George Mackay Brown (1921-1996)

George Mackay Brown died twenty years ago today.

Although this blog focuses mainly on Catholic social teaching, it's worth considering precisely how the arts -and in this case poetry- contribute to our life as social beings. At the funeral Mass, Archbishop Conti said the following:

I remember George describing the earth under the farmer's plough as being scourged -or was it the back of Christ he say being ploughed?...If my memory falters, it is because of George's characteristic interchanging of images, which revealed not only the twin sources of his deepest inspiration, namely his native Orkney and his adopted Catholicism, but also his easy integration of what for so many remain separate orders of life and faith. This is why his death at this season seems so right, for this is the season when the life of faith and the life of nature so marvellously correspond; when he who was hung up on the bare wood, and moistened it with his blood, made it to flower as the instrument of salvation; when He who ws buried in the dark earth, and shared it with its apparent sleep, burst forth from it revealing the new life of grace.

[From: Ron Ferguson's, George Mackay Brown: the Wound and the Gift, p.365]

Brown's work and Archbishop Conti's assessment of it above suggest two immediate thoughts for me. First, there is the link with Roger Scruton's use of the concept of the 'Lebenswelt' (roughly, the environment for human beings, constructed by our imaginative engagement with the world) and the need to repair and enrich it, in part through the use of literature and art. (For an article on this by Scruton, see here. For previous discussions of Scruton on this blog, see here.)

Secondly, and continuing with this first thought, Catholicism in Scotland can often be seen to be 'foreign' or 'other'. (The nineteenth century Protestant jibe of 'the Italian mission to the Irish' is relevant here as are more recent secularist attacks on the acceptability of Catholic understandings within a modern Scotland.) Brown reimagined Orkney as a Catholic landscape. He also reimagined Catholic Orkney as a central landscape rather than one marginal to Scottish and wider human concerns. Despite all the differences between them, Brown's enterprise here strikes me as at least analogous to Tolkien's construction of a 'legendarium'. Bradley Birzer's book, J R R Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth deals with this aspect in considerable detail:

[Birzer] also explores the social and political views that motivated the Oxford don, ultimately situating Tolkien within the Christian humanist tradition represented by Thomas More and T. S. Eliot, Dante and C. S. Lewis. Birzer argues that through the genre of myth Tolkien created a world that is essentially truer than the one we think we see around us every day, a world that transcends the colorless disenchantment of our postmodern age.

[From review here.]

A small selection of Brown's poems, read by him, can be found here.

[Details of image: here.]

Laudato Si', the environment and natural law

I won't pretend to have digested (or even fully read) Pope Francis' Encyclical Laudato Si' yet. The full text is available here. As way of a stop gap (I'm sure we'll return to it again and again over the coming months!) here is some relevant material:

1) The Environment was one of the subjects tackled on our course in first term of 2015/16. The relevant blogposts on that session are here (which contains some helpful links to relevant supporting material) and here. The relevant handout from that session (containing among other things) extracts from previous teaching about the environment) can be found here (scroll down to find week 9).

2) The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church deals with the environment in chapter 10: here.

My initial reaction is that this Encyclical is an extremely welcome addition to existing teaching in this area. It has always struck me as highly odd that, in a secularised culture which is highly responsive (at least in theory) to talk about the value and care of nature, this existing concern is almost completely divorced from valuing and caring about human nature: the very commodification of nature which is (rightly) condemned in environmentalism is instead celebrated in some of the 'neuralgic' issues of personal morality where the licence to create and recreate ourselves ignoring or even deliberately at odds with the rhythms of (human) nature is demanded as a right. Whether you emphasise the Hellenistic philosophical ideas of a right order in the kosmos and in the human being, or the scriptural account of a divine wisdom structuring all creation, this sort of divorce between human nature and nature tout court is profoundly foreign to Catholicism and, moreover, strikes me as an obvious tension in secularised thought which can be noted and engaged with. The Encyclical seems (at first sight admittedly) to make important progress here in articulating that Catholic sense of the naturalness of morality in the natural law.

My predecessor Benedict XVI likewise proposed “eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correcting models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment”. He observed that the world cannot be analyzed by isolating only one of its aspects, since “the book of nature is one and indivisible”, and includes the environment, life, sexuality, the family, social relations, and so forth. It follows that “the deterioration of nature is closely connected to the culture which shapes human coexistence”. Pope Benedict asked us to recognize that the natural environment has been gravely damaged by our irresponsible behaviour. The social environment has also suffered damage. Both are ultimately due to the same evil: the notion that there are no indisputable truths to guide our lives, and hence human freedom is limitless. We have forgotten that “man is not only a freedom which he creates for himself. Man does not create himself. He is spirit and will, but also nature”. With paternal concern, Benedict urged us to realize that creation is harmed “where we ourselves have the final word, where everything is simply our property and we use it for ourselves alone. The misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognize any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves”.

[Laudato Si', section 6: here.]