Frederick Kinsman On Agnosticism

I found Frederick Kinsman's Reveries of a Hermit enormously stimulating, and as I said the other day, its title is misleading. His main argument is that the varieties of Protestantism are all actually versions of agnosticism:

The aim of these lectures is to compare and relate three points of view from which the Christian religion is regarded. The first looks on it as something based on unreliable legends, and therefore negligible, except as myth expressive of picturesque fantasies. The second professes to hold its essentials but is ever ready to relegate component parts into the category of non-essentials, is eclectic; and the successive stages of its history are chracterized by rejections rather than by retentions. The third regards it as the one great fact in human history, to be retained intact and given dominant place in human life. Common names for these points of view are, the Agnostic, the Protestant, and the Catholic.

. . . One main purpose of the investigation here undertaken is to point that the three points of view are reducible to two. In practical consequences as well as in many presuppositions, Protestant view-points tend to become identical with Agnostic. There is truth in the broad generalization that there are two attitudes of mind in regard to religion, the Catholic and the non-Catholic, if this be modified by the recognition that many individual non-Catholics start with the Catholic point of view, and make many of its presuppositions, though not making full deductions from these. Hilaire Belloc has somewhere said, "We have in Europe today, among those who make mind, two moulds of intelligence, one a philolsophy, the other a mood. The first, the philosophy, is Catholic doctrine; the second, the mood, is Modern Thought, and covers all that is opposed to the faith." (pp 10-11)

He breaks Protestantism down into three parts, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism, and from a career spent in part as a professor of Church history, he has remarkable insights to offer on all three. What he says on Anglicanism bears directly, I think, on reasons for the failure of Anglicanorum coetibus, which I'll cover tmorrow, in one or possibly more posts.

Although he was appointed professor of Church history at Catholic University following his conversion, I don't know at this point if this was just some type of honorary position, or if he ever taught there. He was clearly of independent means and didn't need the money, while he spent most of his time after resigning as bishop in seclusion in Maine, so I simply don't know if he would have wished to commute to Washington to teach there.

As far as I'm aware, there was no course available to me as either an undergraduate or graduate student that would have covered Church history as Kinsman saw it. I do assume that any course he taught at CU would probably have been quite similar to the material in Reveries of a Hermit.

The Anglican Racket

I've had to defer my next post on Frederick Kinsman at least until tomorrow, as I received a lot of material for a post on my old blog on developments at Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio.

It seems to me that phenomena like the racket Fr Christopher Phillips was able to run for almost three decades at Our Lady of the Atonement, in which he indulged himself and selected underbosses at the expense of people who were allowed to fancy they were getting authentic Catholicism, is an extension of Kinsman's take on Anglicanism -- especially for high-church types, there has always been a key element of fantasy.

I'll have more to say about this, but it's definitely a factor in the failure of Anglicanorum coetibus.

Frederick Kinsman

A visitor to my old blog brought a fascinating figure in Anglican and Catholic history to my attention, Frederick Kinsman, and he's very kindly sent me copies of Kinsman's books as he's located them. According to Wikipedia,

Frederick Joseph Kinsman (September 27, 1868, Warren, Ohio - June 18, 1944, Lewiston, Maine) was an American Roman Catholic church historian who had formerly been a bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church. From 1908 to 1919 he was Episcopal Bishop of Delaware.

However,

On May 14, 1919, Kinsman announced his intention to resign as Episcopal Bishop of Delaware the following October. He subsequently became a Roman Catholic. He was appointed professor of modern church history at The Catholic University of America.

The photo above is apparently his formal portrait as Episcopal Bishop of Delaware. I haven't been able to find any other photos of him, though they must certainly exist. If anyone can locate any others, I'd greatly appreciate learnimg of them. He wrote an apologia for his conversion to Catholicism in Salve Mater, published in 1920, and several other important books, including Americanism and Catholicism (1924), The Failure of Anglicanism (1929), and Reveries of a Hermit (1936).

The visitor recently sent me a copy of Reveries of a Hermit. The title is at least in one sense misleading. Following his resignation as Bishop of Delaware, he appears to have lived largely in seclusion at a rural estate in Maine, which could make him a hermit -- the question of whether he was also a canonical hermit in the Catholic Church remains open. But the book is anything but reveries, which I take to mean desultory and detached daydreams. Instead, it's tightly reasoned apologetics, not the same as Chesterton or Belloc, but in many ways superior.

Before he was Bishop of Delaware, he was a professor of Church history at Berkeley Divinity School and General Theological Seminary. His erudition is manifest in his later books. I think that, with other figures like Ferdinand Lundberg and John Steinbeck, he's one of the underrated writers of the 20th century. Certainly the Roman Catholic Church had a profound thinker whose writings it should have consulted before it promulgated Anglicanorum coetibus.

