The Authority of Soul, and The Sole Authority: Comparing Two Catholic Memoirs, The Romantic Approach / The Classical

ABSTRACT

The provenance of this article is somewhere between a critical review of two less-well-known Catholic authors (and their respective memoirs), and a reflective commentary on the same. As the head-title has it, the unifying and necessitating chosen reading direction pits the two Catholic memoirs as contrasting romantic and classical approaches to self-representation and self-discovery; and this, of course, within the purview of their Christian itineraries. In short, I read both memoirs as sacramental journeys as well as empirical journeys. While Belloc's work invokes personality and animation across both his recounted journey and his reflective/pictorial representation of such, Knox evinces in turn a classical asceticism wary of temperamental vagaries and influences, both substantively and formally or stylistically. Precisely because both authors are less well-known, I have sampled their respective works generously, reflecting, again, the dual purview of the article: not only an interested commentary but also an advertent critical review.

KEYWORDS:

• Catholicism
• memoir
• anglicanism
• 20th Century
• Knox
• Belloc

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet and critic. Two of his extant collections are: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and The Square Root of Beirut (Cinnamon Press, 2010/12); a fourth collection: To The Middle of Love is forthcoming with Cinnamon in winter 2016/17. His Beirut novella, Via Negativa: A Parable of Exile was released by Liquorice Fish Books on October 2015. He has published, in academic mode, or more belle-lettristic, on George Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Joseph Conrad, and others; as well as many contemporary poets. He now teaches at the American University in Dubai (AUD). www.omarsabbagh.me.

Notes

1. A philosophical parallel and illustration: ‘Suppose a magician is hired to perform the old trick of making the emperor and peasant become each other. He gets the emperor and peasant in one room, with the emperor on his throne and the peasant in one corner, and then casts the spell. What will count as success? Clearly not that after the smoke has cleared the old emperor should be in the corner and the old peasant on the throne. That would be a rather boring trick. The requirement is presumably that the emperor's body, with the peasant's personality, should be on the throne, and the peasant's body with the emperor's personality, in the corner. What does this mean? In particular what has happened to the voices? The voice presumably ought to count as a bodily function; yet how could the peasant's gruff blasphemies be uttered in the emperor's cultivated tones, or the emperor's witticisms in the peasant's growl? A similar point holds for the features; the emperor's body might include the sort of face that just could not express the peasant's morose suspiciousness, the peasant's a face no expression of which could be taken for one of fastidious arrogance … ’ (Williams 11–12).

2. This reflection had me thinking of an analogous reflection, from the realm of psychoanalysis. Just as both sides (during his time of rationalistic doubt), of heresy and orthodoxy, seem contingently placed in respect to each other—in one of his essays, prominent psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, writes of how it is not just, for instance, the narcissistic personality who appeals in the session (as more generally) for (unhealthy) ‘narcissistic supply’; but that the very analyst diagnosing such narcissism is, via the diagnosis, aiming for his own narcissistic supply. Qui bono? (Phillips 200–25).

3. I'm indebted for this formulation to Herbert McCabe's Law, Love, Language.

4. See, as a telling parallel, G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: ‘the main problem of this book … How we can contrive to be at once astonished at the world and at home in it … ’ (2). Or: ‘I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it’ (4).