the creative act of self-definition, whereby we realise the vision of human freedom, and its corollary, the ideal of the dignity of man, bequethed to us by the Humanists of the Renaissance.

"O highest and most marvellous felicity of man!", declared Pico della Mirandola, "To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills ... Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit." But in order that it may bear this fruit, the seed needs both the darkness of the earth and the light of the sun. The power to act without the freedom to choose is blind. Freedom of choice without the power to act is an impotent wish. The light must learn from the dark, and the dark from the light. "Our antagonist is our helper", Burke tells us, "This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial." Without this inner conflict, where we are both our own antagonist and object, we do indeed risk becoming "superficial", by which I mean either insipid or gross; but, like most worthwhile human endeavours, this conflict carries risks of its own, and certainly cannot always be relied on to be "amicable".

It would be a mistake to regard darkness - or evil, if you prefer - as a passive or inert quality, from which one can borrow indiscriminately and with impunity. We should never forget that darkness is a living entity, with a dynamic of its own. And there is always a price to pay for the wisdom that we would seek, and particularly for the strength that we would draw, from the darker side of our personalities. Just as the light learns from the dark, so the dark learns from the light: it becomes subtle; it learns dissimulation and, above all, it learns patience; but this will never alter its fundamental nature. We should take care lest the strength of will we borrow to control ourselves and others be turned towards destruction, even our self-destruction, because this is the precipice to which the dynamic of darkness will inevitably draw us. And how does one fight will with will? If that from which we have been accustomed to draw our strength suddenly turns against us, where then are we to turn? True; every time we pull ourselves back from this precipice, we become stronger and wiser. But so, too, does our adversary. Like the "implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention" in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it remains ever watchful for the next opportunity to draw us over the edge. And I must be ready for the day when a dark volcanic island will emerge from the bright serene sea of my space, silence and solitude, and shatter once more the peace of my vita contemplativa.

A question of principle

I have always found the idea that the universe is ruled by an omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent deity incomprehensible, and I shall never cease to marvel at the obduracy (and sometimes the ingenuity) of those who persist in this belief. But it is not the Christian idea of God that defines my attitude towards the Church (of whatever denomination); it is the Christian idea of man (though one idea might be said to follow from the other). The Christian “virtues” of humility, obediance and self-mortification (whether this is undertaken for its own sake, or for that of a suffering world) have always repelled me. I much prefer the Greek and Renaissance ideal that the affirmation of our powers and sensibilities should be the highest goal of man. And whilst it’s only fair to acknowledge that it has come a long way from its origins in an hysterical slave cult – partially rehabilitating and assimilating the classical heritage, and making significant cultural contributions of its own in the Medieval period and beyond - Christianity will never be entirely free from the taint of the nihilism and ressentiment of its early protagonists; and, unless I am very much mistaken, these tendencies are making something of a revival in the Church of England today.

Coleridge once looked upon the clergy of the Church of England as the cornerstone of what he called the “clerisy” – namely, the body of learned and upright men whose great charge it was to cultivate intellectual and moral excellence in our national life. It is difficult to see how this ideal could have been more cruelly mocked than by the state of today’s Anglican Church, as it drifts listlessly towards disestablishment, irrelevancy and oblivion.


It used to be taken for granted (and not just in M.R. James stories) that the parson would be an educated man, learned in theology and ecclesiology, and perhaps also a keen local historian and antiquarian. Nowadays a learned clergyman is very much the exception to the rule of mediocrity. But it isn’t just mediocrity I complain of here; it is a regrettable change of attitude of many in the Church towards its historic and cultural heritage. This changed attitude is hard to define succintly, but if I had to sum it up in a phrase I would call it the revenge of the spirit of self-mortification on the pursuit of excellence. Of course, this is not the self-mortification of the flesh practiced by the primitive Christians – its modern day practitioners appear sleek and well-fed enough; nor is it of the dour and mirthless Puritan variety – a certain kind of mindless and “happy clappy” jollity is looked upon very favourably, I understand (and must come as a welcome relief from the mournful strains of ‘Kumbaya’, I imagine). It is, rather, what might best be described as a self-mortification of the spirit, where this word sheds its fuzzy connotations of amorphous and effusive sentimentality and assumes a narrower, more specialised meaning denoting the highest expressions of our powers and sensibilities.

This new wisdom manifests itself in diverse ways. It can be openly iconoclastic (in what T.S. Eliot called “the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic” revisionism of the New English Bible, for example), but mostly it is content to assert its malign influence in more subtle and insidious ways. These include the unspoken rule that we shouldn’t be permitted to enjoy any genuinely sublime or beautiful cultural artefact without the admixture of a becoming sense of guilt or irony. “Guilt” here encompasses not only the more familiar ritual of futile (not to mention hypocritical and nauseating) handwringing about “our brothers and sisters starving while we, the privileged, enjoy this extravagant, but essentially frivolous, experience, etc.” (I’ve never been able to see the link between my enjoying a fan vault or a Tallis motet a little less and the alleviation of Third World poverty), but also the more sinister sentiment that it is somehow wrong to place the highest value on something from which many are wholly or partly excluded, not from want of opportunity, but by want of capacity to enjoy it. Irony, too, has its part to play in the war on cultural elitism. Not only does the juxtaposition of some tawdry contemporary “art” with the finest work of Medieval master masons detract from our enjoyment of the latter, but it also carries the subversive message, intended for the immature and the impressionable, that the two works are actually on a par (“this is how we expressed our faith in the thirteenth century, and this is how we express it today”).