In subsequent posts, I want to go over some of his writings and insights into Church history and what they say about the clear failure of the Anglicanorum coetibus project -- and how an Anglican bishop on a distant planet could become such a figure of fun in a madcap comedy. I think Kinsman anticipated this in a way that other figures like James Pike did not.

Space Anglicans

To clear our palates after The Godfather Part 2, we watched Mel Brooks's Spaceballs, a sendup of the Star Wars franchise, last night. Although there are no upper-class women with The Look in it, my wife warned me that it would lower my IQ by 20 points for some period of days.

A scene I'd ignored in previous viewings was the wedding. This is probably because I hadn't watched the film since Anglicanorum coetibus, and I'd either taken the denomination of the archbishop for granted, or I hadn't given it much thought. But he's clearly an Anglican. The Spaceballs Wiki says he's in the First Intergalactic Temple (Reformed) of the Druids, but he's vested as a bishop, and since he's conducting a royal wedding, he must be an archbishop.

But also, according to the Wiki, in the second attempt at holding the wedding,

The [Archbishop] decides not to risk their wedding becoming interrupted by giving, "the short, short version," in which he simply asks the bride and groom, "Do you?" Lone Starr and Vespa excitedly answer, "Yes!"[.]

This can be nothing other than a reference to the multiple options for the liturgy in the Episcopalian 1979 Book of Common Prayer. And the planet Druidia is portrayed as a Middle Earth-like place, where any sort of religion would have to be comfortably Anglican.

Except that, by the late 20th century, there wasn't much you could do with Anglicans, even space Anglicans, except turn them into a joke. This was one of the grave miscalculations behind Anglicanorum coetibus.If nothing intervenes, I'll have more to say about this.

The Godfather Part II: Allegory Of The Patriarchy

Last night we watched The Godfather Part II on TV. i reflected on it overnight and looked it up on Wikipedia this morning. Wikipedia says it's one of the greatest films of all time. Yeah, and Joe Biden's Abraham Lincoln.

The film wasn't even into the final credits when I realized it was an allegoery of the Patriarchy, with various jabs thrown at the Catholic Church. Wikipedia's plot summary misses the point. The story arc involves the careers -- or more specifically, the inescapable, Patriarchical character flaws of Vito Corleone, the original Godfather of Part I, and his son Michael. Vito must leave Sicily as a boy of 14 when the local Mafia boss, Don Ciccio, kills his father and sets about to exterminate all the sons of the family from the justified fear that if they survive, they'll avenge their father and kill Don Ciccio.

Vito, basically a good guy, rises in the New York Mafia and is gradually corrupted. By the 1920s, he's prosperous enough to return to Sicily to avenge his father and brothers and murder Don Ciccio. This is a key element of the story that Wikipedia completely ignores.

By the 1950s, it's become plain that Vito's older son, Fredo, isn't smart enough to succeed Vito and take over the family. His younger son, Michael, becomes the head. The first scene in Part II covers a party at Lake Tahoe, where Michael lives, to celebrate his son's first communion. It's significnnt that the camera focuses on the way the sacrament is administered, the old-fashioned intinction, in Latin, on the tongue, with an acolyte holding a paten.

In a post-Conciliar world, this is a statement about the Church that's frequently repeated throughout the film -- quaint, supersitious, out of touch, obsolete, an enabler of every hypocrisy -- and Patriarchical.

The plot device that drives Part II is that Michael, young and in many ways progressive and forward-looking, must nevertheless revert to his Sicilian roots and avenge the betrayal of Hyman Roth, a putative ally of the Corleone family, when Michael correctly intuits that Roth is behind an attempted assassination of Michael and his family.

At this point, the film focuses on Michael's wife, Kay, who is played by Diane Keaton, herself Hollywood artsy royalty. Kay's character is someone we've come to recognize in subsequent decades, an upper-class woman with The Look, in total contrast to Michael's trashy-flashy sister, Connie. Indeed, Kay in the film is hard to distinguish in style and demeanor from Jen Psaki in real life. In the midst of Michael's plot to rub out Hyman Roth and a Senate invetigation of the Corleone family, Kay decides to abjure the mob life.

The question in my mind, which the film does nothing to answer, is what attracted the well-bred, tastefully dressed Kay to the mob life in the first place. There's a reference in one scene to a promise Michael made to Kay that the Corleones would be "legitimate" within five years of their marriage, which hasn't taken place after seven. But this is certainly an indication that Kay knew full well what she was marrying into, and there's no indication that she was ever disssatisfied with the lifestyle of royalty.

Instead, pregnant with what both she and Michael believe is a son at the time of the film's main action, she decides to abort the baby. The implication, not fully articulated, seems to be that she wants to end this Sicilian cycle of murder and revenge by killing off the Patriarchical lineage, except that they've already had a son and a daughter.

When she tells Michael that she plans to divorce him and take the surviving kids, Michel's reaction is predictably Sicilian, violent, and Patriarchical. Kay becomes the suffering victim and another icon of post-1970s conventional feminism, stigmatized by her assertions of freedom in divorce and abortion. In both instances, the unstated but clear message is that the Roman Catholic Church is a force of repression and an enabler of hypocrisy.

Again, the problem I have is the root of Kay's rebellion. Every indication is that what she wants is to take the children with her and maintain her lifestyle -- which of course has been and will always be financed by Mafia actitities -- but just leave behind the inconvenience of Michael, whom she apparently married in the full understanding of who he was and how he earned his living. In other words, her decision is frivolous.

It also amounts, in Catholic theology, to a substitution of private judgment. I think mature people, finding themselves in situations they'd pretty much chosen in full recognition of what they were choosing, would be driven to some type of serious self-reexamination, and this would certainly involve somthing more than selecting the best divorce attorney.

A big problem with the film is it doesn't go there. Not anywhere close.

Neanderthals

When I was taking anthropology as an undergraduate, I learned that there was, at least at the time, a great deal of controversy over whether there was such a thing as a Neanderthal man. One point that was made was that the bone structure of such individuals was hard to distinguish from human bones of people with hyperthyroid conditions. More recently, I read, or hear on TV or something, that we all have Neanderthal DNA, except we all also have pumpkin DNA, so I'm not sure what any of this proves.

White House Press Secretary Psaki did little to clarify this yesterday in defendng President Biden's remarks about two governors:

MS. PSAKI: The behavior of a Neanderthal, just to be very clear. The behavior of.

But wait a moment. All we know about Neanderthals has to do with some bones and stone tools and such. What on earth do we know about Neanderthal behavior?

But then I thought about another N word. What if Biden called someone the other N word? Would it mitigate anything if Secretary Psaki said he was referring only to the behavior of a _____? And if you think about it, if we know nothing about Neandetthal behavior anyhow, aren't we just referring to a fantasy stereotype?

Actually, to refer to a "Neanderthal" is implicitly to cite the unproven Darwinian model by which the course of human history leads inevitably to us just as we are. Neanderthals are some not-quite-there precursor of our current state of human perfection. It's one more manifestation of the Whig Interpretation of History.

One thing we can probably say is that the "science" of Neanderthals is not settled, although we might point to a reified scheme of human evolution as something "scientific" that makes us feel comfortable about what we are.

But the "science" of COVID is just as unsettled. All the controversy about Biden's use of the term as in effect a racial slur simply illuminates the real issue.

Amid Plunging COVID Stats, Gov Newsom Says Wear Two Masks

One puzzling phenomenon in recent weeks has been that Gov Newsom, facing a likely recall election this fall, with vaccinations underway, and with pandemic statistics plummeting, has made little change in his, or the state's, COVID messaging. In fact, in a clear rebuke to Texas, Florida, Mississippi, and other states, he's now recommending that Californians wear two masks, not one.

“We are encouraging people basically to double down on mask wearing, particularly in light of all of what I would argue is bad information coming from at least four states in this country,” Newsom said. “We will not be walking down their path. We’re mindful of your health and our future.”

Newsom’s remarks come after Mississippi and Texas governors ended their mask mandates.

But Newsom recently faced criticism after making a Tik Tok video from inside a Fresno restaurant, where indoor dining is not allowed.

What's puzzling is that it might be appropriate to recommend two masks at times like late last year, when cases were surging and additional preventive measures might seem reasonable -- but instead, Newsom closed barber shops and hair salons, putting people out of work during the holidays, with no perceptible effect on the disease.

Public orders to avoid holiday "gstherings" also seem to have had no perceptible result, with no surge in cases seven to 10 days after New Year's, while cases continued to decline during and after the Super Bowl and Presidents' Day weekends.

In addition, for whatever reason, the PSAs that featured ladies with various homespun messages advocating social isolation scribbled on their masks seem t\o have disappeared from Facebook.

But Newsom seems to be stuck someplace in last November. The problem I see, just handicapping the likely future course of the pandemic, is that conditions on the ground will likely continue to improve, but there will be little benefit to Californians even if they're allowed to do things like eat indoors with most restaurant seats blocked off.

But the continuing contrast will be in states like Texas and Florida, where such controls are abolished or minimal, while their statistics are no worse than California's.

This has got to be a losing bet.