My antiquarian interests mean that encounters with these kinds of negative attitudes are frequent and unavoidable. As a lover of Gothic architecture, I like to visit old churches. While I find that non-religious visitors are still welcomed in some parish churches, in others I have encountered reactions which range from blank incomprehension through to open hostility. Of course, this is less true in cathedrals or those churches geared up for large numbers of tourists. But even there I sometimes feel as though I’m venturing into enemy territory and, as they say in John Le Carre novels, that “Moscow rules apply”. An incident that occurred during a visit to a cathedral somewhere in England will, I hope, help illustrate what I mean.

My visit was drawing to a close, and I was starting to think about lunch, when I noticed an interesting Elizabethan burial monument, one that didn’t appear to be described in Esdaile’s English Church Monuments, in the south aisle of the nave. The only problem was it was obscured behind some hideous chrome and plastic exhibition boards, to which were affixed posters about AIDS or famine in Africa, and some very indifferent artwork from the local comprehensive which would have struggled to make it into the "under fives" category on 'Vision-On'. Anyway, I moved some stacked chairs which were blocking off the narrowish gap between the display boards and the wall, and proceeded to make my way carefully towards the tomb. I was just about to bend down to make my inspection, an operation which would have involved giving the display boards the gentlest nudge with my posterior, when I heard a noise like snort and a shrill stentorian voice erupted from somewhere behind me. “Excuse me,” bellowed the voice, which might have issued from a Wodehouse aunt, “what do you think you are doing?” Composing myself, I turned around to be confronted by a pugnacious-looking obese woman of mature years. Smiling, as I thought, in a friendly and disarming manner, I explained that I was merely trying to inspect the tomb. Looking at me incredulously, as if the proffered explanation could only have been an absurd ruse designed to conceal some baser purpose, she stated unapologetically that it wasn’t possible to move the display boards for health and safety reasons. This seemed odd to me at the time (- when “health and safety” was not yet a ready-made excuse not to do almost anything -) because the display boards were firmly anchored in a bulbous and sturdy base, and there was quite clearly no danger of their toppling over. When I asked if I might at least read the inscription, she retorted triumphantly that there was a translation on a plaque which could be read without disturbing the display boards. To this I objected that none of the “translations” on the other plaques bore much resemblance to the original inscriptions, and were evidently intended only to satisfy the casual curiosity of the average tourist. There was a brief hiatus in our exchange, and for a moment I thought I might have gained my point. But my adversary was not to be so easily cheated of her victory. Her complexion, already somewhat florid, was now distinctly purplish. She puffed herself up like a particularly obnoxious species of poisonous reptile, poised to deliver a venomous strike: “If you don’t come away immediately“, she hissed, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave”. It was a fight or flight moment, and I’m ashamed to say that, in the best traditions of Bertie Wooster, I funked it, repairing to the pub round the corner to lick my wounds. When I returned an hour or two later, resolved upon a second assault on the tomb, it was with dismay that I discovered that the bloated Harpy was still at her station in the gift shop, a vantage point from which she enjoyed a clear view of the display boards in front of the tomb. She glared at me menacingly. The element of surprise lost, I admitted defeat. The tomb remained unvisited.


It was only when I was on the train home, reflecting on my ignominious retreat from the gift shop ogress, and racking my brains for an esprit de l’escalier which might have served as an effective Parthian shot, that it dawned on me that it wasn’t my supposed breach of health and safety rules that had so enraged her, it was the implied contempt of the aesthete for her ugly display boards and the flabby humanitarian values they proclaimed. In a flash I saw that it was my blindness to the true source and virulence of her hostility which had left me vulnerable to her attack.


Sun Tzu counsels us to “know thy enemy” and reminds us that “never will those who wage war tire of deception”: wise words indeed. Now, following in the path of the great warrior, I prefer to win my victories without giving battle. Of course, it is not always possible to elude bossy and patronising busybodies, who seem to possess that peculiar instinct of the self-righteous for sniffing out the self-indulgent; but I find that guile and dissimulation, rather than frankness and rational argument, are the most effective tactics where a skirmish is unavoidable.


It has sometimes been suggested that showing greater courtesy and respect for the rules and values of my hosts might yield more favourable results than my wonted cunning and deceit. And, I readily concede, this approach is all very well when one is dealing with a friendly and sympathetic counterpart (and I still come across them from time to time). But the wily adversary – the one who divines my ulterior motive before I speak, and perceives my insincerity when I do – will always scorn payment in such false coin: my polite request will be met with an equally polite refusal. If personal charm is not to be found among my meagre store of gifts, am I really so very much to blame for preferring the example of Machiavel to that of Castiglione? And if I were to practise his false virtues of humility, obedience and self-mortification, would I not, by embracing the detested principles of my enemy, stand convicted of the basest hypocrisy?